I’m sick rn and work has been fun/crazy this past month and !! I’ve been reading books !! and not just ff these days (currently reading East of Eden since I decided to tackle my big books this year and it’s been super enjoyable so far)
and just living my life I guess. Idk why I’m writing this but this tumblr kinda feels like a journal where I talk about how I feel, mostly about writing but sometimes other things, so that’s what I’m doing.
I’ve been feeling kind of drained recently and I don’t really know why. I haven’t been sleeping very well (like having a hard time getting to sleep and waking up a lot) and I feel more low-level pervasive anxiety than I have for the past few months. I’m not really sure why because I haven’t changed anything major. It’s frustrating because I feel like the anxiety and bad sleep are a vicious cycle where I can’t sleep well because I feel anxious, but then the anxiety is what makes it hard to really relax and get good sleep. Maybe it’s because my schedule is less routine and I’ve had some big events to plan/execute for work, and I’m the type who gets a little inevitable physical anxiety (even if I feel mentally fine) for that kind of stuff.
I’m finally get some injury stuff sorted out (after like 2 years of only being able to do light exercise) so maybe I can finally do some cardio soon. That always used to help me with managing my anxiety.
Having literal physical anxiety from time to time is weird because mentally I feel fine. My life isn’t full of things that should genuinely induce stress. But I get these physical symptoms like tightness in my chest or difficulty sleeping or my heart racing and it’s frustrating, because where is it coming from? I don’t stay up at night actively worrying about anything. The only worries I really have are hoping I get into a degree program that I applied for and my long-term career goals. Nothing that is an immediate stressor bc my situation is pretty stable and comfrotable. Ugh. Why tho. Why it like this.
Different anon but I would love an outline/draft of ending of AFH if you're comfortable with it! I'm sad that you chose not to continue, but it's completely understandable, and I respect the standards you place on yourself and your work. I'm glad that you introduced this interpretation of the characters to us, and you have a knack for getting us invested lol, for better or worse. idrc about the quality of the outline, but it would be nice to have any sort of closure!
I’ve been meaning to reply to this for a while, but it was such a lovely message that I kept reading it several times over and forgot to actually answer!
I appreciate so much that you
(a) are still interested
(b) respect my self-imposed (sometimes too harsh TT) standards
(d) think that I have a knack for getting people invested??? :o thank you so much?? I didn’t realize that but I guess I may? Thank you for the compliment because I’ve really never thought of my storylines that way
I will try to shape up a good detailed outline. Honestly I could give away the outline of the last chapter in about 5 sentences, but I feel like anyone who’s waited this long deserves more than that.
Among other things, one of my resolutions this year is to actually post more.
For a while I didn’t because I developed a lot of anxiety about it. Almost like performance anxiety, I suppose you could say? I got some comments with constructive criticism like a year ago and, honesty hour: I reacted pretty badly to them. Not with anger, but I got pretty defensive about certain choices that I made, or I didn’t reply to the comments but I let it affect my attitude towards writing. I’m the first to admit that I’m NOT a perfect writer (I was in even worse shape a year ago), but ultimately my reactions made me realize that I was tying too much of my self-worth up in other people reacting positively towards my writing. It wasn’t healthy. I also moved and changed my life situation pretty drastically around that time, right when I had just started picking up steam with my volume of work (around August 2016), and I didn’t have the time or the mental energy to write for several months.
Ultimately, writing is not my highest priority. Keeping my life together is my priority. Taking care of myself is my priority. Writing was just supposed to be something to blow off steam for a few months where I had absolutely nothing to do. And yet... it has become something more. I enjoy it so much, and some days I feel like I can’t stop writing. After nearly a year of radio silence, I feel like I’ve gotten to a place where I’m happy with my writing, and I feel ready to share it again. I want to share it again. I think it’s just pulling the trigger that has become the most daunting thing. Part of me thinks that I avoid finishing my recent works so that I have an excuse not to post them. Part of me thinks that I let my plots get too elaborate and carried away from me so I have an excuse never to finish, to always feel like I’m only halfway done with what I’m working on.
