On the trail of the Chameleon, Betty Brant has travelled to another dimension and landed in Gotham City, home to the vigilante crimefighters, Batman and Batgirl. They too are seeking the master of disguise, although they know him as False Face. The Chameleon meanwhile has allied himself with former district attorney Harvey Dent, AKA Two-Face. None of this concerns Betty Brant right now though, as at Bruce Wayne’s invitation, she has a ball to attend as his disguised guest…

Issue #15: The Brave and the Bold

Download from Maskingwriter (Yahoo! Group)

My writing app of choice, Scrivener, lets you create virtual index cards to plot. Here’s a glimpse at some of the 22 I have that currently hold the plot for (probably) issues 16-18 of Spider-Girl. The discipline of describing the plot chunks in such a small space is really handy, I find.

Just wanted to share.

Just moved the blog over to WordPress.com in about five minutes flat, another five minutes to get it customised. I’ve done this once before with another blog in my ‘other’ life – surprised I put up with Blogger for close to a year, to be honest. They get the basics right, but it’s just… uncomfortable. WordPress is so much more friendly. It lets you do cooler stuff…

… like splitting posts. God, I missed that on Blogger. Overall, WordPress is just… better. Why did I wait?

That’s one. Two, The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, apart from having a bloody awful name, is surprisingly good! Nothing like a well-written TV show that honours its original source material to get me happy.

Third, the music I’m listening to. Feelgood pop-rock. It’s called ‘feel good’ for a reason.

Four, I’ve finally plotted the rest of Crossover the way I want it to be. (I know I said I like to have the plot done before I write. I lied. Well, I exaggerated. I’m not perfect.)

Five, I’m warm and cozy on my bed with the sound of my wife’s laughter next door.

Six, I find it weirdly amusing that I’m writing this in the full knowledge that you won’t see it for a while, as the blog isn’t ready. It’s like having a post to my inner self. HELLOOOO, inner self.

Bet you’re glad you wondered, now.

Anyway for anyone who’s not read one of these before, here’s what I’m either thinking about, plotting or possibly even writing at the moment that I’m not talking about extensively. Everything gets assigned a letter, just to confuse me. There’s no guarantee anything here will ever see the light of day, but if something catches your imagination… let me know.

Project T hasn’t been worked on for a while (bear in mind before I came back to Spider-Girl recently, I hadn’t worked on anything since September), but just so you know, it’s at just under 50,000 words… and I think could well be double that when it’s done. I basically think it’s a novel, now. I won’t be releasing it until it is done, either – with the exception of serial stuff like Spider-Girl, that has no fixed ending, I’m trying not to release parts of things if they’re not finished. Just FYI.

Anyway, the writing of that has been a lot of fun. I got past a major, major scene a while back which had been in my head forever, and when it was down on paper I felt so close to it I couldn’t even tell if it was any good. I sent it to an ‘independent adjudicator’ and I’m happy to report he gave it a glowing report card. So hey, I know at least one part of it is good.

As I’ve said before, but just for the record, this is a male-to-female story involving bodysuits.

Other stuff I’ve actually written words for; several years ago Victor and I sort-of collaborated on a story I called Housesitting, which we never finished, although I have about 12,500 words of it done. Frankly I was never that happy with the plot that we came up with, and yesterday I finally re-plotted the whole thing (hence my post on plotting).

I’m a lot happier with the potential for it now; it seems a lot sturdier to me, with some interesting interactions I’ve never written before. (For ‘interactions’ you can also read ‘sex’ if you like.) I can see myself tapping away at this for a bit and seeing how it goes. This is another male-to-female story, but more traditional – a kid imitating his mother using a mask.

I mentioned Love Hotel before… I will finish this one day, but honestly I’ve got to be in the right mood. What’s written of it was done in 2001 in a hotel on a business trip… perhaps the next time I’m alone in a foreign clime with time on my hands I’ll get it done. (And I do have a potential trip in the first half of this year….) I’d like to tell you what it involves, but it’d spoil the surprises….

