#gonna start working through my backlog of drafts later

[neathyingenue]

WOKE Fallen London

The Traitor THEY/THEMpress

POLYthreme

The Great PRONOUNd Railroad

The CorresponDEInce

The TrackSLAYer's Union

The Masters of the Bazaar

LESBIANbones Road

[bayalexison]

Bay’s Writing Summary 2020

Welcome to another Bay's writing summary. Some Foul Play and, gasp, a new fandom? Okay, let's get started!

POKEMON FICS

-Foul Play (Chapters 19-26)

Yes, I'm still chugging through Foul Play. I didn't exactly get to finish the rough draft due to some writing burnout the first few months and then other writings later, but I'm getting closer. In terms of backlog, I'm up to 29. Recently I announced that the story should end by 34/35 chapters so I'm getting there!

In terms of updates, I managed to post all of the Poni Island arc! That arc I added in after that one Pokemon anime episode in the Sun/Moon saga and happy I finally posted Ch 24. I posted less chapters than in 2019, but it was still decent amount of updates all things considered.

-At the Pokemon Daycare- I wrote this for Canalave Library Yuletide. I went with the prompt "Ethan needs to grow up" and wrote a story about Ethan being frustrated with losing to Silver. I struggled with the first couple of scenes but then after switching to Lyra's POV the next couple scenes I was able to write it much quicker.

FE3H FICS I started writing FE3H fics during the summer whenever I wanted a break from Foul Play. List of those:

-Wolf and Bear- A Felix/Bernadetta fic I wrote loosely based off my Black Eagles/Crimson Flower playthrough. For that playthrough I was only allowed to recruit sword and magic based students, hence why Felix was recruited and not his friends. That then led to Felix angst that wasn't intended lol. Also start of my love for Felix/Bernadetta.

-Head Over Heels For You- A spicy Felix/Annette fic I wrote for the Netteflix and Chill Bingo. This was the first explicit writing I did in three years, but I'm proud with how it turned out.

-Overnight Stay- Another Felix/Annette fic written for the prompt, comfort. Loosely inspired by some interesting info from the datamines where the Blue Lions route was gonna be much more dark than it already was.

-School of Hard Brawling- Balthus fic I wrote as a submission for the Balthus Zine's application that I then later get invited to. Also kinda last minute Byleth birthday gift even though I didn't intended it to haha.

-There's one fic I wrote for Solaris: A Balthus Zine. However, I can't preview/post it yet and probably not allowed to until preorders started. Once I'm in the clear, I might update this post with the link.

-Spark- My third Felix/Annette fic that I wrote for a gift exchange. Annette helps Felix with Reason magic, and the two have a heartfelt conversation over their not so great relationships with their fathers.

2020 sure is a year, huh? Despite a lot of stuff that happened that year I still managed to do quite a bit of writing.

I didn't get to finish Foul Play as originally planned, so for 2021 I would like to finally have the fic finished. At the same time, I think I would like to do more FE3H fics. I might be able to balance Foul Play and shorter FE3H fics, so hopefully I can do that.

Writing FE3H is interesting. I thought I would be writing a lot of Dimitri/Byleth but instead I wrote a lot of Felix/Annette and Balthus haha. I didn't get too much comments and I was upset at first but I do appreciate the comments I did get! I did a couple posts on FE3H's zine scene and I've been thinking again about that. There's been a lot, and I mean a lot, of FE3H zines popping up that I'm losing track lol. Many I passed over due to not having good writing samples and/or no time to do that. There are a few I've been keeping an eye on, but on the fence of trying out. I might make an attempt at applying and have my expectations in check.

One other thing is I'm thinking of trying out original work. At the moment I only brainstormed the basic premise and a few characters but I would like to work on it some more. Probably this is something I might pick at if I don't feel like doing Foul Play or FE3H stuff.

So yeah I guess that's it for my 2020 writing summary! Hopefully I'll make good progress in 2021!

[copperbadge]

There was a recent discussion on tumblr, which I didn’t reblog for obvious reasons, about how people with a large readership cope with a heavy interaction load -- how the person would be anxious if they dealt with that volume of notes on each post, that amount of interaction and contact. I was tagged in it because of my habit of "lochnessing", where I cause an activity spike on posts I reblog that looks like the loch ness monster.

