if i disappear: progress
Jul. 15th, 2019 00:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
autisticblueteamWith nearly 10,000 words or so of outline, I'm at the half way mark of roughly outlining the 27 or so chapters of If I Disappear; this is... going to be a much longer outline than my outline for TtTaR despite the fact that they've ended up looking like they'll have the same number of chapters, somehow.
A lot of that is likely because I'm thinking of a lot of small details I don't want to lose to my terrible memory, so each scene's vague description is much longer than I'd usually let it be. There's a lot of dialogue ideas, a lot of specific thoughts and tiny actions I think of, and so on and so forth. I'll almost certainly have to trim this or make a secondary tighter outline by the end, but for now I'd rather have all the extra and tidy it later than lose something that might prove invaluable.
I've reached the sort of 'dead zone' in the timeline; the space between the end of Sarcophagus and the Scrapyard mission, where everything I write is entirely my own and there's no canon input to take into account. And predictably, this is going to be some of the hardest area to outline because I have a fair chunk of time to fill that has to simultaneously cover a lot of ground and not become repetitive or draggy. I know which relationships need to continue to develop and I know what Connie has to learn and do during this time, but I don't know how to go about it yet, outside of a few dividing points. It's probably best to simply outline the key plot events in each chapter and come back to fill in around them after, but we'll see how that goes.
I know where I'm going. I know what places I want people and relationships to be in by the time Connie leaves, but getting there is obviously a process.
Other fun little things I've so far had to do as I've gone along: make an entire note dedicated to the facilities included on the MOI, right down to deciding the most weird and invasive places the Director might put a leaderboard (so far the winner of that prize is 'in the showers'); writing out a leaderboard for every single chapter I've planned until I finally reach the point where the board stops moving; and coming up with names for colonies that will only be referenced once, but I refuse not to already have a name for.
Nothing major and nothing particularly new, but hey.
I have to dive back into academic writing this coming week, so I may not manage to get as much done as I'd like on this, but it's one of my main non-academic projects right now so I hope I'll manage to at least free myself a little from this sticky area.
A lot of that is likely because I'm thinking of a lot of small details I don't want to lose to my terrible memory, so each scene's vague description is much longer than I'd usually let it be. There's a lot of dialogue ideas, a lot of specific thoughts and tiny actions I think of, and so on and so forth. I'll almost certainly have to trim this or make a secondary tighter outline by the end, but for now I'd rather have all the extra and tidy it later than lose something that might prove invaluable.
I've reached the sort of 'dead zone' in the timeline; the space between the end of Sarcophagus and the Scrapyard mission, where everything I write is entirely my own and there's no canon input to take into account. And predictably, this is going to be some of the hardest area to outline because I have a fair chunk of time to fill that has to simultaneously cover a lot of ground and not become repetitive or draggy. I know which relationships need to continue to develop and I know what Connie has to learn and do during this time, but I don't know how to go about it yet, outside of a few dividing points. It's probably best to simply outline the key plot events in each chapter and come back to fill in around them after, but we'll see how that goes.
I know where I'm going. I know what places I want people and relationships to be in by the time Connie leaves, but getting there is obviously a process.
Other fun little things I've so far had to do as I've gone along: make an entire note dedicated to the facilities included on the MOI, right down to deciding the most weird and invasive places the Director might put a leaderboard (so far the winner of that prize is 'in the showers'); writing out a leaderboard for every single chapter I've planned until I finally reach the point where the board stops moving; and coming up with names for colonies that will only be referenced once, but I refuse not to already have a name for.
There's also a few little observations I've made when once again re-watching the Freelancer parts of season 9 as I outlined the area surrounding the Sarcophagus mission. One I've already posted about, but a couple of other small things include:
- South drops from 5 to completely off the board extremely quickly and with no discernible, on-screen reason as to why. One minute she's in 5th and then as soon as we see the board after Tex's introduction, she's gone. Not all that long can have passed between these events, North was still getting heat from Bjorndal before the fight and Sarcophagus was clearly not that long after.
- My assumption is that she was moved so as to allow Maine up without actually sending York, North or Wash off the leaderboard. Her position as the twin who would be denied an AI was sealed either long before Bjorndal, or immediately after it; her board position no longer mattered, so moving her served a dual purpose of punishment (including locking her out of Sarcophagus) and allowing the board to remain exactly as the Director desired.
- Connie's absolute determination to get Wash to listen to her, until the aftermath of the Sarcophagus mission and him walking in on her talking to the Insurrectionist Leader. I knew, of course, about all her little comments directed at him, but it's another of those things where I've been subconsciously aware of it without considering the implications. Every time Connie is seen to put effort into getting someone to listen to her about what's going on, she turns to Wash. So, until that point where she realises he's not going to listen, she seems to have trusted him the most; or at least, of the people she trusts, he's the one she thinks is most likely to listen.
- In totally, totally unrelated news, I'm still extremely bitter about the lacklustre reaction to her armour in the desert. The lack of payoff from some of these little things set up is absolutely infuriating but it's around the time I get ranty that I remind myself that things like that are why I'm writing a fic about Connie's arc in the first place so here we are.
Nothing major and nothing particularly new, but hey.
I have to dive back into academic writing this coming week, so I may not manage to get as much done as I'd like on this, but it's one of my main non-academic projects right now so I hope I'll manage to at least free myself a little from this sticky area.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-16 02:43 (UTC)That's a really good point about Connie and Wash. There definitely seems to have been some kind of trust and friendship between them pre-season 9, yet we only see that relationship deteriorate over the course of two seasons, and we're left to wonder what their friendship was really like before.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-16 23:52 (UTC)Their friendship is something I'm glad got picked up on a little during the Triplets episodes, honestly. From what little we see in the show, she clearly saw something in Wash that made him, specifically, worth the effort and risk of prodding with not-so-subtle hints that something was up, but of course by the time she leaves, the only one she trusts to leave her intel behind for is Tex. It's going to be interesting to explore that.