#googdocs

[internutter]

Okay, compy genius side of Tumblr, I have a puzzle for you.

This is supposed to be a GoogDoc of a Doctor Who fanfic. It is showing a part of an early chapter of an ongoing novel series of mine.

TLDR version: Why do it do that? Further, how can I stop it without causing myself psychological pain?

The system: Linux CatchyOS [X-11] The browser: Firefox Number of GoogDocs tabs I have open: er... probably less than twenty and yes, I do need them all. What it does:

Sometimes when I go to the tab, sometimes when I'm editing in the tab, the appearance of the doc will just switch to some random other doc that I may or may not also have open for tab hoarding reasons [threaten my tab hoard and die lol] and reloading the page can restore the appearance of the doc intermittently.

Experiments I have done:

Copying the text I went there to copy will work regardless of what my screen is telling me.

Same with pasting.

There is no rational pattern to whether or not reloading will resume the appearance of the normal text

Obviously, I don't want to sully my lovely late-stage-capitalism-free system with (blergh) Chrome (retching noise) so any and all good alternatives are welcome.

Especially if any of y'all can recommend something to get me off of GoogDrive and GoogDocs. I would like the same features but none of the evil.

Thanks in advance.

[brood-mother]

i have fic ready to be posted but i'm on mobile and im fighting a losing battle trying to edit/format on a tiny smashed screen that's 1/3rd dead so. guess it can wait for the weekend

[heli0s-writes]

Idea/prompt? Reader is a foreign politician's daughter (Dr. Doom's, maybe?) on American soil for college. She refuses security detail, as she wants a low profile. Her dad hires/convinces Steve to check in with her constantly to "keep the peace", both internationally and his own mind.

They have a mutual respect, became friendly even, but America's golden boy is ever the professional.

An assignment means that he's going to be away for an unknown period. He tells her this in person and introduces his stand in - Bucky.

oh yes, brat reader shoves political immunity in steve's face every chance she gets. she does mostly innocuous shit but is *very* annoying about it. flirts with him for the sheer fun of watching him be mildly uncomfortable. he's had it by day 4, so he throws bucky (grumpy, needs more sunlight) her way by bringing him by her suite as an "assignment".

she opens the door hungover to hell in underwear with like 3 people in various states of naked and debauched behind her and who really knows wtf happened because steve cannot fucking read her. maybe it was just a really lit mariokart party. he doesn't live this life, he's unwell looking at it.

but then bucky sidesteps, makes eye contact, they??? like??? cONNECT???, and he walks in without another word and shuts the door on steve. what happens neXT????

aka my generally exasperated steve, unhinged reader, bucky not helping the situation at all fantasy :)

[whalechief]

just a silly lil creature sitting in the dark recounting moments of autistic signs while kk parade plays on loop

[noushoe]

DM transcript update

my god that was infinite

Chapter 2 Shimi-O is now live on the googdoc transcript I've been working on. It's mostly complete, 95% at least, just need to check for a couple more flavortext options. Also I skipped most of Mary's talk options for the whole thing but oops there's sometimes extra character dialogue and not just Go Do This

For the whole thing, I need to go back and add what Mary has to say at different progress points during the investigation, make sure my formatting is consistent, and I've definitely been halfassing the redtext edits.

Figuring out the mechanics by testing everything is neat - Shimi-O gives a lot of hints as you throw incorrect items at him, especially in the last round. It does mean this is such a trial and error process as you try to put all the notes, tips, and items together to figure out the right combos. This is also the first boss you can get to without having all the items you need for a Purify run.

[patchworkgargoyle]

ooo i’d love to hear about Roll for Perception!!

Aw, this one!! It's my first foray into an outsider POV Steddie fic! It's a modern!no UD!AU from Dustin's POV, where Hellfire is playing a long-distance d&d session, inspired by this post. Steve and Eddie have gotten together, but haven't told the party yet. Dustin hears someone, and sees part of him in the background and proceeds to tease Eddie about it, not knowing who it is. There's a Reveal, of course, though I've yet to write that bit because this poor wip has been languishing in my googdocs for a few months now 😅

But here's how it starts!

