vomiting words upon the page
that feeling when you are 85,000 words deep in your long-dormant fanfiction novel featuring historical french men having a sappy romantic love affair, and have separate open research threads on ‘criminal trials in the 1830s’ and ‘oil painting’ because for some reason both these topics have come up in the same chapter.
this probably begs several questions--
to the question of: are you posting any of this novel somewhere on the internet, the answer is no, currently.
the long answer is, I am in the initial stage which I am calling “wordvomiting” which is exactly what it sounds like: I have a google doc where I simply spew out all the ideas, separate them into chapters, and copy/paste them around until they are in chronological order, and when I have run out of chapters to vomit, then I can see what of them is useful. The thing is, the farthest I have ever gotten into any written work in the past is around 15k-20k, and almost all of my long-format works got abandoned due to loss of attention span and forgetting how I meant to go on/finish them. So I will admit feeling rather daunted by the knowledge that this will certainly exceed 100,000 words before I am done word vomiting, and possibly reach 150,000, because I know right now for sure of about 25,000-30,000 words I still haven’t been able to purge out of my mental record, and it might be a whole lot more than that as I remember and recall bits that are in the shadowy corners of my twisted mind.
to the question of: why are you writing it to begin with, the answer is:
This is simply the result of a flight of fancy where I thought it might be nice to actually write down the whole of my headcanon, the whole of the chronology of my french boys in love and how things happened and in what order, which has subtly changed and evolved over the years because a) I came up with new ideas I liked better and b) I forgot minor details since they have never been written down before. So, genius, write them down, I said to myself, and then I said back to myself, fine, I’m going to write out my headcanon at last, and, uh, 85,000 words and 24 chapters in we have some kind of monstrosity that is currently half-finished.
to the question of: why do you care so much about researching little details that only come up in, like, three paragraphs of an apparently-300-page novel, that you may never even allow to see the light of day?
because, with only a few exceptions, flagrant historical inaccuracy bothers me; if I know I have entirely fabricated something in defiance of historical record, I feel acutely uncomfortable. I am legitimately soothed by the knowledge that if my work isn’t completely historically accurate, it could at least be plausible, to the depths I am capable of researching, at least. And there is literally no reason whatsoever why I cannot type the subject in question into a google search before writing my chapter about said subject; the worst that can happen is I find nothing that immediately answers my question without having to consult a book from 1996 that has no English translation when my French reading comprehension is rather woeful. So yes, eventually I will as a last resort just make it up entirely, but if I’m going to make it up, I’m going to try to make it plausible based on the things I was able to find out. There are times when I can ignore the question of accuracy/plausibility, but on the whole I just like doing things right whenever I can, to me it makes the finished project feel more rewarding.
to the question of: what is your writing style anyway, god damn?
sorry, I am a stuffy pedant. a great bore with a stick up my arse--this isn’t just a description of one of my boys, it works for me too, and I am an especially doe-eyed Romantic idiot who likes the writing style of the 19th century far more than the slangy casualness of modern day, so it’s pretty much infiltrated my own personal style. I will not say, it is an exact representation, but I do abuse semicolons flagrantly and delight in flowery language. I am entirely willing to accept criticism of confusingly-worded phrases or poor sentence structures however.
to the question of: are you just writing gratuitous Enjolras/Grantaire porn again and hiding it behind a veneer of respectable research and polished prose?
yes. they enjoy the sex a great deal, I deny them nothing, so they get to live together and do a lot of it, while I get to satisfy my own pleasures of researching little details and crafting subtle jokes and witty turns of phrase and deciding which of the thousand stupid ways to say I love you to write about next.
in conclusion: hi tumblr. i do not say i’m back. but i needed somewhere to chronicle my current insanity.
i began this project on april 1, 2023. as of April 20th i have 84,529 words and 169 pages.
i meant wordvomit, because sometimes it really does feel like uncontrollably spewing onto the page.
i have neglected a lot of sleep, work, chores, interpersonal relationships, and personal care to be doing this, but my friends have been cheering me on and encouraging me to keep going, if not actually share it, so who knows what may come.
if i eventually reach a point where i am not too self-conscious and afraid of negative feedback i will post it, and for that purpose i recently reactivated my AO3 account (which has the only other work I have any pride in posted now, sur les débris fumeux des stupides orgies, which ironically can be considered, sort of, as a prologue in some respects, as it was merely a glimpse into my voluminous headcanon now being splattered into this novel.)
