Entries tagged with topic: writing

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Slowly Getting There…

So, that break has yet to fully materialize, but I’m getting better, bit by bit. Got my grade – excellent (just barely, but hey, I just wanted to pass) – so at least all the stress and literal stomach aches were more than worth it. I am now officially a computer science expert for software development and I’ve got a piece of paper that proves it. Still feel like a complete n00b who can barely manage an if statement, though.

► The quick fix for the car didn’t last, predictably, so it broke down again while my mother was in the hospital, leaving me to deal with it. I swear, this car hates me. The last time it broke down, my mum was stuck in Poland with Covid.

► My mum’s surgery went well (despite the unexpected general anaesthesia). The recovery, not so much. Because of the wound healing she wasn’t allowed to take the meds against her auto-immune disease, leading to a flare-up. The symptom: excruciating pain in hips, back and shoulders that pain meds don’t work on (getting doctors to take it seriously is always fun, especially with orthopaedists).

► We got the water bill for the year while my mother was in the hospital and it was unreasonably high. My mother couldn’t cope, so we didn’t deal with it until she got back. Only found the potential cause yesterday (faulty faucet for the garden hose), but in the meantime, we “used” 25 litres and hour while no water was being used by us.

► While all that was going on, I actually managed to do

candyheartsex – and I had fun, like always. I even managed to write a last minute treat this time, which I hadn’t managed since

chocolateboxcomm ran.

► I finally got around to editing my travelogue some, so I hope I will manage to post it sometime in the near future. It might be of no interest to any of you, but I like how the act of writing and re-reading them every now and again helps me remember my travels, since I barely get to leave the country.

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2024 Certainly Was A Year…

… and I’m looking forward to being done with it. It wasn’t all bad. Just very, very stressful in a couple of different ways.

I failed getyourwordsout – which is fine. As I mentioned in January, I gave myself permission to. I tend to get most of my writing done in November during NaNo, and that wasn’t an option, with three exams and the super important project scheduled then. But I did way better than expected! I’m only 16,485 words short of 75k, when my self-imposed goal was hitting 25k (aka what’s left without NaNo).

I survived the exams and did end up doing really well in those too. I won’t be done with everything until mid-January (barring illnesses etc.), but then I’ll be free (to go look for a job. Urgh.) Exams suck, especially if they’re no longer routine, and if a lot depends on your performance on a couple of days.

Another success this year: I hit 200k written for exchanges. That is A Lot. I also managed to take a pinch hit this year and had a lot of fun with it!

I have so many projects that I started and still need to finish… hopefully, I’ll get that done some time next year.

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Shitty Brain Time

So, as the title says. Yeah. Not the best time. My sociophobia has been acting up for months, and now my general anxiety level is picking up too, since it’s time for exam registrations etc and there’s Too Many Unknowns, which my brain hates, leading to it convincing itself that I’m going to fail miserably. The next four months are going to be fun, so don’t worry if I’m getting a bit more quiet than usual. I wish people would come up with better ways to assess skill.

But, on a more positive note, my vacation in Gdansk went well! I wrote a travelogue, which I’m probably going to post here when I’ve polished it a little. It’s not the best, since I haven’t written one in a while nor read one in ages, but feel free to read it if you’re interested. I mostly write those for myself, since my memory is not the best due to the reasons expressed by the title.

Also, since I am not going to make my

getyourwordsout goal for exam reasons, I’d set myself a very modest one in its place: 25k, or a third of my original pledge, which I’d struggled to meet outside of NaNoWriMo last year. But this year, I didn’t struggle. I hit it this month! I’m almost up to 30k, finished the first draft of a ficlet for

fandomgiftbasket yesterday and am generally pretty happy with how my writing has been going this year.

Apart from that: currently drowning in blueberries from our neighbour, managing my mum’s new toy (camera for animals – if you’re interested in grainy hedgehog footage, I can post the links here as well), finally managed to acquire wool but haven’t started on a project yet, and tried rowing for the first time last week for work-reasons (first impression: fun!)

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A Prickle of Hedgehogs, And Other News

So, Zumi got released on schedule, and promptly disappeared into the night. We don’t know for sure how she’s doing, but we have seen a hedgehog roughly her size after. Plus, my mother, giant animal lover that she is, puts out food for them in a special rat-proof hedgehog feeding house (the rats, as our neighbour finally admitted a month after my mother got a huge scare, are not our fault). Then, yesterday evening at dusk, I spotted a hedgehog on the lawn when my cat stared at it. So we went out to check if it was going into the house. It wasn’t, we were too fast and it was hiding in the ivy, but then I noticed the smacking sound coming from the house and ’lo and behold, a humongous hedgehog was happily munching away. And then I noticed a suspicious molehill that hadn’t been on the lawn seconds earlier that was roughly Zumi-sized. So yeah, we appear to have not one hedgehog, but a whole prickle of them.

