#wip: wawn

[goldfinchwrites]

author ask tag

thank you very much to @the-inkwell-variable for tagging me! i rarely talk about my projects and this one is a mere tag of aesthetic pictures so far so here's my first foray - i will refer to it with the working title of WAWN (what a wounded name) for convenience's sake

What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

There's no lesson. WAWN is a lot about things I myself don't have answers to - of perspectives that are at odds with one another that don't fit into right or wrong. I don't want it to ever feel like any character is condemned or vindicated - it just isn't that sort of story.

I chose this because it's more interesting to me than a straightforward Story with a Moral.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

I don't write second world fiction. Worldbuilding is just research to me. I suppose I chose the era I did - the end of the 1970s - because it felt so suited for gothic fiction, from a right-wing perspective because of its sense of decay, especially surrounding the future of the arisocracy, and the harshness of that winter, the horror stories of rats en masse and bodies piling up, but from my more left perspective that it doomed the UK to Thatcherism which we never really recovered from. (If I had a nickel for every time I wrote postwar fiction set just before general elections, I'd have three nickels, which wasn't intentional.) And any historical fiction with its salt considers the way it resonates with the present, and extreme weather conditions, inflation, a drastic right wing shift and rise in strike action...need it be said. And then the place! I chose the countryside surrounding Bath because I don't live in them but I've been there enough that it's both familiar with a degree of seperation. It's set in the same town as Innocence (as dicussed on my old blog), just four years earlier, and all the reasons are the same. Something, I suppose, about WAWN being about writing itself and the monopoly Jane Austen has on defining literary figures and tourism that's getting old.

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, or help the reader grow as a person?

Julia's an odd one. All she strives for is comfort - a cosy house, something sugary, protection from others. That isn't what she actually wants, but she deliberates makes the world she occupies very small out of fear. I'm not ever sure she is the main character, or just the narrator, in that was she has a Richard Papen/Nelly Dean quality. She's unassuming and so the most interesting person to see WAWN through. For the second question, no, no and no. As long as the reader has enough attachement to want to listen to her account of the plot, that's all. Again, I've no interest in teaching moral lessons.

How many chapters is your story going to have?

No idea. It has nine so far, but the way I plan isn't by chapter, but as I write the natural breaks just come to me. I don't think about chapters with WAWN much at all - Innocence had two perspectives to alternate between so was more segmented but this is all Julia, and I have so much more to go. It could be forty or fifty.

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

As always, original content. I might post it privately to friends but nowhere else any time soon. I hope to query it with agents but I'm still on the first draft so I'm not thinking about that right now!

When did you start writing?

It's hard to pinpoint a specific moment in time because it's something gradual over my teen years, but I say fifteen for convenience's sake because that's when I began a (god-awful) fantasy novel that ended up being the first full draft I finished, even if it took three years. As for when I started writing this, August 2024, which makes it five months in, with my goal to finish this draft in December.

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

No, actually, everyone should give up immediately. In all seriousness, writeblrs, or any writer on tumblr, that I'd like to shout out, and also tag for this: @transthadymacdermot @oliolioxenfreewrites @radioregine @laufire @skippydiesposting @goodluckclove @clypso @asablehart @redotter @erensattacktitancock @verifiablebot @barnbridges @chargoeson @authoralexharvey @vickythestrange @pinespittinink

[goldfinchwrites]

While I do think that the cast of #wawn (not yet announced) are so set in their time, and can’t be removed from their generation, that they are fundamentally people who came of age in the late 60s/early 70s, part of me knows how much Julia would have thrived in the only #coquette spaces…there is a hole in her heart that YEARNS for Nicole Dollanganger and unreleased Lana Del Rey.

[goldfinchwrites]

Am currently writing from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl, and it's making me realise the crux of being a child was how frightened I was, all the time. just perpetually lost an unhappy when the world was so unfathomable that, thankfully, disappeared upon adolescence. it's an ordeal going back to that age though.