LokiOfSassgaard

I have no idea what I'm doing

Quality Instruction: Notes

August 25, 2024 /

This is a fic I’ve been posting somewhat privately on my site, while I worked on getting back into the headspace for writing fic.  It’s a bit like the rest of my stuff, where the tags are both totally accurate and weirdly misleading, because I have no idea how to tag other than cautiously.  The things in the tags do happen, but they’re not really a main focus or plot-driver.  Except that they kind of are a bit of a plot-driver, in that the fic is about a group of unruly school children that aren’t very well supervised.  Basically, nothing terrible comes of any of it, but I’ve tagged it just in case.

One important point I do want to make, which is not really a spoiler, but also kind of is depending on how you define spoilers.  Everything in this fic is based off of the characters’ stage personae, as it were.  For some of them, that might include characterisations and details that are true to reality.  For others (David in particular), characterisations will not line up to stories about childhood that have been told publicly.  Especially with David, the only way this fic works is if he’s the sort of person who will interrupt the teacher to go on a mad tangent that no one but him cares about.  Otherwise, this wouldn’t be a very interesting fic.

It’s also another one of my “taking panel shows literally” ideas that I had whilst smoking a joint and binge watching QI until 4am for about a week on end.  So many times, the panel likens being on the show to being in school.  And that part of my brain that likes these sorts of concepts said bet.  So here they are, a bunch of delinquent children in a school that may not follow any real world rules on how schools ought to be run.

I was originally planning to finish this one before I posted it to AO3, but I’ve got a good amount of it typed up, so yolo or some shit.

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Watch Party Info

May 19, 2024 /

Watch parties will be happening (fairly) regularly on Tuesdays in the Taskhusbands discord server in the voice channel.  They are open to everyone in the server, and will be a livestreamed event.  If you do not have the media in question, don’t worry!  You won’t need access to it.

When is it?

Watch parties will be taking place on Tuesdays between 2-3pm Portland time.  You can see what time that is for by clicking here and adding your own time zone to the chart.  The times may shift a bit depending on group (and host) availability, but this is what we’re going with for now.

What’s playing?

What we watch depends on what gets suggested here.  You can suggest as many films, stand up specials, television programmes, etc as you like, put please limit one request per form.  Requests will be pulled randomly from the list, depending on their length, whether I have to track them down (and how difficult that is), and the overall mood of the server.

Watch parties will generally last as long as people have energy for (host included).  For television, this could mean watching a full six-episode run in one go, or just a single stand up special.  What we will almost certainly not be doing is collectively binge watching full multi-series programmes at once.  For longer, multi-series programmes, we will navigate those as we come to them.

Currently I am building a collection of works involving Taskmaster alum, but we are not limited to this list by any means.  It’s also going to take me ages to get the collection put together, but so will watching all of it.

How to Participate

As this will be in the voice channel, there will be some quick rules around microphones.  At the beginning of the party, we’ll have an open lobby to make sure sound and picture works for everyone.  Only the host should be streaming video.  Once the watch party begins properly, all microphones must be muted, and chat directed to the accompanying text channel.

If subtitles are available, they should be turned on to English.

If you would like to guest host, please DM me to arrange so we can set it up in advance.

 

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Using Calibre and AO3

January 3, 2024 /

Installing Calibre and Plugins

(My site has decided to eat all the images I posted here, which was causing endless load loops.  To stop that, I took them off.  I don’t know why it does this.)

Here’s a detailed and hopefully helpful walkthrough for using Calibre with AO3, using the FanFicFare plugin.  Follow these steps to download fic, keep track of what you’re reading (or not reading), and sync eBooks from one device to another.

The first thing you need to do is download Calibre.  It currently has releases for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  I’m running Windows and iOS, which you’ll notice isn’t officially supported.  I’ll show you how to make that happen in a bit.  There are a few ways to do it.

Installing Calibre works like anything else.  Download it, run the file you’ve downloaded (whichever format it happens to be), and on we go to the next step.  When you run the Welcome Wizard, make sure your library is in a cloud folder.  Dropbox is best.  This will make syncing to a mobile device easiest, because the baked-in methods have got unnecessarily complicated.  If you don’t have Dropbox, that’s fine.  There are other ways to do it.

Once installed, the first thing we want to do is install FanFicFare.  For the sake of my own sanity and not going back through everything I’ve already done, I am not doing this from a clean install, so just pretend that my screenshots are blank.  Click on the Preferences button on the top of the menu, and then click on plugins on the bottom of the pop up.

Then, click on the Get new plugins button on the bottom, with the yellow jigsaw piece.

And then in the filter by name box, type in fanfic.  The only one that pops up at this point should be FanFicFare.  Select it and click install.

It may give you a security warning about not being monitored or supported or something, and ask you if you accept the risk.  Click OK or Accept or whatever affirmative button pops up (I’m not sure exactly and don’t want to reinstall this whole thing).  Optional, you can do this again for the Generate Cover plugin, if you want to make some fancy covers for your fic.  Or you can use the default ones Calibre gives you, which aren’t half bad themselves.  I just got bored.

Configuring Calibre for Use

Now, we need to configure FanFicFare.  You will need to give it your AO3 credentials in order for it to see locked and explicit fic.  Click on the down arrow on the side of the FanFicFare icon and select Configure FanFicFare.  Then, click on the personal.ini tab.  Scroll until you find the Archive Of Our Own section, and make sure it looks like this, adding your username and password:

[archiveofourown.org]
[defaults]
is_adult:true
username:XXXXXXXX
password:XXXXXXXX

If it’s not there, add the above text to the bottom of the document and replace your username and password with your own.  Calibre and FanFicFare cannot make changes to your account.  You are giving it read only access to be able to see the site and scrape fic content that is otherwise hidden from view.  If you are concerned about safety, you can create a separate account only for Calibre to use, but it’s not really worth doing since it would mean waiting in the invite queue.

There is more customisation to be done within the FanFicFare plugin, but it’s easier to do after you customise Calibre itself at this point.  If you right click on any column header, you’ll get a context menu with an option to add your own columns.

This is where you’ll be able to set your own custom information, such as read status, word count, ships, characters, and more.  Some of them can be auto-populated from AO3’s metadata, others will need to be manually entered.  There are loads of options, and it’s easy to use the wrong one in the wrong situation.  Rather than walk through every option a person could possibly want, I’ll explain what the options do and how they might be used in this context.

  • Lookup name: This is how Calibre stores the column information.  It should be all one word, and in lowercase.  If you do it wrong, it will tell you, and give you a pop-up telling you how to fix it.
  • Column Heading: This is how it looks client-side.  It can have capital letters and spaces and look nice.  If the lookup name is readstatus, your column heading can be Read Status.
  • Column Type: This is the tricky one that can cause a lot of confusion, because there are a lot of options.  I haven’t even used all of them yet, but here are the ones you may find the most helpful:
    • Text, column shown in the Tag browser: The default.  You get one entry and it doesn’t matter how it’s formatted.  Anything that goes in this field is the whole entire tag, even if it contains a comma.
    • Comma separated text, like tags, shown in the Tag browser: Proper tags.  Multiple entries, separated by commas, how you’re probably used to tags working.
    • Long text, like comments, not shown in the Tag browser: A space for notes to yourself.  Leave yourself reminders about where you’ve left off on a fic, or keep records of your own comments, or put anything you like in here.
    • Text, but with a fixed set of permitted values: If you want a drop down menu, and know you’re not going to be adding any more options, you can use this instead of the default text option.
    • Date: What it says on the tin.
    • Integers: Numbers.  Calibre alphabetises numbers.  I mean, three comes before two, because of how they’re spelt.  If you want to include word count or chapters, you need to use integers.  Ask me how I found that out.  Has options for formatting numbers, but you need to get into Python for that, and you probably won’t need to get that detailed.
    • Ratings, shown with stars: What it says on the tin.  Has an option to allow half-stars
    • Yes/No: What it says on the tin.  Has a few display options.  You can use this for whether or not you’ve read a fic, but I choose to use the default text so I can mark fics in progress.

There are a few others that I haven’t touched on, because they are a bit too fiddly and not really.  The text column for series-like information, and columns built from other columns are something you can play around with if you like, but I haven’t personally found them terribly useful.  All of these will have a field for Default value, which you can set to save yourself some time.  For instance, on a Read Status column, you can set the default value to Unread, which will save you having to manually set the status for every new import.

This is useful not only for tracking read status, but loads of other AO3 metadata as well.  By default, Calibre will import all of the basic tags, such as fandom, characters, ship, etc, but it will lump them all together into the “tags” category and not separate them out very well.  You can use custom columns to separate that information out, so that characters, ships, ratings, etc are easier to filter.  So far, the only one I have not been able to get to work is fandoms, which I have been doing manually.  You can also add in columns for word count and chapters, which is where those integers come in handy.  Another one I’ve found useful is to replace the default Date column, which only has the month and year, with a Date Updated column, which includes the day the fic was posted or updated.  You can’t delete default columns, but you can hide them from view, which is more or less the same thing.

Once you’ve got your custom columns set up for the information you’d like to track, Calibre will ask you to restart.  This is necessary for the next step, so do that.

Then, you’ll go back to configure FanFicFare, and click on the Custom Columns tab there.  Here, you can have FanFicFare pull any metadata from AO3 and match it up to the columns you’ve created.  It’s likely not everything you created will have a matching option, and that’s fine.  You can do some things manually, and some things by default.

Next, go to the Basic tag on the FanFicFare configure menu, and take a look at how you’d like to set up your reading and import experience.  I’m not going to tell you how to set this page up, because it’s going to vary depending on how you like things done, but I can explain some of the options.  I won’t go through all of them, because it’s a lot, but here are some of the important ones:

  • Default Output Format: When you scrape AO3 for fic, this is the format the fic will download as.  You have the options for ePub, MOBI, HTML, or txt.
  • Default of Story Already Exists: In this one case, I will say set it to Overwrite Always.  Otherwise, you won’t catch new chapters or edits when they’re made.
  • Keep existing tags when updating metadata?: If the author on AO3 deletes a tag, do you want Calibre to delete it as well?
  • Check for existing series anthology books?: Do you want Calibre to store series information?
  • Check for changed story url?: This will check if a oneshot has turned into a multi-chapter fic.
  • Take URLs from clipboard?: This saves you the step of pasting the URL from AO3 into a tiny little box.
  • Reject without confirmation?: If a fic is on your reject list, do you want Calibre to skip the fic entirely?
  • Delete on reject by default?: If you reject a fic, do you want Calibre to delete whatever information it has already stored?

There’s quite a lot more here, and I strongly encourage you to play around with all of them.  You can’t break anything, and if you don’t like the way something imports, delete it from your library, change some settings, and try again until it works the way you want it to work.  In fact, you’ll probably notice that we’ve ignored Calibre’s settings entirely, and only played with FanFicFare’s.  Calibre’s settings and preferences are much more intense and far less user friendly, so we won’t be touching them as much.

If you’d like to play around with the Generate Cover plugin, it’s a fairly intuitive plugin to use.  Again, you can’t break anything.  Just play around with it and see what happens.  Since it’s a visual plugin, it’s a lot harder to explain without screenshots, but if you need help I can show you in the discord.  Import some images, create some templates, and apply them to different fics.  I’m working on figuring out if there’s a way to apply covers to fics based on specific metadata, but so far it seems like that’s not possible.  I’ll update that page if anything changes.

Importing Fic

Now here’s the bit you’ve been wanting to get to.  And there are multiple ways to do it.  The way I did it is stupid and it will take all day, and I will show you how to do it that way if you like.  Or there’s a far more sensible way of going about it.  It amounts to more or less the same thing.  We’ll do the simple version first.

Importing fic one at a time

To import a single fic, copy the url from AO3 and click on the down arrow on the FanFicFare button on the menu, and then select the Download from URLs option.  Depending on your settings, the URL may already paste into the big box.  Double check that the settings are as they ought to be, and then click OK.  It will take its time fetching metadata, which for a single fic, is usually just a few moments.  Then, you’ll get a pop-up in the lower right corner, telling you that it’s complete.  If it’s worked, it will tell you that it found 1 good and 0 bad updates.  Click the Yes button to add the fic to your library.

Importing multiple fics

If you want to import an entire fandom, or maybe there have been a few posted at once that you want to read, you can do multiple fics at once.  And there are a few ways to do it.  You can do it the same way as above, pasting URLs individually, one per line, and then follow the same process.  This is best if you only want a few fics.  If you want to download an entire fandom, or you already have done and you want to update the day’s uploads, you can do a bulk download.

Go to the page in question that lists the fic.  This is going to be any page.  Say, for instance, this page.  Copy the URL, click that down arrow on the FanFicFare button, and this time select Get Story URLs From Web Page.  Make sure your URL is pasted in correctly, and then click the For Individual Books button.  It’ll take a minute for something to happen, and you may think that the whole thing has frozen.  Don’t worry about it.  Eventually, that same dialogue box as before will pop up with 20 URLs listed from that page you just pasted in.  Again, make sure everything is as it should be, and click OK.  It’ll take a lot longer this time to make import everything, but it will get to the same end result, with the entire page of fics importing.  I find on average, it takes about 5-6 minutes per page, but this can skew longer if there are more longfics than usual on a given page.

Updating fics

There are multiple ways to update fics.  When you import multiple fics using the method above, if there are any fics already in your library, Calibre will update them if they need updating.  When I go in to grab the 2-3 new fics that may be uploaded on a given day, it will also catch the ongoing WIPs that have also been updated as well.

You can also update fics by highlighting them in your library and just clicking on the FanFicFare icon directly.  Whether you do it one at a time, or in a batch, you’ll get the same window, titled Update Existing List.  It will have similar options to the window above.  Check those to make sure they are set to do what you want them to do, and click OK.  Calibre will then go through the same process as before, to fetch the metadata from AO3, and then download the fic from the site.  I generally find it easier to do it the copy/paste way, because in almost every situation, updated fic will be moved to the top of the tag anyway.

