#so you hit on stuff i've been Percolating

[theladyragnell]

How did you get to a stage where you love your writing so much you don't care about marketing it? I have had trad pub in my head since I was 13 years old and struggle not to think about what others would think of my writing even even I tell myself it's just for me :(

Oh, anon, I wish I had easier answers for you, or really any for-sure answers at all.

First, I just want to say that for me, this is a few different questions! Wanting to do traditional publishing, loving your writing, and not caring what people think are all related, but they don't have to go together all the time.

Because I do still, in my pie in the sky dreams, want to be traditionally published! I read a lot, and I love my writing, and I think that my writing does stand up to a decent amount of what's coming out, but it's not currently a path I'm pursuing, which is largely because publishing is full of Nightmare Tasks for people with difficult brains (query letters my beloathed), somewhat because of how the industry is treating workers and authors these days, and somewhat because of how hard I find criticism to take.

Which leads to, as you say, struggling with what other people think of your writing. And I do! When I post a new fic, or share a new story with a friend, I get anxious and I want people to like it! But nonetheless I write things I love and want to write, because I have tried the "write trends" thing and tried the "write things to make a specific person happy that I'm not into" thing and popular as the results might be, and they're fine stories because I'm a good writer, but I don't love them or come back to them.

But also, that "that I'm not into" thing is very important! Because I do still care a lot what people think of my writing. It's just that I count myself as one of those people, and I try to write for certain people or subsets of people, not the whole world, because the more people I try to please, the blander and less like myself I feel like my writing gets. So I try to write for myself, and also I'll write a trope or relationship dynamic a friend likes, or I'll write for a subset of a fandom that has a particular taste, or I'll just make up a guy in my head (positive). It becomes an exercise in triangulation! This is something I do a lot with exchange fics, where I try to find a midpoint between my tastes and my recipients' tastes, something I find very enriching. So yes, I do care a lot what other people think!

But the loving my own writing ... that's a mix of a lot of things. Some of it is experience. I have been writing as a major hobby for literal decades, and I write fast, which means I have written enough to feel comfortable with my skills. Some of it is wrapped up in the previous point, where writing things I love makes me love my writing more, which means even if I'm not writing publishing trends (my pacing is slow and has too many conversations! I don't like a lot of the current romance genre trends, much less SFF romance trends!) I still love what I'm doing.

But it's also learning and growing so that I know my writing is getting better! It's analyzing what an author I love has that I lack and trying to find my own way to it. It's learning to use language in new ways when I'm not a very language-forward writer. A lot of times, it's trying (and frequently failing, because this one is hard as hell and easy to do wrong) to find the core of my id on a certain trope or relationship dynamic and go all in on it.

I love my writing because it's mine, and my writing is the way it is because I love it. I loved my first embarrassing gel-pen-in-a-cat-notebook "novel" in seventh grade, and I love the epic 6-book sci fi romance series that I finished most recently and may someday be brave enough to self-publish. None of them are trendy. But for me and the people the stories matter and have mattered to (friends I no longer speak to from middle and high school passing my handwritten works back and forth in the middle of class, friends who read my works as I write them or when I finish them now), and the people they might someday matter to, I don't think the trendiness or the marketability matter.

And I don't think they will for you either someday, anon. <3

[ahkaraii]

i might have already asked but are you planning to update five or a lot can change in a year anytime soon?

As always, very happy people are still interested in this story because I've poured a lot of myself into it <3 My answer is, still, I do plan on finishing it! But I've left it on the backburner because I am no longer in the correct headspace, and also, I no longer have the same time availability I did before.

blah blah the usual excuses under cut

I think I hit a crossroads when I lost my old laptop some years back, with it went the psd files for about 12 parts of the story and I was never able to recover them. That, plus the fact that I started Five before I went through clinical rotations, and the karaii before that and the karaii after that are very different people. Not to be too melodramatic about it, but public hospitals in third world countries with intense local gang warfare is pretty ptsd-inducing, and fictional stories about child soldiers quickly start feeling a bit sour when you see in front of you real live people shaped by those forces in a very not-fictional sort of way. You see one person dying and then you see several couple more and you fuck up giving CPR once and all these things kinda pile on, y'know? My comic about Kakashi started feeling like something I couldn't get into anymore. For a while there, all my art felt like it had been drawn by a very different person that I could no longer recognize. Infantile, childish, narrow-visioned-- deep sunk in a place of fiction when real life in front of me demanded my attention.

