korafox | Entries tagged with writing

Trying to ward off new-job-starts-tomorrow terror by working on a long overdue interlude. (hi everyone my jerkbrain says I'm totally going to screw everything up gods why can it not shut up even for a day I am the most awkward turtle ever)

I did not realize I was going to be writing from Nefin's POV until I sat down to start this. Can I just say he is so much fun, and I really hope I'm doing this right? Yayboo for NPCs.

Finally, my cat is being so ridiculously snuggly with the weather cold and us back from the holiday. Right now she is cuddled up on my tummy with her face shoved into the crook of my elbow. I think she might actually be asleep, which given how neurotic my cat is, is pretty impressive.

She's a perfect match for me.

(arglebargle)

I am the slowest damn writer ever. *sigh*

500 words added over the course of...four hours? Rough draft (very very very rough) done. Argh these characters, argh.

Now I need to make dinner. And then maybe do some light cleaning, and I guess the rest of the evening I should relax or something.

Edits tomorrow. That would be wiser. Too emotionally invested right now.

1. I'm remembering that listening to music before bed helps immensely with the post-game emotional hangover the next morning. It's like drinking plenty of water after booze, yes? (I have never been able to drink enough to have a hangover, but this is my understanding.) For each super-emotional RP scene you play, listen to at least one melodramatic-bittersweet song before going to bed. I swear it works.

2. Yay, game is back! I got to have a scene between Dahlia and Nefin and I didn't screw it up and hopefully it set the right vector towards endgame! (I swear to the gods we are not changing my ending again. I like it how it is.) It was so weird having the two of them speaking directly to one another. Somewhere there's an alternate universe where Dahlia didn't get "killed" during the Gardens jailbreak, and the two of them reconciled early on and became a platonic crime-fighting duo or something.

3. Now I need to write an interlude that happened just before this episode between the two of them and it's going to be a fine line to walk. In my headcanon, Dahlia has a lot more visceral PTSD about him (and being stuck in a White Room-ish chapel and having him suddenly appear with her would be fucking terrifying and triggery for her), but it's difficult to play that out at table and keep it consistent. Plus she needs to be able to be in the same space as him and functional in order to work out their issues, so that is limiting.

4. And before I forget, I had the most amazing Steve and Bucky dream last night. It was some sort of AU thing where they were both part of this secret assassin cult and Bucky had to go do this rite to keep an Elder God from waking up, but it was going to let the Elder God into his head. And 99% of the time this results in the person going insane and the assassins have to kill them. But after Bucky did the thing, Steve grabbed him and shook him and told him he had to fight it because otherwise, Steve was going to jump into Bucky's head to help fight it and he was going to die too. So he made Bucky take back his mind to save him and it was amaaaaaazing and now I want to watch the Civil War movie. Do I have to see the actual Avengers movies first? Because I've only seen the Captain America ones. : P
This dream probably brought to you by my brain making weird associations with HYDRA (the logo looks like Cthulhu!) and also this song, which is my unofficial Steve/Bucky anthem, being amongst my recent mp3 acquisitions.

See anything interesting?

BWAH. That was unexpected. It's not exactly the most accessible of interludes, but apparently people liked it.

It's funny because usually when I have a bunch of messages in my inbox, I try to temper my expectations by thinking, "Oh, they're not for you, they're just notifications of arts by the people you're watching." NOT THIS TIME.

Note to self: caffeinated beverages and trying to write a scene with the POV character in sheer terror do not mix. Sorry, heart.

Things that sucked this weekend:

1) Being covered in bruises and having some sort of low-grade 24 hour fever/headache combo on Saturday.

2) Really just slogging through writing due to said fever.

3) Being in absolutely stupid amounts of pain due to That Time and a complete lack of Ibuprofen in the house.

4) Four-hour power outage today. Probably the worst thing about this was that MY HEATING PAD RUNS ON ELECTRICITY, YO. See also #3.

Things that were good about this weekend:

1) I only felt sick for one day rather than plowing headlong into illness while at academy.

2) I did writing!

3) Husband went out and got me Ibuprofen because he is awesome.

4) The power came back on, and me and my family made it through the severe weather with homes and selves intact.

Dear brain,

I don't care how exhausting this week has been. MAKE THERE BE WORDS. You only have six more weeks to finish this interlude series. (Yes, that is the metric right this exact second. And I know how ridiculous that is.)

Why is editing so much harder than writing? (Although this editing is going to involve a lot of writing, I think.) I can't tell if it's the laziness of already having something produced, or having to struggle against firmly established headcanon.

So I just finished a book (technically I finished it about a week ago) that was so appallingly bad, it was only by virtue of mocking it roundly to husband that I was even able to get to the end. There were many reasons for this--idiot plot violations of the highest caliber, glaring police/legal procedural mistakes about every other page, characters so two-dimensional they'd blow over in a stiff wind--but the worst thing about the book was the dialogue.

(I suppose I should say which book this was. True Blue by David Baldacci. For the love of god, don't read it unless you're a masochist of the MST3K variety.)

See, dialogue is one of those areas of writing craft that I have been paying special attention to lately. Well-written dialogue has all these half-seen markers that keep it flowing properly for the reader. Your brain should process the he/she saids, the little bits of action before/after/in the middle of a character's lines, and give you a running mental picture of the scene without having to stop to think about it. Since I don't have formal training in how to construct these things, I'm trying to note how good writers go about it.

Well, it turns out that bad writing can be just as instructive. Here's a hint: when I have to go back to the beginning of the conversation and count off every other paragraph to tell who says a particular line, you're doing it wrong. For gods' sakes, going on for a page and a half without attributing a single line to a character or including any actions does not make for snappy writing. It makes for writing that I have to re-read three times to get the gist of. (And if I can't tell who's saying what by nature of the dialogue itself, maybe you should figure out how to make your characters not all sound the same.)

On the plus side, I now have several specific things to look out for when editing my own writing. Yay that. Boo the several hours of my life I lost to that piece of utter dreck.

Dear me:

Yes, I know you usually write better when you've got music playing in the background. Yes, I know it corrals the bits of your brain that like to go shooting off on tangents while the responsible parts are actually trying to get things done.

But maybe when you've spent all day tabbing away from Word to go, "Oooh what's this new song on Pandora?" or alternately, "Oh my gods this song I must now cry in the corner or rock out or both simultaneously", it's time to put the music away for a while.

Three characters. You will finish them by bedtime. Spit-spot, everything but the descriptions done, how hard can the rest be?

Maybe then you can have your music back. Maybe.

Cheers,
Self

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So, I got back on the wagon today and inked the Weaver. I am...cautiously optimistic that I won't have too much tweaking to do when I get it on the computer. I already noticed that the right arm is way too long, but that should be relatively trivial to fix. And I think I finally figured out how to not leave graphite smudgies all over the damned thing that have to be erased.

Now I'm trying to work up the energy to get something else, anything, done tonight, but my brain is not cooperating. Perhaps when husband gets back with dinner, the efforts will go better. It doesn't help that I'm torn between wanting to doodle my detective character (in my brain he now looks like the Middle Man) and wanting to start planning a scene from his POV. It really, really should be in first-person in the greatest tradition of cheapo noir crime novels, but I'm not certain I'm up to that particular task.

As a side note, working with

cereta on this story has been amazingly fun. I'm looking forward to the end product when we finally get there. :)

Possible downside to new netbook: kitty has decided that since I'm sitting in the recliner, she gets to claim my lap whether it's already full or not. Have managed to scoot her far enough toward me that my wrists are not trapped under her considerable furry bulk, so I think we have a temporary truce.

On plus side, finally trying my hand at narrative writing for this week's character homework. I expect I will make many awful first-timer mistakes. Please don't tell me about them for a day or two so I can get my at-rest embarrassment levels down a bit over the whole thing.

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So yesterday I was having a chat with

kilroy , and we were talking about writing. I expressed how I would like to actually try my hand at it one of these days, but I'm so infernally slow because of this niggling perfectionism I can't get rid of. To which he suggested I try NaNo next year (not this year, alternate project here that's serving as a testing-the-waters sort of thing), since it would get rid of my inner editor faster than I could imagine.

Well, I decided to take a first step toward that goal while writing up last night's wiki entry. See, one of the biggest stumbling-blocks for me in writing is actually naming. Names are important to me; they're like a cue card that tells you how to relate to whatever the thing is. You'll never forget a good name (nor a bad name, but for all the wrong reasons). So when I'm naming something, I want it to be perfect, and that takes time.

Last night, I threw up my hands and put a placeholder in for all the names that didn't come to me after about ten seconds of deliberation. And things got done. Not only that, but it didn't take me nearly as long to come up with the names after the fact, maybe because I had a better idea of what I was looking for.

Progress is made!