#this is kinda a filler chapter…ish so it’s a bit shorter than the others

[honeyedmiller]

I’m almost done with part 7 of a burning desire… and I’m feeling a little feral 🧍‍♀️

[kriz-smthn]

I'm starting to fear that you're right (in a way)

It's like... A very complicated feeling.

The perfectionists in me WANTS the story to be good and to deliver the main message of my story as best as I can. But on the road to that, well, I've had to set up the 'plot beats' and they leave very little room to play with...

I know what's coming next and I'm very excited to get to that part, but I also know myself (ish) and if I want to read/get to the parts I'm building up/planned, I need to build up to them!

My best friend tried to advise/get me to write out of order (as I has planned everything already), and I simply refused to. My argument? I couldn't jump from writing, say, chapter 3 to chapter 5 because I didn't know what happened in chapter 4. Like, I need to know exactly what happened right before so I know what to reference and what to leave behind!

It's a bit hellish and, more often than not, I get the feeling of being 'stuck'. But then I would get unstucked and I keep on going forward until I get stuck again and have a little mental breakdown over it like.

My Fantasy WIP™ is on it's third first draft because I would get to a certain part and realize that what I had been writing wasn't really working. My first go had about 25k of pure filler BEFORE the start of the plot! I was just quickly going through about 5 years of context just to get to the 'present' and get the story started. 25k of exposition and information I could sprinkle in between the chapters as the relevance came up.

The second attempt was shorter and it was basically like four chapters. One was about 10k and I had to chop it up into three because, holy shit. And the fourth one I got stuck with because I couldn't WORK the start of one of my MC's dynamic with their only other friend.

This 'third' attempt is more of, like, a fourth, really? Because, up until a year ago, I was still writing in my native language. I decided to switch languages for funsies and to see if it helped; and it kinda? did. Writing in English help me get unstuck in certain bits where I will just be in a loop of reading what I wrote previously to remember and see what to write next, but actually devolved into REwriting everything, into being able to just. Not notice most grammatical errors and just the typos and few sentences that kept repeating themselves.

I do frustrate me quite a bit and I'm still trying to find a writing routine that works best with me. It's proving tedious, ngl. I am my own worst enemy.