I've been a medical doctor for a couple years now though, so I've grown into my big boy boots and am doing quite well for myself, as it were. I'm currently a postgraduate resident for psychiatry so art and fandom have returned to being a place for me to destress and chill :) My Five comic is a legacy I am very proud of and really truly do want to finish, but I need to get back into that headspace to do it proper-like. There are so many unfinished stories percolating there that I'd be long-term sad if I fumbled them all in an effort to speedrun an ending. It would be a disservice to my younger self, who was so ambitious and had such a clear vision, y'know?

As it is, these things take time, and patience, and if you've run out of them then I hope you enjoyed the ride, and find greener pastures <3 Life's really truly too short to sweat the small stuff. Enjoy your health while it lasts, and don't forget to make your own meaningful human connections 'cause those can keep you going for a long time :D And thanks for being interested enough to send me a message! I am genuinely very happy people still enjoy my old works enough to come asking me about them. Stay awesome, and don't forget to smell the flowers!

[bee-and-the-slimes]

2024! (owo)/

First of all, Happy New Year. 🎉 *pfooot*

Second of all, thank you for still flooding my inbox with questions, lol, I'm glad I'm still on your mind, despite having slowed down considerably over the last year. I'm trying to pick and choose the best of them to continue and my "I need to park my butt and work on X" list keeps getting bigger, so thank you to those who have been patient. It's hard to keep up when you have so many ideas percolating and have to juggle a job, a house, hobbies (soooo many hobbies), and friends and family. Here's hoping 2024 can keep me going. Trust me, Bee loves your attention.

Thirdly, I know I've not been very big on talking about the Me behind the slimes, but I originally set out to keep Bee and co as a separate entity from what I normally do. Partially because I have a terrible potty mouth and a lot of my other works aren't really set up for a PG-13 rating, so I kind of wanted to keep that separate for a bit.

That being said, my New Year's goal basically boils down to "Read more, Write more, Draw more" -- one I hit the ground running toward this week. It may be more Bee, it may be more of my other comics, but if I'm silent here, maybe you might be interested in some of the other stuff I do? I haven't stopped doing, I just haven't been doing it here.

Maverick Hunter: Special Forces - Do you like Reploids? I like Reploids. Like, way too much to be considered normal.

SYSTEM.Reload is an attempt to adapt 20 years of RPs and lore building around my and my friend's characters after events of the Megaman X video games. It's a sequel of sorts to an earlier comic RIPtheSYSTEM, which was a collaboration between me and a friend that we started in 2003 and let fizzle out in 2007. .Reload started out as an Ask Blog that never went anywhere, and I just shrugged and drew 250+ pages of characters doing things under the guise of a plot. I don't pretend to know what I'm doing, I'm just kind of enjoying the ride. It's a lot more rudimentary than my actual ART because comics take time and I'm an impatient woman who will physically explode if I don't get my ideas on paper.

My biggest goal is hoping to finish out Part 2 this year. I have the majority of Part 3 written and Part 4 laid out, but I promised myself I'd hit a 2022 goal to complete Part 2 and failed that pretty miserably.... mostly because I keep going back to smooth out wrinkles instead of just finishing the thing.

I genuinely try to keep it censored for Tumblr, but Delta has the temper of a gangster with the mouth of a drug problem.

My DeviantArt - BUT WAIT, there's more! If you aren't sick of OCs or Reploids or OC Reploids you might like my page of art dump. It's where the rest of my stuff gets tossed that isn't Slimes. I don't really draw fanart that much, so mostly my work of upcoming comic panels and ideas that I haven't gotten to work in SYSTEM.Reload yet, commission work, short stories, plushies, or just RP related stuff that I felt like drawing out.

And everything is related.

Everything.

Right now I'm obsessed with working on a short story novella about a vampire named Alecscander St. John, who sucks (hurr) at being a vampire. Born in 1842, he left Texas in 1864, watched his uncle hang for a murder he didn't commit, and 'died' in 1876. I plan to be very mean to him as he tries to build a life for himself while his ex-wife holds a grudge and his adopted sire makes his life miserable. :3c Because I'm a writer. I write. And I've read too much Dresden Files to see everyone get a happy, boring existence...

So... yeah. Here goes... It's 2024.

Wish me luck.

