(Writing)

*tuts exasperatedly at protagonists*

Hardest bit of dialogue I've ever written? Y/Y

Dialogue

My dialogues are usually riddled with long pauses and all kinds of discontinuities. I'm finding that incredibly difficult to write, though. How do you write about all that silence?

(Yeah, I know there are ways. I'm just not very good at this.)

Imbalance

There's this strange imbalance in The MAD Doctrine. The first half is all fast-forward history; the second half is mostly dialogue. I'm not sure it works. But I don't think I can change it, at this point. The thing's practically done, and it's taken for-bloody-ever; I'm not gonna rewrite half of it now.

I may have just written the last sentence of this thing.

Or I may be a few sentences past the proper last sentence already.

Or there may be one sentence still missing.

I can't tell.

Arrgh.

What's the predominant wind direction in and around Manchester?

This is important, guys.

Never mind; the Met Office has a page about it.

Sorry, should have googled first.

Now all I need is some hilly country west of the city... if there is any available, that is.

Okay, I think *now* I've got the ending.

6550 words - 14 pages exactly.

Six years.

There's still a few details to fill in with research, but that should be easy enough.


... Wow. I can switch my brain to another fic now! That feels amazing. (And slightly scary, because of course none of them are easy... In fact, it's *really* scary, because my plans for most of the fics I want to work on now are far too vague to begin/continue writing right now, yet I want to be writing away at something.)

It will be interesting to see...

if there's still anyone around who'll even want to read this fic, come to think of it. I've been out of touch so long, I have no idea what state the fandom is in.

Any fandom, really.

My last fic post was in November 2010, and that was a bit of a throwaway thing, a tiny ficlet I'd had in a drawer for half a decade and then one day decided to finish (Breakfast of Losers, Farscape). The one before that, January 2009, was The Last Lost Generation, based on Mikey's Undercover stories (LoM), so, again, not one of my major longterm projects. The one before that, in February 2008, was another short, quick one, How to Love a Madman (LoM). And the one before *that* was my last actual, big project: 68 Wives (Highlander, January 2008). So it's been a year and three months or so since my last fic post, and *four frelling years* since my last *major* fic. Wow. Yes, indeed, it's time to post something proper here.

If there's still anyone around to read it.

(BTW, I think it may actually just be five years since I started The MAD Doctrine, rather than six as I said before. It may have been started in early 2007. I'm not quite sure anymore, and can't find the earliest version of the file.)