Dustin made it a habit to wait in the Hellfire discord's voice channel earlier than anyone else. It was the only way Eddie would hear out his theories, complaints, and suggestions for the campaign after he'd gone on for an entire hour after a session and Eddie had to literally shout over him that it was now 1am, and he would like to go to sleep now please-and-thanks. And so, after apologies and much discussion, Dustin hopped on roughly an hour early and waited for his DM to join. Luckily it didn't actually bother Eddie. He claimed that he did actually like the feedback and used some of the suggestions, if rarely, and it ended up being a way for them to chat about life shit now that Eddie lived in Chicago but Dustin was stuck at Hawkins High for one last year.

So when the discord chimed to let him know someone had joined, Dustin didn't expect this.

"-gonna take a nap," said someone distinctly not Eddie, punctuated by a yawn.

"'Kay, enjoy your beauty sleep, sweetheart. I'll try to keep it down." Now that was Eddie, sounding more affectionate than Dustin had ever heard.

A sound like a snort, or maybe Eddie bumping his mic, was followed by, "Yeah, sure."

Silence stretched on for a minute and Dustin realised he'd been completely forgotten, and he absolutely would not let that stand. So.

"Did you seriously have your booty call over before D&D, Eddie?" he asked, distaste dripping from every word.

Something loud dropped on Eddie's end. "Jesus fuck–Henderson, give a man some warning next time.

[cmweller]

Where I am in my writing

[dragon-zena]

Contemplating writing a long googdoc about my thoughts on this game and the characters within

[internutter]

::deep inhale::

Listen.

I have overflowed THREE GoogDocs on this fucking WIP and am perilously close to overflowing a fourth.

I've spent two years on this.

It won't leave me alone!

If this story is not worth it...

If nobody else in the entire world loves it as much as I do...

If not one other soul fucking reads it...

I

Swear

I will find a way

To

Burn

The fucking

World!

...meanwhile, the very first novel I deemed worthy of traditional press is still in pitching purgatory, I have three other novels waiting for the same excruciating process and this pentology WIP is going to turn into a sextology because fuck my life and nobody knows I fucking exist because writers have to be social and grow parasocial relationships with thousands of strangers just to be noticed these days and I don't know how to people...

I just can't not write, you know?

75% of writing is convincing yourself that your story is worth it

[ur-ghostgirl]

even a googdoc link?

nah just message me if you want it i'm not posting something for everyone to see c:

[internutter]

Where I am in my WIP

[todoroki-shouts]

Thinking abt that one fic i started writibg bc i got invested in the ship w those two first years from aoba johsai and it was supposed to be two chapters but i only managed the one and the other half of the story is floating somewhere out there in my googdocs sorry to whoever was reading that maybe ill finish one day

[internutter]

Yeah NGL, if I had an ounce, a gram, or even a karat of your luck, I'd already be on the bestseller lists.

Procrastination is my very regrettable copilot in my process. Whilst waiting for some people to get back to me about one book, I got into the weeds writing another... and then forgot about pitching for like five more novels. [One needs a rewrite and I have this "brief little thing" that has taken over my life and four GoogDocs that's my current WIP

I... might... have a lot of anxiety about this adventure.

So I've been procrastinating more by getting pitch kits together for each and every one of those novels.

I've been told to pick one and prep for that. Move, damnit.

I have picked one. And now I'm procrastinating by fine-tuning my pitch kits for just that one. Heck, I even procrastinated writing this bit.

The plus side is that I now have a checklist for pitching four complete [but not all completely ready, I need money to pay for an editor but I can't procrastinate because of that] novels to that one I picked. Yay.

I'm packing for my adventure. Feeling a lot like Samwise Gamgee on that invisible line between "home" and "the furthest he's been from the Shire".

...nobody's there to carry me, too.

