#writing reflection

[sometimesiship]

i reread once moer with feeling these past two days!! huh. wow. so many thoughts!! this is mostly for myself tbh but you're free to read it. but it's very long LOL

the first day, i made myself go to sleep at 5am. got 1hr30m of sleep 🤪

last night, i went to sleep at 7am. got 2hrs of sleep 🤪

at the risk of sounding SUPER full of myself lMFAFAOMOAO but i actually have no idea how the ppl who didn't binge read it had the self-control. i saw my notes to drink water! maybe stretch!! maybe sleep! and i myself went "no. screw you past-lisa, don't etll me what to do."

altho tbh i don't really think it has to do with my writing or even the plot. i think it was only *just* good enough to grip me, but i don't really know what about it did that.

holy crap, i kind of get the emotion ppl have at the ending of it now. i'd been writing it for so long that by the end of it, i didn't feel at ALL like the development from loid at the beginning to loid at the end was convincing or major, but rereading it, i'm like "wow. i'm gonna reread the first few chapters just to get the full effect of how different loid is now"

having said the above tho i also feel now that it is very much a fic about loid and centered around loid 🤔 which makes sense, bc i do think that yor is much more emotionally mature and thus doesn't really have as much "character development" to do, which maybe is why i made her arc more about doing things that would boost her self-confidence. which i guess does affect her character development, bc ultimately, she had the self-confidence to make her own choices (leaving garden, etc...). hm yah okay actually i like both their character arcs now LOL I JUST CONVINCED MY OWN FUCKING SELF LMFAO

i'm actually surprised that all the political stuff made sense to me. it's not as bad as i feared (it's really not bad at all, but i can def tell i've never written anything like that before). i'm also surprised by how paced it was!!! i remember writing it, i was like, "god, these bits feel inserted in at random and nothing i do seems to be fixing it" and while i was writing the ending arc, i was like, "god, i feel like this whole political bit is so rushed now" but huh. i thought it was well-paced. and it made sense that it picked up towards the end

but i still don't think i'll ever write anything even remotely political again. JUST NOT MY WHEELHOUSE!!!

there are so many stylistic things i'd change about the writing. i wonder if how i write now reflects that. it's reassuring that despite how happy i am with OMWF on this re-read that i feel like there were flaws, bc if i thought it was perfect, i'd be concerned LOL

the smut was actually very good. i have been dreading rereadng that part the entire time i've been starting and stopping reading omwf and then abandoning it mid-way thru. i remember when i was writing it being like "oh my god. this is terrible. this is so sappy and cheesy and omg i'm using 'groan' too much oh my god this is not gonna read as natural at all or believable oh my god" but actually it felt really right. but i did use 'groan' too much, but i cut myself a lot of slack when writing smut bc. there were only so many ways at the time that i knew ohw to write it rn without being ultra cringe KJSHF(@ hopefully i've improved bc uh starstruck is heavy on the smut 🥴

holy shit. sylvia's chapter is SO. GOOD. and i don't even mean that in a self-congratulatory way, bc i'm SO MAD the rest of the fic is the way it is when I AM CAPABLE OF WRITING THE WAY I DID IN SYLVIA'S CHAPTER. WTF!@@!!!!

related to the above about sylvia's chapter. i'm amazed that despite my wordiness and overall flowery language (this is what i'd change about the fic lol) and the (overuse lol) of metaphors, all the description does describe what i want them to describe most of the time. i had to reread at some points like "wtf am i expressing here," but not as often as i thought

i actually teared up multiple times, throughout several parts of the story. which surprised me. and actually, i reread 100% perfect before this and i also cried at ~that chapter~. i always surprise myself. lOL

my favorite version of loid and yor absolutely still remains a canon compliant version where they know eachother's identities and dinner talk is stuff like "today when i killed my target, this interesting thing happened!" or "i need to get my gun checked, it made a strange noise yesteday before i shot my mark," or "do you need the blood washed out of your clothes? i'm about to do a load ujst for blood" or "is this poison in the fridge or grape juice?" or "i'm starting a round of lead and mercury, can you remind me to take them at 9pm every night?"

