colorcoded (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
colorcoded) wrote2024-11-30 11:22 pm
colorcoded) wrote2024-11-30 11:22 pm
November update: Quodo Mirrorverse fic surgery
Hm, well, I was hoping to be able to sign up for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
consent_issues_exchange, but I ended up not getting anywhere close to finishing the sign-up process itself (picking out freeforms, writing requests, etc.), despite putting a lot of work into it last Saturday, so nope, I guess it's not happening this year. 😅 I probably could have had a lazier sign-up/requested fewer things, but it would have been less fun that way!
Also, the other issue is that I already have a big Quodo Mirrorverse WIP that is very related to the themes of CIEX and similar to what I would have requested in that exchange if I signed up. Knowing this, I decided it would be okay to sign up for CIEX *if* I made significant progress on editing/patching up this fic. However, while I did make a lot of progress on that task, I also didn't end up finishing that up in the end. That's okay, though - instead of participating in CIEX for the next couple of months, I'll take the opportunity to try to push this project forward instead, which I kinda need to do or this project won't get finished.
Background
This WIP is something I came up with quite a while ago, in 2022, in response to a Mirror Quodo prompt in Quodo Mini-fest II (nearly three years ago now, wow!). It *very quickly* started getting away from me, though. The basic premise of the fic is that it's a "fix-it" fic (of sorts) of S2E23 "Crossover" where neither Mirror Odo nor Mirror Quark die. Instead, Mirror Odo proposes that, instead of executing Quark, Odo will train him to be a model Alliance citizen, basically. It's a bit of a dark romance featuring a lot of values clash between a very conformist Mirror Odo and a Mirror Quark who is dedicated to undermining the totalitarian governments that tend to dominate the Mirrorverse.
Anyway, this fic is currently a ~25k word monstrosity that I've finished the first 3 chapters of and am maybe halfway through writing Chapter 4. However, I've been struggling with the writing on this one for a while now. The main issue is that I need to use the first ~third of the fic to establish a specific dynamic between Mirror Quark and Mirror Odo (one that establishes a starting point of antagonism/resentment/cruelty in the relationship, which slowly changes over the course of the story) and to feature some episodes that will be plot-relevant later on.
However, I've been having trouble with both the pacing of this section and also trying to figure out when/how to drop the necessary info. I think the main problem is that, while the events of these various episodes are different, the general pattern is the same so I am worried that it will be repetitive. Also, I'm too attached to particular episodes to omit any of them or to combine them with another episode.
Boring reread
In trying to get unstuck on this one, I had to reread what I've written so far, and unfortunately discovered another problem I wasn't even aware of. Which was: what I'd written was boring! I could hardly make it through the three chapters I'd written - in fact, I stopped early in chapter 2, just exhausted and bored.
Now, usually if you reread your work and you're bored by it, this is not necessarily a sign that you need to edit the story. This is especially so - in my experience - when it comes to sex scenes (and there are a lot of sex scenes in this one), because sex scenes will often be more boring on reread than they were when you first drafted them. I don't know if this is other people's experience, but often when I reread my sex scenes, they are a bit cringe, I'm often tempted to skim or gloss over parts of them, and they just somewhat lack sex appeal. I think this is because writing sex scenes is hard and some aspects you intend to make it through in the writing don't quite come across.
But also, just with rereading in general (especially if you've read the same part of your story dozens of times, which I've done at this point), turns of phrase that were interesting and novel and intriguing become stale and predictable. You already know what's coming; you've read the scene and these specific words so many times, you just want to skip. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that your reader will find the scene boring - to them it's new!
So usually when I reread and the sex scene is a bit lacking in shine, I usually let it be. However, rereading this fic was different. As I mentioned, there was the pacing and repetition issues that were my concerns going in, but there were also two other things I felt were contributing to the dullness of the sex scenes here: (1) Mirror Odo's characterization, and (2) Mirror Quark's anatomy.