It never occurs to me, because I’ve dealt with high-volume social media for so long -- realistically about ten years, probably closer to fifteen -- that it’s difficult for people to handle that, because they don’t have the systems in place that I do. I mean it does occur to me in the sense that I have become more cautious about what I reblog and its impact on the OP; there are things I’d like to share with you but don’t because I recognize it would be harmful to the person who wrote them. But it doesn't occur to me that someone might struggle with a high volume of notes purely because it's a volume that they don't have a system in place to deal with the way I do.

So I said I'd do a writeup on the "entire ecosystems" I had in place for handling the high volume of interaction I receive online. I sit at a weird place where I'm not so well known that I can just ignore most of what comes at me with impunity because everyone acknowledges I can't answer it all, like say a youtube star. But at the same time I do get too much attention to return it at the same level I receive it. I am one and you are sixteen thousand. So I had to make systems to return as much as I could and feel okay about not returning the rest.

Reading through this, of course it sounds like a weird humblebrag: "Here's how I deal with my MASSIVE POPULARITY". There's no real way around that; I can't talk about how I deal with comments without talking about how I get a disproportionately high number of them. The fact that I do is what leads me to do things like the Zero Comment Challenge, or Radio Free Monday, to try and balance shit out. So, as I mention occasionally below, you can think I'm an asshole for talking about how I am popular, but I can't talk about how to deal with that popularity without acknowledging the reality of it, and someone somewhere's gonna think I'm an asshole anyway, so whatever.

These are the systems I use to manage my life -- work, play, the weird inbetween space that's kind of both. Many of these are akin to the systems that I use in managing my depression, in that they involve a lot of small steps building up to a big result, but each small step on its own is manageable.

Let's start with AO3, because it's actually probably the simplest.

I clean out my comments once a week. Usually there are between forty and a hundred and fifty, depending on if I’ve published something recently or been recommended by someone. 

I go through all the one-sentence comments first, because those are the ones that are least likely to require a response. I read all comments but I learned through trial and error, twice in ten years, that I am physically and emotionally incapable of responding to every comment I receive even if it's just with a "Thank you!" and I'm just going to live with the fact that people think I'm an asshole for that. Also while I appreciate someone who leaves a "Great fic! <3" comment, that's genuinely really cool and validating, I don't think they truly need or expect a response. So most one-line comments, unless they are super weird or contain a question, get read, appreciated, and then deleted. 

Then I go through the longer comments that need a closer reading, and delete any that are cool but still don't seem to require responses. If someone has left a ton of comments, I'll find the one I think is coolest or most needing of response, delete the others, and reply to that one comment with a thoughtful response including a line thanking them for all their other comments.

Finally, I respond to comments that are in-depth or have questions that require some thought. I find that if I don't respond to these on a weekly basis they pile up and then someone who asked a question like six months ago is still waiting for an answer, so this one is non-negotiable: my AO3 inbox has to be empty at the end of each week, and everything that needed a reply has to have one. (I do have one or two that just live in my inbox because they are cool ideas I will one day get round to writing, and I want to credit them when I do, but it's never more than two.) For me, it's easiest to wait until Friday or Saturday and just take an hour to clear them all out, rather than clearing as I go, because I don't have AO3 open all the time the way I do some other sites.  

Tumblr: Every morning, before work, I go through the previous night's responses; I open all reblogs/mentions in new tabs to read and reply-as-necessary, and I reply to all comments that need responses. (This is also something I'll do throughout the day, but especially if I'm tired or pressed for time, the comment replies might be saved as a draft or left in an open tab until I can get to them). Occasionally shit doesn’t show up or I miss stuff but I’ve learned to just live with that as the price of doing fandom on Tumblr. 

If there's a post by someone else that requires a response from me -- either a reblog of one of my posts, or someone tagged me in a post -- I Like it to find it later or I save it as a draft. I don't use Likes as anything other than "I want to be able to find this again in less than a week's time" and I never have more than about 20 Likes in my files. (Unless I’m traveling; it’s easier to Like something than save it as a draft or respond, so when I get home from traveling I often have 30-50 Likes in my file.)

