Problems With Writing a Long Fic

[dragonlady7]

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seananmcguire http://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/183092350590/problems-with-writing-a-long-fic :

araceil http://araceil.tumblr.com/post/157245934915/problems-with-writing-a-long-fic :

cooliogirl101 http://cooliogirl101.tumblr.com/post/155484962076/problems-with-writing-a-long-fic :

“Wait, when did that happen again”

“Wait, which event happened first again”

rereads something I wrote five chapters ago I have no recollection of writing this

I know this one thing I’m referring back to happened somewhere between chapters 15 and 30 but I have no idea where, welp time to go back and dig through 100k worth of words

rereads first few chapters oh my god this is awful holy shit this is so bad did past-me really write this

Tries not to contradict myself and contradicts myself anyway

“What is even going on in this fic”

has detailed notesscene ideas

three days later

lost notescan’t remember scene ideaslost the will to livegained three pounds from stress snackingdehydrated from crying into keyboard

stares into the camera forever

The unexpected joy of having dedicated readers though is that sometimes you can just. give up. and post on your own blog. “I know Character X ate a cracker once, it was a thing,” you say. “But when was it, and was it a cracker with cheese, or peanut butter?”

and the ultimate blessing is when after a little bit you check back and somebody has written “it’s in chapter 2 of novel-length work no. 3 in series and it’s actually a graham cracker with peanut butter, crunchy if that matters” and then pastes the quote for you because they are a blessed angel.

The ultimate, ultimate blessing is when that sparks a comment thread where someone then pops up the thing you were actually thinking of, which was that Character Y was eating Cheez-its and teasing Character X by not giving her any in chapter 3 of shorter interstitial novella at #5 in series position, and they paste in the quote and yes that’s the incident you were going to refer back to but you hadn’t remembered that Y was involved.

oh my gosh. because sometimes I do reread my own shit, guys, but at this point for any given series that’s like, 15 hours of reading and I don’t have time to do that and write more. And a ctrl+f would NOT have turned up the Cheez-It incident because you’d forgotten you’d used the brand name.

Man that’s the ideal. I don’t want to be causes-me-problems level of famous but I totally, totally relish being at the critical-mass-of-people-paying-attention level where such a question doesn’t just sit there unanswered for the 22 hours it takes you to reread your whole series, not find the scene, then realize you missed shorter interstitial novella at #5 in series position and annoyedly skim it and almost miss the Cheez-Its thing and then finally be like no that can’t be it but then it maybe is and why do you do this anyway? What’s this all for? What was the point you were going to make? You don’t remember why you cared about the crackers, now.

anyway.

tl;dr thanks for reading.