#msilverstar

Thank you for writing in!

FAIL SAFE by Persephone (WIP | 76,331 | T)

Two years from now, Bucky Barnes will disintegrate before Steve Rogers' eyes. An event which will come to be known as the Infinity War. After that, a quantum chance will arise for Steve Rogers to write - or rewrite - his own personal history.

Before that, well, a lot would have happened. Including that Bucky Barnes has been restored to life. Physically, and mentally. A journey of mystical healing for the broken vet that will refract through space and time . . . and leave Steve Rogers . . . awakened.

i knowwww it’s really tragic honestly. i liked writing those stories and i still like the not-quite-abandoned circus au but i just lost all interest ………….. imo i blame the third hobbit movie. such a downer. to this day i haven’t seen it a second time.

  A guest has been leaving kudos on my old...

mine too, I think I only wrote the one

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That one’s been out for a while - and actually it was a repackaging and expansion of one of my first-ever romance story sales, once I got the rights back! So no worries if you missed that one! <3 It’s an interesting one - I think my writing style’s changed a little, but I also still really like it, and I can see things I would do differently now but I also really love the characters!

(story in question, for anyone wondering: Sorceress, which was originally published by Ellora’s Cave, way back when! now it’s been re-released through my current publisher, JMS Books!)

And it’s one of my rare m/f romances - though with bi main characters, so, not exactly straight! So there’s that too. (In my head it’s always a trio of stories - Sorceress is m/f with bi main characters, Magician is m/m with gay and pan main characters, and Princess will be f/f with bi or pan and lesbian main characters! But that third one is still just a vague idea, and the second one is of course the WIP...)

I always knew the rough plot of the second story - it’s a redemption story, and it’s sort of about what you do when you’ve already done everything, and it’s sort of about magic, and it’s sort of about the most dangerous magician in the world hiding away on an island until a young man on a quest turns up...

Here, this is a snippet I’ve had written for YEARS, from later on in Magician...poor Gareth is coping with a lot of emotions, being a second son from a fairly rustic (but goat-rich!) mountain kingdom, and now in love with someone who’s been both the hero and the villain of countless ballad’s and children’s tales...

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Lorre sat down beside him on the fallen branch. He did not know how to mimic Gareth’s posture; he was not used to not knowing anything. “Then what is it about?”

 “You’ve cursed and cured a king,” Gareth said. “You’ve been a dragon. Your former lover is the First Sorceress. What am I?”

 “You,” Lorre said, “are the person who convinced me to leave my island.”

 Gareth looked up.

 “The only person,” Lorre said, “who ever did that.”

 “Because you decided to. Not because of me.”

 “You’re the person I wanted to know more about. The person who reminded me that other people are important. And goats. And repaired village bridges. All of those.”

 “You just like a good goat’s cheese,” Gareth muttered, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

msilverstar replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” ...”

Maybe it's your unpublished first novel and you should move on to the next?

I have moved on, many times, and have circled back around to it because it is a story I want to tell and care about deeply. I think there’s a story in it I ought to tell, but I am also aware that I’m fairly mired in it-- however, the only reason it’s being discussed at all is that I picked it up briefly because I spent a year slogging through a Brand New Idea that also bogged down into bullshit after I wrote about 3/4 of a draft and it failed to develop a plot.

So methinks it’s not that particular novel that’s the problem, somehow.

mikkeneko replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” ...”

I'm sure you've heard this one before, but: perhaps printing out your draft, the whole ass draft, and then typing it up again would let you sift out the good stuff

Mm I tried that. The waste of paper horrified me, so I used side-by-side computer windows and transcribed it entirely  in the 600,000-word process I described earlier. What happens with that is that I often think “oh I could go this other completely different direction here instead” and then I have two completely incompatible storylines going, and you can repeat that infinitely and it’s super easy to get a million words of which there is not one coherent chunk for you to work on. So that’s super not an approach that’s useful for me, but I know it works for other people and I’m not knocking its validity-- I just know, I’ve tried it, a bunch, that’s great for a really thorough final polish but utterly disastrous for a good way to winnow through a lot of ideas and pick just one.

astroloquacious replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” ...”

WOW, that's a lot! I rescind that particular bit of advice, then, ha ha. Would you say that the issue is more a lack of feedback, then? You mention feeling like it needs editing-- do you mean structural editing? Is it an issue of not feeling like the plot & characters are solid?

It’s that I have too many ideas, chase down more and more of them, and wind up with a huge fractured mass of story, mostly worldbuilding, with endless iterations of new reworkings of the old ideas, and they are measurably better with each iteration! but I can’t actually support a plot on them, they’re too fragmented.

My problem is largely that for most of my life I haven’t had anyone willing to read my writing, and it’s only made worse by my horrid rejection-sensitive dysphoria that means that if someone says a thing I wrote isn’t exactly perfect as-is then I have to lie on the floor in despair. I’m hoping I’m a bit more robust now as like a whole-ass adult but that’s debatable. In my real life, people think it’s funny that I think I can write a novel, and are super not interested in reading it, and that’s all I’ve had.

pantsy-fancy replied to your post  “astroloquacious replied to your post  “replies and asks and such”   ...”

                       If if would help your original novel progress to have an AO3 comment squad for cheerleading & encouragement as you write chapters, then sign me up!!! You are one of my favourite writers and I would love to read anything you're working on. (Apologies if this is out of place--I realize I'm jumping into the middle of a conversation here)          

Oh, you’re not out of place at all. Someone else (@s_leary? maybe?) suggested I put this original work up locked on AO3, and I was under the impression that original works were prohibited on AO3, but now that one mentions it I guess they changed that. It’s not impossible! I just... don’t use AO3 as a place for concrit, so I’m not used to attempting that, but I guess I’ve had some good comment discussions there. But that’s why I was trying to post the mammoths thing on Dreamwidth back in 2019 (you know, before the earth’s crust had cooled, back in that epoch, so long ago), but so few people use DW it was rather difficult to really get any discussion going.

~I’m finding this one absolutely entertaining, because...no...I mean, maybe in one or two specific ways? I would absolutely not say I am the mom friend. I like staying up late and good beer, I tend to procrastinate even when it’s a project I want to work on (I sometimes wonder about undiagnosed ADHD - along with the depression...), and I’m fairly sure I’m not terribly maternal! (We were just joking about being one of the only childless couples on a friend Zoom call, the other day!) ...Having said that, I do genuinely love bringing people together and putting things together: conference panels, collecting fellow academic-friends at conferences and introducing them to each other and watching them get along, making travel plans, editing essay collections and bringing contributors together...I love getting friends together and watching them become friends too. Sometimes I think about trying to host a monthly mini-conference / old-fashioned salon at our house, where we’d have 3-4 people talk about their current interesting projects (creative, academic, artistic, anything) and then let everyone chat and talk and ask them questions, and we could bring together people from all sorts of literary/artistic/dance/culinary fields, and it’d be so much fun.:-)

rllhenson said:   Your necklace is very cool, what is it made of? And the ghost earring is adorable!                            

~Thank you!! The necklace is a pose-able bendy metal (I’m sure there’s a more specific name!), and we bought this one in Sedona, Arizona when visiting my grandparents, but I’m pretty sure you can get them on Amazon, like this one! The ghost earring set is just from Target, but they were cute. :-)

mutanteagle said:  IS THAT A GHOST EARRING?! that’s so cool omg    

~It is! It’s just from Target - last year, actually, so I don’t know if they still have them this year - but I like them!                       

msilverstar said:  I’m delighted to have a face to put with the words. I didn’t have a picture of you in my head but you fit right in there!