I think a lot of lists of worldbuilding tips are really extreme to one end or the other of the spectrum from prioritizing realism to prioritizing storytelling.
Like on the one side there are those that act like it’s just a series of blanks to fill in and things to make up names for, which I feel like is especially a trap for younger writers because ?? idk when you’re 20 you just inherently know less about The World, the real world, than when you’re 30, so you tend to under-think certain things. And possibly those things aren’t relevant to the plot of your story and go relatively unnoticed, but like, you CAN tell when somebody doesn’t know anything about farms or hospitals or other things that can appear in a wide variety of totally imaginary settings but which are constrained by certain logistics. And you DO lose reader immersion when there’s no sense of continuity to your setting’s culture and every place in the hero’s isolated village sounds like it was named in a completely different language.
But then on the other side there are people who are like don’t even visualize your setting until you’ve determined what the dominant minerals in the soil of the planet are and I don’t get that either. A setting serves characters, it can’t be a collection of arbitrary decisions. You can build from the planetary core up and have a lot of fun and learn a lot of stuff but that’s no way to actually tell a story
I feel like the trouble is that..in my experience worldbuilding is a sometimes very frustrating process of goal-oriented research. The hero’s home world is a desert planet, but why? The hero is the only magic user in their isolated village, but why? The “why”s are what make things feel real and writers I think are really good at worldbuilding often link them to very real-world topics like human migration and climate and cosmology.
But also in my experience...
Worldbuilding is an admission that stories are made of stories. We experience what we experience through the lens of history and culture. The best worldbuilding feels like learning meaningful facts about the world--it’s a joyful experience of discovery or of finding something that resonates with you (or in the context of fiction with the POV you relate to). The hero’s village’s name comes from a quirky remark by an official of a long-dead reign who passed through centuries before. The desert planet was once earth-like but that was long before anybody lived there; just beneath the sand there are fossilized jungles, frozen in time and shale. You can’t fill in the blank with a word or a number. You have to fill it in with a story!
I have this little post Face The Raven AU that I’ve been poking at off and on for about two years now. It’s never been the primary fic I’ve been working on, but little by little I’ve added to the first chapter, and a few scenes after that, and it’s come together into something I really like.
Only, I have no idea where it’s going. Or really, just a vague idea of how I would want to re-write Heaven Sent and Hell Bent to go with this divergent AU timeline, but not any solid plans for how to get there. I love it as a what-if and a character study, particularly for a slightly darker take on Clara. But I’m not sure if it actually has legs past this point?
I put the finishing touches on chapter 1 the other day, so I thought maybe I’d throw this final-ish draft version of it out here on Tumblr and see what you guys think. Do you like it? Would it be worth figuring out how the plot unfolds from this point? Or is it just too weird for you to want to read more?
The feedback I get on this post will help me decide what to do with this fic, so definitely let me know your thoughts!
Working title: Feral Circle, chapter 1
With a gasp she comes back to herself, lungs aching and circulatory system lurching abruptly into motion. Her final words to the Doctor are still on the tip of her tongue, but she knows, she knows—
She has never been more herself and less Clara Oswald than she is in this moment. She has never more clearly understood the how and the why of Clara Oswald. She has never hated herself more or felt more at home in her own skin.
She has never been more blindingly, incandescently angry.
“Well, shit,” she groans. Her voice is hers and yet not hers, utterly familiar despite the maze of memories now coursing through her mind, and under the control of absolutely no one but herself. This has always been a curse of her own making, a death sentence ordered and carried out by herself alone. But here on the other end of her grand master plan, she is filled with anger and disappointment, instead of the triumph she had so long envisioned.
All those years of planning, all those decades of hiding, wasted, and for what? The life of one solitary human? One inconsequential blip of a boy and his overly adorable offspring?
It was the Doctor with Rigsy’s baby that did her in, really. Damn him. The moment is burned into her mind in a way she knows will stay with her for lifetimes. His or hers or the universe’s, it’s all up for debate just now.
She pushes herself up to sitting, takes a moment to readjust to gravity. She half expected to find herself still on the cobblestones of the Trap Street, but she’s in a quiet back room, laid out on a bed. Of course they hadn’t left her where she fell. The Doctor wouldn’t have allowed it. Not for Clara, not for his Impossible Girl.