Recently, I had gotten pretty close to being confident enough about a longer piece to shape it up and post it. However, Jonghyun was one of the big side characters, and several of the plot decisions made by the main characters hinged on his actions. In light of Jonghyun’s recent passing, I don’t know if it’s crass to post a story including him. Especially with the characterization I gave him. He was a lot like a Snape sort of character in that we see him in glimpses, and through the lens of the main character whose life is disrupted by the decisions he makes, so although his depiction in the piece is unfavorable for a while, I don’t think of him as a bad person (in the piece or in real life). I struggled to rework the plot without him, or with a different character filling his role. I knew I would have to be extremely careful about how I depicted him if I left him in the story, and that’s too high stakes for me to feel comfortable tackling with my first piece that I put out after a hiatus. Ultimately, I left it on the drawing table.
Another thing that has me worried is that the nature of what I write has changed. I no longer write for the fandoms I used to, and some of the stories are more adult in nature. I know that the latter is actually more popular in most fandoms, but it has me worried because it’s a departure from anything else I used to publish, and once I post it then it’s out there for all the world to see. It almost feels like putting something out that’s more vulnerable, in a way, even if I do think that a few of those pieces are some of the best I’ve ever written. I don’t necessarily mean that regarding the graphic parts, but for the story that goes with it. The physical aspects are important because of how much weight they give the emotional situations, and sometimes the two are inextricable. In the end, it’s easier just to not post it, but another part of me--perhaps the part that is still attracted to making bad decisions--wants to.
(Sidenote: I HATE the grammarly extension. Don’t get it. It makes typing in web browsers so irritating T_T and half of what it recommends isn’t even grammatically correct.)
If there was a way to put as private or unlisted I would, but I don’t think that there is. Whenever I read it back, I just hate it. So much of it is misinformed and badly done, the pacing is off, the dialogue is stilted, I don’t even like the plot at this point, some of the phrasing is SO awkward and purple... just... argh. It’s a horrible representation of my writing because it was quite literally half-baked and rushed. I was recently thinking to finish and post the ending, but I forgot that every time I consider finishing AFH, I review what I’ve already posted and it digs up these deep feelings of disgust for how bad some of what I wrote was. I will say, I am decently happy with ch. 1-4. Everything after that, less so.
I’ve been waffling over this for a while, with either just leaving it as it is or deleting it. I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it at this point. It would take me rewriting ch. 5-12 to feel comfortable with updating it, and I don’t know that I want to do that at this point because I have moved on from writing those characters and fandoms.
no idea if you'll ever see this, but any hope for an AFH update? hope this question's not an annoyance, and that you're well :)
the timing of this message is uncanny, because I’ve actually been thinking about this lately. Part of me wants to finish it, but part of me feels like it would be mismatched to put a well-edited/well thought out ending to the story when I’m particularly unhappy with some of the later chapters.
Over the summer I re-read AFH and there were some parts that made me cringe so badly. For a while I had given up on the edits, but lately I think I might do it. Mostly for issues of pacing, or scenes that are patchy or have awkward flow, or stilted dialogue. I don’t want to change the story or the essence of any scenes, but the execution (particularly in ch. 5-12 because those were the ones I churned out really fast) can use some cleaning up. Possibly over Christmas break because I’ll have a lot of free time, but I can’t make a promise. Only then would I feel comfortable polishing up and posting the ending on an official platform.
If I don’t post ch13 (and 14? I don’t remember exactly but I think there was enough for 2 chapters), I can post my outline and draft of the ending here on my tumblr, if anyone wants it? If you want it, dear anon? Maybe if I haven’t touched AFH by January, then I can post what I have already? Thoughts or opinions?
And please don’t worry, the question is not an annoyance! I said so many times that I wanted to finish AFH and it’s delightful that someone still remembers it and would like to see more even though I haven’t updated for so long. I have been well. I’ve been writing a lot over the last year to work on my technique (and to keep myself entertained), but not posting or finishing much. Maybe that’s my next problem to tackle, or try to tackle again.
After all of the writing I’ve been doing over the last ~6 months, the amount of unfinished drafts I have is frankly terrifying.
