isabeau, posts by tag: writing - LiveJournal

So I am actually writing stuff for ffw again. I am too lazy (and spoon-deficited) to track badge accomplishment stuff, but I have a personal goal of doing something for each challenge, preferably at least one within 24h of the challenge going up.

Prompt: Fortune
X-Men: Fanfic: Rituals. Old mutants in love. ffw or AO3

Star Wars TFA: fic drabble: Finding Wealth. (Hey, new fandom for me.) ffw or AO3

Prompt: On the Outside
Inside Out: fic: Identity. (Also a new fandom!) On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog... or a girl. ffw or AO3

Star Wars TFA: Fanfic: Lost. Finn isn't quite sure where he belongs. Spoilery. ffw or AO3

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

Trying to decide whether to do NaNo this year.

Pro: I would be likely to get something written; I would have a last gasp chance at not failing GYWO; and if I actually do some prep work in October I might manage to even get a novel out.

Con: I don't need more pressure on myself; November is always busy; doing NaNo would reduce my crochet output (which is already abysmal); I can't really type and don't have a good dictation setup yet so I'd be doing it entirely by ipad, which always makes writing slow.

I want to be a writer; I miss writing. But it's just way too awkward, and I don't know if it's how I want to spend my spoons right now.

Mrgh.

(But otoh, if I get plot and characters set up, and break it down into 30 chapters, that's only one chapter per day; easy, right?)

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

I am in the "gaaaah this SUCKS" phase of ficwriting.

(At least I'm over 1k words, even allowing for the fact that Scrivener counts html tags as words and so "<i>this</i>" counts as three words rather than one.)

(but seriously, this sucks so much omg)

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

My remix fic is currently 490 words of fic-sketch. Think I can expand on that?

*narrows eyes at fic*

ETA 5:43: Have re-consumed the necessary portions of canon. I have rants but it would give away fandom, heh.

ETA 6:38: File stands at 671 words now, and I'm, hmm, somewhere between a third and a quarter done. (I delete the sketch-paragraphs as I write their replacements, so it's not *quite* as pathetic progress as it seems.)

8:28: 962 words, and time to stop for today.

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

I *miss* writing.

The answer (some people say) is to write. But I can't. I try, and the words don't come, or I get tangled up in logistics, or something.

I have stuff that I want to work on, except that because I don't really get new plot ideas any more (which comes from not writing), most of it is stuff with existing writing, so on top of the process of writing being like *pulling teeth* only less fun, I have a paralyzing fear of breaking it.

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So much of that stuff is so old omg. I just ... I feel like such a failure at writing, but I can't remember how.

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

So a discussion on the internet (never a good start) about 50 Shades of Grey (run away) and whether or not there is rape content (spoiler: I was on the "oh hayull yes there is" side) has resurrected the "rewrite 50sog as a story about an asexual discovering her kinky side" bunny I had a few years back.

Except now my brain wants to write it as a lesbian relationship.

Yay?

#

In trying to dig up any 50soa journal entries, I found babblings about a year where the novel progressed from "unicorns that are totally not Companions" to "unicorns vs zombies" to "unicorns vs zombies and also unicorns vs evil murlocs" to "also a dragon" to "unicorns vs zombies plus unicorns vs evil murlocs plus zombies vs evil murlocs plus evil murlocs using plants as defense (hence plants vs zombies) plus unicorns vs dragons plus unicorns and dragons vs zombies omgwtfflail"

So I dug up the scrivener file for that year, and discovered a bunch of stuff that's decent, and a bunch of stuff that's salvagable, and a bunch of insecure flailings, and some major non sequiturs:

There need to be more mermaids in this book.

How do you get to mermaids?

Follow the hippos

And for the dragons I stole names from WoW because I could, and so then there's this:

"I haven't come this far to give up," Marek said fiercely. "Is there nothing we can do to change your mind?"

(you can go on a quest to kill six snow meese! ...and then repeat it daily, along with feeding sea lions that are too stupid to find the opposite sex, and gathering supplies that are two feet away from me, until we like you enough! ...wait, that's Kalu'ak, not one of the dragonflights. never mind all that.)

Also the characters abuse sarcasm:

"...bother," Marek said. "I suppose we could go take a vacation and party or something."

"That was sarcasm, wasn't it," Aniela said.

"Oh you know it was."

#

Now I just need to find the scrivener file from the year I started a YA story that is Totally Not X-Men (With A Disabled Protagonist).