Often on Tumblr I go through what I call the Line Cycle -- I read my dash, and then I go "down the line" and open all the other pages that might need attention, in specific order. I open asks and try to respond to a few -- I try to answer at least five every time but sometimes I don't manage to answer any for whatever reason -- then I open likes and try to convert as many likes as I can to either queued reblogs or drafts. I open drafts and try to convert some of those to queued reblogs. Then I go through the same process for one or two side blogs.

(Also in drafts are a lot of things that I'm not sure I want to put in my queue yet, or things that I put in the queue weekly like the Zero Comment Challenge post, which I dust off when I'm ready to queue it, then immediately re-save to drafts when it posts.)

Occasionally if I feel shit is getting out of hand I dedicate myself to, every time, not leaving the page I'm on until I've reduced its "count" (number of asks, likes, drafts, etc) by five, or at least to below the next multiple of five -- if I have 23, for example, I'll try to get it below 20.

Sometimes posts in tabs sit open for a while because in order to respond I have to read an article or watch a video, which take a lot of focus and attention. It used to be that recommendations for books or stuff to watch also sat open forever until I could get round to doing it, but now I just have a "reccs" file on the cloud that is a list of what I've been recommended and who recommended it, and I work my way through them slowly.

Email: Once I've read them, site notifications in my inbox get deleted; I've turned off follow/kudos notifications because they tend to be white noise.

Email is tough for me, it requires a lot of focus and emotional attention to answer emails, so I treat it the same way I would asks or likes or whatnot, but much more slowly. I tend to have a backlog of about thirty emails in my inbox, though often five to ten of those are emails that don't need response and that I'm saving (I star them to mark them as not needing attention). I have the multiple-stars function in Gmail turned on, and when it gets really bad, I start opening emails and triaging -- "This will be easier to answer" "This will take some time" etc. by starring them different colors.

I like to have no more than fifteen emails in my inbox but that is a rarity. 

The Internet: Because social media takes up a lot of my time and I also work eight hours a day (well, four, we'll get to that in a bit) I have streamlined the way I encounter the internet, as well. I have a list of "daily reading" bookmarks that I open every morning and check through -- the horoscope page, the mustard tag on tumblr (which I don't follow because then the same dumbass two hipster fashion posts keep showing up on my dash), a blog that follows and posts about new small flash games that I might enjoy playing, a few others. (I also have a Monday file that I open once a week, it's calendars of events and such, and I go through on Mondays and add anything to my calendar that looks interesting.)

But if I can, any regularly-updated page that has an RSS feed gets converted to RSS and put into my Netvibes reader account, where I peruse it at my leisure. The Netvibes reader account includes a direct feed from the Steve/Tony and Steve/Sam tags on AO3, plus a few others; longform.org, some cooking blogs I follow, a bunch of podcast pages, a few webcomics, and one or two tumblrs that I don't want showing up on my dash (mainly artists' porny sideblogs, what up you glorious pervs) or think I would make the person uncomfortable by following them.

I have five tabs pinned to Chrome at any given time, and four tabs pinned to Firefox. The Chrome tabs are my personal Netvibes, Google Drive, a Google Sheets spreadsheet with my calendar and accounting tabs in it, Gmail, and Tumblr. The Firefox tabs are a second Netvibes account I use for work (we have several news sources we all monitor daily), my non-fannish gmail, my non-fannish facebook with a custom reading page so I never see anything twice, and the Google "family calendar" that I and my family use to track where we all are and what we're doing.

My parents use this more than I do, which is why I often open the calendar app on my phone to check my work schedule and find that my parents are taking the dogs to the groomer's today (yes, I know I could turn this off, but it amuses me). When I introduced my mother to Google Calendar her eyes got super big and she fell in immediate love; the first three things she added were the birthdays of her two dogs, followed by the birthday of Jesus. I would be more insulted by this but I had already added all the family birthdays, so at least I didn't come in behind the dogs AND the Christ Child.

Once in a while, when I'm at work and I feel like I'm not sure what I should be doing or that my day is spiralling out of my control, I'll take a deep breath, pull up Chrome, and go through all my pinned tabs, one by one, changing or fixing something on each -- I'll clear out my Longform reading, answer a few emails, check the calendar, etc. Then I'll go through any open tabs and try to close at least one. I get anxious if I have more than five or six non-pinned tabs open. Like having an inbox that's rarely over thirty emails total, it's not a sign I'm more effective or efficient than anyone else, it's just a sign I'm debilitatingly anxious about this kind of thing.

