Aug. 12th, 2020

characterization, i will fight anyone on this

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rederiswrites https://rederiswrites.tumblr.com/post/178903733436/i-will-never-get-tired-of-of-geralt-being-kind-and :

I will never get tired of of Geralt being kind and gentle and patient and respectful with small children and confused trolls and terrified women and godlings and hideous cursed creatures and enchanted pigs and basically anyone vulnerable or disadvantaged.

of vengerburg, yennefer pegs jaskier, meet death sitting, the witcher

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Somewhere in my neighborhood someone’s car alarm went off at like 4am. Long enough that I slowly came out of sleep into groggy half-dreaming and thence to wakefulness. It shut off, and I lay there pondering things a while, and slid back off into sleep.

And then it went off again, at like, 4:45, so.

I knew I wouldn’t fall back asleep, but I wasn’t going to get out of bed until the opening scene of this fic sort of came to me, so, I guess I do have one more Witcher fic in the Ancient Sea timeline to do.

Yennefer wasn’t a cottage-in-the-woods kind of witch. She could admire the aesthetic, certainly, and there was a quaint folkloric charm to it, but she was much more a city sorceress, and so instead she had a tasteful two-story townhouse with a retail front downstairs and a workshop in the back and a nice apartment upstairs for her to live in. She didn’t have a garden, didn’t do any cooking, didn’t have any chickens of her own, no livestock, no kitchen to speak of. Her neighbors were a barber shop on one side and a tailor’s shop on the other, and there was a tavern two doors down that delivered her meals to her when she was in residence so she never had to waste her own time on anything domestic.

The fic has a spoilery working title about Dandelion but I know it’s mostly Yennefer-centric because I need more of her, so. We’ll see where it goes but all I have so far is Yennefer the city witch sexually torturing Jaskier until he cries, and I figure that’s all anyone could really ask for as an opener. (Actually, the opener is that she has just done this and now he’s crying and she’s lying there being both pleased with herself and solicitous of him. Listen I don’t actually know what my id is up to either.)

It’s more useful than either excoriating myself over nothing original I write being any good, or making little fantasy lists of the things I would comfort-buy myself if I ever got paid any actual money for any of the things I do in my life.

(My current weird obsession is that I would buy 18th-c tailoring books https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com/products/the-workmans-guide-to-tailoring-stitches-and-techniques-by-a-tailor?pr_prod_strat=collection_fallback&pr_rec_pid=4463788589143&pr_ref_pid=4463788556375&pr_seq=uniform and all of the twill tape in the world. I’m not sure why, that’s just what’s currently preoccupying me. I had set aside a work giftcard to buy myself frivolous things to keep me sane and I did buy one (1) totally unnecessary necklace with it but then I lost my nerve and spent the rest on first aid supplies and toilet paper just before it was set to expire, so. There’s no point in trying to have nice things if you’re too anxious to be able to enjoy them.)

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today’s jam is The Botanist, from Sleep’s 2018 album The Sciences. No lyrics, just a really heavy jam.

(Yes, Sleep is the band that did Dopesmoker, the album that’s a single one-hour track about being super fucking high that I definitely wrote an MCU snippet about in like 2015 but fucked if i can find that on Tumblr all these years later. Listen sometimes you need some really heavy sludgy stoner metal with what I think a critic once described as “bludgeoning riffs” and I thought that was such a good phrase I kept it.)

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So I gotta talk to one of the company owners, who does the payroll, about how I worked like 30 hours in July and didn’t get a paycheck for any of it. (I went in and found my records in the clock in/out system so I can verify it was 30.45 hrs exactly.) (he also has access to this system!) (I guess he did not notice when he pulled the reports, that I was there, that I had worked, despite it having been discussed with him. I dunno!)

I called and the number to their location only works intermittently, took me about an hour of occasional redialing to get through. But I got through, and talked to the guy in the shipping department.

I asked about the co-owner. “Ah, nah,” he said, “he’s not in, it’s a golf day.”

I tell you what, that makes a girl feel cherished. (Can I leave him a message? Eh prolly he won’t get it though so nah just call back maybe tomorrow.)

I will never actually receive any money again in my life. I’m just. Going to lie here for a while. It doesn’t matter that I’m on the clock.

If you’re bad enough at advocating for yourself, every position can be a volunteer position!

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astroloquacious https://astroloquacious.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “replies and asks and such” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/626198592582008832/replies-and-asks-and-such

because the book in your head isn’t REAL or CONCRETE and is therefore incapable of having flaws. And being so upset at the flaws that you don’t write means you aren’t improving. To paraphrase Ira Glass, the only way to get your work up to the quality of your taste is to first produce a lot of shit. Also I was 100% right and please tell me more about dumbass paladins and the incredibly exasperated handlers who love them. Lawful Stupids & Lawful Assholes are the best.

I just gotta address one thing in this very sweet message (which I did enjoy but I feel deserves a response!), which is that the only way to get your work up to the quality of your taste is to first produce a lot of shit –

I have written literally a million words of drafts of this novel, so far; I started work on it in 2003.

Please believe me, the problem with this novel, and all of them, is not that I have not produced a lot of shit already.

It has taught me a lot of things! it sure has! I learned close 3rd POV when I threw away the entire third draft of the book and started from scratch completely rewriting it in 1st person so that I could then re-translate it to 3rd person. It was 200,000 words long at the time and I did a complete retype with no copy-pasting, both times. (That was approximately 2004-5, I think, though the file dates aren’t definitive since I’ve switched computers a couple of times since then.)

I just. Haven’t made a full coherent draft any of those times, and took all these breaks to write fanfic instead so I could get some feedback (and in the midst of that, took breaks from fanfic to not write at all, which did rather bad things to my psyche, but not really worse things than spending my life getting laughed at for wanting to write a novel, really; you gotta balance this shit).

But it’s not that I lack faith or confidence or haven’t practiced. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot of time burning myself to acquire some skill and it’s hard to bravely plunge back in again, and by now I’m extremely skeptical of that novel ever being anything worth anything on its own as opposed to an object lesson in The Way Not To Do It.

Which was why I was also working on other unrelated novels… But anyway, I just felt that should get a response. Because yes! as always, the correct answer to any worries about writing is generally, write more, but in this specific case, it can safely be said that I did try that one. It might be time for me to attempt something else, like maybe supportive beta readers or like, somebody with some concept of how an edit ought to work, but those aren’t things I know much about and I’ve been so alone for so long.

This is the novel, in fact, that taught me the valuable life lesson that Nobody Cares About Your Novel, now that I contemplate it, so. I mean, there’s some scar tissue here. I’m working through it.

But yes, I’m fully aware, you gotta write a lot of shit before you write anything you’ll like, and in fact, I’ve done so.

(Actually I’m within 10,000 words of having published two million words on AO3 since I got an account there in 2012, now that I look. I think of the million as a benchmark because I remember a Neil Gaiman quote about something about writing a million words before finding one you like, and that was when I tallied up my words on the various drafts of this novel and came up with something over the million mark, so. At any rate, his advice was practice, and I’ve done that!)