Alas!
summer_of_giles is over. Now I must go back and make sure I left all the feedback I wanted to leave for people. It was a great year.
Accomplishments:
+ Stealth nominations of some SOG stories I liked.
+ I wrote a script to turn
my del.icio.us bookmarks into an
RSS file for
FanworksFinder.com. I hand-massaged the results, however.
+ Vast amounts of software written for my employer.
+ G/E story is >4000 words and ticking along. Need to write the sex.
+ G/B story is >3500 words and ticking along. Have structure. Need to write the talking. And lots of other things.
Finishing stories: why is it hard? Second-guessing. Incomplete work fizzes with possibility. Committing and finishing means it can never be better than it is now.
I often kick off the first part of a story in a free & easy loose mode. And then I bind myself up in worries when it comes time to write the next section. This is what has killed me about Reconnection (world's worst title).
It takes me ages to write some of the more serious stories. Tradition & Protocol part 1 took about five months. "Thusia" took four months. I started "Readings" a year ago. "Breathing" took, what, four months? Ars Draconis is taking ages, though I love it dearly. (Might be my favorite of all my stories.)
Ideas are the easy part. Would you believe that during the decade of Not Writing Any Fiction I was crippled by the fear that a) I had no ideas, and b) the ones I had were not worth writing? Fanfiction has hit me with the clue bat about both of those. I might have taken this "have lots of ideas" thing a bit far, I admit. It's worse even than you think, because I have a pile of half-finished stories you haven't seen at all.
Today's random links:
Grotesque 1. Grotesque 2. I particularly enjoy the juxtaposition of the url with the nauseating effects achieved in the photos.