dragonlady7

via https://ift.tt/2HAMrVc

seananmcguire:

araceil:

cooliogirl101:

“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 notes**scene ideas*

three days later

*lost notes**can’t remember scene ideas**lost the will to live**gained three pounds from stress snacking**dehydrated from crying into keyboard*

*stares into the camera forever*

*viciously attacks entire rest of life to wrestle free enough time to write for a while* *spends entire time struggling tooth and nail to write a scene* *within scene manages to hit a plot point that’s been building forever* *days later wrestles enough free time to go back and reread* *discovers that plot point already taken care of in a much earlier scene* *now you have two scenes for the same plot point and they are incompatible* *it will be weeks before you have time and mental space to try to reconcile them* *this novel is never fucking getting finished*

Some well-intentioned commenter on an old fic where this same thing happened to you years ago and you gave up: “Plz update!!!” 

Some well-intentioned inspirational essay: *examples of authors who wrote books while working full-time* “See anyone can do it!”

me: *dies unpublished*
(Your picture was not posted)

Called in because of this pulled muscle in my back. I'd left early yesterday-- well, I left at 3:30. And that was great, because I could go to the frozen custard place and buy ice cream sandwiches to have in the house, and then I could go to the butcher's shop and get stuffed pork chops so we could have them for dinner tonight, and then I still could get home before traffic was bad, and then I could get sat on by the cat.
The muscle in my back is fine, unless I sit in an office chair, basically. Or lift anything, or stand for too long. Actually, or lie in bed in any comfortable position; I woke up pretty miserable because I don't like to lie flat on my back but if I did anything else it hurt, so I'd go to sleep lying on my back and wake up folded like a pretzel, no matter what I did.
Anyhow.
I insisted on pizza and wings last night, because even though I'd bought stuffed pork chops I was not going to stand and cook them. Dude had a rough day yesterday too; someone somewhere in their network of companies they work with had gotten hacked, but they didn't know if it was them, it was all very secretive, so they spent the whole day painstakingly auditing all their security, and they still don't know who it was but they've established there's no way it was them, so at least they know that. It was exhausting and stressful, though.

Oh, it turns out, sitting on this couch hurts my back. I'd been in the Ikea Pöang chair and that was fine, and then the sun was in my face and I was enjoying it but decided I'd get more done if I moved, and now I'm discovering that no, I'm not just being a goldbricker, I have to go back and sit in the Pöang again. I guess that's good to know. :/

I've decided I'm going to spend today in a last-ditch effort to make the Mammoths novel work. The pacing is terrible but I"m going to ignore that. I'm just going to skip ahead to the next Action Section, and I'll have to go back and fix earlier parts but like. Whatever. Go on, write the action, then figure out if it's going to cohere into a real novel or not. I spent all of yesterday afternoon feeling terrible about it and thinking I'd have to throw the whole thing out, and like, whatever, maybe I do. At least I should write the climax of it.

I made myself feel better by reading the abandoned novel I wrote from about September thru November, set in the same world but featuring whole other characters, which is how I figured out my whole arc about citizenship rights and such. It's also badly paced but it could be something too, and it's only about 35,000 words so far, but I stopped because I had no idea where I was going with the plot.

Sigh. What I need is like. I don't know what you call it. It's not a beta-reader, I need someone who can help me figure out where to go with my plots. But I don't know how to ask the right questions to get the answers I need, and I don't know how to tell what answers I need anyway, and I just-- I dunno, I read the acknowledgements of other people's novels and think maybe if I had these people I could have a novel done by now but I don't know where to start. I've written whole novels, fanfic ones, I should have the hang of this by now, but I don't. I have no shortage of ideas, I have no problem coming up with them, the problem is I have too many, and it's really hard to tell which ideas are actually going to sustain the story through to an ending, and which ones I could spend six months writing long rambling descriptions of but never figure out how to wind it up, and I don't know if an idea I have is good on its own merits or I'm just somehow mentally horny for it and want to make it a thing that it's not. I don't know how to tell, I don't know how to decide. I have too many ideas, I have too many possibilities, I have too much vision and too little discernment.

It's tiring, and I don't have any answers, and I don't know how to proceed. So I guess I'm just going to try to push through anyway. "Keep going" is the best answer, but all it's meant so far is that I keep going farther and farther and still don't get anywhere.

