It's cold and I want tea and sleep and hugs and I'm grumpy. What I am really wanting, at this moment, is to be Bernard Black. I want to stand in front of people with an empty mug and shout "What? What?!" until they get tea for me. And then I want to mutter at them indecipherably, collapse onto a sofa, and fall asleep with a book on my face. Is that too much to ask?
I am starting university in 13 days and I don't have a house. This, I think, explains the constant need for/lack of sleep.
What I have been thinking about:
The problem with writing romantic pastiches when your fandom is essentially slash with swiftly changing shinies is that things cannot be simply flipped. This isn't even going into my small problem with stories that are simply films rewritten with the fandom protagonists as the main characters - I can allow them their place in fandom but I'm really not interested in them myself, because I really don't see the point - this is talking about the way I desire my fic to have a small slice of reality.
Romance films are not about reality, of course. Romance films are about escapism and feelgoodism and other isms I can't be bothered to articulate. A shining example of this is Trick, which is about a Broadway Musical Writer who picks up a Go-Go Boy and they spend the entire night looking for somewhere to shag. And yes, I have thought about the fact that Rodney played piano in his youth and I'm still not writing it, hush now. Anyway, yes; this film takes place in an entirely gay world, with a gay bar, a gay club and a piano bar with risqué and ribald sing-songs. The gay is not an issue because the film is written around a subset of gay culture and it's kept carefully within that.
But when you're pastiching a romance film which is originally about straight characters, meaning that one of them used to be married and the other is engaged, how far does that need to be dealt with within the fic? Because it would be entirely too easy and entirely too annoying to dismiss it out of hand, because this is romance and romance isn't reality. On the flip side of that, The Gay and any and all resulting freakouts/changes/worries could become the central issue of the fic and the romance could be sidelined, which really isn't the point either. So how much is enough?
I have a sinking feeling that I have to rewrite almost the entirety of my fic, which is why I spent much time weeks ago crowing about writing more than I ever had before and then went abruptly silent when it stalled at 18,000 words. In all probability it's really not as dire as all that but I'm having trouble looking at it objectively. Which would explain why I'm back to writing the traditional ficlets and pretending the folder with the notes and story in doesn't exist.
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sheafrotherdon is having a Stargate: Atlantis belly fest, which I have in fact written for. 
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