The Fiction Ramblings of Nikki Bjelica.

This page was borne of me wanting to increase the amount of babbling at the bottom of my main index page, specifically the "About the Author" portion, to an unmanageable and inelegant length. That is to say, I like to just sort of splah in text and once you splah, it's hard to delete anything.

Case in point: See that Buffy gif on the left, there? Yeah, the one where she's kinda looking back over her shoulder. Cool image, huh? I swiped it myself. Heh. It originally had Xander in it, I think standing on the left, but -- sorry, Xand-man -- I took him out, as well as the background setting of the photo, and made it an invisible background. Fortunately the color of her outfit and the lighting of the photo made it so that its color blends well with the color scheme I selected for my pages. I like blues. Anyways, since I'm 99.99995% completely freaking USELESS with Photoshop, I just had to say that I did that, I did that, I did that! Yay me!

One time I wrote a fic because of a song; the song was never mentioned by name in the fic but the lyrics were included at the end for anyone who was interested. I just couldn't help myself. I had the CD in my car for weeks and every time track 3 started playing I got all 'when Spike tried to comfort Buffy at the very end of "Fool For Love," that was so great, he's totally being redeemed, sorry Angel, but I'm now a Buffy/Spike shipper for-fucking-ever!' Swear to god, I tried to keep it under wraps, but I wrote it anyways. I hope it's not too over the top. I did try to specifically avoid doing the stuff that annoys me.

The only problem is that, see, I got this new CD the other day, and there's this song on it that REALLY reminds me of Spike and I just couldn't help but think that if only Spike were to hear the song he'd think of Buffy and . . . and . . .
. . . just kidding.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the sort of fanfic writers who can turn out page after page of well-written, well-plotted, well-characterized work. David Hearne, in the X-Files genre, is one of my favorites. He manages to write these brilliant stories with Colossally original ideas, and I haven't yet been disappointed by anything he's written, even the tiniest of vignettes. In fact, when I was trying to prove to a friend of mine that not all fanfic is worthy of nothing but contempt, I forwarded several of David's stories to him, and he actually sounded, somewhat grudgingly, like he liked them. But I'm not that sort of writer. ;) I come up with an idea once every month or two, usually when I'm trying to get to sleep, and since I usually don't write it down, it dissolves overnight and is gone by morning. I'm going to try sleeping with a notebook by the bed so I can write down any half-baked ideas I think might make a good story. Which leads me to this:

My criteria for a story are pretty much* as follows.
1. It should advance the characterization of the individuals in the story. That means, no one-sided characterizations-- Buffy's not just an athlete, or not just a cute college coed, or not just a shrewish older sister, she's all kinds of things with all kinds of motivations. I try to reflect the many facets of the characters in my stories.
2. It should address something that wasn't in a show. I've read some fics that claimed to be "filling in a blank" that an episode left, and were pages of prose based on the transcribed teleplay, with two lines added back in. No lie. That's not creative writing, that's adjusting what happened to suit you. I like the stuff that gets in-depth. Going back to X-Files, say -- by the way, you should just take it for granted that if a show has a potential 'ship, I'm a shipper. Carol and Ed on "Ed," Mulder and Scully -- OF COURSE! --, Sam and the blonde Republican on "The West Wing" (I just started watching a couple of weeks ago, I don't have all the names down yet, okay?), et cetera. -- Going back to X-Files, say you think that Mulder and Scully have been secretly snuggling since the episode "Millennium." Well, it wasn't happening on screen, so where was it happening? That's the kind of fanfic I like. Episode-quality stories that help fill in the blanks.
3. It shouldn't be contrived. I like the idea of Spikey-redemption as much as any other BAPS member, but if he's going to see the light, he has to do it for a reason. He isn't just going to wake up one morning and say, "Hmm, this morning, I think I shall do six good deeds before bringing flowers to the fair Buffy." It's all about the motivation, baby.
I guess that's most of the story-related requirements I have. I do try to write it so that the first couple of paragraphs of a story or of a section really set a tone, so that hopefully the reader will be intrigued enough to continue. (I've read some real dreary introductions that turned out to be good stories, but I'd like to think that my good story has a good intro, too.) I try to avoid using phrases like "the brown-haired soldier" or "the tall vampire" because I think they're tacky, but sometimes I slip them in anyway from force of habit or just to get some variety other than alternating between the character's name and "he" or "she". Stephen King infected me with a fear of adverbs, too, after reading his book On Writing, and I now guilt myself with every single adverb I can't talk myself out of. Which seems to be rather a lot. I don't like transcribing accents -- "The Scotsman said, 'Aye, th' lasses're try'n'a get onna harse with nae saddle! They'll be kilt fer sure!'" or "''Ey thar, whar' ya goin' with that, missy,' the bandit demanded of his hostage. 'Sitchurself down or ya'll make me git mean! An' I'm the thund'rin' meanest bandit in these here parts!'" I like to rely on description, and the fact that those of us who are reading fanfiction are already pretty familiar with the characters, to get things like that across. Though I'll indulge on occasion when I want to make sure it gets across in a certain way. Of course. :-) I guess it's sort of like using seasoning in your food -- too much and it tastes gross, but using spices judiciously can produce much better results than without.
* = Subject to change without notice. :-)

