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fiercelydreamedThis was all the preamble that was going to go with the story snippet, which may now be ... post-amble? Whatever. I also haven't really done a post like this over here before -- they usually happen on my fannish filter on my primary LJ -- but presumably those of you reading here have at least some interest in my writing and/or the process behind it, so it seems like as good a place as any to talk about it.
I've been having this strange experience lately: since the quarter ended, I've on the one hand been really motivated and productive fannishly. I made my first vid (look for that showing up in a week or so), got a WIP 95% of the way to the end, and have generally been all gung-ho for creativity. I've been plotting, with the help of the ever-generous![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anatsuno and svmadelyn, to get a website in the works so my fiction has somewhere besides LJ to live. But I've also been almost completely roadblocked on anything I'm working on that's remotely serious in tone.
It's hard to say why, exactly -- I think a large part of it is that right after the quarter ended, I got hit in the back of the head with the two-by-four of some serious life stuff that had snowballed to unexpectedly large proportions while I had my head buried in books. It's not a crisis situation, and I've still got the drive and the energy to do creative things, but it's like this: some serious emotional weather has descended in the last week, and the thought of digging into emotionally heavy stories just ... doesn't sound fun at the moment, you know? Part of it's also that I've been unable to write for long enough that I've lost some momentum, and it always takes me a week or two to get back into the swing of things.
Of my two SGA stories that have been on unexpected hold, one ("Who's Left and Who's Leaving") I am bound and determined to finish this month, and there's no way it has more than 2,000 words left on it. I'm giving myself until the middle of next week to take a vacation from it, and then I'm rolling up my sleeves and getting back to work whether I'm in the mood for it or not, because I feel confident it'll go fine when I actually sit down to do it.
The other one ("Probability") -- I'm really not sure. I'm definitely not abandoning it, and I desperately want to write it, especially since I know at least 85% of what happens in it in considerable detail. I love the idea, and the challenge of what I want to do with the characters. But man, that one is heavy -- substantive, really -- in ways that none of my other SGA stuff really has been, and it already got off to a rocky start. I'm going to give myself a little more time to come back to that naturally, because I don't want to start forcing it when I'm not even 1,000 words in.
Also on my radar is an original work that's still in the early stages of developing the characters and prose style. It's been on hold for a few months now, but I would like to see if I can finish the practice scene I'd started in the next month or so.
As for To the Dead ... this is me, burying my face in my hands. God, I want to finish that story, and finish it while it's still relevant to me and to people who care about HP, even if the fandom isn't active. But I don't know whether it's better to run ahead from where I was or do the rewrite now that it'd take to get the existing 20,000+ words of it up the level that my prose is currently at. I also haven't been in that particular fandom's headspace for months, and in less than four weeks I'll be back in school and my writing will slow to a crawl again. I'm not sure it's even worth the effort of dusting that draft off until summer.
So, the story that is tentatively called "Switch." I think I first had the idea while talking toseperis about her fascinating Story of a Girl, but I was in the middle of "Rebuilding Babel" and just starting to really percolate on "Probability," and it didn't rate very high on the idea totem pole. Then I spent today at work listening to dodificus's excellent podfic of trinityofone's thoroughly enjoyable You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl), and it sparked my urge to pick this idea up again. (Please note I am not implying this will be anywhere near the caliber of either of those -- that'd be seriously presumptuous, this early on.)
Now, here's the thing. As you may have noticed, I only post finished stories, not WIPs. This is a little because I like to go over and over the language in my stories before I'm happy with them, and a lot because I absolutely don't want to paint myself into a corner. By that I mean, I don't want to put something out there until I'm relatively confident of the plot, because I don't want to feel that my hands are tied if I realize later that I should have done something differently. But for the purposes of getting my momentum back up, there's not much that I find more helpful than a five-finger exercise: a story I'm not yet passionate about, where working on it gets me back into the rhythm of writing without representing any commitment.
It should be noted that Unidentified started this way.
So I think that, for now, I'm going to take "Switch" out of the box and play with it for a while -- and for a change, I'm going to do that in public, because honestly, the encouragement and interest of other people does more for my writing momentum than almost anything else. But I do feel the need to warn you: I don't know what the plot of this story is yet. I don't know what the backstory is. It is entirely possible that I'll end up going back and retconning myself halfway through, or that I'll hit a roadblock and never go any farther, or that the next quarter will start before I finish and there will suddenly be months between parts. This is an experiment in many, many ways, one that's starting from half-meta, half-PWP roots, and I have no idea if it'll succeed or fail. So anyone for whom this sounds too self-indulgent or uncertain, know that if and when I finish it, I will put up a final, cohesive version so that you can still read the story while sparing yourselves my mucking about.