[pokeparkservices]

so you might be wondering, what the heck is a water conservation district and what does it have to do with Castelia??

well strap in because I'm gonna tell you exactly what a water conservation district is AND what it has to do with Castelia AND why you YES YOU should care about it

SO. first of all. if you've ever looked at a map of Unova or been anywhere vaguely in the vicinity of Castelia City any time in the last, uhh, few centuries or so

you might have noticed the GIANT HECKING DESERT between it and the entire rest of the landmass. you know, the one that takes up like a full quarter of the peninsula?

yeah that one.

has it ever struck you as KINDA WEIRD that there's a big fuckoff desert right at the tip of an otherwise VERY GREEN peninsula? smack in between two rivers?

because it KINDA IS. and it's also kinda a problem!

because that desert is very very difficult to be in. or to get across. yeah, they managed to get some construction up along that route, and that definitely makes it easier... for humans

but what about pokemon?

now, don't get me wrong, the desert has been there for hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years and has become an important Pokemon habitat in its own right. nobody's gonna be summoning Kyogre about it or anything (and if anyone tries I will hit you with my rake do not fucking test me). but Castelia has grown dramatically in modern times, and eaten up a lot of what was historically lush seaside habitat for Pokemon that don't like living in deserts. so where did those Pokemon go?

unfortunately, a lot of them just... didn't. the descendants of those pokemon, at least the ones that couldn't make it upriver or across, are just making do with the fringes we've left them, their populations drastically decreased from historical levels. and it's getting worse: big modern cities like Castelia, with lots of pavement and tall buildings made of metal and glass, reflect a LOT of heat, and also take up a LOT of water and resources. if we're not careful, a city like Castelia can make everything around it - those last green fringes - into barren desert.

hey Lennox that's sad and all but what about the water conservation thing

I am SO GLAD YOU ASKED, inquisitive hypothetical reader

bare basics: a conservation district is a local government unit that carries out and oversees resource conservation activities in its jurisdiction. so, the Castelia Water Conservation District is basically the governing body that does stuff to conserve water in Castelia. simple.

as I've said, I work as a groundskeeper for the district. and my specific workplace is actually Extremely Cool and is a place I think everyone in or around Castelia should visit!

the official name is something like Castelia Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch or something like that, but we mostly just call it Castelia Riparian or the Preserve. and what it is, is a water treatment and groundwater recharge facility that doubles as manmade pokemon habitat!

basically, there's a series of lakes that we fill up periodically with reclaimed water. which, well, you wouldn't want to drink the stuff, but the tiny fish and aquatic bugs and plants? they can live in it just fine! and the plants purify it over time! and in turn those tiny plants and things serve as food for wild Pokemon, who also do just fine on this water. and the lakes make it possible for bigger plants, bushes and trees, to grow around them - and THAT makes homes for lots and lots of wild non-desert pokemon, baybeeee! and eventually the water in the lakes rejoins the water cycle by either evaporating into the air or percolating down into the groundwater, and either way that makes for a happier, healthier ecosystem - and once the lakes are empty, well, we've got plenty more to pump right back in!

since this park was established, population numbers for non-desert-adapted Pokemon in the Castelia area have been consistently rising. and it's not just the locals, either - since it gives migratory pokemon passing through the region an extra place to stop off and rest, we've been seeing those numbers rise as well. even better, we've seen a decrease in extreme high temperatures near the preserve, thanks to the natural cooling effect of the lakes and tree cover - even the desert areas immediately nearby the park have been starting to support more greenery and healthy Pokemon populations! if we keep this up, then over enough time, we might be able to significantly reduce the size of the Unovan desert, make the remaining desert area significantly more hospitable both for the Pokemon that live there and other species that have historically lived on the peninsula, and almost totally offset Castelia's adverse impact on the climate!

damn, that DOES sound cool, Lennox!

IT SURE DOES, DOESN'T IT

and you can even come visit and spend the day here! there's walking trails built right into the park and everything! and it's free! you can't beat free!

however, if you do come to visit, be warned: you are NOT allowed to capture or battle pokemon here. no, we don't care if they jumped out at you in the tall grass, you shouldn't have been in the tall grass in the first place. there are trails. you stay on them. enjoy the trees, enjoy the pokemon from afar, and everyone will have a nice chill time.

(okay, yes - we will make an exception if you were in fact minding your own business and a Swanna decided it didn't like your face or something. we can't hold you accountable for some pokemon just being assholes.)