I read it Sunday night because my hold came through from the library and I downloaded it to be prepared for the power outage and then the power outage never came so I just... read it.
This is one that I think must be significantly different to read in an ebook than in hard copy, because I kept thinking surely it must nearly be over, and then I'd glance at the progress bar and it was like... 75%. The author kept introducing new POV characters, well into the book, and I feel somewhat vindicated because a beta reader for Home Out In The Wind told me they couldn't continue because it was too many different POVs and they weren't well-defined enough, and yet, here's a published novel on the nom list for Nebulas and Hugos and 45% of the way through the book we've got yet another first-person narrator whose name we don't find out for pages. (You figure out it's a new person because she begins with "my father" and mentions a character by name who we've never met as being a close person, and eventually we get that she's a whole new person we never knew about before.)

I don't want to give away any of it, of course-- it's typical Naomi Novik (if I can say that, having read only one other book under that name) in that the magic is much more practical and yet more mystical than one expects. The premise is the fairytale peasant girl who can spin silver into gold; ( if you're going to read it anyway then skip, it's best to read without any idea of what's going to happen! but if you're on the fence, click, they're not spoilers )

Anyway I have to return that library book soon, so I'm rereading but I don't think I'll write any fic. I have to get back to my own original work, which has bogged down again and I sort of know why but sort of don't, and I'm going to have to unravel another thirty thousand words, and that sucks, I've already deleted ten thousand and started over at the problem spot, but I clearly started over wrong. I'm sure I can salvage them-- it's not really like knitting, that stuff isn't really gone, it's more like sewing where you've got to seam-rip it and recut the pattern piece and put it back in, and you can probably reuse most of the fabric from the muslin for other stuff and it's no big deal, you had to do that work to get where you are and it's fine, just write it down for the love of God, mark your alterations on your pattern you idiot, and I never do, I just fix it and say I'll remember next time I cut this piece but then I don't.

Sometimes I think I'm not really very good at blending into the fannish community. I like it, it's nice, but I don't... work like that.
I've seen a lot of people doing this thing where they're... is it a generator? One of those Buzzfeed-style personality quizzes? (Or... those were the first memes I remember on LJ, and you'd do one and it would give you a chunk of HTML to post your result with a picture in your blog. What Kind Of Doc Martens Are You etc. Why doesn't anyone get HTML results like that anymore, hm?)
Anyway I'm not sure, but you do something that helps you rank the tropes you like best in fiction from most to least.
I've been looking at the lists they come up with and I'm like... I have read both good and bad things in those examples? There are a couple things that are mild squicks, for me, so I'll avoid them if I see them called out because they almost always gross me out or make me uncomfortable, or ruin the story for me because I feel the author didn't really consider the fundamental ways in which such a dynamic would genuinely function, but that's usually more a mechanism of the story than of the trope itself.
(Like, for example, 7 or 8 times out of ten, if there's a wedding scene, it grosses me the fuck out, and most of those times it's because the wedding is a substitute for an actual character resolution and super often weird rituals that are highly specific to our culture just get transplanted wholesale into the fic's culture without any questioning and it's bad worldbuilding guys*, and some of the times it's because I'm a bitter old harpy who has never managed to get anyone to wife me and so is twisted by jealousy, and yet! People don't call out weddings as a trope and generally don't tag for them, so I just deal! Also, i have written wedding scenes, so clearly this isn't bulletproof for me!)
*(This is based on 0 specific examples for the moment so please do not think I'm vagueing about anyone in particular, please, because I'm not, this is like 35 years of reading distilled, here, and not anyone I actually would be able to remember the name of.)

I've read amnesia fic that was awful and unredeemable, but the very best SGA fic I've ever read, long before I ever watched the series, was about amnesia. (It was on LJ and I don't remember the title or author and it was probably 2004 so.) I fucking love meet-cutes except about half the time they make me want to barf. I cannot fucking stand soulmates/soulmarks any of that stupid bullshit, except sometimes people write them and it's weirdly compelling. (That's not how love works! And yet sometimes fiction's not about how love works and is good anyway!) A/B/O is gender essentialist and super gross, and yet sometimes people write it and it's super hot so just don't think that hard. And so on, and so forth.

