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Over the last ten days I've written 3,140 words of my novel!!!!!!

Which is not very much on its own, true, I could comfortably do that much during one evening. But the main difference is that it came from ten STRAIGHT days of writing 300 words. Every day after work, I sat down and tapped out my 300. And - I am making progress, man, I am making progress.

This is new to me. I've done writing challenges before, but they were all rather short-term. A spike and then a drop for however long. Now every day I'm making a decision that yes, this matters to me, yes, I am going to spend time and effort doing this, and yes, I will continue doing so until I have reached prose complete on my first draft. Chipping away at it day after day after day. Seeing progress, day after day after day. Man, it's crazy that I can do that. That I get to do that. That I can make a promise to myself and keep it a little bit every single day.

Draft's at ✨60,480✨ When I hit 100k I'm gonna celebrate like it's my fucking BIRTHDAY.

#wear writes #behind the scenes #original

I just wrote the final closing argument of Architects of Heaven. I was riding a train and thinking about what might make [redacted] finally decide to [redacted], because that had been the last big question mark in the story that wasn't purely execution, and then it just... poured out. And now it exists. I now know how exactly how the story ends.

I am nearly bloody there. Took me six years to get here, and goodness knows how long now, but I can see the end in sight. Jesus Christ. I'd never written anything quite like this story before. The idea that I could a) start it b) finish it is still staggering. What else could I start and finish???

#wear writes #behind the scenes #fire emblem #architects of heaven #claudeleth #i find it so intensely validating #it's a BIG ambitious story which will be about the length of a serious novel #a sprawling political-military epic with a thesis on power #and hope #always hope

There are now 52,000-ish words in my original novel, nearly a quarter more than it was two months ago. That's one thing to be proud of. But on top of that, I've just reread a big chunk of it beginning to end and---holy crap it makes sense. It's saying what I want it to say. The characters are alive and doing things and making the reader care about them. There are huge bits of plot missing, mostly action, and the ending's a right mess, but I can see it becoming a novel rather than just a draft.

It's stunning. Goodness knows I've completed big stories before, but always in the comfort of fanfic. This is something of which nothing has ever existed, but now it does. I'm making things! With my brain!

#wear writes #original

It's such a strange feeling to scroll through tumblr these days. Being a grown ass adult has meant that I've now spent over twenty years in the fandom. In some ways, it changed drastically. In some others, not even a little.

I got to know the fandom on the forums and the blogs and the actual, proper websites that we used to have way back when. Tumblr used to be like a blog too, you could have one just to publish your multi-chapter fic on. And then there was livejournal and fanfiction.net and translation and literature communities, some of which I just checked are still goddamn alive (shoutout for Forum Literackie Mirriel which turns 20 this year)! These spaces were full of kids, actual children and pre-teens, hanging out alongside teenagers and adults and learning from them through various kinds of peer pressure. We'd have silly contentious conversations about literature and atheism and the Catholic Church and when the next chapter of a popular fanfic was coming out and whether it was okay to give one another our real-world names. We'd form little communities with insane amounts of drama. Have cringy in-jokes. Argue endlessly.

Now we have social media, obviously, and tumblr supports short video format for some reason. Still, it churns in the same old circles. Watching it go at it again and again (purity culture! is it permissible to get inspired by other people?? if you don't have the same opinion as me you are a Moral Failure), I'm having a peculiar sense of... having grown up. I really couldn't tell whether those breathless announcements come from 30-somethings or a pre-teen, but by this point I know them by heart. It's so predictable. You come into a new place riddled with so much uncertainty that you scramble for clarity, and once you've taken hold a piece of it, you announce it with all the zealotry of bringing order to chaos. I've been there. It was fun and stressful and all-encompassing. I like to think that I came out the other side with opinions that allow for some nuance (hot 2000s take: Twilight was not a good book and the way the media ganged up on the author was profoundly misogynistic and regressive). But now I've got a full-time jobs and a pair of cats, so I guess that's only fair I spend less time arguing with people online. But what you see constantly is other kids and teens and young adults relitigating the same old fandom dramas. For them, they're still fresh and far from settled.

I dunno. It's all a bit melancholic. We came into this exciting new space for cool kids and grew up in it for the first time. And now other people are growing up in it after us, and we're still here watching it. Sort of like the first elves watching people build Númenor. I hope it serves them well. But god, some of those mistakes are so unnecessary and so painful.

