Aurora's Sundry Notes

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I've either forgotten or been so tired I haven't had the energy. But, this year the previous hosts of Write Every Day have had this new idea that I'm going to continue. So, if you want, rec something you've written in the comments to this post!

And if you didn't happen to write today but want to rec, you can just comment on the post anyway to rec your writing (maybe specifically mention that you're not checking in for the day, just so it's clear).

I haven't managed to do this yet, but I'll try now that I'm hosting it. I'm going to post mine in the comments. At the moment I'm trying to read through my old fics to find something I can rec - the problem is that I keep wanting to edit the already posted works and finding they're not as good as they were in my head... Trying to find something that doesn't make me lose faith in my writing... (I try to remember that I am writing fanfic in a language that isn't my own, and that actually can be something of an extra challenge.)


Today's Writing

I was exhausted by some RL stuff, so I let myself just do the word equivalent of doodling: I added character sheets for a few characters into my Scrivener project for Ambush Project #2, and wrote bits and pieces about the characters there. It's useful both for getting ideas down, and seeing what I still need. But I got a bit distracted trying to decide which pictures would best represent my characters (I saved a bunch when I first brainstormed it). And then I got even more distracted by inherent sexism in my language, gah. People tend to imagine Finnish is very gender-neutral because we don't have gendered pronouns (or gendered nouns, adjectives etc.) but we do have a ton of job names and titles that are inherently masculine, and they can be a pain. Some of them are easy to change into gender-neutral versions, but some are decidedly not. You can't just insert the word for "person" or "woman" where the original word has "man" because the expression only has the meaning in its original form, and people get totally different connotations when you change the word. Gaaaah.

Basically I don't know what to call one character's job title because it's one of those words and I can't find a workaround that's any use. Maybe I have to brainstorm with some local writerly friends... (And no, the society hasn't tried to find a gender-neutral version of the title yet either, as far as I'm aware.)

Tally

( Days 1-18 under the cut )

Day 19: alexseanchai, auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, yasaman, ysilme

Day 20: alexseanchai, auroracloud, badly_knitted, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme

Day 21: auroracloud, china_shop

Let me know if I missed you on the tally, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet! You can join in or drop out any time.

I actually managed to somewhat start tidying up my home today. Not a lot, but some. At this rate I might have a nice-looking home by 2030? But hey, it's a start.

Today's Writing

More worldbuilding today, this time for Ambush Project #2. Wrote down lots of stuff, it was really interesting. I've been in a bit of a daze most of the day, this kind of thing isn't really conductive to being well-organized about the rest of my life!

In the evening I also took a look at my bingo prompts again, wrote down a few ideas - and I ended up actually starting that story that I wrote down the fandom and prompt for yesterday. Didn't get far, though, because I'm getting tired. Then again, I did also spend a lot of words on a non-WED post about fannish things, so even if that's not what I typically count for writing (because I want to make sure I somehow work on my creative stuff), but it did take its time.


Tally

( Days 1-14 under the cut )

Day 15: auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme

Day 16: alexseanchai, auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman

Day 17: alexseanchai, auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman

Day 18: alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, nafs, sanguinity shadaras, sylvanwitch, yasaman

Day 19: auroracloud, china_shop,

Let me know if I missed you on the tally, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet! You can join in or drop out any time.

We're actually in the second half of April now. To be honest, I have trouble with feeling any sort of scale in the passage of time. It's also five weeks exactly since the whole isolation / social distancing thing began in Finland. Which is probably why time scales are hard. Anyway, I don't know who else needs to hear/read this tonight, but: whatever you're feeling in these times, and I mean whatever, it's okay to feel it. Let yourself feel it and ask yourself what you need and be good to yourself a bit. Or more than a bit. Anyway, that's all. If you want some lovely links and things, elisi has some, See this post for nice things.

Anyway, on with the travelling writing show.

Today's Writing

I took a break in the afternoon from Stuff I Needed To Do and spent some of that time scribbling down ideas for my Ambush Project #2. That was fun. I love the brainstorming and imagining phase.

In the evening, I looked at my bingo cards a bit, then went to my femslashficlets prompt table (queer women's lit quotes) and looked at the one completed ficlet I had there and edited through it the best I could. Tomorrow I'll decide whether I should try to get a beta, or just boldly post it without.

