lettered | La Vie De TKP: the rodeo chapter

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La Vie De TKP: the rodeo chapter

It's time for me to speak up...about meat and milkshakes and mwriting! Look at my malliteration! Go me!

So yesterday I was looking forward to a day of vampire porn, this mustard apple porkchop recipe I wanted to try, and (*flips through planner*) oh look, more vampire porn, when my BFF calls and starts talking about the rodeo. I think it's understandable that it took a moment to orient myself. Not Anne Hathaway in a sassy little hat. Not Angel riding ~~Xander~~ the bronc and worst of all, not Lorna. No, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. So anyway, out of the blue my friend suggests we go. By out of the blue I mean we'd planned it for weeks, and by suggested I mean "let's meet at 3.30". (By friend I really do mean "friend". Yis.)

So, we go to the rodeo. Actually we go to Starbucks, but same difference really. Come to think of it, the rodeo is actually just like the Renaissance Festival (which is actually nothing like Starbucks. I don't deconstruct your segues!): people dress up, act old timey, and best of all: cater meat on a stick. Sausage on a stick, BBQ on a stick, shrimp on a stick, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup--oops, Bubba, wrong list. *rifles* Ah--brisket on a stick, scallops on a stick, and my new favorite: pizza on a stick. Yes folks, pizza. On a stick. I fucking love this earth.

In fact, yesterday for dinner? I had fried Oreos, a milkshake, and tater tots. I got the milkshake and the taters (PO-TAT-TOES! Boil 'em mash 'em stick 'em in a stew. How many lists of ways to cook different foods ARE there in cinema?) at the House of Pies but still. Fried Oreos. Actually, as for that, give 'em to us rrraw and wrrrriggling. You can't taste the Oreos for the fried. It's like a cookie inside a funnel cake without the cookie.

hannasus claims the fried cookie dough is good, but alas, I couldn't find it. The other delicacy we didn't enjoy was eating brisket in front of the cows. It's a time honored tradition amongst me and my friends, but we just didn't have time. Those poor baby cows. Why do they have to taste so good?

The cowboys were very interesting. One of them wore a pink shirt with sparkly purple fringe on his chaps. Kroger and I.W. Marks won the wagon race. A lady in a sparkly purple (it was a theme) unitard (I wish unitards had been a theme) rode on a horse standing up with fireworks and the Texas flag. When they did that cattle roping thing with the kids, this one gal kept the calf pinned by keeping its head between her legs, but when they interviewed her her eyes were desperate and filmed over with tears, so we only laughed very hard on the inside and made noises of crooning sympathy on the outside, except when we were laughing on the outside too. Poor girl.

Maroon 5 was playing, and I think that one song is alright, but I didn't know they did that other song, you know, the song that really sucks? I had no idea that was them. But my eyes were transfixed by the shininess of the lead singer's buckle, which I think established a rapport between itself and my shining eyes. For some moments there, there was no one in that stadium but me and that buckle. Then, what should intrude upon my consciousness but the gleaming, glowing grill, the one the vendor had on his teeth and that was winking, winking, illuminating my tears of wonder into not only a glistening stop-light red, but gumball blue and orange as well.

This, this grill, that buckle, my shimmering eyes--this is what rodeo is. It's not about winning or losing or meat on a stick. It's not about stagecoach font or pig-racing or cows sniffing your genitals. It's not about the longness of Jack Gyllenhal's eyelashes or even the blondness of Robert Redford's hair. It's all about the shiny. Tacky commercialism, cowboys, and hey, enjoying yourself. Holy trinity, baby. *single perfect tear*

So anyway, the Maroon 5 guy, after making the transcriber spell onomonopea (sp?), says, "let's wrap up with a song by one of my favorite artists." And I say, "you're not going to play Neil Young so who gives a hardened yet strangely crumbly cow chip?" And then he played, "Rockin' In The Free World." Victor Hugo once said that it is no coincidence that the root of "irony" is "iron", and he musta knew something because boy was that irony burnished last night. Between that and the buckle and that grill I mentioned I was kinda blinded.

Then, House of Pies. It was a good day, I'm telling you.

*

So, I was talking to

l_aurens and we got to talking about collaborative fics. I always thought it would be interesting to try one (sekrit message to

a2zmom: OMG we have to!) but one thing I'm afraid of is that I'll be too picky and want to take over the whole thing. Anyone else have this fear?