Okay, the cat sitting curled up purring in my lap is making me think about sleep. I'm outta here. Toodles. -- 5/20/2001

Arrrrrrrgh! I just watched a bunch of episodes of Quantum Leap on the Sci-Fi channel. Quantum Leap was one of my favorite shows in high school. But I never got to see the series finale for some reason. I remember a friend telling me "Sam didn't go home," and me being properly scandalised. But it didn't really sink in until I saw the episode just now. What do you mean, Dr. Sam Becket never returned home?! I don't care if you say he was controlling his own Leaps the entire time. He can't not ever go home! Come on! That's just mean!

I'm in a seven-year delayed denial phase right now. I'll get over it. Maybe. No! Screw that. What do you mean HE NEVER WENT HOME?!?!!! What's the matter with you people!

Dammit! How could they do that to poor Sam and (more to the point) the poor audience? Even Chris Carter let Mulder and Scully kiss on the show like, twice, and we all know he's just about as sadistic as it gets. (Season premieres in November, indeed. That's *also* just plain mean.) I mean, I think it's great that he Leaped in to convince Beth to not leave Al (because poor Al also deserved a little bit of karmic reward) but ... but what about Sam! Dammit. I'm going to write a letter to Bellisarius Productions and bitch them out a good one. I have all the ire in the world since, what, 1994, so I can really emote. God! I can't believe they didn't let Sam go home!

Grrrrrrr, Arrrrgh! -- 9/22/2001

I guess I officially recant my rant, above, about songfic. I'm writing a series named after a song, in which many stories have sort of theme songs that go with them. It would be hypocritical of me to maintain some sort of superior attitude about stories referencing songs, thus. BUT, I don't recant the bit about "girls just want to have fu-un!" Still eschew that stuff. Sorry. :)

I'm going to see if I can't get a bunch of these dangling stories resolved tonight, and completed on the site. I want to post them to FanFiction.Net, but for some reason I can't get to their site by name tonight, only by IP. I wonder what the deal is. Probably just my ISP. Oh well.

Tah. --21 October 2001

So I've just spent a week in lovely, wonderful, beautiful southern California. San Diego, to be precise. Oh man. I want to move here. I love Chicago; I really do, Chicago's home the way no other place has been home, but you would have to be certifiably insane to come to southern California in December and not at least think about whether or not you could live there. I'm dying. I was already thinking about taking an extended vacation this summer to drive across the country, and spend a week in California, and maybe from from LA to England because I really, REALLY want to attend the SFX Event (and not just because JM is going to be there; SFX is my favorite magazine in the world and I read every issue cover to cover the minute it arrives on my doorstep -- the photo captions alone are worth the cover price)... but frankly, kids, I just bought a kick-ass new Apple G4, and I don't know if I could afford to go to England. I've always wanted to go there, and the SFX Event is a darned good reason, but ... well, let's just say I'm carrying a balance on three credit cards now, and even if much of it is this conference I'm attending that will get paid off as soon as I get my work expense checks, I'm thinking, paying property taxes probably more important than fantasy vacation of my dreams. Sigh. Reality really does bite.

