#thank you Swype for making this post possible

[dvar-trek]

having the world's worst nausea and nothing is helping 🙃 and lo! therefore have i sunk into the depths of despair, and lo! therefore hath a great shadow fallen over me.

[asleepinawell]

huge fan of your fics! if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your writing process? i’m always so impressed with how quickly you complete fics, especially when the quality is also wonderful

process is a generous word for it. for the majority of my fics I just...write. no planning, no outlining, just sit down and write and assume plot things will sort themselves out in the end. too much planning ahead makes it less likely I'll finish something because once I know how it all works out I lose interest. I don't usually know how fics are gonna resolve or end, but I often have one or two very clear visuals for a specific moment in time I want to include and I just have to figure out how I'm going to get there.

in the last year though I switched to pre-writing entire fics before posting them. I still don't plan them out or know how they're going to go ahead of time, but it does let me tighten up world building since I can go back and edit early parts with the knowledge of how it ends before I post it.

the trade off is that I don't get the ongoing encouragement/validation of kudos and comments as I go to provide motivation, but so far that hasn't been as big an issue as I thought it would...partly because one of my friends reads my wip stuff a lot which is an enormous help (thank you @themaarika 🙏) and partly because it turns out I really want to know how I'm going to make the story magically work this time!

like it's always great when I'm writing and I realize that some random thing I shoved in the story with very little thought turned out to be the key to how a main plot conflict gets resolved. that was something that happened in a big way in the fic that I just started posting and I was like wow thanks past me!

so I think the writing in full ahead of time thing is working out well for me. it's way less stressful since I don't feel like I run the risk of losing interest and leaving a story unfinished after I start posting it. and I don't feel bad for taking forever to post a chapter. wǣrloga is the longest I've done that with, though originally I'd guessed it would only be 40-50k words and it ended up at 74k-ish. considering stc was supposed to be, like, 60k and ended up at 319k I figure my estimate wasn't too bad by comparison.

so yeah, I usually get a story idea and fixate on it and maybe think up some cool random ideas associated with it. in some specific instances I then pause to do research. for the dishonored au fic I went and read through the book I have that has every single book/note/text from the game and spent a lot of time on the wiki and replayed all the games to nail down the world of the game to make it as accurate as possible. for the lighthouse fic I spent some time looking up how lighthouses worked and diagrams of the insides of lighthouses. a lot of times I'll find ref images too of things that fit the story aesthetically. I very occasionally have a mood playlist as well. I did for this latest one.

then I just open a gdoc and start typing. I don't outline but as I write I often scrawl down notes to myself about things I need to resolve in the plot later. in the case of wǣrloga, which was unique in the fact the world building was entirely original and I prewrote it (as opposed to star wars and dishonored au which were prewritten but based on existing worlds) I made a ton of notes as I went of things I changed slightly to improve world building that I would have to go back and correct after.

once I finish a chapter I usually read it through once or twice and do a rough edit. at that point if a friend is reading it I'm okay sending it to them. there's often still typos (I write everything in gdocs on my phone with a swype keyboard and it makes some wild typos) and sometimes I'll realize I need to add part of a scene, but it's a good draft at that point. then I'll move onto the next chapter. for the last fic, when I finished the whole thing, I went back and fixed some specific notes I had and then edited the whole thing together as one for pacing and stuff.

then I spend like 3-4 days whining about how titles are hard and eventually start posting.

way more than you probably ever wanted to know. and thank you!

[skelffricat]

Bath Blog

Today is the beginning of FunFreeFeb. I was just going to give up Facebook (Facebook Free February! I like alliteration) but then I decided to try no meat, booze, or (animal) milk and its derivatives. Sure, it's only 28 days. Or maybe I'll never want some of those things again? Who knows? And maybe FunFreeFeb is a misnomer. Maybe I don't need any of those things, to have fun... (and there are plenty of other social media. And fish. And eggs.)

It seemed a bit negative to just Give Things Up, though. Hence me writing the blog. In the bath. More alliteration. I could try and draw a picture every day, too, but I'm much slower, at drawing. I'm terrible at finishing them.

I'm writing this on my phone, using Swype. I used to think it was strange that we weren't taught how to type at school, but perhaps, like shorthand, it will die out, as it is now unnecessary. (Shorthand is a beautiful thing; yet I don't know anyone under 50 who can do it). Now we can just talk at our phones (they even understand Belfast accents, now! Mostly.)

Or we can run our fingers over their clever screens. I love Swype. I love how trying to type a word on a mobile phone has changed over the years. These days, there is no chance I'll get accidentally called Snow, or Pony. Technology has moved on, and Swype is here! I think perhaps I can Swype as fast as I can talk? Though it always needs fixed... I had to fix 2 words in that last sentence. And I love how, even if you randomly make shapes on the letters, it'll still make words. Accidental poetry. I shall demonstrate:

“Esbjerg ankh wants policy was TV oh es hi Slaidburn proud word ahead omagh puri please ward ugh our weds.”

Beautiful. Hahaha.

It's like that "game" you can play with pressing the predictions of your mobile phone. I shall demonstrate, once again: (this is a relatively new phone; I haven't actually tried this on it, yet. I'll do the middle button, first):

“and then I can use it to message and call you tomorrow to confirm the time for the interview on the phone at the same time as I am currently working on the same size as the one I sent you a couple of days ago and have attached it again so you can see what you have done so far and I hope you can help me with the kids and my mum all said thank you very much for the lovely presents you gave me yesterday and the kids are at home and it's really hard to get a job as they are you going to the cinema to complicate things with you and the kids are at home with you and the kids are at home with you...”

Eventually, it starts to loop.

Here is the left button:

“15...”

Is that it?! I wonder if it's because of the colon? I'll try without it

“is the first time last wk years of my head really hurt me and the kids were a little nervous and I have to go to work in the black area and have to go to work in the black area...”

Hmm. I DO have to work in the black area, tonight! And finally! The right button (can you still call them buttons?):

“the same time to say the first one in a couple weeks or weeks after that one of my cold ones has gone through and they will be missing something in a couple weeks to be a bouncer and I will not have to pay the bills in full in September or July next week and they said that the right one would get a taxi from a place in which I will not pay the bills until after midnight on Friday as I will have to go back for my shift on Friday was due for renewal at a later stage in my car and the car insurance is a complete and no deal yet as I'm currently away from home until after Christmas so hopefully I'll have enough to get a few more weeks notice before we go off for work but we have to wait until next month to pay for our first trip next year so I'll be working in a couple out for the first week and a couple weeks away to stay for the next couple weeks for my family to be a bouncer friend for the first week and a couple weeks away to be in touch sooner as I'm working at 6pm am for a couple weeks...” Jesus. I got bored of pressing it. Don't think it's ever gonna loop. I could do left - middle - right, but perhaps I should wash my hair and get out of the bath, instead? And stop writing the most boring blog post EVER!? Na, fuck it, here we go, last one:

“I am not a late license for all of us so please help me with this as soon as possible please so that I wasn't when he is going to be in the office for a few days and is going to see if I can do...”

Right. That's enough. If this was a Monty Python sketch, a policeman in a tutu would come and make me desist. Until tomorrow, then...

1st February 2019