All Eyes on Me

Maybe I'll make a pod fic...?

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 23:22:37 GMT

Been interested in working on fan fiction a fair bit lately. I think it’s because I can make my original work and have to beg people to give it a chance, or I can slap up a new chapter of my Captain America serial and get a hundred strangers to read it in one day. It’s a nice little dopamine hit every time I watch the hit metrics climb, and that’s something I can use these days.

I don’t really write porn, and with my preference for canon compliance I usually write het, so my work is not exactly fandom’s preference. My work is decently if not insanely frequently read, according to the indicators on my profiles on FanFiction.Net and on An Archive of Our Own. It’s tricky to compare popularity between the two, since they measure things differently. On AO3, a click to the story overall registers as one hit, whereas on FF.Net you get a hit for every individual chapter click. I supposed you could average the number of FF.Net hits over the number of chapters to attempt for something comparable, but I don’t know how close that actually is.

Ultimately, the piece that I believe has been read the most widely is Dad Body, an Into the Spider-Verse fic I wrote on impulse in three days, right after seeing the movie. As a crotchety old person, I found myself wanting less of the joke characters and more of the senior lead reaching out to his estranged ex-wife, so I wrote that. It is far and away my most popular story on AO3, which I expect is because I “got in early”— that is to say, it was one of the earliest fics posted for the film, when there was less competition among other stories for people who wanted to read Spider-Verse. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty good piece, but since it’s fairly grounded het marriage drama, it’s not the sort of things that tends to act as fandom catnip.

On FanFiction.Net, however, my "Steve returns the Infinity Stones" fic As Long as He Needs is my most popular, with several times as many hits as my next most visited. Not only that, there it serves as a modest— very modest —hit mill, in that it has averaged ten hits a day since its publication, and often entices readers to check out my other work in addition. At least, so I think, since there tends to be a correlation between when any of my numbers go up, the hits on As Long as He Needs also increase.

It’s probably my, for lack of a better term, most significant fic, in that it is a well-structured, self contained narrative that deals with an important part of the MCU narrative— that is, Steve returning the Infinity Stones, and coming to the decision to retire to the 1940s with Peggy. And I actually think it’s pretty good. It takes Steve through a naturalistic, in character process of making up his mind with enough structure from the time travel journey to give it shape. And while it could likely use a cut-down to combat my usual wordiness, I think it’s generally quite strong.

For the last year I've been slowly expanding a sequel story, His Part to Play, about his life post retirement. For this piece, I am resolving myself to try and practice certain things that do not come naturally to me. Firstly, it gets me writing prose, of which I have been so avoidant, in a circumstance where the stakes feel low. God knows I need that practice. Next, I am writing His Part to Play as a true serial. As in, I am periodically releasing a new installment of an extended, ongoing story that is somewhat episodic but mostly small pieces of a larger sprawling whole. I am doing minimal advance planning, except in the service of building to a particular struggle with general thematic points in mind.

And thirdly, I am permitting it to unfold very slowly. VERY slowly, even more so than I expected to. I know the conflict I am building to, and I knew it was going to take a lot of groundwork, establishing Steve’s new life in the 1940’s before he reached that specified point. I realized it would work a lot more strongly if Steve was quite well entrenched by the time it came, which meant there was a lot of ground to cover. His new identity as Grant Carter, the relationships he maintains, the lengths he goes to remain unidentified as Captain America, his marriage to Peggy, their eventual children. I’ve written twenty thousand words so far and I’m not sure when this part will be through.

But I am trying to make every such moment do three things— explore Steve’s character, establish the story’s themes, and foreshadow the issues of the main struggle. Some are weighted more towards one or the other. When Steve finally meets Daniel Sousa and puts that specter to rest, it’s mostly about his character. When he chats with a waitress who used to be a USO girl who asks him if he’s do it all over again, that’s a bit more foreshadowing. When he tells a dad who misses his fallen war hero son that he’s coming to realize it sucks that any of them had to be heroes, that’s more thematic. I'm actually pretty happy with what I've got, even if it doesn’t have the sharpness of a project I’ve carefully planned and edited.

I’m toying with the idea of making a pod fic— or basically, an audiobook version— of As Long as He Needs. Like I’ve said, I’m interested in making more projects, but I’ve got enough high-intensity ones in the works that I don’t want to take on something really involved. But an audio recording project might just be the right balance of an easy process to make a cool product. And, because of the fan fiction aspect, it won’t be a battle to find an audience. I’ve never directed an audiobook reading before, but I always enjoy having my awesome actor friends perform my work. It might be a nice little boost.

