#MAYBE they were looking at my giant spriggy plush but WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT AT 10PM WHEN THE HOUSE LIGHTS ARE ON

[mannatea]

hey, who wants to explain to me why three scenes later i still have two scenes to write. also, it's over 7,000 words now.

and that's WITH me getting distracted because a house popped up for sale that checks a surprising amount of boxes and of cOURSE this happens while my husband is in ITALY

EDIT: i finsihed the storyyyy it's 9000 words. over 9000 even. lol

"the 4th story in this series will definitely be shorter" i say and then write 5,000 words by accident. i still have two scenes to go. maybe three? idk idk idk

truly wild is the minimal outline i'm somehow following and how well the words are flowing despite that. i'm not saying any of these stories are like, god-tier writing or The Next Big Fic in Fandom (they are not lol), but so far i feel like i'm doing an okay job of writing things that aren't too boring considering the subject matter. after all, not many people are out there writing about steiner and beatrix's childhoods in detail.

then again, most people aren't me. normally this isn't my forte either; i prefer writing romance, truth be told, but i've written literally hundreds of fics (over 700 at this point), and the one thing they don't tell you about doing that, is how you kind of start to...run out of material eventually.

more about the writing itself and the process (and a lil experiment i'm trying out) below the cut.

like, i have ideas and stuff? but they're not the kinds of ideas i would have had over a decade ago. like, i could eASILY jump into writing beatrix and steiner in a post-game relationship. i could write smut with them or sparring with sexual tension or awkward attempts at dating in the postgame before zidane shows up again where they both feel like shit for finding something in one another while their queen (and FRIEND) is struggling with grief and hope. and y'all know i can write angst--like just, oodles of it. nonstop. ten million angsts.

but! that's easy. and if i do one story, short or otherwise, then what do i write next? the next thing? and the next random idea? then i just have what i already did in the attack on titan fandom, which is...like, flood it with a hundred one-shots.

this isn't necessarily bad, of course (more stories for a small fandom like ffix is probably a good thing?) but since last year, when i started writing chaptered fics again in earnest for the first time since...2005, i learned something about myself and my writing journey—which is to say, i feel like my pool of reasonable writing ideas is...limited?

like again, it's not that i don't have ideas. i'd love writing some smut or spicy sparring or awkward date night stuff. but i feel like i've written those things before, you know what i mean? attack on titan wasn't the only fandom i carpet bombed with fics: fire emblem saw WAY MORE of them!

most of my writing consists of one-shots. i feel like the formula has, to some degree, run its course with me, or at least with my proverbial pen.

like obviously i think i could do something really cool with the freya idea that was literally beamed into my brain at random yesterday, but part of that is because, while I like Freya, she doesn't appeal to me on the same level as Steiner and Beatrix do--or even Garnet, to be honest. i'm pretty confident that i could write one good, solid, meaningful story about freya and i'd be...done.

beatrix and steiner, though? nope, i have way too many thoughts and opinions and ideas, which leaves me two options.

tell a lot of stories, or

tell a bigger story

i've done the "tell a lot of stories" and it can be fun, but what also tends to happen is that they start to feel...samey and sometimes even repetitive, because you have ideas about the characters and quirks and such that get reused over the course of many stories. again, not bad for your average writer, but if you post 100 fics you just know you're repeating yourself a lot, and that doesn't feel good. (and trying to break out of that mold is hard, too, in my experience, for many reasons, but i'll talk about that some other time maybe.)

honestly, in the end, there's just a lot more you can cover and do in a longer/bigger story. in this case it's a connected series because i feel like what i'm writing doesn't read very well as a traditional longfic, but the idea here is to write that "bigger scope" story.

again, i could definitely write some post-game awkward dating stuff and just like, refer back to prior events (like how Beatrix loses her eye; how the duel between she and Steiner went; who their families are and what those relationships are like) but doing active writing about established characters as children is something i've never really done, so it feels pretty fresh...and it's GREAT practice for writing original characters without the commitment of, you know, having to write a traditional novel (which is coming, too, but not yet).

because i think there's something super fascinating about beatrix and steiner as characters; there's so much unknown about them, so many blanks to fill. we don't get a lot of information about either of them. we get far less about beatrix, but even with steiner, most of what we get is of his personality, not like, his personal history that makes up who exactly he is as a person (because even he doesn't know; he's lived his life serving others and has no deep sense of self). beatrix is very similar but she has so few lines that we don't even really get a deep look at her personality beyond the fact that she's very politely spoken and spends her time after the love letter scene in a weird funk until the very last cutscene in the game.

so i feel like it's just a really fun and interesting exercise for me personally to fill in those gaps myself, and rather than just scribble notes and refer to them, try to really shape and mold these characters into who they are.

