Blogging Excuses
*blows dust off the furniture*
Hello! Yes, I aten't dead. Again.
But I have been finding it increasingly difficult to put together anything approaching an actual blog post. One with words and thoughts and so on. It's much easier to chatter on Twitter and reblog stuff on Tumblr and my brain has been on a "do the easier things" setting for most of the winter. There's a lot of reasons for my absence and lack of braining, including (but not limited to):
WINTER - This has been the worst winter since my first one in Canada. So, so cold. So much snow. Constant, unrelenting snow and ice and shovelling and falling over. I've been feeling quite low a lot of the time, with occasional forays into irrational dread when another snow storm is forecast. If we can please not have another winter like this for a few years, that would be great.
If spring could start to show up, that would also be great. It was -15C this morning, before windchill was added. There's another big snow storm predicted for later this week. IT'S FRICKING MARCH.
So yes, winter. My brain got eaten by winter. And also...
Writing - Words have been difficult. I've written a couple of shorter fanfic stories that were a lot of fun, but I spent most of January and February trying my hand at my first high school AU...and finally put it into (long term) hibernation at the beginning of last week. I had about 20k written and it wasn't going anywhere and the contortions I was performing to make the plot work were sending the characters further out of character with every chapter. Just thinking about trying to finish it or fix it was making me depressed and I was struggling to get more than a couple of hundred words down each time I tried.
So it went into hibernation and I feel so much better. It was for a Big Bang challenge, but in the ten days since I gave up, I've developed and written the first 10k of a new fic for the BB. Clearly, this is working better :-D And I feel confident about hitting my deadlines with a fic that I won't be embarrasssed to be associated with now, which is a plus.
The whole debacle reminded me (again) that there are things I'm just not cut out to write. I can write short stories about characters having feelings with no external plot, but longer stuff? Nope. It's just not something I'm built to write. My brain is wired to need some kind of story (with adventure, journey, explosions, danger, etc.) to hang all the character things off. When I try to construct something long without that, where the plot is mostly people having feelings and working through them without external interference, it all falls apart. And on this particular ocassion, it added to my winter melancholy to be a horrible mess.
The new fic is fun and I don't feel like I'm straining for every word, which has always been a good sign for how well a project is going for me.
My plan is to get this fic plus another, shorter project finished up this month, to first draft stage at least. Then I can be working on the edits and beta-ing in April because...
My current plan is to mostly take April off from fanfic and concentrate on an original story. It's something that's been rattling around my brain for a while and I'm reaching the "must write this" stage now. This week I've been writing a short story connected to it, just to get it out of my head, and I'm itching to get to the main piece. I don't know whether it will go anywhere beyond the hard drive of my computer, but I want to try and I'm planning to use Camp NaNoWriMo as the motivation for it. AFter all, the regular NaNo got me mostly through writing a fanfic novel. Hopefully it's baby cousin can keep me on track for something original. At least for the first month, anyway.
(I'm not calling it a novel, in case it gets intimidated and runs away from me before I finish it. Set the bar low and all that.)
If people see me chattering about Zombie Circus, that's what I'm doing. There are no actual zombies in the circus. My working titles only make sense to me :-D
This entry was originally posted at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/504931.html. There are currently
babbles on the entry on Dreamwidth
Hello! Yes, I aten't dead. Again.
But I have been finding it increasingly difficult to put together anything approaching an actual blog post. One with words and thoughts and so on. It's much easier to chatter on Twitter and reblog stuff on Tumblr and my brain has been on a "do the easier things" setting for most of the winter. There's a lot of reasons for my absence and lack of braining, including (but not limited to):
WINTER - This has been the worst winter since my first one in Canada. So, so cold. So much snow. Constant, unrelenting snow and ice and shovelling and falling over. I've been feeling quite low a lot of the time, with occasional forays into irrational dread when another snow storm is forecast. If we can please not have another winter like this for a few years, that would be great.
If spring could start to show up, that would also be great. It was -15C this morning, before windchill was added. There's another big snow storm predicted for later this week. IT'S FRICKING MARCH.
So yes, winter. My brain got eaten by winter. And also...
Writing - Words have been difficult. I've written a couple of shorter fanfic stories that were a lot of fun, but I spent most of January and February trying my hand at my first high school AU...and finally put it into (long term) hibernation at the beginning of last week. I had about 20k written and it wasn't going anywhere and the contortions I was performing to make the plot work were sending the characters further out of character with every chapter. Just thinking about trying to finish it or fix it was making me depressed and I was struggling to get more than a couple of hundred words down each time I tried.
So it went into hibernation and I feel so much better. It was for a Big Bang challenge, but in the ten days since I gave up, I've developed and written the first 10k of a new fic for the BB. Clearly, this is working better :-D And I feel confident about hitting my deadlines with a fic that I won't be embarrasssed to be associated with now, which is a plus.
The whole debacle reminded me (again) that there are things I'm just not cut out to write. I can write short stories about characters having feelings with no external plot, but longer stuff? Nope. It's just not something I'm built to write. My brain is wired to need some kind of story (with adventure, journey, explosions, danger, etc.) to hang all the character things off. When I try to construct something long without that, where the plot is mostly people having feelings and working through them without external interference, it all falls apart. And on this particular ocassion, it added to my winter melancholy to be a horrible mess.
The new fic is fun and I don't feel like I'm straining for every word, which has always been a good sign for how well a project is going for me.
My plan is to get this fic plus another, shorter project finished up this month, to first draft stage at least. Then I can be working on the edits and beta-ing in April because...
My current plan is to mostly take April off from fanfic and concentrate on an original story. It's something that's been rattling around my brain for a while and I'm reaching the "must write this" stage now. This week I've been writing a short story connected to it, just to get it out of my head, and I'm itching to get to the main piece. I don't know whether it will go anywhere beyond the hard drive of my computer, but I want to try and I'm planning to use Camp NaNoWriMo as the motivation for it. AFter all, the regular NaNo got me mostly through writing a fanfic novel. Hopefully it's baby cousin can keep me on track for something original. At least for the first month, anyway.
(I'm not calling it a novel, in case it gets intimidated and runs away from me before I finish it. Set the bar low and all that.)
If people see me chattering about Zombie Circus, that's what I'm doing. There are no actual zombies in the circus. My working titles only make sense to me :-D
This entry was originally posted at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/504931.html. There are currently
babbles on the entry on Dreamwidth