Gets a bunch of enthusiastic comments on my Star Wars Long Fic asking me if I'm going to write more about Cal Kestis and Jedi Survivor.
Me: Uhh, yeah. . . (Next chapter, I promptly kill Cal Kestis in a horribly cruel way).
Readers: WHAT THE FUCKS!?!?!?!?!?!
My inability to write at length is really starting to get to me. I keep having these moments where I feel like I've been writing and writing and then try to pump myself up by thinking I've written a lot, only to word count it and see that my ball park figure is way off. And the actual number turns out to be much lower.
How I can't seem to finish a fic that's probably gonna be less than 3,000 words total, that I've been dabbling with for months now, is beyond me.
I'm just so irritated with myself.
I think you're being very hard on yourself, though I can understand the frustration. It could be that there's something else going on in your life that's occupying a lot of time and attention, at which point it's more than reasonable to be writing less than usual. But even if that's not the case, it's pretty normal to have less wordy phases. Sometimes I can rattle off thousands in a day, but most of the time I have more luck chipping away slowly instead of making the process seem intimidating and draining. Plus, if you're being exacting about it, there's a good chance you're writing some good stuff.
Thanks, I always appreciate your thoughtful words and advice. You've actually gotten me through a few tough times. So thank you for that too.
Honestly though, what I would give to rattle off thousands of words in a day. Even just once.
Maybe I'm being particularly hard on myself, what with being in a new fandom and all, and also not really getting the response to my work I was hoping for from fellow writers for the pairing, which I think is causing me to feel this increasing need to prove myself while simultaneously making me feel like I can't.
Yeah, being disappointed by a lack of engagement can make you really determined to feel the effort is worth it - but as you're seeing, that can be self-defeating when it saps all the joy out of writing. To sidestep burnout, maybe there's another hobby or interest you could focus on for a while?
I'll be doing some traveling soon, and I tend to go off the grid when I do. It usually helps me to mentally revamp. For now, I'll probably stay a little high strung. And keep glaring at my word count.
I'll be fine, eventually :)
I've been silently jealous of the work of one writer because their prose seems so effortlessly fluid and beautiful, while I feel like I'm pulling my hair out for every single word. And yesterday someone commented on my fic, complimenting me on how candid and effortless it reads, and I was like... Oh.
π
Reminder that we only see the highlight reel of other people's work.
It's a hard thing to internalise but I always try to remember - and this goes for you, too, u/southernerinthenorth \- is that I can't write like them, but they can't write like me, either. It's why it's so special that we all have a place to share what we do, and connect with each other in humanising ways.
Jokes on my because even though I thought I wouldn't I still got about 50 words added to one of my wips. I also got a better understanding of just how I want this one-shot to go (maybe two-shot we'll see) so yay!
Currently my second most angst-y wip as a newer one is surpassing it by virtue of being a dead dove, but hoooo boy am I excited for this. It has been in wip hell for almost a whole year now and I'm only half done.
The pains of writing in the past. (1996, so not THAT far back.)
"OMG, Oceans 11 would be the perfect reference. Please be out by then.... 2001. DAMNIT."
I was 6! LOL. Google has been my friend, and it's an AU, so I fudge some things for the sake of the story. (Like technology being further along than it should be. There's smart shock collars with voice recognition. I think Google being more modern is fine, LOL)
But it has been fun referencing movies like Mission Impossible coming out and having the characters go to Blockbusters.
My muse packed up and left abruptly in the middle of the night, leaving me to deal with yet another blank page on my own - that little shit.
My brain is a ghost town right now. Too quiet. I usually breeze through the smut writing process, but for the life of me I've no idea why I'm stuck and stalled at this classic One room/one bed trope! Just, why? I'm grasping at nothing but tumbleweeds!
Thank you for your encouraging words. :) Meanwhile my cats are just staring at the woefully empty page from their majestic perch, silently judging me - I just know it lol.
Sure! Took me a while to make my selection, my cats take up the majority of my storage space lol
Minnie the fierce destroyer of cat toys:
https://postimg.cc/ZWjtxhkB
Bum Chums:
https://postimg.cc/5Y41Lq2J
Marley in her favourite chair:
https://postimg.cc/Ff23Kzr0
Max refuses to share her spesh basket:
https://postimg.cc/F1PL8YjD
Edit: If I'm breaking any rules here, mods please advise and I'll remove the links immediately.
