#probably because in lots of my draft i use colour as a placeholder word until i can be bothered to edit in proper descriptions

[vaya-writes]

Word Game

Word Game!

I was tagged by @sio-writes and my words were: string, colour, bath, and fright

I tag @moonshine-nightlight, @eruden-writes, and @bucketsofmonsters with the words: decadent, delight, and dread :)

Excerpts under the cut!

Okay this one was written to be just smut but I never posted anywhere and hasn't been finished really:

The room she is brought to is unlike anything she has seen. Polished marble floors decorated with lush red rugs. A whole wall dedicated to a fire place and some book shelves. A four poster bed wider than her old cell, with gossamer curtains. An open door that Maia can see a large bath tub through. Another wall made up of nothing but tall windows.  

The curtains, thick and dark, are drawn shut. If Maia hadn’t caught a glance out the windows on the way here and seen the sun for herself, she’d have assumed it was evening from the room’s orange firelight.  

The door clicks shut behind her and Maia flinches. She hadn’t seen the Mantis leave, and was now alone with the room.  

“H-hello?” She swallows, voice hoarse from disuse.  

A figure appears in the bathroom doorway, only half dressed, and hair tousled and wet. Almost - human?  

Maia realises her mistake when the man - the creature - crosses the room. His dark curls and deep eyes, paired with smooth olive brown skin are handsome, but the grace to his movements, the way he nearly glides across the floor, leaves Maia’s nerves alight with fear.  

Her body screams at her to run and only a lifetime of training allows her to stand still.

-

This is from my Nanowrimo project last year, nicknamed Girl Meets Prince:

He faces her. “Are you okay?” 

She shakes her head. 

“What was that about?” 

She rubs her face. Holds out her arm in a silent request. 

He lowers her down onto the bank and waits as she splashes her face, and removes her boots. She undoes the bandage around her ankle, before lowering it into the water. Hopefully it will be cool enough to help with the swelling. 

She rubs her arms. Tries to put the words together. Fails. She gives Moreau a weak smile. “Was it that noticeable?”  

His face is set, deadly serious. “Literally anyone with a preternatural sense of smell would have noticed. You reek of terror. I think the tiefling is the only one who missed it.” 

She frowns at her arms, red from the heat, and splashes them too. She tries again to string the words together. 

-

And another from the same project. I hadn't settled on the species for the creature in this excerpt yet:

He grins, with his mouth full, and she has to ignore the viscera poking through his teeth. “Oh, I’ll eat any meat. Lizards, birds, rodents, stray humans…” 

She raises her hands. “If you wanted me to leave, you didn’t have to scare me. You could just ask.” 

He chuckles. “Forgive me, I do not get many visitors, and I do so enjoy frightening them. But, to answer your question, I like fish best. Fresh or rotten, I enjoy the taste. Besides, I’m cold blooded. I can slow my metabolism if need be.” 

“Do CREATURE’S prefer stagnant water? I imagine you’d catch more fish at the creek.” 

He sighs. “I would. But the Prince prefers to keep me here, away from temptation. He seems to think that if I were bored enough I would drown his courtiers.” 

“Would you?” 

The creature laughs. “Probably.” 

-

Lastly is a tiny, tiny excerpt from the horror porn fanfic I have pending, Willing Participant:

Your body is a mess. Your legs coated with dried blood; barely an inch of clean skin. Your chest is already smeared with it; fresh and reeking from your hand. Your bra, once pastel coloured, will never be stain free again. 

[chayscribbles]

chayscribbles’ monthly writing update ☆ january 2024

☆ STATISTICS.

projects worked on: The Gemini Heist. also i glanced at Andromeda Rogue but gave up on that real quick

proudest accomplishment: i uhhh drew some really cool gemini heist aus

books read: The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet by Becky Chambers; The Blighted Stars by Megan E O'Keefe; System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells. i got the first one for christmas and I CANNOT RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH. the other too were really good too.

☆ GENERAL COMMENTS.

hi! i have been very scarce from writeblr lately (and that's probably not gonna change soon) but i am alive and still creating! i mostly drew this month tbh but i did get some writing in, surprisingly!

you may or may not have noticed, but i'm no longer putting my wordcount in these updates. i've realized it's just not a valid metric for me to be measuring my progress. like, just because i haven't written any words in my draft doesn't mean i didn't make progress on my wip in other ways. and it doesn't make sense to use it for things like editing or revising, where words get cut all the time.

in wip news: i'm still reaaaally struggling to edit andromeda rogue, and after tinkering with it a bit at the beginning of the month, i made myself put it aside until february. which is... tomorrow. we'll see how that goes.

in the meantime i got some progress on gemini heist!

more specific wip-related comments + featured excerpt below.

