Picking up where I left off
I just found Robin McKinley is here on LJ. God bless technology. You can find just about anyone online these days. I love her book Sunshine [which is my favorite horror/romance] and now I really adore her as a person. I mean, the humor just kills me! And she described exactly how I, as a lowly fanfic writer, feel:
"When I was first writing stories, when I was a kid and through my teens, my great problem (the one that I knew of anyway) was that I could think of terrific beginnings and terrific endings (I believed) but never any middles to stick them together. I found that if I just kept writing the fragments I knew about eventually they got longer and began to bump together in the middle (sometimes with a nasty grinding noise)..."
I was just commiserating with alternate ego the other day about our mutually stalled fics- although once mine stalled, I was the one that just stopped writing altogether, and maybe that was the problem, the longer I left writing alone, the more I doubted my ability to contribute anything worthy of my ship.
With Voyager, I couldn't stop thinking about the characters and plot points and possible quips, and on one particularly convoluted fic, I wrote like...*checks* OMG- 33,000 words? I can't imagine being capable of doing that anymore. I was so obsessed, I had about four or five plot bunnies in mind at any given time, and I'd scribble notes to myself at school so I wouldn't forget!
And I didn't think I had the ability to lose myself in writing for a ship anymore...I didn't feel motivated, I had scraps of plot but no coherent link between them, and it was just random pieces of action and dialogue that were irrelevant, if I was brutally honest with myself. I figured I may as well give up- but somehow, it just came to me. An idea at long last. Not to 'The Garden's End', unfortunately, but a new fluff piece with no pressure, no convoluted plot or timeline hopping or sustained perspective jumps. I'm dipping my toe in again, and it feels safe, so far.
Such a cliche, that the plot just hit me but now I remember what the feels like, to have the characters tugging me down a certain path and dictating the way they want to be portrayed and it's so odd to think that I could've ever forgotten this feeling, this exhilaration mixed with the occasional spurts of panic and fear that it won't be anything like what's in my head and that no one will recognize the characters and it'll be just a waste.
But I'm not going to second-guess myself this time. I'm going to finish it, I'm going to post it and then I'll move on, even if I get critcized for it. I used to write for other people, but right now, I just need to know that I can do this again.