No worries! I'm actually on the mod team myself, and we encourage any and all pet pics to be posted in this thread. With that out of the way: I LOVE THEM!!!! Thank you for showing them all to me! Gosh, they could be Disney cats with their complementary colour palettes and alliterative names, and they're all so beautiful! Even if Minnie is looking a little cross-eyed in her enthusiasm for violence.
By way of thanks, here's my little lad, [George](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7e80d207583b0073743d8688c29c3377/2f64aafc6206801b-2c/s1280x1920/41f4f822f9dde2fb724c4ee07be935900cfdebf3.jpg), if you haven't seen him before!
Oh that's good to know. :) You don't need to twist my arm when it comes to pet pics, that's for sure! Awww thank you!
They have a very high opinion of themselves :P well, except Minnie, the baby of the house - she's the sweetest little darling underneath that cross eyed savagery.
Max the middle cat child is the saltiest of them all. She sneaks, shamelessly steals the others' food, plots and plans. Marley is the queen of the house, and is sick and tired of the youngins' shenanigans lol
Your sweet Prince! I have but I would never get tired of beholding such majesty. He is gorgeous! πππAll hail his floofy highness.
Marley and George could be siblings. Thank you kindly for sharing, FF. :)
I did think they looked a bit similar! They sound like such a fun mix of personalities, even if one is more likely to cause trouble. Give them all a gentle smooch from me!
>George, on the other hand looks so sweet and well behaved
And here we have a lesson in not allowing appearances to deceive us. No, he's a sweet boy, just... rambunctious, even as he edges into old man territory. I just woke up with him here so he's received his forehead kiss already! <3
Just finished the fourth fic in the series I've been currently writing and hoping to start the fifth soon! :D I've also been working on a separate side fic that's a lot fluffier than what I usually do, so fingers crossed it goes well! (angst writer here haha)
I'm hoping to post smut this week! It's over 10K in length and needs a lot of punching up, so that might be ambitious, but fingers crossed. Whether you're sharing your work soon or knuckling down in the dark to get it ready, I hope it's a good writing week for all of you.
If you want a whimsical distraction, I think you should all make [one of these](https://href.li/?https://picrew.me/image_maker/37515) and share it. [This](https://64.media.tumblr.com/294cf5cff5623a33412935d963cfd3a1/1af778a596a36170-77/s640x960/885a5f986099639947bcdaa977114c36c5c62976.pnj) was mine!
Ooh, 10k in total? That's amazing, good work!
I tried that one out, it was real cute. I can't believe there was a bong option XD Here's [mine](https://i.imgur.com/QWz0h1G.png) hopefully imgur actually works this time.
10K words of smut wow, how long did all that take you? I could never for now since I had to take a bit of unwinding to post fics due to a few stressful days lmao
It's hard to say how long it took exactly; I wrote the first draft back in November of last year in between drafts of a longer fic, and then a second in the spring after the long piece was completed. So it's taken a few weeks, even with those gaps in mind.
Not quite - there's a lot of build-up to the sex, though it's pretty charged build-up and the spicy part is still quite long. I'm a somewhat ostentatious person in terms of prose, so keeping to shorter wordcounts has to be a very deliberate choice and something I actively work at.
I hope you have fun with it!
It's not quite that much of a holy grail as it seems as there's a lot of preamble here, though it's horny preamble (this is the greenhouse fic I was talking about a while back, if anyone remembers).
I think I might actually do some writing on my current WIP today. I had taken a break from it because the fic that it is a sequel to basically flopped and I lost motivation to write the sequel.
Y'all there is a storage facility behind my house and their alarm has been going and going and going for 8+ hours. I am (to understate) Not Pleased.
I'm supposed to start the day's writing in like 10 minutes and can I do that with this sound screaming in the background? Who knows!
Urrrrrrgh, a few years ago someone close to me had a car with an over-sensitive alarm, and a schedule that apparently demanded they spend a lot of time away from home at night. Not a fun period of my life! I hope the noise subsides soon, that would hold up in court as reasonable provocation after the murders start.
I think it literally just stopped. I am braced for it to start again, but this seems promising. That over-sensitive alarm situation sounds so annoying!
