mayalaen

This isn't a complaint or demand, and I would never directly ask anybody to change how they do things. Because fic is free, and I'm grateful.

And I spent years in fandoms back when writers frequently didn't even list pairings or fic length or summaries at all.

But it's very difficult for me to figure out whether or not I want to read a fic when the summaries are only snippets of the fic itself. Snippets that don't even include key sentences.

Some fandoms seem to do this more than others, but I'm seeing it more and more.

I don't check tags unless there's a snippet summary, but most of the time I can't even figure out what a fic is about from the tags.

Again, I'm not complaining, but I'm asking if this is a trend done on purpose and I'm just not connecting things or missed something.

Is it done so more people read the fic because they want to find out what it's about? Is it a stylistic thing?

If traditional summaries are going out of style, I don't want to fight it like an ass on my own fics.

I like numbers/stats and research, and my schiz brain recognizes patterns and is happy when I indulge it so I did some fun work 🥳

I already looked into how gummy nights impacted my work life, but today I looked at how it impacted my writing, and I’m even more shocked by my writing than work.

I started gummies on Saturday nights in the beginning of 2018.

In December 2022 I started taking them nightly, but stopped ALL gummies May 1st once I realized that it only fixed 2 (admittedly big) things but brought on about 15 other intolerable things, including no motivation or creativity and more depression.

See if you notice the difference in my writing year by year 😲

Number of Fics Per Year

2013 - 1 (my first fandom fic after years of hiatus)
2014 - 46
2015 - 30
2016 - 43
2017 - 43
2018 - 1
2019 - 1
2020 - 0
2021 - 2
2022 - 3

Words Written Per Year

2013 - 7707
2014 - 418,162
2015 - 440,238
2016 - 213,917
2017 - 345,959
2018 - 238
2019 - 4946
2021 - 323,168 (2/3 of this written in 2017 & plagiarism motivated me)
2022 - 35,211

I also had WAY more interaction with friends before 2018

The stats are very similar with my real life work, especially once I started taking gummies nightly.

However, it was much easier to sit and watch TV, so I got a lot of things watched when before I didn’t really watch all that much TV/movies 😂

BTW I’m not saying gummies don’t serve a purpose or that they’re not helpful for anyone else. I still plan to use them for severe psychotic episode, much like I would’ve done years ago with antipsychotics (gummies are WAY safer for me with WAY less side effects) taken for an 8-week course.

I’ve wanted to redo my website for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it because the shop takes up so much of my life.

Yesterday I decided I should just start working on it instead of putting it off, get what I can done just so I have SOMETHING.

I want to make it functional for as many people as possible whether they need light or dark background, use screenreaders, etc.

To get some inspiration, I looked at a few websites of famous authors and BNF writers in fandom who had their own sites.

But after looking at those sites, I’m shocked by how bland they are.

Is this a thing? Are they trying to focus on the books? Are book readers other than me easily shocked by colors and movement and interesting things?

Even writers who have blogs are doing this. Even writers who know code. Even writers who have tons of $$$ to throw at web designers.

I wasn’t planning on making something so overly flashy that it wasn’t functional, but should I be backing way off in my plans and just go with a white background, a few boring pics, and simple paragraphs next to them with a bland header and no footer?

No eye candy whatsoever?

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead

Back when I was writing and posting a lot of fics, a big part of why I was able to do that is I was using prompts from other people.

It never occurred to me that the reason was I had a goal in mind and oh I dunno AN OUTLINE to work from.

Now that I’ve created an outline for the first 4 parts of CON ‘verse, it feels more like I’m filling a prompt and more stuff is flowing and it’s easier to pick up where I leave off from one day to the next.

I know professional writers and teachers always talk about outlines and how important they are but I thought my schiz brain worked differently and it wouldn’t help. I’ve tried before and sucked at creating the outlines in the first place.

In conclusion, outlines are cool.

When I was working on the CON ‘verse series three years ago, I posted Part 2: Control Theory quickly even though I didn’t really like it. Parts of it felt rushed and weird and my beta was trying to help but it just wasn’t flowing.

Now that I’ve reread it, I like it more than I did then. Sure it could use some beefing up with descriptions, fleshing out, but I like it.

It’s also making me realize that Part 3: Differential Association wasn’t supposed to be next in the series.

Part 4: Symbolic Interactionism fits better following Part 2.

And Part 3: Differential Association needs more things to happen before it can fit into the ‘verse anyway.

I’m editing everything and getting ready to post Symbolic Interactionism, but it’s very long and involved.

I think that’s another reason why I got overwhelmed by the whole series (and life itself). A lot of stuff going on and I usually don’t outline things. I kinda just write notes.

With a ‘verse that’s been in my head since I was 10 years old with well over 20 parts planned and/or written, it’s big.

I’ve gone back and outlined the first 4 parts of the series, and after I post Symbolic Interactionism (part 4 that will actually now be part 3), I’m going to go back and edit some of what’s already posted

* WARNING THAT THERE WILL BE EDITING TO THE ALREADY POSTED TWO PARTS *

I don’t know if switching up the order will confuse readers who were expecting Part 3 to be the summary promised at the end of Part 2, but oh well.

I also kinda wanna change Ruby to Meg. The more the series goes on, the more I’ve found a role that’s perfect for Ruby. And Meg fits the current Ruby role better.

For several weeks now I’ve been editing both the original fic version and the SPN version of CON ‘verse. Figured I might as well since I was gathering examples for the places that wanted proof of plagiarized stuff.

Over the last few days I went from editing to writing before I realized what I was doing because it just started flowing.

I checked last night and I’m at 20k words added to the fic in just the last 3 days, and I was like AWESOME I’m writing!!!

I couldn’t sleep more than 2 hours last night, so I got up and was messing around on the computer. I started looking at my old houses on Zillow and Google Maps, and Maps recently updated their photos.

The houses looked so bad that I started to cry. Wasn’t sure why. I’m not a nostalgic person, but they were impressively bad compared to just a few years ago. I grew up in shitty neighborhoods to begin with, but damn it’s like everybody’s not just letting things go but actively making it worse.

I got so upset that I went back to bed and I’m like why am I crying over this!?

Then I remembered how much I’d been writing and was like oh yeah I’m depressed that’s why the writing is flowing so well.

Ugh. Why can’t I be doing well AND write?! It’s been like this all my life!

I guess that shows how well I’ve been doing over the last 2-3 years AND how shitty I’ve been the last few months. Didn’t realize I was quite this bad.

But I’m writing! I missed writing sooooo bad!!

I didn’t really write last year. For the whole year. It was weird.

So I started January 1st, trying to write a little every day.

I managed 3 days in a row. They’re short, but I’m somewhat happy with them. More happy with the fact that I actually did it for three days in a row.

Family and shop things got in the way the last few days, but I’m kind of excited. Putting aside time to write without worrying something else is suffering (because it really isn’t) is nice :)

Thinking about posting them on AO3 feels a little overwhelming, and I’m not sure why, so I’m probably going to post them on here and PF and DW. Maybe my confidence is lacking more than I thought? Or maybe just because I haven’t posted on AO3 in so long? Dunno :)

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mayalaen

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Walking Corpse

Entries tagged with writing is hard

summaries?

Stats

website redo

can't be smart all the time

con 'verse

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writing in 2019

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January 2025

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