Editing Metadata

The only time you’ll want to really use Calibre’s built-in options is when editing metadata.  You can do this in bulk or individually, and the times you’d want to do either depend on which metadata you’re editing.  In most cases, you really need to only double click on the relevant field right there in your library and it will let you edit it, but sometimes that will pull up the book because it thinks you want to read it.  You can right click to get a context menu, which will have options to edit metadata individually or in bulk, or use the metadata icon in the menu to do the same.  To edit metadata in bulk, you will need to have multiple items selected, and to do that, click on one item, hold down shift, and click on another.  All items in between will highlight.  To highlight multiple discrete items, hold down ctrl/cmd and click.  Each individual item you click on will highlight.  When you select edit metadata in bulk, the metadata you edit will apply to all highlighted items.

Calibre will separate out what they call the Basic metadata from the Custom metadata, allowing you to tweak your own separately to the default fields.  This should be fairly straightforward, but if you have issues, let me know.

Getting Fic to your Mobile Device

This used to be a lot easier, and I don’t know what happened.  It’s been years since I’ve been able to plug my iPad into my computer and just sync it that way.  Now, they want you to use this Server thing, and I cannot make it work for anything. I’m kind of convinced it doesn’t work at all.

Directly via Dropbox

As long as you have set up Calibre and FanFicFare to put your fic in an accessible place, and download fic in a format that is readable on your device, you are pretty much there.  You may not even need to go any further.  If you’ve used Dropbox, and your mobile device is capable of using a Dropbox app, you’re done!  You can go to your Calibre folder, and start navigating through all of the folders in there and start reading.  It’s a bit unwieldy though, and that might not be for you.

Another option is to not use Dropbox as your main library, in which case you can click that Calibre icon up top, and move your library elsewhere, and then copy books individually to Dropbox as you need them.  I really dislike the way Calibre structures its library, but I get it.  It’s structured like a library, by author.

For Kobo users, here’s some information and troubleshooting on how to get Dropbox working.

Dropbox via Companion App

On iOS and Android, there are a variety of companion apps, some paid, some free.  On iOS, I use Calibre Sync, which was about $4 or so.  It talks to Calibre and sees all of my custom metadata, and then pulls the ePubs from my dropbox and puts them into my Books app.  I see it as a $4 convenience fee to keep me from having to dig through hundreds of folders.  If you’re on iOS or Android, look around and find the app that works best for you.

Drag and Drop

You don’t need Dropbox for this to work, so if you don’t have it, this is the one for you.  If you’re on iOS, you’ll use iTunes for this.  If you’re on Android or any other device, I can’t offer as much help, because I don’t know how those systems work.  Plug your device into your computer, or use Wifi Sync if your set up supports it.  Go to your Calibre folder where all your books are, and drag the folders into iTunes or wherever they go on your specific device.  Especially if you’re on iOS, you might want a better eBook reader than the one that’s built in, because you won’t be able to see any of your metadata.  In fact, I have just tested and the Books app cannot even see the metadata that AO3 imports, much less the custom metadata.  But if you just want to read, and do all of your organising on Desktop, this works.

I need a different file type than what FanFicFare offers

Not a problem!  The reason most people are likely familiar with Calibre is eBook conversion.  Like the metadata above, you can convert individually or by bulk.  Select the books you want to convert, and click the Convert Books icon in the menu.  You’ll get a big, giant window this time with a whole bunch of options, but the main one you need to focus on is a tiny little button in the top right labelled Output Format.  Click that, and you’ll get a whole list of formats that FanFicFare doesn’t offer.  Select the one you need and click OK.

If know you are going to need to convert your files, I would recommend not changing FanFicFare’s download options.  It will be set to ePub by default, which convert fairly nicely to a wide variety of other formats.

Misc Notes

A few things of import that seem worth pointing out:

  • Your custom columns in the tag browser will all have the same ugly icon unless you change them.  I went to emojipedia and got some cute emoji for mine.  You can use whatever you like.
  • Tags in the book details pane are always listed alphabetically, which is not always helpful if authors use them to build off of one another.  However, if you get confused, like I do, you can always click on the archiveofourown.org link in the IDs field, which will take you to the fic (it looks like it goes to the site’s home page, but it does go to the fic).
  • Anonymously-posted fic will populate as being posted by an Anonymous author unless it is your own and you have given Calibre your own credentials.  Then it will know that you posted the thing.  I got jumpscared by this and I did not like it, because I forgot that you have to sign into the plugin.
  • There is a tiny, almost invisible button in the lower right that says Layout.  Click it!  There are loads of options hidden in there that are actually useful and user friendly!
  • You truly cannot break anything.  If something goes a bit funny, delete what you’ve done, fix the messed up setting, and re-import it.  I have re-imported my entire library about eight times, because I keep fucking around and finding out.  But that’s how you learn.  I’m on the discord and can (hopefully) answer any questions you have.
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Fic notes: He Doesn’t Look Very Dead.

November 29, 2023 /

Good grief.  Long damn chapter.  That’s going to become normal, I think.  Sorry about that.  I’m really not sure what’s going on or how that’s happened.  Anyway, I’ve decided to post this one early this week because I have a sneaking suspicion I won’t be at my desk much tomorrow.  So rather than be late two weeks in a row, I decided to head it off at the pass instead this week.

This is one of those chapters that’s slow and languid, and focused on the characters.  There isn’t a lot of action happening, but instead all of the forward motion is taking place internally.  We get a little bit of that from Greg right at the start, in the form of his insecurities about his glasses and how Alex perceives his reaction to them.  Greg as this character who hides his insecurities behind vanity speaks something to me, so him seeing having to wear glasses as a sign of ageing or weakness felt like a natural extension of that.  I liked the idea that he actually would have started wearing them much earlier than we saw in reality, but resisted for as long as possible.  There are probably about three people in the world at this stage who even know he needs them, and I suppose that list of people changes depending on whether or not Alex counts as a person.

Mark arrives to this whole mess first, because of course he does.  He knows how this goes, and he wants to see the whole thing play out from the very start.  He’s not here to play the game either.  He has two goals in mind, and he achieves them both in short order: 1. see that his friend is doing as well as he claims to be, and 2. become a pain in the ass for said friend at earliest possible convenience.  The fact that Greg has allowed Mark to come spend ten weeks pissing around with Alex in the first place more or less achieves point #1, as hinted in the previous chapter.  Mark arrives fully prepared to launch into point #2 and become a Problem as soon as he’s able.  Of course, Alex is also a Problem, so they pretty quickly settle into a routine with one another, chatting shit as though nothing at all unusual is unfolding around them.

The other guests, on the other hand, are a totally different story.  Now keep in mind that so far aside from Ed (and by extension Nish), none of these people are in the entertainment industry in this fic.  So when Aisling shows up nervous as all fuck, those nerves are from the perspective of a young woman who has answered an advert promising a lot of money, and now she’s at a house where a creepy man is literally role playing the opening act of Clue (or Murder by Death) with a bunch of strangers.  She should be nervous.  She should be running for the fucking hills.  But £1,000,000 is a lot of money, and people will do some stupid crazy things for that kind of cash.

When Mark reveals himself to be here for the third time, this is me slightly changing the rules a little bit.  Obviously, there can’t be a Champion of Champions.  It doesn’t quite work that way now.  But Mark has done Taskmaster three times, because he did it at Edinburgh twice.  Same with Key.  So here, I’m going for something a little bit different.  Rather than only getting one go at it, with only winners being allowed back, I’m taking a different approach.  Anyone can come back, but the odds of being allowed back are very slim, bordering on next to non-existent.  Unless you’re Alex’s nosey mates, in which case Greg both recognises it’s easier to let them come round and see for themselves that Alex is perfectly fine, but also having them round gives Greg the opportunity to bully them for ten weeks.  And if he throws a bit of cash at them at the end, they’ll put up with it and let him and Alex get on with their lives for a while longer.  So they alternate who comes up to check on Alex, making sure he’s still around, and getting the snot kicked out of them by Greg, and then split the cash between them most likely.

No one is innocent or morally clean in this situation, basically.

And then we get to Nish, who I have been looking forward to for so long.  The first thing he does in this fic is shout the roof down, and that should be an indication of how his time will be spent.  I mean, you’re here.  You’ve seen series 5.  I’ve said so many times that my favourite genre of contestant are the ones that seem like they were kidnapped halfway through placing an order at McDonalds, and Nish is the perfect embodiment of that trope.  In fact, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to work that in properly, but that’s basically what happened to this guy.

Once they get to dinner, Mark really decides to become a Problem, almost to the point of looking like some kind of plant.  If Alex hadn’t already planned on making his stay hell, he probably would have come up with something terrible for him just off the heels of this bullshit right here.

The flashback bit is one I had a lot of fun with.  We’ve got Greg either trying to get to know Alex as a person, or he’s trying to size him up.  I think he does like Alex, and he does want to get to know him better, but at the same time he has definitely noticed that the guy is socially isolated and it doesn’t seem like a single human being would actually notice if he vanished from the face of the planet, and part of him does want to verify that somehow.  Except it really throws him for a loop to actually get that confirmed.  One of my favourite banter bits is from s04e06, when Alex rambles on with some implication that his mother abandoned him after leaving behind nothing but a letter.  Pair this with the recent live task where Greg claimed Alex was found as an infant, and what the hell was this man’s upbringing actually like??  But it makes perfect sense for this weirdo character.  I love it.  The only people he has in his life are his two strange mates who refuse to let him go, and if Greg wants to keep Alex, he’s going to have to deal with Mark and Tim.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  But all through this whole conversation, Alex finds himself compelled to respond in ways that he thinks might please Greg, even if it’s a conversation he doesn’t want to have.  He says things that he doesn’t want to say, and winds up having to defend himself.  And then when Greg gives him another strange order he has frankly no business giving him, Alex obeys without question, to the letter.  He makes sure he is absolutely not seen at all the following day by leaving at the ass-crack of dawn, and going to visit Mark and Tim.  And because he doesn’t know what to do with himself, he cleans their flat and gets bullied.  Tim immediately assumes the worst in everything Alex says, and he’s frankly right to, but at this point nobody really fully grasps the true extent of the situation.  All Tim knows is that his friend doesn’t have much of a support network outside of him and Mark, and even if they aren’t exactly healthy or functional in their own right, Tim is determined to make sure Alex doesn’t get into a situation he can’t get out of.

Back to the present, I’ve shuffled things up a bit again.  I’ve decided to move the interviews to the beginning of the process, for a couple of reasons.  They feel like a good thing to have as a consistent warm-up task, and also as a way for Alex to gauge how everyone will respond to tasks and the environment.  Having the interviews actually serve a purpose felt like a good way to use them as part of the greater process.  Annoyingly, series 5 is one of the only series where interviews do not seem to exist anywhere online, so I had to make it up.  Because of course the ones I actually needed would be missing.  At the same time, I’m kind of glad, because I’m going to be doing a lot of remixing and transcribing as it is, and boy do I hate doing that.  I’ve already had to do it once in this chapter already, for Mark’s text message task, which is very subtly different.  And there will be a lot of that.  Quite a lot of this series has been re-ordered to fit the narrative better, because it doesn’t work for location tasks to be randomly spread out like they are in reality.  Also, some of the tasks worked out better to be rearranged to tell a slightly different character story, so that’s what I did.  There’s also the part where I wanted the whole thing to take place over ten weeks, for consistency and continuity, so I had to stretch an eight week series into ten weeks, while also removing all of the prize, live, and most of the solo tasks because they didn’t work either.  But I think doing all of that will make the tasks themselves a little more interesting than just wholesale revisiting them exactly as they are.  Mark’s text message task, for instance, while a simple one, is now a little bit more stressful for him.  Even though he has ten fewer texts to send overall, he has to send two per day to make up for it.

As for the intake bit itself, I really wanted to play up just how fucking terrible that house actually is.  The lab really is a room that looks like somewhere you go to get murdered.  Again, Aisling absolutely reacts as she ought to, weighing her safety against the promise of a life-changing amount of money.  At the same time, Alex isn’t really a terrible person.  He’s here just doing a job.  He recognises that she’s uncomfortable, and why she’s uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to make that worse.  But he’s also awkward and weird just by nature, so there’s not a lot he can do about it.  But Alex will give as good as he gets, and that cuts both ways.  If he doesn’t have a reason to be passive aggressive and sarky with someone, he won’t be that way.  He can be kind and patient when he needs to be, because he doesn’t want to go through ten weeks of hell any more than these people do.  Especially since his hell has the potential to be amplified by several orders of magnitude.

And then with Mark, it’s a different story entirely.  He falls right back into antagonising him, because Mark can and will take it and dish it right back out.  And because this is not only Mark’s third time being here, but everyone’s aware he’s Alex’s weird mate at this point, the rules are different from the start.  He’s not dropped off properly.  Alex doesn’t show him around properly.  Instead, Alex just follows him around, letting him act like he knows what he’s doing while he throws insults around.  At no point through any of it does Mark begin to take it seriously.  He knows he’ll come out of this with some amount of money, and he’s going to get to spend the next ten weeks pissing about with Alex when he’s not holed up somewhere on this estate.  It’s almost worth getting bullied by Greg every week.

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Fic notes: Worse Than Terrible

November 25, 2023 /

A little bit late this week, because on top of being a weird goddamn week, I genuinely think I may have swine flu for the second time in my life.  Christ, I will actually scream if that’s the case.  But anyway.  I was feeling well enough today to finally sit down and edit the rest of this, so here it is.

So, let’s start with the apparent.  Greg is very different in this chapter.  He’s not being horrible, for a start.  And when Greg’s in a good mood, Alex is in a good mood.  These two are feed off of one another in a way that can only be described as dangerous, I think.  Alex is taking every single one of his cues off of Greg, and Greg is taking every single one of his cues off who the hell knows at this point.  We’ll find out.  But maybe Alex wasn’t completely lying to Tim and Mark when tried to tell them to mind their business in the previous chapter.  Maybe this is just how things are, and maybe he does like it this way.

Maybe.

