hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

Someone I follow is doing tarot readings to raise money for getting necessary dental work. Stop on by if you've a dollar or two to throw around.

If you're a writer, have a good read on how to write characters while finding believable balances of competence and vulnerability.

I am getting into Japanese lolita fashion, and will take pictures when I get dresses and accessories in the mail. Wish me luck.

It's developed a plot.
... help!

You love Natasha being awesome, I love Natasha being awesome. So why not make this character-focused story about Cap being suddenly female turn into a MASSIVE MISSIVE about Natasha being a spy? Yeah.

Because who doesn't love competence porn? I just have to write ... a lot. And quit quietly freaking out about it.

So I was thinking that the two fics I was going to write, the Bucky&Nat bro!fic and the Agender!Cap fic, were going to be 15k between the two of them. Now they have become parts of the same story, and I will be lucky if this monster is done before it's 40k. And somehow it has turned into almost a Team As Family fic, which while one of my heart-squishiest genres was not something I was planning on writing. I still have a handle on the slow mission creep of extra things I need for the story (for now). I don't know how long that will be true for, though.

I have begun taking CEU's for updating my massage therapy license, which I have to do this month. I don't know why I let it go so late. Possibly I have dread and anxiety about diving into figuring out how to get my NCTMB certification without going back to school and spending thousands of dollars. I want to do the thing, but I don't want it to be complicated or stressful. And that is just not how life works, which sucks.

I still have a homeless friend living in my car, which is going to get dangerous here in a couple weeks when it starts breaking 95 degrees on the daily. Not sure what to do about that.

When I was young, I was perceived as intelligent, mostly because I was hyperlexic and loved puns which were considered to be beyond my age level. Whatever. But people had expectations about me because of those talents that didn't match up to the rest of me. Sometimes those mismatches were obvious and I would say so, and other times they were not obvious and I would try in vain to meet those expectations, sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades. I knew that I was never going to be an astronaut because I was no good at sports other than fighting (and I wasn't even great at that). I knew that I wasn't going to be a senator, no matter how good with words I was, because we were poor and my family did not look anything like TV families did, and people disapproved of us. But that did not keep people from having those expectations of me.

And maybe if I had been raised to think of talent as something that happens to you, something that comes from the outside and is bestowed on you, I would not have been so hard on myself. Maybe if our culture had that thought, they would have rested gentler expectations on me, and I'd have borne them easier.

But we can never know.

Thanks to Resonant I have gotten the sex scene written. I porned! I think it doesn't suck! But ZOMG it was really, unreasonably hard. Have I told y'all lately how bad I am at feelings? And you know how psychosexual dynamics are basically all about feelings? Yeah, screw you, feelings. You suck.

I am grumpy today. Stiff. Pain at 4/10. Probably about to start my period today or tomorrow.

But most of the story is done. I'm gonna go take half a tramadol and take a nap and see about finishing this thing off and sending it to beta.

If you want to read my fic and hate spoilers, then skip this. But if you enjoy laughing at my pain (let's be honest, my pain is funny even to me) then feel free to witness my confusion below.

Basic fic premise: just after the fall of SHIELD, Natasha finds out about Yelena Belova's reconstructive surgery to look like her in order to infiltrate SHIELD's networks. Hard on the heels of this (only very slightly unsettling) news, Pepper reveals that she's been lying by omission about having superpowers the four months they've been dating. Pepper reveals this because Natasha is pretending to be emotionally stable despite her currently less than stellar emotional state (SHIELD/Yelena/her emotional confidantes being out of the country or unavailable).

So: if I let Pepper keep Extremis (and Extremis!Pepper is one of my favorite things, solid gold kink) then I'm not sure how to work that ideologically into the story from Pepper's point of view and keep my underlying theme of vulnerability and the need for trust. Maybe I can contrast her physical invulnerability with her higher emotional vulnerability after she killed Killian? Maybe Pepper feels outclassed being a glorified personal assistant dating OMG The World's Most Dangerous Spy? What would a normal person do here? Insert answer in comments. *points at comment button*

Most of the fic is written from Natasha's headspace because I had a complicated childhood (heh) and I'm better at writing her than Pepper. But there are a couple scenes that either have to be in Pepper's perspective or omniscient third person from nobody's perspective because they have to be a surprise to Natasha later. The problem with that being: I know how to make Natasha vulnerable, but Pepper is a normal, neurotypical person, and my powers of imagination are failing to bring me enough of what that's like to model the people in the situation. And if I can't model Pepper having the feels then I can't model a Natasha responding to her and I'm kinda stuck.

Do I make Pepper really anxious about revealing her secret and invent a reason for her fear? I could do that. That would increase her feelings of vulnerability and is a thing that normal people do, I am reasonably sure. Like 75%. I've read books where it happens? Or do I make her find out about Natasha's secret freaking out and have them fight about keeping secrets and write her vulnerability as the fear of losing relationships because of lack of trust? It would be difficult to write them fighting, but I could do it, and I have not seen any examples of two emotionally astute adults having an argument in any fandom, so maybe that needs to be written.

There needs to be a fic primer on How To Argue Like An Adult, and I could write that. Or you could write that. We could all write that! There needs to be a challenge where people write grown-up relationship problems. Kinda like Take Your Fandom To Work day, but with relationship troubles. I should poke a BNF and see if it gets traction.

Can I just complain that writing is hard every day until I'm done?

I started reading Stephen King's On Writing to maybe get some ideas on process that don't come from years of being in fandom and reading the blogs of people who occasionally mention their writing process, which I like? Vaguely? Remember? And that was enough to write the first installment of my story, and yay, I did the thing.

But now there's more thing in my head, and it's not going anywhere, so I guess I'd better get serious about writing so that I can at least bring it to people in a way that maximizes their enjoyment of the thing I want to write.