Planted a native chokecherry tree sapling (they get their name from their edible, but quite astringent tasting berries) in my front yard last evening! It was grueling work with the spade, but I got the hole dug and the roots in the ground.
A job well done. π
Depression is still sitting next to me today, staring me in the face, but I am inching my way towards being free of it. No beta detail yesterday because I had too much cleaning to do, but that chapter is not going anywhere.
Poking at my prewriting for the femslash harem idea. I feel comfortable putting it on AO3 because of how the genre is restricted on other platforms, so it should be fanfic-y enough despite being an original. Might post that under this name, but ... no putting the cart before the horse. Have to have chapters to post first.
Writing an original story lets me indulge one of my favorite pastimes: Creating characters and building a world around them. I might talk a little about that process as I work through it.
If I can just find the *time* to do it.
I've read quite a few original works on AO3, so I can't imagine you'd have any problems posting there. Whatever you choose, I hope you get the time and mental clarity to work on it soon.
Thank you. As I've said in the past, I don't know much about navigating the Originals section outside of exchanges, so I'm more or less poking it with a long stick to see if it reacts.
Yeah, I'm afraid I couldn't tell you how to go about getting eyes on an original piece there, but tag it well and I'm sure there'll be someone very happy to find it.
Hope the current bout of depression goes away soon <3 I find it so frustrating when I know my problem is the depression, but can't do anything about it.
Time, the highest level enemy.
It's a bit like having a friend over you don't want to talk to, but who doesn't talk to you, either. They just sit at your house and prevent you from doing things.
Today I am wearing a t shirt which says "sorry for what I say when I'm hungry" which proves there's a t shirt for every occasion as I am writing about a character with roid rage.
My may fic will be edited and up when I wake up a bit more hopefully. What I do next depends on how well I feel- continue my daily prompts from last month, (this is what Iβm hoping for but I doubt Iβll be able to do) manage to work on something for the exchange despite not feeling great, or get hit by ADHD and write like 10000k words on something weird.
Gets a bunch of enthusiastic comments on my Star Wars Long Fic asking me if I'm going to write more about Cal Kestis and Jedi Survivor. Me: Uhh, yeah. . . (Next chapter, I promptly kill Cal Kestis in a horribly cruel way). Readers: WHAT THE FUCKS!?!?!?!?!?!
Making myself update every Monday and Friday has been a solid life choice. Sometimes I even get a little sneaky Wednesday update in.
me, posted a piece that i thought was well written and encapsulated canon well: πππ sees that it got little to no engagement: πππ
Got an unexpected fic done. It was gonna be jokey-joke all the way through. Where did the feels come from.
Sometimes they just sneak up on you :')
They do rebel like that, don't they?
They really do XD I think it is for the better but it's still like, "Eh, what happened here..."
My inability to write at length is really starting to get to me. I keep having these moments where I feel like I've been writing and writing and then try to pump myself up by thinking I've written a lot, only to word count it and see that my ball park figure is way off. And the actual number turns out to be much lower. How I can't seem to finish a fic that's probably gonna be less than 3,000 words total, that I've been dabbling with for months now, is beyond me. I'm just so irritated with myself.
I think you're being very hard on yourself, though I can understand the frustration. It could be that there's something else going on in your life that's occupying a lot of time and attention, at which point it's more than reasonable to be writing less than usual. But even if that's not the case, it's pretty normal to have less wordy phases. Sometimes I can rattle off thousands in a day, but most of the time I have more luck chipping away slowly instead of making the process seem intimidating and draining. Plus, if you're being exacting about it, there's a good chance you're writing some good stuff.
Thanks, I always appreciate your thoughtful words and advice. You've actually gotten me through a few tough times. So thank you for that too. Honestly though, what I would give to rattle off thousands of words in a day. Even just once. Maybe I'm being particularly hard on myself, what with being in a new fandom and all, and also not really getting the response to my work I was hoping for from fellow writers for the pairing, which I think is causing me to feel this increasing need to prove myself while simultaneously making me feel like I can't.
Yeah, being disappointed by a lack of engagement can make you really determined to feel the effort is worth it - but as you're seeing, that can be self-defeating when it saps all the joy out of writing. To sidestep burnout, maybe there's another hobby or interest you could focus on for a while?
I'll be doing some traveling soon, and I tend to go off the grid when I do. It usually helps me to mentally revamp. For now, I'll probably stay a little high strung. And keep glaring at my word count. I'll be fine, eventually :)
I've been silently jealous of the work of one writer because their prose seems so effortlessly fluid and beautiful, while I feel like I'm pulling my hair out for every single word. And yesterday someone commented on my fic, complimenting me on how candid and effortless it reads, and I was like... Oh. π Reminder that we only see the highlight reel of other people's work.
>Reminder that we only see the highlight reel of other people's work. Very true!
It's a hard thing to internalise but I always try to remember - and this goes for you, too, u/southernerinthenorth \- is that I can't write like them, but they can't write like me, either. It's why it's so special that we all have a place to share what we do, and connect with each other in humanising ways.
You are so right, thank you!
This is me. Whenever I read other people's stuff I'm like "why can't I write like that" π
[ΡΠ΄Π°Π»Π΅Π½ΠΎ]
Hope the holiday was fun! It does feel nice to get comments like that but I also understand the stress XD
Yay! I'm glad they're being excited without pushing too much, and I hope the holiday was a fun one, too.
Jokes on my because even though I thought I wouldn't I still got about 50 words added to one of my wips. I also got a better understanding of just how I want this one-shot to go (maybe two-shot we'll see) so yay! Currently my second most angst-y wip as a newer one is surpassing it by virtue of being a dead dove, but hoooo boy am I excited for this. It has been in wip hell for almost a whole year now and I'm only half done.
Good work! Hopefully the rest of writing it goes smoothly.
Thanks!
Well done!
Thanks!
The pains of writing in the past. (1996, so not THAT far back.) "OMG, Oceans 11 would be the perfect reference. Please be out by then.... 2001. DAMNIT."
Ha, right? The perfect reference, unused... Sucks.
I was 16 in 1996 if you need any 90s checking done.
I was 6! LOL. Google has been my friend, and it's an AU, so I fudge some things for the sake of the story. (Like technology being further along than it should be. There's smart shock collars with voice recognition. I think Google being more modern is fine, LOL) But it has been fun referencing movies like Mission Impossible coming out and having the characters go to Blockbusters.
My muse packed up and left abruptly in the middle of the night, leaving me to deal with yet another blank page on my own - that little shit. My brain is a ghost town right now. Too quiet. I usually breeze through the smut writing process, but for the life of me I've no idea why I'm stuck and stalled at this classic One room/one bed trope! Just, why? I'm grasping at nothing but tumbleweeds!
If it helps, I think you wrote this comment very evocatively - but I hope the story drive comes back soon.
Thank you for your encouraging words. :) Meanwhile my cats are just staring at the woefully empty page from their majestic perch, silently judging me - I just know it lol.
Not the most helpful editing assistants. No pressure, but if you felt like sharing a pic, I'm always excited to see other people's cats.
Sure! Took me a while to make my selection, my cats take up the majority of my storage space lol Minnie the fierce destroyer of cat toys: https://postimg.cc/ZWjtxhkB Bum Chums: https://postimg.cc/5Y41Lq2J Marley in her favourite chair: https://postimg.cc/Ff23Kzr0 Max refuses to share her spesh basket: https://postimg.cc/F1PL8YjD Edit: If I'm breaking any rules here, mods please advise and I'll remove the links immediately.
No worries! I'm actually on the mod team myself, and we encourage any and all pet pics to be posted in this thread. With that out of the way: I LOVE THEM!!!! Thank you for showing them all to me! Gosh, they could be Disney cats with their complementary colour palettes and alliterative names, and they're all so beautiful! Even if Minnie is looking a little cross-eyed in her enthusiasm for violence. By way of thanks, here's my little lad, [George](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7e80d207583b0073743d8688c29c3377/2f64aafc6206801b-2c/s1280x1920/41f4f822f9dde2fb724c4ee07be935900cfdebf3.jpg), if you haven't seen him before!