As for writing, I mentioned that I was giving myself permission not to meet my

getyourwordsout target this year, and I’m still planning on doing that. But May was the first one where I met my target – a combination of

fandom5k and a drawerfic set in a tiny fandom that my brain wants to write for reasons unknown to me – and that’s making me happy!

I also posted a photo in

common_nature in an attempt to come out of my shell a little bit. For some reason, posting in communities always scares me, even after almost twenty years on LJ, IJ and DW.

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WIP Progess and RL Madness

I am now stuck in the worst part of my story process – the looking-for-a-beta phase. It’s also where plenty of my stories go to rot. I seriously wish there was a good, commonly accepted way to find betas that was accessible to people like me. I hear it’s mostly done via chat these days and I don’t do chats (plus, the fandom is tiny). Anyway, I added a couple of short scenes to round out the story in the editing phase, so the current status:

Drafted chapters: 17/17 ✓
Typed up chapters: 17/17 (76,999 words)✓
Edited chapters: 17/17 (77,577)✓ (love the word count)
Beta: TBD

And I found out that I just cannot ignore typos and other minor mistakes when editing. I have to fix them, or I can’t concentrate on anything else, no matter how hard I try.

In RL news: right now it seems as if I can’t do the job retraining program as work from home because the German bureaucracy is still stuck in the age of the fax machine (quite literally). The kicker: the job retraining programs most accessible to me via commute are all done online, so I would have to commute for at least over an hour per day to sit in front of a computer to do an online course for eight hours while someone sits in the room “in case I have questions” – this someone being a random white collar worker who can only answer administrative questions.

And now, I’ll go try to solve today’s Advent of Code problem (thank you again, two people who recced it to me). Yesterday’s was easy. Today’s, not so much, at least for me.

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WIP Update #5

Again, I have been busy. Only one week of internship left. I am heartily sick of TYPO3, which isn’t really pure software developer territory (it’s a CMS), but after dealing with it for a week and being barely any the wiser, I’m convinced that it ended up in the department because only a software developer had the patience to deal with it for an extended period of time. But hey, I got to go on top of the drop tower this week!

Drafted chapters: 17/17 ✓
Typed up chapters: 17/17 (76,999 words)✓
Edited chapters: 14/17

So, not that much progress, but if I keep chipping away at it, I might be able to post the first chapter before the next season airs in February. Other plans for this weekend: signing up for

holiday_wishes and looking at what other people are asking for, and hopefully figuring out where to start my Yuletide fic.

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WIP Update #4

Yeah, so, this has been what can only be called “a week”, so not that much progress:

Drafted chapters: 17/17 ✓
Typed up chapters: 17/17 (76,999 words)✓
Edited chapters: 7/17

No progress since Tuesday, since that’s when I started a four-week internship that’s kind of demanding, mentally, but fun. Eight hours of work plus two and a half hours of commute don’t leave you with that much time for editing when you’re also swamped with household tasks (my mother still isn’t back because she’s still Covid-positive and thus doesn’t want to expose others to her germs), doing canon review for Yuletide (another one to two hours a day) and when everything that can go wrong does go wrong (just got back from failing to get groceries because the car broke down midway through my errands, lost my phone charger earlier this week…)

But hey, I learned how to write a super simple Python program this week, and the place where I intern is really cool, even if I’m interning in the very unglamorous IT department. Also, I’ve got great neighbours who absolutely will watch out for packages arriving for you and who will come tow your car when it breaks.

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WIP Update #3

Almost done! With the typing/first edit, at least.

Drafted chapters: 17/17 ✓
Typed up chapters: 16/17 (72,343 words) ETA: and I'm done! 17/17 (76,999 words)✓

Which means there’s only one chapter and the epilogue to go, and I estimated the total length pretty well. I’m a bit unsure about the last chapters at the moment. Not because they’re bad, but because I get a feeling that readers might think they’re rushed. The thing is, I’ve done everything with the story that I want to do with it, and I’ve more or less wrapped up all the story arcs, emotional and plot-wise. If I add more chapters, they will be filler, more missions that don’t add anything to the story except a buffer between one chapter with important content and another. Hopefully, I’ll figure out what to do on re-read.

