Still not dead.
Chapter 11 of The Apocafic That Ate Scarlet Carsons' Brain is almost done. So, ehh, 2-3 chapters to go.
While writing the chapter, I had this horribly wangsty drop in confidence, the writerly equivalent of a dark night of the soul (I know that everyone has them occasionally, they seem to be de rigeur), and looking at my own prose made me want to headbutt my laptop. Without confidence, you really are screwed. It doesn't matter how good or bad the fic actually is: if you don't have confidence, it's difficult to enjoy writing.
However, I'd made up my mind to finish things, and I hoped that the drop in confidence was just a phase. I think that writing is often more about endurance than talent or skill - sometimes, you just have to get used to running on a muddy track. The story was really just an exercise in writing a short novel-length fic; when I kept that in mind, I felt less inclined to worry about my flaws, and more inclined to just treat it as a learning experience. It's an inescapable fact that, when it comes to writing, I am a n00b. I've only really been trying to write fiction since around mid 2008. I need to be patient with myself.
Writing does seem to require a lot of faith. Faith that you'll get over your block. Faith that you'll find a way to resolve Plot Issue X. Faith that you'll actually finish the goddamn story. Faith that it won't suck - and if it does suck, faith that it will still have been time well-spent, because you'll have learned a thing or two in the process of writing it.
I do think that I've learned from it. At the very least, I'm now over my fear of writing longer fics. My grammar has improved too, I hope. (I've always had lousy grammar, although that's mainly because it has gone uncorrected for so long. I did not get me a good edufication.)
I've also learned a few things the hard way. For example: following a vague story outline and posting things as a WiP is a really weird way of doing things. In an ideal world, I would have written a treatment and sent it to a beta, so that the plot and pacing could be critiqued even though the actual story would still take a while to write. I think that posting things as a WiP is a bad idea for me, period; when I finish the story, it's still going to have the flaws of a first draft, because I can't go back and shuffle things around or delete/edit earlier scenes in order to neaten things up a bit. That said, at least posting WiP makes me feel as if I have to commit myself to the fic and finish it.
Totally unrelated, but why am I so bad about giving compliments? I wish that I could express my admiration for people by throwing rocks at them in the playground.
While writing the chapter, I had this horribly wangsty drop in confidence, the writerly equivalent of a dark night of the soul (I know that everyone has them occasionally, they seem to be de rigeur), and looking at my own prose made me want to headbutt my laptop. Without confidence, you really are screwed. It doesn't matter how good or bad the fic actually is: if you don't have confidence, it's difficult to enjoy writing.
However, I'd made up my mind to finish things, and I hoped that the drop in confidence was just a phase. I think that writing is often more about endurance than talent or skill - sometimes, you just have to get used to running on a muddy track. The story was really just an exercise in writing a short novel-length fic; when I kept that in mind, I felt less inclined to worry about my flaws, and more inclined to just treat it as a learning experience. It's an inescapable fact that, when it comes to writing, I am a n00b. I've only really been trying to write fiction since around mid 2008. I need to be patient with myself.
Writing does seem to require a lot of faith. Faith that you'll get over your block. Faith that you'll find a way to resolve Plot Issue X. Faith that you'll actually finish the goddamn story. Faith that it won't suck - and if it does suck, faith that it will still have been time well-spent, because you'll have learned a thing or two in the process of writing it.
I do think that I've learned from it. At the very least, I'm now over my fear of writing longer fics. My grammar has improved too, I hope. (I've always had lousy grammar, although that's mainly because it has gone uncorrected for so long. I did not get me a good edufication.)
I've also learned a few things the hard way. For example: following a vague story outline and posting things as a WiP is a really weird way of doing things. In an ideal world, I would have written a treatment and sent it to a beta, so that the plot and pacing could be critiqued even though the actual story would still take a while to write. I think that posting things as a WiP is a bad idea for me, period; when I finish the story, it's still going to have the flaws of a first draft, because I can't go back and shuffle things around or delete/edit earlier scenes in order to neaten things up a bit. That said, at least posting WiP makes me feel as if I have to commit myself to the fic and finish it.
Totally unrelated, but why am I so bad about giving compliments? I wish that I could express my admiration for people by throwing rocks at them in the playground.