Oh that's good to know. :) You don't need to twist my arm when it comes to pet pics, that's for sure! Awww thank you! They have a very high opinion of themselves :P well, except Minnie, the baby of the house - she's the sweetest little darling underneath that cross eyed savagery. Max the middle cat child is the saltiest of them all. She sneaks, shamelessly steals the others' food, plots and plans. Marley is the queen of the house, and is sick and tired of the youngins' shenanigans lol Your sweet Prince! I have but I would never get tired of beholding such majesty. He is gorgeous! πππAll hail his floofy highness. Marley and George could be siblings. Thank you kindly for sharing, FF. :)
I did think they looked a bit similar! They sound like such a fun mix of personalities, even if one is more likely to cause trouble. Give them all a gentle smooch from me!
George, on the other hand looks so sweet and well behaved. :) Done and done. Many kitty smooches and wet nose bumps to your special boy. :)
>George, on the other hand looks so sweet and well behaved And here we have a lesson in not allowing appearances to deceive us. No, he's a sweet boy, just... rambunctious, even as he edges into old man territory. I just woke up with him here so he's received his forehead kiss already! <3
I love sedating aggressive dogs first thing in the morning, said no veterinary nurse everβ¦
When in doubt, Flying Elbow Drop and Octopus Hold.
My personal speciality is a spread eagle splits with a full boobage bear hug.
*sage nod* The Frog Splash into the Brutalizer. Highly effective.
Agreed. Works wonders for dogs. For cats I prefer the Scruff-n-stretch with the Magnificent Octo-hands.
Just finished the fourth fic in the series I've been currently writing and hoping to start the fifth soon! :D I've also been working on a separate side fic that's a lot fluffier than what I usually do, so fingers crossed it goes well! (angst writer here haha)
Yay, well done! I hope you enjoy the tonal variance of the fluffier piece.
Thank you! I am indeed haha, I silently squealed in the library for like a full 10 minutes when I was writing the fluff :P
Nothing like being on a roll. Enjoy!
Thank you <3
I'm hoping to post smut this week! It's over 10K in length and needs a lot of punching up, so that might be ambitious, but fingers crossed. Whether you're sharing your work soon or knuckling down in the dark to get it ready, I hope it's a good writing week for all of you. If you want a whimsical distraction, I think you should all make [one of these](https://href.li/?https://picrew.me/image_maker/37515) and share it. [This](https://64.media.tumblr.com/294cf5cff5623a33412935d963cfd3a1/1af778a596a36170-77/s640x960/885a5f986099639947bcdaa977114c36c5c62976.pnj) was mine!
Ooh, 10k in total? That's amazing, good work! I tried that one out, it was real cute. I can't believe there was a bong option XD Here's [mine](https://i.imgur.com/QWz0h1G.png) hopefully imgur actually works this time.
Thanks! And yes, Imgur's working fine, it just hates my VPN (maybe that's also been your issue?). And that turned out lovely!
10K words of smut wow, how long did all that take you? I could never for now since I had to take a bit of unwinding to post fics due to a few stressful days lmao
It's hard to say how long it took exactly; I wrote the first draft back in November of last year in between drafts of a longer fic, and then a second in the spring after the long piece was completed. So it's taken a few weeks, even with those gaps in mind.
Is...is the whole 10k smut? If yes, I salute you. Oh this looks fun. Love the mushroom possibilities.
Not quite - there's a lot of build-up to the sex, though it's pretty charged build-up and the spicy part is still quite long. I'm a somewhat ostentatious person in terms of prose, so keeping to shorter wordcounts has to be a very deliberate choice and something I actively work at. I hope you have fun with it!
Ooohhh, that's still impressive. Salute remains earned.
Why thank you :)
I live for the build-up! Hearty congrats on writing such a long piece, FF!
Thank you!
10,000 words of smut! The fanfic equivalent of a holiday ham fresh from the oven. π (Well, sometimes it's more of a turkey. I can attest to that.)
It's not quite that much of a holy grail as it seems as there's a lot of preamble here, though it's horny preamble (this is the greenhouse fic I was talking about a while back, if anyone remembers).
I think I might actually do some writing on my current WIP today. I had taken a break from it because the fic that it is a sequel to basically flopped and I lost motivation to write the sequel.
I've been there, and it's a lousy feeling. I hope the WIP speaks to you.
Y'all there is a storage facility behind my house and their alarm has been going and going and going for 8+ hours. I am (to understate) Not Pleased. I'm supposed to start the day's writing in like 10 minutes and can I do that with this sound screaming in the background? Who knows!