Father Knows Best, some of you will remember I’m sure. (Three parts were released a few years ago, but I never finished it – dammit.) I really want to finish this but I still don’t know what the hell the ending is. It might just need a complete re-plotting session, like Housesitting… I’ll try and do that, we’ll see what I come up with.

Moving on to stuff that’s plotted, or semi-plotted, but not written at all… I have a complete outline for what should in theory be a ‘short’ but knowing me it won’t be! Lemme see… I guess that would be Project A, but I know that’ll confuse me so let’s just give it a working title – Anita. Believe it or not this is a female-to-male story, with some other stuff I won’t spoil. Any interest?

What else, jeez… I guess there’s Project TNG, which is long, has a very complex plot and would be a huge challenge to write, as previously mentioned. I still don’t have an ending for that damn thing so it’ll probably stay untouched until I figure that out. It’s primarily female-to-female, but has female-to-male stuff in there too.

I mentioned something called Project B before, and just to allow you to connect the dots, that’s actually The Babysitter (a working title) which I talked about the inspiration for a little while back. So re-read that post and imagine if you like. (Or even better, suggest your ‘Holy cow, my babysitter is actually a masked hottie’ fantasies to me and give me some material.)

Project TSL is my serial story, the one inspired by The Black Widow. I do want to do this, but plotting it is actually a lot harder than expected. I will get to it, but the plot needs to be totally done, and I’d be writing it in either 9 or 13 parts, so that’s quite a lot of plot. Wait and see.

And finally… Project AC isn’t dead, but it sure isn’t very alive either. Frankly I can’t see myself working on it until Spider-Girl is done… so that’s a loooong way away. But never say never. Project G… uhh, we should probably forget about that. It’d be huge, and it’s an idea without a story, really, and would need researching and… life’s too short.

That’s it. If you want to see any other post where I talk about these projects, then helpfully, they’re all filed under ‘projects’.

Something like – ooh, say – Black Canary’s costume?

On the left: a fan-created costume by the brilliant cosplayers at Gotham Public Works. On the right, a changed-for-no-good-reason costume for the presumably big budget Smallville.

I mean seriously – if you say ‘Black Canary’ you think ‘long blonde hair’ (and if you’re me, ‘long blonde wig’) and ‘fishnets’. (Yes, I admit they got that bit right.) But you sure as hell don’t think ‘Stupid domino mask apparently applied using mascara’ or ‘Short blonde buzzcut’.

Why Hollywood, why? When you were so damn close? Sheesh.

More fugly pictures are at Comics Continuum, if you want to see – the episode, ‘Siren’, airs in the US on February 7th, and will be at your favourite ‘torrent site shortly after.

As you might have guessed from the post title, this one took a while to finish. For some reason the last scene, a scene that would normally be gravy (a transformation) just took forever to do. I’m not entirely sure why. It might be because I was trying to give it a sense of importance that it didn’t deserve. That’s kind of hard to gauge though; after all, the transformation bits are generally why you’re reading, so I’d imagine your reaction is probably “How could it not be important?”

Eh, I guess the point is when you feel like you’ve written this sort of thing every single different way you can think of, some days you just want to write “Then they got changed into a different outfit and went on their way”. It’s not as if I have actors or actresses in front of me giving me visual stimulation… instead it’s all in my head, and I’ve got to make them do interesting things. Otherwise they just sit around with blank looks.

Anyway, it is done, and in the last few lines I threw a wrench in my own plot because I thought it’d be fun. We’ll see… Future Ghostly might end up cursing my present self. (See what I meant about foreshadowing and plotting?)

Right. I feel like rambling on, so I think I’ll go shoot some posts into the future to make it look like I never leave the keyboard. Thanks for all the recent comments by the way people; I appreciate it a hell of a lot, especially when I’m forcing myself to try and write one more line.