Now.  More art.  The piece in this chapter isn’t anything specific, but it’s actually based off of an entire collection.  The artist is Stuart Semple, whose name I never actually get round to dropping specifically in this chapter for whatever reason.  I’m not sure why.  It just never seemed to happen.  And the series is My Sonic Youth.  I love this series in general, but also for a Taskmaster portrait because some of the pieces have a lot of elements that work both thematically for the sorts of portraits that have gone up, but also as a series there are a lot of elements that just feel very much up Greg’s street.  There’s a Happy Mondays reference in there with a 24 Hour Party People lyric as the quote, and it has that sort of avant garde slant that he tends to score highly on art tasks in general.

I want to get more into Greg’s hobbies in general, because it seems like as a character, he’s got quite a few of them.  As the task writer, a lot of Alex’s hobbies naturally seep into the show, but in the context of the show’s lore, it’s Greg who’s setting these things.  I know Alex likes to set tasks that appeal to or deliberately irritate Greg for one reason or another, but I’d love to really dig into Greg’s interests on a character level.  I love the idea that the Taskmaster is into art, even if he’s probably not particularly good at it himself.  I see him as someone who is well-read, but his tastes are probably quite odd and obscure.  I think he does like cinema and theatre, but we know he hates musicals.  I’m definitely keeping in how much he hates football.  That’s going to remain Alex’s thing.  But it’s other things that I want to dig into.  Where does he stand on some of the other things that crop up again and again?  I’m not sure.  I’ll have to really think about it.

And finally, we’re getting closer and closer to series 5.  Good grief, it’s taken forever.  Alex has hung the Magritte in the cottage, so things are at least taking shape to start getting going.  We learn that Ed is the first person in the fic to sort of break the mould, as it were, and retain his actual job in this story.  He’s still a comedian here, because it did sort of make sense for his little group to keep to that line of work.  And in the context of this AU, not everybody does have to have some other unique job anyway.  Greg’s an important person who can have friends from any walk of life he likes, and it sort of makes sense that some of his friends could and would be in the entertainment industry.

It should be obvious who Ed’s stitching up for the series 5 lineup, but in case it isn’t, I’ll save that reveal for the next chapter.

There’s another recurring thread going on that’s sort of been present, but which really starts to become apparent here, that Greg is a lot more obvious about his relationship with Alex than Alex would necessarily like.  They aren’t public, exactly, but when it comes to showing Alex off in front of his friends, Greg is perfectly willing to do so, to the point of making it everyone else’s problem.  Alex doesn’t mind being shown off when he’s an object of praise or affection, but it takes a different tone later on when Greg’s in a mood right before he leaves for Spain again for Christmas.  There’s a tag on this fic for “manufactured sexual attraction,” because I wasn’t quite sure how else to tag whatever the hell is going on in this relationship.  I think someone used the word “Gregsexual” in the discord, and that works as well, but it’s a lot more specific.  Either way, Alex is less into Greg sexually, and more into the idea of making Greg happy and pleasing him.  I don’t know if I’m playing him as fully asexual here, or just woefully inexperienced, but he has certain lines he doesn’t like to cross for one reason or another, and Greg is at least willing to respect those lines, while at the same time wholly disregarding him as a person and a human.  Alex is disrespected, degraded, used, and cast aside in short order, and then immediately ridiculed to others.  Because of course Rhod knows what’s going on, and of course Greg openly jokes about it with him.  Greg probably told him his intentions outright when he left to find Alex.  They’re leaving for two weeks, better go get a quickie in before they head out.

At the same time, I wanted Alex to have advocates and allies in as many corners as possible, even if he has no intention of ever taking advantage of them.  I think he possibly has even more than he realises, but because he’s so shut off from everyone else around him he’s been trained to see everyone as an antagonist.  He’s over here doing his own thing, ignoring people until he can’t ignore them, and then things get awkward and weird and he’s forced to run away.

Going back to the other timeline, Alex knows way more than he ever wanted to, and it’s fucked with his head.  He was already off-balance and making bad decisions, and now he finds himself doing things he can’t even rationalise.  He may as well be on autopilot at this point.  Greg tells him to do something, and he does it without thinking.  He’s so close to danger, and he can’t even see it.  His only thought is trying to make this man as happy as possible, to the point of nearly damaging himself over it.  Greg’s crossing boundaries with him as well, and Alex doesn’t even notice.  He’s making demands he has no right to make, getting weirdly physical with him, and Alex just rolls with it, because he’s Alex.  There’s no other reason for it, really.

Then, we get to the spanner in the works that is Mark Watson.  Mark’s shown up in the application list, and Alex does exactly what he’s supposed to about it and tells Greg.  Because Alex knows his place, and he’s not trying to play any games or break any rules.  He’s got a job to do, and his idiot friend showing up could get in the way of that.  But Greg lets him invite Mark over instead, and maybe he’s digging his own grave, but Alex loses his entire mind and decides to play a prank on not only Mark, but on Greg as well.  And we all know how that’s going to end.

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Fic notes: You Drive Like a Lunatic

November 16, 2023 /

This is the first new chapter, so if you were reading it before when it was on AO3, you haven’t seen anything going forward.  Though I do still recommend reading the previous stuff back anyway, because I’ve edited it all up, and there’s quite a bit of new stuff added.  This is the longest chapter yet, and we’ve got Alex in a bad mood right off the bat.  When Alex is in a bad mood, nothing good ever happens, so here we are, dealing with that.  He’s set Kieran a terrible task, and is being an all-round pain in the ass about it.  What else is new?

To start this off, I want you to know I baked Kieran’s horrible cake that was more like a weird Yorkshire pudding, and I hated it.  My husband, on the other hand, ate the whole damn thing and loved it.  Then again, we also tried the super sour sweets Greg made Alex eat in series 9, and I ate five at once and thought they were no big deal, while my husband wound up fighting for his life over just one of them, so I don’t know what to make of any of this.  I’m saying the sweets are lame, and the cake described in this fic is gross, and that’s what I’m sticking to.  All I could taste was sugar, and it was nasty and it really did stick to my teeth.  0/10.

We get to Alex getting very jealous of Greg having friends over, because ultimately all he wants is to have Greg to himself.  Instead, he’s having to share, and that’s really getting up his nose.  A cycle is referenced, and they’re at the tail end of it, and now Alex expects things to be getting better where they aren’t.  In his mind, this should be his time with Greg, so when he comes home to find that he’s going to spend the evening either ignored or on display, it takes the mood he’s been in all day and sours it further.  Oddly, this scene had me waffling more on something than nearly any other part of this fic, and it was the joint being passed around.  What had me waffling in the first place is that it’s not something I see a lot of in this fandom in general, so I wasn’t sure if it’s something that’s widely accepted as a concept.  But he’s mentioned smoking weed on the show, and has bits about it in his stand up, and Wicky smokes a joint in the Cleaner, so fuck it.  It seemed worth including.  And for Greg’s list of sins in this fic, smoking a joint with his mates is low on the ladder, let’s be real.

Another thing that happens in this chapter is that it’s the first time it’s referenced that Alex doesn’t always cook meals.  That’s a thing that only happens when it’s just Greg.  There is a proper staff, and when there are guests, that staff is utilised.  Mostly I think the kitchen staff are employed to cook for the rest of the house staff, and probably for the guests who are there to entertain Greg like trained monkeys, but they’re probably also aware that there will be times when being told to suddenly prepare a meal for a group is expected.  Anyone who works for this man has likely got to get used to a certain amount of instability very quickly.

For the flashback, we get to the first big reveal, and to the point where the plot finally starts to pick up.  I loved the idea of making Rhod a solicitor, because he’s wholly unfit for it.  The man is distilled chaos, and because of that he’d be your worst nightmare.  Like, he’s definitely got a reputation as someone who wins cases, but through absolutely insane tactics.  And it was for scenes like this that made me decide to make it be Rhod.  It could have been literally anybody, and nothing about the story would have changed.  But I wanted it to be Rhod because I wanted his mad, intense energy in these scenes.  I wanted the jeopardy that because it’s Rhod, he’s going to fuck it up.  It’s Rhod, and he still could.  If I had gone with Mike, the calm, cool, collected man who was a doctor in a past life, that jeopardy wouldn’t be there.  But as well as Rhod being here to bring chaos, we also have the elephant in the room finally out in the open.  We now know what Greg’s fucking problem is; why he’s so goddamn weird with meals and why he doesn’t seem to trust Alex.  And Alex knows it as well, and then some.  He knows a much wider part of the story than he did when he made that decision to stay on.  He did not replace a personal assistant.  He replaced a former lover in a very kinky relationship that seems to have gone very, very sour to the point of attempted murder that ended with the wrong person dead.  There’s obviously more to it than Alex knows still, but Alex knows enough to have a more or less clear picture of what he’s got himself involved in.  It’s enough to know that he definitely needs to leave.  And yet, he makes the choice to stay anyway.  Because he spent three days alone with Greg, without distractions, being told what to do and he liked it just a little too much.  He doesn’t realise that, and he doesn’t understand it, but that’s definitely what happened, and now he wants more of it.  And he wants it enough to make decisions that will lead to him getting locked in cupboards and slapped around twelve years later.

But this is a chapter of big reveals, because we have two more after we find out what happened to the guy Alex replaced.  Basically, we’re six chapters and about 40,000 words in, and the plot is finally kicking off.  That’s what’s happened.  It’s final judgement day, and these people are fighting for their prizes, or to not be murdered as someone in the discord speculated.  There’s no murder, though.  Because as was pointed out at the time, that would mean I’d have to kill off some of the best people, and I don’t think I can do that in this fandom.  The failpeople are my favourites.  I can’t kill Nish.  So, spoilers for that, I guess.  Nish survives this mess.  I love him too much.  But somehow it manages to be more sinister than that at the same time.  Kieran’s come last, and he still takes home a substantial prize because I do actually have a formula to convert points to cash, and the exact number he took home was about £860,000.  I think that number was in an earlier draft, but it felt better to leave it vague in the end.  But if you’re wondering, they all made out like bandits.  This will not exactly be the case for the idiots in the series 5 group, because of the wider spread of points.  But these people have just spent ten weeks of hell, and in order to do anything with this money, they can either pick greed and keep it all by staying attached to the guy who made their lives hell, which probably won’t be very good for them in the long run given how we all know how Greg feels about people who don’t pay their tax, or they can report this money and try to explain it.  Given Alex has a stack of business cards at the ready, it’s probably apparent which option most people pick.

I have also changed the rules on who gets to come back.  It’s not just the winners, because I’m counting Edinburgh as canon for plot reasons.  And at that point, anybody can come back, so I had to establish some new rules that don’t really mesh with Champion of Champions, but whatever.  Greg is luring desperate people, and desperate people are probably not going to be amazing with money in the first place.  Alex has probably seen a terrifying amount of people blow through their prize money and wind up worse off than they were the first time.  And when they do come back, they’ll be even more eager to please the Taskmaster.  Obviously, Bob throwing CoC doesn’t mesh with this, but Bob doesn’t mesh with reality in general.  But that’s how Greg keeps them silent after he’s just psychologically tortured them for ten weeks.  People will do anything for money, and when you tell them they can come back for more, they’ll continue to play your game.

And all that leads directly onto the final reveal of the chapter.  The one that I was most looking forward to writing, because we finally get to meet Tim and Mark, and the shed incident pays off at last.  Remember when Alex first applied, and Greg said he’d have Saturdays off?  That’s never really stopped being a thing.  He’s spent previous Saturdays at home, doing nothing, and being weird about it.  But after he sees to the guests and gets them out of the house, Greg gives him £50 and tells him to go enjoy himself.  There’s a routine in play, and Alex immediately falls into it, because it’s one that’s been in place for quite some time.  But what he doesn’t count on is that routine getting disrupted by Tim being observant.  At the same time, he doesn’t do anything about what he knows is clearly going on, other than loudly complain.  It’s not a surprise to him that Alex gets smacked around, or that he has no desire to leave this situation.  Nor that he has no money outside of what little Greg gives him for the evening.  Tim and Mark are both totally aware and acclimatised to this situation, even if they clearly hate it.  Tim wants Alex to come to his senses, but he’s still willing to play along with curfews, and even at the end of the night when Alex is too drunk to get himself home, Tim sees that he gets into a cab safely, rather than doing what someone else might do and removing Alex from the situation.

Now why on Earth might that be?

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Fic notes: A Walking A-Z

November 9, 2023 /

We’re taking a bit of a break from the insanity to spend time with what basically turned into some Hemingway fanfic for a while.  There’s a brief reference to The Sun Also Rises, which is not an accident.  It’s one of my favourite Hemingway novels, and if you know me and my writing it’s probably not difficult to pick out why.  At the heart of it, it’s a lazy story about people and what they get up to when they think no one is looking, and every one of those people are fucking insane.  I didn’t want to go fully into emulating the whole thing, but I did want to evoke something of the novel and its setting the way Baz Luhrmann fucked around with Gatsby, using creative anachronism to turn it on its head a bit.  Only in this case, it’s Pamplona in 2004, so all the nostalgia of the novel has been lost, replaced by fast food and fast fashion and neon signs in shop windows.  The San Fermín festival is still a thing, and still happens today as a traditional festival, but Pamplona is a modern city, and this is enough to distract Alex from everything else he should be paying attention to.  Spain will keep featuring in this story, but not as the main focus the way it was in The Sun Also Rises.  But there is the same theme of a group of absolute psychopaths ostensibly going for the bullfights, but really just looking for a new backdrop for their insanity.

Before we get to that, Alex is neck deep in this insanity, and he’s so close to doing the correct thing about it.  He should be putting in his notice, but he’s so caught up in being professional about it that he can’t bring himself to put his notice in until they get back.  So he carries out tasks he doesn’t understand, even though they make him uncomfortable.  He refuses to ask questions that might seem like crossing a line, and makes up excuses for himself.  He just carries out these insane demands and pretends to be okay with it.