She wishes now that she had let him say it, let him confess the words that so desperately needed to be spoken aloud. That’s how native she’d gone, how thoroughly she had believed her own lie, that with moments left until her death all she could think about was sparing his feelings, reminding him to be a Doctor. What an inconvenient time to have finally perfected the art of disguise.
The Doctor is no longer here, he had snarled at Ashildr, Mayor Me, whatever the hell she wanted to call herself. You are stuck with me! And I will end you, and everything you love.
That was him, the love of her life, finally showing his true face for the first time in centuries. And she had to go and beg him to stop. Of all the idiotic things to do.
Every one of her muscles burn in a way that she knows from long experience means this is only a temporary reprieve before her body goes all explodey, just the reset before things get real. She needs to get out of here, she needs to get back to the TARDIS.
She needs to find the Doctor.
How long has it been? This process shouldn’t have taken more than mere minutes, but she can feel the shift in local relativity that can only mean one thing. She’d told Ashildr to remove that stupid transmat bracelet from the Doctor, but then she’d up and died before she was able to enforce that demand. There are voices coming from the next room, but she knows, she knows he’s gone, out of her reach just when she really needs him, just when she finally truly understands, in a way she never once before in her very long life understood, and she is, she is—
She is enraged is what she is. At him, at herself, but most of all at the meddling little bitch who lured them here and ruined everything. This was not the way it was supposed to happen.
Clara Oswald was supposed to die in the Doctor’s arms, someplace far more private. Dramatic, overwrought, and ultimately unavoidable. The perfect climax they’d been building to all these years, the final tragedy after so many narrow escapes. A poignant, heartbreaking end to everything that might have been between them, rendered in blood and tears and the Doctor clutching her broken body. Without an audience.
The rest of it had held startlingly close to script, she is forced to grudgingly admit. He had gone through all the stages of grief right in front of her, threatened to summon armies in her name, to rain down destruction for all time in exchange for her life. He had nearly said the words they had both so carefully danced around for so long, and would have done if her overdeveloped sense of self-sacrifice hadn’t gotten in the way. He was sure as hell thinking them, doing his best to press them into her temporarily-deafened skin in those last moments.
But the key turning point of The Plan— he was supposed to be there when she woke up, he was supposed to witness the miracle of her restoration to life with his own eyes. He was supposed to hold both of those truths in his hands and realise he couldn’t have one without the other. It had come so close to being perfect.
Damn it all to hell.
She pushes her body into motion, every cell screaming out for release. It is irrelevant, unnecessary in this moment: the pain isn’t overwhelming, she can put it off awhile yet. At least long enough to find out where Ashildr’s stupid teleport bracelet sent the Doctor, and maybe wring from her the information of just who set this all up, who was pulling her strings.
It’s only a few steps from the bed to the door, but she refuses to open it until she can make an entrance with some level of dignity. She is Ashildr’s worst nightmare made flesh, and she should sure as hell act like it.
Breath in, breath out. Her ribs ache. Goddamned raven. Stupid bloody quantum shade of all bloody things.
She pulls herself up to her full height. Recites her titles in her head. Reminds herself exactly what all this was for. Lifetimes of work, millennia of longing. A dance of soulmates, played out across all of time and space. One pathetic pseudo-immortal viking isn’t going to stand in her way.
She strides through the doorway like the vengeful goddess of death she is, and revels in the way all conversation comes to an abrupt halt.
“C-Clara??” Rigsy stutters, wide-eyed in her peripheral vision.
She doesn’t bother to correct him. The less he knows, the better. “Run on home now, Rigsy,” she tells him, her gaze fixed on Ashildr with a ferocity that could ignite concrete. The viking girl has gone very pale, and takes a step away from her out of instinct.
“You’re alive! How? How are you alive??” the boy demands.
“Go home,” she tells him again, sparing him a glance. “Go home to your baby and forget this ever happened. Do not look for me. Do not contact me. Do not tell anyone what happened here. Go, now, before I change my mind.”
She doesn’t have to tell him a third time. The newly reunited Janus mother and daughter follow him out the door, leaving her alone with Ashildr and her own mounting rage.
“I don’t understand,” Ashildr says, retreating another step. “You were dead! You should be dead!”
“Death is for other people,” she says, pacing deliberately closer. “Do I strike you as someone who would let a little thing like dying slow me down? Or keep me from the Doctor?” Her voice is clear and steady, anger held in check like a coiled spring.
