do-it-yourself guide to building an apocalyptic militia

So I had a moment of buh while looking at my posting stats in AO3.

Total Word Count: 3,192,064
Down to Agincourt series: 541,405 (and in progress)
Percent of Total: ~17%

Granted, there are several things I haven't posted there, but still.

I posted my first fanfic circa 1999, but roughly 17% of my total posted output was in the last nine months with three novels, and two of those are one and two on my longest novels list (A Thousand Lights in Space and It's the Stars that Lie, respectively). My five longest novels are those, Jus Ad Bellum (X-Men), Map of the World (book one of Agincourt), and War Games (Star Trek Reboot).

When I started this series--which was a freaking writing exercise, for fuck's sake--three years ago and it started growing, I made a joke about haha, this could reach 300,000 words. According to my last rough word count in my Agincourt workbook, because it needed one, the series will top 1.5 million words, and numbers immediately lose meaning for me just writing that.

...and I still can't tell you how this happened. My last clear memory was when I sat down and thought "I wonder what Cas and Lucifer's meeting after Dean's death in The End would be like". And in A Thousand Lights in Space (book three), I have the better part of a chapter devoted to the characters digging a giant hole for a new mess and observational relationship drama (and coffee).

Like, years ago, hradzka described John Ringo's later books as man gets women and builds things and how that was super attractive as genre. I got it then, but I really really get it now; it's very fighting to save the world plus home improvement (...militia camp improvement?) and negotiating important trade alliances while learning to cook (and farm) and build a do-it-yourself camp LAN. There is something unbelievably satisfying about how after killing demons everyone goes home and works on that new addition to the cabin and fixing potholes and learning leatherworking and scheduling patrols in Excel before checking the reports you are adding to a Oracle database that patrol turns in on jump drives. And you have just enough time to go pilfer rugs from somewhere because the ones in the living room are hideous before cleaning your personal arsenal that takes up an entire closet and talking about what all your knives are made out of (titanium versus ceramic versus hardened steel).

Last clear memory: writing a angsty confrontation between Cas and Lucifer over Dean's dead body.

Current part I edited recently (about two books ahead): a sincere discussion regarding the pros and cons of certain colors of weather-resistant paint for Chitaqua's cabins. It's getting kind of heated and everyone is way too armed.

Comments

[domarzione]

Worldbuilding is the most fun part. All the more so when you have to very literally build a world. (Wanna know why Qui Habitat's not finished? Because I had far too much time figuring out the economy and the social structure to figure out how to kill the bad guys. Turning salt and homemade snickers bars into commodities beats space warfare. Figuring out how to raise an army is more fun that sending that army into combat.)

[seperis]

Wanna know why Qui Habitat's not finished? Because I had far too much time figuring out the economy and the social structure to figure out how to kill the bad guys.

That's a lot of my word count once I got past intro and primary plot setup. Not to mention how a well-armed, well-trained militia that kills the supernatural avoids terrifying the towns they want to trade with and the fair market value of farm labor and hunting services when trading for food, cloth, and leather.

I love re-reading Qui Habitat just on social and economic grounds, so yeah, I approve of your focus like a lot.

Turning salt and homemade snickers bars into commodities beats space warfare. Figuring out how to raise an army is more fun that sending that army into combat.)

Heh, mine are socks, underwear, and cocoa as valuable trade commodities. There's a scene later where they're at a town party playing poker and the stakes are homemade wine, socks, yarn, silver (not for value; to make bullets and knives) and a priceless package of peanut butter cups and everyone is blown away by anyone risking commercial candy as stakes.

[niqaeli]

I mean, I admit, I still haven't read any of it but I really, really enjoy laughing at you a lot over this series. Shockingly, worldbuilding is fun and you kind of got eaten alive by the worldbuild. Shockingly. :P

[seperis]

It's too fun though. I actually get annoyed sometimes having to get back to the adventure/plot/fighting because I could have everyone learning about asphalt and Cas dealing with people having bad breakups and wanting to move out (he has to work out the logistics of people moving between a limited number of cabins). Or everyone's relationship drama! (Because sixty-something people in a single camp? ALL KINDS OF RELATIONSHIP DRAMA.)

[vicki_rae]

Looking forward to reading this so much. I'm always going to be most interested in the characters but world building and how things get done is a huge part of why post-apocalyptic stories appeal to me.

I don't read WIPS because the but what happens next questions drive me crazy. The only problem here with that strategy is every new chapter prompts a little voice in the back of my mind saying start now and read realllllly slow and you won't catch up before it's done. Hah! I'd blitz though it in a month and then curl up in a corner whimpering until the next update.

[seperis]

Someone in my comments on Chapter 12 or 13 blitzed the entire three novels in thirty-six hours. I re-read all I posted between posting the novels to double check and update my workbook with anything I changed by accident so I can keep my continuity clean, but I can't do that and I wrote them. I mean, I can't read them as a reader does, but still.

[tkodami.livejournal.com]

For real, I have no clue how they did it in 36 hours. But I can guess they were INCREDIBLY motivated. Because that's just how Agincourt is. It gets its hooks in, and then by the end of the week, you're eating cookies and cry-laughing over the part where someone is hanging lights, and you've read it twice already, but that doesn't really stop the hilarity.