Work: I've read, many times, that people who work eight hours a day in a white collar job like mine really only do four hours of actual work. And for a while I joked that I wondered if I even did four, because I dick around on the internet A LOT. But lately I started to genuinely wonder, and so for the past six weeks, I've put that statement to the test.

When I arrive at work, I immediately put in two hours of solid work. I don't read tumblr, I don't read anything but work-related material. I triage all my work emails, I go through my Google Task list for the day and sort things by most to least urgent, and then I work my way through them for two solid hours. It's not easy at all, but any time I think "This is when I would stop and read tumblr" I shake my head and try to do one more work thing, and then I get back in the groove and can do like, three more. I also use this first morning period to take care of "personal work", stuff which has to get done to keep my life running smoothly, like mailing packages or replying to my parents' emails or whatnot.

Then I get a half-hour break to read tumblr, play a flash game, maybe read a piece on Longform. (I don't read fanfic at work; I sometimes clean out Netvibes of fics that from the tags and summaries I know I won't be interested in, but I don't open fanfic at work at all.) I also use this time to get some food in me.

Then I do another two hours of work, same deal. And that's four hours of work. And I get a shitload done, let me tell you.

For the next three hours after, I am basically free to do whatever I want. I usually use about an hour to do some freelance work, and I spend time on tumblr or on personal email, reading articles, listening to podcasts, playing games. I eat a snack, I talk to my coworkers. I find I actually run out of new stuff to read, and I do try to process the old stuff, like empty out my drafts and likes. And of course the nature of my job means that sometimes there is work to be done that comes up suddenly, but it's usually just a matter of teeing it up for the following morning's work shift.

For the last hour of my work day, I go through my work inbox, make sure everything's set up for tomorrow, send any last emails, do any last wrap-up, and make sure all my documents are either saved or closed. (Our IT team likes to run updates and involuntary restarts without warning, so I've learned to always save at end of day.)

So, yeah. Those are some of the systems I have in place in order to run a very mentally busy life. I'm not necessarily recommending them; a lot of them won't work for everyone because everyone is different, and I recognize that some of them are inapplicable (I work a job with no outward-facing element to it; a barista or a librarian or a teacher can't do what I do, schedule-wise), and some of them are a level of regimentation I'm not sure most people would find healthy. But that's how I do my thing, and maybe some of my techniques will sound appealing to other people who occasionally feel, as I do, like they're drowning a little bit.

(Did you find this useful or interesting? Keep me organized and drop some change in my Ko-Fi or at my Paypal!)

[buzzdixonwriter]

Writing Report June 11, 2017

Yet another example of how the writer’s mind -- at least this writer’s mind -- works, in which I create a story I will probably never write…

…but more on that below. I shall annotate as needed.

Thursday morning, after finally getting a good night’s sleep after being sick most of the week, I awoke with a story title in my head:  ”Drive Down The Devil’s Highway”

I actually saw the title already printed up in my dream, in the style of old time men’s adventure magazines.

[Annotation #1:  Men’s adventure magazine -- affectionately known as “sweaties” -- were a popular format / genre from the 1950s to the mid-1970s.  While their predecessors existed in the earlier pulp era, the “sweaties” were different in several key aspects.  For one, while sci-fi / fantasy / mystery pulps transmogrified into square bound digest-size publications, the “sweaties” melded with the saddle stitched racy pin-up magazines.  For another, their stories, while remaining mostly fictional, attempted to pass themselves off as factual true events.  While the stories remained somewhat plausible at the beginning of the “sweaties” era, by the mid-1960s they were thinly disguised male wish fulfillment fantasies of increasingly improbably proportions.  Nonetheless, they were a hoot to read, and even now the genre has fans such as those found at Bob Deis’ Men's Adventure Magazines & Books on Facebook.]

Back to my dream:  I awoke with the title in my head, and from the style of the title I knew the story had to be in classic men’s adventure magazine mode.

But what kind of story?

Well, obviously, something to do with highways (…duh).  I had just started re-reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in the original scroll draft (which, technically, is a memoir or a travelogue, and not an autobiographical novel as the first edition was), so the story would be constantly moving, traveling, going somewhere, but…why?

