emef: daisy passed out at the typewriter (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] emef at 01:19pm on 21/01/2019
I've heard that people have been doing a lot of decluttering lately! So have I. I've been sorting through the notes on the note-taking app on my phone. There are a lot of them - the oldest one is from Christmas 2013.

Some of the notes are like "try charcoal for weird smells" or "sleep" but most of them, particularly the older ones, are quotes, plot ideas, chunks of dialogue, etc, probably because, unlike to-do lists or anything with a deadline, I didn't know what to do with them. So I just left them there.

Sorting through old story notes gets funnier the further back I go because the older they are, the likelier I am to have no memory of them. There was an entire Elementary fic I'd forgotten about! And about five times more Oz fic notes than I remembered.

OH OH not the topic of this post but THAT REMINDS ME: the hypothetical fic meme is still ongoing! Give me a title if you haven't already.

Ok anyway here's why I'm posting now: apparently, in February 2014, I had an idea for an AMAZING detective story concept, wrote it down, and immediately forgot about it. (Well, I say amazing. Amazing to me.) Here's what I wrote:

A detective story about a detective whose big personal issue is procrastination. Like - they don't go around hunting in crime scenes on their off hours; they have trouble getting up from their sofa.

"But Emef," I hear you saying, "isn't that Mycroft Holmes from the books?" And you're right, it is, but (1) I think I was actually thinking of a kind of apathy rather than procrastination, (2) Mycroft is neither the hero nor the narrator, (3) usually that kind of personality trait is a way to give characters an identity and make them feel real; it *might* be a plot point at some stage but most of the time it isn't. So WHAT IF instead of that, the apathy - which I'm thinking of as a sort of... not so much a personality trait as a result of the kind of social conditioning that makes you feel like nothing you do will have any real impact - was the actual limiting factor in the story? Like, like the malaise of modernity is the real enemy.

*swishes cape* THIS IS MY ART

Ok that's it that's the post! Hope everybody's well. <3 <3 <3
There are 3 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
tei: Rabbit from the Garden of Earthly Delights (Default)
posted by [personal profile] tei at 08:33pm on 21/01/2019
Oh... man. Well, now that idea+ Mycroft is in my head, I really do want a version of him where he's just the poster child for millennial burnout. And where he maybe does occasionally get around to solving a crime but only in the panicked whirlwind of of-shit-I-told-someone-I-would-do-this-I-suck-so-much that is the end stages of procrastination.
emef: daisy passed out at the typewriter (Default)
posted by [personal profile] emef at 08:51pm on 21/01/2019
Ok that is an amazing idea (and please take it and run with it btw!!) BUT I feel compelled to add that part of me wants to remove the I-suck-so-much part? Or... maybe that's not what I mean. And, come to think of it, maybe you had the same idea. It's just - when I picture it, the story places the blame squarely on the context that creates a certain kind of apathy, and not on the person experiencing the apathy. So maybe this Mycroft thinks "ugh I suck so much" to himself, but the narrator is definitely meant to think to themselves "noooooooooooo Mycroft IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT."

...I've been thinking about that "How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation" buzzfeed piece a lot.
tei: Rabbit from the Garden of Earthly Delights (Default)
posted by [personal profile] tei at 08:59pm on 21/01/2019
OH yes absolutely! I guess the "I suck so much" part is, for me, reflective of how I usually feel in those kinds of situations, where yes absolutely on a larger social level there are good reasons that my life is not arranged to make doing things that I know I want and need to do easier to do on a workable time frame, because YES to everything in that buzzfeed piece. But then once you're actually in the frantic end state of procrastination, one of the features of it is that it always feels like not just your fault but your moral and, like, lifestyle failing.

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