dragonlady7

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msilverstar https://msilverstar.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” …” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/626267556452401152/astroloquacious-replied-to-your-post-replies

Maybe it’s your unpublished first novel and you should move on to the next?

I have moved on, many times, and have circled back around to it because it is a story I want to tell and care about deeply. I think there’s a story in it I ought to tell, but I am also aware that I’m fairly mired in it– however, the only reason it’s being discussed at all is that I picked it up briefly because I spent a year slogging through a Brand New Idea that also bogged down into bullshit after I wrote about ¾ of a draft and it failed to develop a plot.

So methinks it’s not that particular novel that’s the problem, somehow.

mikkeneko https://mikkeneko.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” …” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/626267556452401152/astroloquacious-replied-to-your-post-replies

I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, but: perhaps printing out your draft, the whole ass draft, and then typing it up again would let you sift out the good stuff

Mm I tried that. The waste of paper horrified me, so I used side-by-side computer windows and transcribed it entirely in the 600,000-word process I described earlier. What happens with that is that I often think “oh I could go this other completely different direction here instead” and then I have two completely incompatible storylines going, and you can repeat that infinitely and it’s super easy to get a million words of which there is not one coherent chunk for you to work on. So that’s super not an approach that’s useful for me, but I know it works for other people and I’m not knocking its validity– I just know, I’ve tried it, a bunch, that’s great for a really thorough final polish but utterly disastrous for a good way to winnow through a lot of ideas and pick just one.

astroloquacious https://astroloquacious.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” …” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/626267556452401152/astroloquacious-replied-to-your-post-replies

WOW, that’s a lot! I rescind that particular bit of advice, then, ha ha. Would you say that the issue is more a lack of feedback, then? You mention feeling like it needs editing– do you mean structural editing? Is it an issue of not feeling like the plot & characters are solid?

It’s that I have too many ideas, chase down more and more of them, and wind up with a huge fractured mass of story, mostly worldbuilding, with endless iterations of new reworkings of the old ideas, and they are measurably better with each iteration! but I can’t actually support a plot on them, they’re too fragmented.

My problem is largely that for most of my life I haven’t had anyone willing to read my writing, and it’s only made worse by my horrid rejection-sensitive dysphoria that means that if someone says a thing I wrote isn’t exactly perfect as-is then I have to lie on the floor in despair. I’m hoping I’m a bit more robust now as like a whole-ass adult but that’s debatable. In my real life, people think it’s funny that I think I can write a novel, and are super not interested in reading it, and that’s all I’ve had.

pantsy-fancy https://pantsy-fancy.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and asks and such” …” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/626267556452401152/astroloquacious-replied-to-your-post-replies

                   If if would help your original novel progress to

have an AO3 comment squad for cheerleading & encouragement as you write chapters, then sign me up!!! You are one of my favourite writers and I would love to read anything you’re working on. (Apologies if this is out of place–I realize I’m jumping into the middle of a conversation here)

Oh, you’re not out of place at all. Someone else (s_leary? maybe?) suggested I put this original work up locked on AO3, and I was under the impression that original works were prohibited on AO3, but now that one mentions it I guess they changed that. It’s not impossible! I just… don’t use AO3 as a place for concrit, so I’m not used to attempting that, but I guess I’ve had some good comment discussions there. But that’s why I was trying to post the mammoths thing on Dreamwidth back in 2019 (you know, before the earth’s crust had cooled, back in that epoch, so long ago), but so few people use DW it was rather difficult to really get any discussion going.

I could try AO3, I suppose!