“But the raven—”
“Where is he?” she cuts her off, in no mood to listen to the babblings of such a pathetic excuse for a lifeform. “Where’s the Doctor?”
“I— I don’t know,” Ashildr says, eyes wide with fear.
“I’ve had a very bad day,” she tells her, angling her approach to block Ashildr’s path to the door. “And I do not have the time to drag the truth out of you in the sorts of painful ways I would prefer. Where. Is. The Doctor?” she demands, punctuating each word with another step closer.
“I don’t know!” the girl insists, backing up against a wall. “They didn’t tell me where they were taking him! All I was supposed to do was put the teleport cuff on him and make sure he couldn’t get to his TARDIS! They didn’t tell me anything else!”
“‘They’ who?” she demands, her patience fraying.
Ashildr shakes her head frantically. “I can’t, they’ll kill me, they’ll—”
Her hand shoots out and she grips the girl around the neck, hard enough to let her know she means business, but not enough to crush her fragile windpipe and make her useless. “I will kill you, don’t for a moment think I won’t. Tell me who took him. Do it now.”
“But all those things you said to the Doctor—”
“None of that was meant for you,” she tells her coldly. “You should not have had any part in my death, and whatever happens to you now, it’s your own bloody fault. Don’t make me ask you again,” she says, tightening her grip fractionally. “Who took the Doctor?”
“The Time Lords!” Ashildr gasps out, hands scrabbling against her grip.
“What?” she spits, her rage climbing to new heights.
“They threatened the Street! I had no choice! No one was supposed to get hurt!”
“Which bloody Time Lords?” she snarls, only barely managing to keep from wringing the life from the viking girl. Ashildr will heal from most things, but she can think of a few ways to make sure she stays dead.
Though, if the girl is telling the truth, her murderous intentions are better directed elsewhere.
“Rassilon, and others with him, I don’t know!” Ashildr cries. “The confession dial, they wanted the Doctor’s confession dial, too. I swear I don’t know anything else!”
She drops her hard against the stone floor, her mind racing as the girl sits at her feet, wheezing and rubbing at her neck. Rassilon and a transmat bracelet and the Doctor’s confession dial. Her bad day has just gotten significantly worse.
“Where is it?” she demands, once she can form a sentence that is anything more than howling obscenities. “Where is his confession dial?”
Ashildr gestures vaguely towards the mantelpiece but says, “They took it already. I was told to leave it there for them, and now it’s gone, they must have—”
“If you are lying to me,” she says, staring down at her and forcing herself to be slow and calm, “I will use that Mire chip in your skull to make your death take a very, very long time. And then I will bring UNIT in here to make sure all your little pets get the same treatment. Do you understand me?”
The girl nods, wide-eyed. “What happened to you?” she asks, a millennia of being all but invulnerable making her reckless. “The raven should have killed you, not turned you into this.”
“The raven killed Clara Oswald,” she replies, her voice detached. “I woke up as myself.”
“Then who are you?” Ashildr presses.
She pauses before answering, both a well-honed inclination towards theatrical gravitas and a moment to consider. Names are tricky things, they can define a person as much as their actions, set a tone and an entire trajectory. There are dozens of names bouncing around her head just now, old and new, real and false. But in the end, there was only ever one name that truly fit.
“You can call me the Master,” she tells the girl. “And for your own sake, you should hope we never meet again.”
--
Of course, she thinks, as she makes her way to where they’d left the TARDIS as quickly as her deteriorating body will allow, she only wishes it was that simple. That clean of a break. Clara Oswald did die in that cobblestone alley — the cover persona, the human façade. And yet the Master knows herself well enough to realise that she is still Clara. She lived that life, she felt those emotions, and never once questioned her own identity. She willingly threw herself into the Doctor’s timestream to save him. She demanded he find a way to out manoeuvre death, if he loved her in any way. She told him that everything he was about to say, she already knew, and she meant it.
She can never go back to being just Clara Oswald, but she will never again not be Clara Oswald, either.
The friend inside the enemy, the enemy inside the friend, she said to the Doctor, back on one of her more self-destructive days, when she was still wearing her last face. She tried to get her future self killed that day, did her utmost to cause the death of her next face without actually assassinating Clara Oswald herself. It was all in pursuit of The Plan, of course, and she remembers wondering at the time if she told the Doctor too much, been too obvious, if he might finally look at the face of the woman masquerading as human and see her real self in there. But he had been simply too relieved to have his Clara back.