(i also think as a reader, there's something really fun about seeing these events play out for themselves, and then seeing how the character's opinion of those events changes and warps over time--or what details they choose to share with other characters later. and hopefully that's something that will be fun about this story: seeing beatrix and steiner meet and finding out down the road what they choose to tell each other and when—and how that shapes and directs their opinions of and feelings for one another as the story progresses!)

in this 4th story, i'm already seeing bits and pieces of our in-game Steiner appearing and it's been personally rewarding in this really unexpected way! in the first story he doesn't really feel like the exact same person (obviously, he's 5 years old in that story) but over the course of the next few (7 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old) traits start emerging that he shares with the "him" he is at 33...which feels good. like i'm connecting the dots, but not too quickly, because i feel like a very different person at my age than i did at 15, and i'm sure many of you do, too. but some traits are still there, even all these years later.

like being insufferable about the things i love.

--

now for some writing process stuff.

i've been trying very very hard to combat my adhd self with this series. i usually struggle with writing in short bursts (by which i mean, anything under like 5 hours) but i've been trying to force myself to try anyway, and i think being kind of "active" with my attempts has been really useful. i've finished 3 stories in this series already and i'm on #4! i have at least another 22 banked for the series, and then a completely unrelated freya story i might try to write this weekend if i feel brave. i'm not stuck in a manic state which is nice, because even though i think i do write just fine while manic, i also tend to pay for it later via burnout and exhaustion...and i'm just getting over covid so...i don't need that. (just tested negative five seconds ago FINALLY so yay for that at least!)

anyway, the best part of this weird "attempt to write even if you don't have a lot of time" thing is that i've noticed that even if i don't add a ton of words to the story, i can usually bang out a small scene, or part of a bigger scene, or, barring that, maybe just a few hundred words and a guideline for where to go next, which has been instrumental in these stories being finished.

see, my brain tells me i need an entire day to write, or an entire afternoon after work. it tells me that if i start late (after 5pm) there isn't time to write. why does it say this stuff? it's that adhd BULLSHIT where it takes what feels like 95 years to get into the groove, and then interruptions just shoot your concentration to hell and you have to go through the process of falling back into the groove all over again. it's exhausting...and frankly it makes writing very unfun when there are constant or regular distractions.

the issue is, i'm rarely in a place where there won't be distractions during the week, so i need to nip this in the bud if i want to go anywhere with my writing--fanfic or otherwise. i can't just sit around and wait for manic episodes to make me feel PUMPED AND EXCITED ABOUT WRITING A STORY; i have to work more at making myself sit down and write, even if it's just a little, even if it's just 30 minutes of me deciding where the story should go next or how i can tie this scene into something later.

i've spent most of my life writing out of boredom or in manic states so this is the first time i'm interested in an idea but not manic about it—and certainly not bored with nothing else to do to occupy myself. so far i think it's going pretty well, but i guess only time will tell.

on the plus side, because i'm not manic, i feel like i have WAY more control over my unmedicated ass. in a manic state i'm so focused on writing i'll do nothing else for hours and hours, which almost always results in poor health afterward, because that's what happens when you can't spare brainspace or time to eat properly and stay hydrated and go to the bathroom when you should and blink.

i used to prefer and even revere the manic state experience, because it honestly feels incredible; it's such a rush. i can't even describe it. if you know you know. like, i wrote 100,000 words in 3 weeks because of it and i felt so happy and fulfilled the entire time. the moment the story was done i felt like i'd stepped off a cliff into a meat grinder, though.

but after trying this experiment so far, i'm starting to prefer to avoid falling into a manic state if i can help it. i am productive in that state, but i'm also unbearable (moreso than usual). i neglect personal relationships (rip to my husband in particular, and remember that we met through fanfiction in 2003), struggle to get enough sleep because i can't focus on resting, start making mistakes at work because i can't focus on work, neglect housework except litterboxes, etc.

i wouldn't say i'm clear-headed (i feel like i'm always rather foggy-headed, and it sucks), but when i'm not manic i feel more fully in control of myself. i can be having a nice time writing my story, but the clock flips to 9 or 9:30 or 10 or whatever and i can say, "i should go to bed" and then i write a few quick notes about ideas i want to remember to include in the story that are currently floating in my brain, and then...i do. i go to bed. that's not something i can control as easily in a manic state; i may not even notice the clock until midnight (which is obviously terrible since i wake up at 6 and sometimes earlier; thanks chronic pain).

anyway, i just wanted to kind of get this out there, because i hope to continue this experiment for a while to see how it turns out. i do think forming a habit will help me a lot, but you have to be pretty consistent with it for good results, especially if you happen to have adhd.