#wear writes #behind the scenes #personal #this is a post about the Discourse in particular #i wouldn't call today's discourse any more or less toxic than what we used to have #but god does it sting to see that you can't just transplant twenty years of it into people's head and call it a day #reading is not a moral act AND boycotting a harmful author can be useful #the way an author treats characters could be problematically reflective of a real world problem AND you can enjoy it even so #interpretation 1 is not necessarily more valid than interpretation 2 AND objective truth still exists #just don't be an asshole about it #that sort of baseline would make fandom a much happier place I feel

Lately I've been making a Pikachu face at the fact that yes, reading more means that I also write more. Incredible stuff. I'd tried for years to "make more reading time" but it turns out all I needed to was put one (1) book on my nightstand and give myself a timer of 10min a day. Four months and eight books later, I am feeling pretty chuffed with myself and also highkey annoyed that All Of Those Just Build A Habit People were right, actually.

Here are the books in no particular order, because I want to talk about them and don't feel like creating a goodreads account:

- "Once and Future King," T. H. White. God everyone should read that book, ideally with as much leisure as it unravels. I wept like a child and vowed with my whole heart to do Arthur proud before he returns.

- "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," John le Carrè. Really enjoyed the start and finish. The middle gave me a headache and a distinct student-like sense that the author assumes a level of context and intelligence that simply isn't there

- "Sand Talk," Tyson Yunkaporta. Made me feel like an animal of the earth. I started embroidering the symbols and then forgot about it. I should get back to it

- "Lalka," Bolesław Prus. Suffered the acute and unique frustration of being brought up as a Romanticist, getting Positivist with class consciousness, and then reading about a dude that refuses to commit to either side. Cmon man

- "Jingo," Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay," Terry Pratchett, and also "Night Watch," Terry Pratchett. My entire soul has lived there for twenty years and I'm discovering bits of it between the sentences like old candy in couch cushions

- "King: A Life," Jonathan Eig. From the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. Made me listen to Dr King's speeches on the tube and wish I'd done it years and years ago.

Soothes my soul, all this stuff. Moral clarity is so hard to find these days. And goodness me, does it change the day to feel like I am spending a bit of it doing what I want and choose to do and which is good.

i clicked on a poll and i can't kick it out from the app. help

Wear you work in tech. Why is an all confusing you

Tumblr app is a black hole, you say comfortingly, patting my head

I thought this was a post about books you read???

shush this is now environmental storytelling

Voting ended onMay 9

#wear writes #reading #behind the scenes

One day I'm gonna figure out a way to write that isn't entirely antithetical to the idea of healthly lifestyle and that doesn't make me feel like crap physically even if my mind's delighted. In the meantime, I am fucking Over The Moon (shoutout Artemis!!!!!!!) with the fact that, for the first time in months if not years, I'm making progress on my novel!!!! I've got my character doc, I've got my drama, I've got my certainly-not-over-the-top layout of the political system with explicitly identified references, I've got solutions to most of my plot holes, and the draft goes on. Enquiry stage I'm coming to get you!!!!!!!!

I am also hella sick and sleep-deprived. A pick one sorta situation.

#wear writes #behind the scenes #original

https://archiveofourown.org/works/40392438/chapters/217367831#workskin

The young King of the Federation is a deeply unhappy man.

Man. I will sooner finish a random Three Hopes AU fic than Architects of Heaven, but we knew that. But I've been making AOH progress too! Slowwww progress.

#wear writes #behind the scenes #fire emblem #claude von riegan #byleth eisner #shez fire emblem #claudeleth #things we cannot recall losing

I saw a post the other day that said something to do the effect of "being in progress of writing and being someone that finishes writing things are two different states of being." It put a finger on that pervasive feeling I've had about the writing process and how it requires vastly divergent things at different points.

Being in progress means writing and rewriting and editing and tweaking etc etc; all in service of getting your work closer to the ideal state of what it could be. It's the thinking, the imagining, the daydreaming, the mindscape of possibilities. But then finishing it forces you to acknowledge not the ideal, but what it is. Vision meets execution, and bends and creaks under the weight of it. And that is---intimidating, and more than a little painful.

I've been thinking about it in the context of my original fiction. I've always played pretty fast and loose with fanfic: a lot of my AO3 entires are first published as first drafts or close to it. (Then I'd tweak and beta and all, but that's beside the point.) My original novel, on the other hand, has been taking approximately forever. Two and a bit years after I've started working on it, the total amount of words I've written for it is around 50k. That's, like, two months of fanfic volume.

Because once I write it, it's there. It's on the page. I can no longer fantasise about the possibility of it existing because it exists right there. It's a scrap of my soul regurgitated onto the screen and now it's there. And sure, first drafts, worst thing that can happen to it is that it sucks and I edit it. But the shape of it will exist and then it'll no longer be something to project vague hopes and themes and songs upon, it'll be a story to read. A finite one.

mmm. No conclusion there. Only that I wrote my bachelor's thesis on the philosophy of the unfinished and it is really fucking on the nose.

#wear writes #behind the scenes #original #on writing

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