Oh what a death that would have been. Pity it didn’t work out.
The TARDIS is locked up tight when she finally reaches it, and she drags her key on its chain out from under her jumper, grateful to have the option. She has a vortex manipulator stashed away just in case, contingencies laid in place long before she became Clara Oswald, but she doesn’t have the time or the patience or the physical resilience to put up with cheap and nasty time travel just now. The TARDIS’s Cloister Bell starts tolling before she’s even got the door open, and she rolls her eyes as she fumbles her way inside. The regeneration process is starting in earnest now, she can’t put it off much longer, and it’s making her clumsy.
“It’s just me, you old cow,” she tells the TARDIS, pushing the door shut behind her.
The rotors make a worried sound overhead, but at least the Cloister Bell cuts out.
“You’ve known it was me for ages, haven’t you?” she asks absently as she goes to the console. She needs a quiet place to do this, somewhere she’ll be able to focus on getting the details right. Earth in this timezone would be easiest. Privacy, but an outdoor space. The Doctor always seems to want to do this inside the TARDIS, for reasons she’s never understood and certainly won’t be emulating. The only thing that could make this wretched day worse is if the TARDIS booted her out or crashed mid-regeneration.
This first, and then she can focus on saving the Doctor. Put your own oxygen mask on first, like the human’s aeroplane safety instructions always say. The Doctor needs her, but she won’t be any good to either of them if she goes off half-cocked with her brain still on fire.
The TARDIS makes another concerned noise, telepathic awareness reaching out, but she bats it away.
“Shush, mummy’s working,” she says, focused on the navigation system. There’s a field she knows, a meadow high up in the mountains, far enough from everything that she’s unlikely to run into any humans...
A holograph that looks like her flickers to life a few feet away. The last time the TARDIS did this, the Doctor was stuck in a pocket universe trying to save a lost time traveller. The TARDIS must have known then what she herself would never have believed, must have recognised her true self hiding in the shell of Clara Oswald. No wonder the old girl had shown such a marked dislike for her.
She barely spares her holographic doppleganger a glance. “We do not have time for this,” she says crisply. “I have places to be, and you are going to take me there.”
“You are a danger to the Doctor,” the holograph says in her own voice, staring her down with lifeless eyes.
With an exasperated sigh, she turns towards the projection. “You do realise what we’re up against, don’t you? What Rassilon is doing to the Doctor, even as we stand here arguing?”
Overhead, the rotors make a distressed noise. Of course the TARDIS knows what’s happened to her madman, what the Time Lords must be doing to him. She bites her lip against asking for gruesome details that will only distract her when she most needs to be focused.
“I cannot permit harm to come to the Doctor,” the holograph says.
“Good, we’re on the same page: I’m not wild about the idea, either.”
“I cannot permit you to harm the Doctor.”
“How exactly am I a danger to the Doctor?” she demands.
The holograph stutters, then flashes rapidly through an array of her previous faces, Missy and Saxon and Yana and back and back through their shared past.
“Oh, don’t go digging up ancient history,” she tells the TARDIS sourly. “How am I, this me, a danger to the Doctor?”
The hologram settles on Missy, sneering out, “You would go to hell if she asked. And she would!”
“Except I’m not the one asking! I’m not the one who’s done this to him, and you bloody well know it. It’s them. The Time Lords. It’s Rassilon, because of-bloody-course it’s Rassilon.”
The projection shifts back to her current face. “And you want to kill Rassilon?” it asks.
Of course I want to kill Rassilon is on the tip of her tongue, but she pauses and forces herself to think through the haze of the beginning of the regeneration process. She has wanted to kill Rassilon for aeons now, but right this moment that’s not the point. “I want to save the Doctor,” she says instead, knowing it’s the truth. “Everything else is secondary.”
With a flicker, the hologram disappears. The overhead lights dim, and she can feel the TARDIS considering, pacing out possible futures branching out from this moment.
“Look, are you going to help me or not?” she demands impatiently. “I have every intention of saving him, just as soon as I’ve got this regeneration situation under control. You are welcome to come along, but if you prefer to leave the saving up to me, I’ll be happy to tell the Doctor that his beloved TARDIS abandoned him when it mattered the most.”
