#i wrote in october 😅 or if any of the prompts actually inspired me or if they were just there already 😅😅😅

[forcebookish]

ok i think i'm a wee burnt out re: writing so i'm going to refrain from opening documents and listlessly staring at them lol if i get an idea i'll write it down of course but i'm not going to try to force anything

kinda bad timing considering novella november is in three (four? do you count november 1st?) days...

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

Happy STS, Elli! My STS asks have been severely lagging recently, but hooray for the holidays and free time!

What’s the biggest burst of inspiration you’ve ever had, and what was the result of it? And why do you think you were so inspired?

Happy STS!

A lot of scenes, or parts of my works, are inspired by stuff. A throwaway line in a game, a piece of equipment with a certain look, a prompt, a gif set, a bad movie, a chat with my friends.

But for me, 'burst of inspiration' has to actually lead to something, and the only thing most stuff leads to at first is the age of daydreams, and by the time I get to writing, it's a... giant soggy pile of inspiration.

I think looking at sheer scale and speed, that point would have to go to Glass Shards. I wrote the first, 90k+ words draft in October 2016, in a month. So basically a good nano if you ignore the fact that I can't read a calendar.

Three things made that possible: The fact that I was still writing in German, the fact that I just dropped it into an existing world to deal with the consequences later, and the fact that I was fueled by anger, sadness, and spite.

In 2015, I learned of the term asexuality, and for the first time, things made sense. The next year, I spent hating my life, doubting myself, crying my eyes out, having no place but online, which was littered with hate.

And then I turned to what I always turned to — books — and couldn't find any. Sure, there were some lists, and I read a bunch, but many were m/m, which really, I can't relate to, and too many still contained sex (because compromise, or demi/gray). I'm sure they're the right books for someone. They weren't for me.

I have no idea which damn stars aligned for me to grab two of my chars and be like "what if I cut this one's arm off, and what if this one has to save him, and what if both were ace" but here we are. I shoved Merry into the cell with no idea what would happen and "yes, and" my way through a first draft.

The first version had a lot of flaws — hell, the current version still has a bunch 😅 — but it was the first time I finished something. The story was pretty much the same, I just had slightly different backstories for both of them.