Sleepwalking through life

I'm a bored University student from Prague who spends way too much time in her own head. I'm aspiring to be a published writer one day and practice on fanfics in the meantime. I enjoy playing music and singing, but dislike performing professionally. I like analysing works of fiction and picking apart the themes. I spend most of my free time either by browsing the internet, listening to music, writing or tormenting my family with various musical instruments :)

[eareniel-blog]

200 K words!

As of today, Armor of the Gods has reached the 200 000 word line. I have no idea how I managed to write so much, but holy crap, is it a lot. I’m in the middle of chapter 30 now, with five or six more to go.

But the end is finally in sight! Hurray!

Now I’m just gonna eat my birthday cake from yesterday and write some more. Maybe I’ll even finish another chapter today :)

[eareniel-blog]

Tales of Insomnia: Conversations with my brain

I love my brain. It’s brilliant and gives me tons of good ideas. The downside is that it doesn’t let me sleep much. The more I create, the more immersed I get in writing and giving life to my ideas, the less I sleep. Which sucks, because I love to sleep. 

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep (usually between 2 and 3 a.m., after I've already spent two hours staring at the ceiling), I end up leading conversations with my brain. They go something like this:

2:08 a.m. 

Brain: Hey, listen! Hey, hey, listen! I’ve got a great idea!

Me: Nooooo, not again.

Brain: No but really, this is great.

Me: It’s two in the morning already. I don’t have time for this.

Brain: Seriously, you’ll love this.

Me (giving up): All right, I’ll bite. What is it?

Brain: It’s this great plot twist I’ve been working on for the past week. Imagine what would happen if Tony found out that…

Me: OMG! OMG. Go on. *lunges for a piece of paper and a pen, spends the next twenty minutes scribbling furiously*

 2:35 a.m.

Brain: …and that’s it.

Me: Wow. That was pretty good. Thanks for nagging me. If you hadn’t, I would have forgotten everything by the morning.

Brain: Yeah, I’m the best. I’ll let you sleep now.

Me: That would be appreciated.

 2:47 a.m.

Brain: Hey listen! I’ve got another idea!

Me: No! Go away! I’m trying to sleep here.

Brain: No but really, this is great. If you don’t write it down now, you’ll miss out on something awesome.

Me: Fffffuuuu. I hate you so much right now. But since I know you’re not going to shut up until I write it down, I might as well do it now. All right, what is it?

Brain: What if in chapter 17, instead of that thing, this thing happened.

Me (writing it down): Holy shit.

Brain: I know, right? Aren’t you glad I kept you awake?

Me: Not really. But thanks anyway. Can I sleep now?

Brain: Well, if you must. I’ll try to be quiet now.

3:04 a.m.

Brain: Hey! Hey! Listen!

Me: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 Conclusion: Yes, my brain at night is basically a slightly more intelligent version of the Navi from Zelda games. As much as I love writing, the insomnia is a bitch. (Also, I'm only posting this because it's 2:30 in the morning here and I can't sleep. Feel free to ignore my rambling.)

[eareniel-blog]

Exam passed! Hiatus over :)

I passed my Civil Law State Exam this week, which means that I'm now finished with exams! Forever! It was the last one I needed to pass to get my Master's Degree, so now I only need to hand in my thesis and I'll be finished with Law School. Yay!

This means that I can go back to my writing schedule. I'll be looking for a job soon, but right now, I have all the time in the world to write. As soon as I tear myself away from Dragon Age: Inquisition (I haven't been able to play for three weeks. It was a huge exercise in self-control on my part), I'll be back to writing full time. I'm so happy right now, you have no idea.

[eareniel-blog]

Hiatus? :D

Apparently, my brain doesn't know what the word "hiatus" means, because despite all my attempts to drop the fic and concentrate fully on my studies, I still end up writing a whole bunch of stuff each day instead. Today I wrote 2500 words in two hours, which is just insane by my standards (my usual writing pace tends to be around 700 words/hour). It looks like when you tell me that I mustn't write anything, I end up churning out half a chapter every evening in protest. I wish this approach worked all the time :D

Anyway, I'm now a good 110K words into Armor of the Gods and chapter 17 is almost done (only one scene left! yay!).

If I don't pass my exam, I'm going to sue Tony Stark for this. It's all his fault.

[eareniel-blog]

Writing hiatus + plans for this year

As I have already mentioned in the Author's Note of the latest chapter of Armor of the Gods, I'm going on a short, three week writing hiatus. I have a huge exam soon and need enough time to study. I should be back at work after January 21st, but I'll make sure that future chapters of AotG still get posted as planned, even when I'm not actively writing. 

The exams are pretty inconvenient, because I have my head full of ideas for fics that I can't write right now. Luckily for me, this is the last exam standing between me and my Master's degree, so once I'm done with it, I'll be able to get back to my writing. 

What are my writing plans for the nearest future? I have so many ideas for fics, I barely know where to start:

1) The Avengers:

* Armor of the Gods has the highest priority. I have already written more than half of it (cca 100K words so far!), so I'm planning to finish it in the next month or two after the hiatus.

* besides the epic fic, I also have a half-written Avengers/X-Men crossover that I really wish to finish. It's an AU in which Tony grows up under Charles Xavier's tutelage. 

* there also may or may not be a short-ish (10K words) FrostIron smut in the works. It will probably contain all the scenes that I don't use in AotG. The "Explicit" tag should be well-deserved for that one.

2) Dragon Age

DA: Inquisition has stolen my soul these past few weeks and I've had a horrible itch to write something for it for days now. I've started on two short fics (mostly smut) that I'm hoping to post sometime in January. It's entirely possible that once I get deeper into the plot, I'll come up with more things to write. 

3) Hobbit

If I write something for the Hobbit, it will probably be something short. (I haven't forgotten about the promised sequel to DMB, just wasn't in the right mood to write it.) The earliest I can write anything for this fandom is after I'm done with my FrostIron fic, because it's difficult for me to switch between British and American English (especially when the styles are as different as these two are). I always need a few days of reading to change my writing style when I switch, so don't expect anything too soon.

4) Random stuff

I have a few fics on the backlog that I started writing and abandoned due to lack of time (Merlin, mostly). I probably won't get to them anytime soon, because I have so much of other, higher priority stuff. Still, I'd like to finish them one day. We'll see.

All in all, this will be a busy year for me. Instead of feeling drained and needing to take a break like I did last year after Discovering Mr Baggins (I love that story, but boy was it hard to write), I'm only getting more ideas for stuff to do. If my energy holds up, I should be posting several new stories in the next few months. 

This is going to be a fun year :)

[eareniel-blog]

My (mostly) spoiler-free review for The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies movie

I've just seen the new Hobbit movie on a special premiere and need to sort out through all my impressions, so I decided to write a review for the movie.

I’ll try to keep out any major movie details, but I’m assuming that everyone has already read the book (it’s been out for over 70 years!), and that you at least know the major plot points (what happened to the dragon, outcome of the battle etc.). If you don’t, turn back now.

Now on with the review!

I liked the movie overall. It was better that the previous two, though not by much. Despite all the effort, it’s still nowhere near the Lord of the Rings movies quality-wise. What I liked was that unlike the previous two movies, which took a lot of liberties, this one was quite faithful to the book – there is very little padding (if you don’t count the hour-long battle) and the dialogue scenes follow the book pretty closely. 

The scenes that weren’t in the book mostly make sense, because they were included to add coherency to the tale (the aftermath of the dragon attack on Laketown, for example), so I can’t really fault them for it. Unlike the fifteen minute barrel chase or the endless White Council sequence in the first movie, these scenes mostly served a purpose. Overall, the movie was well paced, well-acted, and the music was beautiful. The scenes didn’t drag needlessly and the pointless filler was minimal, which I appreciated.

The biggest problem, unfortunately, turned out to be the tone, which was all over the place, effectively killing any emotions the scenes were trying to evoke. Most dramatic scenes came out awfully shallow, because the tone was just wrong – the slaying of the dragon, for example, made half the cinema laugh, even though it should have been a tense keep-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat kind of scene. There were plenty of dramatic scenes that got killed by unintentional humour, which was a great pity. The movie had a lot of potential that it didn’t quite live up to it. But even with all the flaws, it was still pretty good. 

And now, in no particular order, random impressions: 

The dwarves got woefully underused. Anyone who wasn’t Thorin, Fíli, Kíli, Balin or Dwalin barely got to speak. In fact, most of the dwarves spoke two sentences at the most, and those were all mainly group scenes (shouts/arguments).

Bombur doesn’t say a single word. Again. The poor guy doesn’t have a single line in the entire three movies.

Even at the end of the third movie of the trilogy (almost 9 hours in!) the vast majority of people still won’t be able to put all the dwarven names to the right faces (or, in fact even remember all the names). I was only able to do it because I spent a year writing for the fandom. If I were a random movie-goer, I would have no idea what the dwarves’ names were (apart from the five I mentioned above).

I really liked the way Thorin’s gold-sickness was handled. They spent a lot of time on it and really developed the character arc, which I appreciated.

Dwalin has a great scene with Thorin, as does Balin. The two really shine in this.

Poor Fíli got the short end of the stick on all fronts. No dwarf-hug from Thorin and definitely the worst death of them all. Poor guy.

Kíli fared a bit better, though not by much.

Speaking of death – the canonical death scenes had surprisingly little emotional impact. I had expected to cry a river at the end of the movie, but not even a single tear appeared. We had spent three movies with these characters, there should have been enough tears in the theatre to flood a small town, but there was so little emotional connection with the characters that nobody in the cinema cried. The closest I got was when Bilbo’s voice hitched upon pronouncing Thorin’s name at the end. It calls for a comparison with the ending of FotR, which always makes me cry buckets, even though I never liked Boromir all that much. His scene is made so well that you simply can’t help but mourn him, even if you barely spent half a movie with him. In contrast to that, we have this movie – I love these dwarves, I’ve spent months on end living in their heads, but I barely felt anything when they died. It’s a shame, because I was looking forward to a huge emotional experience. Instead I came out feeling a little disappointed and imagining all the stuff that could have been instead.

As for Thorin – he has a pretty great character arc in this and two scenes with Bilbo that slash fans will like. Especially the first one is wonderfully open to interpretation and will probably launch a thousand fanfics very soon. Still, from the slash fan’s point of view, there wasn’t as much subtext in this movie as I hoped there would be. Fellow writers will have to compensate for that ;)

The audience laughed a lot at this. Sometimes it was good because the scenes were genuinely funny, but a lot of the laughter was caused by unintentional humour that shouldn’t have been there. When you edit together Legolas’s pratfalls and a death scene of one of the most beloved characters, you can never take the death seriously.

Same case – they tried to do a mirror of Eowyn’s fight for Thorin, but instead of being dramatic, it was played for laughs. Therefore when he finally fell, there was nobody crying because it felt like a Three Stooges sketch. What a wasted opportunity.   

Legolas was completely ridiculous in this. They were trying to play up the humour in his fight scenes and it mostly worked, but sometimes the editing between Legolas’s shenanigans and the rest of the battle completely killed the emotional impact of seeing so many people getting brutally slaughtered. Again, bad shifts in tone.

Thranduil was great in this, though he suffered from a huge case of the not-gays. Everyone and their grandma has pointed out that he comes across as super gay, so they had to find a way to squeeze in a few mentions of Legolas’s mother, just to assure the audience that yes, this guy really had a lady once. The whole thing was awkward as hell.

There was a great WTF moment somewhere in the middle where four goats suddenly appear in the middle of the battlefield for no reason, just in time to take Thorin&co. where they need to go. The total randomness of the goat ex machina made the whole cinema go WTF?

Apart from the uneven tone, most of the scenes were handled pretty well both story and character-wise. I especially liked the scenes with the dwarves inside the mountain, which went almost exactly as I had expected.

There is no funeral for Thorin and no coronation of Dáin, which took me aback a little. I had expected the funeral to be a huge emotional affair where I can finally say farewell to the characters, but nope! They just cut from the end of the battle right to Bilbo leaving. Bard doesn’t get a crown either :(

The movie as a whole left very little emotional resonance (at least for me). Maybe other people will cry, but I only felt a little melancholy from seeing the saga end. After having spent so many months of my life with these characters, I can’t help but feel that there should have been more – more connection to the characters, more emotions. Maybe the Extended Editions of the movies will fix this (though I’m a little afraid to watch them after the first one. The extended Goblin King was not an experience I wish to repeat any time soon). 

As it is, Billy Boyd’s song turned out to be the most moving part of the movie. It has exactly all the right emotions that the movie is missing – the pain caused by the loss of beloved friends, the gratitude of being home again, the melancholy of having such a great era of one’s life coming to an end. But mostly it makes me imagine all the things that could have been different, better. 

The people working on these movies have done an amazing job with the story, and the work they left behind is admirable, but after so many years of breathless expectations, I honestly doubt that anything could have compared to the version of the book we all carry in our hearts. And so we will go on and some of us will write the version we wished we had seen instead. I’m really looking forward to all the great works this movie will no doubt inspire.   

[eareniel-blog]

Hobbit premiere tonight!

I managed to get tickets to tonight's premiere of the last Hobbit movie. I'm so excited, you have no idea. I'm really curious to see what they did with the rest of the book and also to see how my story compares to what Jackson&co. cooked up. I'll make a post about the movie tomorrow, because I will most likely have a ton of feelings to share. 

It's also highly probably that it will give me the spark of inspiration needed to go and write something short and sad for the Hobbit again. Bad news for Avengers, good for the Hobbit fandom :D

I can't wait for tonight!!!

[eareniel-blog]

My new fic is up!

This is a bonus scene from the first Avengers movie. It's just a short piece to get things started, but I'm proud of it nonetheless. 

It's a prequel to my novel-length Tony/Loki fic, which is currently being written. I already have 50K words down, so updates on that one should be fairly regular :)

[eareniel-blog]

Avengers fic update

I'm hard at work on my newest fic right now and it's going great. I've already written 22K words and it feels like I've barely gotten started. I have no idea how long it will be (novel-length, most likely), or where it will take me but I'm really excited about it. Two chapters are already finished, with a third on the way. The first chapters should be posted before the end of the year. I don't want to rush anything or put myself under too much stress, so it will still probably be a few weeks before anything goes public. If anyone's interested, I might publish a few excerpts here, to give you an idea of what I'm writing (it's a Tony/Loki fic, very plotty).

I've been getting an urge to write something for Hobbit as well these past few weeks, but I prefer to write one fandom at a time, especially, if they use completely different vocabularies (as much as I hate to admit it, switching between British/American English is hard). For now I guess I'll just wait and see what the Muses bring my way :)

[eareniel-blog]

Working on a new fic

It feels so good to be writing again!

So, I've managed to pass my State Finals and I'm almost done with the University, so I finally have time to write something new. I'm currently busy at work on a new plotty novel-length Tony/Loki fic. I also have a short-ish PWP (cca 10K words) from the same couple on which I'm working on the side and which should be published pretty soon. The smut practically writes itself ;)

I may get back to The Hobbit eventually, but right now I'd like to finish at least one of my projects before I start anything else. The Avenger fics have been sitting in my folder since early spring, so it's high time to pay some attention to them. (Not like it's any hardship, since they are one of my favourite pairs).

[eareniel-blog]

Done with exams!

Hi guys!

After several long and gruelling weeks I'm now finally done with exams. Forever! I now only have the State Finals left in September, so I should have plenty of time to write. I have lots of ideas and several WIP's that I started but couldn't finish due to studying. Now I'm finally free to write again and I'm really looking forward to it. 

You can expect a new Hobbit fic or two, a few Avengers ones and maybe I'll even dabble a bit into the X-Men, if I feel brave enough.

Thank you for waiting and not forgetting me! :) I really appreciate it.

[eareniel-blog]

Update

Hi guys,

I'm not dead, I just took some time off from writing to catch up with my thesis and work on a few projects of my own.

Specifically, I contributed a short Hobbit story to an anthology fanbook, which came out a few weeks ago (unfortunately, only a limited number of copies got printed, so it's probably impossible to get now). I'm still intending to post the sequel to Discovering Mr Baggins eventually, but my attention got completely eaten by the Avengers fever recently, so right now I'm working on a Tony/Loki story instead ^^ Once I get it out of my system, I should be able to return back to the lovely world of the Hobbit. Sorry for the delay, my Muse gets too easily distracted by snarky handsome men :D

[nazgullow-blog]

More from the Eareniel’s Discovering Mr Baggins series! Thorin’s chapter was long and full of significant scenes so I ended up doing 4 pics for that chapter.

