Failure isn't all bad. It's the only way we ever learn about stuff. I was mulling over some Daria projects started here that did not pan out as I had hoped. I don't mean unfinished fanfiction, which will indeed get finished one day. I was thinking of other things, poking around wondering how they could have been made better.Like LATIFA.
The idea behind Lovestruck Atomic Teenage Invaders from Mars was to set up a silly shared-world background, entirely derived from bits and pieces of official Daria material (suitably mangled), offering Lawndale High as a center for science-fiction and fantasy hijinks of the comic variety. I added something about interstellar berserkers, and that part probably should have been taken out (wasn't funny, sort of irrrelevant to concept), but the rest of the background was to inspire writers to create wacky tales about Daria and Jane and company running amok around the galaxy or wherever the author wished them to go.
LATIFA did not take off like Daylight did. Daylight blew out of here like a Saturn V, but LATIFA did not even leave the runway. Its engines coughed a little, a few passengers got on but then got off, and LATIFA was soon pushed off to the side to make room for faster traffic.
I have pondered on the difference between LATIFA and Daylight. Was comedy less appealing than drama and angst and The End of the World in a Different Way? Or could I have put LATIFA together better, made it more fun and attractive? Not sure. LATIFA is still there and won't be taken down, just in case someone buys a ticket for it. It is hoped that the two webpages about it are at least entertaining. Lots of sound bites. Still wondering how to revive it.
More failures later. Stay tuned.
14 comments:
For me, it was simply the setting that kept me from writing in LATIFA. I don't really have much interest in writing in sci-fi space settings. I can get into space stories in a more current-day setting, like Daria and Jane Go To The Moon, but the far future never really held much interest for me. Post-Apocalyptic settings, on the other hand, are right up my alley.
So would you say LATIFA was more like a Delta Clipper, or an N-1, then? ;)
I remember when I first read the LATIFA page, you mentioned how you'd tell us more about the Swarm later. But you never did. :(
Maybe if you do a write-up of the Swarm and the hows and whys it purees planets, people will become a lot more interested. (Even if they are a few centuries off from contemporary Daria).
I thought it was a cool idea, I just have too many projects going right now as it is.
:p
Well, you did a better job of selling Daylight. I mean, everyone was aware of it from before Day One. This is the first time I noticed that LATIFA was supposed to be a shared-world setting.
When I have some time (after hell week at work and the Daria Lies About the Kiss story I'm in the middle of), maybe I can take a hack at it.
It's funny in a way that I knew what I wanted to do with LATIFA, but wasn't sure how to do it. I wanted a setting like R. Talsorian's "Teenagers from Outer Space" RPG, if anyone remembers that game. There were ways to bring it out using all sorts of alter egos, touched-up pictures, sound bites, fan art, and so on.
I still don't know if the Swarm was a good idea, which was what kept me from finishing that part. I can see where that delay would have slowed response to the setting.
So would you say LATIFA was more like a Delta Clipper, or an N-1, then? -- Well... you remember those old black-and-white movies of people trying to build airplanes, and they all failed miserably and crashed? There you are. I still think the idea has merit, but need to clean it up and set it straight.
I'm not quite sure LATIFA could work without the Swarm, actually. With Earth getting a constant influx of extraterrestrial technology and refugees, there's not much that could be the driving force. Perhaps if the galaxy at large was an anarcho-capitalistic war zone, with alien corporations locked in never-ending conflict with one another across the cosmos for control of resources, which incidentally uproots billions of sentients from their homeworlds and forces them to scatter to parts unknown (i.e. Earth). It could easily supplant the Swarm and would fit in much more easily with the rest of the whole goofy sci-fi adventures theme. (Just look at the Vogons, for example).
I'll be honest. I just couldn't find LATIFA when I tried to write the story I had in mind. It was a Roswell TV series rip off with Daria and Jane being Max and Liz.
I was looking forward to a few stories to inspire me.
After I wrote a few Daylight stories, I realized that I had too many irons in the fire. I knew I could write one or the other, but not both.
I think Cinc's experience probably pinpoints the problem closer than any other. You released the two proposals way too close together, and fell victim to idea exhaustion. Leaving a gap of a year or so between universe ideas would have allowed the initial Daybreak enthusiasm to wear itself out and leave people wanting new ideas; instead, LATIFA just got lost in DB's glow.
Mr. Smith and CINC hit it on the head; also, there was just something about Daylight that really inspired me. I mean, you could paint as broad or as small a canvass as you wanted, and (for me) other pluses for Daylight was that I could run with ideas that I've wanted to try with the characters (but couldn't in the mainstream stories), and that I can also flesh out secondary characters without doing a disservice to the main Daria characters. For me, Daylight has been a big boost for making story for secondary characters like The Alliance and Arcana; the latter has started moving up in status in my LLH stories (actually pushing my Fatal Five storyline back), and this wouldn't have happened without Daylight.
There have been some incredible stories in the series that have given amazing character development; Disco316's 'When The Ball Dropped' is a perfect example, as Legendeld's work about Daria and Quinn as a married couple. Someone else did a piece about Mystik Spiral members and their attempting to move forward, and even the one-shots work well. Daylight works so well, in my opinion, because the setting allows the characters to remain the characters that we've always known and cared for, but totally and forever sets them outside of their zones of comfort and forces them to act in new and unusual ways that allow us to see them in ways we've never seen them before.
It's even allowed other story ideas to blossom that act as fodder for more stories in other continuums; Recruitment Day, by the bug guy, has given me ideas for other fics.
Maybe if LATIFA had come along, say, this fall or winter, I might have been able to get into it, but 'too many irons' seems to be my excuse, too.
I was proud of Daylight because it had a semi-original angle. When I started it I hadn't realized all of the bizarre secondary effects that would result from a massive series of flares, like the super-electrical charges forming on long metallic items. Funny now to see that the movie "Knowing" ends with a solar flare, but not in the way such flares usually occur. (It's a Hollywood flare.) I liked my idea better. More angst!
Still like LATIFA, though. I might spruce it up someday, add one more page about the Swarm. I won't take it down; it was too much fun to create.
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