Thanks for tagging me, @writingingraves! I think I got tagged by others, too, but I can’t find them.
From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content! To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.
RULES — When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!
I’ll talk about my fantasy book The Stray Spirit for this one!
📖 Planning
Honestly? I used one of Nanowrimo’s brainstorming guides. Pretty sure you can find it as a part of their middle-grade resource packets. It was specifically the page where you write down anything you’re interested in, then pick three and start to draw connections between them.
(My three for TSS were: bards, possession dynamics, and caves! And by possession dynamics, I was specifically thinking of Ling and Greed from FMA:B).
Honestly, I recommend that process if you have vague ideas, but nothing solid enough to work with yet. It’s a pretty low-stakes game to start making new connections between things that already interest you, and could lead to some cool places.
📖 Drafting
I wrote a version of the book for Nano 2020. Felt ‘meh’ about it, and left it hanging until Nano 2021, when I went “eh, I wanna write something, but I don’t have any new ideas. And I keep thinking about Emry Karic and Aspen. what if I just...re-wrote that?”
After that, it was a lot of:
elaborate google sheet outlines
drafting
beta readers
more elaborate google sheet outlines
editing
crying on the couch because the book was unfixable and I sucked
more editing
Including my final drafts post-copy editor and post-proofreader, The Stray Spirit got up to eight drafts between Nano 2021 and spring 2022.
📖 Publishing!!
If you’re interested in some specifics related to my self-publishing journey, check out the #self publishing tag on my blog, but TL;DR- I’m publishing this baby on 8/8/22!! ⭐🎇💃⭐
ARCs to be released next week, pre-order info (& gifts!) coming in July.
(also do you see this cover?? look at what a good job my designer did. it’s so dang cool.)
Tagging in turn, with zero pressure: @zmwrites, @drabbleitout, @spacetimewraithwrites, and @akindofmagictoo! I’m interested to know how y’all brainstorm specifically, but I won’t make you talk about a certain wip.
Rules: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!
Dropping this for The Curse of Broken Shadows
1) Inspiration
Basically, Brela was the inspiration.
Every time I write something new, I try to challenge myself with something new. The first book I ever wrote was to prove to myself that I could. The second was to prove I could write a sequel. The third was to test out writing in a different perspective. The fourth was to write a series and create my own world and magic system.
With TCOBS, I wanted to write adult fantasy with romance and magic but also test myself to see if I was capable of writing epic fantasy. Add in my signature flare - a FMC who is absolutely, unapologetically herself and makes all of those things above stand out on the page. Enter Brela, whose character creation alone formed the backbone of everything that happened in this book.
2) Preparation
As a chronic obsessor of having the perfect first line before I can even start writing, I spent weeks writing on a different project while I ‘brainstormed’ TCOBS. Read that as I procrastinated writing the project that was slowly consuming my every thought because I was afraid to start. I came up with so many excuses:
“The magic system isn’t perfect” - spend days altering the names of the core magics and their affinities.
“I don’t have the world set up” - create a map, name all the cities, oh but wait what if I need to add something later, I should make up a ton of other cities just in case, oh and those cities will also need history and people and maybe a story that makes it unique...
“i’m not quite sure what the ending looks like” - so why even start?
Until I just went for it. I said “screw it” and just wrote the characters to see what story they wanted to tell.
3) Art Process
Because I had the five characters (two main) already fleshed out, it was mostly about writing their adventures based on how they would react to situations. I knew the basic timeline of events until the middle of the book and a few scenes that I knew needed to happen for the plot that were scattered through the last half, so it was just about letting the characters dictate what happened in between.
The fleshed out chapters were the hardest to write because I had this idea of what needed to happen and I tried too hard to make it perfect the first time around. The other chapters were easy - just having the characters do what they do - and I found those days the most fun because it shaped what was to come in a way I didn’t expect when I started out.
I’m an “edit while you write” type of person. Usually to start the day, I read what I wrote the day before, make edits or changes or just add detail, then continue where I left off. At the end of the day, if I have thoughts about what needs to happen, I’ll write the bullet points at the end of my page so I know where I wanted to go. If I am stuck, I’ll leave it blank and let my brain daydream about it to figure out the next day.
4) Thoughts
I definitely covered some dark elements in this book, which made for a lot of challenges but also a lot of fun (that sounds morbid). It really forced me to look deeper and explore the spectrum of human emotion. Ex. I wrote a character with stockholm syndrome which gathered a few negative comments from reviewers who didn’t understand why she or her friends didn’t intervene to stop her from going back to that person. There was also other triggering moments that were explored and the consequences of those memories/thoughts/actions. In the end, it made my characters who they were in this story which might not go over well with others.
