Thinkin' out my shit, as usual
What a completely unpleasant surprise to come back and see that my journal layout has been distorted/ruined by giant advertisements. Seriously, what the hell, LJ? I've been using this site for over ten years and your ads were never so imposing. Once again, you've made yourself worse instead of better. Will you be surprised when no one goes here anymore? Now I can't even link my journal to outsiders without looking like a fool who doesn't have her layout in order.
Also, a big Fuck You to Photobucket, another site I have used for over a decade that was always simple and fair and now apparently charges FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS just to embed images into other websites. Again, I have been relying on PB to host my pictures since I was 15, there are at least a thousand photos on my account that I now have to sort through and reupload to some other site that's not going to be a dick about it.
So yeah, sorry everything's a mess right now? Maybe if I fork out some more money I can figure it out, which I totally have now that my rent, car insurance, and comcast package have all been hiked. The world we live in is so disgustingly greedy.
Well, for the time being, Open Office is still a free program, so I can write to my leisure, at least? pff.
He's There has made a bit of progress. I keep going back a chapter to fix stuff, having second thoughts about small choices made, just in general overthinking whether I have an effective sequence of events. BUT, people want updates, so they give me a reason to stop wallowing in what I've got and push forward. I'm really coming to a threshold, too, one I should be excited about. Chapter 14 (the next one I will work on, which is started too) will be the last chapter that I totally write from scratch. I think. Well, at least, there's about to be a lot of structural choices made in draft one that I can refer to so that I'm not having to work so hard on that. I can focus on improving the scenes that were there, and adding a few big things that were introduced prior to them and kind of back-burnered. Sometimes, I think draft one's problem was that it would build drama and then just drop it, or let it kind of float around. Everything should have been snow-balling, otherwise it makes Lily look more like a fool than a girl who's faced with too much to handle, ideologically and emotionally, and makes mistakes from the pressure.
Ugh, even thinking about it gives me anxiety. I actually spend a lot of time feeling anxious that I'm not going to get things right. Or I'm going to forget about something that would have been a really moving, effective aspect to a relationship or a situation, and I won't know how to fit it in when I go back. I've already done that with the second draft, or I realized that something was too intense to go in yet, so I had to hold off on it.
One of the big differences between the second arc (which I'm now finishing) and the third is that the second is all about subtlety and nuance, while the third is full of confessions and discoveries that shed light on what the second arc was hinting at without it being appropriate to lay out on the table. But then it also raises new questions and higher stakes. It doesn't help Lily or the reader actually feel they're standing on more stable ground. It's getting shakier, the more truth you pile on. Lily invites this by the end of the second arc. She thought things were one way when they weren't, and "Erik" busted her for this while he was making her jump through a ton of hoops to prove he could be more honest with her.
Also, you know what's interesting about the second draft is that I've had to have Paulina be a lot more aware of what's wrong about her relationship with "Erik", whereas in draft one I kind of stupidly had her being supportive when someone as socially savvy and romantically experienced as her should have known better. I've now switched things so that it's actually Mariam that's kind of tone-deaf about these things, and distracted. It really takes this upcoming conflict, which Lily puts behind her but which the Giry girls think is a giant red flag, for Mariam to start feeling resentment towards "Erik" and inward paranoia about him. She's going to start being a bit passive aggressive; she won't have the energy to joke as much about him, and then it'll all fizz over when Lily starts drifting from her in order to be there for "Erik".
Oy. All this time thinking about it instead of writing it, and I don't have a lot of time to spare to begin with. Well, I suppose every now and then it's good to get stuff out of your head.
Thanks, to anyone who still reads...
Also, a big Fuck You to Photobucket, another site I have used for over a decade that was always simple and fair and now apparently charges FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS just to embed images into other websites. Again, I have been relying on PB to host my pictures since I was 15, there are at least a thousand photos on my account that I now have to sort through and reupload to some other site that's not going to be a dick about it.
So yeah, sorry everything's a mess right now? Maybe if I fork out some more money I can figure it out, which I totally have now that my rent, car insurance, and comcast package have all been hiked. The world we live in is so disgustingly greedy.
Well, for the time being, Open Office is still a free program, so I can write to my leisure, at least? pff.
He's There has made a bit of progress. I keep going back a chapter to fix stuff, having second thoughts about small choices made, just in general overthinking whether I have an effective sequence of events. BUT, people want updates, so they give me a reason to stop wallowing in what I've got and push forward. I'm really coming to a threshold, too, one I should be excited about. Chapter 14 (the next one I will work on, which is started too) will be the last chapter that I totally write from scratch. I think. Well, at least, there's about to be a lot of structural choices made in draft one that I can refer to so that I'm not having to work so hard on that. I can focus on improving the scenes that were there, and adding a few big things that were introduced prior to them and kind of back-burnered. Sometimes, I think draft one's problem was that it would build drama and then just drop it, or let it kind of float around. Everything should have been snow-balling, otherwise it makes Lily look more like a fool than a girl who's faced with too much to handle, ideologically and emotionally, and makes mistakes from the pressure.
Ugh, even thinking about it gives me anxiety. I actually spend a lot of time feeling anxious that I'm not going to get things right. Or I'm going to forget about something that would have been a really moving, effective aspect to a relationship or a situation, and I won't know how to fit it in when I go back. I've already done that with the second draft, or I realized that something was too intense to go in yet, so I had to hold off on it.
One of the big differences between the second arc (which I'm now finishing) and the third is that the second is all about subtlety and nuance, while the third is full of confessions and discoveries that shed light on what the second arc was hinting at without it being appropriate to lay out on the table. But then it also raises new questions and higher stakes. It doesn't help Lily or the reader actually feel they're standing on more stable ground. It's getting shakier, the more truth you pile on. Lily invites this by the end of the second arc. She thought things were one way when they weren't, and "Erik" busted her for this while he was making her jump through a ton of hoops to prove he could be more honest with her.
Also, you know what's interesting about the second draft is that I've had to have Paulina be a lot more aware of what's wrong about her relationship with "Erik", whereas in draft one I kind of stupidly had her being supportive when someone as socially savvy and romantically experienced as her should have known better. I've now switched things so that it's actually Mariam that's kind of tone-deaf about these things, and distracted. It really takes this upcoming conflict, which Lily puts behind her but which the Giry girls think is a giant red flag, for Mariam to start feeling resentment towards "Erik" and inward paranoia about him. She's going to start being a bit passive aggressive; she won't have the energy to joke as much about him, and then it'll all fizz over when Lily starts drifting from her in order to be there for "Erik".
Oy. All this time thinking about it instead of writing it, and I don't have a lot of time to spare to begin with. Well, I suppose every now and then it's good to get stuff out of your head.
Thanks, to anyone who still reads...