Those of you who have written collabortive fics, how do you do it? One person writes one chapter?--How do you keep track of where the plot is going? (Or are you like, evil to each other, and leave a chapter with a cliff-hanger the next person has to resolve?) One person writes one character?--Then who writes the in-between stuff, and doesn't it feel back-and-forth? Who edits? Do you do it over im? How does that work, anyway?

And how have these experiences worked out for y'all? Did you quit? Did you keep going, dissatisfied, knowing you'd never do it again? Would you do it again? Was it an edifying experience?

And does anyone approach reading cowritten fics differently? Who reads them guessing who wrote what? (*raises hand*)

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The ones I've written have been two writers dividing up the characters. Most stories were omniscient or from the POV of the main two characters. Another one I'm working on has alternating POVs, but is written the same as the rest. Here's a line, there's a line.

Written over IM. One of us is the better editor (me) and bears the brunt of editing. However, there's something about authorial control and if a bunch of dialog needs to be edited, the other person needs the say so.

There's been some problems. I feel like I'm less likely to get suck and more likely to finish the initial writing quicker as there's someone cheerleading.

I always guess when I read. I really like to know who wrote what.

I liked the Maroon 5 guy when he was all about the sticky-uppy hair and five o'clock shadow...this clean-cut image does nothing for me ;)
I've written one co-written piece and it worked quite well, but yeah pick who you write with wisely! :) We split the piece in half, so that she started the plot and content and I finished it, but then we both felt fairly comfortable with writing the three characters in the fic. I'm not sure about taking a character each because then the plot might go wonky? I dunno. I think it worked quite well, but then our styles are a little similar, I guess.
Who reads them guessing who wrote what? (*raises hand*)
Oy. Try doing that with the

virtual_ford story.

Whoa! This is one of the best LJ entries ever in the history of LJ. I was going to quote my favorite bits of your rodeo rant-of-stream-of-consciousness, but they are all my favorite bits.

*loves entry hard*

because there just aren't many posts that manage to cover the House of Pies, cows snorfling at your nethers and onomatopoeia (don't ask me if it's spelled right). I am consumed with the Rodeo/You love in all it's tacky splendor. Ain't that America. *sigh*

I'm intrigued by collaboration but loathe to try it because I have to be in control. I'm also not consistent with fanfic writing; I'm very 'on- again, off-again' and I would hate to do that to a partner. *pokes unfinished C/A*

I have never wanted to go to a rodeo before but now I want to go with YOU! Hee!

I've written collaborative fic two ways. Secretary we ended up writing a chapter each, all of us writing all the characters, and sometimes they got pretty long; so I'd do a 2,000 word chunk, pass it onto whoever was next/available and they'd do one. Sometimes they were longer/shorter depending on what we had to cover. We got together in email to discuss plot but for the early/middle parts we pretty much took it where we wanted and left it for the next person to develop because that was fun. Then it got too complex for that so we had to stop and plot :-)

Co-written, just me and one other, are usually quite tightly plotted before hand, two main characters, I take one, the other person the other and we split minor characters depending on who they're with in the scene. The tags are much shorter, sometimes a few lines, sometimes a few paragraphs, and we pass them back and forth, email or a private LJ post. I've written up to 5,000 words a day with Wesleysgirl doing that.

Editing we both do, taking it turns. One of us will read it through, pass a cleaned up copy over, get it back even cleaner.

I love co-written fics; they're fun, addictive, and you get an incredible amount done quickly. WG and I wrote our novel, 110,000 words of it, in five weeks. You have to be working with someone whose style is similar to yours and who writes at the same pace but I've been very lucky that way.

You can try and guess who wrote what, but with Secretary I can look at it now and really, truly not know if I wrote it as we developed a particular style for it that wasn't entirely typical of the way we write solo, just to make it match.

Dude, I've never thought much of the rodeo, but you make it sound fun! Maybe the one single time I went to a rodeo-like-esque thing in my childhood, there wasn't enough shiny? I might give it another chance someday.

And I've always had similar questions about how the collaborative fic thing works, so I'm interested to read the responses of the people who've done it. And, yeah, whenever I read a fic that I know has been written collaboratively, I try to guess who wrote what, but I'm not normally successful. Actually, I've beta'ed for one person pretty consistently, and she recently sent me one that she'd written with another person. I thought I was familiar enough with her writing style that in that instance, I'd know what was hers, but nope. The two styles must have flowed pretty well together. I should have thought to ask what method they used.

marenfic and I are currently working on one story (Come Undone) with another in the early planning stages.