☆ COMMENTS: THE GEMINI HEIST (draft 0)

this has got to be the messiest drafts i've ever written. my first drafts are usually somewhat clean, but this? it's placeholder city in here, i've skipped writing any kind of description, there are plot holes that i only realized existed later but forced myself to ignore for now in favour of moving forward. this is fine.

i'm not going to lie... i still don't have most of the heist figured out. i'm a plantser but i've been pantsing a lot more than planning and it feels like i'm flying blind and i'm gonna crash into a wall at any moment. this is totally fine.

not to mention, a ship i did not expect has emerged and punched me in the face, and since i have little self control, everything is even more messy, especially between these characters, and i have no clue how the hell i'm gonna resolve any of this. everything is fine. (and no, i'm not saying who is involved, but at least [REDACTED] has two hands. sorta.)

i'm having fun, though. that's what matters, right?

☆ FEATURED EXCERPT.

since i haven't really posted any writing in a hot minute, here's a slightly longer, VERY gay excerpt 😏 for context, this is right before the girls are set to crash a coronation party, and Gabi has asked Euna to help with her makeup 😌

“Thank you,” Gabi said, beginning to stand. “It’s not done,” Euna protested, taking her wrist to pull her back down. “I still have to do your lips.” “Oh,” Gabi said, settling back onto the bunk. She squirmed in place. “It’s not that important— I don’t want to take up any more of your time—” “It won’t take long,” Euna promised, taking out a tube of shimmering pink lipstick. She brought her other hand up to Gabi’s face, pausing right before touching her. “May I?” Gabi nodded, her neck bobbing slightly as she swallowed.  Euna gently cupped Gabi’s chin and drew her closer so she could see better, uncapping the tube with her teeth and spitting it out onto the bunk. Gabi sucked in an audible breath as Euna pressed the lipstick against her top lip and carefully smeared colour and glitter from one side to the other. Her hand slowed as it dragged the stick in the opposite direction along Gabi’s bottom lip, coming to a complete stop when she reached the end. For a moment, she stayed frozen in place, holding the lipstick to the corner of Gabi’s mouth, her other palm pressed against Gabi’s warm cheek, feeling her racing pulse at the tips of her fingers.  “Is… is something wrong?” Gabi asked in a whisper, barely moving her lips. Euna quickly withdrew both her hands from Gabi’s face. “No,” she said, groping the covers around her to retrieve the cap. “Just, ah, making sure I’d done it correctly.”

☆ TAGLISTS. let me know if you want to be added/removed to any of them.

general taglist:

@nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @onomatopiya @quilloftheclouds @ashen-crest @writeblrfantasy @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @extra-magichours @avi-why @lefttigerobservation @chazzawrites @bardolatrycore @innocentlymacabre

gemini heist taglist:

@florraisons @akindofmagictoo @cream-and-tea @nicola-writes @memento-morri-writes @antique-symbolism @rose-bookblood @afoolandathief @pepperdee @avi-why @zonnemaagd @chazzawrites @analogued @enchanted-lightning-aes @innocentlymacabre @kahvilahuhut @celestepens @cilly-the-writer @extra-magichours @onomatopiya @outpost51

[mathematicalghost]

The Basting Stitch

Unfortunately I am going to talk about Supernatural (yes, 2005 TV Series) because the ride never ends, and it'll be Supernatural right up until the end of the year when we can collectively forget that the show ever existed, like a distant memory that could just have easily been a dream.

The reason I mention Supernatural is because I was trying to figure out the first year I attempted NaNoWriMo. My best guess is 2011, which is shortly after season six ended. I'd become attached to the show via Tumblr because I was in my early teens and that's basically what anyone on Tumblr in their early teens in the early 10's did. In my April school holiday I watched all six seasons (up to what was currently airing) on terrible quality streaming sites, and came away in a haze of having consumed far to much middle-quality urban fantasy television. My first project that November, had transformed from a light-hearted fantasy tale to something that could easily be ripped off from a season of Supernatural. The project was doomed to failure, and I finished my first NaNoWriMo attempt at somewhere in the 2,000 word region.

