terabient

★ I achieved my goal of finishing A Thing and posting it by the end of October. I had the fic drafted earlier in the month but editing and managing my own anxiety around both writing and sharing it took up, well, the rest of October, lol. But at least i got over it within my self-imposed deadline. Two years ago, I don't think I'd have done that.

★ I have been thinking about where want to spend my internet time this month. I was pretty happy at the beginning of October when I was focused on meeting word count goals and occasionally screaming half-formed opinions into the unseen void that is this blog. I dropped off in the second half of October, and while a lot of that was due to a real-life work emergency, some of it was also due to ...becoming numb to the way fandom activity occurs on Twitter. There is just so much being shoved into your eyeballs at all times that at a certain point you just look at stuff without it making any sort of impact on you. Trying to curate your feed feels like a lost cause, i'm never remotely happy with the results. it's just become easier to not look at my feed at all then try to work it into something i like seeing again.

So I want to use the time and energy i was spending on Twitter shitposts on something actually enjoyable...i just don't know what that entails, yet. it might mean more fandom oriented posts here, it might be trying to make a home over on pillowfort (...eh) it might mean trying to use discord as a community tool instead of ignoring it. i dunno.

★ I committed to finishing a rough draft for at least one more fic and getting through an outline for another at writethisfanfic. I've never used an outline for fic before, but some of the ideas i'm working out are too complicated for me to just freeform through, especially as I've started to write scenes out-of-sequence. I don't think I'll have anything in a finished, post-worthy state at the end of the month but getting one fic to rough draft status would be great.

★ Today at school one of the speech therapists said an "unidentified child" had come to the school and needed specialist testing to determine their ability level. I'm guessing she means a parent who didn't do the proper enrollment process and just showed up at school with their kiddo, but the way she was talking it almost sounded like an unknown child had just wandered in, looking for a classroom...I do hope the kiddo ends up where they need to be. It's possible they'll be in our class tomorrow since we have the best (but still short-handed) staff - student ratio at the moment.

★ Kinktober update: Hit 5000 words which is not exactly a lot for two weeks of writing, BUT considering how the longest thing i've ever written was just shy of 10,000 words and that took, i think, almost a month? It's pretty good for me. I feel decent about hitting my very modest goal of "finish and post something...anything...in the month of October." 😁

And while I won't be able to post something every single day, I think it's possible to have enough to post something each week? Maybe not the first week, but everything after that? I'll have to be more disciplined with the way I use my free time next week, and i don't have much discipline or free time.

★ I played a very charming, in-browser puzzle game, Spell Blocks. It's based on an entry for METEOR's My Famicase art show, where people submit their concepts for Famicom game cases. I have a deep fondness for these kinds of puzzle games, and I enjoyed how tricky it can be to build the 4-block spells. Its become a go-to activity if I'm feeling moody and need to do something fun for a few minutes to mentally reset.

In 4 days i've written...about 1500 words... orz

That's still better than 0 words in 2 years, so I'm not beating myself up over it...yet. :p

I've never been a disciplined writer--even when writing for exchanges or challenges I spent most of my time procrastinating and the last few days trying to cobble together something respectable. So trying to write a little bit every day is...different. Yesterday I managed to write more than the first 3 days combined--hopefully that's not an outlier but a sign that the daily grind approach is having a positive effect.

I'm also writing out of chronological order; some years ago, I read some advice along the lines of "start by writing the scenes that are most vivid in your mind, and go on from there" which has always sounded appealing to me. I think one reason yesterday was more productive than earlier was brought about by hopping to something i felt more interested in...I do worry about my ability to stitch these scenes together later on, though. I normally deal with scene transitions by uh, not writing long enough things to require them. x_x

I wouldn't say it's been a FUN few days, but it has felt cathartic which is also good

Saw this meme over on Pillowfort and decided to fill it out. Lately I've been stuck in a rut where I want to write but don't actually DO it; I'm trying to self-motivate by reminding myself that writing is, in fact, a thing i'm capable of.

1) How many works do you have on AO3?
After all these years....16, orz

2) What's your total AO3 word count?
35,018

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?
On AO3? Blazblue, Ninja Gaiden/Dead or Alive, Resonance of Fate, Ghost in the Shell, Left 4 Dead, Persona 4/Q, Soulcalibur, and Star Wars; eight total. There's a lot of drabble-length and microfic floating around livejournal/dreamwidth and old kink memes but i'm too lazy to try rounding them up at this point.


4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?
Accidental Bliss (Persona Q, P4 Protag/P3 Protag)
these vices are my service (Persona 4, Adachi/Yu)
Merger (Ghost in the Shell, Hacker/Makoto, NON-CON)
Stain Your Hands With My Blood (Soulcalibur, Raphael/Siegfried)
Play the Angel (Blazblue, Tsubaki/Noel)

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?
I am horribly inconsistent about replying--honestly, i'm horribly inconsistent about even *reading* comments in the first place, mostly due to anxiety. I've been trying to chip away at this particular habit but there's still like, a 50% chance I will deal with a comment by pretending it doesn't exist.

6) What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?
i think all but 3 of my fics are angsty so not sure what to pick....