[thetragicallynerdy]

hey! no idea if you’ll see this but i’ve been a fan of your fics for a year now(rip my history), particularly your ofmd ones!! honest talk i really love how you characterize all the folks in that show, and how you write about consent and gender and queerness?!?! it’s lovely dude. also congrats on being one of two authors to write something that out of nowhere hits me with the GENDER FEELS oh my god

it’s 11:34pm for me and i have class tomorrow but hoping you’re having a good night

Hello!!! Ohhh my gosh, I saw this when I woke up this morning and had to sit on it for a while because it made me so happy, like I've been letting the good vibes percolate into my soul

Honestly, thank you, this was such a lovely ask to find - it means so so much to hear that you like how I write about consent and gender and queerness!! Fic is such a big way for me to explore my own gender stuff, and consent is one of the most important things for me (especially considering I write a lot of rough kinky sex etc). Hearing that my fics gave folks Gender Feels is literally like, the highest compliment ever!!

Also thank you for saying you like how I characterize OFMD characters, I always have a low key worry that I'm wildly OOC, so it's super reassuring. They're such rich characters, and it's been incredibly fun to explore those I've gotten to write!!

Thank you again, this absolutely made my day <3 like, I have a screenshot of it in my phone so I can remember it later.

I hope you got some good rest and have a good day of classes, and hopefully get to enjoy some nice fall vibes or at least some chill downtime too <3

[ezra-brainrot]

The past week has been chaotic BUT - I am proud to have posted something every day of dimilix week. <3 Last year was very hit and miss although I think the year before I'd also managed it. Granted, some of these are WIPs so I don't get full marks.

Day One - Lost/Confessions/Shakespearean AU think but this and all is mended - 2/3

The prompts are perfect for a Midsummer Night's Dream mashup, so that is what we are going for here with tweaks. Mine is not nearly as bawdy, although I'm enjoying Felix making sword and lance metaphors that may not be metaphors because he really is a weapons fan.

Day Two - Rumors / Dancing / Teacher AU And Miles From Where You Are - 1/4 Anastasia AU. Sylvain finds a boxer in the underground that just so happens to look almost exactly like the dead/missing prince of Faerghus. Felix is not so pleased. (I've got this one partially written but need to focus on the "Sylvain teaching someone else how to act like a proper noble" part.)

Day Three - Journeys / Ribbon / Supernatural AU AND Day 7 - Found / North Star / Another Time and Place Sir Felix and the Azure Knight Idk if you have noticed or not but I am all in on fantasy and I've been percolating on a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight story for a while as an excuse to play around with Felix's concepts of chivalry and indulge in some olde school King Arthur myths. The problem? Felix hasn't even met Dimitri yet! ;.; ;.;

Day Four - Tea Time / Ghosts / Customer Service AU lost in the supermarket There isn't much to say about this. Anna has two annoying customers being annoying. There's probably more in-jokes about the condom purchases that I could go into but it didn't really fit well. Also, if anyone cares, "lost in the supermarket" is one of my favorite songs by The Clash.

Day Five - Wounded / Midnight / Fairy Tale AU The Tale of a Boy, His Cow, and the Lost Prince - 1/3 Another one I'm pecking away at but I think this was conceived as a Jack and the Beanstalk / misc fairy tale mashup so I promise it will be weird.

Day Six - Lions & Wolves / Rituals / Tumblr AU my body aches to breathe your breath (your words keep me alive) - 1/2 - NSFW Uh - I've been thinking of writing something like this for a while because, y'know, weird fantasy. Title is from Possession by Sarah McLachlan. May or may not be relevant. Felix runs a blog about investigating old myths and cryptids and ancient sites, and Things Happen.

Day Eight - Free Day the thing and the hole of the thing I'd written this for a fellow dmlx'er who has been doing a lot of heavy lifting and graphic design and misc stuff and just thought it needed to be expanded into a full fic. With holes. Lots of holes. None of them naughty though.

[awritingcaitlin]

10 First Lines

@elbritch-kit tagged me for this a month ago! 👋🏻 Sorrynotsorry I'm late!

Anyway, I've done a couple of these before, but this one's rules is very specifically:

rules: share the first lines of the last ten things you’ve written

So, uh, this should be interesting because fun fact about me, I rewrite the same stuff over and over again.

🔥TBW: Mama Cass normally prided herself on her composure.

🥃LGO: In all honesty, Rinnie was too drunk to remember who hit the bed first.

👩‍🦰RA: “Where are we?” Taryn asked.

🎻ROTG: A Temple of Adelus wasn’t her favorite place for a gig, but considering Em was avoiding Seamus Finn establishments, she’d take what she could get.

💥SB: The wind on Berthingtonn’s eastern docks always seemed to blow far more strongly than it did on the west side.