Uh. I think that's all for now. I'm going to go write some. :)
I've been having this strange experience lately: since the quarter ended, I've on the one hand been really motivated and productive fannishly. I made my first vid (look for that showing up in a week or so), got a WIP 95% of the way to the end, and have generally been all gung-ho for creativity. I've been plotting, with the help of the ever-generous
anatsuno and svmadelyn, to get a website in the works so my fiction has somewhere besides LJ to live. But I've also been almost completely roadblocked on anything I'm working on that's remotely serious in tone. It's hard to say why, exactly -- I think a large part of it is that right after the quarter ended, I got hit in the back of the head with the two-by-four of some serious life stuff that had snowballed to unexpectedly large proportions while I had my head buried in books. It's not a crisis situation, and I've still got the drive and the energy to do creative things, but it's like this: some serious emotional weather has descended in the last week, and the thought of digging into emotionally heavy stories just ... doesn't sound fun at the moment, you know? Part of it's also that I've been unable to write for long enough that I've lost some momentum, and it always takes me a week or two to get back into the swing of things.
Of my two SGA stories that have been on unexpected hold, one ("Who's Left and Who's Leaving") I am bound and determined to finish this month, and there's no way it has more than 2,000 words left on it. I'm giving myself until the middle of next week to take a vacation from it, and then I'm rolling up my sleeves and getting back to work whether I'm in the mood for it or not, because I feel confident it'll go fine when I actually sit down to do it.
The other one ("Probability") -- I'm really not sure. I'm definitely not abandoning it, and I desperately want to write it, especially since I know at least 85% of what happens in it in considerable detail. I love the idea, and the challenge of what I want to do with the characters. But man, that one is heavy -- substantive, really -- in ways that none of my other SGA stuff really has been, and it already got off to a rocky start. I'm going to give myself a little more time to come back to that naturally, because I don't want to start forcing it when I'm not even 1,000 words in.
Also on my radar is an original work that's still in the early stages of developing the characters and prose style. It's been on hold for a few months now, but I would like to see if I can finish the practice scene I'd started in the next month or so.
As for To the Dead ... this is me, burying my face in my hands. God, I want to finish that story, and finish it while it's still relevant to me and to people who care about HP, even if the fandom isn't active. But I don't know whether it's better to run ahead from where I was or do the rewrite now that it'd take to get the existing 20,000+ words of it up the level that my prose is currently at. I also haven't been in that particular fandom's headspace for months, and in less than four weeks I'll be back in school and my writing will slow to a crawl again. I'm not sure it's even worth the effort of dusting that draft off until summer.
So, the story that is tentatively called "Switch." I think I first had the idea while talking to
seperis about her fascinating Story of a Girl, but I was in the middle of "Rebuilding Babel" and just starting to really percolate on "Probability," and it didn't rate very high on the idea totem pole. Then I spent today at work listening to dodificus's excellent podfic of trinityofone's thoroughly enjoyable You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl), and it sparked my urge to pick this idea up again. (Please note I am not implying this will be anywhere near the caliber of either of those -- that'd be seriously presumptuous, this early on.)Now, here's the thing. As you may have noticed, I only post finished stories, not WIPs. This is a little because I like to go over and over the language in my stories before I'm happy with them, and a lot because I absolutely don't want to paint myself into a corner. By that I mean, I don't want to put something out there until I'm relatively confident of the plot, because I don't want to feel that my hands are tied if I realize later that I should have done something differently. But for the purposes of getting my momentum back up, there's not much that I find more helpful than a five-finger exercise: a story I'm not yet passionate about, where working on it gets me back into the rhythm of writing without representing any commitment.
It should be noted that Unidentified started this way.
So I think that, for now, I'm going to take "Switch" out of the box and play with it for a while -- and for a change, I'm going to do that in public, because honestly, the encouragement and interest of other people does more for my writing momentum than almost anything else. But I do feel the need to warn you: I don't know what the plot of this story is yet. I don't know what the backstory is. It is entirely possible that I'll end up going back and retconning myself halfway through, or that I'll hit a roadblock and never go any farther, or that the next quarter will start before I finish and there will suddenly be months between parts. This is an experiment in many, many ways, one that's starting from half-meta, half-PWP roots, and I have no idea if it'll succeed or fail. So anyone for whom this sounds too self-indulgent or uncertain, know that if and when I finish it, I will put up a final, cohesive version so that you can still read the story while sparing yourselves my mucking about.
Uh. I think that's all for now. I'm going to go write some. :)