I also looked at the other prompts, made some new notes about ships I could write stories for (more specifically one new ship, courtesy of my podcast listening last night), and then I started to find one. I didn't get very far because it made me feel more things than I had the energy for, but it was a start.


Tally

( Days 1-14 under the cut )

Day 15: auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme

Day 16: alexseanchai, auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman

Day 17: auroracloud, china_shop

Let me know if I missed you on the tally, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet! You can join in or drop out any time.

Voluntary writing question of the day: Do you track words counts or do you have other ways of tracking/measuring your writing progress, besides checking in here? I didn't use to do anything like that, unless I was doing NaNoWriMo and wanted to beat a specific goal. Then for a couple of years at least, I did track my word counts and have yearly goals, inspired my some communities here on DW. But I abandoned it this year, because it didn't feel like a meaningful way for me to follow my progress, especially when I sometimes handwrite a lot (making it hard to get a precise count) and also write in two languages that have very different structures, making the word count comparisons less meaningful. But now that I'm only following my daily writing, I sometimes miss being able to mark in a list when I've had a particularly productive day or something. Ah well, I can probably live with it. But thinking about that made me curious about how you folks approach these things.

I do have some tiny rewards for myself for whenever I reach certain word count milestones with the new version of my novel, but I haven't yet reached any of them. Maybe I should just add more tiny rewards for other things as well! Like for an X number of fanfic words, for published fics, for fics in new fandoms, for getting so-and-so far in a notebook... But I'd have to think of how to come up with enough rewards since I don't have a lot of money these days.

On with the show!

Today's Writing

Though I had actual scheduled programme in the morning, I woke up early enough that I had some time for writing after breakfast. I did more free-writing that turned into more brainstorming for Ambush Project #2 (it needs a snappier pseudonym). And in the evening I finally got started on one of my bingo cards - I wrote 499 words on one of the squares on the April Bingo Card. Pure fluff, but that's what I need now. It still needs at least a few hundred words to be complete, but I was pleased with my progress anyway.


Tally

( Days 1-10 under the cut )

Day 11: auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, yasaman, ysilme


Day 12: auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, falkner, lferion, luzula, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, yasaman, ysilme

Day 13: alexseanchai, auroracloud, badly_knitted, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, falkner, lferion, luzula, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme

Day 14: auroracloud, badly_knitted, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, yasaman, ysilme

Day 15: auroracloud, china_shop

Let me know if I missed you on the tally, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet! You can join in or drop out any time.

All right, my little Easter break is about to be done, but I guess I really needed it! I do feel good about having taken some extra time "off" (in quotation marks because my schedules are so very self-determined at the moment, not because it wasn't time off). Guess if I did any of the cleaning I meant to do, beyond routine maintenance? No!! Uh, I really do need to get to that soon.

By the way, the posts have recently gotten too large to crosspost on LJ anymore, but nobody's been checking in there, so I'm just not going to crosspost. I'll try to make a note about the fact there, in case someone does need it, but it's too much hassle to make it crosspost when nobody seems to need it.

Today's Writing

I ended up doing a lot of non-fiction writing by hand. Memories and such. They might just be practice, or I might some day want to do more purposeful non-fiction about those topics - doesn't matter now, the important thing was writing them. I really enjoyed it. Later I typed up some more handwritten stuff for my novel. I didn't add and edit as much as I did for yesterday's scene, but some, anyway.

I kind of meant to do more, but then I spent a lot of time writing a podcast recommendation e-mail to a friend. Which reminded me that I've promised to do one over here... Will try to do it soon! (Can't just copy-paste since it was in Finnish and I'd ideally like it to be useful for more than two of my readers.)


Tally
(edited days 1-12 for the updates from comments to this post)

( Days 1-10 under the cut )

Day 11: auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, lferion, luzula, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, silveradept, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, yasaman, ysilme
Day 12: auroracloud, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, deifire, falkner, lferion, luzula, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, shadaras, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, yasaman, ysilme

Day 13: auroracloud, china_shop,

Let me know if I missed you on the tally, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet! You can join in or drop out any time.