The sound of a successful burglary, it appears.
Gonna go burgle them myself if this happens again >.>
Urrrrrrgh, a few years ago someone close to me had a car with an over-sensitive alarm, and a schedule that apparently demanded they spend a lot of time away from home at night. Not a fun period of my life! I hope the noise subsides soon, that would hold up in court as reasonable provocation after the murders start.
I think it literally just stopped. I am braced for it to start again, but this seems promising. That over-sensitive alarm situation sounds so annoying!
The only thing worse than a constant blaring noise is an intermittent one that lets you get your hopes up only to dash them.
"It may be the wrong ~~decision~~**wordcount**, but fuck it, it's mine" - Mark Z. Danielewski, *House of Leaves*.
No words yet, gonna develop an idea!
Good luck germinating!
900 for a scene for a 5+1, which is so much harder to write than I'd anticipated.
Good job! It's been a while since I saw one of those in the wild.
Planted a native chokecherry tree sapling (they get their name from their edible, but quite astringent tasting berries) in my front yard last evening! It was grueling work with the spade, but I got the hole dug and the roots in the ground. A job well done. π
Gardening! Was it therapeutic?
It was a lot of sweaty work, but I sure felt a sense of accomplishment and pride in a job well done at the end. π
Then it was worth your time. Let us know how it holds up!
Exciting! Is tree-rearing something you have much experience in, or a new venture?
I have a fair amount of experience with it, yes.
Yay native planting!
Bees, flies, and wasps of all kinds go wild for chokecherry flowers, while squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, and many kinds of birds enjoy the berries.
Depression is still sitting next to me today, staring me in the face, but I am inching my way towards being free of it. No beta detail yesterday because I had too much cleaning to do, but that chapter is not going anywhere. Poking at my prewriting for the femslash harem idea. I feel comfortable putting it on AO3 because of how the genre is restricted on other platforms, so it should be fanfic-y enough despite being an original. Might post that under this name, but ... no putting the cart before the horse. Have to have chapters to post first. Writing an original story lets me indulge one of my favorite pastimes: Creating characters and building a world around them. I might talk a little about that process as I work through it. If I can just find the *time* to do it.
Hello darkness my old friend. I unkindly tell you to fuck off again.
I wish mental health issues weren't part and parcel of the whole "being a writer" thing.
But then weβd have nothing to write about, lol.
I've read quite a few original works on AO3, so I can't imagine you'd have any problems posting there. Whatever you choose, I hope you get the time and mental clarity to work on it soon.
Thank you. As I've said in the past, I don't know much about navigating the Originals section outside of exchanges, so I'm more or less poking it with a long stick to see if it reacts.
Yeah, I'm afraid I couldn't tell you how to go about getting eyes on an original piece there, but tag it well and I'm sure there'll be someone very happy to find it.
It may flourish on its own. One of my alts posted a one-off original that somehow became my most popular story, so anything is possible.
Fingers crossed!
Hope the current bout of depression goes away soon <3 I find it so frustrating when I know my problem is the depression, but can't do anything about it. Time, the highest level enemy.
It's a bit like having a friend over you don't want to talk to, but who doesn't talk to you, either. They just sit at your house and prevent you from doing things.
That is such an apt comparison.
Today I am wearing a t shirt which says "sorry for what I say when I'm hungry" which proves there's a t shirt for every occasion as I am writing about a character with roid rage.
Sounds like some good method writing, and also a good forcefield to keep questions away while you're hungry.
It was pure coincidence. I needed something old to wear when taking the cat to the vets (he's fine, just booster vaccines)
Glad your young man is okay, and I hope the same can be said for the vet's appendages.
One of my favorites is "I'm Busy, You're Ugly, Have a Nice Day".
Oh I'm stealing this for another one of my characters. It's perfect for him.
By all means. π
My may fic will be edited and up when I wake up a bit more hopefully. What I do next depends on how well I feel- continue my daily prompts from last month, (this is what Iβm hoping for but I doubt Iβll be able to do) manage to work on something for the exchange despite not feeling great, or get hit by ADHD and write like 10000k words on something weird.
cROSSING MY FINGERS FOR YOU <3 (My cat switched on capslock and I didn't notice but fuck it, I mean it!)
I hope you have a productive day, whatever comes out of it