Otter's Rock

What I should be working on, fic-wise:

*this year's sg_rarepairings entry (1400 words done, no idea how long it will turn out to be, probably at least two times as long as it is now)

*the four prompts from this round that don't have stories written for them yet. One of the ones yet to be written really interests me, two are so-so, one doesn't inspire me at all and may just be quietly dropped.

What I am working on: the post-Superman Returns story that's been sitting on my hard drive since January of 2007. (No, ljs_lj, not the Biopsych plot bunny, the other one that's six months older than that one.) Have finally figured out what I hope is the last elephant between me and finishing it, then will send it off to beta to see what someone else thinks of it. (It's been sitting in my head and been re-thought so many times I'm not quite sure about it.)

htbthomas wrote me a fic for my birthday. It's a fun twist on the Superman Returns cliche.

I needed the pick-me-up. I leave for Pennsylvania at six in the morning on Friday, and there are some things that simply have to be done between now and then. Such as finishing the bridesmaid dresses. I thought I was in good time; all that needed to be done was the final fitting to make sure everything fits right with the zipper in, and mark where the hem needed to be. It had been fitted before I put the zipper in, so I wasn't anticipating it needing any alteration. Yeah. It needed an inch and a half taken in at the waist. That's not "take in the zipper an eighth inch or so," that's "take it apart and put it back together." I have no idea how I screwed up that badly. So, yeah, a lot more work and a lot more stress than I really wanted my last few days at home.

So I'm trying to get my 500 words/day in on the fic I'm mostly working on now, a post-Superman Returns fic with Kara Zor-El (Supergirl), and I've realized that my seminary classwork has seriously affected this. Among other things we're doing in Systematic Theology is studying "theologies of liberation," which include perspectives from just about every oppressed group you can imagine. I was writing Kara's perspective and all of a sudden there was all this stuff about voicelessness and the way language shapes thoughts/identity and cultural imperialism in there that I had no clue about until I started writing ten minutes ago but seriously makes sense from what we know of Krypton. (Not that she can really articulate it, atm.) This is not the first such revelation I've had with this fic. However, I think it will require serious betaing when I'm done with it because I'm too close to it, and can't tell if I'm being too heavy with it or too oblique. Also because I'm a white middle-class American female young enough to have encountered no serious gender discrimination in her life, either practically or theoretically, so I would kind of like someone who has experienced such things check out the whole perspective of the oppressed thing Kara's sort of sprouted (not that she counts herself as oppressed, mind). But that'll be a while. 6,000 words in and they haven't even left the Fortress, yet.

So, I'm writing, getting in my daily word count, continuing a disagreement between Kal-El and the Jor-El hologram. All of a sudden Kal-El thinks something to himself that comes out of nowhere as far as I'm concenrned, but it explains so much about Movieverse Superman, it's just amazing. I don't think I've ever read quite this take on it, but I could be wrong; in any case, thank you, Kal-El for sharing that with me. It's making my job so much easier. It's also telling me that I'm really getting the character down.