Salutations and good wishes to you. I am an Indie Author seeking to go Pro. Some good advice and guidance might help minimise the mountain of my anxiety about doing this. I know you got your start with fanfiction, but did you find a publisher/agent through that door? [lots sneer at these days. Still] How many rejections did you suffer before you found your place in the literary world? Thanks for your time and sorry for bothering you <3

Hi there! And don't sweat it: this is no bother.

I have to apologize in advance, because my own career arc isn't likely to serve as much of a good example. In terms of how I got into this business, I'm a serious outlier.

Quickest and easiest to discuss: my agent and I got together after my first book was already bought and published. (Which back in the day was seen as a good enough way to go forward, and then still entirely possible.) He was recommended to me by one of my editors, as—like me—he was just getting started in the business: a likely-looking newcomer then scouting new talent. We met up and chatted, and it seemed to both of us that we'd be a good fit for each other. After forty-odd years of working together, we still are.

About the fanfic: (Adding a cut here so as not to carpet people's dashes with wall-to-wall text...)

What writing all that fic did for me—from about age sixteen onwards—was give me a whole lot of practice in getting the initial garbage associated with a story written and out of the way. Best to admit it here: we all have plenty of crap writing in us. And yeah, even long-term professional writers do. Whether you're at the beginning of your career or right in the middle of it, this is what "zero drafts" are for. You tell yourself the story, first time out... and routinely at this stage a lot of what proves to be unusable stuff emerges, and can be discarded in rewrite. (Of course crap writing can also emerge without warning in the later stages of a project, but there are many reasons for that, all beyond the scope of this discussion.) And you learn even more from reworking the material after you've gotten rid of the dross.

During the period when I was executing what might have been, oh, half a million words of fanfic—Trek originally, and then LoTR—and while reading a whole lot of everything, as I'd been doing since I was first allowed to go raid the town library by myself at age eight—I learned a fair amount about writing without realizing it. Some of it was simply about writing inside a set of rules. (Which I hadn't been doing previously: between eight and sixteen I was writing original fiction, mostly fairy tales.) Naturally in fanfic you have to obey the laws of whatever universe you're working in... or even if you wind up flouting them consciously, you do have to be conscious of them. But this work also led me to something that I hadn't really spent a lot of time thinking about: the concept that fiction writing as a whole had rules. I realized I'd better find out what those were.

The best stuff I found out during this period was what I picked up by direct example from other writers, whom I'd immediately start imitating and then sort of leave by the wayside when I found others I liked better; at which point I'd start imitating them. (This being a great way to learn and hone new skills, and to start getting a sense of what a writer's "voice" is and can come to mean. I think every writer does this, to some extent: because it's really, really tough to learn how to write without reading. And the more extensively the better.)

I have to emphasize here, BTW, that the fanfic that came out of me as I started slogging up this learning curve was all almost uniformly terrible. All of it, mercifully, along with my earliest original fiction, is gone now: long since burnt, shredded, composted under many layers of time. Trust me, it's just as well. Gah was it awful! Nobody else ever saw the stuff, for which I thank great Thoth every time I think about it. ...What's interesting, too, in its way, was that I didn't even know that what I was doing was fan fiction. I had as yet no contact with any kind of organized fandom, and it would be a long time yet before "online" was invented. I was working in utter isolation, unaware that anybody else might have been doing the same thing. (And it's difficult to describe the sense of astonishment and joy that hit me the first time I went to an SF convention, saw fanzines for the first time, and found out that I was not alone. All unsuspecting, I'd stumbled onto one of my tribes.)

But somewhere along the line, as the years went by—as I finished high school and went to college, and then from there to nursing school, and graduated and started working as a psychiatric nurse, and kept on writing—at some point, as I started writing original fiction again, as well as fanfic, the quality of the output began to improve. The combination of constant practice and voracious reading of better writers outside my chosen genre was slowly having an effect. Trusted friends who saw this later material started saying, "This isn't bad, you should try to get it published!" But since none of these folks were writers, I didn't pay too much attention to their opinions.

I did pay attention, though, when my good friend and mentor David Gerrold said something similar on reading my first novel in 1976. And when that was bought by the first publisher who read it, I had to admit he might have had something there.

This too, though, is unfortunately also a way I'm an outlier: I haven't had a lot of rejection. (Even in my TV work, where rejection is pretty much the rule rather than the exception.) Speaking very generally, just about anyone I've pitched something to in the prose market has bought it—or if they didn't like the idea I came in with, they've immediately said "But would you like to do this instead?" And often enough, what they've offered or suggested has been something that sounded like fun. That's how I wound up doing the Star Trek: Rihannsu books, for example: they were "instead of" a Romulan dictionary. Paramount essentially ringfenced an entire AU-area of Trek and gave it to me to play in, which struck me at the time as amazing. And continues to do so.

Now all this may make me sound almost unfairly lucky. But things do tend, slowly or quickly, to balance out. Over time the universe has made up for its relative kindness at the rejection end of things by making sure I knew plenty about the non-rejection forms of writer-career pain: projects from which I was not rejected but which went terribly wrong (wheels come off a huge deal just before signing, promised actors or directors fail to materialize...), projects where I did the work but didn’t get paid, or where I was brought on board and then got fired/ghosted unreasonably or for no reason at all, or sometimes (mortifyingly) for quite good reason. And as a very pointed shot across my bow as my career-vessel was just pulling out of port, let's not forget how half the print run of that very-much-buzzed-about debut novel was pulped in the warehouse because another, far better-established writer's new book needed the pallet space that mine had been taking up. (insert rueful smile here) Believe me, entropy is running, and will catch up with you one way or another. So make yourself as ready for it as you can.

I don't mean to increase your anxiety. Yet that said: you're preparing to enter a business in which, for a freelancer, at least some level of anxiety is more or less part of the basic ground of being. You are going to have to develop ways of dealing with the everyday forms of that to keep it from routinely derailing your work.

I find it helps a little if you can come to consider this as a modern form of Going On An Adventure. Good things will happen; bad things will happen; and all of these will be in service of building your career. Think of yourself as being on a quest.

Your job now becomes the business of suiting up with the best equipment and advice you can find (ideally not from outliers like me). The web is full of useful pages on subjects such as how to query and how to find an agent.

Here are links to some.

Compare these resources one against another to see how their different kinds of advice seem to stack up, and which ones are the most congenial for you.

Then use this data to start drawing your personal roadmap across the terrain. Get as clear as you can in your own mind about what you're trying to get out of being in this business: what kind of writing you want to do and what results you want to produce. Then set out, redrawing your road map as necessary as you keep moving forward through the new terrain.

And I wish you good fortune on the journey! (Because luck, as you can see from the above, can definitely be part of this... but fortune favors the prepared.)

Meanwhile, get out there and have a blast. :)

[guardianfloofs]

Gonna try to make some of these character tweets a bit more consistent in terms of writing setup. I'm sort of just bouncing between copy-pasting from my GoogDoc notes, and writing my thoughts down as I go.

Also sorry for the weird delay on these, I've just been mentally all over the place for a bit. Plus, some of these characters have a bit less concrete designs and art, since I'm in the middle of developing them. So, I feel kind of awkward posting just concepts for a character. Still, I'll try not to get too caught up in it, and show what I have for them.

Anywho, that's enough for now. Thanks everyone following this account. I hope I can entertain you a little with the little world I made. ^^

[patchworkgargoyle]

WIP Wednesday Thursday

It’s WIP Wednesday Thursday, time for a little accountability, sharing your work, and getting a kick in the pants.

Thanks for tagging me @helixferrano!! :D

Here’s how it works:

In a reblog (or new post w/ rules attached), post up to five (5) filenames of your WIPs; not titles, file names.

Post a snippet from one of them. Snippet must be words you wrote in the last 7 days. We’re posting progress here. If you haven’t made any, go make some and come back to post!

After you’ve posted, people can send you an ask with one of your file names. You must then write 3 sentences in that file. If the filename is one you can’t share from (for example, an event fic), write 3 sentences on it anyway, and then 3 more on another to share.