♟TGG: “Eileen,” Aravae said, trying to put enough warning into her tone that Eileen would get the message, but not so much warning that Finley would pick up on it.

💨WH: “Wind’s howling,” Teagan mutters in her best Geralt impression.

❄CTQ: Two women walked along the busy evening streets of Himmelmauer, their course pointed towards the castle.

🍲AEB: First there is chaos, and then there is cold.

💎TWS: Rinnie is on a beach, but it's not a beach she recognizes. The magic feels different. 

Okay, that actually wasn't too hard to track down all things considered. I feel like elaborating with more stats, so I'll do that under the cut.

But first, I'll tag: @sentfromwolves, @tananaphone, @legiomiam, @mjjune, and @muddshadow (no pressure, anyone!)

The Brewing War: aka Book 1, it's up at the top of the list (most recent) because it's been in steady revisions of it since April. That first line? Totally new.

Lights Go Out: is a character study of Rinnie, Aravae, and Ciara and I was writing it separately from TBW because that content does not actually belong on the pages of TBW, but it's up there because I wrote it in June.

Redheads Abound: is a AU fanfiction essentially combining my characters with characters from 3 others writeblrs on here. Wrote that back in April.

Relic of the Gods: aka ViolinHeist, happens in the same universe as TBW but is not a prequel. It got a few revisions in April, but after rewriting the first three chapters of Draft 3, I set it down to let other stuff percolate in the back of my head.

Siege of Berthingtonn: aka Book 2 got some edits back in March, though that first line is older.

The Great Game: aka Book 4 where I've done bits and pieces of that so that's the first line I've written but it's definitely not Chapter 1 or a prologue even. That was back in March.

Wind's Howling: is a flashfic I wrote back in February. Experimenting with present tense.

Cure for the Queen: aka Book 3. It got finished back in March of 2022. April-August was ROTG Draft 1, August-October was then SB Draft 8, November-February was ROTG again which explains the break and reemphasizes that I just write the same things over and over again.

Soup 2 Another Electric Boogaloo: was something I was working on back in October of 2021 (in between working on CTQ). It was fanfiction of fanfiction and I wrote it primarily while still working at GameStop because I could just write it on my phone.

Team W Shenanigans: was also something I was working on back in the Fall of 2021, same time as AEB. It was fanfiction that Rinnie was also involved in.

Hilariously, Rinnie never seems to get first lines unless it's a character study, or fanfiction. I should probably change that. But also, Rinnie's not really a candidate for the prologues of the main series of books so there's also that.

Okay I'm done rambling now. Have a cookie if you read this far 🍪

[fieldsofview]

Talk shop Tuesday in return 🫶

What inspires you to sit down and write? How do you brainstorm ideas for your work and what is the process of planning for WIP?

Oooooh so I think the first question has two different answers for me, so I'm going to answer that last. Also, fair warning this is a very rambling answer 😬

Brainstorming ideas usually happens (at least at the start) against my will. I think at my core I'm a storyteller more than anything else, and the majority of my hobbies over the years reflect that. I tend to just always be thinking of possible ideas and how I could tell them. I used to be really into the OC cosplay sphere on Tik Tok, I've always been both a D&D/TTRPG player and a GM, I used to be a YouTube vlogger back in HS, and, of course, I've been writing in some form or another since I was in elementary school.

The ideas just hit me, randomly, and I let them percolate in my brain because it's fun. Kind of like daydreaming, but with more of a focus on structure and building it into something.

Once an idea has enough of a form in my mind to be at least somewhat viable as a story - like I could pitch the summary to someone who's familiar with the medium and they would get my meaning - then I'll add it to whichever of my myriad of documents that has all my ideas in a place where I won't forget them. Kind of like tucking a book aside to read on a rainy day - I know it's there when I want to pull it out.

Picking something to start as a project is a little more fluid, but usually I have one of those above mentioned ideas that keeps creeping back into the depths of my brain over and over again until it reaches a point where I want to bust out my computer and actually start working on it. I start with a document where I just put every detail, large or small, related to that idea that I can think of. I call it my Brain Dump Doc and I have one for each larger project. Once all the things are out of my brain and on paper, then I can work on molding it into a structured outline and can fix the pieces together into a better narrative to fit the medium I'm working in.

From there, typically *starting* into the project is easy. Especially with writing, usually the idea has been in my head for long enough that I have a really clear picture of how it needs to start and can just put the words on the page in a fit of hyper fixation. This feeling comes and goes, though, with longer projects. I usually have some scenes that are really clear in my mind and then the in-between bits are fuzzier and take work to get through in a way that makes sense. It's also why I'm big on editing. I can get something rough down on the page and then come back to it 3 weeks later with fresh eyes in a way that let's me make it so much better.