oh wow okay i just finished reading the epilogue and yah i'm crying. woah. LOL

(added later)

i'm pleasantly surprised by the anya and damian side arc, too. i was very insecure about that when i was writing and posting. i think i made them a lil too cheesy at the end (before the epilogue, when they were still kids), but what's done is done! now i know for next time P:

another thing i'd change is just how angsty this fic is. it actually leans towards "teenage-levels of angst" for me, where it's almost indulging in its own angst HAHAHAHA i think if i wrote it now, it'd be a bit more subtle!! altho the way i write these days, it might just go to the comlpete opposite extreme where i'm completely irreverent... LOOLL

omg roman is kinda cheesy. also, some of the monologuing is cheesy,. but also it made me smile bc even tho it's cheesy idk the cheesiness charmed me. i feel like you can tell i watch a lot of animation WAHAHAHAHA it's almost like getting a peek into the version of me in 2023-2024, which is nostalgic

the fact i wrote this in 5 months weirds me out!!!! i feel like that is not as long as a fic this ambitious, esp for my first time, should have taken!!! and i don't mean that in a "pat myself on the back" way, i feel like it lessens the emotional impact. like imagine if this had taken years to update. the emotional payoff at the end would have been ridiculous 🤔 but i guess IRL, ppl read 100k books in a single sitting, and the payoff is still awesome. so i'm probly twisting some sort of self-standard here LOL

i think that's it. i should do more writing retrospectives hAHAHA

[transcendragon]

Let Me Assign You a Literary Genre

I’ve reached somewhere around the 75% mark of my current novel project and the world feels like it’s falling apart, so I could use a bit of distraction. This part of my novels are always difficult, because it’s around where the climax is and I have to actually deliver on all that foreshadowing and build up I’ve been doing. It’s a lot of pressure, so I took a break by making a genre…

Let Me Assign You a Literary Genre

[morganski-19]

I Don't Know Which Way's Home Wrap Up

If you were to ask me back in November that this idea I had and thought would just be a one off tumblr post became one of the longest and best stories I've ever written, I don't know how I would react to that. Honestly, I'm not sure I would have believed it. But here it is, finished before my eyes.

I go back and look at some of the material I've written for this story and can't believe that these words came from my own brain. That I was able to convey certain aspects in a way that not only affected me as a writer but also as you as a reader. I'll get comments of people pulling quotes and telling me how beautiful these lines are, or analyzing it in a way that I didn't even intend, but is true. Things I sprinkled in and wondered if anyone would notice, and they did.

It was fun to write the outsider perspectives from canon events in the show as it's something not explored in the original media. It was fun to introduce this new character to the group and see how they interact with the characters we know and love. And it was fun to write a story that meant so much to me, and see it through to the end.

I wasn't ready to let this story go, and I'm still not. There are ideas I never got to and scenes that didn't end up getting written. Plot points that I would love to revisit and expand on. Flashbacks that I'm sure will come to me way too late and can't be added in. Maybe I'll get to them someday. Write a little one shot to continue this story I love.

But for now, this story is completed. It was longer than intended, and went in a completely separate direction than first planned. There were laughs and there were tears. This story was so much fun to write and I could not be prouder of the product.

To all the readers, thank you. To all the people who saw the original post and said this was an idea worth fleshing out, thank you.

See you on the next one.

[little-peril-stories]

Camp Nano July 2023

How It Went

Um, not how I expected.

The good:

I managed to write every day. I'll confess here that, because we went on vacation and were all over the place most days, I sometimes updated my word count for the day, wrote more, and saved that 'update' for the next day because I like getting the badges. (All the writing was done in July though! I did all the outlining and planning work between February and June, but I didn't start writing till July 1.)

My outline was helpful. I didn't spend a lot of time agonizing over "what happens next" because I always knew, even if the specifics were a little fuzzy. My process boils down to 'plan hard, but allow for deviation & exploration' and it seems like that is still a system that works for me.

Some of the writing was OK. I mean, it's a writing challenge and I was going fast. She gonna need work. But I often smiled while I was writing, or when I was rereading scenes, and that's a good indicator for me. :)

The , uh, well, you see:

I wasn't always feeling it. Trying to track exactly why I felt this way has been tough. I'm willing to admit it could have been burnout (or something adjacent to it) since Camp Nano began right on the heels of the end of the school year, and I had just finished the whirlwind of writing The Queen of Lies in a month, a Thing That Happened that we may never understand. Maybe I started planning too early and the passion had faded since the height of my enthusiasm as I plotted it out. Idk. Maybe it was being on vacation, constantly being around people and having limited time to myself to really feel the story and the words and the everything. Idk.

