i’m still here

SMILE, people

Here is one of the ones where I have been chilling this week!

I am still planning that!  

It’s just been and is going to be a while.  I’ve had a lot of medical issues in the last year and I feel like I’ve been exhausted since November.  I’m trying though - you caught me mid-drawing of some strange Johnny and Edgar thing, even.  So it’s still happening.  It’s just… probably going to happen well after anyone is interested in seeing it, haha.

Banshee will still be there! And she’ll have a better version of her role, I think.  She’s the catalyst for a lot of things in the original, some of them Kinda Dumb Honestly, so she’s now a catalyst for much better things.  The way the others interact with her will play a more significant role in how things all turn out.   I had considered making a version without her or not making a new one at all because she was kind of forged in the fire of the first story, but reSWAN was so many leagues better than the original that I’d like to give Banshee that shot too.  So she’s definitely still there and I hope people enjoy her again this time the way they did, uh, fuck, ten years ago.  

Yikes.

The original spent a lot of time in weird half-breakup land or something with Johnny and Edgar, and we are not going to spend any time doing that at all this time, because we all just watched these two be willing to commit death-related offenses for each other.  They’re good.  Things are fucking weird and messy and probably dangerous, but they, together, are good.  Largely because they are so good, actually, Edgar has been not wanting to participate in the plot, so he’s been kind of a weird sticking point. 

  It’s been hard to get everyone on board, actually.  I don’t want to force them into a story they are not naturally going to play out, but I also would like it to, you know, resemble major beats of the original to some degree.  So like, ‘shit sucks but is kinda normal, hey children in ditches is y/n?, Edgar getting mail from strange lady,’ that sort of thing.  It’s harder to rewrite than the first one because the first one just went off on its own after a while and now I’m having to pull back on it a bit.  I’m not sure if it’s the best thing for it, so it is choking a little.

I’ve rewritten the beginning like five times.  I have so many versions of it.  Every time I think I’ve got it I realize why it is not working and I have to scrap another one. 

The Pie Scene is there though, and is great.  Johnny is a giant drama queen for the whole thing.  Also Ballpit.

It does help me to know there’s still interest and enthusiasm for it, though!  My eye is fucked up still and my job is a Straight Up Nightmare Situation but I want the Homicides to be a big portion of my life again soon.

I do!  

I bought the DVD back when it came out because I’d heard about it somehow and decided I had to see it, but I haven’t seen it in years.   I listen to a few of the songs regularly, though.   Chase the Morning, Zydrate Anatomy and one other that I’m blanking on.  I felt like most of them weren’t melodic enough to warrant repeat listens on their own, but that they’d mostly worked okay in the context of the film.  I liked the aesthetic a lot, and the story idea, but I kept feeling like individual parts of the whole weren’t cohesive or polished enough to carry it properly so it never became a screaming favorite thing for me like I wanted it to be when I bought it.  Bit of a mess in places, haha.  

I really dug the Graverobber, though.  I think I remember wanting to draw him, which is usually a sign of me reacting strongly to something. 

I’m tempted to put the DVD in now.

god I hope there are shenanigans

At what point would his TV training kick in and make him want more than Johnny could offer him?

no ‘charm’ in anything that isn’t online already. alas

“Have her deliver shit to Edgar and Nny’s room,” Jimmy said.  “They can walk in on invisible shenanigans.”

Despite his distinctly warm (if still baffling and somewhat alarming) feelings for Edgar, there was comfort to be found in being the least scared one.

This was a good set!  If you choose strategically, you can get revealing chunks out of this meme, haha.   As two of these would indicate, there is Nny POV coming up!

2:What scene did you first put down?  From this fanfic questions meme.

I feel so boring answering this one too, but the story here is very much similar to the previous one in that I believed that I was only going to do one chapter (because I have a awareness of my own tendencies that is not unlike being in a coma, apparently), so the very first words of reSWAN down to the end of that chapter sprang from me almost exactly as they are.  

Which was actually a shock. 

I thought to do this project coming back from collecting my work after an art show and buying a bag of underwear.  And from the fucking K-Mart to my bedroom, I thought, “How fun it will be to rewrite that first chapter, I wonder what it’s like to read it now?” 

And then I got home and wrote, “When he bothered to look, he saw three people in the mirror.”  

I didn’t know I was going to do that, I didn’t know I was going to do anything but reproduce and just ‘make nicer’ everything that was already there.  Evidently, I wanted to make big changes from the very first sentence and I hardly knew it was coming when it happened. 

Because reSWAN is a rewrite, most of the story is already laid out for me, and I’ve been writing a lot of it straight through and then backstitching a bit for continuity, foreshadowing, etc as it becomes necessary.   I usually have the bulk of 2 or 3 chapters written at a time before I put another one out, just so I can call back and forth to things in a reasonably fluent way.  This isn’t totally ideal, but I’m not publishing a fucking book, I’m just writing fanfiction rivaling the lengths of several.  It keeps my interest up and gets other people excited if I post chapters every so often rather than wait for everything to be totally over. 

I do have some things written out further than two or three chapters in advance, but they’re all just paragraphs of description or small dialogue chunks that I thought were very clever while in my car.   (This bit of Nny and Pepito is sitting very near the bottom of the document:  

“While we’re being cheery, you wanna tell me what happened to actual Satan?”
“It was an accident,” Pepito said flatly.  
“That’s fantastic.  I’m glad all this was really professionally put together.”

Frankly, that last line could apply to what I’m doing, haha.)

I wrote the original SWAN literally chapter by chapter in most cases, and so there was no way to go back and add something if I needed to.  It suffers from this in some places, and when I went to do ISH, I wrote a TON of it out of order and way ahead of time because I thought this would help.   

This ended up sort of wasting time in that by the time I got to some of the stuff I wrote ahead, the moods or characters had changed so much that I was straining to make things fit.   It did help me feel less lost when I started a new chapter, though, since it wasn’t just a white void, and it helped me keep some structure better than I did with SWAN.  

This does mean that ISH is one story where the first scene written wasn’t the first one you read, though! 

Not really, no!  I don’t have tags for almost anything I reblog, just stuff I post myself.  I bet if you opened my archive you’d find a bunch pretty quickly, though!

My chief exports are blood and glitter.  :P 

Thank you for saying all this!  The whole (re)SWAN/ISH thing means a ton to me, and I’ve been able to make it even more so with the rewrite, so I really love hearing that it had some influence on someone else.  And I’m literally always happy to share music - if you get me going, I will not stop.  I know several people who can attest to discovering that I’ve sent them in excess of 200 songs over a week.  So I’m delighted to hear you liked some of what I shared through my bleeding glitter garbage children~  It’s like a double dose of fabulous.  

It’s a good world to retreat to, isn’t it?  I’m glad you do this too!  It’s not a super pleasant world, but I like being there.

You’re totally understandable, don’t worry!  If I didn’t know already that you usually speak Spanish, I wouldn’t have thought this message came from someone who wasn’t a native English speaker. 

On that note, I always feel like I need to offer kudos to people who read SWAN in particular who don’t speak English as a first language.  I do so much weird shit with the way they use words and the things they talk about that I applaud people soldiering through it!