As a concept, NaNoWriMo always appeared to be entirely doable for every moment other than in November itself. I'd managed to hold up a streak of 380 days on Memrise once (before I lost it whilst going to Tokyo Disneyland), so writing each day for only 30 days had to be feasible, right? Then one skipped day lead to two, which lead to three, which lead to a fourth day of maybe only a paragraph, and then eventually it'd be January of the next year and I'd have maybe the best part of three chapters.

Then I'd spend all of the next year resolving to try again!

I wrote about it at the time, but 2017 was a weird year for me all in. Part of that year being weird included the fact I wrote a book in three months and finished it around three days before the start of November, another part of that year being weird is I instantly went on to write 30,000 ones in a project I no longer have any record of. I could spend a whole blog talking about how the year was weird in a million different pieces, but those two were reasonably significant.

My 2018 attempt was better, camping out in Pret-A-Manager stores around central London and spending my extremely limited student budget on 50p filter coffees to justify my presence on a table for the next four hours. In the end, I reached nearly 40,000 words. I wrote every day (not quite enough every day, but I wrote every day regardless). And it felt good! I could do it! I could get there! And in 2019, I wrote... under 2,500 words!

This year I figured that I could either start again with a new project, or try something else. My 2017 project (not the abandoned one, the one I wrote just before it) was sitting there, and I'd tried hard to edit it over the next three years. I knew it would take a lot of work - the seven chapters I'd already edited had all nearly doubled in size from their first draft, which was handwritten. So I figured that I may as well take that first draft and rewrite it as a NaNoWriMo project.

In sewing, there's a thing called a "basting stitch". It's used in hand sewing to essentially be a way to hold a fabric in roughly the position you'd like it to be in, before yanking it out later. The project I had in my hands was a basting stitch. Full scenes happened in a sentence. Character conversations were summarised into "and the x explained to y the situation". Entire locations compressed down into a reference to the colour and primary material. By the midpoint of Chapter Seven, I was technically half way through a manuscript with which the original draft didn't even qualify as a full NaNoWriMo win, which is how short it was. All I could do was start and hope I had 50,000 words stored away into the final half of the draft I already had (I won't leave you in suspense - I did).

Anyone who has tried, regardless of the result, a NaNoWriMo will probably be familiar with the moment that you run out of steam. Sometimes it's just the exhaustion of having to live your normal life and then somehow find at least an hour to sit down and write words in an assortment that vaguely makes sense, but usually there's just a moment where the "You Are Here" marker and the ever elusive point B are too far away to make them connect. Any other time I'd wander away, put the project down for a week (or month, or year) and then come back to it. But the pure pressure of time fixes you in your seat and forces you to write through it.

Normally this is the point when I give up. I'm not great at planning, usually I might write a few bullet point touchstones before I start, or I'll make a rough outline of chapter notes that give me enough wiggle room to change my mind later. More often than not, I'll start a project with most things as a placeholder and hope it'll come together eventually. I don't have the patience to think about something that's so nebulous in my mind as something as formal as a plan, so I don't. With the time pressure, the nebulous nature of a project never solidifies, and I give up.

Writing this barebones first draft avoided that problem, in many ways. There was still the bullet point outline, but then I wrote a first draft where my solution to not knowing much about a scene resolved as - okay, but what do I know about this scene? Suddenly I didn't need to get hung up on knowing exactly why my character decided to ask a Tough Question of another character, they just... asked it. It wasn't quite the NaNoWriMo level quality where a character rambles because I have five hundred more words to write today and zero ideas to fill it, but still a sense of placeholder of shoddy writing. There's a level of clarity to being concise with your words but taking great strides of plot in them. I don't need to spend a whole chapter slowly revealing a character's emotional state when I can just tell you that they're feeling sad in this draft and developing it into something you understand later. It's changing an idea from being nebulous to holding an outline you can see. It's holding together two pieces of fabric so you can roughly assemble the shape. It's a basting stitch.

I'm still riding the first NaNoWriMo win high, nine years after my first attempt, but I'm thinking I'll try again next year. But instead of spending eleven months telling myself I'll do better next time, I think I'm going to start on my terrible first draft now. Then we'll turn the basting stitch into a running stitch. And then eventually, we'll have clothes.