This chapter is also the first we get to see Alex being Alex, and not the weird mess he’s become when he’s under Greg’s thumb, or acting out because he’s not getting enough attention.  This is the Alex who wears camp shirts and has silly tattoos (the timeline of which I’ve altered because the timeline has been altered in this fic).  The Alex who fell into this job in the first place because he has a knack for admin and memorisation.  He’s taking care of all of this stuff, and he’s happy to do it not just because it’s his job, but because being in charge of it makes him feel better.  If someone else were in charge, he’d lose that peace of mind.  He’s already a ball of nerves from having to deal with Rhod and Roisin being on this trip, who he doesn’t much like to begin with.  And now Rhod and Greg are causing trouble on the flight, and Alex can’t quite figure out what’s going on when the two of them are near one another.

It’s not much different on the ground.  Alex finds himself in the way more than anything, vaguely inconveniencing the entire trip to the hotel.  It’s almost like he’s not supposed to be there in the first place.  At the same time, Greg’s being weird and not letting Alex out of his sight.  He keeps Alex almost uncomfortably close until they get settled into the hotel, ignoring him the entire time.  The hotel that they stay at is the Gran Hotel Perla, which I picked because not only is it on the bull route, but Hemingway himself stayed there and is used as a selling point.  In this world I’ve created, Greg has a standing booking each year for the festival, in the same block of suites, and has probably had this arrangement for quite some time at this point.

But then, just to further solidify the idea that Alex is more in the way than not, once he’s done getting everything unpacked, Greg dismisses him outright.  Alex gets the rest of the day off, and he spends it wandering around the city, getting to know the area.  It’s a lovely little calm before the storm that is the other three when they’re left alone.  And the other three are anything but calm, as they remind him later that evening when Roisin and Greg manage to start smashing shit up.  If Alex wasn’t already bombarded with hints that he needed to put in his notice weeks earlier, this is another neon sign that he’s making bad choices.  Greg defends Alex’s fashion choices, and then quietly takes him aside only to give him a private telling off for his tattoos.  Tattoos which, while Alex is working, aren’t even visible anyway.  This is the first Greg has seen them, and it was only by accident that he even spotted them, because he had already dismissed Alex for the day.  Alex is on his own time by this point.  He’s not technically working right now, and is only in Greg’s room because he heard an alarming noise and came over to make sure no one was hurt.  Greg has no real right to tell him off for it, nor does Alex have any obligation to do anything about it, but he still goes out of his way to adjust his personal wardrobe to make Greg happy, when he’s still thinking he’s going to be putting in his notice in a few days anyway.  Alex is already a goner at this point.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  He is already doing things entirely to please Greg, outside of the scope of the job he was hired to do, and he’s in so much more trouble than he realises because of it.

Another thing I wanted to do in this chapter was start to change Alex’s opinion on Rhod and Roisin.  Rhod specifically and especially.  Rhod was introduced as intense and too much to handle, and Alex didn’t much like that, but this is the first time he’s had the chance to properly get to know him as a person outside of Greg’s influence.  I wanted Rhod to be someone who exists to antagonise Alex, but without being outright hostile toward him; someone who isn’t a threat, but who isn’t a friend either.  He exists in this nebulous space where Alex knows he can trust him, but he isn’t someone he can necessarily go to for help if he needs it.  Roisin, on the other hand, is someone to be constantly intimidated by based entirely on her gender.  There is a bit of lore in that regard that will be popping up later, but it’s not strictly relevant here, so we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Another thing to point out, or bring up, or whatever is that this is I believe the second or third reference to who I think at this point is fairly obviously meant to be Tim and Mark.  The fact that we haven’t seen them yet is not an accident.  Alex has been far too busy to even think about seeing his mates in this point in the timeline, and everything he does in the present story is dictated by Greg.  They both play present roles in this story, and we will be seeing them shortly, but for now they’re just allusions and foreshadowing.

Back to Greg for a bit, we learn a little bit more about him via Roisin, both directly and indirectly.  Alex being given the day to himself the day before may or may not have been entirely by accident.  It’s entirely likely that Greg knew what Alex is like, and that he’d spend it doing admin-based activities like getting familiar with the area under the guise of being a tourist.  And sure enough, it comes in handy, because he knows where to find a chemist when they need one.  When Roisin asks Alex to take her back to the hotel, it’s likely for the same reason, that Alex will be able to get her back there quickly, without having to wander about to get her bearings.  And then we learn something new, in a vague, shrouded sort of way.  Greg didn’t trust his previous assistant, and something about the story Alex had been told isn’t exactly true.  And once again, Alex is confused because nothing is adding up around him, and there’s no one he can turn to to help him sort this mess out.

Also don’t forget, the playlist I made updates as I work on the fic.  It’s got quite long, and will only get longer as we go.

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Fic notes: Get the Egg out of the Egg

November 2, 2023 /

This chapter contains a scene that I knew early I wanted to include.  I don’t know why this particular scene needed to make it in, aside from the fact that it’s one of those weird ones that definitely has precedent if we read into the studio banter.  Precedent in more ways than one.  It keeps coming up.  But we’ll get to it later.

Let’s talk about the task and subsequent breakdown at the beginning of this chapter, because I spent money on this.  I bought the books because I wanted to dissect how this weirdo writes the tasks.  And I still don’t think I got it right.  But also, just like the house is a character, so are the tasks in a way.  I wanted to use the tasks as a reflection of Alex’s mood, because they do tend to reflect something from series to series sometimes.  I wanted to create a scenario where Alex has just enough control in his life where he’s able to lash out at someone else, and he does that via the tasks.  Greg has not been treating him kindly, and Alex has spent the last three chapters clinging to any scrap of stability he can, hoping that either Greg’s mood mellows out, or he figures out what he did to irritate him in the first place.  Alex never got an answer to the question that had been bothering him, and it’s not really clear whether Greg’s truly come round, or if he’s still playing around.  And even when Alex is rewarded, it’s not a reward for him.  His reward is doing something he knows makes Greg happy, and then being thoroughly humiliated after.  Not much of a reward, really.  So when Greg asks for teams immediately after, Alex lashes out in the only way he perceives as safe.  He words the task in a way that closes as many loopholes as possible, and makes the task as unpleasant and stressful as possible, which will only go further in filling the brief Greg gave him.  He wants to see them hurry, and he wants eggs.  Alex can deliver that, and he can feel in control of something at the same time.

Because the dubiously consensual part of the whole thing applies to the entire situation between him and Greg.  Not just the sex, but everything else.  Alex being incapable of saying no to anything is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen about a human being, and it is the root of his entire problem.  He would not be here at all if he could just say no to anything.  Any one thing, at any point, if he’d just said no to it, he’d be in a very different place in life right now.  As it is, he’s desperate to make Greg happy, because that’s what he’s wired to do, but there’s some disconnect between what he wants and what Greg wants.  An entire, yawning cosmic void of a difference.  And if they were proper, mature adults about this situation they’ve found themselves in, they might be able to get themselves on the same page about it.  Instead, they’re on different planets about it, and Alex is left having to passive-aggressively bully other people to make up for years of bullying from Greg.  And what’s worse, he’s deluded himself into thinking it works for him.

Of course, it all goes immediately to hell when he’s locked in the shed.  I’ll be honest, this one comes from the “surprise Alex” task in series 3.  I’ve always wondered why nobody just locked him in there.  They wouldn’t have even had to properly lock him in.  Just feed the lock through the hasp and pretend to have locked it, and then panic when “nobody can find the key.”  I’m sure that would definitely surprise him.  It was my very first thought.  And then the opportunity presented itself to really lock him in there, and of course that’s what I did.

I probably rewrote this scene about five or six times, because nothing I did seemed quite right though.  I didn’t like the idea of Alex doing anything to deliberately damage the shed, because Greg would absolutely wallop him for that.  I didn’t want to leave him in there too long either, nor did I want to rescue him too quickly, or give him an easily exploitable way out.  I’m fairly certain the whole window frame actually pops out on the shed, or at least it seems like it does, and now at least there’s a very large back window he could have easily got out of.  But at this point, which would have been between series 4 and 5, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there at that point.  Either way, locking Alex in the shed seemed like a good way to get Greg to go right back to pissed off with him all over again, so that’s what I did.  But at least this time, Alex knows what he did, which is all Alex wanted in the first place.

As for the flashback, I know this is what you’re probably wanting to see.  Here’s the portrait:

It’s called Fisheye, and it’s another one that just screamed “Taskmaster portrait” to me when I saw it.  Annoyingly, this is the only photo of it I could find on the internet.  I have to admit, I don’t know a whole lot about this artist, and only found him while looking for someone who could be reasonably mistaken for Banksy, and who would have been active at this time.  I can’t even find any information on when this piece was done, but let’s say for the sake of this fic it was done before 2004, and thus would have been something a person into art would have wanted copied by that point.  But he definitely ticks all the boxes, and had a fantastic self portrait that worked for what I needed as well.

Back to the present, we have Alex having to deal with the aftermath of being locked in the shed.  I’ve always loved that bit in series 12 when he had to break in after Guz locked him out, and this is kind of drawing from that a bit.  I feel like in this universe, Alex has broken into the house more than a few times, so he knows all of its weak spots.  But this part of the chapter isn’t about Alex breaking into the house.  It’s about Alex and Greg, and their terrible, terrible relationship.  This chapter plays straight a common bit that’s played for laughs on the show, which is that Greg does slap Alex around.  There are a few times throughout the series where Greg raises his hand to him in warning, and Alex leans away, and it’s a wonderful little bit of physical telegraphing between them, because it says so much about what must go on between them when they haven’t got eyes on them.  Greg doesn’t need to say anything to get Alex to step back into line.  There have even been a few times where he has actually slapped Alex on camera, even.  And then this is the same Alex who finds the courage to shit talk panellists to their faces because he’s “next to [his] big man.”

There’s a certain journey there, and Alex is currently lost somewhere in the weeds along it.  He’s also so turned around and fucked up from whatever’s been done to him so far that he apparently truly believes that this relationship or situation or whatever you want to call it will kill him, and the biggest emotion he can manage to conjure about it is at best a hopeful indifference.  He doesn’t want to die.  He’d like to avoid it, actually.  But he’s accepted that it’s inevitable and is probably going to happen sooner than he’d have planned for.  He knows exactly what Greg means by those contradictory statements when Greg says that Alex is here for life, and that he can be replaced by morning.

Now, we get to the part that I mentioned earlier.  I don’t know why this burrowed into my brain, but it sure lived there rent free for ages until I found a place for it.  There’s a lot of banter about Alex not being toilet trained, and one in particular about Greg cleaning the mess up with Alex’s beard, and a part of my brain supplied the thought that he’d done that before.  Greg has absolutely rubbed Alex’s face in his own piss, and it’s absolutely a thing that’s happened more than once.  Then I got to thinking about the dog bed, and the cuddle banter, and this bit from the podcast where he was locked in a cupboard (???), and this whole weird scenario sort of popped up fully formed where Alex is basically a kept pet with chores.  He’s kept in a cupboard when he misbehaves, and when he’s very good he gets to sleep in the big bed, and sometimes Greg puts up with having his leg humped and occasionally has to rub Alex’s nose in his own piss.

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Fic notes: The Audacity to Look Annoyed.

October 25, 2023 /

I mentioned this in the discord server, but I feel like it bears saying out loud as well.  I absolutely love that this show uses the same title format I’ve leaned on for years with my own chapter titles.  Just pick some random, out of context bullshit from somewhere and use that.  It doesn’t matter if those few words have nothing at all to do with the overall tone or trajectory of the chapter.  They sound good as a contained little segment on their own, and act as a sort of clickbait, so why not use it as a title?  I was absolutely thrilled when I noticed that this show did that as well, because I love a fandom with a baked in title convention, because it makes it easier to come up with titles.  For me, anyway.  But this?  I don’t have to change anything.  I’ve been doing it this way for ages.

Okay, so stream-crossing memes from my other fandom aside, let’s talk about taking the television show out of the lore for a while.  The decision to axe the show entirely came very early in the planning stages.  If I was going to go full Wilson Fisk (sorry!) with Greg in this fic, I had to properly, unflinchingly commit to the bit.  And I think I mentioned last week that the lordship gave me the means through which to pull it off without being too outlandishly ridiculous about it.  I didn’t want to go all the way to a cape-wearing, helmet-donning supervillain with him, but he needed to be close to that league.  Someone with the power and influence to pull off something uncomfortably close to criminal.  And if you take away the television show, and look at Taskmaster as it presents itself, there is something oddly unsettling about it.  When I pitch it to friends, I call it SAW for circus clowns, and that’s the best way I’ve found to get people’s interest piqued, but it’s also not wrong.

What I decided to do with it was look at what the show presents itself as, rather than what the show actually is.  What it actually is is a panel game.  We all know that, because we watch it.  We wouldn’t be here otherwise (presumably.  If you’re reading this without having seen the show, what are you doing?).  But what it presents itself as is, well.  SAW for circus clowns.  Five people locked in a house, made to perform incomprehensible tasks to please the whims of a madman.  And that’s the angle I’m playing it as.  Obviously, the Taskmaster house is too small to make that work, and there’s the whole actual judgement and trophy aspect which doesn’t entirely work either.  I needed to keep the points and scoring, because pleasing the Taskmaster and arguing for points is such a big part of the competition that I couldn’t just throw it away.  The trophy, on the other hand, wasn’t enough of an incentive.  It’s a funny prize for TV, but what would compel five people to do this in reality?  I thought long and hard about this, and ultimately there was only one real answer: money.  Well, there were two answers, but the second one was a little too dark for this fic.  I could have gone properly SAW with it, but somehow the outright torture porn route didn’t feel right for this story.

Actually, there’s a secret third answer, which is that the people who sign up to do it just really like getting told what to do, but I also think that’s another concept for another story.  One which does also fit into this universe quite nicely, but there wasn’t enough room for it here.  Also, this is Alex’s story.  So.  The answer was money.

Greg as a character clearly enjoys telling people what to do, and it really doesn’t seem to matter to him whether the things he tells people to do make sense or not.  He only cares about seeing people work themselves up trying to please him.  So his demands not making sense play into this, because if the tasks don’t make sense, they’ll get more worked up.  And if there’s financial compensation, in the form of competition for whoever can best please the Taskmaster, they will all desperately want to please him.  They will turn on one another over points that would seem stupid and meaningless in any other context.  They will put up with the humiliation and degradation they might otherwise throw down over.  Because there’s quite a lot of money on the line.