The romantic tension isn't there. And this one hurts, because I (personally, as someone who is actually really new to writing romantic tension lol) think I did this really well in TQOL, so what's different here? (Aside from diff characters, diff story, okay I get it, you know what I mean.)

I was distracted. And this one is purely my fault. I was editing chapters of TQOL for posting throughout this time, too, and even though it takes a different kind of brainpower, it was often the task that called to me more.

Overall:

So, I'm SUPER proud of myself for achieving my Camp Nano goal of 31,000 words (1000 words/day) on July 28. But I kind of wonder if maybe it wasn't quite the right time to write this story.

We'll see how the last three days of July go (I want them badges, dang it), but the true test will be in August, when I have no goal set for myself. Will I focus on the finally finishing Book 1 and letting humans read it? Will I just work on TQOL? Will angsty heist wip rise again? Or will the passion for Book 2 (which I was SO EXCITED TO WRITE) return the moment the daily word goal is gone? (lol what a joke we all know I'm gonna write Will's POV chapters for TQOL.)

Thanks for reading this pointless ramble.

[starlightcleric]

2022 Personal Fanfiction Retrospective

It’s the beginning of a new year, so time to reflect back on the old one!

What was your personal writing goal? Did you meet it?

“Knock out some stuff from my mental backlog/prompts lists I’ve imposed on myself. I have some WIPs on my laptop that are 3-4 years old.

In the “less self pressure” variety, stop writing things saved only on my laptop and write on google drive so stuff is backed up in the cloud and available from multiple computers!“

Well, I didn’t accomplish the first, but I did accomplish the second. I’ve moved almost entirely to writing on google drive now.

How much did you write? 

Counting Prepare for the Dawn, 31,561 posted words in 20 stories. If we just look at solo work, that’s 19,910 words in 19 stories.

I have an additional 4,679 words in unfinished/unposted works, for a total of 24,589 words in solo writing.

I also did a ton of rpg writing this year, so I’d be interested to total all that up, too.

How does that compare to last year? 

That is 16,940 words more than last year!

Which fandom did you write the most for?

Final Fantasy XIV, and this is the first year I’ve written for that fandom, even.

What story was your favorite? 

Tie between “Soup, With Love” and “How to Impress Girls.” The first because I think it’s good comedy, the second because I’m proud of the action scene.

What story do you think could have used more work?

I’m not happy with “Leaving Gridania” and sometimes question if I should have posted it. It’s very rambly and was the result of me starting to try to write what turned into “Shelter in the Storm” and failing. I think I did the beginning of Belle’s journey better in the Junelezen 2022 ficlets.

What is your writing goal for next year? 

I’m trying to set quarterly writing goals this year because planning for a whole year is hard, so my goal for the first three months of 2023 is to finish the first draft of a five chapter fic I started and to finish at least one of the prompts in my inbox.

[alexanderdanner]

It was an oversight on my part not to explicitly mention in 46 that Dimitri was at the trial. He *was* there, though it's understandable that some listeners have been wondering about that. A key part of my idea for this episode was that the characters with the highest emotional stakes, but least agency in the outcome of the trial should be left in the background, unable to directly affect the narrative just as they had no control of their own future. This primarily applies to Nica herself, of course. No one is more affected or has less power. By contrast, Leon has a high stake, but also has significant agency, even in his currently weakened state. But like Leon, after Nica, the person with the highest emotional stake in the event is Dimitri--who was similarly powerless at this point. He couldn't be an active presence in this chapter.

Still, I regret not mentioning him. It would have been simple and valid for Chuck to simply make mention of notable attendees in the trial's audience, which likely included a number of familiar characters, and certainly included Dimitri.

[notalittlebutalottie]

Writing Reflection: Against the Cards {Klaroline}

Thinking about Against the Cards + Against the World and I can’t believe I even finished it... I know some people really like it, but I have so many negative associations with that story and I thought since it’s been two years since I finished the original AtC and a few months since AtW was wrapped up, I would discuss it.

How did I come to write it?

The first time I wrote it, I was in my first semester of university, lying in bed. I’m not sure how I came up with it, but I remember writing that first line ‘She could not help it. She just could not fucking help it. That bitch’ and going from there. I just wanted to write a story where Caroline had had enough of people telling her how she should feel and dealt with her resentment towards Elena. It was originally intended as a one-shot, but it spiralled and ended up a full story. I think my biggest goal with it was to just actually finish a WIP for once!