I'm a writer who really needs to write linearly, so I have to work through those bits to get to the stuff I know well and am excited about. So sometimes writing really is a desperate push of staring at my screen and putting one sentence down in front of the other, trying to eke out a few hundred words. And other times I'll work through 5k in an afternoon because I'm on a roll. It varies, but especially with longer projects, I usually try to work on it several days a week, even if it's just chipping away in small sections.

I would like to say I write every day - but SMH has proven that I don't. I think I average 5days/week though. And the work shows, considering it's 140k and nearly done!! SMH has been an exercise in proving to myself that I don't have to get stuck in those lulling moments and I can push past them to finish a longer project. I used to have a really hard time with that, and I have a lot of projects that I've abandoned at the 15-40k mark over the years. But, now that I'm older and more aware of my own flaws, I've gotten better at making myself push through because I know the reward of finishing will outweigh any of the struggle of writing.

Thank you for the question and for giving me a space to ramble about my creative process!! <3

[bobaheadshark]

I very diligently read the entire ask list then promptly forgot which numbers I wanted to ask you so at random: 2, 6, 7, 11/12, 14, 17, 20 :)

mads!! so many aaa thank you... at the risk of being very long-winded but i will try NOT to b....

2. Do you read/reread your own fics?

rarely tbh! i will go through like six to nine month bouts of not opening any of them ever and then re-reading a bunch and going, omg this was actually quite good??

i feel like i put everything into writing them for that moment and then get too conscious about what other people might think of them and that colours my perception for a while. so maybe new year's resolution is im trying to just meet the fics i've written like... where they were, rather than what i think they could or should be.

ok that was really long-winded already...

6. Are there any fics from others you reread all the time?

earthbound (reylo), i think about it every couple of months

i also think about ever_so_reylo's head over feet/lawyers AU quite a lot though i haven't reread it in a while. thought it was a masterclass in romance shortform that hit a lot of strong beats and just kept me reading while advancing plot really seamlessly. idk like, no surprise that ali's like a bestselling romance writer now???

7. How many ideas for fics do you have right now?

*long sigh* too many and honestly it's mostly sports yaoi this year. don't ask me how that plot twist happened, idk either

11. Do you have specific playlists for writing fics?

usually yes! i write a LOT to music. and usually for fics that are taking a while to percolate in my head.

12. Do you have a playlist for your current WIP(s)? Share it!

idk how to share it without giving away my spotify details but here's one for the sequel to infraction

14. If you could see one of your fics adapted into a visual medium, such as comic or film, which fan fic would you pick?

answered in linny's ask! the gong yoo salesman rpf one LOL

17. What’s something you’ve learned about while doing research for a fic?

not necessarily research 'cus i read these before i started writing sydcarmy fic, but i definitely think the kitchen memoirs and books i read for enjoyment factored into the authenticity of the kitchen stuff i wanted to write for subsequent the bear fic. specifically: kitchen confidential by bourdain, eat a peach by david chang, and salt/fat/acid/heat - samin nosrat's cookbook. someone in the fic comments said the cooking and kitchen details felt true to life to them as someone who worked in a kitchen before (and i've neeeever worked in a kitchen before), so i was v flattered!!

20. What’s a favorite title for a fic you’ve written?

the recent sydcarmy one ("you make christmas seem like a four letter word")! lovingly stolen from a sufjan stevens song. tonally appropriate. also bit of a departure from the one-word titles i'd been using.

asks from here

[abeautifulblog]

In the unnaggiest way possible could I ask how song of selfish hearts is getting on?

It haunts me everyday, friend. 😔

So the next chapter was being a bitch on account of the sudden pacing change (to wit, the first five chapters covered 4 days in 75k words, and the next one chapter has to cover 9 days in 15~20k words), and it's also doing a LOT in terms of the emotional threads it's juggling. It is currently 15k very patchy words.

And then I got derailed for a few months writing the very dubcon one. Sometimes I'm like, What happened, why is this chapter of SOSH taking so long?? And then I'm like oh right, cuz you fucked off to write 60k words of something else. 🤦‍♂️

In the last few months I haven't written anything at all, which is just... what happens, sometimes. Very few writers can be "on" all the time, and especially when you've found yourself hitting a wall, sometimes what it needs is for you to step back and let it percolate in the background so you can come back to it with fresh eyes later.

