Why do I make this so hard for myself?

[yvannairie]

Writing is hard when all you want to write about is how hard writing is.

I am sitting on two things that I could, with enough writing, just be done with. The first one is about 500 words of breaking down the character dynamics in the Wreckers comics, that could probably be bashed out into a publishable shape as soon as I get over my embarrasment that my opinions have once again gone off in a direction that is very different from all my friends...

and the other one...

*beleaguered sigh*

I have about a thousand-ish words of meandering nonsense -- further explorations of the properties of Energon that ties back to what I was talking earlier about the various flavour profiles of chemicals, ingestion that also refers back to the energy cycle of a frame, with the goal of actually talking about energy dispersion -- and along with that, the physiology of overcharge and whatever the hell was going on with Ratchet's original SynthEn formula

and it's all very interesting, but like you can see from that explanation, it's also one of those topics that is at a great risk of starting to meander the moment you give it even a little bit of thought, right? In order to talk about what happens when someone is overcharged, why it creates the symptoms it creates, how that connects to other sorts of intoxication, and how the frame may further react and regulate those symptoms, you first need to establish what the systems even are, what they do, what a standard fuelling cycle even looks like, and at that point you start to meander into talking about maintenance and self-repair and listing off-course from another angle entirely

and this is something I run into with TF stuff a lot, I have individual interesting ideas (I'm really attached to the idea that mecha can just "purge" themselves of extra charge, essentially instantly sobering up, but it has its own limitations, and also some tentative ideas about what a system like that could be otherwise used for) but in order to get to them and not sound like a loony, I need to establish the baseline that I'm talking from (in this instance, trying to explain why inhibition would be tied to the energy levels available, just like how they're tied to cognition) or else rely on nebulous fanon that I might not always be wholly on board with. On the one hand, this is the joy of talking about TF, but on the other hand, everything becomes this negotiation of "what are the base assumptions and how do I communicate them?"

And often the solution is just to refer back to how they "act" human, and have responses that parse as human, and then explaining why what we see is the way it is, what the implications of it are and how exactly is it different. My original overcharge meta was an example on how to do it wrong, but something like my concussion meta or my medical Energon meta are proof that I can do it and make things that are good to read

and that's why I can't get it done because my brain tells me, having done a bad job once, I need to be better this time, which leads to the inevitable meandering.

... and like I said, I could just write about the Wreckers again, but when I say that ultimately it's the non-narrative stuff that appeals to me, that also means that if there's something impersonal, general, overhead and backend-y to talk about, I'd rather talk about that than talk about any one character, no matter how much I like them, and then it just turns into a snarling fight over preferences, over whether I'd write something I'm not very into that I could probably get done or not write the thing I want to write but also want to get right

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing.