I think that I'm starting to understand (again) what kind of writer I am. And that it's not the kind of writer who can write long, angsty stories that don't have some kind of active plot to them.
I'm really not the heavy long angst kind of writer at all in fact.
But when I'm writing something longer, there needs to be a plot structure of the action/mystery/doing something variety to hang everything else off. Even Dreams and Circus Crowds, which doesn't have a huge action/adventure plot and is closer to a plain romance than anything else I've written, has a core plot around Coulson's past and how it's affecting his present and how Clint's entry into his life starts to change him. Someone described it in a comment as Coulson starting out with a grey, stark kind of life and Clint starts to bring colour back and wake him up, which pretty much sums up what I was doing in that fic.
When I'm writing longer pieces, I need that core *thing* to hold all the other elements together.
I can happily write short little things with very little in the way of plotty focus. Character studies, fluff, short bursts of angst, short bursts of total crack: short fics don't necessarily need a big overarching plot and they're a lot of fun to write.
When I'm writing longer, though, I struggle when I don't have the larger story to hang my character development off. This is probably why I'm struggling with one fic right now: the whole thing is character growth and development with no outside influences to push things along and I'm having trouble making that work. Hence I'm in editing hell on it. Ugh :-(
And that may explain why the two big fics I'm currently writing are really plot heavy. And in the case of the crackfic wingfic AU, hopefully including a fair dose of outright humour.
Like Clockwork, the steampunk AU, is turning into a novel. Which is appropriate for a Big Bang fic. And I'm flying by the seat of my pants way more than I normally would with something this long: I've got the main high points noted in my outline but most of the details are evolving as I write and so far that's working. I'm probably two scenes away from one of the bits I've really been looking forward to writing so it's going well :-D
Match Made in Heaven *was* going to be very firmly Clint and Phil-centric. But Sitwell and Darcy are working their way in, which means I'm getting to have a lot of fun writing their scenes with Phil. It's actually a fic where I'm just really enjoying all the character interactions and writing Clint fighting dragons is just a happy bonus.
It's probably a good thing that I'm enjoying writing these fics so much because otherwise I'd be trapped in editing hell with no breaks. Ugh.
I'm at T-minus four days to Deployment Day Take Two. We are definitely a go now because the team deploying the source application are under orders to deploy their thing, no choice, no roll-back, if things don't go well then they'll be sitting at their desks coding until it's all fixed.
So on Saturday, I will be spending the day working. There are going to be some big breaks of a couple of hours (at least) where I'm not doing anything but can't leave my desk. So I'll either be reading a book or working on fics during that time. My busiest period is likely to be from mid-afternoon into the late evening, although I'll be starting my day around 9.30AM so it's likely to be a twelve hours at my desk day.
My prediction is that this will go one of two ways:
1) Everything will go very smoothly, much faster than the schedule, and I'll be done by early evening.
2) The source application will hit a snag and they'll lose a few hours fixing it so my stuff will still be deploying late Saturday/early Sunday morning and I'll work through the night.
Given this project's history, option two seems the most likely right now.
Today I'm locking down the revisions on all the objects at noon. We have to compile so much paperwork and so many lists and I need to have that stuff in tomorrow morning. That means I'll spend this afternoon double and triple checking all my lists, matching things off with highlighter pens and trying to make sure nothing gets missed.
I'm about 99% certain that I'll still get asked to make minor changes despite being on revision lock-down so all the paperwork ends up being redone, but at least I tried?
The good news is that I probably won't have to work on Monday (Canada Day) itself now! Woo! I plan to...sleep. And maybe watch a movie from my recliner. But mostly sleep.
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