Mirror Odo's characterization: Throughout the whole writing process of this fic, I've kind of struggled with how to characterize Mirror Odo. You only get a few glimpses of him in the show so he's the writer's canvas, basically. The characterization of Mirror Odo in the Mirrorverse fic "Dark Space Nine" by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
cool_ha_ha is probably the thing that most inspired this fic, but in my fic, I wanted Odo to be a bit more ideological, someone who buys entirely into the morality system of the Mirror Universe and who, while not particularly thoughtful, is at least thoughtful enough to have formulated a set of "Rules of Obedience" that he uses to keep order among his workers and which he thinks are getting at something deeper about the world more generally. By contrast, the Mirror Odo in "Dark Space Nine" is a bit more clueless, a bit more awkward, curious, experimenting, sensitive. My Mirror Odo here is more experienced and also more confident/smug.
While writing, I also think I made the mistake of thinking I needed to establish Mirror Odo's characterization and ideology quite quickly so that the reader understands his personality, and so was dropping this info very early on. Rereading, though, I wasn't sure why I felt the need to do this. In fact, it seemed more interesting if Odo is a bit of a mystery at the beginning, a cipher, and the reader (and Quark) slowly learns more about him over time. Chapter 2, which I had originally written from Quark's point of view, I had purposely changed and rewrote almost entirely to be from Odo's point of view just to quickly give his perspective on things from early on, at the cost of having to drop an interesting Quark moment that could only happen in Quark's POV. Rereading Chapter 2, I thought that maybe this was a mistake and I should have kept it Quark's POV after all! Not only did all this infodump make Odo/the story less intriguing but it was also slowing down the pace of the story. And not only did I not like dropping so much information about Odo's character, but I also didn't like the characterization decisions I had made for Odo while doing that!
Anyway, it took me a while of thinking about what was going wrong here and debating what difficulties and constraints I was facing when deciding how to characterize Odo and his motivations, his attitude toward sex and so on. But finally, I decided the main issue with Mirror Odo's characterization was that I needed to make him more of a creep, basically! So anyway, some changes I decided to make in light of this analysis was (1) restore Chapter 2 to Quark's point of view, and (2) make Mirror Odo more of an asshole.
Mirror Quark's anatomy: The other decision I made for this fic that was causing problems in the sex scenes is that I wanted to have inhuman anatomy for Quark in this fic. There are various reasons why I wanted this - for one, I think it is just both more realistic and in line with canon that Ferengi (and non-human races in general) don't have human-like sexual parts. However, non-human anatomy is not particularly my strong point and, after much struggle, I had decided to give Quark anatomy inspired by ducks. However, when I was rereading sex scenes, the anatomy was really bogging it down. The anatomy I had chosen did not have elements that I find the most important for conveying eroticism - e.g. clearly grokable signs of arousal. Another issue was the use of unfamiliar terminology that just made the sex scenes distant and not particularly recognizable as sexual, which was a shame. I decided one "easy" change to make would be to figure out a way to adjust the anatomy to try to do my best to restore recognizably erotic elements, while hopefully avoiding a situation where aliens just inexplicably have very human-typical anatomy.
This did not turn out to be as easy as I thought because there were a lot of constraints to manage here and I'm not particularly well-versed in xenobiology possibilities. I had to do a lot of brainstorming to try to find a way out of this problem, and settled on the kinda cheat thing where the part names and actions are the same but the parts just look a bit unusual. But I think this was the right change to make because there is so much sex featured in this fic and I don't really want to make writing sex scenes harder than they already are, or bore myself, the person who probably has to reread this fic the most. Small changes in the decisions I make here can save me a lot of time and pain later.
So finally, I went in to make my edits and realized... this would be a much bigger change than I was expecting because so much of the early sex scenes and even some later ideas I had planned relied on Odo being unfamiliar with, and therefore curious about, Ferengi anatomy. This was so much built into the writing and the sex scenes that I began to worry about the wisdom of the changes I had just decided on. But in the end, I decided to go forward with the changes, just making a note that some of the "Odo confused about Quark's biology" elements would need to become less prominent. So yeah, I thought this would be a light sex scene/configuration rewrite and instead it became something that ended up affecting quite a few plot points!