In taking out the televisual aspect, I also had to slightly rearrange how the “show” works.  I took out the prize task and the live task, one of which hurt more than the other.  To start, I took out the prize task mainly because I couldn’t make it fit with the way I decided to take the “we’re here for ten weeks” thing literally.  I know that’s not how the show is filmed, but I wanted them to literally be stuck there for ten weeks, being driven to absolute madness from trying to please the Taskmaster.  And I stretched all of them, even the early series out to ten weeks, because I like the consistency.  But if they’re stuck on the estate for ten weeks, subjected to a psychological torment, I couldn’t really find a way to make the prizes work that made sense.  I really liked how Julian Clary saw them, as he revealed in the podcast: that he interpreted the prizes as being gifts for the Taskmaster, but even that would mean letting these people off the estate about once a week.  And idk.  The isolation seems key to the psychological decline.  Being allowed to leave feels too much like enrichment and reward to me.  We can’t allow that.

I also got rid of the live task, but more for logistical reasons.  They don’t have a big crew on hand to set up parlour games for them.  I thought it would be funny, and even toyed with it, but it didn’t work as well as I’d have liked, so I scrapped the whole thing.  Instead, I replaced it with a homework task, which kind of bridges the gap between the two.  It’s something they all have to do, but it’s assigned based off of the week’s scores and designed to either punish or reward to further divide the group.  The homework task isn’t scored, but not doing it at all may come with its own consequences, such as special criteria on a future task, resulting in one of Alex’s famous “admin errors.”

For this made-up group, they’re not sticking around for long, so I didn’t want to use a proper series for them.  I just made up some new tasks for them to do, and we’ll be seeing the back of them shortly.  When I get to series 5, however, they will be more of a constant presence.  And because of the way the show is filmed, I had to do a little bit of jiggery-pokery with the tasks to make it work as well.  Mainly, I had to rearrange a few tasks, because episode 1 starts off with a location task and that doesn’t work well with the way I’ve structured this not-show setting.  I think technically it changes who wins the first episode, but shh.  I kept the most important task from this episode, which is the special cuddle, because it’s the perfect tone-setter.  But we’ll talk more about that when we get to it.

Either way, things are a little bit funky, because I’ve removed the show from the TV show.  This is about the characters Greg and Alex play on the show, when they go in front of the cameras and do whatever the fuck it is they do that drives me insane.  They’re insane.  And this fic is just an extension of that insanity.

There’s a subtle point I do want to call out, because I think it’s easily missed and I want it to not go completely missed.  And if you don’t want these kinds of notes and questions, click away now.  In the flashback sequence, Alex explicitly has Saturdays off.  He doesn’t utilise them properly, but per contract, he has them to do with as he pleases.  In the present, it’s Saturday, and that goes very quickly acknowledged.  It’s Saturday, and he’s not exactly spending it on himself.  In fact, he’s still very clearly working, even if he is being very lazy about it.  Something has changed.  I’m not going to tell you here what’s changed, but I want you to be aware that something has changed.  But if it wasn’t clear already, Alex has been run through the ringer by the present point in this fic, and the flashback sequence will be exploring how he got here.  I love this weird character he has within the lore of the show, because there’s so much going on with him.  And there’s so much going on between him and Greg.  Ultimately, that’s what this fic is about, but there’s a much bigger plot at play as well.  If this were played straight, and this were a healthy, functioning relationship, this would be a story about trust.  Other fics in this fandom have done that story very well.  I’m not doing that story, because this isn’t a healthy, functioning relationship.  This is a relationship that, realistically, broke down within a week of Alex getting hired on.  Alex should have left as soon as he witnessed whatever the fuck that was between Rhod and Greg.  Also, with Rhod, the idea of him being the world’s most unqualified solicitor amuses me to no end.  Him being Greg’s solicitor on top of it can realistically only spell trouble, especially if they have the sort of relationship where they get drunk and shoot one another with BB guns.  Now, with this in mind, series 7 does happen in this universe as well, and I would like to explore that as well at some point.  With the information given in the chapters I’ve already posted, you can probably figure out at least part of how Rhod found himself doing tasks for ten weeks.

But there will be an exploration of trust in this fic, but it’s not going to be quite the same exploration that you’d get elsewhere.  Alex puts way too much trust in Greg, and he barely thinks to question it.  Just, yep.  This is the guy he’s decided to devote his entire life to.  One thing I really wanted to play with was the idea of a sort of manufactured desire or attraction.  There have been a few banter bits where Alex has lines about wanting to make Greg happy, and there’s one in particular where he doesn’t like being shouted at, but he knows that when Greg shouts at him that makes Greg happy, and he likes when Greg’s happy, and that’s an absolutely insane thing to say.  I needed to play with it.  I think that may have been one of the tipping points that made me decide to write this fic, after hearing it one too many times.  There are some other things he says from time to time that seem less in character, and more just Alex Horne uncomfortably saying things, but those things still got into my brain a little bit.  Awkwardly stating that he’s straight, right after doing some patently gay shit with his co-host, which I will take at face value and not analyse outside of the context of this specific fic.  But that is a concept I wanted to look at in this fic.  If the Alex in this fic was completely straight, what would the relationship between him and Greg as it’s presented on the show look like?  It’s very clearly sexual, even if we don’t take that bizarre fucking puppet outtake from series 15 into account (I’m definitely taking it into account).  How do you get someone who is straight into a relationship like this?  And that’s where those weird-ass tags and warnings come in.  Even in this chapter, where there is nothing coerced or dubious about the consent on the surface, Alex is explicitly only doing what he’s doing because Greg likes it.  If he were in control of this situation and doing what he liked doing, he wouldn’t be doing any of this.  But he likes making Greg happy, and this is how that’s done.  At the same time, he wants to do it.  It’s not his favourite thing in the world to do, but that doesn’t matter to him.  Nothing in this chapter is his favourite thing in the world, but none of it matters.  He does it because Greg wants him to do it.  And that’s the crux of it all.  Alex Horne will do whatever he’s told, and Greg knows it.

What a strange man Alex is.  I wonder why he’s like that.

Also, starting next week, I’m going to start adding eBook downloads for each chapter, including retroactively.  I haven’t been able to do that because I’ve been stupidly busy all month, and assuming everything works, this week’s chapter should post while I am on a train.

Also also, I’ve started a sideblog for fic stuff, over on Tumblr.  Follow that for fic specific ramblings and announcements and stuff.

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Fic notes: An Overstuffed Penguin.

October 12, 2023 /

Okay, right off the bat, I have altered the historical timeline a bit, so let’s get that elephant out of the room.   I’ve already rearranged a small patch of West London to make the setting operate a bit more smoothly, which I haven’t really properly addressed either.  So let’s consider that addressed and acknowledged, and move on.

The painting that unsettles Alex in the flashback part of this chapter is a piece by Joos van Craesbeeck piece, evoking the works of Hieronymus Bosch, titled Terror and Desire – The Temptation of St Anthony.  It looks like this:

I picked it because it was the perfect mix of batshit unhinged, and weird-ass portrait.  The problem with it is that it wasn’t revealed until 2016, and the flashbacks take place well before that.  I usually don’t like fucking with the timeline (historical or canonical, and yet I’ve done both) where I can help it, but I wanted a really fucked up portrait and immediately fell in love with this one the second I saw it, honestly.  Nothing else I found lived up to it.  So we’re just gonna pretend it was unearthed from whatever basement it was found in a few decades sooner than reality in this universe.

But honestly, it had to be this painting.  What else was it going to be?  Just look at it; it’s fucking insane.

As for the timing of the flashback itself, it’s sort of another area where I’ve altered canonical history a little bit to make the lore work in a way that makes better sense.  The lore on this show is all over the place, but that’s because it was never intended to make sense.  And that’s fine.  It was never supposed to exist in the first place.  It just happened organically by accident, and now here we are with these two doing whatever the fuck it is they do.  I sort of have it in my head that Alex started working for Greg much earlier than the show would have started, so that fancy “new” flat screen television that would have cost about £4,000 that Alex is definitely not thinking about would be circa around 2004 or so (thanks to that delightful outtake with Rhod).  I’m shuffling things around to make them go where they fit best, because the lore doesn’t fit together smoothly anyway.  It’s a wild mess of contradiction, often within the same banter segments, so like, fuck it.  This is going to be the sort of fic where all I can ask is that you roll with what I throw at you and trust that it’ll work out in the end.

The “present” part of the story takes place just before series 5, so you can decide for yourself if that’s Alice Lavine or not.  It wasn’t meant to be.  I think I accidentally and subconsciously turned that character into her while not paying enough attention to the name I gave her, but given what I’ve done with Greg to make the whole framing of the task element make sense, it could go either way. The show doesn’t recycle panelists except for Champion of Champions, but if we count Fringe shows as lore, there are quite a few people who have done it more than once. And I like the thought of that on a thematically messed up level, because I can do something with it helps brace up some more wobbly bits of my worldbuilding where the lore isn’t doing me many favours.  And I am counting the Fringe shows as lore for plot reasons, but in a backwards, janky sort of way.  TL;DR, the lore as it exists doesn’t make sense, so I’m giving myself carte blanche to cherry pick from it and do with what exists of it as I please.

As for what I’ve done with the whole task element, I really wanted to play with the entire lore element of that concept.  There are so many jokes and references and allusions to the tasks being done for Greg.  It’s his house, and he wants these things done for whatever insane reason.  Obviously, it’s just a framing device, because it gives some semblance of context for what is ultimately a very stupid and silly television show.  But this is a new fandom for me, fic-wise, which means most of you are probably new readers here, and my favourite question to ask when writing fic is why.  Why does this insane man want these things done?  But also, what is the in-universe context behind all of it?  If we take away the obvious answer—that one very silly man wrote some lines for another very silly man to read into a camera—and look at this through a fully Watsonian lens (which is often my favourite lens to look at anything), the answer becomes a lot more opaque.  Luckily, thanks to the frankly baffling amount of yes-and improv that happens on this stupid show, we do have an answer.  And it is just as insane and unhinged as that painting, but it’s also an answer that doesn’t need a lot of shoe-horning in for the exact same reason.  Because the man who wants things done really enjoys telling people to carry out pointless tasks, and is in a position of power that allows him to tell people to do these things.  He’s the sort of eccentric weirdo who can give himself a daft title, and nobody really questions it.  In fact, enough people treat it with at least a sort of mocking respect that it encourages him to keep doing it.

Alex, meanwhile, has something else entirely going on.  They both do.  Last week I talked about how there are two very different versions of Alex in this fic, and this is where we really see it.  Right off the bat, we see that Alex has always suffered from, “Guy who just says things” syndrome.  Somewhere along the line, that changed from nervously chattering on about whatever popped into his head to casually chattering on about whatever pops into his head.  So really, not much as changed, except he’s probably got a little more casually randy about the shit that comes out of his mouth.  I made this odd decision to break the chapters up this way, putting the flashback bit in the middle because I wanted to immediately show both of them at their worst—Greg at his meanest and Alex at his most needy and pathetic—immediately followed by both of them before they became whatever broken creatures they are now.  In the flashback parts, we’re going to see how they got to this broken state, while the present-day part is going to be something else entirely, set to the backdrop of series 5.

I’m also slightly altering that timeline a bit, and pretending that series 5 lasted ten weeks just for the sake of the narrative.  This is a world without the television show, and therefore a world without the constraints of such schedules.  The whole task element doesn’t work the same way the show does, because it doesn’t need to.  The guests stay on the estate for ten weeks, endure what is probably a war crime amount of psychological torture, take their compensation, and get sent on their way, with weekly meetings with the Taskmaster to discuss their performance.  It’s all very comic book villain, but he sort of is one.  And it’s a good job I’ve got plenty of experience writing those guys, because idk how I’d be able to handle that with a straight face otherwise, honestly.  When I was sitting down to work out how this would even, well, work, comic books were exactly where my mind kept gravitating back toward and eventually I had to just give in to the temptation.  It’s a patently stupid concept, and I think leaning into the stupidity without any amount of self-consciousness is really the only way to make it work at all.  Just embrace how ridiculous it is.  This guy, an actual lord, would likely have a lot of connections that would let him get away with a lot of dodgy bullshit.  They’ve joked about him having wealth, and multiple homes, so he could probably pay off people who weren’t already willing to look the other way, honestly.  He’s already admitted to being willing to take bribes to fix the competition; if he’s taking them, he’s probably not above making them, let’s be real.

TL;DR, Lord Greg Davies is dodgy as fuck, in more ways than one, and he should not be trusted.

As for Little Alex Horne, he’s got some problems of his own.  I pretty much went entirely stage persona with him, so don’t be surprised if certain details are missing.  He’s still a fucking weirdo though.  The key thing I’m leaning on here is the “Alex will do anything you tell him to” bit that Greg is often all too eager to exploit.  And that’s going to be the crux of this entire fic.  Alex will do anything he’s told, and he has bumblefucked his way into an interview to work for a man who far too much enjoys telling people what to do.  That right there is a match made in hell.

I’m going to be making a lot of executive decisions along similar lines as we go with the rest of the fic and characters as well, because this is a sort of Lore AU, or whatever we want to call this thing. Things need to make sense in that context.  There is no television show. The whole thing has been restructured and reframed into something a little more sinister to fit the lore as it’s presented around Greg and Alex’s weird-ass relationship as presented in the show, because that’s the primary thing I wanted to explore here. I’ve been fiddling and tweaking my original outline, removing and replacing a plotline that I’ve been uncertain about, and I think I have settled on keeping it, but keeping it means that I’m going to really need to rework it because in coming back to this I’ve decided that I hated how I was planning on doing it the first time round.  It’s a bit thematically out of pocket, but also kind of on brand at the same time, so I think it works.  Basically, this fic is weird, but it needs to be weird because everything about this show is weird.  I’ve already talked about the warnings and how they make everything seem worse than it is.  But it’s also not going to be a fluff-filled love-fest either.

I write weird fic for weird people.  And shit just got very League of Gentlemen all of a sudden somehow.

