January 2024 Writing Wrap-Up
Feb. 4th, 2024 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fractoluminescenceI don't really know how to start this, since it's my first time writing anything like it. I did make a first post when I created my journal, but this feels different - and while I have a habit of briefly journaling during my writing sessions, I rarely reflect on what I've accomplished beyond a couple of days back. I thought this would be as easy as any entry - but now that I'm here, I hesitate, I dread to look back - which is so unlike the writer part of me.
Well, here I am. And I've got a month of entries to go through, and a lot to say, so I'll be alright.
I've had several things going on this past month - as I usually do. What was new was the Dreamwidth account - I'd never used a traditional blogging platform before, so it took some adjusting. I took some time to figure out how the website worked - am still figuring it out, to be fair - and what I wanted to do with it, because it looked fun and wouldn't it be a shame to leave it be now that I have access to it. And wouldn't it be a good opportunity to have a neat archive of my writing journey - not a messy day-by-day journal like I have set up on Notion, and not the what-am-I-even-doing-with-these journal entries that I've got all over pretty much any account and paper journal that I use.
I guess I'll find out if it's meant to be soon enough.
GYWO is going well. I worked on my writing on 12 days in January - the minimum my pledge had me aiming for being 10. It's a good thing, of course - especially since I know there are months during which I tend to write significantly less, so (like November, ironically enough).
There are two writing projects I'm focusing on right now, the first of which is the story I'm writing for the IchiBowl event. It's a tough one for me - I'm not really used to writing short stories, because most of the stories I come up with instinctively are at least novella-length. It trips me up - there was no already-existing plunny I could use, and I've got a minimum of 5k words to write in a couple of months total, which is longer than the short stories I'm used to writing (when I write any at all). And I can't even tell if it's going well - I got myself into a bit of a pickle because I realized when I started the second scene that some of the themes and symbolism were reminiscent of Shakespeare's The Tempest, so I decided to take some time to read through it while taking notes. For inspiration purposes.
I had miscalculated how long this was going to take me, of course. It's early February though, and I'm finally done with it. I've still got roughly two weeks until the next check-in, so as long as I don't run into a wall of some kind (I always do, but most walls I can climb over rather easily), things should go fairly smoothly.
The second project I've got ongoing - well, it's the first project out of the two really, because I've had it ongoing for years and it's been the love of my life - is whatever the fuck what I used to call Isolated has become. It was meant to be a single story - but now that I've learned to outline and I know it's SEVEN FREAKING BOOKS (probably), things have started making a lot more sense - and looking a lot more messy now that I know what a mess looks like.
That's where my writing progress this past month comes in - but first, some more context. I'm mostly focusing on the first book - or what I currently think of as the first book, the order may change since different books follow different characters - which I've temporarily titled You Only Die Twice (a title that has ironically come to downright contradict elements of the wider story since I first picked it). And I've been having this issue with it...See, originally - back when this story was meant to be one book, and was a crossover - back when its main character Lydia was as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper and the genre was supposed to be romance - back then, I introduced a subplot about the second lead. Or - I mean, I guess I'm not sure if he's the second lead in this particular volume anymore - maybe he is. At any rate, I introduced a subplot because of the crossover aspect - and when I removed that aspect just a couple of months into writing the story, I kept the subplot, because it was fun.
Yeah, except it didn't fit with the rest of the story at all. It didn't fit with the themes that the story developed over time - nor with the worldbuilding, nor with the character it was supposed to be centered around. I spent years trying to make it work - and a year or two trying to remove it, because it was starting to impede my story and made it so much harder to write. The worse part is, it didn't even have any impact on the rest of the books - but it had been there for so long, and was so deeply anchored in the whole original concept I had for YODT, that removing it was genuinely really hard.
Well, guess what. I've removed it. I've finally found a way of extirpating it from the story. It felt like removing a bunch of supporting beams, and now I've got holes to patch all throughout the 20 or so chapters I've already written, but I roughly know what to fill them with. And the character development for the second lead makes a lot more sense now. The story seems...so much more in harmony with itself - and with me. Now that it's removed, the pattern is re-knitting itself together in a way that works and it look so much better.
Other than that, I've worked on the worldbuilding for Isolated a bit. It's mostly just fanwanking, but this story specifically is too interlaced with the worldbuilding for me to take it lightly, lest I awkwardly tread on eggshells trying to make it make sense to the reader without revealing I have no idea what I'm doing.