8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you've written?
no

9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?
no, but i did have one reader complain about a lack of pussy eating in a femslash fic which honestly is a valid complaint.

10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?
yes, the...uh...uncomfortable kind?

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?
no

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?
no. i did have someone draw a whole comic from one of my first fics (back when fanfiction.net was the only major fic archive) which is....not at all the same, but pretty neat, right?

13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?
no

14) What's your all time favorite ship?
I keep going back to Raphael/Siegfried so i guess this rarepair that pretty much only i write is The One

15) What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?
all of my WIPs are things i no longer want to finish due to lost interest. That's kinda why they're WIPs in the first place (the 2nd place is that most of what i write is microfic one-shots). WHOOPS

16) What are your writing strengths?
I think i'm pretty decent at conveying internal conflicts/mixed emotions and describing tactile sensations.

17) What are your writing weaknesses?
the actual act of sitting down and putting words down orz

18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
I think it's difficult to do well, and very easy to fuck up and break immersion, so I avoid it. If the character in question has a habit of using more than one language in their canon dialogue I use that as a guide, but I think adding phrases that a multilingual character *doesn't* use in canon is ahh...not a great idea?

19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?
Skies of Arcadia, back when I was still in high school. I used to ask my friends to read/review it at lunch lol :')

20) What's your favorite fic you've written?
I'm actually pretty happy with how Accidental Bliss turned out. Like, I wish I could write more unabashedly PWP fic lol. I'm usually dissatisfied with my """serious""" fic after writing it.

★ I finished up a bunch of paperwork for job related stuff today, then started studying for my phlebotomy class tomorrow...and ended up falling asleep for two hours W H O O P S. I got a call from the pharmacy for a refilled prescription during that time frame as well, so I started errands at, oh, 8:30 this evening. I also managed to get all the way to the post office before realizing I'd left the mail at home, so I had to drive back home then back to the post office. Also also, some of the main roads were washed out from the melting snowbanks and rain today, so I had to take several detours each way.

Then, because I'm a basic bitch at heart, I stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts to get a pumpkin spice coffee but they had closed, like, 10 minutes before I got there. I probably should have gone straight home after that, but I felt like I had to get SOMETHING I wanted but didn't really need tonight so I drove 5 miles down the road to a different Dunkin' Donuts that I knew would be open because I used to stop by there when I had an overnight shift in the area. Then it took 15 minutes to get home because of the aforementioned water issue. I might not be making the best life decisions right now...but at least the coffee was nice and I had a lot of it.

★ Game stuff: I did part of the tutorial in Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, and even though it uses a 4 button layout with only two of those buttons meant for attacking (the other two are dedicated to tag-related stuff) I still found it difficult to grasp beyond, like, the basics of autocombo and dedicated instant overhead moves. ~_~

I don't expect much from the story and nothing in the prologue suggests that I was wrong in this assumption, but I am glad to hear the dub voices for Blazblue again. I disliked Centralfiction's story and I think some of that is because I had to read its' vast amounts of stupid exposition instead of listening to it. Like it's a bit easier to tolerate walls of boring text when someone is passionately trying to sell it to you. And I've always preferred Noel's dub voice.

I played a few rounds of Overwatch and Soulcalibur VI. Nothing particularly exciting happened in Overwatch although I had a few games where dudes were mildly toxic about me picking Ashe >:| Also I headshot a blinking Tracer!!!, so now I have to quit Overwatch forever because I'm sure that will be my peak.

I was just grinding out the "play x number of matches online" type achievements in SCVI and ended up with an exactly 50% winrate, a rank up and a ragequit. Yay? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

★ I've been...thinking about writing fic lately. Which doesn't amount to much, I suppose, but given that I haven't considered fic for months (years?) until Kinktober this year, it's a significant change for *me,* lol. It mostly boils down to no one writing the porn I want to read but tbh that's always been my single greatest writing motivator.

wrt writing explicit material, I remember reading a tweet somewhere that suggested starting with the sex scene first which sounds like maybe a good idea? I often give up writing a thing because I lose motivation to get to 'the good part' which is always the strongest scene in my mind when I'm starting...so maybe starting at the part that is most interesting gives enough motivation to slog through the rest of the fic. Maybe something to try for next month.

surfacing from the depths to ask a question:

there's an inactive fic challenge community that i want to post to--like, i finished the community challenge (well, one of them) and i could post the fic whenever, but since there are no mods checking claim requests i can't have my request approved.

BUT i do have posting access to the community, so i technically don't need mod approval to post the finished fic. is...is that okay, or should i not post to the community and just keep it to my personal accounts? or should i try getting in touch with the mods...? i dunno.

it's not like it's especially scintillating fic that MUST BE SHARED, i just want to get back in the habit of posting stuff i've written publicly, even it's kinda meh

( Spoilers for TWD: Judge, Jury, Executioner )

Totally unrelated: This month I signed up for writethisfanfic - basically it's a motivation comm. where you can get some outside help for reaching fanfic goals, and I have two I want to finish for bloodyvalentine by the end of the month. It has been going pretty well, all things considered. I haven't been averaging a lot of words, but I've managed to finish the first draft for one fic (still needs a TON of editing, though) and started on the second today. And I haven't missed a day, which is HUUUUUGE for me. :o I don't know if I can keep it up for the whole month, but honestly, just being able to work on fic for a whole week is kind of a big deal for me. XD

When you are writing, do you prefer to use a pen or a computer?