The TARDIS doesn’t respond, and for a long moment the console room is dark and silent, eerily empty in the absence of the one person she can’t bear to lose.
She braces her hands against the console and closes her eyes, dropping her chin to her chest. “Please,” she whispers, not above begging in this suspended, unwitnessed moment. “Please, you have to help me save him.” She gathers up all her worry and fear, all her anger at what Rassilon has stolen from her, all her concern and longing for the Doctor, and pushes it to the surface of her skin, willing the TARDIS to hear her. To believe her. “Please.”
Slowly, the rotors spin back into life overhead, and she opens her eyes to see the lever beside her hand flip itself into the ignition position, sending them into the Vortex. She remembers pulling that lever herself, the side of her hand pressed snugly against the Doctor’s, and her longing for him doubles. Clutching the edge of the console now, her hand has begun to glow with dim golden light, and she knows she’s out of time.
“That little hidden valley in the mountains, you know the one I mean?” she asks the TARDIS, her gaze fixed on the regeneration energy seeping from between her fingers. “Take me there.”
The TARDIS lands quickly, the doors swinging open before she can raise her numb hand to snap. The world beyond is lit by late afternoon sunlight, outlining the waving grass and wildflowers in gold.
“Wait for me, this shouldn’t take long,” she tells the TARDIS, then staggers out into the field, away from the TARDIS, trailing golden light behind her. There isn’t a moment to spare, but she can’t simply release her stranglehold on the energy coursing through her body. No, she has to be far more careful and strategic than that, if she’s to have any hope of salvaging her future.
Controlling the regenerative process, choosing a face, is merely a question of focus. Even the Doctor had managed it, this last time around. And she isn’t replicating someone else’s face, she’s choosing her own all over again, choosing to regenerate into exactly the same form. It ought to be simple enough.
She designed Clara Oswald back when she put The Plan into action, handcrafted all the little details she knew would get under the Doctor’s skin. Big, emotive brown eyes in a pretty face. A small stature, weak looking, so that the Doctor would feel instinctively protective over her. Quick-witted and funny, able to keep up with his babbling and his harebrained schemes. She’s known him for centuries, since they were children — she knows his type. In the end she hadn’t been able to talk herself into masquerading as a blonde, and she is grateful now to realise that gamble paid off. Brunette always suited her better, anyway.
There’s no stopping the regeneration process now, but if she can replicate Clara Oswald all over again, she just might be able to get The Plan back on track. Once this is done, she’ll go save the Doctor from whatever hell Rassilon is inflicting on him, and he will look at her and see his Clara, back from the dead. He’ll look at her and see the Master and all their long history together. He’ll look at her and see Koschei, his first love. He’ll look at her and see her.
Please, just see me he begged her, when she hadn’t yet been able to see the Doctor hiding behind his new face. That’s all she wanted, in the end. To be seen by him.
She can feel the regeneration energy coursing through her, pulsating in a rising tempo, and focuses her mind on what she wants out of this, what she needs.
Her face, her face absolutely has to remain the same. This face was the first face the Doctor saw when he regenerated, he would spot any tiny difference.
Her hands have to be perfect reproductions of themselves. After all these months, the Doctor had finally gotten comfortable with holding her hand again, and he would know if they changed.
Her voice has to be the voice of Clara Oswald. When she calls to him, he has to hear her, the woman he loves.
She resists the urge to add a few inches to her height. Five-foot-one and crying he once said. He would notice if she changed that. Her past faces had always resented his height, the extra inches he used to tower over her, but she had found the power of a small frame, this regeneration. Making him bring himself down to her level, fold himself smaller to accommodate her.
The hair, the hair needs a slight update, it can’t be what she regenerated into the last time, it has to match her recent haircut. Such a small thing, but she almost missed it.
She holds the idea of Clara Oswald in her mind, all the little details that make up her physical being, until she can feel her body acquiesce to her demand. Every cell will die and every cell will be replaced by an exact replica. Because she wills it to be so. Because she needs it to be so.
But the body is only half of it. The other half, the personality, well— she’s all over the place just now, and she scrambles for some sense of control, as the golden glow of regeneration spirals outwards from her hands, growing in intensity with each beat of her hearts.