We've gone through a couple of ways of writing. When we first talked about cowriting something we established (a) the characters involved and (b) the general plot. We laid out a specific outline for the first five or chapters with the rest of the story plotted, but not necessarily in specific detail.

It's obvious that Maren and I have different writing styles but I think in the story it's not quite so obvious who wrote what part because of the way we handle that. We started out with me writing Angel and Faith, and she would write Buffy and Will. I feel like I have a better Angel voice than Buffy voice and dude, Maren writes the best Buffy ever. It worked really well at first but the inevitable happened. We got stuck (or more specifically, I got stuck).

So we then moved to working on sections, no matter how if it was a 2,000-word piece or a paragraph and passing it to the other when we got stuck. I think it's helped the flow of the piece and our styles to merge in a more pleasing, less jarring way.

We put the story aside for a bit because of other ficathon commitments but *we* are going to finish it. However, we're not going to post any more chapters until it's completed because nothing is worse than a languishing WIP. :(

When it comes to plotting/outlining we do that over e-mail and IM chats (mostly IM chats). I have logs and logs of our conversations where we're just batting around ideas, expanding a sub-plot, etc. It's worked really well because we're both on the same page as to where the story is going, the characters' motivations, etc. Neither one is flying blind, so to speak.

And that's our story of collaboration.

I've had collaborative fics that turned into authorial pissing matches and crashed and burned and died a horrible death. I've had others that went beautifully, and some that just sort of fizzled when we both realized we didn't know what the hell we we doing.

The ones that went well were a series I did back in EQ fandom, where another writer and I planned out a starcrossed romance plotline for our characters and wrote four or five stories. We worked out the basic plotline of two incompatible characters Recognizing (ElfQuest elves have this telepathic "Mate or die!" thing that can kick in at any time, with almost anyone. Oh, the angst!). It was your basic 'good woman falls for rake, who then falls for her against his will' storyline, but we had fun with it. THe first story we did in alternating first person POVs--my character, then her character, then my character, etc. Then each of us would go over the other's sections and make changes. Later stories were done in third person, and we'd collaborate on the plot and trade scenes back and forth until we were satisfied.

Interesting responses. Scary, even. As in, daunting. We shall have to think about this.

As to the rodeo, when I lived in Houston we went several times. I was 5 or 6. They used to have this thing where the kids of a certain age would be invited into the ring to chase a goat. Whoever got the string off the goat's horns or whatever would win something. I never did.

Why is there a girl on a horse with a Texas flag at EVERY TEXAN EVENT EVER??

Oh oh oh! Rodeo! omgiloveit We have lil slushy things here, and I can blow like seventy bucks on buying those, man.

Me and my friend Ali from dirtyvirgin.org are working on a little teen Faith series - but it's more of a Faith & her best friend series, because it focuses mainly on them, but we're also focusing on her watcher and Faith's klepto boyfriend Steve. It'll verge into AU post-watcher 'cause they're going to go to LA which only means having to write Angel and other characters that I don't know how to write and omg writing Angel -cowers in fear-

...Aaaaanyway, the way we're writing it, is that we're more or less going to "RP" it. I write a paragraph, she writes a paragraph, of the interaction and everything, because we already know exactly what's going to happen in a scene. It's tres more fun, I think, because we both love RPing... and I tend to be able to focus more on RPing than actually writing stuff outside of that. However, if we don't find a similar style, I think the breaks between each thing we write are going to be obvious and throw readers off.

NYC might have egg creams but we do not have rodeos. I am bereft.

We must colloborate. I actually have a shiny idea, in point of fact. (if you wish you may AIM me and save me from a lifetime of bedroom cleaning.)

Fried...Oreos? Oookay...

And is it bad that I don't find the idea of pizza on a stick at all odd?

