New icon! I, uh, thought it suited me. ;)

So, surprisingly, this is a non-fic update, sandwiched in between me doing Saturday chores on Sunday. Believe it or not I actually put down on my to-do list "Update LJ with something other than fic updates" just to prove how pathetic I am. Heh. But I have been writing a lot lately, and as I was saying to trialia the other night, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that I'm not buried neck-deep in papers and essays and assignments and reading and studying for the first time in ... well, since I can remember, really. November has historically been a really shitty month for me creatively due to all the deadlines, such that I have usually been able to get almost no writing done because of school. Obviously, school had to be the focus when I was still attending it, but I'm not gonna lie, it drove me UP THE WALL sometimes when I had to start on the umpteenth paper or whatever instead of writing.

This year I've got none of that, and so my muse has gone into absolute overdrive. Which is AWESOME. :D I whipped out two chapters of Insanity Underrated this past week and another last night, and I am praying to the fic gods that I can continue to use all this free-floating inspiration to push through the rest of the S2 arc and perhaps even into S3. That would be SO awesome, and might even allow me to finish up this fic by the time 2010 rolls around. Which would be more awesome still. Unlikely, perhaps, but awesome. I adore Insanity Underrated, I honestly do, but I don't particularly want to spend almost three years working on it like I have with To Ignite the Stars. Granted, TIS was always going to be a much longer and more ambitious project, and I knew that going in, but it still kind of ticks me off that it will be three years come June 2010 that I started it, and I am not even anywhere CLOSE to being finished. Real life has had a lot to do with that, since various collections of catastrophes have befallen me since June 2007, but still. I've never been able to write fast. It is a slow, painstaking process for me. I wish I could do it faster. >.>

Anyway. Reaction to the last three IU chapters has been overwhelmingly positive, and once again I won't lie - that is a HUGE relief to me. Normally I don't care so much what reviewers think ... I mean, I'm always happy for constructive criticism, and I value each and every comment that I receive, but at the same time my life doesn't revolve around them. I would write the longfics regardless of whether anyone else read them or commented on them, because once those plots got inside me, I had to get them out and write them. My writing has always been first and foremost for me, because I enjoy it and I need to write like most people need food and water. (At no time was that clearer to me than early this November ... as I shall discuss below.) Readers and comments and praise are just very awesome bonuses. :D

But with this latest plotline in Insanity Underrated, I was extremely nervous. The plot point in question had been in the outline from the very beginning, and is in fact one of the linchpins of the fic, so it needed to be included. But on the other hand, it deals with a sensitive subject - sensitive to Kara, anyway, and to me as well - and I had serious doubts about my ability to handle it even as Katie and I were outlining. Then all the shit in July happened and I became even less sure, because I knew that the plot I'd so carefully planned out in advance would now contain some pretty serious triggers for me. I said in an early LJ post when I was still in the hospital that I'd keep going with my longfics as usual, but at that point, and through most of the summer, they were actually in serious danger of being abandoned.

I hadn't ever considered doing that before, and I am glad to say that I have not since. I hasten to emphasize that I will definitely finish both To Ignite the Stars and Insanity Underrated (plot point and all) as planned. :) In the end I decided to continue because, as I said, both fics are something that I have to write, just like I have to breathe, and because they actually ended up bringing me far more comfort and solace than I had thought they could. Again, the past two weeks have provided ample proof of this. :D

But goddamn was I nervous about Insanity Underrated. I'd seen other people deal with the same type of plot point, i.e. Kara getting pregnant, but they seemed to handle it so much better than I thought I could. The thing too was that most of those fics I had read were set after "Epiphanies" and Roslin's ban on abortion, which basically provided a blanket reason why Kara would not seek such a procedure. A lot of fics, to their credit, still had her going to the president and asking for an exception, but that was almost uniformly not granted.

With Insanity Underrated I deliberately decided to have the pregnancy occur before "Epiphanies" for a number of reasons, some of which I can disclose, and some of which I can't (spoilers, hehe). Primarily among them was that I wanted to analyze Kara's reaction to a pregnancy that she could potentially make a choice about. Setting the pregnancy after "Epiphanies" would have removed that choice and would, in my opinion, have amounted to taking the "easy way out." (Please note that I am NOT criticizing fics which do this - that is of course up to the discretion of each individual author, and they are free to do whatever they want with their fic. I'm just trying to explain why I did not feel that having Kara's pregnancy occur after "Epiphanies" would be the best thing for Insanity Underrated.) I really wanted to get inside her head with this and puzzle out what she would do and how she would feel ... and no, I can't tell you her decision yet. Heh.

But I was scared of how readers would react. I was afraid that I as a writer wouldn't be able to portray Kara in-character and that, even if I did, readers would automatically assume some kind of deus ex machina would come into play to make for a happy ending (or maybe even a non-happy ending) and that they would be put off by that. I thought some readers might be turned off by the idea of a potential babyfic, even a partial one, even one that was and is by no means a sure thing.

Some of these fears certainly still exist, and I don't think they'll totally go away until I write and post the parts in which Kara makes her decision and learns to cope with the consequences of that decision. But I'm certainly more reassured than I was when I began the fic, and I'm determined to see it through.

I began Chapter 11 last night, and wrote exactly 900 words of it before going to bed. In keeping with the unofficial NaNoWriMo theme, my word count since the start of November is 10,024, which, although probably still way behind where I should be if I was actually doing NaNo, is not too bad for me. This is, of course, not counting the work I did on the fic before November - Insanity Underrated is, in total, 29,860 words long right now.

*crosses her fingers* Fic gods willing, I should have more for you guys relatively soon. :)