I also love this book because it really focuses on characters over other things. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a plot, but at its core we get to see characters flourish separately and together.
Plus, there’s a found family of assassins. And knife flirting. It’s the best.
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Sorry, y’all it’s been a lifetime so I don’t know who has done this yet. Tagging anyone who wants to do this plus @avrablake, @emelkae, @mel-writes-with-her-dragons, @the-orangeauthor
From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!
To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.
RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!
@haeyeongs and @moonlightsdream tagged me and chose my Extraordinary You gifset. Thank you Camille and Layla 💐💖💖
Tagging the following folks if they want to do it:
@savingfaces for this set
@sjoongki for this set
@anya-chalotra for this set
@dramaism for this set
@dead-end-street for this set
@monae for this set
@inejz-ghafa for this set
@komunyoung for this set
(Technically, I was tagged twice so I can tag around 10 people right? 🤪)
PLANNING
The planning for this set started simple enough, as it was made for Day 1 of the #KDRAMAWOMENSWEEK prompts, which was "Doubles/Foils".
I immediately thought of making something for Extraordinary You given the show's premise. My first idea was to make something out of Eun Dan-oh being the actual show's main character, but the "extra" in the comic book their characters live in vs Yeo Joo-da as the "protagonist" of the comic book, but a supporting character in the actual show.
Unfortunately, Na-eun and her kpop group got exposed for bullying one of their bandmates at around that time, so this was scrapped.
I still wanted to work with Extraordinary You, so I pivoted to focusing on Dan-oh's character, juxtaposing her comic book/stage character with her true, off-stage character. With this in mind, I wanted to ensure I display both her "stage" self and her "true" self in the set, so I started looking for and screencapping scenes I can use for the set.
On this note, I also made it my goal for this event to learn how to blend and overlay gifs. I forced myself to only make sets in these styles I've never tried.
I perused @anya-chalotra tutorial on putting multiple gifs into one using shapes for my first scrapped idea, and @inejz-ghafa tutorial on blending gifs, which I ended up relying on the most as I began creating.
CREATING
Let's just say creating was a messy process for me because this was my first time attempting to do a blended gif.
To start, I was just speed-browsing through Extraordinary You episodes, and capping as much scenes I could potentially use as possible. I wanted to focus on how stage!Dan-oh is always portrayed by the writer as weak and sickly, and shadow!Dan-oh is more strong-willed and full of life, and blend those two together.
I think with experience, I will probably learn how to make better screencapping choices, but at this point, I was just in the I WILL MAKE IT WORK AND BLEND IT mode.
Anyway, I coloured the gifs first as I saw fit, before blending. As you can see for this one I had a lot of PSDs saved. Essentially for each gifset, I have the base PSD, the accent PSD (which essentially will be what I blend with the base), and the blended gifset (where I experiment with the blending, and adjust colouring). If there's gonna be text on the gifset, I also save that as a another PSD, so that's around 3-4 PSDs per gif.
The colouring itself just follows my usual process for doing my coloured gifs. The only thing I thing I did differently is to colour the area where I want to blend with a black paint brush, and set that layer to Soft Light, and duplicated the layer, changed the opacity of the layer until I achieve the darkness I need for my blended gif.
I kept the colouring for the accent gif for this one pretty basic...
Because I ended up adding the purple colouring later on after I blended the gifs together.
After I've made my colouring adjustments to the blended gif, I converted everything into 1 smart object, added noise, then converted back to frame animation so I can add text.
The process is the same for pretty much all 3 gif sets, but of course I did experiment A LOT on what scenes to blend with the base gif. I think this is when experience with doing more blended gifs come into play cause I wasn't very smart in choosing the scenes to blend. I just know what idea I want, and the base gif I want to use and tried to hammer it in until it looked passable to me. Maybe the base gif I chose isn't the easiest to use for blending, etc., but I think making those smart choices will hopefully come to me the more experienced I become in making these types of gifs.
POSTING
For posting this one, since it was part of an event, I had it in my drafts until the event started. So I set up the caption, and tags as soon as I finished the gif set, and saved it until I was ready to post.
In general, I do post my gifsets and save it in the drafts as I make the set. It show me the full picture of the gifset I'm creating, and helps me see whether something needs colour adjustments, or the flow of the gifset isn't looking as good as I thought.