I’ll be updating the tag list that shows up on the landing page as I go with this, which does mean it will continue to get more and more insane and nonsensical as I go. But also, this fic has exploded into something much bigger than I expected it to be. I think it’s just going to become my new pet project, because I wound up with more ideas than I know what to do with at this point. But we’ll burn those bridges when we get to them.

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A note on Your Time Starts Now

October 12, 2023 /

Tone and trope spoilers ahead, but nothing too specific.

Oh look, it’s another terrifying fic with mental tags.  Is this even a surprise anymore?

Actually, it probably is because this is a new fandom for me.  So if you’re new here, hi.  In some parts, I’m known as that guy what wrote that really messed up Thor fic that got popular entirely for creating wank.  Or that guy what wrote that other really messed up Thor fic with terrifying tags (which one? Take your pick at this point.  This has definitely become my brand).

I write ugly stories about uncomfortable things, and boy oh boy, has Taskmaster really burrowed deep into that part of my brain that wants to pick this sort of thing apart.  Of course, I always run into a problem with these fics when it comes to tagging, even (it turns out) when I am totally in control over the tag system.  This is probably the worst one yet on that front, because I have literally no idea what to tag it.  In some aspects, I feel as though I’ve massively under-tagged it, because I simply don’t even know if there are names for half the tropes I’m playing with.  In other aspects, I’ve definitely over-tagged.  The dubcon aspect is especially over-tagged under an abundance of caution, simply because it’s a vague concept that carries a lot of disagreement.  Out of caution, I like to put the non-con warning on as well, but at least since this isn’t on AO3 anymore there’s no more confusion with the way they conflate non-con with rape by default (I’ve always hated that decision because of the way it muddles up kink vs trauma).  Overall, I tried to keep the tags to the overarching themes, rather than trying to hit every single minutiae that comes with the broader tropes.  And there is a lot of minutiae to explore in this thing.

In this fic, the consent is extremely dubious and occasionally under duress, but it’s also wholly separate from some of the other expectations that may come with this warning.  Similarly, the violence warning is there separate from the non-con one, and plays more into the “unsafe, insane, and dubiously consensual” tag.  The violence warning is there to cover the aspects of the BDSM element that permeates this entire ship, particularly with Greg’s frequent threats of bodily harm in mind.  Those threats are not going to be entirely empty, because I want Alex to have a reason to take them seriously.  At the same time, there is some level of consent to all of it, but the lines are blurred and I do love an unreliable narrator.  And I am going to say right up front, the narrator is unreliable.  This story is told through the lens of someone who is, I’m not going to say broken, but not quite right.  Unsafe and insane are the key words here, and that applies to both of them.  There are a lot of really good fics in this fandom that do it properly, and this is not one of them.  There are no safewords, and Alex barely has a way out of this situation, if he even wanted it.  One of my favourite bits of banter between them are the contradictory gags of “you’re here for life” and “I can replace you by lunchtime.”  Which one is it, Greg?  Or is it both?  Is he replaceable, but on the condition of something unspeakable?  What are you going to do to him if and when you finally get bored with him?  It is delightfully fucked up, and the fact that I’m sure neither of them have ever spared a second of thought toward it is what makes it so much fun for me.

In many ways, this fic is going to be a balls to the wall ride of insanity, but at the same time it’s likely to not quite go in the direction the warnings might make it seem like.  The freeforms are as accurate as I was able to get them without having the words to really articulate a lot of what’s going on.  But at the very basis, this is going to be a story about someone who has got into a situation he can’t get out of, whether for lack of viable options or because of his own psychosexual damage.  There are two separate stories being told in this fic, juxtaposed against one another in varying cadence and rhythm, and trying to tag for both of those stories at the same time was a nightmare.  There’s a certain degree of consensual non-consent in one story, and a complete breakdown of core functions in the other.  And that’s what I most wanted to play with here.  In this fictional universe they’ve created with their stage dynamic, there’s definitely something sinister going on.  Although it’s played for laughs, I wanted to strip that comedic element and play it completely straight.  I wanted to dig my fingers in and pull it apart at the seams to see what would make this sort of twisted dynamic work.  I wanted to find those dark corners and shine a light on them to see all the worms and spiders living there.  And to do that I needed to take it to all the extremes necessary to get these characters to a point where Alex wouldn’t even think to defend himself against having his face smeared in his own piss.  I had to really lean on that unhinged comic book villain energy to get Greg to a point where locking Alex in a cupboard as punishment is the least worst thing he could choose to do.

At the heart of my tagging issues with this fic is the story that’s set in the flashback sequences.  I have no idea how to succinctly describe the vibe I am going for here, or the story being told.  This story, which I don’t want to call the B story, but it’s also not the A story, it ultimately about privilege.  There’s the obvious power imbalance that comes with playing the Lord Davies gag straight, with a sort of sinister Downton Abbey twist in that Greg is very much in a position of power that could wholly and completely end Alex’s career prospects with a single bad reference.  Alex is naturally going to want to appease that just for the sake of the pay cheque and the reference.  But it’s also about the position of privilege Alex enjoys.  There’s an overall atmosphere of foreboding and discomfort that would make many people pack up and run for their own safety, pay cheque and reference be damned.  But Alex is an uncommonly tall, straight, white, able-bodied man.  These are instincts he very likely would never have learned to even recognise, much less act upon.  He’s awkward and uncomfortable as his default setting, so not being able to pick apart what makes this discomfort different from what he may have experienced in the past winds up being his own downfall.  By the time he realises this, it’s too late, and now he’s in hell.

I’ve got this whole fic sitting in Aeon, waiting to be typed up into proper drafts.  I don’t know how to tag it, but I tried to be as accurate as possible.  But there are two different stories happening at the same time and the tags make it seem even worse than it is, but it’s still definitely going to be bad, but maybe just not in the way you expect it to be.

Basically, take everything at face value, but don’t expect everything to be relevant to the same part of the story.

Addendum:

These notes were originally posted in February 2023, when this fic was posted to AO3.  I’ve slightly edited out references to this fic being being posted there, since it’s been pulled from there along with everything else.  But also, this fic got massively sidelined in March, along with several other projects I had going at the time.  The reason it got pulled from AO3 is separate to it getting sidelined.  The quick version for pulling it from AO3 is that I disagree with the way the site is run, and the abuse from certain demographics of the userbase aren’t being handled properly, so I quit.

If you followed me on Tumblr or my newsletter at that time, you’re probably aware of what happened on a more personal level.  If you didn’t follow me then, the quick version there is that my neighbour shot up my apartment and it turns out that having bullets go into your home really fucks you up and stops you being able to write for a while.

Since I’m reposting it here, I’ll be taking the opportunity to tidy some things up and bring some aspects into line with new lore that’s dropped in recent series.  I’ll post chapters every Thursday.  It’s not going out to the newsletter, because well.  It’s not exactly newsletter material, let’s be real.  Even without being RPF-adjacent, this fic is insane.  I’ll announce it on Tumblr every now and then, but that’s about it.

And since I’ve been doing this with other fics I’ve been posting, I’ve made a playlist for you, with the music I listen to while working on the fic.  This one was made today, because a lot of the music I was listening to the first time round was either on vinyl, or on smaller playlists that I consolidated into one big one for easier linking.  I’ll probably add to this over the course of working on this fic in the coming months, so don’t be surprised if it gets even bigger than it already is.

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Fic Notes: Tarbell – Callbacks

October 10, 2023 /

I’m gonna be honest, I like posting chapters for longfic, because it’s a lot less backend work to deal with.  The most taxing part of posting any fic is getting the whole process started, because of all the crap that goes into setting up the actual upload.  Also, I forgot how short some of these early chapters were.  Barely more than 1,000 words, this one was.

This chapter really does one thing, and I think it does it quite well.  It highlights Darcy’s burnout.  She’s not in control of anything that happens in her life.  Everything happens around her, and she’s an incidental part of her own story at this point.  This is very much by design, because it’s often what it feels like when you reach this level of exhaustion with life.  She doesn’t want to be where she’s at, but she can’t find a way out of it.  Everything she tries is met with a roadblock, and she can’t really muscle her way out of it because it would only be edging in on what someone else is already doing.  Steven and Hannah have their own thing going, and Darcy was just a last-minute stand-in for him because Hannah couldn’t get the time off work.  She knows this, and she’s able to push it aside without feeling too big of a sting from it, but it still hurts.  That kind of thing always will.  But she’s also too focused on trying to find a way out of this situation she feels like she’s stuck in that she has missed what has turned out to be a rather crucial plot point.  It’s another thing I’m not sure anyone ever picked up on, because it’s subtle.  But the lecture she wasn’t paying attention to is about Thor.  I didn’t want to be blatant about it, because I didn’t want it to be the sort of thing that jumps out and makes the reader spend the next 50,000 words tear their hair out and scream at her for being stupid.  Last week, I mentioned the unreliable narrator not quite being from the characters’ perspectives, but it’s not not from their perspectives either.  Darcy confuses Iceland with Sweden, which is a very American thing to do.  The lecture is obfuscated and muddled, because she isn’t paying attention, so the details get mangled in this game of telephone to the reader.  By the time they make it to the page, all we know is that some drunk politician apparently said something he shouldn’t have done.  Which is all the information Loki gave us in his chapter as well.  A bit more comes out over the course of the story, but even if Darcy had been paying attention in her lecture, she’d still have no way of knowing at this point that it was about her boss’ boyfriend, because he never talks about anything before he moved to the US.

Her PolySci degree has always fascinated me, because there’s quite a lot that can be done with it IRL, but it’s not really relevant to anything at the core of the story we’re given.  And that’s the point.  She’s burning out, so she takes this bizarre internship that has nothing to do with it just to get away for a while.  Every time I use it, I like to give it a different slant.  I’ve had her genuinely pursue it to completion, I’ve played the story straight exactly as it’s presented in Thor 1, and I’ve had her drop out to take a totally different direction (not knowing at the time that’s what Marvel would eventually do, but in a different way).  I’d like to also eventually play it straight the way Marvel did, having her pivot to astrophysics.  In Isla Nublar, when she completed it, I spent some time looking into how her degree could be used in a way that could be relevant to a Jurassic Park story, landed on media and journalism, and stuck her in the editing room for a news station and gave her a job she actually enjoyed for a change.

Tarbell is the one where I let her drop out and take a totally different direction, by contrast.  I feel like that’s probably obvious, if you’ve not read it before and you’re here for the first time.  She and Loki do manage to cross paths eventually, as should be evident from the tags, and I do have a whole series planned out that sort of mirrors the actual Tarbell Course in Magic book series (which sounds insane if you know what those are).  I want to do a whole thing about celebrity relationships and public personas vs the private individual, and if I actually manage to make it work, it will be done in eight parts.  And  nothing about it will be sane or healthy for either of them.  But that’s showbiz.

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Fic Notes: Tales of Yggdrasil: Dwarf’s Ransom

October 10, 2023 /

This is exactly what I was talking about last week, about how I’d done something goofy with this fic, quite unintentionally.  Originally, when I had first posted this, it had been all over the place.  Multiple series, with interludes and asides, and it didn’t make any sense.  In the reposts, I’d decided to structure it as a single upload, so that nothing got missed, and then use chapter titles to separate all of the different sections.  But the idea is that it’s structured like the comic books are, where there are different titles that all take place within the same lore, but are all kind of doing their own thing.  So there’s the Ragnarök title, which is Laufey’s story (and is actually quite small overall).  Tales of Yggdrasil is Old Asgard.  Not Old Old Asgard, but the previous generation.  Odin’s generation.  All his stupid friends that he ran around causing trouble with.  And this one seems like such a departure from what the summary promises that I feel like it put a lot of people off.  But in a lot of ways, it’s just a giant prologue.  A 22,000 word prologue.

This story is pulled straight from the Eddas, and only has a few minor changes.  Although, what I was not prepared for was the day I posted this to AO3, Marvel published a comic in which Kvasir was revealed to be alive and well.  That was both hilarious and surprisingly annoying.  He’s such a nothing, nobody obscure character that I thought surely Marvel will never use this bitch.  I can do whatever I like with him, including use him exactly in the context in which he originally appears in the Eddas, present him as a corpse, and move on with the story.  So that’s what I did, and then Marvel exhumed his ass from the grave right out from under me.

But the whole point of starting with this one was to show Odin as a character in his youth.  Odin is 17 years old in this story.  We’re seeing this story through Jari’s eyes though, who has never seen an Asgardian until now.  He has no idea what an Asgardian even is.  The other Loki, by contrast, is in his 40s.  The reason Odin is fucking around on Niðavellir, which may or may not become apparent later on, is because he’s taking a rite that all Asgardian boys take at 17.  Although in his case, he’s likely taking it less as a matter of tradition, and more to get away from his tyrant king brother, Cul.  If you read what was posted to AO3 already, you’ll remember our Loki doesn’t take his until much later than 17, and doesn’t even take it properly.  So taking this rite for the wrong reasons, and not doing it correctly clearly runs in the family.  But you won’t hear that from Odin.

I like Odin as a character, because he’s complicated and contradictory in a lot of ways.  He wants everyone to see him as this stern, serious person, but he’s anything but these things.  He’s just as stupid and bone-headed as the people he hangs around, and over the course of this story, that façade of his wears down until he’s making the same insane choices as everyone else.  By the time he’s king, and dealing with ruling a realm and being a father to a gang of horrible children who don’t follow anyone’s rules including the ones he lays down, he’s at the point of giving up.  If he weren’t king, he’d be the sort of dad who wakes up one Tuesday morning and announces at breakfast that he’s decided to wilfully go senile out of spite.  But at the same time, he’s got no one to blame but himself, because he was the exact same way.  Our very first introduction to him in this series is him running around with a half-giant and a dwarf, wrecking shit on Jötunheimr over a few jars of mead.  Not because of any attachment to the man who was killed, either.  Neither he nor Loki seem overly fond of Kvasir; in fact, they both seem to have hated the man when he was alive.  Odin just doesn’t want anyone else to have the mead.  He doesn’t even seem too fucked about the actual justice part of the mission.  They find Jari’s brothers, and oh, well that’s sorted then.  Odin deals with that with a heartless out line, and continues on his journey with single-minded determination that even Loki finds crass and distasteful.

