not feeling so hot

Fourth day of enslavement to the pointless fever. It makes no SENSE. I'm not nauseous, not coughing, not sneezing. Just a headache the likes of which has never been reported in human history (I could be exaggerating, but it's EVERYWHERE. I'm used to having one section of my head hurt, nasal areas. This entire skull thing? Not so much), the concentration capacity of a hummingbird on speed, serious levels of lassitude, and a FEVER. Every time it goes up, I bond with cold things, people, objects, what have you. When it goes down, I break into a sweat and itch, then it goes up and for about seven and a half minute, I feel normal before I trip over one hundred again.

This really makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I mean, really. None.

I'm bored. I can't concentrate and I'm bored from the laying around grabbing onto cold objects so....

Intensive navel gazing ahead.



Three fandoms, five stories. Most of the people who are reading this probably have never read the first four stories (yes, except for you two, Vic and Bethy). Trust me, you don't need to. Consider this my anti-rec for all time.

Flight, Voyager, Tom Paris

I hate it with the passion of a thousand firey suns. It doesn't just suck--it's this amazingly twisted ANNOYANCE that I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote it and knew even less when I finished it.

It's stylistic without being--well, good. It's too vague, with too much emphasis on imagery and indirect over explaining what the hell is going on. It fails on every single level a story can fail on. Frankly, I'm amazed anyone got through it and didn't think I was on acid.

However, on the bright side, it was my very very very first slash of any kind, even if only by implication.

Illusions, X-Men the Movie, Rogue, Logan, etc

It suffers from what I like to call the "jenn's teeth hurt" syndrome. Like Absolute Zero before it, when I am in pain, I take it out on whatever happens to be in range, and these characters were the closest things. The first story isn't bad in itself, and should have been kept to that, but I expanded when the enthusiasm level for the first story was so good, and I was all, ooh, you LIKE this? You know, writer's head turned. Hence a backstory. A long, overangsty, painful backstory of pure, unadulterated angst, and the present time stuff was just--dark. Everyone suffers. Seriously, I don't know what the hell I was THINKING. Sex, drugs, more drugs, more drugs, raves, more drugs, almost-underaged sex, Logan possibly as sociopathic as I've ever made him, suicide, self-mutilation, the list goes ON.

It's not even badly written, at least as far as I can tell, but it's so dark and hopeless that by the time I stopped writing it, I couldn't see anywhere this could go other than group suicide. These people were fucked up beyond my ability to deal with them. Seriously, I read it when I need to be depressed. Because it does depress me. A LOT.

One Reason, X-Men the Movie, Rogue, Logan

The thing this story has going against it most is that I was in a pure style phase and bored as hell. And when I say style, I mean, extremely structured--this was something that didn't grow naturally, that I worked at to get to how I thought it should be, without actually taking the time to make sure it was a story there and not a writing exercise. I don't think many people knew what was going on during the story, and frankly, I'm not sure I can tell either. It's just bad. It's annoying that it had a good, relatively solid concept behind it, and if I'd just taken the idea and run with it, it would have been interesting. Instead, this weird hybrid came out and in hindsight, it just does not work.

Just Breathe X-Men, Rogue, Logan

Another to fall into the too-stylish for words category. Too damn much implication, not nearly enough actual content. The idea itself was tricky, but at the time, I'd written enough to think I could handle it, but the structure I chose just doesn't work. And in itself, it didn't really know what it was. Not romance, not happy, this sort of passive dark thing going on that on re-reading drives me crazy. I can see what I was trying to do, but failed completely in accomplishing it.

Syzygy Smallville, Clark, Lex

Okay, I don't dislike it. I'm ambivalent about it. It doesn't start and doesn't end; more along the lines of dropping in the middle of something in progress and then pulling out. I did know what I was doing--the problem is, I don't think the audience knew, which is somehow worse, and I was trying to write in a way that's foreign to me as a writer. It either had to hit someone just right or it simply wouldn't work. I'm almost tempted to say it needs some kind of context to make sense, but I'm not entirely sure that's accurate.

I think, now, that experimenting with archetypes and themes and symbology ALL AT THE SAME TIME when I'm not used to doing any of those is at least a third of the problem. I was seriously playing around with symbolism throughout, and honestly, I think the story fails because I didn't know how to do it well. I still don't--my natural habitat is with anvils and big, obvious roadsigns of coming attractions, so to speak. Even Dust and Jus, both of which were hugely thematic, did it obviously. The religious parallelism in Dust and the hugely WWII/racism thing in Jus were deliberate and supposed to be blindingly obvious--that was most of the point. I really, really wasn't being subtle The second, more interesting to me, is the entire choice thing, which is my own thing--I gave Rogue what I didn't give Lex, a way out and the strength to use it.

Another conversation for another day.


Okay, well, that alleviated the boredom somewhat. I should poll. Since I am gripey and sick, should I give into instinct and torture/kill some characters for fun?

Going to catch up on my friendslist and take more ibuprofen. And more coffee and juice. Caffeine withdrawl is NOT pretty.