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

The December talky meme still has plenty of dates open, if anyone wants to suggest stuff. (Date is optional, but I want topics pretty please)

NaNo: up to 45k. I don't quite know how. (It helps that some of what I'm doing is the autobiographical blog thing -- 20k words of that, and I'm not even through high school yet -- where the "plot" is fixed and the events have happened and it makes wording easier.) I am steadfastly *thhhhbbbbbppppttt*ing at the voices in my head telling me that some of what I'm doing (e.g. the days where the words I write are whines about my life, or the fact that I'm spreading the words out over multiple projects rather than a single novel) is Totally Cheating And Therefore Doesn't Count, because fuck that noise.

Not my words: Cognitive Trope Therapy. "the way it works is that when you have a [negative/depressive] thought ... then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil ... and if so then you don’t listen" Only there's more. Go read. It's useful and awesome.

Yuletide stuff: My assignment has a finished draft ... and it is *long*, for me. Not like 50k long, but like "third longest fic I have on AO3" long. Also "longest fic I have written for Yuletide" long. I am a little boggled. Also, I have finished four (!) treats, and have started two others, as well as the pinch hit I snagged. Boggle.

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

I am sort of behind on nano words (600-odd the last two days and less than 400 today, which is one day's "target" spread over three days)

BUT

a) my Yuletide assignment story is now the longest fic I've ever written for Yuletide, and it's still not done

b) I have written something every day so far

d) I have maintained my duolingo streak (445 days and counting)

e) most awesomely, my sister has successfully made a tiny human, and I got to go down and visit them today. It's the first time I've held a baby that I can recall, definitely the first time I've held one less than 24 hours old, and -- because I am totally not biased or anything -- she is the cutest baby ever omg. And tilting back with a nice warm sleepy burrito baby on my chest reminds me a lot of the way Suri used to be, except less purry and more squeaky.

f) I am terrified that she isn't going to like me, especially since I can't really physically interact with her at all, but this is more under the category of "stupid brain tricks" (and also "why I would make a really bad mother")

g) today's adventures are going to leave me with a major spoon deficit tomorrow, yikes. And it is hard to write without spoons

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

I have officially done Awesome Shit writingwise in the past three days. I am doing NaNoWriMo using three separate projects; Project A is a blogged autobiography thing, Project B is stories for Yuletide (assigned and treats), and Project C is miscellaneous other writing. Between the three of them I have gotten 5000 words so far, writing three out of three days. And better yet, I have actually written *and finished* two Yuletide treats, one posted to the archive already (fourth story in the collection lol) and the other too short to post yet but it's ready to go once the Madness archives open. And I have noted on my assignment, and fragments written of three other treats, as well as a list of like 35 more possibilities based on letters.

Let me re-emphasize this: I have *written and finished* two stories in the last three days.

I don't want to jinx anything, but starting with the poem I wrote a week or so ago? Not only has my creativity come back, but I even like what I'm producing. (Which is big, because the last few years, writing anything has been like pulling teeth, squeaked out reluctantly as close to deadline as possible and I've hated the end result.).

I very strongly suspect that this resurgence of creativity is not coincidental to the drug that I'm going off of (with psychdoc approval, don't worry). And if I can get my writing back -- if I can write, and have fun with it, and get stories out in a way that flows and feels good -- it is hella worth the fact that going off said drug is also giving me rebound insomnia.

Which is why I'm posting at 1:30am. Because hi, I'm pretty awake.

I am also having seriously ping-pongy mood swings in the last few days. Bouncing from "yay everything is awesome" to "I am a horrible person and woe and gloom" is ... quite frankly, exhausting. But I guess it's progress over constant copelessness.

It does, though, feel astonishingly vulnerable. Like the miasma of constant depression was somehow an armor or shell or something, and opening up more exposes my squishy innards.

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments

So last year my brain decided that what I really wanted to do was rewrite 50 Shades of Grey as "a story about a mostly-asexual girl discovering she has a thing for kink, except done with common sense and less skeevy rapiness". NaNo that year got derailed in part because of kitty health issues, and I don't know that I am ever really going to *write* this; but I keep coming back to it as a playground. Especially when I encounter (or seek out) recaps or commentaries or whatever of 50SOG.

I realized today, a sort of revelation while I was walking to chorus rehearsal, that a lot of what it comes back to is basically a theme of Girl Versus Cultural Narratives.

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But. Yeah.

Something.

Man, this all sounded more profound when I was revelating...

Cross-posted between DW (here) and LJ. Comments welcome in either place; DW has comments