having to pause at the end of the first half of the chapter and just stare at a wall AAAAAA the whiplash of cynthia going from like
breathless (concern? reads like no, but i feel like the parental instinct to comfort crying baby would still be a kneejerk) to the general concern about the baby. to the line of justifying rage like OH NO- but right back to the harder concern of baby being okay- and then in the next sentence her feelings just dropping like oh-
more suspense and tension and pit of your stomach everything than what most high quality films etc pull off wtf dude how are u this GOOD my poor anxiety LIKE NO PLS DON'T DO IT- oh nvm fuck-
Ahhh thank you! That’s such a massive compliment! 🥰🥰
Cynthia’s POV was SO fun to write you have no idea! I got into her headspace and the words just flowed so easily. Originally, the section was from Simon’s POV, but the words kept getting stuck and it was a massive mental block on the chapter - and then I swapped POVs and suddenly it was like a breath of fresh air. Cynthia unlocked the chapter for me.
*raises hand*
yes give us the TEG sads
bequeath upon us the bountiful angst
though, yk, when you can and are able. get rest, chug water, hope you feel better soon <3
hi!! thanks for the vote of confidence :D
ooh it's for tomorrow's upload. I should take another look (or 5) at it
hey, do you know what the original recording of the sound that's under the 'alien signal' in Contact is? i swear it's a noise recorded from space but i can't find where. pulsar? CMB? random planet/moon noise? nothing's matching.
(For anyone not familiar, here's the clip!)
But, damn, okay, so after doing some digging, it looks like it's prolly not an actual recording from space. I can't find exactly what they used, but the trivia section of the IMDB page claims it's a slowed-down TARDIS sound! I'd bet it's not actually directly sampled from Doctor Who, but the sound might have been made the same way. Apparently the TARDIS sound was made by dragging keys over a piano string.
If anyone knows more about this I'd love to hear it - they really did nail it with the sound design. I mean, holy shit.
As a lil bonus, here's a super fuckin eerie recording of Saturn's rings, which is what I was gonna guess was used for the transmission sound originally, but the timeline doesn't line up given Cassini launched the year Contact came out.
me idly scrolling and seeing you use an OUAT gif and launching into your asks like a feral cat like- congrats you're a person of class. someone gets it. you get it. yes.
(and no idk specifically what you're getting here, either. being an ouat fan? the vibe of something? there's a vibe here, methinks. idk what.)
Oh, darling, I was FERAL for OUAT when it first came out. Absolutely obsessed. Retelling of classic fairy tales with twists? The play between the modern world and the Enchanted Forest? The way all the stories were woven together? The characters and the heart and charm of everything? CAPTAIN SWAN?
OBSESSED. I admittedly stopped watching sometime around the Frozen arc, but god I still look back on that show with fondness.
So chaotic. So over the top. But somehow, so good.
read that one ask asking for a sequel so. pulling up to say, yes, interested in that completely original TF fic you're working on. :D
and yeah, also interested in knowing how you'd put SW thru the wringer in a sequel.
and while there's other methods than heavy emotional monster of a story, ex. drabbles, snipplets, little slice-of-life bits like you said, i figure at that point you'd just want to roll it all+the effort into ex. that original fic?
also, question, i don't remember it being explicity stated - what happened to the little subplot of SW dreaming of his processor/the dimensional-web-thing and going over the maps/patterns of the LL's jumps? i remember it being stated he couldn't figure it out?
did it roll into the later subplots (crystals, the god-megatron bit, etc) in a subtle way and i simply missed it, or did it become one of the open-ended-no-answer points at the end that SW could eventually learn?
i feel like it simply faded off into the background and never cropped up again but i doubt you'd leave such a loose thread. so i'm probably forgetting something.
ohwait, the portal bit. is that what it rolled into? but i thought that cropped up from the crystal frequencies/single mention of (i think it was) "nooo, the energy's BETWEEN the strings" or whatever statement was made that lead to the portal subplot.
(sigh, i'll sit down and reread the fic again soon. so many fun tiny peices.)
Hi!
>interested in that completely original TF fic you're working on. :D
Thank you! I appreciate that =D
>also interested in knowing how you'd put SW thru the wringer in a sequel
wellllllll for a start, he's still got that hunger rolling around inside him... that could go all kinds of badly... 😬
>i figure at that point you'd just want to roll it all+the effort into ex. that original fic?
Yup! this might sound weird, but drabbles/slice of life/quite short stories would be very easy. I can do them in my head and they feel... like, uncomplicated. fluffy and fun and easy, which has its place in fanfic for sure, but I need to challenge myself to be a better writer in long form ;A;
gonna put your questions after the jump :)
>what happened to the little subplot of SW dreaming of his processor/the dimensional-web-thing and going over the maps/patterns of the LL's jumps?
yup yup ok this is two different things
In the very beginning of the story, Soundwave dreams this:
The structures were made of stars connected by thin lines, pure and vibrant, as if from a spool of thread made from his spark. They towered like constellations over the landscape of his processor. They vibrated like plucked strings, each note filling the space between the stars with... data...
data he couldn't define...
The stars are atoms, the lines are like, the arrangement of the atoms (as seen in diagrams) in crystals. He cannot define the data at this time because his emotion suppressing protocols are still (kind of) working.
The only thing he understood about this dream was that the structures and the sounds they produced were linked. Not just linked, they were one and the same. They were visual and auditory representations of data in his processor, flowing together and coming apart again. Their mixing produced a third type of data that he couldn't define. It manifested itself viscerally as something like a field pulse, hovering between the latticework.
"visual and auditory... flowing together" is supposed to prepare the reader for the idea that, for Soundwave, his sensing organs mix the senses. It foreshadows this:
my spark is linked to my primary tentacle. its tendrils are my spark-senses-the-world, my ears-become-eyes and eyes-become-ears
The part about Their mixing produced a third type of data that he couldn't define... something like a field pulse means that the visual and auditory stuff combines together to make emotions (mechs express their emotions through their fields/field pulses). Emotions are the third type of data, and he cannot define them at this point in the story because he does not feel emotion (mostly).
SO all that stuff is foreshadowing the fact that Soundwave is missing part of his processor, it has to do with his senses, his ability to sense, and his emotions.
Nowwwwww the map of the LL's jumps - the one that Brainstorm sneaks into his hab suite - that was something I wrote before I fully knew how the story was going. It was something I thought Soundwave was going to end up dealing with - frankly, becoming powerful enough to fully understand it (aka 2938 Megatron levels)- but that power level seemed too high for how he was turning out by the middle of the story. That thread did, indeed, fade over time, and I wrapped it up at the end with Brainstorm saying “There are infinite dimensions to jump to. Infinity is a big number, Rodimus. Why should we have repeats, when we've not even jumped through a million dimensions? Let alone a billion? Or a trillion? Or a quadrillion? Or-”
Which, admittedly, isn't as neat and tidy as everything else in the story (although I do like it and it makes complete sense), but what you see on AO3 is literally the first draft xD it's the very first, fully written draft of the story. and if I could go back, I would try to neaten it up for sure
The portal subplot was also something where there were several avenues happening at once. at first I was going to have Soundwave figure out how to build a portal by infiltrating Astrotrain on the Irradion (Soundwave does do that in the story, and Cyberverse Astrotrain is able to make dimension-crossing portals, and it seems to be a power he possesses, not special tech). But that would mean that SW basically stole the data: it's not very proactive for him to do as a character, aka, it'd be better if he figured it out himself.
I also had some little whispers of things going on in the back of Soundwave's head- for this avenue, it would be that he remembered how he used the groundbridges on the Nemesis. but I eventually decided to tie it into something more intrinsic and important to the plot- his crystals. though, informally, the Astrotrain data and the Nemesis knowledge did help SW develop the 'song' for the portal to play
Hope that answered your questions =) thanks for the fun questions and for reading!
here's a fun question, did you listen to music or a playlist while writing TEG? as in, got any songs that scream plot-of-TEG to you, or specific scenes, or any thoughts as to what'd be used for themes, or in a OST for it? etc :}
also hai again, hope you're doing well.
haihai, doing ok, worked 4 ten hour days so I can have tomorrow offffff I wanna wriiiiiiiiiite >.< I'm rill rill tired
listening to music was an on-off thing for me while writing. iirc in the beginning of TEG I would listen to music while writing, but towards the end I actually had to stop listening to music. and not just when writing. for whatever reason, I'd have to stop listening to music a week before I wanted to write. idk why but my brain says I can either have music, or I can write. so that kind of sucks, to be honest, lol
I don't usually associate specific songs with characters or events, because I overthink it. a character is too multi-dimensional to be perfectly encompassed by a song. people have asked me, in the past, what songs I would associate with Rodimus or SW, etc etc, and I just don't have an answer :s
I like music a lot. I'm listening to some right now. but I don't associate Earth-made music with Transformers* xD
for the record, JRO used to release playlists for MTMTE issues and I never listened to those for the same reason. lolllllll
