Now Playing: III-XV. Desperate Times And Desperate Measures, Pt. 1

Why Vader calls the 501st clones in Fortune's Rule by their CC/CT numbers

One of the trickier things I've had to decide for Fortune's Rule is how Vader should address the clones who are still in the Imperial 501st. Although I was tempted to have him use their names, I ended up having him call them by their CC/CT numbers. It still feels weird and clunky, but it seemed like maybe he would actually do that because Anakin would of course refer to the clones by name. So, in distancing himself from his life as Anakin Skywalker, Vader might deliberately choose to do the un-Anakin-like thing and call the clones by their numbers.

The nightmare that is AO3 tagging

Okay, so maybe that's being just a touch dramatic. Seriously, though, it seems like there's a lot of tagging advice on Reddit, etc., that talks about not using a lot of tags, only tagging the really major characters, keeping the tags relevant and useful for sorting, and all that. I've kind of freaked myself by reading those conversations, and then looking at my own fic like... oh... dear... you have so many tags... do people find that obnoxious?

I dunno. Personally, I love all the fun, silly, casual, chatty, cracky, creative tags that authors use. Maybe they're not much good for sorting, but they make me smile. I don't mind reading through a huge block of tags, because apparently mine is a bit of a magpie brain, but instead of shiny things, it wants words. Plus, when there are a lot of tags, there's that much more opportunity to find a fun one!

It's also usually nice when there are a lot of characters tagged, because then I can see who all is in the story, not just the MCs. Same goes for relationships. When it comes to tagging my own fic, of course, I'm like, "Major characters? Important relationships? But they're all important! I want to tag them all!"

So, I totally don't blame people who do this as well. And if you prefer to be efficient and tidy, that works, too. Seems like, it's your story, and you know how you want to present it, so why not tag away as you see fit?

**Now that I think of it, though, there could be one very valid caveat to this perspective. Do the majority of AO3 tagwranglers find it frustrating to deal with the zany, one-off tags?

The Prosaic, Now-Perennial Paper

This started out as a vocabulary assignment way back in middle school, with the article "Venerable Citizen Exonerated: A Follow-Up to 'Mr. P.G. Tips in Hot Water.'" Then I ended up continuing it into a whole mini-newspaper personifying various teas in the kitchen, and their society and escapades. It's been an off-and-on project over... egads, the last ten years, I think. (Sheesh!) Anyway, thought I'd post the more recent issues of the paper (those from the past 3 years). The earlier ones are a bit sillier, the ads aren't as well-done, and the quality of the writing is lower.

Do you ever have a writing idea that you're pretty meh about, and you're not sure you can make it work, and you're beginning to think you should just forget about it... but then you scribble out one scene, just to mess around... and it's adorable, it just works so well, it's like magic, and then you can't bear the idea of these characters not getting this scene, so you have to include it? And because you have to have that one scene, you're now totally sold on the idea that seemed meh just minutes before?

Lately, I've been procrastinating writing a tricky bit of Fortunate's Rule wanting to draw a scene where Ahsoka has been knighted, and Anakin has taken on Starkiller as his second padawan.

This drawing began as a pencil sketch on a light day at work. (On printer paper. With a crappy eraser. It was painful.) And then I photographed the sketch, loaded the pic in Krita, and colored over it. Then found a Varykino pic to go off of for the background, since the trio seemed to require one.

I'm fairly happy with it! Really pleased with the shading on the clothes, and with Ahsoka's lekku in general. Shading Anakin's face was incredibly trying for some reason, however, and I'm not at all sure that he looks ~10 years older than in TCW.

Oh, and Krita has this cool impasto brush that made filling in the gravel on the patio so easy! There's also a nice sponge brush that made the water similarly simple.

(See below for OG sketch and pose reference credit.)

The OG sketch:

Based off of this pose reference that I found on Pinterest, by mellon_soup.

