#woes

[ba1laur]

parasite

[joking-hazard]

|| Dirty || not a ship, AU-related

[saintvoids]

what i'm currently cooking (wips)

@mephisto-art it was a grave mistake to tag me in this muahahahaha

filthy smutty angbang art because i haven't drawn enough of them fucking this year DONE

Maedhros and Fingon portraits DONE

the third generation of Finweans all hanging out (which is a massive peice i keep procrastinating)

The last 4 chapters of The Strangest Torment Maedhros in Angband loooong fic (its soooooo close to finished, my plan was to post it all by the end of this week but now i'm sick so that may delay editing... grr) DONE!

Tar-Miriel falling into corruption under Mairon in Numenor (madly in love with this one right now)

angbangfang first time threesome one-shot DONE

Thuringwethil x Ungoliant smutty one-shot DONE

The Rule of Three Eregion fics I started posting back in August and then had to leave unfinished cause i got sick BUT they are meant to be 3 stories, all be updated at the same time so the narrative wanders in time

Flash Sync the angbang mafia au which i said i wouldn't return to until TST was finished... and then did anyway

alright, how are your kitchens? (zero pressure) @melestasflight @gaydhros @queerofthedagger @ulmondil @silmalope @katyamondfische @winds-of-zephyr416 @thescrapwitch

[yellowrosesforgetmenot]

how it feels to play overwatch alone solo queuing as support and losing all your games

[ladymirdan]

I own quite a legendary pile of shame/opportunity, and I have without exaggerating, stuff to paint for years, and I'm a pretty fast painter.

So why are the only two things I really want to paint right now things that have never been in my pile? (Sylvaneth and Chaos Knights)

[bomberqueen17]

cold

It has snowed a fair bit. I mean, probably an inch accumulation. Chita is still not really eating. She hid under the bed yesterday but today she is crouching goblin-like by the heat registers and occasionally making comments on things. I am offering her tid-bits of every substance I can think of that she might want to eat. She slept on my face all night but we managed to get through most of the night with minimal interruptions, so I am somewhat human today, unlike yesterday when I was a zombie.

Anyway. I have a number of errands to perform this week, and the thing I want most of all is to crack the final ending of the original novel I'm working on.

I'm realizing that the huge feat I pulled off of five years of Witcher fic coming around to actually connect and pay off in various ways, in some cases after hundreds of thousands of words of setup, was propped up far more than I realized (no, I did realize, but I didn't fully realize-realize) by having an active set of readers who would happily talk out plot points with me, in various chat venues and comments, some in Docs but many on Discord. I brainstormed and talked out a lot of those plot points before finally connecting them together, and while the final form the stories took generally was my idea, there was a lot of work done in talking it out.

I don't have anyone to talk out plot points with for the original novel. I have a wonderful subsection of commenters who've offered feedback on chapters as I've posted them, but I just don't have anywhere to talk out plot points before I write them. In my old life I was used to writing alone but I never finished long things and I think that's why; I write myself into corners because I haven't talked it out, and then can't figure out where to go. I've got this novel up to the climax, I got the mammoth doing the kool-aid-man-smash through a wall that I was excited about for thousands of words of lead-up, and then I don't know where to go from there because I haven't talked it out.

I've tried talking it out to myself, I've tried writing out summaries of where I'd like to see it, but I haven't managed to find the way like that. It's not working and I'm stuck. And I just can't keep focus long enough by myself to actually think through the whole structure. So it's going very poorly. I mean, I made it through a 150,000-word novel and then 170,000 words into the sequel before I really got stuck, so it's not that it went entirely poorly, but. I am stuck.

So I guess I'm going to try to talk it through with myself at some point, and hope I actually have enough free time free of crises this week to actually do it. We'll see. But that's where that is.

I had toyed with making a Discord to talk about the work as I was working on it, because I'd been talking about it in a thread in a channel on an existing server but nobody on that server could actually manage to keep up. But the respondents to the survey on beta-reading were pretty mixed as to whether they'd use Discord at all, and I don't really have moderatorship in me, and also it felt extremely weird and egotistical to make a Discord server about solely my own fiction. It would make more sense to join a server that's about people writing their own fiction but then of course, I don't have time to read anyone else's fiction, so I would be entirely useless to anyone else, which is always what happens when I try to join writers' groups. Every writer just wants to talk about their own OCs, which is natural and understandable, but oh my god I don't have time or attention for anyone else's OCs because it turns out mine are a lot of work. And then it feels just really gross and conceited to be like no, everyone talk about my OC's. Because it's not actually that they're my comfort characters or whatever, not that there's anything wrong with show and tell of comfort characters but that's not what I'm trying to do here, I'm trying to make them interesting because I need to hang the scaffolding of this plot on them... but... anyway it just feels icky and also ineffective to be like "please come talk to me about my blorbos, Guy Who Makes Plot Go and Girl Who Makes Plot Go and Guy Who They Both Like To Make Out With Who I Can Hang Plot Twists On, and how I could more effectively torture them for fun and profit".

anyway. I don't know how to talk about things. i can't outline for shit. Most of what happens when I talk through plot points is that I realize that the thing I'd been idly assuming would happen can't actually work, and the harder a commenter argues that it should, the more convinced I become that it can't. But I need that. So I have to figure out how to do that for myself because I really can't figure out how to connect to anyone else who can do that for me.

Mostly that's looked like writing tens of thousands of words of backstory, so far. I keep toying with putting some of that on AO3, because most of it's too long to put on Tumblr, but IDK. IDK what it would look like or how it would go together or what. And I just don't know how to talk about it.

Man sometimes I really fuckin' miss Livejournal, you know?? But I've tried using Dreamwidth for that-- for this novel, in fact, years ago, no less-- and it doesn't work. No platform works for communication if you're just talking to yourself. So.

C'est la vie, c'est our extremely lonely internet age where the means of communication are all optimized to extract value from us instead of letting us talk to each other. IDK i got no answers.

Also genuinely for the first time in over twenty years my dude is being emotionally needy because he has been the primary caregiver for our cat for so many solo months and I don't really know what to do about that so. it's all a lot, kinda.

[the13thh0ur]

Do I have to read Thirteen's comics in order? Or can I skip some and still know what's going on? I hate skipping but it's just that Ten is in so much of it, like get him out of there. It gives me war (fourteen-potd) flashbacks.