As I’ve gotten older I’ve realised that I require structure. My brain chemistry dictates that I live a very chaotic life so any small measure of control I can exercise is very comforting. I’ve made myself a writing schedule if I stick to it is as much a mystery to me as anyone else. However, I’m on day twenty-three and I believe I’m doing relatively well. I’m hoping to keep myself engaged. The 007 Fest I recently was a part of showed me that I needed challenges, but not in the form of deadlines. I’m trying to set goals for myself that are not necessarily regular postings. If I manage to write around four hundred words a day or work on a project for at least an hour I feel pretty satisfied with my progress. I’ve made a tentative writing schedule if anyone wants to check it out. It is definitely subject to change and I’ve tried to promise myself that I will not contribute to my existing unfinished fics.
So part of that schedule is editing my older already posted works. One of the greatest challenges that I face is that I have no beta. I’ve been using the free version of Grammarly lately. It catches most of the errors considering that my English is a bit irregular. For the first thirteen years of my life, I went to an international school, so I use a lot of British spellings and expressions. When I moved back to the United States, I had to school myself to remember that Americans don’t spell or say things that way. I finally gave that up after a few years and just let people deal. So now my writing is an amalgamate of British expressions and weird Western American colloquialisms. Recently, I’ve found that if I plug my stories into Google translate and let it read it back to me I find all of the words I’ve missed or parts that just sound unwieldy.
As part of my editing, I am revisiting Fanfiction.net. I don’t care for it, but some of my audience is still there. I’m reuploading the explicit fics that I had censored during the 2012 purge. I haven’t made the decision yet as to whether I am going to take the chance to post them in their entirety or rewrite portions of them to pass the guidelines for M but not MA. I feel like rewriting them would be untrue to the intent in which I wrote them. I have, however, decided to upload the rest of my fics; for a while, I had left only my most popular ones on the site
Speaking of popularity, does anyone read original stuff any more? I’ve written a few original works, but I feel like there is no interest in original fiction anymore. I wonder if it is because I exist in an echo chamber of fanfiction or it is because of my own experience. I find lately that I struggle to read anything that is not fanfiction, even if it is the source material for my fandoms. I posted a couple of chapters of my NaNoWriMo 2012 novel Dark Dreams on AO3 and have since then come to realise that perhaps it is not the best platform for original work. I hesitate to describe it as a thriller anymore because of the dystopian overtones in the story. I totally lost interest in completing it after the 2016 election. Current events at that time, and since then, mirror the content far too much for me to be comfortable about the subject matter. However, I do have some poetry which I am still considering getting published as an ebook. I have several beautiful photographs I’ve taken over the years that I want to pair with each entry. Perhaps I can leverage some of this newfound motivation into getting that done.
Well, that is about it for this entry. Next time it’s all about fandoms, new and old. I’ll finish off with another plug for my SS Sam series and the link for the prompt list. Plot bunnies abound, until next time y’all!
blueharlequin 