Sadly, I am actually VERY MOTIVATED to work on it right now, but I just spent a week in California for Sam's wedding, then got knocked on my ass for another week from the airplane crud I contracted, and now I'm scrambling to try to get caught up on the orders that got delayed -- a queue that is only likely to get longer in the upcoming months, because Halloween is my busiest time of the year. So right now I am impatiently banging out leatherwork with the hopes that once the queue is slightly under control I'll have time to sit down with SOSH again.

I know I've been posting a lot of Sandman stuff, but while I find Dream & Hob very compelling and it's what I've been reading, I haven't actually been seized with a story idea that I want to write. (Thank fuck, because I don't want to lose the motivation to finish my witcher projects.) Witcher fandom is still what's firing my creativity.

(That said, TWN itself is so dead to me, you have no idea. 🤣 Season two was so shitty, leaving nowhere to go from there, that I found myself just Over It. And now information about season three keeps trickling back to me and it feels like this one time my ex wanted to get back together and I was like -- nah man, you had all the chances in the world to do better, and you didn't, and I'm not interested anymore.)

[mad-madam-m]

So I'm just curious, how do you get yourself to write? And do you use prompts and if you do where do you get them? I meant to use NaNo to get me to write but it took 4 days into November for me to realize November started so I failed lol. I've been meaning to start this original thing and it's just not...working.

First of all, anon, you could start writing RIGHT NOW (yes, with 10 days left in the month) and you would not fail NaNo. You might not hit 50k (although I know people who have hit 50k in that amount of time, or less), but you won’t fail. NaNoWriMo isn’t about hitting 50,000 words so much as it is about putting a stake in the ground and saying, “Here. Today. I will start writing the project I’ve always wanted to.” And doing it. Doesn’t matter what that project is—original novel, short stories, fic, poetry, revising something, a series of blog posts—NaNo is about just. Fucking. Doing it. And you still have time to Do It.

To answer your questions:

Do you use prompts and if you do, where do you get them?

For original stories, particularly novels, I usually don’t. For fic, particularly short fic I’m writing for events, I do. Tumblr has a wealth of writing prompts that range from “here’s a situation” to “here’s a line of dialogue GO,” and I tend to reblog them under the tags “fic prompts” or “writing prompts.” Honestly, most of them would work for either original fic or fanfic, so if you are a writer who likes to work from prompts, go forth and enjoy!

How do you get yourself to write?

That’s kind of a big question, and uh, the answer to it got long. Very long. (I said once that if you give me half a chance, I’ll talk about writing all the live-long day, and this answer is no exception.)

Different things motivate me for different projects, and as with all writing-related advice, YMMV, but here’s a few things that really help for getting myself to write:

1) Develop your story.

The current original story I’m working on, for example, I have not really had to struggle to get myself to write at all because 1) I’m stupid excited about it and 2) I have developed the hell out of it.

I’ve talked before about outlining my stuff here, so I won’t go too much into it again; suffice it to say that I have done about the same amount of development on my current original story that I had on ADA by the time I started writing. I started around the very end of September developing my characters and spent a good chunk of October working on setting, worldbuilding, plot, and finally my notecards.

Shockingly, having some idea of what’s happening and where I’m going is making this story easier to write.

Right? Like WHO’D HAVE THOUGHT.

Because of that, I’ve been excited about writing my story, so getting myself to write on it has been (comparatively) a cakewalk.

That’s not to say any of the writing is good (oh God no) or that there aren’t parts that need fixing, or that I haven’t been stuck. But it’s been stuck like “how do I describe seeing a tree-covered mountain in the middle of fall from the POV of someone who has never seen something like this” rather than “I have no fucking clue what happens next uh…”

The stories I struggle the most with writing are the ones that I’ve worked the least on developing. The stories that have been the easiest to write have been the ones I’ve spent at least a month doing prep work on before I ever start drafting.

2) Love your story.

Being in love with a story makes it a lot easier to write, at least for me. Because here’s the thing, ideas are easy.

If you’re a creative person, you’re going to end up with a file of story ideas—maybe prompts you liked, dialogue that stuck with you, one of those “humans are space orcs” tumblr posts that’s just really clicking in your brain—that will be longer than you could conceivably write if you had a hundred lifetimes. That’s okay! That’s great. But it means a lot of them are never going to get past the idea stage.

