#so glad to finally get this out of wip status and posted officially

[anotherhomelanderblog]

Oooh I'm super intrigued by Like Marble for the WIP ask game 🤭

WIP Ask Game

Oh hello there, person who definitely isn't the official Like Marble Enabler(TM). ☺️ What can I say about this mysterious WIP?

...It's a Beauty and the Beast AU of the Homelander x Reader variety...

I know it's not gonna be everyone's cup of tea. It's my most extremely self-indulgent WIP since, well, ever. 😅 So much so that I don't think I could or should explain it all succinctly here. This was the first fic idea I had, before I even made this blog, and you can absolutely thank/blame @themeraldee for the fact I am actually attempting to write it... slowly, slowly... because I wouldn't be if she hadn't been so lovely to me. 🥺❤️

The basic idea is that I'm switching the sci-fi for fantasy. I have lore, a lot of lore. I won't dump it all here, because spoilers, and also just the sheer amount of it.

But the curse. Homelander has not been turned into a ferocious monster with fur and paws. No, no. That would be too nice for him. He could still cause some damage like that. Instead, he's been turned to marble, so he's a walking talking statue, gradually becoming less flexible as time runs out. Very eerie. Creepy, even. And, most importantly, full of angst potential. 😈 The reasoning behind this choice is he and Mirrorlander have that whole thing about wiping away his humanity and making him "pure, clean, like marble" and I just thought about the body horror potential of making that literal rather than metaphorical. He doesn't have any powers now - although, y'know, if he punched you in the head, I'd assume you're not getting up again - and he can't taste or smell or even physically feel anything. His suit is literally part of him now. He's got little cracks all over from moving about.

He is not very happy about any of this.

One of the reasons this is such a big WIP is because I've got so many characters involved. I am making a concerted effort to barely scratch the surface here. It's kinda daunting, and it's gonna be a looooong time before I start posting it properly, but I can provide a snippet from a random bit. Have some Mirrorlander:

“Aren’t all gods monstrous in one way or another?” his other self finally asks, breaking him from his reverie. Homelander has no idea how long he’s let the lull in their conversation go on for, but he glances up now to watch his other self chuckle. “The ones worth remembering, at least.”

Homelander tries to scoff.

“You still think I’m a god?” His voice sounds sullen, even to his ears. It’s at times like these he’s most glad the marble won’t let him weep.

“Sure you are, tiger. You could kill her.” His other self shrugs cheerfully at the idea. “Not like it’d be hard, even the way you are now. She knows it.”

Now Homelander does scoff.

“So she’s just afraid of me? That’s all?” The truth tastes bitter, though it’s a flavour he ought to be long used to.

He can’t discern your heartbeat, but that shouldn’t make him blind to what’s clear on the surface. He supposes he’d hoped he was playing with something a little less open-and-shut-simple with you than plain fear. Perhaps he’s been in denial. Even entertaining the notion this curse might end any other way than this first broken piece of him indicates was stupid.

Pathetic.

You hate him.

His other self all but giggles. It’s a sound Homelander isn’t sure he’s heard him make before. He wonders, if he wasn’t numb with cold already, if it would chill him. Is this how you see him?

“Well, of course she’s afraid of you, silly! Humans are all the same. You know that.” His other self sighs fondly, shakes his head. Something in his smile tightens like shackles. “When are you going to learn, champ? Even your son dropped out on you when the crunch came. It’s just you and me.”

Until he crumbles into dust.

Homelander stands stock-still by the mirror through much of the night, long after his other self retreats from view.

Thank you for the ask! ❤️

[bi-disastersoup]

A Promise Between Heartbeats

After recovering fully from his injuries, R'alma has decided to start right away on the list of promises he made to G'raha at the ends of the universe. First on the list is a trip to Ishgard, during which he is determined to take the advice he's been given and finally make his heart and affections known to his companion. But that objective proves surprisingly difficult, given that they can't seem to get any significant amount of time to themselves in a city where the name and face of the fabled Warrior of Light are so well-known…

Link up there, preview below the cut! Also counts toward March of the Tropes: Day 31 - True Love's Kiss!

And with that..... I have officially completed March of the Tropes! *flops over and dies*

R'alma really did hate the cold.

It was no surprise, really. As a young Miqo'te kit, she'd grown up in the hot, arid climate of Thanalan. As an Auri woman, her scales and horns had been sensitive to temperature changes. Now…

Well, now he had these long, flopping ears that seemed to just leak body heat. At least, for the moment they were flopping. Normally, they'd be standing up tall and proud, their red tips and sleek black fur on full display. But ever since he'd set foot in Coerthas, he'd had them pinned almost flat against his head in a poor attempt to keep them warm.

And to keep the snow out of them. It seemed like everything that fell from the sky managed to find its way straight down into his ears now.

Sometimes he really missed having horns instead.

He was trying his best not to complain about it, and all things considered, he felt he'd done a pretty good job so far. He'd made sure to dress as warmly as he could, and was thankful that Tataru had already finished the adjustments on the heavy coat she'd made him for the Garlemald trip. After all, he knew present company wouldn't have let him out in anything that still hid his tail (which was also cold now, by the way).

And besides, G'raha seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself. What was a little discomfort in the face of that?

Downtime was something that had been hard to come by in recent years and, as such, R'alma hardly knew what to do with himself when he had it. Even worse, his most recent bout had been forced upon him by his injuries, leaving him absolutely stir crazy for the last several days. Finally, though, Y'shtola had deemed him fit for travel,  and with no catastrophes looming on their horizon, he had decided it was a good time to start working on the list of promises he had made.

And to maybe work on getting up the courage to do what he and Thancred had discussed. The swordsman had given him no shortage of very pointed glances since that night. All of which he very pointedly ignored.

As it was, he and G'raha had been in Ishgard since yesterday, and he still had yet to bring it up.

The fault was not… entirely his own, arguably. As he kept telling himself, he just hadn't been able to find the right opportunity. After all, when they'd first arrived, it felt as though they had been immediately beset on all sides. Downtime was most certainly difficult to come by, even without a looming catastrophe,  it would seem.

[joeys-piano]

Writing Update - #1

WIP Formally Began: July 18th, 2019 Date of Update: August 31st, 2019 WIP Intro: Here

Current WIP Status: Outline/WIP Bible Current Status W/C: 65,340 W/C Added: ~5,000 words (this week)

Summary Report: My current project, Survive Said The Prophet, has grown significantly in a variety of ways throughout this week. Not only has the outline grown, but the official summary and title were also finalized and the story has been formally introduced to the Tumblr sphere.

                                                   ~~~~~~~~~

On August 25th (Sunday), my outline for my conspiracy + sci-fi fic, Survive Said The Prophet, surpassed 60,000 words. The last time I had written this much for any story was either last year or two years ago, when I jumped the gun and tried my hand at writing about organized crime for the first time. Since that endeavour and learning from my experience, I’ve found that approaching stories with an extensive outline beforehand gives me a clearer idea of the arc/character progressions threaded throughout the plot. Although the 60k+ words to that organized crime story will not be picked up again, the experience and the sheer endurance that it took to write it has definitely prepared and laid down a foundation of weaknesses and strengths that I can refer to as I continue outlining Survive Said The Prophet. The formatting of the outline may’ve been an important part as to why I’ve written so much, why I still have the drive and energy to come back to this story, and why the story still intrigues me after putting so much of my time into developing it. Perhaps it’s the nature of the mysteries or how I’ve interwoven worldbuilding between canon hallmarks; whichever the case, coming back to this outline and just writing it makes me feel at ease. It’s been a few years since I’ve felt this way about writing, since I’ve felt this comfortable and sure of myself. Curious to know if it’s experience, if it’s a change in my mindset, a combination of both, or the influence of something else. On this same Sunday — mind you, I was writing as much as I could before the first day of the academic semester — I edited and finalized the summary for Survive Said The Prophet. For the past month or so, I’ve been rewriting and editing different summaries that I felt were decent previews to what’s to come. In my original drafts, I wanted to incorporate quotes that were from the story or quotes from the referenced authors in Bungou Stray Dogs. Before Survive Said The Prophet, many of the summaries I’ve written depended and leaned heavily onto quotes to convey whatever premise I was writing about. However, for this story, I couldn’t do that. I wanted my writing to stand on its own, rather than relying on the words of someone else or from a throwaway line that I’ve jotted somewhere in my outline. The most difficult part about this entire process was having to build a summary from scratch. During the past month, I referred back to previous summaries I’ve written and wondered if I could rework those for Survive Said The Prophet. What I quickly realized was that it wasn’t going to work. The summaries I’ve written beforehand, while they featured worldbuilding elements, weren’t for complex or heavily-involved stories. For the first time in months, I had to completely start from scratch. Unused to the experience, I knew I had to start somewhere. From July 28th to August 25th, I wrote close to a dozen new summaries with different directions, starting points, and different vibes on how to convey the premise of Survive Said The Prophet was to be presented. Keep in mind that for the most part, I didn’t know what the premise of the story was. Although I had jotted it down, it was a very pale reflection to what the actual premise was. Stumped at every corner and unsure what to do, I looked to resources on how to tackle this summary. From Goodreads to YouTube and to eventually IMDb, I found a muse of a summary that gave me an inspirational pause. While searching up thriller movies, I encountered Shutter Island. Reading the summary to that movie cleared the jumbled thoughts in my head, and it helped me realize what I wanted my summary to convey. Shutter Island’s summary began by noting the time and the incident that triggers the start of the plot. Out of all the summaries I’ve searched and read, this was the first one that began in this way. If I had only read the first sentence and nothing else from the movie’s blurb, I would still feel intrigued and would want to watch the movie to see what would happen. To me, the hallmark of a brilliant summary is when the first sentence has that kind of effect on the reader. Amazed and inspired, I began to draft what would eventually become the official summary for Survive Said The Prophet. On August 25th at 3:08 p.m., after editing and revising it so that it could within the character limits of AO3’s summary box, I had accomplished one of the most difficult parts of the outline so far. Now when people ask me what Survive Said The Prophet is about, I no longer have to give an abridged telltale version of what I think the premise is. Now, I have a summary that I can show to them and from what I heard from interested peeps and from my lovely brainstorming partner + muse, the official summary captures the essence of what Survive Said The Prophet is and raises more than enough intrigue to prompt a reader to discover for themselves what the story will be.

Between August 26th to August 28th, not very much happened. With this being the beginning of the academic semester, I didn’t have time to work on my main outline. With this in consideration, I decided to update and work on other aspects of Survive Said The Prophet that have nothing to do with writing. Namely, I wanted to create a wip introduction so I could formally show and talk about what I’ve been working on for more than a month now. I already had the summary completed and I had a few ideas in mind on what the story edits would be. I knew I was going to use a combination of Unsplash, Fotor, and Canva to help me make those edits into a reality, but I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be and how nitpicky I would become as the wip introduction moved onto its later stages. Initially, the wip introduction was going to list the main characters that were in Survive Said The Prophet. However, after gauging how long the introduction was becoming and wanting to keep things concise and easy, I decided to omit the main characters from the final draft. For several reasons: I wanted to those character introductions in a post solely meant for them, I didn’t like how I was initially going to present them, and this main character segment was a real thorn to my backside so omitting cleared away some stress that was on my mind.

On the night of August 29th (Thursday), I completed my wip introduction and formally introduced Survive Said The Prophet to the public. As nerve-wracking as it was to finally do that, it doesn’t trump the stress that overtook my body a few hours prior as I was editing and formatting the images I used from Unsplash for my story edits. Easily, the most difficult part was finding a book cover template from Canva that I could use. Finding one that didn’t obscure the cover image was as easy as finding a blade of grass, half a centimeter shorter than all the rest. Eventually, I gave up on my search for a template and made the cover page on my own. I probably spent two hours, running the story title through dozens of different fonts and positionings until I was satisfied with the end result. Fortunately, I had late classes on the following day so I was able to stay up and work a little longer than I should’ve. But in the end, I finished what I wanted to do and had the introduction ready to be posted.

On August 30th (Friday), having had minimal contact with my main outline for almost the entire week, I spent a few hours of my morning before lunch rereading where I left off and revised/clarified a few things that I had jotted down beforehand. Notably, I revised an entire scene that involved a private exchange between two characters from conflicting organizations. I had noted along the margins that an anonymous tip had alerted law enforcement of what was going on for one of the members of the private exchange was a wanted criminal. Confused on why I added the anonymous tip and with no apparent lead/backstory on who sent it and why was it sent, it made the latter half of the scene play out as a matter of convenience, luck, and the third-cousin almost removed from Chekhov's family of things writers forget to include. Bothered that I included an anonymous tip so haphazardly into the scene, when it’s that anonymous tip that initiates the midpoint turn in the story, I knew I needed to clean things up. Fortunately, I had already begun that beforehand when I reread where I had left off, adding notes of clarification and fleshing out vague details that I had left behind. Now with a better understanding of how this arc progresses, I knew who the anonymous tip came from, why they sent it, and what the anonymous tipper wanted in exchange. Information is power, especially in a wip with psychological thriller vibes, so now I knew the motive and how events prior to this scene made sense and led up to this moment where law enforcement got involved. Afterwards, while still keeping the essence of the original scene’s intent and what happens, I revised how the second-half would follow and have a much clearer idea who and what triggers the midpoint turn in the story. The confrontation with the protagonist and antagonist — I would argue that there is no protagonist or antagonist in this story but for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to these two characters as such — is much stronger and more pivotal now that clarification has been addressed. Makes me really glad I’m taking my time outlining this story because these are the things that wouldn’t cross my mind if I began writing from the get-go.