Before I embark on any long piece of writing – erm, which will be all of them, I guess – I like to try and get some sort of plot written down. That way I have some sort of idea where things are going. Essentially, it’s an insurance policy. If I’m sitting at the keyboard wondering where to go next, I can look at the plot and go “Okay, that’s the objective – now I just have to get there”.

This is especially important in serialised fiction (ie Spider-Girl), as if you have no idea where things might be going to, you can’t throw in clues or foreshadowing – and believe me, I like to do that where I can. I also really, really want internal consistency in any series; the world needs to make sense, even if it’s a fantastic one, and there needs to be continuity. (That I can later retcon. Joke for the comics fans.)

Having said this, in the process of writing, I frequently go off-plot. In other words, the plot changes as I write it, usually because I have some sort of brainwave that is just too good to ignore. When that happens I usually end up re-writing my plot notes to accommodate the idea, just so I can basically tell myself the story and make sure it all makes sense. (Believe me, it often doesn’t. I’ve rewritten the plot for the Spider-Girl Crossover arc about five times since the first draft. Looking at those original notes, there are plot holes big enough to drive a truck through.)

So I like to have the roadmap, I like to have the plot written down. It can be nightmarish to actually create that plot though, hence my hating to plot, too. Sometimes I will just not have any idea where the plot needs to go, or worse, I have an idea but it just seems too lame for words. Even worse than that, sometimes I have a plot and it’s written down and… it still sucks.

This is the worse situation a still-to-be-written story can find itself in, because honestly, once I have the skeleton of a plot down I find it hard to throw that away. Why? Because the process is so tough. Believe it or not, getting ideas is easy (Especially in this ‘genre’ where essentially all I’m doing is writing down fantasies…). It’s having those ideas make sense, and putting them into a story where the characters act in a (reasonably) believable manner, that’s the hard part.

Sometimes, the really damn hard part. This is what leads to having loads of half-finished stories, or stories that are plotted but aren’t written. In the former case, I usually haven’t plotted to the conclusion in a way I like. The latter, I don’t like the plot enough to write it – or I haven’t plotted to the end, either.

Like opposable thumbs being what separates man from animal, I think plotting is what separates ‘erotic fiction’ from just ‘porn’. While I often jokingly refer to my writing as porn (Hey there, Mr. High Self-Esteem!) in reality it’s just fiction… that happens to be erotic in a very specific way. Whereas your average porn movie has zero plot (unless you call ‘will the studly handyman fix the broken appliance’ a plot) I like to think that everything I write has a definite plot, hopefully with decent dramatic tension, some character development and yeah, plenty of eroticism.

And that, I hope, is why it’s worth reading what I write. That and you getting off, naturally. (Just couldn’t exit without a dick joke, could I….)

Incidentally, I am very much of the school of thought these days that writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. However, when it comes to writing essentially the same thing over and over in slightly different ways, that 1% becomes pretty darn precious. That one thing being masking or unmasking scenes.

Don’t get me wrong – I like doing them (and oddly enough, I like the challenge of trying to make ‘em different) but still. It can be tough. This one will come, I just thought while I was sitting here in front of the keyboard, might as well say ‘hi’. So – hi! G’wan, say hi back.

Looking around, she saw one of the guards coming back toward her as he made a circuit. Slowly, she crossed her legs, lifting them up so that her hemline slid down, revealing more of her stockings and even a touch of garter. Sure enough, the guard noticed, slowing down to look at her. With her mouth taped, Betty had to make her eyes do most of the work; she gave him her best come-hither stare, and come hither he did. He stopped right in front of her as she uncrossed her legs then re-crossed them, surprising herself at how good the stockings felt. The guard leaned down towards her, putting one hand on her leg, sliding it up the fabric.

Like I said, it’s cut… don’t worry, there will be plenty of stuff to compensate.

Bugger-all feedback on issue 14, by the way. What, did everyone hate the Dynamic Duo?

The image is a preview of www.only-secretaries.com, the latest site behind the guys who run OnlyTease.com, which I highly recommend if (in their words) you prefer erotic, not extreme. Well hey, we can’t read all of our erotica, right….