Musings of a Writer

A collection of writing stuff of my own make or someone else's. Stuff that makes me smile

[write-on-world]

[musingsofawriter]

i am still alive i promise i just started nanowrimo and antidepressants so this is really an adventure

[musingsofawriter]

Yes I'm still alive apologies for letting you believe otherwise. Writing has stalled because I am now an employed human. Also started journaling again??? Somehow??

[write-on-world]

"Every writer's first shot at a story they mean to publish takes time. I started my first when I 16. Didn't publish it until I was 22. Not because of multiple revisions, you understand - though that did play a part. What really stopped me was that I was frightened of rejection. I was terrified that no one would like it. It's just a matter of summoning the courage to go forward because you have to realize that for every person out there who may dislike your work, there are 10 more people who might say that you're their new favorite author."

- J. Arac

[musingsofawriter]

Why yes, I am listening to Christmas music in August.

I'm writing a Christmas scene right now and needed mood music leave me be.

[musingsofawriter]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Look I did the thing, Part 2 in progress

[moments--and--memories]

[silkandfirewordsmith73-deactiva]

My favorite place! Love the smell of books!

[musingsofawriter]

I don't usually post fandom stuff on here, but it's relevant to my blog rn.

I will give Crosshair the happy ending he deserved myself. Screw you Dave, I do what I want. Crosshair and really the entire Batch deserved better and I will protect all my boys.

Hunter and the crew were right, but they were also wrong. Crosshair was also right, but he was also wrong. Omega is the only one with any emotional intelligence here and must be protected.

I'm off to write a fix-it now. wish me luck

[blackwoolncrown]

pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing and making art got turned into skills  instead of being seen as behaviors

so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives’.

[musingsofawriter]

But nobody said that you have to be good at those things in order to do them. I'm a writer, but I'm not published. I'm a charcoal artist, but most of my art looks like a five-year-old did it. I'm a runner, but I've never competed, and probably never will. I sing in the shower, but I'm not about to win a grammy. I dance while I wait for my coffee to brew, but nine times out of ten I end up banging my hand or leg on the wall and get to laugh about it.

Do the things you love. It doesn't have to matter that you're good at it or not.

[musingsofawriter]

Diary - July 27

Good morning. I am once again neglecting my medication and my creative juices are suffering. Don't do that; if your doctor tells you to take medication at set times with food, just do it. Don't be like me.

In other news, I'm listening to more podcasts and getting back into reading the news. And, perhaps surprisingly, it's getting my creative juices flowing.

Not because I'm inspired by what I'm reading. No, no, no, of course not.

Because I long to escape from reality, even if I have to do it myself.

My favorite author of all time, the illustrious J.R.R. Tolkien was himself an escapist author. Some have argued that he was the inventor of escapist fantasy, and I'm inclined to agree. I really aspire to be like him in that regard.

Mind you, my writing tends to err on the side of realism rather than escapism. My worldbuilding includes convoluted political plots and details. There's quite a few dark parts I have planned in my novel, and the romance aspects of it get ugly sometimes. This isn't a Beren and Luthien story, but it is about learning about one another and learning to love someone who you never thought you would, something that I think we could do with a little more of in the world, but I digress.

That said, there is one really, really fantastical element to my novel, in all of my stories, really, that I absolutely demand.

A happy ending.

Alys and Brylard, my two protagonists, get their happy ending. Their kingdoms return to peace. They suffer, don't get me wrong. Their relationship is strained and they both suffer tremendous losses. But they get a happy ending, not only because that's what they deserve, but that's because I as the author demand it.

Let me explain.

I write happy endings in approximately 90% of my works. Even in the ones that end in tragedy, there is a bittersweetness to it, a sense that everything will be okay. You know why? That's because that's the story that I need. And quite honestly, that's the story that I think the world needs now.

We don't need grand stories of revolution, or stories of victory over great evil. We see that enough in the real world and we don't pay attention to that either. But happy endings? Now those are rare, both in fiction and in real life.

Maybe I'll do a whole thread on happy endings and why they're important, see how well it does.

So yeah, my head is ten kinds of messed up right now. But 1 Corinthians 13:13 says that faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is love. So even though I'm getting caught up with the world, I still maintain that we don't need reality in our fiction.

[musingsofawriter]

Man I'm bad at this. I can't keep a blog to save my life.

I also can't seem to write consistently to save my life, but that's another topic.

No wait, that's better than what I planned, let's talk about that.

Writing consistently

Is utterly impossible. I'm in the middle of a job hunt and actually have a thriving social life for the first time in my life (which is really really weird), and my creative juices have utterly dried up. I have a bunch of ideas, but no idea on how to execute them.

My Scrivener binder just sits open behind my browser window, taunting me. The cursor blinks menacingly, as if it dares me to just up and close the document. That could also be my anxiety, coffee-fueled brain playing tricks on me again, I don't even know.

I'm seriously thinking about making a document just titled "Write" and it's just random drabbles, poetry, and few-hundred word stories just so I can say I wrote something, anything.

Huh, that's actually not a half-bad idea. I'll keep y'all posted on how well that goes.

[musingsofawriter]

Something I've realized writing what I'm writing now that really isn't that big of a revelation, but it's nice to have the reminder every now and again: kindness is free.

It takes no energy or effort to be kind, honest, love one another. What does take effort is vitriol, sarcasm, lying, and all those other negative things we've come to associate with each other.

Those are things of the world. This is a fallen, cruel world. We know that. But we are not of the world, and this world is passing away. So love one another, educate, and be kind. It's the cheapest thing in the world, and gives more returns than anything else.

