Write Every Day, September Day #3

[auroracloud]

It's Monday. I'm tired. So getting straight into the point. :-)

Today's Writing

I feel very accomplished because I finished two of my first drafts for the femslashficlets prompt table challenge. It was only 195 words altogether, because one of them needed just a couple of sentences, but still, it's drafts finished! Hmm, I may have to start looking for betas if I imagine I'm going to post 20 ficlets in two months... The challenge has been running since last November, I think, but I only found it some time in the spring or summer and don't have any posted yet.


Tally

Day 1: carenejeans, cornerofmadness, justmcshane, navaan, shopfront, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme, and me. (9 so far)

Day 2: alexseanchai, brightandravenous, carenejeans, cornerofmadness, navaan, shopfront, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, trobadora, ysilme, and me. (11 so far)


If I missed you or you wrote but didn't check in yet, let me know! And you can join in any time.

Comments

[sylvanwitch]

Congrats on completing two of your ficlets for the challenge! That's awesome! :-)

On this, my very last day of freedom before school begins in earnest once more, I wrote 1084 words on the untitled story.

[auroracloud]

Thank you! They're only first drafts, they still need editing (and my edits always involve some rewriting). But having that stage done makes it easier to really finish the ficlets. :-)

I hope you enjoyed your last day of freedom! That's a nice amount of writing for a day!

[shopfront]

Not much from me today, but picked up and zero-drafted a pinch hit. Saw more scheduling chatter last post - I have a slight preference for December if nobody else minds either way, otherwise definitely still good for November.

[auroracloud]

Yay pinch-hit and zero-drafting!

Okay, good to know! It does anyway seem like we'll be sorted just fine for several months now. I'll just check if there's preference for the November/December arrangement. And of course if something comes up for someone and they can't host when they promised, we'll find a replacement, but we'll cross that bridge if we come to it. :-)

[cornerofmadness]

I was out most of the day but got 1015 tonight

[auroracloud]

Very good for a day when you were out for most of the time!

[cornerofmadness]

It is but then again I write mostly late night so...

[auroracloud]

That helps, I'm sure! But sometimes when I'm gone all day, I'm too frazzled or tired to write in the evening even if I have the time. Though you mostly seem to have a good routine for getting that stuff done, which I'm sure helps. :-) That's commendable in itself; I really wish I had the strength of will to make myself write more than a couple of hundred words on most work days, but hmm, all in its time, I guess. I'm glad I manage to keep writing at least something every day.

[cornerofmadness]

I'll be honest this community helps me with that! I'm lazy and easily distracted. You should have seen my output before the internet days. Even when I started this wip I'm finishing for the big bang I wasn't on AS much as FB, Twitter and the rest of the social media weren't entrenched yet. This story is nearly 140K long

[auroracloud]

I'm glad it helps you! It definitely helps me as well - I would certainly have missed many days (which might have turned into longer stretches) if I wasn't "accountable" here. And especially when I've already gone on for two years without missing a day, I don't want to break the streak even if I'm feeling tired/cranky/headachy/busy/whatever. The alibi sentence doesn't take that long to jot down, after all (and then it often turns into more).

Woo, that's a good-sized story, for sure!

[cornerofmadness]

Exactly. Because setting it aside is EASY.

Right? I had to set it aside when I started writing novels for you know, actual money but I still love keeping a toe in the fandom waters.

[ysilme]

Yay for finished drafts! 20 ficlets in two months sounds a bit intimidating to me, though - but then, I always take so long in finishing anything these days!
I wasn't very productive yesterday, as we first got our yearly wood pellets deliery which involves a sizeable amount of physical assistance on my part, and I'm niece-herding for two days. Still, 54 new words on a drawer fic, about half an hour of work for the epic WIP, and the first of my finished WIPs finally posted. That took me ages, because one chapter was a belated prompt fill for a challenge and required lengthy rule re-reading for that (they're a bit complicated that way), and fiddling with code for two of the archives I post in; I loathe the unpretty files with epic paragraph breaks produced when people copy in word docs or so, but am too lazy to write the whole story in code from the beginning. Also got a nice review for it, which kind of made my day. (I'm not exactly spoilt in this regard, so getting one on the first day after posting a non-challenge fic is noteable. The challenge in question runs every year during March, although entries can be posted all year 'round. But outside of March, interaction is nearly non-existant.)