Alright, where'd my train of thought run off to? Oh, there it is. Right. Coauthoring.

moss6886 (mom) and I are currently working on a BtVS/SG-1 crossover called Heaven and Earth. I'm basically the head writer on it, but the story came from her brain (which is why I tend to refer to her as my pet plot bunny). How we're doing it is she comes up with the general plot, basic scene arrangement, who goes where and when they go there, and she's laid out a lot of the scenes, kind of a "here's what they say, but how do they say it?" situation. I come up with how to get what we want out on the page, fill in the blanks between scenes, etc. Then I send it back to her for feedback & editing every half-page or so. I'm also research girl, because a) we are mythology geeks who hate it when such things get screwed up, and would rather not see ourselves as hypocrites and b) I have way more time on my hands than she does. Although this may seem kind of unbalanced, it's working out really well, as it plays to our individual strengths and weaknesses. My mom being (at least in this case) really strong in the "ideas" department, as well as being way more structured than I, all translates into this (rather long) story actually having a plot; however, she really isn't that much of a writer, it's just not something she does out af habit, so her stuff is just way to precise, or maybe analytical is the word, to work as narrative or dialog(although her Jack-voice isn't too bad and her Giles definitely doesn't suck). Whereas with me, I tend to be so wound up in wordplay and minutely detailed character moments that I have trouble coming up with any plot that would hold up longer than maybe a dozen or so pages, and my dialog often ends up very stilted, even though I consider my individual character voices to quite good, so by giving me a very structured and/or analytical set of notes with a good plot layout, I have room to play and we end up with a decent story.
Theoretically, it would be possible for me to do this with some other co-author over the internet, but I'm not certain it would work, just because so much of the story has ended up hashed out in long conversations involving flailing arm movement that we somehow manage to interpret as the complex information they are meant to convey. It's been great fun, though, and I'd do it again. If we ever finish this one, that is...

When I've written collaboratively, it's mostly been that I have one character and they have the other. Sometimes strictly so -- we decide on an outline and then RPG it out. That mostly works in IRC or some such. In person, it's usually more fluid, with us suggesting lines for each other's guys and feeling free to say what doesn't work for us of their suggestions, but still, basically custody was established by character.

One exception has been writing collaboratively for a virtual season, in which case custody was by scene, with each of us writing assigned scenes according to a general outline and then submitting them to be edited together. However even there, I tended to pick scenes for who was the main character(s) in them.

I really like collaborative writing, especially for the ability to be honestly surprised by what the other person says -- not as possible when everyone lives in my head. But I can get self-indulgent and repetitive for the sheer joy of RPing, so if it's meant as a story and not a game, I think ruthless pre-brainstorming (what do we need to accomplish in this scene) and post-pruning are necessary.

I do know of successes at other forms of collaboration, including a successful mystery writing duo who alternated chapters, but I don't know if that would work for me. I think it might take away a lot of the rewards of collaboration for me -- back and forth flow, sparking ideas off each other, relying on the other person where my skills are weak -- without giving me the creative control you get in a solo piece.

It's all about the shiny. Tacky commercialism, cowboys, and hey, enjoying yourself. Holy trinity, baby. *single perfect tear*

You make me want to go the rodeo so much!! And pizza on a stick?!!! *desires* I'm always initially unsure of events like rodeos, but then I end up embracing the shininess of the whole thing. I've had that experience at sporting events and recently when I went curling (I felt SO Canadian!).

Another interesting writing question! I've enjoyed reading the responses.

I've never written collaborative fanfic but I write scripts with a writing partner. We always plan out the story and themes ahead of time, and have a very detailed outline, although there's always lots of flexibility when we write. We always write together (ie. in person) with one of us actually doing the writing and the other person commenting, and suggesting whole sections and/or additions. We tend to switch off depending on our moods, or who has the voices down better. Editing happens during the writing process, and afterwards.

Even though it's weird to have someone looking over your shoulder as you write, it's awesome because there's constantly someone to bounce ideas off of, to correct and to make what you're writing better. It's also amazing to be tightening phrases or taking the other person's idea and running with it. I do love writing alone and having total control, but it's very affirming and productive to write with a partner.

It's all about the shiny. Tacky commercialism, cowboys, and hey, enjoying yourself. Holy trinity, baby. *single perfect tear*
I want to see cowboys!! Gay, Bi, Straight, non-human. I don't care!! *le cry*

In other news one of the original power rangers (the red one)did gay porn!! Yay!..not. *my childhood innocence is gone. Gooone.* Aaaaahhh! The images get it out! Get it out! *Pictures Angel/Spike in cowboy attire* Much better! :D

My BFF and I will often tell each other our ideas and show each other our writing, so that is collaborative. However, we haven't yet attempted to co-write a fic. I think that would be hard to do. The closest we've got to co-writing is our movie parody LJ site celluloid_redux.

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just here for the sparklies

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