[screnwriter-old-deactivated2021]

you guys should finish your wips instead of scrolling through tumblr for hours on end

[screnwriter-old-deactivated2021]

i’m serious, you guys. it’s time to stop procrastinating

let’s make it a deal that each time you see this post on your dash you go write a couple sentences

[screnwriter-old-deactivated2021]

how many people saw this and decided to go against it honestly at this point it’s a bonding experience we’re all a lost cause let’s just create a club and ignore wips together . here’s a cookie 🍪 continue scrolling and have a good day

[musingsofawriter]

I hate how this actually shamed me into going and writing just a little bit

[musingsofawriter]

Diary Entry - July 17

I have written nothing.

Nothing.

Not one word.

Well, scratch that, I wrote about 200 words yesterday for my novel. But that's it. I haven't written anything in about two and a half days.

I don't know if I feel deprived, ashamed, or if I just need to set new reminders on my phone to take my medications. Probably all of the above.

(sigh) Anyways.

I will say, I am continuing to turn my DnD character's backstory into a longform fic. So that's been fun. I can never do anything with it, but it's been fun. Maybe I'll edit it someday and change enough so it can qualify as an original product and publish that instead of my romance novel. I probably won't but who knows?

Btw, if anyone has any tips on how to write a fade-to-black ending for this chapter, please let me know I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

[musingsofawriter]

Fell off the wagon

Well, here we are, almost halfway through Camp NaNoWriMo. I'm sitting at roughly 9.8k words, nowhere near where I should be today (roughly 41k).

So, what happened? Well, in short, life.

I had several friend gatherings, during which I didn't write at all. I started writing a fanfic for my and my friends' Dungeons and Dragons campaign because I wanted to, and I also cleared up some of my long list of WiPs. Then I got an ear infection that knocked me out for about five days straight. Noveling just... got brushed aside.

And that makes me sad. Because I really want to be able to say "I wrote this, and I published this. This is mine."

But you know what? It's okay.

Because I wasn't writing because I had to. I was writing what I wanted to and I was having fun. That fanfiction I mentioned above? It clocked in at 26k words, almost four times what I planned, simply because I enjoyed writing it. And I wrote it in a little over a week. My long list of WiPs? I finished some, fridged others. Some are still sitting there, but what's left is stuff I'm excited about, not things people expect of me.

So, no, I probably won't finish my planned 100,000 words come the end of July. But you know what? My week and a half absence turned writing from a daily chore into something I do because I have a story to tell.

Don't worry, I'll pick up with the diary entries again, starting tomorrow, but they may not be Camp-oriented. They just might be sleep-deprived ramblings.

But that's okay too. Because guess what? Life doesn't happen linearly, and neither do the best stories.

[musingsofawriter]

Day 2 - July 2

Oh my gosh this is hard what have I gotten myself into it's only day two and I'm so far behind.

I have no time to write let alone blog, so have a midnight, sleep-deprived induced quote from my notes, to be added around chapter 4 or 5 of the work.

“Such things are not befitting of a lady,” the Countess sniffed.“You’re right,” Alys said, dismounting and patting the gelding on the neck. “Which is why it’s a good thing I’m a Duchess.”

[musingsofawriter]

July 1 - Day One

Well, here we are. Day One, Camp NaNoWrimo, July 2021. My first Camp since I was in high school. Been doing the official NaNo every year since like 2016, but only did Camp a few times, just never really saw the point of it all.

But, here I am, still in my house, still without a job, and hey, what better time to flesh out a promising novel idea?

The idea

This idea specifically came from an old flash drive I used often in high school. I spent several hours over the last few weeks going through old flash drives and cleaning them out to either gift to friends or delegate for various projects. While cleaning house as it were, I came across an old Word document. Strange in and of itself, because I never used Word; it was dated from my high school days when my primary word processor was Google Docs and usual export format was .pdf. In college I used Pages for school work and Scrivener for writing projects.

So I opened it. And I read it.

And it was good. I was reading it and couldn't actually believe that I was the one that wrote it. It was my voice for sure though. So I decided that the next time Camp NaNo rolled around, I'd flesh it out and rework it from the ground up.

The plotting

I spent the last month or so working out plot beats and writing out character sheets. I treated it like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Who are we dealing with, where are we going, who's our bbeg, and how long will it take us to figure everything out?

The story, as of yet untitled, is about two young royals, forced into a political marriage to end a war between their two kingdoms. As they settle into their marriage and their kingdoms into an uneasy alliance, several attempts on their lives force them to work together as they question who and why is trying to shatter this hard-won peace.

Princess Alys of Armathain and Prince Brylard of Wardhurst are our main characters and newlyweds. They have never met each other before their wedding day, and only know each others' names and rumors gathered during the war.

Today

Today went surprisingly well. I had to do two writing sessions instead of my planned one because I misjudged how long it would actually take me to write the over 3,000 words needed to reach my 100,000 word goal by the end of July. I also spent an inordinate amount of time looking up wedding dresses, hairstyles, and jewelry in order to describe Alys' wedding dress.

We made it as far as introductions to our main characters and the alternating point of view that will continue as the story progresses. I've already begun laying the groundwork for the inevitable twists down the line (thanks to my drawn-out plot), and I actually wrote about 400 words over my goal.

Didn't make as much progress story wise as I anticipated or wanted, but I'm hoping to make it at least as far as the wedding reception tomorrow, maybe even the wedding night if I feel so inclined.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the wedding day. Well, not mine, Alys' and Brylard's. Well, in their world it's actually still the same day. But you get the idea. See you in tomorrow's update.