Who is she? She’s never particularly had time for existential questions, but now it matters more than it ever has before. There are dozens of names in her mind, lifetimes of personalities, all muddled together now in this strange twilight between lives. Who is she? Who must she be, to save the Doctor?
She is Clara and Missy and Saxon and Yana.
She is the snake-eyed monstrosity and the one burnt beyond recognition, she is the wearer of disguises and puns and goatees.
She is Koschei, and she has been in love with him since before he took up the mantle of the Doctor.
She is a burning ball of anger and hate and loathing, she is the pounding of the drums, she is all the declarations of love that died on her tongue unspoken.
She is if you love me in any way, she is run you clever boy and remember, she is his duty of care, she is someone he can’t bear to lose.
She is his Impossible Girl, and she will dismantle the universe and rewrite time to get him back.
She is Time Lord and Human, she is Clara and the Master.
She is the Doctor’s best friend, his oldest enemy.
She is the one who loves him,
loves him
loves him
loves him.
It is the one truth that has sustained through all her lives, through all her schemes and misdeeds, through every dark day and every ecstatic moment of joy.
She loves him, and it is the most powerful force the universe has ever known.
That is the thought she holds tight in her hearts, as the golden energy rips through her, replacing every cell in her body and changing nothing.
--
With a gasp she comes back to herself, greeted by the smell of wildflowers and the sound of the TARDIS’s Cloister Bell.
The field, and regeneration, and—
She examines her hands, then uses their familiar size and shape to push herself up to a sitting position. The question that had so occupied her final moment before regeneration has found its answer, reverberating in her chest in time to her twin heartbeat.
five and half weeks after dislocating my wrist and I can finally, finally actually type again. I still have to take it slow and not over-do things, but guh, what a relief.
dislocations are pretty common for me, with the HMS/EDS genetic nonsense going on, but every now and then I find a way to dislocate a joint that I hadn’t previously dislocated, and the first time is always the worst. that’s what happened with my right wrist in mid April -- overtaxed myself by playing too much Minecraft on a Tuesday, minor injury to my shoulder the next day, then massive horrific dislocation on Thursday.
it’s been all ice packs and anti-inflammatory meds and trying to rest it for five and a half weeks. I have watched so much YouTube and marathoned so many tv shows, and tried to restrict myself from mouse and keyboard and touchscreen use -- and also things like eating with my dominant hand, or brushing my hair with that hand. it’s obnoxious.
it definitely isn’t done healing yet either, and I still have pain at certain angles and doing certain tasks (especially anything involving pinching). but I spent the first week or so trying to get it back to full (hypermobile) range of motion, so that it didn’t heal in a stiff position, like that same wrist did when I injured it in high school. that time wasn’t a dislocation, but it still took me ~10 months to fully heal, and then another three or four years before I had my normal range of motion back.
I’m going to keep my Tumblr queue at its current low level of 10 posts a day, with my queue stocked up for several weeks at least, and I still likely won’t be around much -- typing is far easier on my hands than scrolling, at the moment. but I’m hoping that now that I can use my laptop again, I can maybe start actually writing again, too.
it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last updated For As Long As We Get and whoo am I feeling it. I’ve started poking at the next part, currently titled Forest For The Trees. I’m re-doing the whole episode, like I did with Honeymoon on the Orient Express and First Christmas, so I expect it’ll end up being similarly oversized like both of those are, and may in fact end up having chapters. it’s currently sitting at just over 7400 words, and easily more than half of it still left to write. so it’ll be awhile before it’s actually finished, but I’m hoping I can start making slow progress on it again.
I’m trying to get back into the swing of writing my Whouffaldi s8 AU For As Long As We Get, the next part of which will be a retelling of In The Forest Of The Night. It’s been slow-going lately, and I’ve mostly been stuck on plot elements. The entire idea of the s8 AU series is keeping the major events seen in each episode, but changing the emotional context they’re happening in, given the shift in Clara and the Doctor’s relationship. Their trip on the Orient Express In Space is their honeymoon instead of their last hurrah, that sort of thing.
At this point in the fic series, they’ve been married about a month, so the emotional context is completely different from what it is in the show, wherein Clara and Danny are still dating, and Danny finds out that Clara has been lying to him about not travelling with the Doctor anymore. That shift changes the entire tone of all of their interactions, and changes the sort of decisions each of them would make when facing the same external circumstance. (I can’t imagine Clara refusing to leave with the Doctor in this AU, for instance.)