And with that, I’m done! Wheewhoo

[eareniel-blog]

The last part of Nazgullow's fantastic series of illustrations that he drew for my story. So much gorgeousness! I have so much love for these pictures (especially the scene from the corridor <3 <3 <3).

Thank you, Naz, for drawing this :)

[eareniel-blog]

Stories I'm working on

This is a comprehensive post that will be updated from time to time and used to let my readers know what sort of stories they can expect from me in the future. It features both fics I'm working on and ideas for future works.

I have several fics in the works at this moment, some of which have been WIPs for months, but hopefully I should be able to finish them eventually. I will be focusing more on shorter works in the next few months to take a break from the novel-length stuff that has eaten my life for the past six months. Luckily my backlog of fic ideas is huge, so there should be no shortage of inspiration.

Listed below in no particular order is all the stuff I'm working on (or planning to work on):

The Hobbit

A sequel to Discovering Mr Baggins - a medium-length fic about Bilbo and Thorin's wedding and the related craziness around it (nosy dwarves, snobby elves, meddling wizards). This one is my highest priority right now, so I'm focusing most of my time and attention on it.

I'm thinking of turning DMB into a series of fics, so there might be one or two more sequels after the wedding one (= one short story about Bilbo's life in Erebor and one that deals with the Ring)

Several short Hobbit fics of various themes (mostly gen) that have popped into my head while I was working on other stuff. Two of them deal with the lives of characters after the events of the Hobbit book (Dís, Balin). Should be posted eventually.

Sherlock

I have an idea for two light-hearted Sherlock/John fics (Sherlock's drunken investigations in Sign of Three have given me tons of inspiration), but very little time to write, so those will be probably written sometime during the summer.

Star Trek

I have a Spirk fic that has been lying on my hard-drive since 2009. I've already written 20K words for it (about a half), but I'm too lazy to edit it right now.

An idea for a River of Gods-inspired Spirk fic has been nagging at my brain for the longest time, but I don't have the time to do the necessary research for it. I will write it eventually, but it won't be anytime soon.

Merlin

I have two WIPs here - a two parter (8K words written) and a oneshot (5K words written), both of the Merlin/Arthur variety. Both will be posted eventually. I haven't watched Merlin for ages (not since season 4 aired), so I've fallen a bit out of sync with the characters.

So many ideas, so little time :( 

[nazgullow-blog]

Continuation of theEareniel's Discovering Mr Baggins series: Bifur, Oin, Dori, and Dis!

[eareniel-blog]

More fanart for my story from the wonderful Nazgullow. Every chapter gets an illustration. Thank you so much for this, Naz! :)

[eareniel-blog]

Writing update

I've taken two weeks off after finishing Discovering Mr Baggins to recuperate a bit (I always set an insane writing pace for myself when I post stuff) and I'm pleased to say that I'm back to writing, a lot sooner than I had expected. 

A sudden burst of inspiration at 3 a.m. on Friday (those are the best ones) gave me the first spark of an idea and I have now written the first 1000 words of the promised DMB sequel. So far it looks like it will be fairly lighthearted, schmoopy affair told from Bilbo's POV. 

Right now I can't even guess how long it will take to write the story, because I first have to research wedding traditions around the world and in history before I make up any dwarvish customs. I also have no idea how long the finished fic will be - my wish is somewhere around 15K words, but my wordcount guesses tend to be horribly unreliable (DMB was supposed to be 50K words long :D )

If anyone's interested, I may post a few excerpts of the fic here as I work before I post it on AO3, so that you can get a small taste while you wait. (To be honest, I don't anticipate this blog getting much traffic overall, but if anyone asks, I'll be happy to post a scene or two :)

[nazgullow-blog]

I read this awesome Hobbit fanfic http://archiveofourown.org/works/1055167/chapters/2112917 (it’s Bagginshield, of course :P) by Eareniel and decided to draw some fanart from it x) . It’s told from the POV of the dwarves in the company, which is cool.

I’m drawing one for each chapter and have like 4 so far lol. Daymn I hope I have enough discipline to do all 13… 

[eareniel-blog]

The talented Nazgullow has done a series of illustrations for my fic, Discovering Mr Baggins. These scenes look exactly as I had imagined them in my head when I wrote it. Thank you for all the work you have put into this, Naz! :)