Because of Kerouac, my brain instantly flashed the story would need to be set in Quebec.  Somebody had to get somewhere -- why?

My brain flashed again:  Roman Holiday, a delightful classic romantic comedy starring Audrey Hepburn as a young princess who just wants to have fun, and Gregory Peck as a world weary journalist who treats her to a night on the town when she sneaks away from her embassy.

Great story…

…but “sweaties” demand gut-slammin’ jaw-poundin’ tire-screechin’ gun-blastin’ !A!C!T!T!I!O!N!, not some wimpy romance.

So…keep the basic idea, only…only the princess has just been orphaned:  The time is immediately at the end of WWII.  The royal family of some small but strategically important Eastern European nation sat out exile in a remote ethnic community of their countrymen in Quebec during the war.  They planned to return as soon as the war ended, but not everyone in the ethnic community wants the old royal family back; some are communist agents who kill her parents.

The princess escapes and is hidden.  However, spies and assassins are everywhere, and even though they’ve tried to disguise the teen as a typical bobby-soxer, her regal manner makes her stick out like a sore thumb.

[Annotation #2:  Where the hell is the RCMP in all this?  Gonna need some handwavium to keep ‘em at arm’s length, but I can come up with that later.]

So my protagonist -- a melding of Peck and Kerouac -- knocks the regal out of the princess by forcing her to clean a public toilet by herself.

The effort leaves her tired / grossed out / pissed off…

…and not at all regal looking.

Now our hero can get her on the aforementioned highway and go barreling down to Montreal where her embassy awaits to protect her.

Well, that evokes memories of Thunder Road which is great:  Plenty of car-chasing / car-crashing action to go around, plus some occasional bomb-throwing / gun-shooting / fist-fighting for variety.

Now we’ve got our title, our premise, our conflict, our main characters, our setting, and enough hi-octane high concept to keep the inventive juices flowing…

…if I choose to write it.

See, everything you just read, including the various asides, formed in my head in the space of less than two and a half minutes elapsed time from the moment I woke up.  (Oh, and I was carrying on a conversation with Soon-ok simultaneously.)

150 seconds to whip up 650 words worth of story concept -- and I wasn’t even thinking about it!

This happens all the time.  I’m minding my own business, not bothering a soul, not really thinking about anything, and BOOM! suddenly an idea has exploded in my head and is screaming “WritemewritemeWRITEME!!!  Write me write NOW!”

Ain’t gonna happen, compadre.

Least not anytime soon.

As fast as I can come up with ideas, I’m nowhere near as fast writing them down.

“Writing them down” is a misnomer.  It really means I’m researching the idea, probing for weak spots, fleshing out the characters, coming up with plot and incident and dialog to drive the story along…and that doesn’t include all the work that comes ///after/// it’s written down, either.

If I decided to write this store, I would want to keep it short (under 6,000 words).  That means if I committed to it, I could probably finish a rough draft in a week’s time.

So why don’t I?

Well, ignoring the huge backlog of other stories in various stages of completion in my mind / on my desk / in my computer, the reason is going to cause a lot of you to look at me as a snob, and if you do, so be it; you’re not the one occupying my skin, I am.

There are, in my estimation, three classes of fiction:  True Fiction, Genre Fiction, Stock Fiction.

There’s nothing wrong with any of them; as noted above even Stock Fiction can be tons o’fun to write and read

But each possesses certain strengths, counter-balanced by equal weaknesses.

We’ll start at the bottom of the barrel and work our way up:  Stock Fiction is nothing but formulaic stock characters involved in formulaic stock situations, saying and doing formulaic stock things.

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with that (lord knows I can’t get enough old B-movie westerns to satisfy me).

Sometimes all you want to do as an audience is turn off your brain and go through the pleasant (e)motions of a story. 

Even when done professionally, as likely as not it’s just a better grade of fan-fic.

You could literally get a computer to write this kind of stuff; it ain’t rocket science.

Stock Fiction takes what already exists and rearranges it slightly and peddles the product as new.

But there’s nothing there.  It’s all just empty calories like a cheap snack food:  One bite and it’s gone (but oh, how delicious while chomping).