So anyways, news! Not really important news, but if you're here and reading this (geez, you need to get out more :-) I figure maybe you'd care. So I mentioned previously my Stephen King-inspired fear of adverbs. I got to thinking, while writing my as-yet untitled sequel to Sneak, why the hell are adverbs so bad, anyways? I couldn't remember why he argued against them so much, just that he had. So I'm reading On Writing again, and I just got through the adverb section. 1. Turns out it's not just adverbs, but it's also adverbial phrases, so stuff like "with a sly grin" is right out, too. 2. What are you supposed to do if you're like me and rather fond of your adverbs? You're supposed to get the sense which you would otherwise be conveying via adverb across in your prose. So if you have someone arguing, for example, it shouldn't be necessary to have your heroine scream angrily or your hero clamp his lips together stubbornly. Your reader should be able to figure out that when your heroine is screaming, it's because she's bloody well pissed off and ready to throw something at the hero's head. If, on the other hand, the reader needs to be told that she's angry, you've failed in the preceding description. This is not as easy as it sounds! Man oh man, I am trying so hard, but .... 3. The last SK advice I intend to treat as the word of god ('cause, well, he is...) is his advice to set a goal of quantity of writing and stick to it, come hell or high water. Like, 'every day I will write two pages,' or 'each weekday I'll spend two hours writing.' It seems that the only time I ever turn anything out is when I have a block of time to think about it -- not just when I get an idea, because I get those with some frequency (and had, by the end of this semester, pretty much abandoned notetaking in my Thursday evening 4-hour computer class (LAAAAAAME to the Nth) in favor of stream-of-consciousness brainstorming a fic), but when I trap myself with the computer in some location with the intention of turning something out. I mean, hey! two weeks ago I turned out two fics in one day, because I was on a train all day and rocking out to my CDs with my PowerBook. I'm somewhat disappointed I haven't gotten anything accomplished this week, but I am here for work and all so I suppose that might have something to do with it. And of course, California. Who wants to be trapped in a lame hotel room (decor style: Coventry Love Shack) when you could be taking the el to Tijuana? (I did that today. It wasn't the el, I grant you, it was the San Diego trolley, but it *did* terminate right next to the border, so I took public transportation to another country and that just rocks. A word of advice for anyone else planning to do the same, though: getting into Mexico is easy -- I went through a turnstile, stopped at the tourist booth to get a map, went through another turnstile and poof, new country, but getting back in to the States took a lot of line-standing and patience. I was never so happy to have a new book and comfy shoes with me as I was this afternoon. But I digress. A whole lot!) So I like California a whole lot. I might take that road trip after all, and see what there is to be seen about L.A., and San Francisco. And Sunnyvale. I can't skip a town one letter off from being Sunnydale, after all. :-)

well, I'm off. Going to try and put some quality time in with my fics tonight, maybe see if I can get some stuff wrapped up. Oh, btw, I now understand why some people make comments about writing solely for feedback. It's fricking addictive. I posted those three stories to FanFiction.net and went back every day for a week to see if I'd gotten any new reviews. And I got such warm fuzzies from them all! Side effect: I'm more interested in reviewing other people now that I know the warm fuzzies you get as an author. :)

