#it makes me feel proud of myself :') today they gave me grammar results and I've passed :D

[kitkatt0430]

not quite an assumption but i am terrified of you how do you find the motivation (and TIME) to write as much as you do + with the quality you do???

I admit... sometime i write during work hours, something made easier because I can just work from home with my home laptop setup on one side of my L-shaped desk setup and my work laptop on the other.

While code is compiling or during a tea break I can write a few sentences or a few paragraphs or do a little editing. I don't write during work often, but on a slow day I can sometimes get a lot done on a fic. (I'm more likely to read or play music off my plex server, but writing is an option I enjoy having available.)

But overall I'm just a fast touch-typist. Slowed a bit recently by my switch to one of those split design ergonomic keyboards for my home office setup. Because, uh... I gave myself some very mild carpal tunnel symptoms this year presumably primarily from my typing. Though I think a few other things contributed. (Thankfully my wrist brace for sleeping in has largely cleared up the worst of my symptoms. No surgery needed!!!) So perhaps I should be viewing my own amount of output fic-wise to be a bit scary too. 😳

I'm not totally sure where my motivation to write comes from, exactly. Sometimes a fic idea comes to me and my imagination spins it like a microwaved plate enough times that I just have to write it. Because it's funny and I want to share or it's serious and it feels like I need to tell it or because my fingers just have to type it out so that it'll stop spinning in my brain. I think some of that is potentially ADHD related, tbh.

Honestly, every year I look back on how much fic I've written and go no??? I didn't write that much. Did I? Obviously I did but... wow. O_O Sometimes I focus so much on the fics that I haven't written, like series continuations, that I forget just how much I have actually completed and posted and that i should be proud of that work. I've really liked things such as the Ao3 Wrapped and other finished fic ask games here on Tumblr that remind me to look back and be happy about everything I've accomplished.

As for the fic quality... I have been writing fanfic since I was very young. The first fanfics I wrote were entirely for my own enjoyment when Star Trek Voyager was first airing. I still regret those fics were lost when the computer crashed. Though I also wrote a lot of plot ideas and story intros to those ideas in various notebooks at that age too, with homages to Snoopy's 'A dark and stormy night' type intros and influence from whatever I was reading at the time. Those are lost too, but all of it taught me things along the way about what worked for me and what didn't and how to improve my spelling and grammar. (Though re-reading my own fics is, to this day, an exercise in patience every time I find a minor error.)

So I owe my writing style and fic quality today to eight-year-old me who saw herself a bit in Naomi Wildman while playing imagination games. To my eleven(twelve???)-year-old self who identified with feeling like the odd one out the way Seven of Nine did and started writing my own stories about her as result and who didn't give up writing when my hand-me-down computer crashed only a few months after it was moved into my room, taking with it all the writing I'd saved. To my fourteen-year-old self who fell in love with reading fanfic and my sixteen-year-old self who tried to break out of the internalized misogyny and queerphobia with my writing despite not even realizing I had those things inside of me. To my college age self who didn't let busy schedules and calculus (ew) stop me from making time for my writing.... to every version of me I've been along the way who kept writing and improving my technique, often without even realizing that's what i was doing.

I'm thirty-five now, so my writing ability has had a lot of time to grow. But really, that's all my fic quality comes down to. All the time I've spent over the years telling lots of stories.

[gatual]

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