For me, the stories that get finished—the ones that not only get started but actually make it through the first draft and then three rounds of editing and revisions—are the ideas that I’ve been percolating on for months, if not longer. They’ve been cooking in the back of my brain while I’ve been doing other things, sorting themselves out, and most importantly: they will not let me go.

Coming up with ideas is easy. Finding an idea that will last and sustain a story and my interest for at least a year, if not longer? That’s harder.

Y’all know how much I’ve been talking about Tiger & Bunny over the past year? We’re talking that level of obsession with a story that I want to write, whether it’s fic or original. Sometimes it takes months or years for all the puzzle pieces to come together. Sometimes the whole thing will congeal within a few weeks, or there will be one crucial piece of story that will just make EVERYTHING come together, I will literally shout “OH MY FUCKING GOD” and that’s it, I’m off to the races. (In this particular case, it wasn’t anything I’d done in the first two weeks of poking at steampunk-y ideas; it was the realization that I could put a circus on an airship. The whole story just went WHOOSH after that.)

BUT. But. Sometimes you don’t have that. These stories are great and I love them and they remind me why I love writing so much (and if you’re writing something that’s gonna be 90k+, like I have a tendency to do, you need to be in love with it, IMO), but sometimes you’re in situations where you just have to get it done. In those cases:

3) Resort to bribery.

I’ve been poking at the third part of Alpha & Emissary, oh, basically since I posted the second part. My problem is that my fandom focus has been, shall we say, split for the past year. *coughs delicately, shoves Tiger & Bunny fics under the bed*

But here’s the thing: I hate having a published WIP on AO3 (it’s why I don’t publish long!fics until they’re completely drafted and mostly edited). I hate—HATE—having an unfinished series on AO3.

So that’s the rub: I have an unfinished series that I want to finish because I hate that it’s not finished. I also have a new fandom that is wresting my attention and inspiration away from said series. What’s a girl to do?

A girl tells herself she can’t write any more Tiger & Bunny fic until she finishes this one WIP, that’s what she does.

And it’s motivated me to sit my ass down and work on that WIP, because goddammit, I have a “but there was only one bed” TaiBani fic that I would really like to have up by New Year’s.

Your bribery will be different. Maybe you get to watch 1 episode of your favorite show per every 1k you write, or you get to try a new knitting project when you finish this short story. Maybe you binge-watch an entire season of your favorite anime if you exceed your NaNo goal. Or you write 50 words and get a cookie. The point is, find what works for you to get it done.

4) Figure out a minimum daily goal and stick with it.

For me, this was 500 words a day. 500 words. That’s it. That’s one 30-minute word sprint for me. That’s something I can do without stressing myself out.

Because of this point and point 3, I wrote more than 7000 words on a story I’d been stuck on for the better part of a year before I had to stop to work on NaNo stuff. Another 7k, and I’ll probably have it finished.

Your minimum word count will almost certainly be different. Maybe it’s 300 words a day, maybe it’s 1000. Hell, maybe it’s 100 words. Again, find what works for you, what you can write regularly without stressing yourself out.

Another important thing: If I didn’t hit 500 words, I didn’t beat myself up about it. Maybe I wrote 350. Or 220. Or just 93. The point is, did I write? Yes? Then I did good. I got myself a sentence or a paragraph closer to finishing. And it all adds up.

(And hey, you don’t have to write every day. I do, or I try to, because that’s what works for me. If it stresses you out to do so, then find another way to make it work.)

5) Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.

This one’s hard because I can rarely keep a deadline that’s not set by an external source. If you tell me on December 20 that you need a story by December 22? Then on December 22, you’ll have a story, edited and ready to post. But when it comes to something I set for myself, the chances of a deadline working are 50/50.

That being said, it is something that helps me keep on track and even if I don’t finish something by a self-imposed deadline, it does get me writing.

6) Sprint with friends!

NaNo is really great for this because all your writer friends are coming out of the woodwork going I need to hit 5k by the end of today, will you sprint with me? Sometimes it just helps to have that kind of accountability. You all get together (I’ve used Discord, Google Hangouts, IRC, and Twitter DMs for this), set a timer, and write for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Then, when the time’s up, you post your word count, everybody congratulates everybody else, and then you take a break before doing the next one.

Sprints are the reason I’ve been able to make some pretty significant headway on my word counts, and few things get me writing like knowing I’m going to have to tell everybody in my group what my word count is in 30 minutes or less. >.>

Like I said earlier, YMMV on all of these. What works for me may work for you, or it might not. But if you aren’t sure, it’s worth giving it a shot.

Happy writing!