Also, as of now, I’ve written 85,194 words this year. Which means I’ve met my

getyourwordsout pledge and can take off November and not do NaNo! Which is good news, because I’ll be busy in November. I was last year as well, but this means more time for Yuletide.

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WIP Update #2

I have made progress with Web of Fate, and I think posting about it every two weeks helps with the accountability for me. So here’s how far I’ve come:

Drafted chapters: 17/17 ✓
Typed up chapters: 10/17 (44,789)

Which means that as of yesterday, I am within my on pace goal for

getyourwordsout – the lowest tier, but hey, I am the slowest writer ever, and this is shaping up to be my longest completed fanfic yet. If I continue at this pace, I might not even have to do NaNo (which is good, because I’ll be very busy in November). I’m planning on letting the story rest for a bit once I’ve typed everything up. Hopefully not too long, but then it’s time for an editing pass, and after that, the dreaded beta search.

But I probably won’t get any writing done tomorrow – there’s an election and I help out at the polls.

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Fandom Gift Basket & WIP Update

fandomgiftbasket revealed! My basket contained two short fics, one very cute outsider POV for Flower of Evil and one that explores what role the prophecy in Carnival Row could play post-season 1.

I also wrote four fics for Eldest Princess Above, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Stardew Valley and Trick Baby that I’ll repost here soon-ish.

As for my WIP, I think I might have a title. Web of Fate is exceedingly boring, but at least I don’t hate it. Which is the best you can do when it comes to a title, sometimes. As for how much I’ve written in the past two weeks (despite being so stressed it affected my heart):

Drafted chapters: 15½/17
Typed up chapters: 6½/17 (28,194 words, no change)

So, next up is the big final action scene, and then the final chapter where I wrap things up, plus an epilogue. So, I’m pretty sure the draft is going to be finished, at least. That’s just two-ish chapters/eight scenes to go. I’m still not sure if the last part is any good, though. I guess we’ll see.

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WIP Update

I still don’t have a title for my long-ass WIP, but I’ve been steadily making progress, even through one of my three-day headaches and my brain inexplicably becoming obsessed with Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power even though it is not good. My progress right now:

Drafted chapters: 12/17 (meaning I’m through the middle part!)
Typed up chapters: 6½/17 (28,194 words)

So much for the good news. Unfortunately, I’ve reached the part of the writing process where I think everything I write sucks. It’s a normal part of the creative process for me, so I’m not too worried (and if it does suck, I still get a story aimed squarely at my tastes out of it), but I hate the feeling. Plus, I’ve already got five points that I’ll need to revisit and tinker with once I’m done typing up the whole fic. I hate editing. And I’ve not made any progress when it comes to finding a title.

Current Music: the cat complaining about a closed door

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Longfics Are Hard

I had kind of forgotten just how hard writing longfics is. As I mentioned in my last post, I picked up one after ten months of nothing, and what I had until then was the easy part. The start is always the easy part, which is why there are so many abandoned WIPs around. I’ve yet to meet someone who says they’re really good at the middle but can’t figure out the start, although I’m sure that sometimes happens too.

Back when I stopped working on the fic last year, I had the prologue and first two chapters typed up and another 2½ drafted. I had no idea how long the fic was going to end up being, but I estimated around 14-15 chapters. Turns out I was wrong; It’ll be 17 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. I have now typed up everything up to and including chapter 5, and I’ve drafted another three, which puts me right at the hardest part – the middle. (The first act and the third one are five chapters each, the middle has seven.)

The middle is always a slog for me. I need to drudge through it. It’s hard work. And I can’t stop working on it, because once I find an excuse not to work on it, I end up finding even more excuses until it’s been ten months or five years, oops. So, writing longfic is like dieting for me. No cheat days and exceptions, or I’ll end up having only cheat days and exceptions. It doesn’t help that the middle is so important. It’s how the characters end up getting from point A (the beginning) to point B (the end) and planning the route is always more work that inspiration for me. With this one, it means a lot of mission fic – the next three chapters I have to draft are a mission each before I have another one with a big emotional moment to end the second act. Missions need so much plotting. So much tension, so many descriptions. So much to figure out… the next three chapters will make or break the fic.

Stuff I also need to figure out: the title. How does The Pall of Fate sound (or Under the Pall of Fate)? I’m not sold yet. Titles, also hard. Two chapters still need titles as well. And I need to figure out if I need to flesh out the OCs more to make them more sympathetic, and whether or not I’m neglecting some of the other canon characters.

