I think I'm going to have to start working on the Seuche edits before I carry on with the main plotline.

The reasoning behind this? Partly I feel like I really just should get the beginning sorted before I try and focus on where I'm going next. Partly because I've just realized that I want to refer (briefly) back to an event which didn't actually happen in the first draft - at least not in any major, noticeable way. I now want it to be major and noticeable and considered as such by the characters. I don't really feel I can move past the bit where I refer back to it before it's actually happened, and I suspect that's why I'm feeling so deeply stalled as regards the scene I'm writing. Nothing the matter with the scene itself, just that one-line reference to something that should have happened and hasn't.

Also, I really just hate the opening chapters. I disliked them in a vague kind of way for a while, but that was before I knew what the problem with them was. Now I actually know what the problem is, I don't like leaving it uncorrected.

I can, I suppose, at least give it a shot. If it doesn't work to unblock my authorly drain, it doesn't work.

... wow, what a pointless journal entry this was.

To try and make matters rather less pointless, have a matched pair of random drabbles (both exactly 100 words long, too!) I wrote an amazing ho-hum amount of time ago and then did absolutely nothing with because I felt they were far too ridiculously short to post anywhere other than the challenge community I did them for, which I then promptly left anyway.


The Camera Never Lies


Childishly, she smiled in photos unless one caught her off-guard. He never quite managed that. She knew him too well, always heard him. Here she is captured raising her head, surprise stealing across her face. Her eyes are inquiring. He remembers how she sprang to her feet at the flash and playfully reproached him, complaining she would look ridiculous. He had promised to destroy the print – a cheerful, easy deception. Photographs failed to define her, she possessed an elusive, interior quality they never conveyed; even so, when Youji looks at the picture, he thinks yes, that was how Asuka was.
____

Ken hides the photograph in the bottom of a drawer and pretends it lost. He imagines it burnt, soot-smeared, its edges charred. Stumbling across it, he is obscurely irritated to discover it whole. The picture is amateurish, overexposed by a marauding midday sun: he fancies the look in Kase’s eyes sly, his own grin infuriatingly vacuous. It’s too recent, a forgery of friendship, Kase has already betrayed him. Ken believes someday he really will burn it and he will feel reprieved: in his heart, though it holds nothing he wishes to remember, he knows he’ll keep it until he dies.


Well, that was pretty painless.

... see, it was supposed to be a pairing challenge, hence why I did Youji and Ken and nobody else. It's not just because I am a hopeless fangirl, really.

I get the feeling that I should probably do more of these, if only in an attempt to get my head round the concept of brevity, but I seem to remember them being pretty fun to do, too. I'm pretty sure I've got the prompt list for that community somewhere, maybe I'll try and do a couple whenever the mood strikes me and see what happens.

Also, I did sign up for weissday after all. Wish me luck, I guess.