So there’s a lot to figure out there, and I’m having to write more Danny content than I would really prefer -- though I will say I’m excited about the scenes with him that I’ve written so far. I thought that was what was sticking in my gears and holding me back from writing this installment in the AU series, but as I’ve started re-reading the episode transcript, I’ve realized that there are a whole lot of other structural/plot issues in this episode that really bother me, separate from Clara’s relationships with the Doctor and Danny. A lot of the science just doesn’t sit well with me with even just my hobbyist level of physics knowledge. And I feel like Maebh is really under utilized in the third act, after they figure out that she can talk to the trees. The core idea of the episode is almost good and almost scientifically coherent, but not quite, and it bugs me.
The other fic that’s really been calling to me lately is Home The Long Way ‘Round, that huge unfinished epic I’ve been returning to every now and then since 2015. That one is built on a backbone of quantum physics, and I love all the research I’ve gotten to do with that, I love fitting in as much science as makes sense for the story, and then just letting it go and leaning into the fiction part of science fiction. It’s a bit similar to This Isn’t A Ghost Story, weirdly enough, in which I did as much research into a couple of specific topics within Egyptology as it’s possible to do without actually attending university courses on it. I love doing that sort of research, I love putting as much of it into a fic as I can manage, and I love just letting go and coasting once I’ve reached that point.
So now I’m thinking that I should probably do the same thing for this AU version of In The Forest Of The Night, really let myself dig into the known science and have fun extrapolating from there. Solar flares, geomagnetic storms, and coronal mass ejections are actually pretty well understood, we just haven’t had any really big storms for a century or more now, since back when telegraphs were the height of technology.
Which, of course, is how I ended up re-encountering a bit of research I originally did way back in the summer of 2020, when I was working on This Isn’t A Ghost Story. A significant beat of that story is set on May 13, 1921, and the week that follows -- those of you who have read it know what I’m talking about. It just so happens that May 13-15 1921 was one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record, the strongest of the entire twentieth century, known as the New York Railroad Storm, because the coronal mass ejection caused a fire at Grand Central Terminal. Telegraph wires conducted the current of the CME, causing fires and electric shocks world-wide.
Auroras could be seen in the night sky the world over, including at the equator, and definitely would have been visible in Egypt on that fateful night of May 13, 1921, and the pivotal days that followed. It’s such a cool historical detail that perfectly lined up with the story I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t find a way to mention it without derailing the action of the story. But for those of you who read it, I thought you might enjoy that little extra detail. ;)
My word count for yesterday ended up being -30. But despite all appearances of actually going backwards, that net loss of 30 words was progress in the right direction.
Chapter 6 of Chameleons and Bowties has been fighting me the last several days -- I finished a first draft that did all the things I need the chapter to do, hit all the plotpoints, but when I read back over it I hated it. The emotional pacing was all wrong, I was over-emphasizing a small point that’s going to be immediately contradicted in ch7 anyway, and the dialogue just didn’t flow the way I wanted it to, especially for a chapter that is nearly all dialogue.
So a few days ago I went through and chopped up the bits that weren’t working, de-emphasized that point that really just needs to be a passing concern in ch6, and rewrote a ton of the dialogue. The second draft of the chapter was better, but I still hated it. Last night I took a long hot shower and just sort of let the dialogue bounce around my head, more daydreaming about the scene than trying to find things to write down. And afterwards I took yet another pass, completely re-writing some seconds and chopping up and re-purposing other sections.
I moved one chunk of ~200 words to my ‘Cut Text’ section at the end of the gdoc, but even counting that in my current total word count (17,424 currently, including cut text that may get re-purposed or may end up cut completely from the final version of the story), I still ended up 30 words less than where I’d started the day.
I’m letting chapter 6 sit for a bit before I go back and re-read, just so it isn’t quite so fresh in my mind, but I think this was all for the best. And if the third draft still isn’t working for me, I’ll do a fourth and a fifth until it’s where it needs to be. And it’s good to remind myself that writing is just like that sometimes, you have to build up a big pile of not-quite-right so you can carve it down to what you actually want. I can get too focused on moving my total word count up that I forget that sometimes the way forward is with fewer words.
