Friday Rants and Raves - October 24

[sarillia]

Hey all! It's been a while. I hope everyone has gotten a lot of fun writing done. Let's hear about it. Had problems? Let's commiserate.

Before I go, here's an illustration by Max Ernst that I find intriguing:

Comments

[sarillia]

I haven't been getting much done lately. But now I'm getting ready for NaNo next month and I have high hopes. It's looking better than it did a few days ago anyway. I had jury duty and the judge said the trial could go until November 14th, but luckily I wasn't picked.

[agilebrit]

All my projects are making me crazy right now. I'm wanting to do something for the Temporally Out of Order antho, and I have 400 (awesome and hilarious) words of setup--and nowhere to actually take it. Deadline is the end of November, so I've got some time to hash it out, but, just. Ugh.

I didn't manage to get Hitman in Hell done for the I Am the Abyss antho, because that puppy turned out to be, well, a novel. It's backburnered.

I did finish my Blurring the Line story, and it's subbed, and my betas' reaction to it was exactly what I wanted, so hopefully I'll see some success with it somewhere.

And I hashed out a broken bit of plot in another thing last night, which was a simpler fix than I thought it would be.

But I don't know, everything has me cranky right now.

[sarillia]

Aww, I hope the crankiness goes away soon. That's no fun.

I didn't finish my story for I Am the Abyss either, but I don't mind too much.

[agilebrit]

Yeah, I got ten thousand words into my I Am the Abyss story before I realized that I hadn't thought it out well enough and that my first-person POV probably isn't working.

So I'll probably bring that one out again after January's short-story NaNo project, because I think it can be awesome, but I don't have time to make it awesome right now.

[inevitableentresol]

Great picture. Is that a Lilith/Biblical reference? I like that its meaning has become hazier through time, if it ever was clear.

I took a break from writing for two months recently to get some things done around the house. We moved 3 years ago and due to a combination of long term illness and flooding we still haven't unpacked all the boxes or have enough furniture to live on. We nearly had, then the flood came and we had to pack up again. :(

We're finally getting furniture now (we'll have a sofa soon!) and are putting up curtains, paintings etc. It takes a lot of time and mostly I'd rather be writing. I don't really care if I live in a hovel as long as the major utilities work, that's my problem. But I'm not the only one to consider who lives in the house. It was nice to concentrate on it for a few months, but now I'm definitely bored. There are only so many curtain patterns you can look at.

Now that I'm so sick of it that I just have to get back into writing, I'm feeling guilty about all the things that are still left undone. But then when I'm sorting out the house, I feel guilty that I'm not writing. I can't win. I believe this is what they call Catholic guilt, which was drummed into me as a kid.

Just before my writing break, I was on the very last chapter of the first draft of my very first novel-length thingumy. It's a huge life goal for me, to write something that length, never mind the quality, never mind the subject, but the timing was just bad to finish it at that point.

My plan now is to warm back up with some smaller bits of writing and then go back and second draft the story before hitting the end again, to gather momentum to get to that final point. Arrgh, I don't even want to think about it too much. It's scary. There are a few plot things I have to fix along the way, but I think they're not too difficult. I kept a checklist. More difficult is getting myself in the mood again. I have to trick my mind, sort of sidle along into accidentally picking up old stories when I have to take a break. If I big it up too much, "Woah yeah I'm writing!" kind of thing, I just freeze and lose the stomach to write anything at all.

So that's where I am now. I wish everyone the best, wherever they are, whatever the weather, and whatever they're writing.

[sarillia]

I'm not sure what the illustration is for, but it's not the only one to feature this woman. If anyone else knows then I'd love to find out, but until then I like wondering and coming up with my own ideas.

I know exactly what you mean about the guilt. I do that all the time even though I'm definitely not Catholic ;). I wish you luck in getting past it.

Ooh, first novel-thingy! That's so exciting! A little while ago I found the first one I wrote back when I was 16 and it was so terrible and wonderful. Keep going! It's a great feeling to reach the end and realize what you've achieved and after putting so much work into this you deserve to experience that feeling.

[inevitableentresol]

First novel at 16! I'm really impressed. When I was a teenager I really wanted to write but I had this idea that writers were far above me, almost semi-mythical beings, and I didn't have the nerve. Little did I know.