For this particular set, I struggled a lot with the second (middle) gif because I was having a tough time finding a scene I want to blend it with, how to style it in general, and even the colouring of it... when I was posting different versions of the second set, nothing was quite working, and in the end I just went with the gif that semi-worked with the flow of the set, even though it's not 100% what I wanted because I've already spent so much time on it and I was already empty creatively.
But yeah, I do like saving the gif set in my drafts as I go along so I can keep my creative vision in check.
When the time rolled along, and the #KDRAMAWOMENSWEEK event started, I just posted it during the day and that's that.
From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!
To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.
RULES - When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours.
@hisfearlesshaz tagged me share my process of making this moodboard that I had done some time back! Thank you so much!
Lmao this one I had actually done one PicsArt, manip and all.
1. Uhm..getting the idea? Lol idk what this step is
So I had ALWAYS wanted to make a she moodboard since I had seen this picture because it gave me so much she vibes:
For the longest time I didn't find the motivation or storyline but then me and my friend were just fooling around one night and then spent 3 hours just chatting about making a she music video, script and all fhfjfk. So the moodboard was actually based on that.
(this is actually a whole 1500 words script for how I would like the music video to be, ngl very proud of this but lol I've never really posted it anywhere.)
2. Finding the pictures and putting them together
Normally I do save the links when I find a pictures for moodboards so after that I just put them together and see if it like fits(?) in the way I want it to by putting it in a collage.
3. Editing each picture
Lol I remember not being able to find the perfect red filter for this so I had just taken a red colour and screened it on each of the pictures fhfjfkf so I did that to all the pictures. For the ones with Harry in it I had to remove the background and go about since I wanted it to fit in with the like, red-maroon thing. Then I just added a little bit of grain since so it looks..normal lol? That's how they looked at the end lol I worked a bit in making them look nice lol
4. The manip
Lol I actually wasn't planning on making a manip but the picture looked like it would fit Harry so well so I was like eh let's fool around and try (since I've never really made a manip lol) so I just found a picture of Harry's swallow tattoos and cross and screened it?
5. Put all of them together
Yeah that was about it! I actually loved making this one since I wanted from a LONG time
Thank you so much for the tag this was so much fun!!! Lol this was a relatively easy one to explain (and make)
I'll tag:
@cloudslou for this louaylor gif edit (which is one of my favourite edits in here)
@thechampagnelovers for this or this edit whichever is you chose (I LOVE YOUR NIALL EDITS SO MUCH)
@badreputatiom for this moodboard (hello talented wifey)
@brekkersbarrel for this louis edit (it's so pretty I love it so so much)
@letsbealone-together for this tpwk edit (I loved the whole series thing you did here!)
@gayndrew for this louis art!!! (maria I love you)
@heyangels for this edit!!! (everything you make is so stunning!)
To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.
From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!
RULES - When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours.
I was tagged by @thosefookinavacados to show the process behind this Megan Harry edit. I had lots of fun reading yours!
1. Coming up with the Idea
So remember when Harry followed Megan so many people I saw where like waprry so true bestie 🙏🏽 so since then I was like him should do a Harry Megan edit.
So then few days back I saw this picture of Harry and I was listening to Body and I'm like damn okay 👀 so I put it in my list of edits to make and then later decided to do it.
2. The Editing
Lol so I wasn't planning on doing this on PicsArt I had my Photoshop open and stuff but then when I started in PicsArt it got over there itself lmao. So uhm basically I started with like a red background and edited it a bit? After that I went ahead and got my fonts which I had saved and added that. This font is Lemon Milk.
After this I like slowly started adding rest of the stuff? First I like tried to picture all of it in and see what I wanted and then made them separate so I can fix things if I didn't like them. So I first did cut out that picture of Harry and Megan (it was a struggle to find a Harry picture which I thought would fit) and edited it a bit. Then did all the separate fonts. The 'body' font is Fairfax Station and the Artist names font is Michaello.
After this I just put them all together? I did make more like adjustments and stuff with size and colour.
And the I just added like some finishing stiff like extra and was pretty much done! It came out better than I thought so I was like lol no need to use Photoshop.
And yup! That was it!
I really liked how this came out. Thanks again for tagging me these are so much fun!
I'll tag:
@zi-shu for the harry icons you made for me!
@gayndrew for this walls edit! (I also love the wmi one! love your brain)
@cloudslou for this miss you edit (I love the idea so much)
@stormyhale for this poster edit of Louis (everything you make is so amazing thank you so much for your edits I love them so much)
@badreputatiom for this edit you literally just posted dhdjdk I love it so much!!!!
@lanwangiji for this zayn edit which is still one of my all time favourites!
@essercipertuttienonperse for these louis ticket edits!! (so pretty!)
Rules: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag others. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!
Tagged by the ever intriguing @saedoeswriting
I hope npbpdy minds if I go a bit theoretical on this, I have this paranoia about sharing project information too early and hyping people up only to later realise I can't finish the project so I don't want to chat too much about stuff that's far away on the publish-o-meter, but it also feels weird to use a sequel for this, and the inspiration and preparation parts of Merry Arlan: Breaking The Curse were such a long time ago (that book took me 4 years to finish, not including the very first ever draft of it)
Inspiration
Usually inspiration comes from a brief blip of a thing. A "what if" on a story by someone else. A song that builds images in my head. A ride at Disneyland Paris on my honeymoon in 2018 followed by 3 days of my wife being snowed off site and us tellng each other stories wrapped up in blankets to pass the time(okay, that's pretty specific, it's my NTK Pirate Project).
Actually, a lot of my inspiration comes from my wife, she gives me a lot of "what ifs" to follow, encourages me when I start rambling about stories and potential stories. She's said before "Yes, take my ideas and turn them into stories because I don't want to write, I jus want to read them"
Preparation
The most prep I ever did was for my 2021 NaNoWriMo project (current title share is Untitled Space Opera, it's part of the Inter-Planetary Alliance Novels, coming ????), I printed off two different prep booklets and built characters, wrote down scene prompts, gave each character their own theme song. And then I used exactly none of that and just wrote what came to mind. (Have I mentioned lately that I'm a pantser?)
Most of the time "preparation" looks like "I can't write this full thing right now, let me just write this scene I have in my head" and "Do I have anything planned on Tuesday?"
Like, I have a plan to be finished with rewrites of the second Guardian Cadet Series book by 30th June and then spend at least the first week of July (possibly longer) just letting the whims take me where they will. That's prep, right?
Process
I write, majoritively, in order. Except in cases where I've written some kickass foreshadowing and I want to write what has been foreshadowed lest I forget that the foreshadowing exists.
I can write in any format, at any time of day, in almost any situation. If I have an idea, I'm writing it down, even if I'm trying to sleep, or trying to catch the bus, or in the middle of a conversation, or making dinner (am I hard to live with? Probably but I've asked my wife and she said she thinks its cute so that's fine, right?).
I will also write scenes that I don't have a location for yet, just because they come to mind. Draft 2 is for putting the puzzle pieces in order. Speaking of draft 2, I usually write 5-6 drafts before anyone else lays eyes on it, then it goes to my wife so she can translate it out of dyslexic-language and tell me that, while I am getting better with full stops, I still haven't quite mastered the art (semi-colons though, those I get).
Thoughts
Sometimes I wish I was more linear. I see people who outline smashing out books like they're frying tattie scones in a bright kitchen with all the proper utensils. Me, on the other hand, I have a fork because the spatula is broken, and the lights keep flickering off so I have to take great long pauses to stay safe and sane.
On the other hand, I know my process makes the books I want to make. (Poorly lit kitchen, fork instead of a spatula or not, those are some damn fine tattie scones.) Not to mention, I probably wouldn't be able to do it any other way (because I've tried).
I've always been impatient with myself and my output, I have so many ideas that I want to write, being able to write faster would be such a boon because it would mean I could get to them faster. But some things take more time. Spaghetti bolognase and Lasagne (okay, I can't spell, I'm sorry) are made up of mostly the same ingredients, but one takes a lot longer than the other. They're both tasty, they're both of the same value, they're both great. So slow-written books can be just as good as quick-written books too.
Tagging
I'm not sure who hasn't already been tagged in this one but if you happen across it and yu want to do it, tell them I tagged you
HOW TO OPEN STUDIO #11: Demonstrating = Maker vs. Seller
HOW TO OPEN STUDIO #11: Demonstrating = Maker vs. Seller
The ‘mudding’ part of my scrimshaw technique that helps my artifacts look like real bone and ivory.
When demonstrating your process, share what you want, not what you think you “have to”…
Short story: Demonstrating your process at an open studio can be a powerful incentive for visitors to come. But there’s a delicate balance between “maker” and “seller”, and that…