Revisiting the original fic notes
Having made the above changes to Chapter 1 and 2, I continued with my reread and immediately encountered more issues, namely the pacing and repetition issues I was already aware of before. Fixing the above issues had made the story both leaner and more interesting, but now I was back to my original situation, stuck with a first plot arc that wasn't really working.
In this case, what I did was go back to my original notes. When I was first building out this fic, I had a bunch of ideas for key scenes that contain the critical emotional moments of the story. By rereading that shorter version rather than the 4k+-word-chapters version of the story, I hoped to sort of reconnect with my original vision of this project and figure out where in my writing I had started to deviate or lose sight of that vision.
This was quite helpful. Seeing all of the key snippets, including what happens later on, gave me a sense of what was high priority vs. low priority for this first section of the story; what this part of the story REALLY needed to accomplish, which was basically to establish a specific dynamic between Mirror Odo and Mirror Quark which is the starting point of their relationship, and also for Quark to become more well-behaved and well-versed in Odo's Rules of Obedience to the point where Odo finally decides to take him outside (to the refinery) for the first time.
The next task I set for myself was to make a basic chapter outline i.e. have a list of chapters with a one- or two-sentence description of what that chapter needs to contain/establish. In order to do this, I listed out all the mandatory elements that needed to make it into these chapters, either to create the right character progression or to lay the groundwork for later events, and then I listed out all the optional/nice-to-have moments. A lot of these optional elements, I realized, were ideological debates between Quark and Odo that I had written snippets for in my original treatment but none of which had made it into the fic so far.
I tried to work out a sequence of chapters and what elements I could slot into each of them. I ended up with seven, possibly eight, chapters for this first portion of the fic. One thing that had come out of my fic reread and was reinforced when I was trying to figure out a character/relationship progression over these opening chapters was that I *needed* timeskips. In my original draft of the first ~4 chapters, one of the pacing issues I kept running into was that each chapter occurred in a set of consecutive days - that is, basically no timeskips. I could tell I kind of needed a timeskip in order to get in all the content I wanted to get in but because I had so strongly established the fic as proceeding very linearly, I was having difficulty shifting into a mode of writing featuring time passing quicker.
So when I wrote the chapter outline, I tried to mark where these timeskips occurred, and I also combined Chapter 2 and 3 (or alternatively, you can see this as dropping Chapter 3 and moving some of its elements into Chapter 2, which occurs earlier) so that I could put in an early timeskip from Chapter 2 (the second day) to Chapter 4 (the fourth day).
Finally, this new chapter outline contained a LOT more of those missing ideological debate scenes, which (in hindsight) is also critical to the goal of establishing the starting dynamic between Mirror Quark and Mirror Odo. So I think that wll also be an advantage of this new chapter plan over what I was trying to do previously!
Current status
I've finished editing Chapter 1, but I am currently in the midst of doing major surgery here on Chapter 2. I do think I was able to (in line with my new outline) splice parts of Chapter 2 (newly in Quark's POV once more) with parts of Chapter 3 (always in Quark's POV). My hope after that is to massage the opening of the new Chapter 3 (previously Chapter 4; also in Quark's POV) to indicate time has passed, and Chapter 3 (/Day 4) represents an unexpected break from an established pattern.
Once I finish that, I hope to be able to start adding NEW words and move onto fresh, unexplored chapters! But gosh, it's been a long journey just getting here!
