now is time for Blog

horrid start to this week, and that's, well. it's not something that's going to get better, just something i have to get used to, i guess. in typical fashion i am just simply Not Thinking About It bc when i do i just end up crying and that's not helping anything. :/

things have been fine otherwise. i've been hitting a lot of goals i've set for myself; getting some shit done around the house that i've been putting off, writing more, etc. a little while back i spent an evening clicking thru the Random Community button and checking different dw comms out. found a lot of writing challenges, which were always something i was big into on lj. finished a fic for a flashfic challenge for small fandoms yesterday. got my eyes on that comm specifically for Evil West reasons lmao.

gonna let the fic set for a few days before proofing it one final time and then i'll post it to the comm; can't post it anywhere else until the challenge duration is up but i'll link to it at least. pretty happy with it overall c:

aside from that, posting spirit hat outside of dw again. decided on this despite my wariness of getting hung up on an update schedule bc about a week back i wrote the final lines for 'sunshine,' so i'm feeling very good about finishing it up soon.

not that this means i've finished the last chapter; i only have a detailed outline/rough draft for it, but bc i tend to write out all the dialogue when i do those i ended up just writing the last little bit of the fic. so now i've got that, heck yeah.

my problem ends up being that i always write those bits in present tense (i don't know why i do this???) so then even if there are salvageable lines i still have to go thru and change the tense on everything lol. i delete this stuff as i go so i don't have any of it from earlier fic chapters and just have stuff that'd be spoilers, but like if you want to see what i'm talking about here's a selection for a scene from an outline/draft i wrote for a din/migs canon divergent book of boba fett au that i'll never write:

( i got so obsessed with the brain lizard detail in book of boba u have no idea )

so that's effectively what the last chapter of 'sunshine' looks like right now lol. sometimes i'll also cut out action descriptions entirely and just do only dialogue, but that's uh. that's the writing process for me lmao. not that i do detailed outlines/drafts like this for everything; sometimes i'll start getting claustrophobic about an outline that's too tight so i have to like. fucking freeball it. i prefer to leave enough room that scenes and character interactions can develop organically when i'm writing, and a lot of that happens when i do detailed outlines/drafts like this and then it's just a matter of rewriting/expanding. but other times i'll have to ax huge chunks of things i've written bc feeling too strangled by them.

guess i should clarify that i do have like a barebones overarching outline of where i want things to go, like a 'how to get from point A to B' kind of thing, but i try not to fill that in too much until i'm actually sitting down to write xyz scene. or, you know, if i get an idea in the shower and then need to jot it down quickly before i forget. and then there are times when i'll get an idea for a scene and decide to write a wholeass fic around it. this happened with an ff8 longfic i was writing in high school and is also the reason i decided to keep going with spirit hat after 'blooms.'

anyway man, that's a ramble. but we are here at the personal blog/Yell Void, so it's fine lol.

feel like i'm getting closer to finally finishing 'sunshine.' been powering through some edits, and while there are still a few scenes i need to finish up writing, or some minor stuff i need to clean up, i am done with the bulk of the editing, which is a huge relief bc i hate editing lmao.

of course lightmode still has to beta everything, and i still need to finish writing the final 2-3 chapters, but the editing was slowing me down so much that just having finished most of it i already feel a lot better about things. was feeling pretty negative there for a very long while so this is also very very nice.

anyway, i think the fic'll end up 23-25 chapters total based on how i decide to split up the last chapter + this series of three chapters before it. also going back and forth with how much i want to add into the last chapter; there's a lot of stuff i'd like to write but which isn't really crucial. like it's all stuff i can cut and post as like a bonus scene later on without changing the narrative any. same with ch18: there's a scene i need to rewrite which will need quite a bit of work, and which i think would really add to what's going on with karl, but it also isn't necessary, and i've been feeling more and more antsy about just finishing, so axing this scene would help expedite that...but i also really think it would be nice to include.

so idk, stuff for me to figure out as i'm finishing up that chapter, i guess.