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Snowflake Challenge #8: Success

Challenge #8: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year

For me personally, 2021 didn’t actually suck. Shocker, I know, but neither did 2020. Guess I’m just good at pandemics. Anyway, I actually did a couple of things that I’d count as a personal win, but I’m going to mention the one I’m most proud, which I already mentioned in an earlier post. I hit my GYWO target! 75K a year might not sound like a lot to a lot of people, but for me, it is.

For those who don’t know:

getyourwordsout is a community that offers you a yearly writing commitment. There’s several pledges (habit – where you sign up to write a certain number of days – and word count, where 75k is the lowest level) and you check in once a month with your progress. It was actually really helpful in getting me working on stuff, not all of which was published. And this year’s sign-ups are still open for one or two more days (time zones can be confusing and I don’t want to math right now), so if this sounds like your thing, try it! The worst that can happen is that you don’t make your target, which is probably what’s already happening anyway.

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Snowflake Challenge #5: The White Whale

Challenge #5: In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

It’s hard to chose an idea here. I’m good at having ideas. I want to do a lot of different projects. But I guess I’ll choose the one thing: my chronic inability to finish a novel-length fic. I’m great at starting them. I’ve started about ten in earnest, not counting the attempts that stalled at one or two chapters. The longest so far has reached a mind-boggling 130k and is still nowhere near finished, and I doubt I’ll ever get around to it. It’s not that I don’t have the energy (which I blamed it on for the longest time), the talent or the time. I just… get distracted. That’s it really. I’ll just come up with a new idea, watch a new series, etc. before I’m finished with a project.

So, here’s a small selection of fic I started:

Aegon and Rhaenys Targaryen survive AU (that’s the 130k one)
Jon Snow goes to King’s Landing AU
Game of Thrones Modern!AU set in a modern Westeros
Ned Stark time travel/reincarnation AU
Cassian Andor as a Jedi AU
Jyn was adopted by the Organas AU
Carnival Row AU where Absalom Breakspear survives (the latest one, which I last worked on in October)

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Christmas Wrap-Up

This year, I thought I’d do a bit of a fannish Christmas post, since I participated in two events and endeavour to be more active on DW again.

First of all, thank you, everyone who sent me a holiday card thanks to

holiday_wishes! I loved getting them and it made me feel more connected to the world-at-large, and all of you in particular. And also, thank you, two people who gifted me with paid time!

( Christmas card picture under the cut! )

And last but not least:

ashling wrote me a wonderful fic for the TV series Warrior (the one from 2019):

recovery by way of breaking more bones (1831 words) by Ashling
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Warrior (TV 2019)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Ah Sahm, Young Jun (Warrior), Hong (Warrior)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Relationship Study, Banter
Summary:
Sacramento is a start.

Now that Christmas season is officially over (it ends on Epiphany here) and a new year has begun, I’m looking forward to trying my hand at

getyourwordsout for the first time. I haven’t written a word this year yet, but wish me luck!

Current Mood: exanimate
Current Location: Hambergen

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Random #31

Okay, so I disappeared again. I swear I didn't mean to, it's just... well, you know. Shiny that distracts you, like City Hunter, the awesome Korean drama that ended yesterday, my meds and the weather, who I think might be responsible for me requiring 16 hours of sleep per day some weeks, the fic exchange that I sighned up for (more on that later) and me just generally being distracted, lazy and short-attention-spanned.

So what have I been doing? I finished the fic for the exchange, which is now in need of an English native speaker who could beta read it. Because it is due on August 1st and I my English has become worse lately. And possibly rather purple. So if any of you feel the strong need to procrastinate on something important by betaing fic, I'm the person to talk to. I also have two Highlander drafts in German (triple drabble and ~10k) to offer by the way.

Regarding the fandom of the exchange fic: I will reveal it next month, and I took a lot of screenshots while I did the review, so I might post a picspam too. Provided my laziness etc. doesn't get the better of me.

And now I have to go earn some money, since I'm all out of reasons not to. And drink some sparkling wine to fight the tiredness.

Current Mood: drained
Current Location: Hambergen

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Random #25

☞ Yes, I’m still here. I just noticed that it has been almost two months. Wow. Well, a) I was rather busy and b) I had nothing to post. I have two and a half story drafts finished, but my beta is MIA and so I haven’t posted them yet.