Anyway, I hope this was interesting to read for anyone not me. 😅 This fic has been quite difficult for me to write, and I am getting a bit tired of having to read the opening chapters for like the fiftieth time in my attempt to add new words. But this time, I am pretty excited about the edits I'm making and feeling optimistic that this time I WILL be able to advance.
consent_issues_exchange, but I ended up not getting anywhere close to finishing the sign-up process itself (picking out freeforms, writing requests, etc.), despite putting a lot of work into it last Saturday, so nope, I guess it's not happening this year. 😅 I probably could have had a lazier sign-up/requested fewer things, but it would have been less fun that way!Also, the other issue is that I already have a big Quodo Mirrorverse WIP that is very related to the themes of CIEX and similar to what I would have requested in that exchange if I signed up. Knowing this, I decided it would be okay to sign up for CIEX *if* I made significant progress on editing/patching up this fic. However, while I did make a lot of progress on that task, I also didn't end up finishing that up in the end. That's okay, though - instead of participating in CIEX for the next couple of months, I'll take the opportunity to try to push this project forward instead, which I kinda need to do or this project won't get finished.
Background
This WIP is something I came up with quite a while ago, in 2022, in response to a Mirror Quodo prompt in Quodo Mini-fest II (nearly three years ago now, wow!). It *very quickly* started getting away from me, though. The basic premise of the fic is that it's a "fix-it" fic (of sorts) of S2E23 "Crossover" where neither Mirror Odo nor Mirror Quark die. Instead, Mirror Odo proposes that, instead of executing Quark, Odo will train him to be a model Alliance citizen, basically. It's a bit of a dark romance featuring a lot of values clash between a very conformist Mirror Odo and a Mirror Quark who is dedicated to undermining the totalitarian governments that tend to dominate the Mirrorverse.
Anyway, this fic is currently a ~25k word monstrosity that I've finished the first 3 chapters of and am maybe halfway through writing Chapter 4. However, I've been struggling with the writing on this one for a while now. The main issue is that I need to use the first ~third of the fic to establish a specific dynamic between Mirror Quark and Mirror Odo (one that establishes a starting point of antagonism/resentment/cruelty in the relationship, which slowly changes over the course of the story) and to feature some episodes that will be plot-relevant later on.
However, I've been having trouble with both the pacing of this section and also trying to figure out when/how to drop the necessary info. I think the main problem is that, while the events of these various episodes are different, the general pattern is the same so I am worried that it will be repetitive. Also, I'm too attached to particular episodes to omit any of them or to combine them with another episode.
Boring reread
In trying to get unstuck on this one, I had to reread what I've written so far, and unfortunately discovered another problem I wasn't even aware of. Which was: what I'd written was boring! I could hardly make it through the three chapters I'd written - in fact, I stopped early in chapter 2, just exhausted and bored.
Now, usually if you reread your work and you're bored by it, this is not necessarily a sign that you need to edit the story. This is especially so - in my experience - when it comes to sex scenes (and there are a lot of sex scenes in this one), because sex scenes will often be more boring on reread than they were when you first drafted them. I don't know if this is other people's experience, but often when I reread my sex scenes, they are a bit cringe, I'm often tempted to skim or gloss over parts of them, and they just somewhat lack sex appeal. I think this is because writing sex scenes is hard and some aspects you intend to make it through in the writing don't quite come across.
But also, just with rereading in general (especially if you've read the same part of your story dozens of times, which I've done at this point), turns of phrase that were interesting and novel and intriguing become stale and predictable. You already know what's coming; you've read the scene and these specific words so many times, you just want to skip. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that your reader will find the scene boring - to them it's new!
So usually when I reread and the sex scene is a bit lacking in shine, I usually let it be. However, rereading this fic was different. As I mentioned, there was the pacing and repetition issues that were my concerns going in, but there were also two other things I felt were contributing to the dullness of the sex scenes here: (1) Mirror Odo's characterization, and (2) Mirror Quark's anatomy.
