All Eyes on Me

Forever Captain:
“The Show”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~

Summary: Steve’s teenaged great-granddaughter cajoles him into going with her to see Rogers: The Musical. And like any good theater experience, they’ll laugh and they’ll cry.

Previous chapters:
1. Balcony Seats
2. The Overture
3. Kids From Brooklyn
4. So Damn Lucky

Chapter summary: The performance’s showy style may serve some aspects of Steve’s early years of military service— but others, they don’t exactly do justice.

I realized recently I haven’t worked on the mainline entry in my MCU fanfiction series, Forever Captain, for like a year now, and I feel kind of guilty about that. Of course, I feel guilty when I spend too much time writing fanfiction as well, so I guess I can’t win. But I do want those stories to get finished eventually. Unfortunately, I always find plotting to be the most intensive work in writing, and in a plot-heavy story like that one, it makes it the number one barrier to making progress.

It sometimes helps when I’m stuck on a prose project to try drafting scenes as drama, to lower the barrier to getting them on the page. That’s not super helpful when I’m trying to just figure out what needs to happen structurally, but it occurred to me it might help on a lower-intensity installment in the series that hasn’t seen any updates recently either. So here’s a scene from The Show, the one where Steve’s great-granddaughter takes him to see Rogers! The Musical. The premise of that piece is that while laughing over the musical’s inaccuracies, Steve gets to reflect to his great-granddaughter about the trajectory of his life, so I can weave pathos into the humor, and I’m afraid this scene is a bit thin for that. But as I continually remind myself— draft now, flesh out later. If you can’t do something you want to with a scene, do the next-easiest thing to it, and fix it in the edit.

I shall definitely have to do that here.



( Day #9 – Singing and Dancing )

I haven’t shot a Little Monsters video in a while now. I was so busy this summer planning for the Hawking filming at the end of June and the beginning of July, then I was cleaning up and recovering after it. But I really do enjoy making the silly little stop-motion films, giving myself a cool little creative project that I can do on my own time, without having to wrangle a hundred people’s schedules, and justify my owning all my dumb little dolls. I should do one more before school starts again at the end of the month.

I admit, I love those ASMR videos where a nice lady pretends to give you a facial. They are ridiculous but I find them very soothing.



( Day #3 - A S Scream R )

I just remembered something that kind of made me laugh.

Years ago, I was writing a small, short, funny larp that was supposed to capture the feel of the Blandings stories of P.G. Wodehouse. None of his characters, but that kind of silly rich people in that kind of Interwar British country world. In that vein, I wrote a character kind of like the Honorable Freddie Threepwood, a good-natured but stupid posh ne'er-do-well, whom I named Gavin Alaric Post II-- in honor of his mother's beloved late bichon frisé, whose portrait still hung on the manor wall, to remind the second Gavin of all he could never live up to.

(That is, in my opinion, the second best joke in the game. The first is, of course, the reason why the earl's prize show pig Persephone is currently unable to compete, having come down with a case of porcine ennui.)

Anyway, one of Gavin's current problems, as shiftless Wodehouse gentlemen of his station are wont, is that he has fallen in love with a chorus girl, but already has a history of romantic entanglement with her sister. I decided to name his current lady love Bonnie Day as a bit of a cute pun, "bonne ideé" being the French for "good idea." It struck me then, that it might be equally amusing to call his former paramour "Molly Day," as my schoolgirl French led me to remember that "mal" is often the word for "bad".

I was feeling quite pleased with myself until, out of an abundance of prudence, I happen to actually look up how you say "bad idea" in French-- which as it turns out, is not "mal ideé" but actually "mauvais ideé". Yet again, I fail my many, many years of French education! I was quite put out, since I was feeling so smug in my own cleverness.

I can't remember if I used it anyway. Heh, I probably did. Even if it may have made me look dumb rather than clever! But I just laughed so much at the idea, I don't know if I could resist...

I am quite late with this, but as I have been absolutely slammed for the last two months, it’s been something of a theme for the whole challenge. Still, I wanted to make sure I do as I always do, and give an assessment of what I made over the course of the month’s writing.

This year’s challenge was easy in some ways and hard in others. I’ve consistently found the process most useful and productive when I had a project to work on, and so I used much of it for drafting pieces for Mrs. Hawking part 8, which Bernie and I have recently dug into. I made a fair bit of progress, though we still have enough questions about how it’s going to work that I expect the scenes I generated to need a ton of editing. Still, I’m happy for the forward movement on the project. I also returned to Dream Machine, which I haven’t touched in a while, and did a few more new Little Monsters and Texts from Avengers Towers bits, so there was a noticeable focus on comedy. Didn’t write as much other fanfic as I expected, or more than one or two bits of anything else.

I am disappointed to report, however, that for the first time in thirteen years, I failed to finish all thirty-one pieces before the end of the month. I’ve been dealing with some focus issues for a while now, but the real problem is the last handful of months have been totally slammed. Between work, chores, and family obligations involving travel, I lost a ton of time that led to me falling behind. I know it doesn’t really matter— this is a challenge I’ve arbitrarily set for myself, with rules that only I care about, and I ended up doing the same amount of writing in the end that I always do. But I feel kind of bad that my perfect streak of all that time is a little tarnished.