I also had the idea that it would be better to get some life experience before I started writing, so that my first stuff wasn't embarrassingly terrible. Now I realise that that happens whatever age you start writing at, unless you're some sort of fluke.

Thanks so much for your encouragement. I've been working at some shorter stories in the last few days, working up my courage again.

I hope I do feel like it's an achievement when I've finished. I worry that I might find it the opposite.

The first time I ever had an original short story published, the publishers edited it to hell. Really, I have no idea what they were trying to do. It no longer was coherent. My friends and family asked me what had happened, and they hadn't even read the original. When I explained the changes, they all went "oh, yes that would have made a lot more sense as it was."

That experience put me off a lot of aspects of writing, vor quite a while. I turned to fanfiction, which gives the writer much more control. If I ever do publish an original novel, it will be self-published for definite.

I have a journalist friend and she has horror stories of how her pieces have been edited over the years. Editors change quotes for instance, seemingly at random, so that she has to go back and apologise to those she interviewed. It's the publishing equivalent of spellcheck disasters, except that these people are supposed to know their jobs.

Anyway, thanks!

[inevitableentresol]

The woman in the illustration really reminds me of the character design for Carabosse, the evil fairy, in Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty. The above illustration was the inspiration, perhaps?

[splinteredstar]

All of those are really cool shots!

[dhampyresa]

Look, person on the internet, if your dialogue is punctuated thusly throughout:

She rose, "Hello."

"Hi." He said.

It does not fill me with confidence in your ability to tell a story. And no, if you intend to be professionally published, this is the sort of thing you should know and not "something to pay attention to in editing" (that makes it sound like you don't see the problem, btw).

[inevitableentresol]

Aha, you really had to get that off your chest, didn't you?

It would annoy the willies out of me as well. I'm actually laughing at those examples, the punctuation was so bad that it's come round full circle to hilarious.

[sarillia]

I'm just wondering how this person basically ended up following the exact opposite rules to what they're supposed to do.

[splinteredstar]

It goes in fits and starts. It's been a rough semester, and it's gotten to the point where I have to carve out writing time just as a matter of mental health.

But I've managed to get a few short pieces done. Occasionally done world building on longer things, but nothing for certain. Working on a couple of request fics, right now. One was easy as anything, the other two though...

[sarillia]

I'm sorry about the rough semester. Thankfully mine has been going fairly well. I think my plan to live at home and take classes only part time for the sake of my health is working. It's good that you're doing what you can to look out for your mental health as well.

Good luck on your request fics!

[splinteredstar]

Thank you. I think it's starting to get easier, or I'm finally figuring out how to deal. (Brains are stupid sometimes.)

Thanks! I'm going to edit one of them in a bit, tonight

[serria]

I've sadly lacked a lot of time to write. Graduate school is, not shockingly, pretty busy. But it's a topic I love and one that I adore writing in (medieval history) so I'm getting inspiration left and right, but just haven't been able to balance my time and energy enough for much creative writing. On the odd chance I get, I've sadly found that my fiction writing is definitely out of shape. Still, though, ideas are constantly churning in my head and if I don't get some of them down soon, I just may explode.

[sarillia]

Medieval history is a really interesting topic. I don't know much but I've been intrigued by it because of all the misconceptions out there. I know a couple medievalists and I've heard some of their rants.

I understand being out of shape for fiction writing. I get like that. But it comes back soon enough. I hope you find some time for writing very soon.

[serria]

Thanks. :) Yeah, medieval history is interesting because it features so often in pop culture, so I suppose a slew of misconceptions are inevitable. Then again, historians and medievalists themselves are often forced to draw from very shaky sources and sometimes their interpretations are treated as fact. Studying it at a higher level, I realize that there's so much we don't know, and a lot of what we have is biased or easy to take out of context. But still, I'm constantly excited about what I'm learning, it's practically my newest fandom.

[splinteredstar]

Gah, I definitely understand that feeling. Half the time when I carve out writing time it's like "wait, words, how do I use them again?"

Glad you're enjoying grad school! Nothing like research in something you love.

[serria]

Hey, you! :)

That's it exactly. If I haven't done creative writing in awhile, my palette of words is sadly bland. I keep reusing the same words and have trouble getting out the juicy details, and my dialogue sucks. Not to mention, it's harder to motivate myself to start at the beginning of the scene instead of just writing a few lines of the exciting part that's in my head.

But I guess you just have to keep at it until you get there again.