Now playing: III-VI, The New Way of Things

In which Obi-Wan and Padmé contemplate, Shili seeks to join the Rebellion, Piett decides to befriend a homicidal child, and Vader faces his Master after the disaster that was Wrea.

hey so fun question, Vibe wise, Palpatine is dealing with a rebellion that is actually Wildly more competent/coherent out of the gate in a way? Ignoring just Anakin/Vader Power aand skill as a warrior, the fact that in sheer military experience Vader blew literally everyone else left out of the water did so much heavy lifting at first when folks are scrambling for years. reason why I enjoyed such things as them stealing Venerators and Super Charging them up because they KNOW their needs.

Yeah, I'd say he is! In this AU, we've got Padmé alive and working behind the scenes during the first couple of years of the rebellion, which was probably a major contributor in and of itself. She has a political motivation to take back the galaxy from an autocratic Emperor, but she also has a very personal motivation to take down Palpatine. So, she would have really pushed for things to get done, for alliances to be made and intelligence networks to developed. Add to that, then, the fact that she and Obi-Wan were both staying with the Larses, so she was able to pull him into the rebellion effort; there was probably a whole bunch of strategic input that came out of that collaboration, e.g. things like the Venator retrofitting program, and a more organized approach to the whole rebellion thing in general, especially with regard to the military angle. Meanwhile, Rex and Ahsoka's work regarding finding/dechipping/helping/recruiting clones post-Order 66 would have helped with strategy and organization as well, taking advantage of the clones' years of military training and wartime experience.

The Empire still has far more resources, in terms of money, ships, weapons, and recruits/conscripts, but the Rebellion in this AU does have a pretty solid foundation when it comes to experience and tactics, and they're able to use their personnel's experience and ingenuity to adapt and make the most out of their limited resources. They still have to be careful—they can't just take on the Empire in all-out war at this point—but they're in a much better position overall, with a unified movement already underway, instead of a scattering of independent rebel cells.

Where to begin?

Fortune's Rule. It's an appropriate title in more ways than one.

Two years ago, I would have laughed myself silly at the very notion that I might ever write a Star Wars fanfic.  Or maybe just looked askance at whoever had made such an appalling suggestion.  Then I saw Clone Wars.  And now, almost seventy thousand words later, I've finally achieved a secret wish of over ten years' duration—to write a novel's worth of continuous story.  (A novel's worth, not a novel, because ye gods, this thing is far from complete!)

It's really weird.

Anyway, before I start posting about writing and anything else that strikes my fancy, I just wanted to say thank you ever so much!! to all the AO3 users who have read/kudo'd/commented on/subscribed to/bookmarked this pet project of mine, as well as to my brother and my mom/moral support/editor/typo sieve.  Fortune's Rule is by far the longest, most detailed, most in-depth story I have ever written, and there's no way in the world that it would have come this far without all of you! So, thank you!!!

Inspired by a "redraw this as your ship" screenshot I saw on Pinterest, and while I wouldn't exactly call this my ship, I thought it would make for a fun, dramatic scene!

And I'm discovering that I be slightly addicted to drawing Rebel graffiti in aurebesh.

Aurebesh font files downloaded from AurekFonts, Boba Fonts, and Pixel Sagas on fontspace.com

Sometimes, being a writer is taking a 30-minute detour from writing to go on a wild goose chase after a word you're pretty sure maybe hopefully exists, and dragging in all the word-nerds in your family to help along the way, because the thesaurus has utterly failed you.

And all you can tell them about the identity of this missing word is, "it's somewhere between castigated and in the doghouse, and kind of a cousin to disgraced."

Because, of course, you only have the breath of a shadow of a ghost of whatever-this-word-might-be lurking in some back alleyway deep in your brain, and you can't even remember what letter it starts with. If it really does exist at all, which, after three of your fellow word-nerds fail to identify it, you're beginning to question.

We eventually found the word, by the way. After a few wrong turns past chastened, chastised, discredited, and besmirched, we came upon abased, and concluded it to be our elusive quarry.

The crowning absurdity in all of this? I just looked up disgraced again in the thesaurus. And there was abased, not quite halfway down the list. (My apologies to the thesaurus. It seems I need to read more carefully in future.) But at least we all got a nice, little linguistic evening stroll.