As I was drafting it, I felt like my quality varied a lot. I remember being very frustrated with some pieces, while others came very easily. Looking back through what I wrote with a few weeks’ distance, however, I’m actually pretty pleased with the general level of these pieces. The character voices seem on point, the jokes are strong where there are jokes, and I managed to give some meaningful character motion in the vast majority of the scenes. That’s actually not half bad, even though I know everything will need a lot of editing, both stylistic and functional. I really do strongly believe that you need to just get SOMETHING on the page, no matter how bad, as the first step to making something good.

The breakdown of projects I wrote for:

Hawking part 8 - 14
Texts from Avengers Tower - 3
Dream Machine - 4
Little Monsters - 6
Gentlemen Never Tell 2 - 1
Forever Captain - 1
Witchy - 1

And the breakdown of characters I wrote for:

1. Nathaniel Hawking - 9
2. Beatrice Hawking - 8
3. Clara Hawking - 7
4. Victoria Hawking - 6
5. Mary Stone - 6
6. Leah Lucchesi - 4
7. Twyla Boogieman - 3
8. Draculaura - 3
9. Venus McFlytrap - 3
10. Frankie Stein - 3
11. Ghoulia Yelps - 3
12. Heath Burns - 2
13. Josie Carraway - 2
14. Meryl Dresden - 2
15. Derek Kaplan - 2
16. Joanna Kerrigan - 2
17. Spectra Vondergeist - 2
18. Clawdeen Wolf - 2
19. Bucky Barnes - 1
20. Meredith Barry - 1
21. Clint Barton - 1
22. Lagoona Blue - 1
23. Abbey Bominable - 1
24. Peggy Carter - 1
25. Devon Chambers - 1
26. Zach Barry - 1
27. Cleo de Nile - 1
28. Ryan Dresden - 1
29. Gwen Galway - 1
30. Justin Hawking - 1
31. Reggie Hawking - 1
32. Logan - 1
33. Megan May - 1
34. Catty Noir - 1
35. Nate Reyes - 1
36. Barbie Roberts - 1
37. Steve Rogers - 1
38. Thor - 1
39. Toralei Stripe - 1
40. Arthur Swann - 1
41. Sam Wilson - 1
42. Wade Wilson - 1

Forty-two characters is a fairly large number, even for me. Last year I only wrote for thirty-six, thirty-seven the year before, and thirty-four the year before that. I averaged about three characters a scene, though most of them only had two while the largest maxed out at seven. I’ve always found it tougher to manage larger-cast scenes, so I’m surprised at how many there were this year to skew the average.

Favorite scenes? I thought I did pretty well this year, so I liked a lot. I enjoyed writing for Beatrice Hawking, with her enthusiasm for learning undercover work and managing her privileged background, such as in #23 - Just Powder and #25 - Tweenies.

#23 - Culture Not Costumes is a really funny Little Monsters bit, as is #19 - Relatable. I was also glad I was able to work out #14 - Special Ability, since I was chipping at that joke for most of the month. I’m fond of #26 - Two Sets of Tentacles if only because it’s a serious contender for weirdest thing I’ve ever written.

I also ended up really liking #31 - Derek in Hell, since it’s one of those scenes that I didn’t know where it was going to go until I wrote it. In fact, the only scene I don’t really like is #30 - In Murder’s Path, which doesn’t add anything to its larger piece and was the first of the two scenes I had to write past the end of the month.

Favorite lines? Lagoona’s weird, weird mini-monologue in #26 - Two Sets of Tentacles. Beatrice’s too-enthusiastic recitation of her melodramatic invented backstory in #25 - Tweenies. Nathaniel’s titular line in #24 - Got the Morbs. There’s some cute back and forth between Justin and Reggie in #17 - Let Me Tell You.

So, yeah, a lot of good came out of the exercise this month. Even if I was a little late getting it all done.

Ugh, I am so tired. I am so behind. This is so stupid. But at least it’s catching me up.



( Day #26 - Two Sets of Tentacles )

I came up with this today while I was out running errands. It made me snort-laugh out loud in a grocery store, so I figure that's something.

Also, remember-- it's not the length of the piece, it's how you use it. ;-)



( Day #19 - Relatable )

Today’s scene is a Text from Avengers Tower that was inspired by the meme below. It’s another one where a small feature of a character interaction is turned into a little observational joke. It’s dumb, but made me laugh. THAT’S ENOUGH FOR ME.



( Day #16 - First Impression )

This picks up directly after #6 - Alien Parasite. Again, it’s silly and sitcommy, but I think it has potential to be really funny. Especially if I can make the Alien parody work somehow…

( Day #11 - No One Can Hear You Scream )

Just a silly Text from Avengers Tower. My favorite way to approach these is to notice a silly little thing about a character interaction and make a joke pointing it out. Today’s entry is very much in that vein, inspired by the party scene in Avengers 2.



( Day #9 - Check In )