[wildestranger]

Your worldbuilding is what got me reading this - I remember reading War Games and getting really invested in how Jim was going to change Starfleet by constructing a new curriculum, and then I saw this new fic by seperis, and thought hmm, I haven't watched Supernatural since season 5, and I don't really like zombies, but let's see what the worldbuilding is like.

And so, nine months later, your story is the light of my life, and I am now invested in the garden Dean is going to plant for Cas, and how they make friends with Alison and Teresa and create a civil society almost from scratch. I am also really invested in hearing what happens to hippofucker. There was a brief drunken moment when I considered learning Demotic so that I could translate it myself, and then I remembered it doesn't exist.

In short, I am enjoying your worldbuilding immensely. :)

[seperis]

I remember reading War Games and getting really invested in how Jim was going to change Starfleet by constructing a new curriculum

I still have somewhere the beginning of a story I was writing by request of a reader of a group of non-commissioned personnel who had been wary about Starfleet due to the discrepancy of its official IDIC and unofficial view of religion being the province of the primitive or their view of the colonies as the equivalent of hicks. It was three pov: young ethnically Indian man who kept to traditional Hinduism, a colonist from an agrarian planet from a Quaker community, and a refugee of a non-Affiliated planet who kept to very 'alien' (to the Federation) religious practices, and their experience with Jim and Spock and especially Uhura from the United States of Africa convince them to give the program a try. Jim's born and bred Starfleet and knows in his bones all the unspoken rules and how to get around them, and he can teach them that, and Uhura's a natural academic as well an officer; she could not just tell them, but show them with Jim how to quite literally be the change they want in Starfleet because that's what's going to happen one way or another.

I didn't actually pull Jim's respect for cultural and religious differences from nowhere; in one of the better Trek novels, Jim as a student at the Academy acted as official defense of a young Native American woman who was about to get kicked out of Starfleet for wearing a very specific set of feathers that had tribal and religious significance to her (and in text, had her explain to Jim (who didn't really understand why she couldn't just not wear them) what they meant and why she did it); they won, by the way, and she kept her cultural identity.

I'd never seen a Trek hit religion from the other side before, and their best try--the Bajorans--was so hit or miss that it was really a surprise to see a writer tackle that even in passing and not make it about the evils of institutional religion but approach it from a sentient being rights perspective (that was influential in Amanda Grayson's bit in War Games, btw). IDIC isn't just about Us and Them at the biology/alien sense, but at the cultural and religious level, and acting like the second is primitive makes the first meaningless.

Trek shows mostly agnostic and atheist level people as officers, and it occurred to me for the first time the premise isn't 'the future is all science and no religion' but Starfleet self-selects out anyone who doesn't conform to that. There's only one way into Starfleet: the Academy. You can do a lot under the cover of rules for students and discipline and get away with it; it's not as if you have to go to the Academy, you can leave at any time, so technically, they can do a lot to make sure the right types stay. All for a good cause, of course: IDIC. Just not the icky kind of IDIC.

...Christ, now I do this here and not just in comments in fic. This is one of my buttons, because I love Trek like whoa, and if it won't canonically fix this issue, out of love I want to do it myself.

[seperis]

...and I forgot to finish answering your actual comment, Christ. Sorry.

And so, nine months later, your story is the light of my life, and I am now invested in the garden Dean is going to plant for Cas, and how they make friends with Alison and Teresa and create a civil society almost from scratch.

Which is what they are eventually going to be doing. I have plans for the infected zone and those corrupt border guards. So many. Plans. I wish I could outsource writing it, though; there's so much I want to do that just won't fit (I mean, I could literally write this story until the day I die, there's so many places here I want to explore).

I am also really invested in hearing what happens to hippofucker. There was a brief drunken moment when I considered learning Demotic so that I could translate it myself, and then I remembered it doesn't exist.

You say TKodami's hippofucker art, right? http://archiveofourown.org/works/2560289 <--if you haven't, GOOD GOD GO. It's just--magic. And Victorian hippo-porn.

[toujours_nigel]

I spent most of yesterday reading A Thousand Light in Space, I did the same with Books 1 & 2.

Your worldbuilding is the best. ♥

[seperis]

Thank you very much!

[fyrdrakken]

So a few months back I was going through podcast archives and a review of the orignal B/W The Day the Earth Stood Still led me to the realization that SM Stirling's Dies the Fire is like an AU of that premise with much nastier aliens: Instead of just shutting things down for an hour to prove they could, with a lot of merciful exemptions to let planes land and cars stop and hospitals keep patients alive, and sending an emissary to explain to humanity what this demonstration was about, Dies the Fire is about what happens after electricity and gunpowder and a few other important bits of technology just stop working one day and humanity has to learn to cope and rebuild. That gave me the urge to reread the series, plus the books published since the last time I read any of them, and now I'm impatient for the two due later this year. But I think the Emberverse may really appeal to you -- especially since past the initial trilogy (when the action jumps to the children of the main characters of first books) it becomes explicit that the explanation is magical and there's a war of gods and demons being played out over the future of humanity. In any case, there's a lot of technical consideration and people plundering historical texts figuring out what they can recreate and learning how to farm and fight and make their own clothes and all the other damned things that suddenly aren't being taken care of by workers thousands of miles away.