That’s it! You can invite others to join in, or just post.

I write in googdocs so I don't have file names, so these are titles or working titles!

WIPS:

Roll for Perception

skin you alive (i want to be human)

Nail Polish

Plagued by Piercings

Shark Bite Meet-Cute

Snippet:

(from Roll for Perception, a Dustin POV modern!AU Steddie ficlet)

So when the discord chimed to let him know someone had joined, Dustin didn't expect this.

"-gonna take a nap," said someone distinctly not Eddie, punctuated by a yawn.

"'Kay, enjoy your beauty sleep, sweetheart. I'll try to keep it down." Now that was Eddie, sounding more affectionate than Dustin had ever heard.

A sound like a snort, or maybe Eddie had bumped his mic, was followed by, "Yeah, sure."

Silence stretched on for a minute and Dustin realised he'd been completely forgotten, and he absolutely would not let that stand. So.

"Did you seriously have your booty call over before D&D, Eddie?" he asked, distaste dripping from every word.

Something loud dropped on Eddie's end. "Jesus fuck– Henderson, give a man some warning next time."

"It's not my fault you got distracted by your base instincts."

"Don't talk to me about base instincts, man, you're twelve." Eddie ignored Dustin's offended scoff and continued, turning on his webcam, "and I'll have you know, that 'booty call' is a fully fledged boyfriend thank you very much!"

That was news. Eddie had complained about failed date after failed date for a year now, after his hopes for a better dating pool in the city had been crushed by a particularly hard blow. Will had suggested once that he should try setting Eddie and Steve up, after Steve and Robin had also moved to Chicago in the spring, but Dustin had dismissed it completely. It had nothing to do with him being jealous that they'd be spending more time together than with him, they just weren't each other's type. At all. Now that Eddie found someone that stuck, Will could stop bringing it up.

Tagging...

Non-obligatorily, as always: @inairbinad, @grisailledreams, @crowtrobotx, @ghost--enthusiast though you can save this for next week if you want, I'm squeaking this in at 11:30pm PT xD

[actualbird]

22?

eyyo anon :DDD

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

my organizational skills

are bad

they are bad.

they are very bad everywhere, and that includes in writing.

i primarily use googdrive and googdocs and at first glance, my fanfic folder looks aight. it’s color coded per fandom (archive downloads r works of mine downloaded the pdf for as a backup)

but once u go into the folder, it’s no man’s land. heres the tot folder, zoomed out VERY MUCH to see a glimpse

i have over 100+ docs in the tot folder and uh

this is cuz whenever i have Any Idea, i make first a preliminary doc for it. that prelim doc, if i develop it enough, eventually becomes the outline doc as well. for the actual fic, i create a new doc so i can have the outline doc and the actual fic doc open in different windows, split screen, as i write

but when fics get long, i have the tendency to split each chapter into a separate doc

and if u can see, some docs are blank. those are Actual Fic docs i made as a placeholder cuz i developed the outline doc but have yet to do the actual writing bit

additionally, INSIDE every outline doc is a mess. bcuz im an insane person who can only write w a detailed skeleton first, so my outline docs usually end up as half the wc of the actual finished fic. my outline for the shovel talk fic, for example, is 5k words long. and that doc isnt just arranged like CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 2, noooo, it’s also arranged with subheaders that say “STUFF I WANT TO HAPPEN, USE THIS AT SOME POINT” and “DONT FORGET THESE THEMES” 

additionally additionally, i have a discord server that only has me in it and i use the channels just for keeping info. i have an entire channel just for dumping fic ideas that popped into my head, fic ideas that have only gone through 0.000005 development

the fic ideas in there span from just a paragraph of description or it’s just a link to a twt thread i did at some point, leaving me completely clueless as to where it goes

basically what ive done to myself is create endless labyrinths upon labyrinths of words. hilariously, this is the only way i know how to function JHVKJSHFVKJSHDFJ

thank u for the ask, anon :DDD