How fucked up you gotta be for a Loki to call you out on your bullshit?

But I love characters who are complicated and terrible, who do contradictory and hypocritical things.  Odin is the epitome of “do as I say, not as I do” parenting.  Everything he gets on Loki’s ass for doing, he’s guilty of himself.  Which is why I wanted to open with this part, before going into our Loki’s story.  Yes, this is the wrong Loki.  Yes, Odin is a great big bag of dicks.  But everything in this part informs why he and Loki will spend the next 25 years butting heads with one another.  Because Loki knows that Odin is absolutely full of shit, and isn’t allowed to call him out on it without being accused of treason.

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Fic Notes: Ragnarök: The Cycle Works Thus

October 4, 2023 /

All right.  There’s a lot to talk about here, beyond just this barely-2,000-word chapter.  Because I’m going to repeat something I posted about two years ago when I started trying to rewrite this thing the first time, not knowing that I would wind up not writing a single work for nearly a year after Life sucker-punched me in the face.  And that is that this fic (the whole thing, being God of Outcasts) does something incredibly goofy.  I’ve done this thing where like, the first 25k seems completely irrelevant, and almost acts as a gatekeeper.  But one of the problems I always had with the original version was that there were all of these background elements that never really got adequately explained because they weren’t included in any of the main fics, and got very easily missed by a lot of readers.  I’d written them, but they weren’t part of the main story, so I posted them separately, just assuming that anyone who cared would follow this other series as well.  But no one did, and then those stories went completely missed.  The whole, “there are two Lokis in the story” thing, for instance.  That confused so many people, because they missed the stories where Old Loki was out clowning around on a different spot on the timeline.

So now I’ve got this really bizarre setup that serves the narrative so much better, but which I think winds up being really off-putting to people.  It opens up with Laufey, of all people, as a POV character.  In the next chapter after this, we go to Odin and this weird version of Loki and his kidnapped dwarf, just going on an epic road trip to find a few jars of blood.  And only if you get past all of that does the story finally start using familiar characters.  And when it reaches about 60,000 words in does it finally start to come around to a point where Old Loki becomes relevant again, though still only tangentially. It’s still going to be about another 20k after that before some real connections start to be drawn.

And there’s so much more that I wanted to include in this story that there was not room for.  And I knew it wasn’t relevant, so it never went in.  And I agonised over it, and right as I figured out how to fix it, I had to genuinely face my own fucking mortality, and everything got sidelined.  So I’m going to put this right here, straight out of the gate.  There is a second upload.  This one is not required reading, but it is supplemental.  A lot of what happens in this second fic will be woven through the narrative of God of Outcasts.  It won’t necessarily be referenced, or even effect it, but it is baked into the narrative.  These are all of the worldbuilding elements that have been living in the back of my brain for literal years that I  never figured out what to do with, until I read Fire & Blood.  And then I got so annoyed, because that was the answer.  Literally.  Just write the damn books that Loki keeps stealing from the library.  There are maps as well, which I’ll be posting as well, probably over the next few weeks.  I wanted to post them this week, but well.  This week sucked, and the newsletter was already late to begin with.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about this first chapter.  Laufey is an under-used character, in my opinion.  The frost giants in general are under-used.  So I’ve decided to shoot myself in the foot and open this story with Laufey’s point of view.  This fic started out as a simple meme fill on Norsekink, about a century ago, and with a few little tweaks, it fit perfectly into this timeline.

There are five scenes in this bit, and I’m so annoyed that I cannot find my original notes on it, because every single one of them was meant to be a different bit of canon, from the myths, to different comic continuities, and the MCU.  I think the ones represented are these:

  1. ?
  2. Myth
  3. Thor: Season 1
  4. J Michael Straczynski’s run
  5. MCU

Basically, I’ve done the Edgar Wright thing on this one.  The first chapter tells you what the whole story is going to be.  If you can figure it out from these 2,000 words though, good luck, because it’s probably still not going where you think it is.  I cannot for the life of me remember what the first one was meant to be, and it’s driving me nuts because I feel like it should be obvious.  How many versions of Loki are there where he got flattened by Laufey?  Annoyingly, I can only think of one, and it happened after this was written.  What’s more annoying, is I can find evidence in my email archives that I might have commented on AO3 what the five parts were meant to be, but that comment has been long-deleted, and I never set it to receive copies of my own comments.  Augh.  Oh well.  If I ever figure it out, I’ll edit this and put it in writing.  Until then, I’ll remain vexed and confused.  I’m sure it’s written down somewhere, but my Scrivener file for this project is an absolute nightmare.

And since I shared this for the other fic in the newsletter, I thought I might as well share my playlist for this fic as well.  Probably unsurprising, it’s the same one.  However, this time it’s at least thematically appropriate, and the fic I started building this playlist for in the first place.

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Fic Notes: Tarbell – Flourish

October 4, 2023 /

A funny thing happens sometimes when I sit down to work on fic, even if “work on” means reading it over real quick to make sure it’s free of ancient, missed typos, and getting it all fresh in my head so I can write up these notes since apparently I don’t have the old ones anymore.  I’m sure I wrote notes for this chapter once upon a time, but everything’s a mess and who knows where they’ve gone.

But I was sat here at my desk, with my arch nemesis Morrissey playing at volume from my speakers, and that playlist was entirely the wrong music for this fic.  Tarbell was written to Otyg and Týr and Skálmöld, and can apparently only be read back to that same playlist.  I have no idea if the music I listen to while writing a fic ever comes across in the overall tone for the reader, but something about it does seem to become baked in for me, because there are definitely fics that have playlists that must be playing when I work on them, or when I read them back, or it becomes impossible to get anything done (Ours to Keep is trip hop and downtempo, with a heavy emphasis on Groove Armada and I Monster, for instance.  And just wait til you see what I wrote Midgard Legends to).

Actually, since I’m talking playlists, this is the one for anyone curious.  It’s my main Viking Metal playlist, and is the one I’ve been curating for about ten years.  A lot of my Norse Marvel fic gets written to this playlist, but not all of it.  Some goes off to weird places, like Ours to Keep did.

Anyway.  Tarbell.  Back to Loki’s perspective on this budding situation.  One thing I’d forgotten I’d done with this is deliberately code-switching within the text itself.  Normally when I write something, I pick a voice and stick with it throughout, but I didn’t do that here.  The narrator is neither Darcy nor Loki, but a secret third entity, and I don’t know who it is, or if it was ever meant to be anyone or anything in particular.  Because it’s definitely not Loki in his chapters, and it’s not really Darcy in hers.  And that’s something I would have done deliberately to keep the narrative voice from becoming too jarringly different as it bounced between the two.  That’s something that I always really dislike about stories that shift between multiple points of view, is they’ll sometimes radically shift in tone, and it can become very off-putting.

You can tell that it’s not entirely Loki’s point of view narrating this chapter because the prose is occasionally at odds with the language Loki uses.  He tells the cab driver to open the boot, and then immediately after, the cab driver opens the trunk.  The narration also tends to call Loki out on his bullshit a lot more often than it would if I were leaning into the more typical unreliable style, where this would be more in his head, and therefore he is always right in everything.  As for Darcy’s chapters, I’m not sure how much different they are from usual, because I never really leant into the tropes of letting the prose go full stream of consciousness with her anyway.  She could sometimes get into a bit of a flap here and there, but I’ve always written a more subdued Darcy to begin with, so it’s harder to tell with hers.

One of the routines Loki auditions with in this chapter is an altered version of one I performed a few times during open stage nights, way back in the day.  A simple Easter picnic, heavily inspired by Penn & Teller routines of the past with awkward fails, fumbling, and a payoff with a lot of blood and mess at the end (mine used a Bible for the book, and ended in stigmata, because it was Easter; I never liked how his version doesn’t really have an ending, but I didn’t know how to end this one without making him look absolutely insane either).  If I remember correctly, the one Darcy’s learning last minute is a riff off of an Amazing Jonathan routine, but it’s been so long I can’t recall any specific details about where my brain was going with what was ultimately a few throw-away details meant to put them in the same place at the same time so he had a reason to nit-pick her in a future chapter.  I’m not even sure if anyone ever picked up on that being Darcy in this chapter, but just to be 100% clear, yes.  That is Darcy that Loki’s watching learn a new routine last-minute at the audition.

Loki’s second routine is kind of inspired by a bunch of different things all at once, and one I just made up for the fic.  I made up a lot of his set that way, picking bits from the books on my shelf, or from routines I’ve always liked and altering them slightly.  But one thing I wanted to focus on with his audition, less necessarily than his routine, was his stage presence.  I focused on his costume early, as well as what everyone else was wearing, because that was becoming true years ago, even when I was down there.  The reason magicians “wear tails and top hats” is because when the act as we know it today became popular, that’s what audiences wore to the theatre, and magicians wore what the audience wore to appear on their level.  Eventually, that kind of became forgotten, and over time, magic acts developed this reputation, I guess, for being over-dressed and ostentatious.  I’m going to mention them again, but it’s why Penn & Teller never wore that costume on stage, because they knew it set them above the audience. When they started in the 70s, wearing a business suit was more appropriate, because it looked more like what the audience might wear.  It didn’t take long for tails and top hats to become the costume of the acts that were either older and respected enough that it was expected anyway (Johnny Thompson) or extremely up their own ass (Lance Burton), but a lot of the younger acts moved on.  But even by 2006 (which is roughly when this fic was meant to take place), when I was doing this shit, the business suit was already outdated.  The audience was wearing jeans and t-shirts, and Nathan Burton, Amazing Jonathan and even Mac King by some bizarre metric had the costume right.

And Loki absolutely hit the nail on the head.  He’s the only one who goes into this audition not wearing the outdated costume, and (obviously), he’s the one who gets the job.  Spoilers if this is your first time reading this fic, I guess, but that’s the whole premise of the thing.  Because the people hiring don’t know that the trends within the industry have changed.  They expect to see magicians showing up, over-dressed, looking stuffy and uncomfortable.  Loki looks the part, and that overshadowed everything else about his frankly mediocre audition.  He probably shouldn’t have got it.  There probably were better, more established names in the pool who deserved it more.

And because of that, everybody suffers.

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Fic Notes: Tarbell – Denny & Lee

September 26, 2023 /

So, we’re doing this again.  Didn’t do one for the first chapter, because I put it straight into the newsletter.  There wasn’t a whole lot to say, and I’m not sure I have much to say here.  But I know people always liked these notes, so it seems worth doing them.  I expected to do a lot more tidying up on this fic, but I’d forgotten that it had already got that treatment a couple years back, so there isn’t much to do on it.  And if I had done notes on it at the time, I’ve no idea where they went.

I remember at the time I originally wrote this fic, somewhere around 2013 or so, Darcy was not a terribly popular character.  She was really only well-liked amongst Tasertricks fans, but otherwise the greater fandom found her rather irritating.  I’m not sure how much of that has changed, because I don’t really engage with this fandom at all, but I always thought it was a shame that within fic even where she was a main character, she was often boiled down to this weird Tumblr persona of a person whose greatest ambition in life was getting boned by the hot guy in the fic.  So what I did immediately with this fic (and the Other One, tbh) was set out to immediately establish her as someone who had very ambitious goals, but who was also deeply burnt out and at severe risk of not achieving any of them.  Because that was the part of her character that always resonated with me.  Her first appearance within the MCU is someone who is, quite reasonably, unwilling to die over a handful of college credits.  She’s taking this absurd internship that isn’t even remotely suited to her major, presumably because she needs a goddamn break from what is from her perspective probably looking increasingly like a bullshit major in the first place.  And instead of getting a vacation like she expected, someone drops a literal space alien on her head, and she has to deal with the Men in Black crawling up her ass before the town she’s camping out in gets blown up.

If that’s what my college experience looked like, I’d handle it a lot less well than she did, frankly.  I mean, mine wasn’t great either.  To give you an indication of how my college experience went, I had a nervous breakdown, ran away to Las Vegas and became a table magician.  So, ya know.  That’s where that half of the plot comes from.

But I wanted to keep as much of that part of Darcy’s character intact as possible, and it’s largely all still there.  Instead of an internship, it’s a student job that has nothing to do with her major.  She’s burnt out and barely achieving any of her goals, on the verge of dropping out.  I didn’t want to set her and Jane up as friends, because that isn’t what they are in the first film.  I wanted to keep that awkward, slightly uncomfortable relationship between them as close to its original context as possible.  But I also wanted to fully restore Jane’s relationship to Don Blake as well, because removing that clown from the MCU was an actual crime.  A single name tag on a shirt and a forged ID is not enough to appease me.  I wanted to see this dork in the flesh, and it never happened.  So here he is, and he is the ticket to showing Darcy actually does have a brain, and can use it.  Don, and by extension, Thor, plays such a weird role in this fic.  He’s both tertiary and pointless, and yet everything at the same time.  Because to Darcy, he’s nothing.  He’s her boss’ boyfriend.  She knows he exists only because he wanders in a few times a month, and part of her job has become relaying messages to him.  But she doesn’t really care about him, because aside from star parties, which she takes a casual interest in because they’re fun, Darcy and Jane’s lives don’t overlap outside of this job.  Because it’s weird to socialise with your boss.  And your boss’ boyfriend.  And Darcy knows it.

But even with these few interactions she does have with Don, she’s picked up something weird about him.  She notices there’s something funny about him.  He dodges subjects, and he speaks in a funny sort of way, but she stays in her lane because it’s none of her business.  She could probably dig up dirt on half of her friends if she had any inclination to do so, because everyone in Las Vegas is weird.

And this is all done, of course, with the audience presumably knowing that Don and Thor are the same person, and with Thor being the entire reason Loki is at this same moment sitting in a terminal at SeaTac waiting for his connecting flight.  His entire story revolves around Thor, and whatever it was he did before leaving the country and winding up in America.  And it’s just because of Darcy’s bad luck in knowing him, despite not being aware of it, that gets her mixed up in all of Loki’s bullshit down the line.