My writing wasn’t perfect back when I was pushing myself to publish but at least I actually finished things. Now I get so caught up editing things to be perfect that I don’t put any of it out into the universe. And because I’m not finishing anything to publish, I just move on from half-done things when I get bored of writing them/as soon as another idea occupies my focus. I get these grand, elaborate ideas with all of these details and nuances to make whatever I’m writing the Best Story Ever but consequently it gets too long and I just don’t finish goddamn anything!!
I had this realization about a month ago and have been **trying** to write one-shots since then. I now have 4 half-finished one-shots that are sitting at around 5k words each. None of them are close to being finished. Womp womp.
I have 5 partially finished long works that I have like... 20-30k written for each, if not more? I don’t even know anymore. One of them I have fully lost interest in, which is a shame because I enjoyed the process of writing it. The pairing just feels stale, and it’s one I wouldn’t have put together myself but it came up after a conversation I had with someone and I challenged myself to write it, but now it just feels like a pain to write and make the characters fit together.
I used to be like this with my writing, which is why I pushed myself to publish AFH (even though I look back on some of it now and cringe, hard). I thought maybe I had gotten better about finishing what I start but nope, nope, nope. Maybe it’s time to push myself again. I’ve been having loads of fun writing a comedy piece (one of the longer works) and have a lot written and the plot fully constructed, so maybe I should challenge myself to finish that.
I’ve been reading a lot of fics lately, and I just came across one that I think may be one of the best things I’ve ever read. Obviously, I have to recommend it. Even if you’re not in the fandom, it is really so, so good.
All those who wander by w_anderingheart on AO3.
Summay: And yet, flowers are universally pretty. Even the dead ones--you look at them and know that they once had their beautiful days. In the past.
Fandom: Exo, IU. Pairings: Baekhyun x IU, Baekhyun x Chanyeol
I have been writing like a mad fiend these days. Mostly working on my pet crackships, aka Yixing x Jieqiong and that Kyungsoo x Irene AU. I never thought I’d see the day where I liked exo enough to even consider writing about them, but here it is. I also never thought I’d see the day that I wrote outside of canon but oh well.
Mostly I’ve been writing just for the fun of it. On one hand, I feel like pushing myself to deadlines is why some of AFH was shitty but on the other, if I hadn’t been writing to deadlines then like half of that story wouldn’t even exist. So it’s a tossup.
I wish I could take some fiction courses again though because I feel like I’ve gotten sloppy with my mechanics. More than just basic grammar, I feel like I wish I had learned a lot more about writing mechanics than I ever did. Sigh.
Weirdly, I worked a lot on AFH ch13 today. I feel like the reader base for it is probably gone by now but it feels like it needs a sense of finality and I already have so much of the last chapter written that it’d be a shame not to finish it. Reading through it made me realize that I actually like what I have written more than I remembered.
I want to make a sincere effort to actually finish it by the end of January instead of the half-ass effort I’ve been making so far. In the past it felt like I needed a looooong break from that fic and now I finally feel refreshed enough to be happy working on it again.
At the end I’d like to make a sappy post on here with things I’ve learned and takeaways from writing it. It’s the longest fiction piece of any kind that I’ve ever written, and I think it changed me as a writer in lots of ways.
Ironically, it’s been exactly 6 months since I posted the first chapter. I could go balls to the wall and attempt to finish it in the last 17 hours of 1/12/17 but I feel like that wouldn’t give it justice and I don’t care enough about anniversaries for it. I’ve officially been working on it since May 9th (that’s the creation date of my oldest saved file) so maybe I’ll shoot for February 9th (at the latest) for some semblance of an anniversary.
Yo I've been writing this EXO/Red Velvet AU thing for the past 3 weeks and I'm up to like 15000 words. I'm just such a happy and content lil bean writing it. I don't feel pressured because I'm writing it for the pure enjoyment and I find myself struck with inspiration for it so often. I feel like I lost this somewhere along the way and I'm really glad I found that joy in the writing process again.
I can’t wait for spring so I can write whatever the hell I want again
Every time I sit down to write fiction my Responsible Brain tells me that if I’m going to write, I should be working on my application stuff, so writing anything has been hard these days. I just feel guilty for “wasting time” every time I sit down so it makes me averse to the whole thing.
By mid-January, all of my applications will be in so I can get this shite off of my mind. Please and thank you. February cannot come fast enough.
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul