Ren the Ghost

There will be no highadrenalineexchange on my part this year. I've done the math, and I simply do not have enough words in the bank for it.

The benefit of knowing exactly how many words I'll write every week this month is that I know pretty exactly how much I'll end up writing—if I succeed, that is—in the whole of May. I get it to 48k words. That's a lot!

But.

I just wrote a 10k ogfic (that is never going to see the light of day) in a single week. I started it and completed it in a single week. 10k words. I just proved to myself that I can in fact write a 10k fic in a single week—which was 95% of my motivation to do highadrenalineexchange.

So that's 10k used already. I want to write 25k words on my original novel this month (that way it'll reach 75k words this month, which sounds very awesome). That's 35k words used/reserved. Plus I need 1k each for bitesizedfandomsex and hurtcomfortex and 5k words for fandom5k which I did not end up pulling out of. That's 42k words.

48-42=6

The math does not add up.

Admittedly the deadline for highadrenalineexchange is Jun 2, so I could write 6k words before that and the rest in Junw. Admittedly also the deadline for fandom5k is even after that, and I could write that entirely in June, freeing up enough words to write highadrenalineexchange entirely in May.

However both of those options means that basically all words in the bank will be reserved for something or other, and I don't want that. I don't like the idea of having no room for spontaneity; simply sitting down and spamming out a 2k fic on the spot because I felt like it and it brought me joy. I don't want all my words to be reserved for Official Projects with Deadlines or whatnot, or be used for somebody else. I want something left for myself, like how I just wrote that ogfic and had a blast and it was just for me.

Also, I don't like those margins of errors. Considering how tough I've found bitesizedfandomsex (let's just say defaulting is on the table) and hurtcomfortex (which I have not started on) so far, it's entirely possible I'll just go for the minimum wordcount requirement on both, but what if they end up being longer? I want some margin for a fic growing legs and running away from me, you know.

And again, most of my motivation for highadrenalineexchange was just... is this something I can do? It was the idea of challenging myself and going for something I've never managed to do before.

And I just did it.

Challenge won.

So... yeah, right now it feels like most of my enthusiasm for highadrenalineexchange is gone.

• Nominations have now closed for candyheartsex and sign-ups open on Jan 1. I am Excited.


• There's one month left on this round of smallfandomfest; if you haven't, I recommend checking out the list of prompts. There are over 6k to browse, so chances are you might find something interesting!


• Pillowfort met their USD 25000 fundraising goal, thereby securing about 6 months of funding!


• duckprintspress's kickstarter for their aetherpunk anthology has begun!


• Bookdun is a discord server that hosts a six-month writing challenge, the new one starting on Jan 1. While it's on discord, it's fine to just pop in for the progress updates and ignore the rest.


• via vriddy, merlin_bbc is a new comm for Merlin the BBC show. They've got a friending meme going right now.


• snowflake_challenge will be starting soon and I am Looking. I've never done it before but I'm (hopefully) gonna give it a try.


• The year-long writing challenges getyourwordsout and inkingitout are both open for signups for 2024 right now.


• fandomtrees are inching ever closer to the deadline, and there are still a lot of trees that need gifts. Check out the master spreadsheet here.


• amperslashexchange and yuletide_admin both finished recently! Moar fics! :D


• via dw_community_promo, dchellparty is a new DC Comics prompt meme.

So I hate editing. This, I've learned, is a fact.

I finished the 1st draft of AGSH (my winning NaNo project last year) in the start of Feb. I felt good about it! It's a cool world with cool characters and I adore... a lot about it. And that pause there is kind of just the tip of the iceberg. Because once I finished it I set it aside; I wrote the whole thing in 4 months, my previous record was about 15 months, and the project before that about 4 years. So 4 months? Amazing!!

But I set it aside, finished the outline for my current project (which was also my Camp NaNo project) referred to here as TGT. Kind of flunked out of March; I only wrote 5k on TGT in March, and was only starting to get my groove back at the end of the month. I updated a fanfic, started a new one, officially abandoned an old one -- the usual.

It's now been about 2 months since I finished AGSH and I just don't wanna touch it.

I hate editing.

It's not that editing and revisions needed are too daunting a task; it's the process itself I hate. It's a chore; annoying, dull, and entirely critical of my own writing in a way that also entirely steals the joy of writing something. I can't imagine a life not writing. It's joyful, it's curiosity, it's coping with shitty things. Writing is fun! I wanna do it forever!

I'm not actually sure I can properly articulate my problem with revising and editing. It's not fun, I dread it with every bone in my body, and the idea of a draft going through multiple rounds of edit like everybody says a draft need? Nauseating. I can't do that. That's the thought that's paralyzing--the idea that it needs to be done over and over and over again.

But the paralyzation can be worked past. It can be ignored. It's only an obstacle if I let it, right? It's a drag, but I could do it. That's not what's stopping me in my place.

It's the fact that, once I get some distance from a project I kind of... don't like it. It's not the writing that bothers me, really, or that I think I wrote it badly and it doesn't work right or something. I just lose interest in it. There are a thousand other stories in my brain clamoring to get written down, and my brain has designated that draft as 'complete' and the idea of returning to it, even if a I have a solid idea of what should added, removed, changed, etc. is kind of incomprehensible.

I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well, or if I'm actually getting across what I mean. But with AGSH, it's a profound unwillingness to work on it. It's not the idea of editing and revising that freezes me, it's the fact that I just don't want to touch it. And maybe that'll change! That would be great! But I'm not hanging all my hopes on that!

And that brings me to this; somebody I follow on Mastodon posted a link to this blog post about how to write a clean (basically a publishable) 'first' draft without using subsequent editing aside from proofreading.

That sounded really interesting, because my brain designates things as 'done' and then won't get close to them again, so not needing to fix things after? Sign me the fuck up.

So I bought the author's Writing Into The Dark book which touches some on the whole cycling method but doesn't go into any details, and the good feeling continued. Also, I saw a comment somewhere where somebody referred to it as 'looping' instead of cycling and honestly, that sounds cooler so I'm just gonna call it that now.

The distinction with is that the editing, revising etc. all occurs while writing that first draft in a lot of series of loops. It's not that the draft is an agonizing mess and you refuse to keep working on it, it's that you do that additional work without every saying 'stop, this is done now' until it actually is all done.

I have started a new short story (well, it's at 4k already and not even half-way done so it probably won't be that short, LOL) specifically to try out this method of writing. Gone through some editing loops already of the earlier parts and so far... it was pretty painless. It didn't feel anything like editing a completed 1st draft does for me. Both in the comments of the post and in the book I read, the author places a lot of emphasis on creative vs critical voice when writing, and evidence so far points to it helping.

That said, I'm not gonna make any judgments on whether this works for me or not until I actually finish this short story. And probably another one for more data. I want concrete evidence before I turn over my entire writing process, LMAO.

But even if it doesn't work for me at all, if the progress right now is just beginner's luck, all writing practice is valuable and if nothing else, I might figure out how to make editing bearable.

So I like it so far.

Today, I started outlining my Fae X Troll (gay) romance novel (tentatively) titled SUNSETS & MIDNIGHT LIGHTS. I'm only on chapter 2 of the outline, but I am already liking this. I also made a cover for the novel because... well, I just do that when I start working on a new project. It's fun! (That's why I had to come up with a title, and that one was the first one I liked.)

It's a simple love story, really. The troll is a woodcarver, and the fae is a medicine peddler, and so far I have done negative zero worldbuilding. It'll come eventually.

I'm also making a point for the fae to be nobody important, because to be honest I'm a little tired of that. There's nothing wrong with fae kings and assassins, I'm just not interested in writing that or similar things because, well, it already exists. A lot.

I'm a lot more interested in the little things. In how day-to-day life for fae and trolls and other things look. What a marketplace would look like. In social norms of such things, and how it would crash between species. I don't care about the politics (though I do care about the laws because laws are fun) and I don't want to tell another story about a fae prince saving his kingdom or something.

I'd like to read a gentle, kind story where the fae might be a little monstrous and dangerous, but it's not a problem to be fixed, or seen as something odd. It's not a result of a tragic background. They're fae. You can't judge them by human (or troll) standards.

So this is a simple story, with a simple (and happy) ending.

...Low-angst, low stakes, little drama and with absolutely no-one saving anyone. It's just a troll and fae falling in love, and I think that's really all it needs to be.