In short, I've spent the month reading through The Tempest to get inspo for my story for the IchiBowl event, as well as figured out how to get rid of that one subplot that has been plaguing YODT for years. It has been a productive month.
Well, here I am. And I've got a month of entries to go through, and a lot to say, so I'll be alright.
I've had several things going on this past month - as I usually do. What was new was the Dreamwidth account - I'd never used a traditional blogging platform before, so it took some adjusting. I took some time to figure out how the website worked - am still figuring it out, to be fair - and what I wanted to do with it, because it looked fun and wouldn't it be a shame to leave it be now that I have access to it. And wouldn't it be a good opportunity to have a neat archive of my writing journey - not a messy day-by-day journal like I have set up on Notion, and not the what-am-I-even-doing-with-these journal entries that I've got all over pretty much any account and paper journal that I use.
I guess I'll find out if it's meant to be soon enough.
GYWO is going well. I worked on my writing on 12 days in January - the minimum my pledge had me aiming for being 10. It's a good thing, of course - especially since I know there are months during which I tend to write significantly less, so (like November, ironically enough).
There are two writing projects I'm focusing on right now, the first of which is the story I'm writing for the IchiBowl event. It's a tough one for me - I'm not really used to writing short stories, because most of the stories I come up with instinctively are at least novella-length. It trips me up - there was no already-existing plunny I could use, and I've got a minimum of 5k words to write in a couple of months total, which is longer than the short stories I'm used to writing (when I write any at all). And I can't even tell if it's going well - I got myself into a bit of a pickle because I realized when I started the second scene that some of the themes and symbolism were reminiscent of Shakespeare's The Tempest, so I decided to take some time to read through it while taking notes. For inspiration purposes.
I had miscalculated how long this was going to take me, of course. It's early February though, and I'm finally done with it. I've still got roughly two weeks until the next check-in, so as long as I don't run into a wall of some kind (I always do, but most walls I can climb over rather easily), things should go fairly smoothly.
The second project I've got ongoing - well, it's the first project out of the two really, because I've had it ongoing for years and it's been the love of my life - is whatever the fuck what I used to call Isolated has become. It was meant to be a single story - but now that I've learned to outline and I know it's SEVEN FREAKING BOOKS (probably), things have started making a lot more sense - and looking a lot more messy now that I know what a mess looks like.
That's where my writing progress this past month comes in - but first, some more context. I'm mostly focusing on the first book - or what I currently think of as the first book, the order may change since different books follow different characters - which I've temporarily titled You Only Die Twice (a title that has ironically come to downright contradict elements of the wider story since I first picked it). And I've been having this issue with it...See, originally - back when this story was meant to be one book, and was a crossover - back when its main character Lydia was as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper and the genre was supposed to be romance - back then, I introduced a subplot about the second lead. Or - I mean, I guess I'm not sure if he's the second lead in this particular volume anymore - maybe he is. At any rate, I introduced a subplot because of the crossover aspect - and when I removed that aspect just a couple of months into writing the story, I kept the subplot, because it was fun.
Yeah, except it didn't fit with the rest of the story at all. It didn't fit with the themes that the story developed over time - nor with the worldbuilding, nor with the character it was supposed to be centered around. I spent years trying to make it work - and a year or two trying to remove it, because it was starting to impede my story and made it so much harder to write. The worse part is, it didn't even have any impact on the rest of the books - but it had been there for so long, and was so deeply anchored in the whole original concept I had for YODT, that removing it was genuinely really hard.
Well, guess what. I've removed it. I've finally found a way of extirpating it from the story. It felt like removing a bunch of supporting beams, and now I've got holes to patch all throughout the 20 or so chapters I've already written, but I roughly know what to fill them with. And the character development for the second lead makes a lot more sense now. The story seems...so much more in harmony with itself - and with me. Now that it's removed, the pattern is re-knitting itself together in a way that works and it look so much better.
Other than that, I've worked on the worldbuilding for Isolated a bit. It's mostly just fanwanking, but this story specifically is too interlaced with the worldbuilding for me to take it lightly, lest I awkwardly tread on eggshells trying to make it make sense to the reader without revealing I have no idea what I'm doing.
In short, I've spent the month reading through The Tempest to get inspo for my story for the IchiBowl event, as well as figured out how to get rid of that one subplot that has been plaguing YODT for years. It has been a productive month.