The second form is Genre Fiction, and this is essentially Stock Fiction written well.

The same caveats and criticism apply, but there’s a little more legroom, a little more breathing space, a little more originality here (not much, not nearly enough, but some).

Genre Fiction basically takes stock characters and stock stories then amps them up with a dollop of originality.

If the pleasure of Stock Fiction is the beauty of the form, the pleasure of Genre Fiction is the deviation from the norm.

Take a Stock Fiction story, give it just enough insight and wit and originality to boost the characters from one dimension to two, and you’ve got a palatable hit on your hands.

The geniuses of this field -- and true geniuses they are, no snark here -- are many, but let’s focus on four in the tiny, tiny sub-group of really well done detective fiction:  Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald’s Ross and John D.

Through their philosophizin’ PIs, their complex and compromised characters, their willingness to tell the truth about the world around them via their genre of choice, they create something new and fresh and wonderful…

…but not completely whole.

When they work well -- as Chandler did, as John D. did when Travis McGee was fresh and new in the world and found only in paperback originals -- they create genuine art, something any reader can consume without shame, something adding to this weary world, not merely draining more from it.

But there is a limit, stylistically if nothing else, that holds these writers and their works back.

They can ride their literary steeds as high up the hill as possible, and in the fading evening light they can catch a glimpse of the city they can never visit, the city they can imagine, the city they can yearn for, the city they can never visit.

True Fiction -- good fiction, pure fiction -- starts so much further out and beyond from Genre Fiction.

It starts with an idea that is fresh! and original! (though sometimes the idea ends up coming to it).

There are no genres in True Fiction, real fiction.  Life is not defined by terms and conditions we conjure up, it is what it is.  We may later find a conveniently labeled box to drop it in, but that’s not what it is, that’s never what it is.

A work of True Fiction comes out of nowhere, entraps us, and takes us all…Somewhere!  Anywhere! we never visited before, indeed, may never even realized existed before exquisitely brought to our attention.

It is a work of art first, a bundle of tropes second -- if at all!

Truth be told, True Fiction may not do well in initial release, but what gives it staying power is that it takes readers someplace brand new even though they’ve already seen it a million times.

”Drive Down The Devil’s Highway” is straight stock fiction, one from column A, one from column B formulaic storytelling.  I might, if really pressed, come up with enough originality to ooonch it up a notch or two in the form of a scene here, a supporting character there.

That’s not what I’m trying to do.

My goals and ambitions lay higher, and while I certainly have some genre and stock influences in me, I’d like to think I’m aiming higher, unwilling to fall back.

Because that’s what Genre and Stock Fiction would represent to me, a falling back to safer pastures.

I probably won’t write ”Drive Down The Devil’s Highway” because I can see nothing in it that promises to rise above Stock Fiction.

If I applied myself and worked hard at it, I might be able to boost it up to the level of low grade Genre Fiction.

But that’s as high as she’ll get.

I have a limited number of years allotted me on earth, and while I night fail in the attempt, I’m gonna spend ‘em trying to write True Fiction.

[Annotation #3:  Some of my more pragmatic friends will ask why I don’t write ”Drive Down The Devil’s Highway” anyway and sell it and use the money to help buy time to write True Fiction.  Because there’s no market for that kind of fiction anymore, that’s why.  Once upon a time a writer could sell two hours worth of TV scripts a year and earn enough to coast thru the next nine months writing True Fiction.  Not anymore:  The freelance market in everything has long since evaporated and the amount of time and effort taken to place a short story simply ain’t worth it other than in publicity and egoboo.  Yeah, ”Drive Down The Devil’s Highway” could probably make a good low budget indie film, but it takes forever and a day to get those kinds of films made; I lack the time and patience.  So this is as close as we’re ever probably gonna get to seeing ”Drive Down The Devil’s Highway” written down.]

[Annotation #4:  Least any of my sibling scribes think I’m trash talkin’ them for what they choose to write…no.  This is about me, my POV, my values, my motives, my soul.  If you’re writing a continuing character who makes you money and your readers happy, you go for it.  Nothing shameful about that at all.  If I’ll watch crappy 1950s sci-fi movies, I’ve got no business telling you what you can or can’t write, should or shouldn’t feel good about.  Fly your freak flag high.]