Which do I prefer? Against the Cards or Against the World?

Against the World will always win for me. Though I’m happy with certain aspects of Against the Cards, the sequel is something I can view more positively. Here’s why: the quality of writing is better in both narration and dialogue; the tone of the story is a lot more mature; it addresses Klaus’ faults as well as Caroline’s; and I think the ‘smut’ scene is both better quality-wise and in terms of its attributions to the story as a whole.

Why do I have negative associations with the story?

Back when I first published it, I liked it! However, as time has passed, I’ve felt a lot of negative emotions towards it. I don’t think the writing was as polished in AtC regarding grammar, dialogue, and certain areas of narration. AtC is the first story I completed for this fandom, so I felt a lot of pressure from the reviews that expected things to happen in the way that they wanted. AtC is home to my first ever smut scene but it is my least favourite piece of writing I have done thus far. After I finished it, I received a very mean review that called the fic ‘fucking stupid’ and likened Caroline to a doormat. I can joke about it now and I literally memed it last month(?) but it was so shit at the time. Personally, I think they were pissed because they got to the end of AtC and KC didn’t end up together, but the fic wasn’t about their romance, it was about Caroline’s personal growth. Yes, Caroline was insecure and bent to the will’s of others but...welcome to the conflict of the ENTIRE freaking story.

The largest negative association with AtW that I have is that I began it following a terribly long hiatus, I was on the brink of deleting all of my work and my tumblr, and I was getting a couple reviews at most. Some of the reviews left me feeling shit because on one hand, people were telling me ‘Caroline should get over it! They weren’t together because of her therefore she has no right to be angry that he slept with Hayley’ but then other reviews were saying ‘Klaus sucks. I don’t want them to be together’. And none of these reviews acknowledged my writing and the work I had done. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t try to change things for those reviews because it was an adult conflict; no single party was right or wrong and that’s how it works in real life. I was at an impasse with this story and finishing it was such a difficult mountain to climb. I’m proud of myself for finishing it, but it wasn’t an easy task.

The issue of smut

I thought this deserved it’s own little section because there are two smut scenes in the whole of this story and they are my least favourite and most interesting respectively. When I began AtC, KC’s first sexual encounter is not fully described, it’s just alluded to so it’s not really ‘smut’. And not to fault said reviewer (as this was a minor part of their larger comment), but someone commented their disappointment in not getting smut. This left me feeling a little pressured, that for people to really love the story, I had to write smut, which I had never done before, and so the smut scene I wrote for chapter 7 was incredibly forced and is uncomfortable for me to look back on. Objectively, it’s not terrible, but I was 20 years old and I didn’t really know myself sexually so how was I supposed to write something like that?

In contrast, AtW has a rather short smut scene in chapter 2 (chapter 16 on AO3) and I find it MUCH better. It was my third time writing smut, second being taken by Sing Me Sweet Nothings, but I just felt like it was much more realistic and just mature. The context of the scene is that KC are arguing over Klaus sleeping with Hayley until they reach this very high point of tension and they have sex. The reason why I like it so much is that it’s raw, emotional, and honest. It’s not meant to be arousing and overtly sexual, it’s meant to represent their conflicted feelings. They’ve been through so much and it feels like there’s always an obstacle, and they’re angry with each other and themselves so they know this isn’t the best circumstance to have sex under, but they want each other so badly.

What do I like about the story?

I love the ending of AtC! It was exactly what needed to happen and no one can convince me otherwise. I love Caroline’s personal growth from the beginning to the end! I like Elena’s characterisation for the most part and how she is referenced in AtW (because at the end of the day, it was never really about her). I like Hayley’s characterisation because she’s not just some mega-bitch out to cause havoc in KC land, she’s just living her life and she’s not suddenly being like “heeeeey bestie” to Caroline after the conflict ends. I adore the kitchen scene in chapter 1 of AtC; I think the tension is wonderful! There’s a substantial amount of dialogue I do love in AtC! And lastly, I love that I finished it! 😂 I see it as a personal triumph.

So there you have it! I hope you enjoyed this rambling of mine. I know I might come off as harsh, but I wanted to be honest in my reflection. I thank you for reading this if you have made it to the bottom and I thank you for reading the story. - Lottie

Never read Against the Cards + Against the World? Read it [here]!