I think this is similar to sexual tropes, too. Like, some people are just super into reading about specific sex acts, and that's never really how it's been for me. Like-- cunnilingus in a sex scene is probably a good sign that there are specific dynamics going on between characters and so I'm going to overall enjoy the rest of the scene, but that doesn't mean that I'm super into reading about cunnilingus (and it has no bearing whatsoever on whether I enjoy giving or receiving that sex act in real life with my actual real life body!) just for itself. (And like, it means there's a woman in the story, which I generally like, so. But it doesn't necessarily, y'know?! And sometimes it's written super gross so there's that too.)

So like. I might love bedsharing in a fic, but I might not. I might really enjoy a snowed-in kind of story, or I might not. The tropes are often a good shorthand for the shit that's going to happen, but sometimes they're not! (So many of them are just ways to put specific pressures on characters to overcome those characters' boundaries that make them the character they are, so that they can do things they'd never normally be permitted to do without going OOC, but because of this external force, they're squeezed into a place where they can do super vulnerable things. So those are kind of redundant tropes, but the different shapes the squeezing takes can give the vulnerability different forms and so that's interesting, and yet. well. i never was good at reducing fractions, so someone with a more analytical mind might have a better go at figuring out how distinct all of those really are.)

It might be an interesting writing exercise sometime to go through various of the tropes in that list and distill out the thing about each trope that is actually what people are looking for to get their specific dopamine releases, and then write a series of ficlets where those tropes happen without the specific element anywhere in them. Or, alternately, write a series where those specific elements happen totally independently of the tropes. But I don't have the patience for that sort of thing anymore, really.

I get why the tropes are a useful shorthand but my brain wiring doesn't really seem to work that way. Or, at least, isn't currently.

I was stuck on the mammoths novel thing for a while, and it's been grinding slowly along, and I know it's because I have a vague idea what the main climax of the novel will be but there's clearly a secondary component to the plot that I have not yet begun to figure out how to articulate. (It's nearly back up to where it was wordcount-wise after I cut like 11k from it a couple of weeks ago because it was all dead ends, but... it's still like, almost 50k and I haven't hit the main plot yet really, but some of that might just be my lack of perspective on literally anything... idk man! idk.)

I was most specifically hung up just now on a moment where a secondary character (he doesn't even have a name) looks at something offscreen, then asks the POV character a hard-to-parse question. (He looks at a gate, and then looks back to POV guy and says "[owners of the gate], friends of yours?" and seems disapproving or something.
The interaction literally wrote itself as I was trying to figure out how to transition from Scene In Transit to Scene At Location where I nebulously figured Something must happen that both illuminates a facet of the worldbuilding and gives insight to character B, which in turn gives character A a handle to hang some facet of their growing relationship off of, for better or worse-- possibly superficially worse but leading later to a resolution.

But I was stuck for about a week because what did Background Unnamed Guy see to make him ask that? I admit when I wrote it, it was meant to kind of be an idle gapfiller, a transition from We're Nebulously Somewhere On The Road Nearby to Now We've Arrived-- what better way to show that than literally showing the actual gate-- but then I was like.... was Background Guy just generally suspicious of the sorts of people who have gates, or was there something specific about this gate and if so, what, and how do I explain that since we're in the POV of a character to whom it would never occur to be suspicious of the sort of people who have gates, since he comes from a settlement with a similar sort of gate and has seen them his whole life?

Anyway. I think I've figured it out, maybe, but it's very first draftish-- POV Character is like "what is he looking at? What could he see? Is it code? What does this mean" and it's really super clunky. but that's what needs to happen to get me to point B.

Here's another weird little process note: I can't tell you how much stuff I write and am like Oh my god that's so first drafty I'm gonna have to massively rework that--
and then in the editing passthroughs I can't find the thing I thought was so terrible?

So that tells you that either a lot of times the clunkiness is mostly in your head, OR I really really fucking need an editor. Marvelous suspense, no? LOL.

[anyhow if you were wondering, this is the solarpunk mammoths novel i'm posting weekly under f-lock, so]

via http://ift.tt/1mhv4L1:
So I threw out my modern-AU Bucky in a helicopter snippet because it wasn’t working for Secret Santa (don’t worry, you’ll get it here someday; it was juicy as fuck and drew on both my father’s and my sister’s Army helicopter experience, and had Howlies in it, it was so good, but there was no way to make a story out of it for this assignment), and instead just now I was inspired by a lightning bolt from heaven on top of all this cold medicine

and I have 

holy shit

3500 words of also-totally-unusable Bucky and Angie friendship fic, also a modern AU.

what the fuck

I need 1k of Stucky smut

what the fuck