--12/7/01, san diego california

Okay, so I got my new G4 all hooked up and I'm AirPort'ing my little wireless network around my house, which is pretty cool, except our iMac doesn't want to see the AirPort base station even though it's only 15 feet away, but... Anyways, I got the G4 all pretty and booted up into OSX, which is really slick. I mean, the GUI is really polished and sleek. And the computer itself is a work of art. The mouse is perfectly transparent Lucite around a black center plastic bit that hides the circuit board, with a white Apple logo printed on it. (And it's a normal elongated mouse again, so it's not getting all twisted in your hand like the round iMac mouse), and the keyboard is the same perfectly clear Lucite (and it's a full-size keyboard, also unlike the iMac). The only thing is, I'm now all used to my iMac and PowerBook keyboards, with the teeny half-height arrow keys and escape key, etc, and also, they put the DVD drive eject button on the keyboard right where the PageDown key is on the iMac keyboard. Which is kind of disconcerting when you're sitting there reading fic, 'cause you go to hit PgDn and it spits your CD out at you. Anyways, the computer itself is really neat. It's the same form as the bondi G3s, but it's graphite opaque plastic with the same Lucite over it, and it's so *shiny* and pretty! And, if you work with computers at all, you have got to respect the internal layout of the case. You unhook the clip on the side and then the whole side folds down, with the motherboard laying parallel to the floor for you to work on, with plenty of room to get at the internal drives. You just gotta like that. Especially if you're like me and once killed your PowerMac 8500 by popping a tiny little capacitor off the motherboard while trying to install memory -- see, on the old 8500, you had to physically remove the entire motherboard from the case, after removing the CPU (which was INconveniently mounted on a daughtercard that plugged into the motherboard), just to add memory. It was a real headache. And apparently I brushed the motherboard against the edge of the desk, snapped off the little capacitor, and poof! $800 new motherboard. It still hurts to think of it.

So anyways! I was saying, or at least I was intending to say, I got a chance to see how my site looks under OSX now. The only problem is this: see, Apple computers are expensive, and they appear to have stopped selling CRTs and are selling exclusively those lovely LCD flatpanel displays, which are also frickin' expensive. So I could only afford to buy the computer, and I'm saving up for a new display. Meantime, I'm using this crappy old 15" PC monitor we had just laying around. The G4 snickered at me. I swear to you I heard it laughing. I booted it up the first time, and it loaded OS9, and then refused to run the Setup Assistant because my monitor wasn't good enough. 800x600 is crap, I freely admit it (especially for a machine which is sold with an accompanying $2599 22" widescreen flatpanel display -- oh, I drool for you), but I slunk off with my tail between my legs in embarassment after that. So, in a nutshell, it looks pretty dreck with IE under OSX. The fonts are all big and the alignment's wonky, and my iMac won't talk to the network anymore so I can't check the design there until we get that working again so I apologize if it looks like crap today. I had a couple changes I had to make to the main index page and since I won't be able to check it on a PC until tomorrow at work, it'll just have to be potentially-ugly until tomorrow. Oh yeah, and it looks *real* crappy in Netscape under Solaris, for some reason. The fonts are tiny there, about half the time, and the other half the time they're normal. God knows why. I use a base font size definition and only change the point size in a couple of spots, for stuff like the webrings. See, this is why Nik never wanted to grow up and be a web designer. Do this stuff all day, I'd be completely bald from yanking my hair out in frustration.

Oh! In other news, check this out. I'm so flattered. Someone added me to a big links page and invited me to join their web ring. How neat is that? Someone liked my dinky little page well enough that they wanted me to know they put me on their site. I'm all warm and fuzzy. And my counter is going up! Way up! Like over 150 hits in the past few days. I was sitting there working on the tables on the index page, trying to make everything look right, and every time I'd redraw the page to see how it looked, the counter would have gone up. That's so neat to watch. I just love my web counter. :)

One thing, I wanted to check something and I noticed that, for some reason, my HTML Joan and Randy story isn't drawing correctly. It's like it's got three columns in the first row of the table, and Title is bumped over to the right. It's weird-looking. So I went to go check the HTML, and Angelfire's editor truncated the body text! I was afraid to work on it and have it maybe truncate the story. I mean, I have backups (of course) but it's a PITA to get it looking right in my HTML template so I don't want to mess it up if I can avoid it. Maybe it's just a temporary glitch, like their ad banner thing is throwing my table off. I'll try checking it tomorrow to see if it's fixed. If it's ugly when you go look at it, sorry. :( I did try to fix it, at least ....

OK, that's about all for tonight. I have got to get some sleep. I'm still on Pacific Time only my alarm goes off at Central Time and I gotta tell you, that seriously SUCKS.

--11 December, Chicago, IL