michelel72

Hello, world. I don't post much; I haven't been doing much. But I figured I'd make some notes of recent things as evidence to myself that I do anything.

Writing: I've been making stop-and-go progress on a story that I never meant to exist; it's ... 69,700 words so far, and it has so much left to go, and I need it to be in place for something else I wrote that follows it, and ... sigh. Why am I like this.

Beware of very mild spoilers beyond this point. Note also that I haven't been in an overly receptive headspace lately, so please know that I don't mean to denigrate anyone's favorites here.

( Books, Movies, YouTube )

I've actually finished this one as of yesterday, but I think it needs to sit for a bit. It's got some rough patches that need time to settle so I can try to fix them. It also meant tweaking the surreal piece that will follow, but that's fine -- that's part of why I didn't just post that yet.

Most of my friends (work and online) are trying to fill their buckets of sudden free time, and I'm just here all "this is actually a normal Sunday for me" -- which is not to be unsympathetic at all! I just have plenty of projects that could use more focused free time that I personally do not particularly have. I did a bit today -- I finally figured out what I have to do to fix formatting at AO3, so I repaired "Shovel" and the first two chapters of "Family, Home". (The rest of that story was fine because that's when I figured this all out.) I'd like to fix all of "Sound of Silver" in one go, to make sure that if I do cause any notifications they at least group, but ... that's gonna be a lot of work, and even "Adjusting Masks" is longer than I want to tackle right now.

The process for a new story is ...
1. Start a story or chapter at AO3.
2. Switch from HTML to rich text.
3. Paste the correct-looking text from Google Docs.
4. Go through (working up) paragraph by paragraph, stripping the extra paragraph breaks.
5. Go through (working back down) sentence by sentence, fixing the approximately 20% of cases that AO3 has randomly stripped down from double spacing to single.
6. Click "Preview".
7. Click "Edit".
8. Switch from HTML to rich text.
9. Go through once more sentence by sentence, looking for italics and removing the extra spaces AO3 has now randomly added between italicized text and adjacent punctuation during the pseudo-posting phase.
10. Post and hope it actually keeps the corrections.

I can't really consolidate the "spacing for sentences" and "spacing for italics" passes because I lose focus if I try to combine them. Frustrating.

( Snippet )

I think I've poked long enough at this particular prequel story in my original-fic series, so I started posting it today. Since that's almost 3k words, adding a snippet here as well seems silly. It'll be a total of six chapters and about 20,500 words, so only four times as long as I originally guessed it would be.

It's a Christmas story, because I have excellent timing, being here in early March. No, I did not actually title it "Silver Bells"; that only would've worked if I'd kept the "Silver" conceit in all the other pieces.

I did look at titling it from a Christmas song, which means I had to read lyrics of dozens of Christmas songs, which is irksome because I really, really dislike all but about five Christmas songs. I ended up being a little silly with a non-lyric title. (The chapter titles are from a Christmas song, though. And I don't care how many people put McCartney's little tune on their "worst of" lists; it's one of the about-five I actively like. FIGHT ME.)

I have one more series prequel I'm working on, a minor confrontation followed by emotional comfort. Once I write and post that, I think the stage will be fully set for my odd mindscape thing, and then I might write one/two more for after that. (I have two events in mind; I don't know if they would fit together as one story or if they should be two.)

My total wordcount, posted and not, for this series has reached about 161,500. Which is not bad! I just don't know whether to average that based on when I started creating documents last ... August? ... or if I should really go back to when I started the character/worldbuilding in like 1995, ha.

I've been sick all week, and I went to work Thursday when I really shouldn't have. (I knew better! But the specific things I would have missed would have been messy to miss! And then I tried to stick out the entire update meeting with my director, but my manager kicked me out partway through anyway.)

I've slept a lot since and I'm now past the vast majority of whatever it was. In the meantime, I re-read a bunch of books on my Kindle app, since re-reading doesn't require much focus. And I read through some of my various sequels for my original-fic project, and I fixed a few nagging problems, and I've now posted both a short 2002-era bit as well as a 13k-word direct sequel to my big story. Neither is perfect -- so much dialogue!!! -- but I like them well enough. I figure I don't really need to post any snippets today, with two fics now up instead.

Those set the stage for the weird mindscape thing I haven't yet posted. I finally rewrote the one key scene in that; I'm still not certain the replacement is quite what I was looking for, but it's better than a 101-level infodump about abusive relationships, so. I'll give it at least a day or so, or maybe until next weekend; I need to figure out chaptering anyway.


ETA: Can I just take a moment to complain about AO3 and Internets These Days?

I'm fundamentally a double-spacer; I've found myself slipping towards single-spacing lately, especially in chat, but I'm trying to go back because all the standard claims about single-space readability are LIES. No, thank you, all web fonts do NOT clearly and unambiguously distinguish between period-space and comma-space, and it wrecks the flow to have to take my glasses off and peer closely at the screen to see which punctuation is there because it MAKES A DIFFERENCE. Ugh.