would like to give some kind of concrete estimate for when i plan to be finished but it's really entirely contingent on how long i can keep up this level of energy/motivation lmao. i guess what i can say is that of the 24 chapters listed in the google doc, all but the last two are 'finished,' with ch18 having a sizable scene left to (potentially) be written and ch20 having a much much smaller section for me to finish. the final chapter is completely unwritten but ch23 is around 3/4s of the way done. oh! and i am planning on an epilogue/coda as well but it's not going to be very long and i'm also really looking forward to writing it c:

of course there's also going to be a final multi-chapter fic, but it's not going to be anywhere as long as this one, thank god. i'd like to work on other stuff sometime before i die after all. it's also got all the shit i've been most wanting to write in it, so that's motivation for sure.

anyway, think i'm done with my little progress report. there is progress! i'm going to eventually finish this sucker!!

and then eventually start on another multi-part wintersberg series bc after all why not, etc.

doing a reread of spirit hat bc finally feeling the motivation to work on it again, but i equally feel the need to reread it to make sure i'm remembering details correctly bc it's been SO LONG, and it's just amusing the heck out of me to get to certain points and know exactly where certain things were changed or even entire chapters deleted. there's also the level of "how much i planned out from the beginning" vs "how much was added in later."

( more rambling here )

and then the other part of rereading pt1 is seeing everything that i was setting up that i haven't even gotten to write yet, but that i've been dying to, and getting all motivated to continue writing.

got so hung up on and frustrated with doing rewrites for so long that it just really compounded the burnout i was feeling and the stress i was under from irl shit that i just had to shove everything to the side. which is, honestly speaking, probably for the best. was getting to where i hated even thinking about the fic for a while there, like it started feeling like a job, not a hobby, and that's exactly the opposite way i want to feel about fiction writing.

it is very genuinely frustrating to have basically the whole of pt4 technically written, but being unable to post any of it bc so much of it needs to be rewritten, in some cases for the third or fourth time (aaaaaaa!!!!!!!!). slowly being backstabbed by my own perfectionism over and over and unable to do anything but sit there all: "okay :-("

and focusing on getting to the parts i'm dying to write doesn't help bc it's just a reminder that i'm not writing it lmfao.

like only lightmode knows how many times i rewrote what i've been calling the shed chapter (the "ethan gets drunk and they make out on the porch" chapter). and i think it's infinitely better for it but by the end i was so fucking sick of it. nothing was working for me 100% and i needed that chapter to work 100%. it was goddamn imperative that it work 100%. not even for like. the success of the narrative, i just needed it to be perfect bc i guess i'll die if things i make aren't perfect? idk.

anyway, enough time has passed now that i'm not feeling the burnout as much and i feel like i actually want to write again. to specifically write spirit hat again. gotta get thru pt2 and ethan's castle explorin' first tho (not a big fan of that section tbh; would prob rewrite it if i was editing pt2 rn). there's stuff that got axed from pt2 too; not bc i misremembered something from the game, just because it fucking sucked lmao. no one knows what bullet we all collectively dodged, but we should all be glad to have dodged it lol.

(oh, except for the part where i was going to have karl find the karl book when they got to the winterses' house and things were going to go Very Poorly bc no telepathy yet and ethan was going to end up impaled and it was going to be So Fraught, and then i was like "nah they spent most of this fic fighting, the karl book discovery can be moved to later." but like initially was really gonna lean into the enemies to lovers thing, was gonna need to For Real Tho the dubcon tag, and then i was just like nah bc i was tired of writing them fighting. also bc i wanted to add in fake married bc i knew lightmode enjoyed the trope. the ways lightmode has unknowingly shaped the fic: fake married. the ways lightmode has knowingly shaped the fic: i asked them what they wanted to see and they said karl in a hawaiian shirt on the beach. i mean also all their edits/suggestions lmao, but here specifically i am referring to Unforeseen Plot Divergences.)

just rambling at this point. a lot of this is stuff i've wanted to talk about for a while, but twitter isn't exactly the best place for it, and then i also figure that this is all a "no one cares" sitch. but thankfully i've remembered my dreamwidth exists: my personal internet word vomit space, hell yeah i'll holler into the void.

anyway back to the reread. here's hoping i can finish soon and actually get to some writing!