Mirror Odo's characterization: Throughout the whole writing process of this fic, I've kind of struggled with how to characterize Mirror Odo. You only get a few glimpses of him in the show so he's the writer's canvas, basically. The characterization of Mirror Odo in the Mirrorverse fic "Dark Space Nine" by
While writing, I also think I made the mistake of thinking I needed to establish Mirror Odo's characterization and ideology quite quickly so that the reader understands his personality, and so was dropping this info very early on. Rereading, though, I wasn't sure why I felt the need to do this. In fact, it seemed more interesting if Odo is a bit of a mystery at the beginning, a cipher, and the reader (and Quark) slowly learns more about him over time. Chapter 2, which I had originally written from Quark's point of view, I had purposely changed and rewrote almost entirely to be from Odo's point of view just to quickly give his perspective on things from early on, at the cost of having to drop an interesting Quark moment that could only happen in Quark's POV. Rereading Chapter 2, I thought that maybe this was a mistake and I should have kept it Quark's POV after all! Not only did all this infodump make Odo/the story less intriguing but it was also slowing down the pace of the story. And not only did I not like dropping so much information about Odo's character, but I also didn't like the characterization decisions I had made for Odo while doing that!
Anyway, it took me a while of thinking about what was going wrong here and debating what difficulties and constraints I was facing when deciding how to characterize Odo and his motivations, his attitude toward sex and so on. But finally, I decided the main issue with Mirror Odo's characterization was that I needed to make him more of a creep, basically! So anyway, some changes I decided to make in light of this analysis was (1) restore Chapter 2 to Quark's point of view, and (2) make Mirror Odo more of an asshole.
Mirror Quark's anatomy: The other decision I made for this fic that was causing problems in the sex scenes is that I wanted to have inhuman anatomy for Quark in this fic. There are various reasons why I wanted this - for one, I think it is just both more realistic and in line with canon that Ferengi (and non-human races in general) don't have human-like sexual parts. However, non-human anatomy is not particularly my strong point and, after much struggle, I had decided to give Quark anatomy inspired by ducks. However, when I was rereading sex scenes, the anatomy was really bogging it down. The anatomy I had chosen did not have elements that I find the most important for conveying eroticism - e.g. clearly grokable signs of arousal. Another issue was the use of unfamiliar terminology that just made the sex scenes distant and not particularly recognizable as sexual, which was a shame. I decided one "easy" change to make would be to figure out a way to adjust the anatomy to try to do my best to restore recognizably erotic elements, while hopefully avoiding a situation where aliens just inexplicably have very human-typical anatomy.
This did not turn out to be as easy as I thought because there were a lot of constraints to manage here and I'm not particularly well-versed in xenobiology possibilities. I had to do a lot of brainstorming to try to find a way out of this problem, and settled on the kinda cheat thing where the part names and actions are the same but the parts just look a bit unusual. But I think this was the right change to make because there is so much sex featured in this fic and I don't really want to make writing sex scenes harder than they already are, or bore myself, the person who probably has to reread this fic the most. Small changes in the decisions I make here can save me a lot of time and pain later.
So finally, I went in to make my edits and realized... this would be a much bigger change than I was expecting because so much of the early sex scenes and even some later ideas I had planned relied on Odo being unfamiliar with, and therefore curious about, Ferengi anatomy. This was so much built into the writing and the sex scenes that I began to worry about the wisdom of the changes I had just decided on. But in the end, I decided to go forward with the changes, just making a note that some of the "Odo confused about Quark's biology" elements would need to become less prominent. So yeah, I thought this would be a light sex scene/configuration rewrite and instead it became something that ended up affecting quite a few plot points!
Revisiting the original fic notes
Having made the above changes to Chapter 1 and 2, I continued with my reread and immediately encountered more issues, namely the pacing and repetition issues I was already aware of before. Fixing the above issues had made the story both leaner and more interesting, but now I was back to my original situation, stuck with a first plot arc that wasn't really working.
In this case, what I did was go back to my original notes. When I was first building out this fic, I had a bunch of ideas for key scenes that contain the critical emotional moments of the story. By rereading that shorter version rather than the 4k+-word-chapters version of the story, I hoped to sort of reconnect with my original vision of this project and figure out where in my writing I had started to deviate or lose sight of that vision.