☞ I also will be rather busy during the next few weeks, because I will participate in NaNoWriMo again (

jaaaarne, I added you to my buddy list). I even have something of a plan. I have no finale for the story, but an idea where the story in headed and who the protagonists are.

☞ I have a new obsession: Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series is adorable beyond belief. And the fanfic is quite good too. Well, I don’t ship Zutara, so that narrows it down a bit. Curiously enough, most of the fanfic seems to be posted on ff.net, so I spend much more time there for a change.

☞ I will also participate in Yuletide this year. We’ll see how that works out. I nominated Heroic Legend of Arslan, Main Hoon Na, Raumpatrouille Orion, Rome, Anatolia Story and Survivors. If everything goes according to plan I’ll post an entry about the three soonish. If not, there’s always Wikipedia.

☞ Also, hopefully, OTW retrospective. I’m too busy this weekend.

Current Mood: dorky
Current Location: Leipzig
Current Music: Ashanti (the film)

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Random # 15

☞ It's been a while. I'm feeling a bit better now, but the last weeks were rough. My depression was really bad, I had the first full-on panic attack in years and my phobias acted up. *sigh* I'm still not entirely back to my normal medium depressed state. I didn't get much writing done and there are still 05:04:47 left. No idea how much I'll write today and tomorrow.

☞ I actually did work on my Merlin fic for the first time in months. I realised it sucked and that it needs a major rework. ( Spoilers for recent episodes )

☞ I think I finally found out why disaster films don't work for me. It's not the wildly improbable natural catastrophes, because those aren't necessarily improbable at all, it's the wildly improbable ways in which humans conquer nature and stop the catastrophes. More often than not by using a lot of explosives. I would like them if they showed humans surviving the catastrophe, I wouldn't mind if they showed humans fighting to survive and dying (The Day After Tomorrow I liked, despite the unrealistic premise). I do mind the age old "conquering the wilderness" trope that crops up again and again. It's not only inacurate, it also reminds me of how humans treat their environment in other situations.

☞ Yuletide: I really hope my recipient will like my story, since I haven't written for the fandom before and couldn't research as much as I would have liked to. It also won't be as long and will end rather abruptly. But I'm confident because we seem to like similar stories and share a few quirks, despite not having any non-Yuletide fandoms in common. Now I only have to find a competent beta and brit-picker who knows the fandom. Or someone who can tell me if the story works once I've typed it up, at least. (Why yes, I still use pen and paper for writing.)

Current Mood: pessimistic
Current Location: Leipzig

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In Other News:

Today is my mother's birthday and she's visiting me at the moment, which is the reason why I've been a bit absent lately. Well, that and the fact that I had a breakdown on Monday thanks to PMS and waiting almost an hour and a half at the doctor's only to be told to come again next week. Oh hell, no!
My muse is dead. I prodded it and tried to resuscitate, but nothing helped. No new fic or other creative effort from me for a few months at least, it seems. Probably longer.
I just can't get rid of the two invite codes.
Watched Slumdog Millionaire yesterday and liked it. It reminded me more of City of God than a Bollywood film. I want the soundtrack.
Does anyone know why the LibraryThing widget won't work in my profile?
Were there any good fics written for the H/D Worldcup this year? I have one in my recs, but I gave up on the others after a while.

Current Location: Leipzig

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When Stories Become Hydras

Okay, I think I found my topic for today's meta (I'm keeping my schedule, see?): long stories.

Not stories that are long, mind you. Stories that feel long (not necessarily the same thing). A good story should make you forget time. It should suck you into its world until you wish the story would never end. I've read quite a few stories like these, and I love them. But there are other stories too. Stories that promise to be these amazing stories that you wish would never end, and then ... they just don't. They get longer and longer, full of stuff that is totally unnecessary, that deters from the purpose that is just plain boring to read. These are stories that I wish were betaed by those competent people who know when a story might be better off being shorter. I know I told an author once to cut a few scenes. Am I just an exception or do other people really not mind these stories?

Anyway, I will list a few stories that felt too long for me, and why:

( List under the cut )

I'd like to know about your experiences and theories about this as well, because I don't think I'm the only one who hates feeling that reading a story becomes some sort of chore that I only keep doing because I really used to love them. And is there any way to tactfully tell the authors that their beloved hydras really aren't as lovely as they seem to think?

Note: This is probably not very well thought out (I'm running on caffeine). I also apologize if linking these examples hurts the authors. I will take out the links if it does, just leave me a comment.