faerie_childe

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

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Over the last week...

Posted and commented on bnha_fans.

Commented on vkotd.

Commented on art.

Voted for the next book in queerbookclub.

Posted on 3weeks4dreamwidth to promote the Themed Rec Fest we're hosting on bnha_fans for the event.

...Promoted 3weeks4dreamwidth and DOING IT AGAIN NOW!!! XD Join the comm, participate in events, create stuff you keep only on Dreamwidth for 3 weeks, have fun! :D

In theory, I was planning to start on the structural edits tomorrow; in practice I feel like I'm being clever "cheating" by starting today. No, I have no external deadline. This is just My Brain vs My Brain and winning 😎 (maybe???), lol.

The feeling most at the surface at the moment seems to be a kind of terror, which obviously is not nice to feel but I'm also fascinated by it. Why do I feel like this? This is the first round of editing. I'll have at least the prose edits later to refine stuff, and proofreading, and then whatever changes happen after beta-reader feedback. That means while there's a ton of work immediately ahead, there's also not as much pressure around "MUST GET EVERYTHING RIGHT LAST CHANCE!!!" Yeah there's a lot to do, but I've been working on the Cursed With for nearly 3 years. I know I can put in the work. I'm using a new method of editing based on that workshop, but normally I'm excited to try new things, especially related to something I know I have difficulties with (clearly my way of doing structural editing for the witch wasn't good enough, considering how much structural rework I had to do again after beta-reader feedback). Is this overwhelm? Is this because, while I was proofreading the witch and noticing different ways subplots or other arcs could have been worked, I kept thinking "Well, at least I'll do it better for the Soul Thief!" and now I feel some kind of pressure around it?

I noticed before that when I transition between projects, there's always a few days feeling out of balance, paddling frantically without finding my footing. Sometimes it's because I'm doing something new, like figuring out how to handle beta-reader feedback when there is a ton of it and some of it requires massive rework. But even when I know how to do something, like the proofreading of the witch earlier this month, there's still a similar adaptation period, even knowing what I wanted to do (use text-to-speech) and having previous experience doing it.

It's interesting to reread that post about implementing feedback because I suspect I wrote the post with the same kind of feeling I'm swimming against today. So I must have started writing the post, and then I made a list of what I intended to do. And today I want to break things down like that as well. There's so much to do, and the very first chapter in particular needs a ton of changes.

( The Plan! )

Okay, self. You got this. And look: there's still a bit of "oh-no-this-is-new-i-don't-know-how-to-do-this" dread, but nothing terror-like anymore. There's a plan! You follow the plan. And if it doesn't work, then you learn something from it and make a new plan.

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

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Over the last week...

Commented on anime_manga.

Commented on bnha_fans.

Commented on common_nature.

I just finished proofreading the latest draft that has aaaaall the changes that came from beta-reader feedback *stares into void* As usual, this is the only step of my process in which my word count gets smaller, although not that much (just by 1%!). Final (#2) draft stands at 58k words.

Unfortunately I've also reached the stage where I hate everything because clearly I'm a garbage person who can only write garbage stories etc etc etc *sigh* I wish that wasn't part of the process. Every time I finish reading a book and the author in the acknowledgements goes "Thanks to my spouse for talking me off the ledge whenever I started hating this story/stopped believing in it/etc" I grumble "WHERE IS MY SPOUSE!!!" lol. I'm going to wait a couple of weeks for the yucky feelings to scatter before contacting the kind souls who volunteered to beta-read. I was thinking of giving folks 5 weeks to beta again? I realise this might be smack-bang in the middle of end of academic year shenanigans for students and teachers though, so I'll have to ask and see if I should wait to align the timeline... I would prefer that over getting the feedback at random times over many months if possible, because I know my brain is going to start working on stuff as soon as the feedback comes in.

I also have a pretty graph!


I'm never tracking daily again!! Lol. I guess it's not really actionable. It reflects the rest of my life more than the writing. "Here I wasn't home... here I was sick... here something stressful was happening..." I like the idea of weekly tracking more, just like I like yearly challenges like getyourwordsout more than once-off events like NaNoWriMo: even if it never feels like I'm doing enough, it's good to see that consistency even small pays off over time. Daily tracking is never consistent!!

You can also see how I went crazy last weekend, like "Fuck the plaaaaan I'm finishing THIS WEEKEND even if it KILLS ME LEROYYYYYY JENKIIIINS" and then it killed me and I wasn't anywhere near finished, but really burnt out instead. I did One Last Push this morning because the end felt so within sight. But the bad feels are still here :C And I had to change the graph to add more days and I'll have to write myself a tutorial about that because I fuck things up every time I try to tweak something.

What comes next? Well, for the witch, contacting beta-readers, getting feedback, praying there are no more structural issues lurking (but if there are, so be it), let the feedback simmer. Starting in a couple of weeks.

More immediately, I'm taking a few days' breather then I'm going to start on the Soul Thief structural edits. I have the detailed plan, what needs to change, what needs to go, 15 new scenes to write for all the missing bits... I'm guessing it'll take a few months. I'm looking forward to it, though, and hopeful I'm truly solving the major problems early before any beta-reader takes a look!

I find it interesting, carrying the hopelessness of the Cursed Witch together with the joy/excitement/hope about the Soul Thief. Obviously, that one is incomplete so it still could be anything. This is one of the reasons I always want to find ways to write more. It's not just because "moar words moar better rawwwr", but if I have other projects in various stages to immediately lose myself into, I don't dwell as much on the bad, nor feel it as much. In 2020 and 2021, for Several Reasons (tm) I was writing about 20k words/month, and I think writing so much really fed into itself well: like, sure, damn, that story didn't work out the way I hoped it would. But rather than think "I am This is crap" I could simply believe that the next story would be better, because I'd already started it, and if nothing else I wouldn't repeat the exact same mistake(s) with it.