This was quite helpful. Seeing all of the key snippets, including what happens later on, gave me a sense of what was high priority vs. low priority for this first section of the story; what this part of the story REALLY needed to accomplish, which was basically to establish a specific dynamic between Mirror Odo and Mirror Quark which is the starting point of their relationship, and also for Quark to become more well-behaved and well-versed in Odo's Rules of Obedience to the point where Odo finally decides to take him outside (to the refinery) for the first time.
The next task I set for myself was to make a basic chapter outline i.e. have a list of chapters with a one- or two-sentence description of what that chapter needs to contain/establish. In order to do this, I listed out all the mandatory elements that needed to make it into these chapters, either to create the right character progression or to lay the groundwork for later events, and then I listed out all the optional/nice-to-have moments. A lot of these optional elements, I realized, were ideological debates between Quark and Odo that I had written snippets for in my original treatment but none of which had made it into the fic so far.
I tried to work out a sequence of chapters and what elements I could slot into each of them. I ended up with seven, possibly eight, chapters for this first portion of the fic. One thing that had come out of my fic reread and was reinforced when I was trying to figure out a character/relationship progression over these opening chapters was that I *needed* timeskips. In my original draft of the first ~4 chapters, one of the pacing issues I kept running into was that each chapter occurred in a set of consecutive days - that is, basically no timeskips. I could tell I kind of needed a timeskip in order to get in all the content I wanted to get in but because I had so strongly established the fic as proceeding very linearly, I was having difficulty shifting into a mode of writing featuring time passing quicker.
So when I wrote the chapter outline, I tried to mark where these timeskips occurred, and I also combined Chapter 2 and 3 (or alternatively, you can see this as dropping Chapter 3 and moving some of its elements into Chapter 2, which occurs earlier) so that I could put in an early timeskip from Chapter 2 (the second day) to Chapter 4 (the fourth day).
Finally, this new chapter outline contained a LOT more of those missing ideological debate scenes, which (in hindsight) is also critical to the goal of establishing the starting dynamic between Mirror Quark and Mirror Odo. So I think that wll also be an advantage of this new chapter plan over what I was trying to do previously!
Current status
I've finished editing Chapter 1, but I am currently in the midst of doing major surgery here on Chapter 2. I do think I was able to (in line with my new outline) splice parts of Chapter 2 (newly in Quark's POV once more) with parts of Chapter 3 (always in Quark's POV). My hope after that is to massage the opening of the new Chapter 3 (previously Chapter 4; also in Quark's POV) to indicate time has passed, and Chapter 3 (/Day 4) represents an unexpected break from an established pattern.
Once I finish that, I hope to be able to start adding NEW words and move onto fresh, unexplored chapters! But gosh, it's been a long journey just getting here!
Anyway, I hope this was interesting to read for anyone not me. 😅 This fic has been quite difficult for me to write, and I am getting a bit tired of having to read the opening chapters for like the fiftieth time in my attempt to add new words. But this time, I am pretty excited about the edits I'm making and feeling optimistic that this time I WILL be able to advance.
no subject
Thank you! And yeah, I think one thing that helps me do major reconstruction is that I save everything. In this case, I fairly recently made a copy of the whole project file so I don't have to feel nervous about majorly changing stuff, since I have that other copy I can refer to or go back to if needed. And then within the project file, whenever I rewrite a passage or a chapter, I copy the old version to a "trash" section that I can later look through if I want to go back. That helps me be a bit more bold about my edits. I guess it also saved me time in this case because I STILL had my Quark POV version of Chapter 2 sitting around in the trash even though that was like two major revisions of Chapter 2 ago. XD I guess at some point I need to stop changing my mind on what I'm doing with the writing, or then editing can take forever, but I'm pretty confident I'll be able to advance after this set of edits!
Oh, that's a nice behind-the-scenes detail! I enjoyed the human anatomy, though, so I appreciate what you ended up deciding on in the end. :D Researching anatomy can indeed be a pain and it's possible to fall down a rabbit hole there. That's very cool that you researched non-human digestion, even if you didn't end up using it in the end!