[auroracloud]

Well, they're only ficlets between 100 to 1,000 words, so it's not like we're talking about the same number of full-length fics (which for me tend to start from about 2,000 words upwards). I could theoretically just write that many 100-word drabbles, though I usually have a hard time making things that short. Also, I have been working on the challenge on and off for a few months; I've got three first drafts ready and a fourth one close to ready, and I've got beginnings or ideas for a bunch more. So it's not as much as it sounds like. For me, producing a few hundred words isn't that hard; the hard part is convincing myself to let go of something, to stop expecting perfection, or to keep from trying to address every single thing in my fic (writing short ficlets could help with that last one, I hope). True, I'd have hoped to have published a few of the ficlets by now in order to have more time to finish them, but I don't think the challenge is undoable at this point, I've just got to get around to actually doing it. :-) Anyway, the challenge has had nearly a year to run, it's just me who came to it rather late. ;-)

Sounds like you've got pretty exhausting days outside writing, so congrats for getting some writing work done anyway. And yay for posting the first of your finished WIPs! Actually posting stuff that you've finished is so satisfying (if a bit intimidating). Yeah, coding can be a pain. I don't tend to think too much about paragraph breaks, but then, I've so far only posted on AO3, and there it's just enough to hit Enter the right number of times.

And woo hoo for a nice review! Commenting and interaction is so rare these days, it's super-nice when it happens, especially outside challenge times.

[ysilme]

I imagined the challenge would run over a longer time than two months, but still I think it's a bit chunk of work, even if it were just drabbles. Not the writing itself, but getting the inspiration, figuring out plots and whatnot... I used to write a lot of drabbles, and at some time, partly for the 100-drabble-challenge, but they mostly were linked and often part of a three- or four-drabble storyline. It used to be easier while I wrote in the Harry Potter fandom; everything was more fixed than it is now, and easiest when it was about my preferred pairing and happening between them. Now it's so much harder; but then I write very little relationship or character-driven stories, so that part of inspiration is mostly missing, and hang around in a corner of fandom where canon is very vague and distant. We have this month-long challenge in March where usually there are new prompts every day, or more, because some people like to create something new for every day. There are some who chuck out a story of 1-3k per day, every day for the whole month. I never would manage that, or even half of it, even if I'd had the time and inspiration for so many new ideas, also because any idea needs quite some time to steep before I can write it. I admire that in others, but my brain is simply too slow or something.

Posting on AO3 comes easy to me, even without code-prepared documents; I copy my texts from Scrivener (where they're formatted in rtf format) or even OpenOffice, paste them unformatted into a text editor which keeps the line and paragraph breaks, and copy that again to paste it in the rich text editor on the AO3. (Sounds more complicated than it is, really). I usually use little text markup, so all I have to afterwards is see if all paragraphs work as intended, and set the one or two separating character string sets I'm using on "center". There might be an occasional phrase or word in italics, which I also just change manually, and gives me a well-formatted story afterwards. (I confess I loathe stories where you have those LOOOONG white spaces between paragraphs, or sometimes even lines... drives me totally nuts and often is a reason to not read a fic. Now I sincerely hope I didn't step on your toes with this...) The other archives I'm posting to run with efiction, which has some pecularities and bugs. I can do the same posting routine in theory, but in practice I need to fiddle around with my centered paragraph break character string sets, (things like ~oOo~ or so) as you need to delete breaks and spaces before putting them in so you can format paragraphs separately. Wouldn't be too tedious either, if the cursor wouldn't spring back to the beginning every time you hit enter, and you're operating in a text edit window the size of my (small) smartphone. (And maybe I just discovered, in checking this for you, that I actually can enlargen the size of that window quite considerably and now feel incredibly stupid. LOL ) I've never posted enough that this would bug me sufficiently to change my posting habits, or to simply adapt to write coded fic in the first place. *g* Ok, I'm a terrible creature of habit, I know.

[carenejeans]

Yay for 2 ficlets done. Re: your comment to ysilme, If you have trouble with drabbles, may I suggest the 6-sentence story? I love those. It keeps you writing short, but it's not as restrictive as the drabble. And besides, if you really need to write 7 sentences after all, just don't tell anyone it's a 6-sentence story. 8-)

I worked on the nonfiction project yesterday, no fiction at all. I'm going to try to change that today, though.

[auroracloud]

6-sentence story sounds somehow intimidating for me, because I've never thought to count sentences. Hmm, it's an interesting idea for a challenge, though! I'll see if I get an urge to try that out - maybe as a way to get more femslash ficlets done before the challenge ends. :-)

Good for you for working on the nonfiction project, anyway! And good luck at getting back to fiction as well. :-)

[carenejeans]

I'll admit that sometimes I turn on the automatic numbering function in Word when I write the six-sentence stories. 8-) Then I'm not distracted by which sentence I'm on.