And then, even when I'm super careful, when I paste from Google Docs into AO3's rich-text editor, AO3 converts about 20% of the double spaces to single. INCONSISTENTLY. So I have to parse every sentence when posting to fix them back. I didn't notice when I was first posting my mega-fic chapter-by-chapter, and by a few chapters in, I ended up stripping all the double spacing out of the remaining source document just so the spacing wouldn't look quite so drunken. And the result convinces me that DOUBLE SPACING WINS FOREVER, and dammit AO3, I WILL fight you to force it. Grr. Quit "helping", dammit!

I haven't done a ton of writing lately. I did finish the posting of my weird quasi-fanfic/quasi-original-fic work, and a couple of very nice commenters saw me through to the end, in ways that had me making improving edits to later chapters throughout. I know it's a very talky, internal fic, but I like it anyway.

I wrote a little 2003-era one-shot in the same 'verse (3800 words), but I don't love where it ends so I'm sitting on it for now. (ETA: I mean 2002-era. One of the problems is that my initial timeline guess was wrong and I have to move it from April 2003 to something like October 2002.) I wrote a trippy mindscape sort-of-sequel (28k words), but a couple of things in it also bothered me. I finally figured out that one full sequence needs to be trashed and redone very differently. But I haven't gotten to that yet, because I ended up poking at something that slots between the posted fic and the mindscape. It's up to 7500 words so far, with more content definitely to come and an unclear ending point. A bit from that is below. ( Snippet )

I thought I was 95% done with something last week. I was wrong about that, but maybe not as wrong as I briefly thought I was, because I'm only up to a little under 26k words and I might be near an actual ending point?

(ETA: This is still my surreal dreamscape thing. Sat down and finished this up a few hours after I originally posted. Done at 26,500 words. Have vague thoughts about a more "canonical" short set in the same 'verse; may or may not try to work it out.)

The weird, driving obsession that got "Sound of Silver" written, as well as the vast majority of this strange sequel, seems to have passed. I don't know if it's because I'm back in the swing of work (which is ... a thing that is happening lately), or if I've run out of anything to say, or what.

It doesn't help that the resolution on this thing took a hard turn on me. Which you'd think I WOULD HAVE EXPECTED, since that's exactly what happened last time, but ... who knows what's going on in my head. (Ha.)( Snippet )

So I completed a first draft midweek, and I've been tweaking since then. Looks like I'm currently at something approximating 92,800 words -- it's hard to tell when I'm split across four Google Docs and have two competing chapter-break models in place.

There's a part of me that is impatient to start posting, but I've made huge improvements to some passages already, and my reader is pointing out several things that needed bolstering, too. (And, y'know, needs time to have a life around reading this behemoth for me.) And I'm still not quite happy with the flow of The Biggest Scene. (It's much, much better now that I've spaced it out, and I think it helps that I purposely started dropping certain punctuation for that section. I'm trying to decide if I want to mess with justification, too, for the stickiest bit; it would be gimmicky as all get-out, but it might actually work. I don't know.) ( Snippet )

I got a reader! I asked on FB if anyone knew a place to find alpha readers, and a friend offered! And it turns out she recently started writing fanfic, too!

I'm proceeding with my plan of adding some foreshadowing to "day 3" and early "day 4", and then keeping going through my character's crisis, at which point I'll have to figure whether the now-slightly-less-abrupt resolution works or if it needs to be dragged out across another plot-day. And I have someone I can bounce those thoughts off of!

Days 1-3 are written; 3 is sketchy but there, and it's a good breather, I guess. It can always be filled in later. Now I see how far I can get in day 4. ( Snippet )

Oh noooooo

( Previously, in the plotting of the world's silliest fic: (cut for length) )

I've been trying to write this fic in order, even though I historically don't do that because scenes occur to me out of the blue all the time and if I don't write them down I lose them. But that was starting to happen here as well, so I had a second document for snippets to work in later. That's been going pretty well.

( But then ... (cut for EVEN MORE length and nattering about plot derailment) )

... which kinda seems like a Things Not To Do When Writing 101? Because erasure of development?

Aaaarrrggghh I don't know what to doooooo.

And I'm in a small snag trying to finish Plot Day 2/Tuesday, which makes me want to switch over to the later stuff that is actually moving, and Plot Day 3/Wednesday was always going to be a weirdly mellow interlude and I haven't even started it. (I don't think it works to shorten the period of the deaging effect, though.)

Writing, man. Always an adventure. Anyway, have a snippet! That I feel really unsure about!( Snippet )

I've been making nice progress on my current silly story. (Quick recap: Technically original fiction but written fanfic-style, even though the "canon" it's playing with exists only in my head; magical-age-regression-in-non-magical-setting plot.) It helps that I've been able to stick with the approach that this is just a very rough first draft, so it doesn't matter if transitions are rough or certain things don't flow right yet.

Then again, a coworker decided to bring his sickness to a recent in-person meeting, and I seem to have caught whatever he has even though I was very careful not to get too close or (I thought) touch anything he did. It's a minor annoyance, but it's just enough so that I've finally gone ahead and taken an antihistamine. So I'll probably pass out soon and sleep through to Tuesday. ( Snippet within:  )