I am absolutely in love with pen-and-paper writing, and always will be. I have 3 notebooks I currently use for writing - a personal journal I got from my grandmother and two that I use for writing fiction and occasionally blog posts when I know I won't have internet or computer access for some time.

I almost always end up writing my first drafts (and sometimes second and third) on paper. I'm not sure if students are taught how to write in a way that makes drafts and corrections easier anymore, now that word processors are so ubiquitous, but I was taught to skip every other line when writing so that there would be plenty of free space for corrections or notes. So, I end up going through a lot of pages even for relatively short pieces. I feel a little guilty about using up so much paper, though I do make an effort to buy notebooks made out of recycled product whenever possible.

On that note...in college, somebody gave me a banana leaf & bamboo paper notebook...it looked awesome, but actually writing on it was rather problematic. After filling it up I didn't feel the need to replace it.

I didn't get a computer for personal use until college, and I think that might have had an impact on how I approach composition today. I have the worst time trying to write initial drafts on the computer - I need a written copy to work off of. I also find something really intimidating about a big empty screen or entry box, while a blank piece of paper just seems to invite me to fill it up with words. Granted, those words and sentences are often borderline incoherent, but then, that's how most initial drafts turn out, right? :p

The other perk I find with pen-and-paper is the lack of internet and other computer related distractions. I know there are lots of programs out there now for writers to block internet access while writing, and programs that restrict a person's ability to access non-writing related programs until they hit a certain quota. When I write on paper, I have fewer problems resisting distractions, since they aren't as easily accessible.

That being said, I do find I become more drowsy while writing on paper...usually because I am in a very comfortable chair, couch or bed while doing so. Heh.

That's all for today~ I think tomorrow I'm going to dork out hardcore and post a lot of video game related stuff which I HOPE will be a little more interesting than reading about power outages and pens & notebooks. :p

The good news about my hardmode fic: I'm well over the 10,000 word requirement. Woo!

The bad news: it's nowhere NEAR finished. PROBABLY I shouldn't have planned two major plotlines, each one involving four major characters, with one taking place in a fictional city in a country I've never been in and have had to research extensively just so I don't fall flat on my face and portray it in an embarrassing and offensively stereotypical way.

I made the decision to work on each plotline separately for the most part, which was maybe not the best idea? At this point, I'm almost finished with what I've affectionately dubbed the 'Sausage and Monster Fest' plot, while the plotline that has all the ladies and city-wide gunfights and zombies and quarantines has just a few scattered scenes here and there. So there's a lot of material, but it's completely incoherent as a whole. OH DEAR.

If push comes to shove, I mightmightmight be able to clear out the super-fun, super-not-worked on plotline out and submit the (mostly) finished plot by the deadline. But naturally that would suck for a few reasons. It's not like you can completely remove a major plotline without creating some plot holes and the nagging sense that somewhere, but definitely not in story the reader is reading, a different, totally rockin' story is happening.

Plus, as one may have already deduced, Sausage and Monster Fest plot has a lot of dudes in it. And monsters. And bad puns, but mostly dudes, while Super-Fun plot is full of girls with guns kicking ass and taking names and also delivering some moral platitudes about the largely non-existent issue of biological weapon development. The idea of dropping a female-centric plot for a guys beatin' up baddies story is something I really don't want to do. At the same time, I'd feel bad about signing up for a big bang and not being able to finish the first part of the challenge, namely writing and sending in a fic for beta reading.

I signed up for big bangs this year to see if I could actually produce a whole lot of creative writing by a deadline and to see what working with a beta reader is like. Well, the potential for getting custom-made art and/or a fanmix is nice too. But mostly I was curious about the beta reading aspect because I've never used one and I'm too shy to go about finding one myself. ^^;

Anyway, I don't know what I'll end up doing. My gut feeling is to drop from the challenge and work on the fic on my own time so I'll be able to write about everything I wanted to, and try again next year, but I dunno. Any suggestions, flist?

To wrap things up, here's a writing-ish meme that's been making the rounds for awhile. It's pretty relevant to my situation at the moment, hahahaha

Simply put, make a list of all file names for any WIPs you have on your computer.

( The list )

If my terribly boring filenames pique your interest, you can ask for a summary or excerpt or whatever you want about them in the comments~

so i signed up for kink_bingo this year because i'm a nerd and a pervert oh noes

( my card )

anyway if you are interested the kink bingo sign-ups are open until August so if you are curious you can get your VERY OWN CARD and write kinky fic for a whole year! (or not) you don't need a dreamwidth account to get a card but you will if you want to post whatever you make to the community. i have a bunch of invite codes if obtaining one is an issue.

(PS if you have suggestions as to what fandoms/pairings might work with some of these kinks let me know so we can squeal like a bunch of 14 year fangullsgirls over 'object penetration' or smth ;)