#imagination junkyard

[rottenappleheart]

LOL FUCK IT, HERE'S THE REST

Kingdom of Dry Bones on AO3, fully uploaded now.

10/10 chapters, 48k words, seven years of drafts, enjoy Ganondorf having some Real Big Feels about destiny and his ex-enemies [ex-lovers], while Sheik slowly ruins his life.

[rottenappleheart]

IT IS FINISHED.

Hey friends. I'm not "back" per se. But I am still alive, and more importantly, I finished KoDB, that ZelGan(Link) novel I have been talking about for literal years. First chapter is up on AO3, and I'll post a new chapter every Friday for the next nine weeks until it's done. I hope you like it. All you ZelGan fans, you Gerudo culture fans, all you who joined me in the beautiful meta discussions about the LoZ lore 2014-2017 - this is for you.

@betterbemeta @corseque @editoress @windcalling @walonvaus @figmentforms @golvio @pocketseizure @winterthur @fencing123 @bearer-of-courage @bearerofwisdom-blog @novellady @robinyourcreator @paintedxdark @ragedaisy @jmindigo @errant-light @ponthion @kashuan @artsykleebreloaded @artsykleeb @saunteredvaguelydownward @vanessarama @tapsters @smolbirbfren @crispy-ghee @lang95 @selahexanimo @greencladprince @thirdstreetcettin @bombshops @mornasol and everyone I forgot or has deactivated since then.

[rottenappleheart]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/10 (finished) Fandom: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms Relationships: Ganondorf/Link/Zelda, Ganondorf & Nabooru Additional Tags: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Assassination Plot(s), Being Too Old For This Shit, The Gods Hate You, Screw Destiny

Summary: Almost twenty years after the new Queen of Hyrule banished the Gerudo King, her country is devastated in a fiery cataclysm, driving Hylian refugees to the desert for shelter. Ganondorf would rather piss glass than help his enemies, but certain old promises haunt him - along with certain new ghosts.

[rottenappleheart]

I am on. Literally. The last scene of KoDB and it is killing me. I have worked on this for so long, I've become so many different people since I started it - Link and Zelda and Gan himself have become such different characters in my mind than when I started it - and the original ending had to go in the dumpster, it's no longer relevant, the world has moved on (which is the point of the story, BUT STILL)

I'm posting this here to nag myself into completing the full draft. By the end of this month. Because then it's NaNoWriMo, which will serve as a good brain break - any lingering edits made in December - then posted, and I never have to stress about it again.

[rottenappleheart]

*stares into space*

I’ve spent the past week setting 45-minute writing timers (apparently that’s my Ideal Amount of Time; 30 minutes “feels” too short, 60 minutes “feels” like too much of a disheartening commitment; but 45 minutes on the timer always ends with me having gotten work done and a little disappointed I have to stop) and I am now 90% done with that ZelGan(Link) thing I’ve been working on since... good grief, October 2015. I’m halfway through the final chapter. Then it’s just beta reading, final edits, and posting. 

This feels weird, but good. I will be very relieved to have Finished this, even if I am very much no longer in the fandom. 

I have also rediscovered that my personal soundtrack for this story is and always was THE BOMB and no one can take that away from me.

[rottenappleheart]

Back in 2019, I learned that the sooner I get comfortable describing any of my stories in Overly Dumb terms, the sooner I am comfortable talking about it in general. 

This is why the past two NaNoWriMo plot synopses are “Zombie Soldier Goes AWOL From The Fantasy Crusades, Settles Down In Viking Stardew Valley” and “Robot Butler And Space Politicians Play Robinson Crusoe On A Deserted Planet,” respectively.

So fuck it, I guess this new one is “Frog And Toad Are Friends (Steampunk Everglades Ghostbusters AU.)”

[rottenappleheart]

Something I find enjoyable about this current story WIP is that everyone, with one exception, is a grown ass adult (or adult equivalent) who are professionals in their various fields. Are their various fields immediately relevant to impromptu high stakes camping situations? Absolutely not, and they can joke about their lack of relevant experience, but at the core they are relatively smart people who are used to 1) figuring out solutions and 2) collaborating. Their tensions come from other sources than Imposed Idiocy.

I like how Ripley is a damn professional in Alien and Aliens, how the crew from The Europa Report got their jobs done as long as they could and as best as they could given the pressures they were under and human frailty vs. how the crew from Sunshine just put on their clown shoes and red foam noses as soon as they launched, how Natalie Portman's character in Annihilation was just plain good at her job. Competency is appealing. Clear-headedness is appealing.

Group casts that are made up of the author's own worst assumptions about human nature are not interesting to me at the current time.

[rottenappleheart]

Like, on the one hand, it was really great with NaNo 2019 to write something completely new and free of expectations (local zombie war vet settles down in Nordic fishing village to learn how to human.) Even if I was deeply discouraged during the actual writing of it, in retrospect, it's an okay first draft, and a good experience for me.

Likewise, good to have gone from NaNo immediately into cudgeling my brains to produce more original novel ideas, not working on any old projects, just trying to get the brain gears going and the idea factory up and running. Some ideas might go somewhere! "Android gardener plaid hell" needs work before it can become a story; "ensemble cast of modified post-humans recreate the plot of Hatchet on the ruins of Earth" just needs me to buckle down and do some research on, uh, long-term radiation exposure.

But having KoDB just sitting there, within sight of the finish line... It bugs me. I want it to be done and I want to drop it like a love bomb on the fandom that I spent so much time in. I've learned so much from the process of writing it, learning to edit things as a whole rather than piecemeal, committing to having the whole thing finished before sharing instead of losing steam halfway through writing it and leaving it forever incomplete on AO3.

But the last bit hurt me so badly. I don't want to, hmm, cheapen my very real feelings about my grandmother's death, and my wasted time, by "using them as inspiration!!!" It's hard to separate the fact that I planned a story about running out of time to love someone, and then I lived it myself, from the the creative process.