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Overhauling the blog section

September 25, 2023 /

This site is, frankly, a mess.  At a certain point, I tried to do too much with it, and it became a nightmare to maintain.  I basically forgot that I can make other sections that can be their own thing, and it all doesn’t have to go in one place.  So I’m slowly removing a lot of stuff from this section of the site and moving it elsewhere.  This week, it’s the blog.  I use dreamwidth now anyway.  I want this section to be solely fic notes, and I’ve been collecting the fic notes that still exist over there to copy over here when the time comes as well.  There’s a lot that got posted to AO3, and I think I have quite a few in Scrivener that I need to sift through, so that’s going to be this week’s project.

But for now, the whole thing has been wiped clean and renamed in the menu and changed the sidebar to make this section easier to browse for fic notes.  I’m going to keep the “blog posts and updates” tag, and all of the backend stuff, because I hate messing with that, but this is now effectively the fic notes section.  I’ve even backdated this entry, so it shows up before the fic notes I’ve been posting.  I’ll be clearing out unused tags and categories eventually, once I clear out unused pages as well.  But I’ve got literally thousands of them, so we’ll see how things go.  By the time you see this post, it may or may not already be done.  It depends on how things look when I fiddle with them.

The reading lists will be moving over to Thor Daily at some point in the near future, but that’ll take some time to do.  I’m effectively going to be turning this part of the site into more of a landing page, and totally separating the comic part of the site off entirely so I can give it its own unique domain next year.  This part of the site is going to go back to just basically a place for my fic notes and occasional updates outside the newsletter.  Nothing will really be lost, because it’s all just being moved around and copied elsewhere.  It’s a whole process that is taking forever though.

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My writing process

August 4, 2021 /

I occasionally get asked how I’m able to write so much.  With a total word count goal of 2,000,000 by the end of the year, and several big bang fics going at once, that’s a fair question.  Although admittedly, that goal wound up being more attainable than I’d realised when I found a bunch of unpublished fic again this week.  With my total goal being about 220k away, that’s still a lot of fic to write by the end of December.

I’ll have hit this goal by October 8th.

I know this, because both my big bang fics are shaping up to be about 100k each, and that’s when they’re due.  That extra 20k is a couple of oneshots I’ll do in between, to clear the cobwebs out of my brain.  And that’s assuming I don’t find anything else that never got published either, which is kind of cheating, but oh well.  I do happen to know there is at least one big fic somewhere, but I don’t have a digital copy of it, and can’t get to the physical copy, so that one will never see the light of day, alas.

But how do I know I’ll be able to write 200,000+ words by October?

It’s like, 90% planning, and 10% knowing how to type.  All the planning in the world won’t get something that big finished and posted to AO3 on time if you’re a slow typist.  I’m old and learned on Mario Teaches Typing and IRC.  But there are many other resources out there today that can help improve your speed and accuracy.

But the planning is so much more important, because you can type as fast as you can and get nowhere if you don’t know what to write.  A lot of people will go “ew planning” when they hear it, as if knowing where you are going will take the fun out of it.  And for some people, pre-writing can feel like you’ve already written the story, causing you to lose the drive to “write it again.”  But drafts are so important.  Drafts are what allow you the freedom to write poorly.

Writer’s block is often the fear of bad writing.  From a very young age, many of us have perfectionism drilled into us.  “Do it right the first time, or don’t do it at all.”  Man, fuck that.  Do it poorly the first time, or it won’t get done at all.

Writing in Drafts

Depending on how one counts, everything I post goes through at least three drafts.  Some things go through many more.  But before I even make myself a draft for anything, I start a soundboard.  This is like a wishlist of all the things I want to happen, while knowing that most will never make it in.  Plot points, dialogue, emotions, locations.  Nothing is coherent.  Some things that go onto my soundboard do make it into the background as subtle worldbuilding or character moments.  Others might come back as motifs.

Winter dangers aren’t heat stroke. He has a decent amount of cold weather gear, but somehow the weather is still a surprise. Every scorpion and spider in the valley has found its way into his apartment
Loki gets stung. He is 100% convinced he is going to die.

He actually manages to slip on ice coming out of the casino. Darcy is right. Somehow winters are worse.
Darcy follows to the hospital. Actually needs stitches. Probably has a concussion.

Water comes from the fish tank. He’s cleaning it, and lazily dumps the old water out the door

Darcy wants to do a twist on a bullet catch. Insurance is a nightmare.
She genuinely enjoys her job. She just does not trust Loki. She still feels used by him.

Loki swears he did not know who she was when he hired her. She doesn’t trust this either.

Nothing goes in any particular order.  I just write things down as they come to me.  If I get an idea as I’m drifting off to sleep, I grab my phone and write it down for the morning.

But once I’m happy with it, I make a copy that can be torn apart.  I like to make a copy because sometimes I want to come back and refer to my soundboard later, and make sure everything made it in as I want, so I want an untouched version.

For the other version, things get deleted.  I start putting the soundboard into chronological order, and remove things from the list as they’re used.  This leaves me with a document at the end that has little bits and pieces I can still use if I find that I need an extra section somewhere.  I can refer to the cannibalised soundboard and see what ideas haven’t been used yet.

The outline itself is very vague.  Main beats I want to hit, occasional snippets of dialogue, and the big, emotional notes I want to hit.

Darcy tries to make it to Denny & Lee, but her schedule doesn’t match up very well. She stops by on dark days, but often can’t make the open stage nights. She managed to make one during the break. She goes back to find some new stuff and get ideas. She gets a call from Loki. Dumbass has been stung by a scorpion and thinks he is going to die. He is the biggest drama queen in the world. She drives out to Henderson to tell him to put some ice on it and calm tf down.

He asks her to stay. He is not really capable of being alone right now. That shit wigged him right the fuck out. He admits to her that he is not okay, and hasn’t been for a while. She realises why he refused to be admitted when he fell. When she suggests maybe he get help, he mentions that he did once, and it went poorly.

They have the conversation Loki wanted to have at dinner. He admits he did a lot of really fucked up things, and apologises. He did not know who she was when he hired her and was already starting to spiral when he accidentally played his hand. He self-sabotages a lot, and thinks that’s how that whole thing got stuck in his head. Darcy still isn’t sure how much she trusts him. She will not be responsibile for his emotional well-being.

Darcy wants to know if he is aware he’s a manipulative, gaslighting bastard. He is. He is also aware he has the world’s shortest temper and no patience.

It’s a little more coherent, and serves as the backbone for the entire story.  In theory, I could write off of this, and sometimes I do if I’m in a good groove, or not working with a deadline.  The outline is a road map.

But sometimes, I need to tell the story exactly how to behave.  It’s kind of like I’m telling the story to itself.  I take this outline, and I break it up into smaller pieces, add smaller emotions, details, and find the pacing within the narrative.  Things will slow down, gain more weight, and begin to take shape.

They come back from their break with a brand new setlist, but still closing with Metamorphosis. Loki has a high he can ride for a while, and manages to claw his way out of his pit for a while.

He’s not happy, but it’s easier to pretend.

It also makes it easier to notice how damn lonely he is.

He drives around their first Wednesday off, and finds his way out to Fandral’s place. His remaining housemates do not like him, and Fandral doesn’t want anything to do with him.

He thinks about calling Darcy, but is desperately trying to respect her rules. He goes home instead, and gets mugged in his own kitchen by a scorpion.

Full panic. He manages to squish it, but has run out of plan at that point. Half his brain thinks he’s going to die. The other half doesn’t want the $4000 ambulance bill if it’s nothing. He calls Darcy instead.

She’s clearly busy, but comes over anyway. She tells him to put some ice on it and calm the fuck down. They come inside to get out of the cold, and he should watch out more carefully. He’s even more convinced he’s going to die, because it’s yellow.

Apparently it’s not yellow enough. It looks pretty fucking yellow to him.

He convinces her to stay. He’s not capable of being alone right now, and that shit wigged him all the way out. He admits that he’s not okay, and hasn’t been for a while. Somehow, it works. She stays.

She suggests maybe he get help. He did that once. It went poorly. “shotgun method” which is the worst fucking name for that treatment.

They have the conversation he wanted to have in ch 1. He admits he did a lot of fucked up shit, and apologises. He didn’t know who she was when he hired her. It was pure chance. He was already starting to spiral and have loads of regrets when he accidentally played his hand. He self-sabotages and was trying to find a way out.

Darcy still doesn’t trust him. She makes that clear. She will not be responsible for his emotional well-being. She wants to know if he’s aware he’s a manipulative, gaslighting bastard. He is. He’s also aware he has the world’s shortest temper, and no patience.

He just wants a friend.

This is my first “official” draft.  It’s crap.  Nobody would read a story told like this, but that’s okay.  The story isn’t for the reader at this point.  The rough draft is just that: a rough look at what the entire story looks like.  And right now, 75% of this fic looks like this.  The rough draft often doesn’t survive the next part of the process, so I don’t have any earlier examples to show you what it looks like in direct comparison.  I don’t make a copy of the rough draft, because I almost never need to refer back to it.  I do my next draft right on top of this one, filling out all the missing bits.

Because the second draft is the one where I tell myself the story.  I fill this out to get all of the important bits in for me.  All of the small notes I want to hit.  All of the dialogue, and the little emotions.  I turn this into something that could be read by someone, and might even be enjoyable.

“I never intended to follow you,” he admitted, still unable to look back up at Thor.  “It just kind of happened.”

“Then what did you intend?” asked Thor.

“I don’t know,” Loki said.  “Cyberbully you until you got fed up enough to come back and take some attention off of me.”

“Loki, you need help,” Thor said.

Loki clenched his fist, barely able to stop himself from slamming it against the table.  “I need to be left alone,” he said.

He looked up at Thor, and that sad and disappointed look on his face.  He hated it.

“I don’t think I trust you to be alone right now,” Thor said.

“What do you care?” asked Loki.  “You left.  You got out.  If you cared, you wouldn’t have left me alone with them.”

He got up and pulled out his wallet, not wanting to wait for the bill to come.  But he’d more or less figured out the local curency, and threw a $20 down on the table to cover both the bill and the tip Americans insisted was required.

“Where are you going?” Thor asked, getting up as well.

Loki shrugged and slid his wallet back into his pocket.  Spotting his phone still on the table, Loki reached over to pick it up.

This draft is often very dialogue-heavy, and doesn’t have a lot of action.  You’ll also notice that there are a lot of misspellings and wonky placeholders sometimes.  I do all but the final draft on my iPad, where I have completely turned off my spellcheck.  I don’t want to be distracted by perfection.  I just want to get the story out.  Nobody is going to read this draft, so it doesn’t matter if my keyboard is running out of battery, or I don’t know how to spell something.  All that matters is that I tell myself the story.

After I’ve finished with all of this, I tell the story to the reader.  This is when I inject all those little details.  The characters act, the scenery comes alive, and eventually there’s an entire world on the page.  It’s only after this point that I finally move to my PC and start working on the SPAG and formatting.

He tensed up again as they got off the beltway and onto the Fifteen.  Darcy laughed, staying in the far right lane and not even having to fight traffic to get off at the very next exit.  Once they were off the freeway, Loki relaxed again and looked out the window at the passing city.  Pretty soon, the Swedish Chef was replaced by screaming and heavy drums, and what sounded like some kind of flute.  For a second, Darcy thought it was a mistake until she looked over at Loki, with his long, dyed black hair, half-sleeve tattoos, and what was now very obviously a band T-shirt.

“Oh my god,” she said laughing loudly.  “You’re a closet metalhead.”

Loki looked over at her with a dissatisfied frown.  “There’s nothing closeted about me,” he said.

Darcy laughed at the mental image of him all covered in black leather and metal spikes, until her mind caught up with what he’d said.  “Wait?  Really?” she asked.

He arched an eyebrow at her and shrugged.

“Oh,” said Darcy quietly, ending that conversation before she shoved her entire foot into her mouth.

Shops became neighbourhoods broken up by big patches of sand, and then big patches of sand broken up by neighbourhoods.

“Where are we going?” Loki asked as they left civilisation behind and travelled further into the desert.  He looked out at the mountains and sagebrush, moving around in his seat like he wasn’t sure where to look.

“Just a little bit farther,” Darcy said.  “We’re gonna do the whole tourist thing today.  Because you have to.  It’s the law.”

“It is not,” Loki said, still looking out at the desert.  He rolled down his window and pulled his hair away from his face as he leaned into the wind.

Sometimes telling the reader the story will only take one additional draft.  Sometimes it will take a frustratingly large amount.  It seems like a lot of work to do, but each pass becomes quicker than the last, as there’s less work to do.

As long as I can get that initial idea on the page in the first place, everything else is just building on the foundations set in place by what came before.  I actually expect to have this fic done by September, and will spend the remaining time doing the same thing for my other bang fic due at the same time.  But because I do it this way, I know this fic is going to be 24 chapters, and clock in just under 100k.  I know the chapter count, because the rough draft is broken up into chapters.  I know the word count, because I’ve done this enough times to have been able to get a feel for it, and know that each chapter will average out to about 4000 words based on my pacing and structure.

But I have the rough draft done, and that’s the hardest part of the whole thing.

This is particularly relevant to fics like Isla Nublar, which I’ve mentioned having not got the attention it deserved.  Normally I use Scrivener, but at the time I wrote the original version I didn’t have a working PC for most of it, and Scrivener wasn’t on iOS yet.  Without being able to compare one document to the other in a side by side view, I wasn’t able to take the second draft and build it up into something with a more robust structure and appropriate pacing.  It’s the same process I’m going through with God of Outcasts as well, using the original fics as almost the rough draft phase, completely rewriting the chapters in a new document, and then repeating my editing process again.

I use colour coding on documents to tell me how heavily a given chapter has been edited, and statuses to let me know how much work has been done on a given chapter.  No matter which stage I’m on, I tend to have the previous step open in one pane, and the current step in another so I can constantly see what needs to be done next.  For big projects, like God of Outcasts, I have a style guide and documents that serve as a canon bible for any small detail I might want to go back and check on.  I also have a check list for every beat I want to hit, to make sure it makes its way into the final draft.

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