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My director's note for Mrs. Hudson Investigates

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 14:17:49 GMT

So many of our most beloved stories are about exceptional people, and Sherlock Holmes is certainly one of them— the brilliant and talented hero who uses their God-given abilities to bring light to where once there was dark. My own Victorian super-detective Mrs. Hawking owes a lot to this kind of character, and through her I’ve gotten a fair bit of experience writing heroic Victorian mystery-solving women. So when PMRP was looking for someone to devise an adventure centered on Mrs. Hudson, I suppose I seemed a natural fit.

But in coming up with a case to be solved by Sherlock Holmes’s long-suffering landlady, I wanted to explore something different. Though the series gives few details about the character, still it didn’t feel right to me to depict her as yet another brilliant deductive mind, quietly absorbing all Sherlock Holmes’s techniques in the course of keeping house for him. But do only geniuses get to have interesting adventures? Are they the only ones worth telling stories about?

So, in this story our heroes are very ordinary people, graced with no particular innate powers that would make them great detectives. Instead, I wanted to follow some decent folk who are good at their own little corner of the world, whose virtues lie in the choices they make and the effort they put in. Most of us aren’t geniuses, after all— and yet any one of us can decide to show up for a friend, stand up for someone unjustly accused, or pay attention to things that most people allow to pass unnoticed.

Additionally, I wanted this very much to be a women’s story, centered on recognizing traditional women’s work. Historically women have always been expected to take on disproportionate responsibility for caretaking and domesticity, tasks that have also traditionally been devalued— perhaps because they are so often the province of women. But here, the only hope of solution lies in the little details of the domestic world that women never get enough credit for managing, that so often go ignored.

In my usual work with Mrs. Hawking, the patriarchy is challenged by stealth infiltrations and knife fights. But here, it’s by scrubbing the floors and dusting the curtains and knowing how to brew a proper cup of tea. I’m happy to have the chance to pay tribute to both.

Click here for performance information!

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Midsummer report

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 14:20:59 GMT

Since it's almost halfway through the summer, I thought I'd give a report while I actually have a moment.

I've been at my new job with Evil Overlord Games for almost a month now, and I think it's going well! I am definitely enjoying it, and I'm working very hard to do well. I've produced an enormous amount of writing, though I'm still getting used to the situation of doing it for a set time for an entire workday. Creativity on a regular schedule takes some adapting! But I'm enjoying the challenge, and I am very determined to deliver good work. This past week I was working as fast as I could in an effort to meet a deadline, so it will likely call for a lot of editing, but getting it down on the page is always the biggest challenge for me.

I've also been working on drafting Mrs. Hawking part 4, tentatively titled Gilded Cages. (I'm not crazy about that title, but I'm not sure what else to call it.) What I've got so far is very rough, but I've made a good start-- as I've mentioned, I've got to just get some garbage on the page in order to have some material to work with and improve. It's been a bit harder and weirder, given that I've got so much other writing to do lately, but having my day job provide way more writing responsibilities is actually a pretty good problem to have.

I'm also in tech week for Murders and Scandals, the PMRP double feature of Murders in the Rue Morgue and A Scandal in Bohemia. I must say, it has been quite some time before I've had a tech week that was this low-intensity, given I've been doing the piece-heavy Mrs. Hawking shows. We open this coming weekend at Responsible Grace in Somerville, so check out our schedule of performances to see which show you can make!

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"Murders and Scandals" - Poe and Conan Doyle with PMRP!

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:17:17 GMT

You may recall that this summer I am for the first time participating in a show with the Post-Meridian Radio Players, a group I have long admired but never had the chance to work with before. This summer I am directing an audio drama version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which I helped PMRP artist-in-residence Jeremy Holstein to adapt, and which has the distinction of being history's first detective story. Our version also has the leads gender-swapped, so our detective is a female version of Dupin, as well as the narrator in the form of Dupin's companion Edelle.

It's exciting to work in this different form-- never directed a complete audio drama before --and it's lovely to have a much lower-key theatrical project than I've usually been occupied with of late. I'm also working with some great actors, some great people in the Mrs. Hawking cast as well as a bunch of lovely new people.

So I'd like to invite you all to the performance! Here is the link to the Facebook event. There's a link to buy tickets on the page, or they can be bought in the door. My show will start first at Responsible Grace church in Somerville, to be followed by Jeremy Holstein's excellent adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia," which features the only appearance of the beloved character Irene Adler.

Hope to see you there!

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