#there are so so so many ways to offensively and ignorantly unwrite everyone's history)

[slippingbetweenthestars]

How goes writing on your fanfic? How goes next chapter? How do you come up with stuff? Writing process?

Wow! My first unsolicited fic ask! I'm going to assume that this is in reference to Growing Where Planted, as Black and White are Also Colors is a fairly niche story and hasn't been updated for a while.

It goeth fairly well! I've been busy with a lot of life stuff lately but I have a chapter almost drafted (mostly finished, really—I just need to add a bit to the conversation).

After that it gets slightly trickier because I'm having a hard time balancing different characters' perspectives. Specifically, whose perspective is relevant enough to show and how much should be shown? I get easily bogged down in tiny details, so it's hard to move the plot forward when I'm tempted to show each scene in its entirety from 2-4 perspectives. When I focus on one character, inevitably I ask myself what another character is doing during that time period, and the problem compounds.

Related to that challenge is the fact that this story is a bit of a grab bag of different tropes that I enjoy, but when you come at a story with "I want to include almost everything I like," scope creep becomes a problem. That this fic is so self-indulgent is hard because it means I'm tempted to just include everything, and not just tropes, but each of the 4 perspectives on one scene, etc.

I've also been toying with adding yet another subplot (*sigh*). Yes, I know that's a bad idea, given the challenges I've laid out. The problem is that I included a never-shown-on-camera four-year-old child by fandom default, and it's been a long time since I was regularly around kids of that age so I have no idea what to do. I can't even watch him to imitate a kid actor's mannerisms, because he exists in dialogue references only. No matter WHAT I do with Tony, I'm going to have to do a lot of research, unless I just decide to ignore him (hard to do—four year olds are not potted plants) or vamoose him away somehow. So I'm currently dealing with some mental resistance on that front, and since anything I do with Jackie or Pete involves Tony and the subplot would need setting up soon, I need to make a decision quickly.

Re: How I come up with stuff/writing process

While I do have a rough outline of major milestones in the story, I tend to be more of a discovery writer when it comes to characters, and a plot-hole filler when it comes to everything else. When the story was very young, I did a fair amount of brainstorming and wrote that down, so I have many pages of worldbuilding/plot bunnies to mine. At the brainstorming stage (though it still happens occasionally), the show's dialogue provided many odd little inconsistencies and unusual details that served as a jumping off point.

So, for example, how on earth did alternate earth circa 2006/7 get technologically advanced enough to produce direct-to-brain streaming? Forget airships (though that does give me some suggestions about how far back in the timeline changes extend to), wearable tech that interfaces directly with the brain suggests a massively different 20th century.

How did earth get advanced enough to create cybermen? To have an existing Geneva Bio-convention governing the creation of new life forms?? AKA a presumably internationally ratified agreement governing new life forms? That suggests cybermen have precedent.

From a Doylist perspective, Pete's world just had to sound right enough for the show, so when plot demands a reason that Cybermen aren't permitted, a big authority is needed, and so Geneva conventions are referenced but now with reference to bio-conventions. But from a Watsonian perspective...FOR THE LOVE OF SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF, HOW???

Because the Geneva Convention isn't just a name for "high-falutin' government rules" that you can just swap around and have nothing change. It's a specific agreement made in the aftermath of a truly awful war (much like the earlier Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions), and they exist in the form that they do because of the specific horrors of the second World War. It's like "war crimes"—it's not just a name for 'bad things,' it means something specific, including conscripting children, using poison weapons, and torture (among other things).

So, if a bio-convention exists, when was it made? Why was it made? What does it contain? How does it fall short? What ramifications does that have? How does it affect my characters? How does it affect the sociopolitical landscape of Pete's world in the wake of the cyber crisis? Those are the kind of questions that prompted the plot of Planted.

So this particular fic was a whole lot of "how can I fill these worldbuilding holes?" combined with some favorite tropes, "huh, Rose looks a lot harder than we last left her," and some extrapolation from her s4 cameos, then working from there. It's a lot of silly things treated seriously :)

#personal #fic stuff #fyi it's gen con 7 because what we call the geneva convention is technically the fourth geneva convention #and i'm including the protocols in the count number and altering the content therein slightly #look there are also some way more involved alternate histories i could have looked at #but...uh...look those are really serious things to deal with and it's already enough of a headache working with what i've got #before i go and decide to do the following: #change the ending of wwi / change the history of the weimar republic / unwrite the second world war / unwrite the holocaust #unwrite every single convention that came out of that / rewrite the entire history of europe #re-write ever single country that gained independence from colonial/imperial occupation because of the events of wwii #(oh and that's not to mention the fact that one silly little webcast apparently decided that all of south america IS A SINGLE COUNTRY??) #(i am ignoring that because i cannot afford to take that seriously. i cannot afford the landmines waiting for me #heck i haven't even decided whether or not whales scotland and ireland are part of the not-UK #(it's not the uk because it's canonically not a kingdom but a people's republic) #there are so so so many ways to offensively and ignorantly unwrite everyone's history) #and in the most loving way possible RTD absolutely did not understand things like nuclear weapons #despite using them for several plotlines #yes they can destroy life on earth as we know it #no they cannot destroy earth-the-planet as in the giant gravity rock #so i think i'm in a good place to decide to ignore details that are objectively ridiculous