Lost in Lualand

projects i'm working on & the difficulties thereof:

* a new Yuri/Claude fic that's haunting my brain. see, there was this Crimson Flower concept for Claude i'd been vaguely thinking about for a while, but couldn't make cohere into something tractable, and then a prompt showed up on the kinkmeme, and somehow the two atoms smacked right into each other and, bam, explosion. i'm still early enough in the outlining stage i don't know for sure if this'll hit go or not, but... i'm feeling really excited about it. will probably end up being a 2-4 parter because it has to do. a lot. before i can get to the scene i'm burning to write. it figures that i would stare at a prompt meant for porn and be like "actually i can turn this into a high concept, artsy angst fic with lots of underlying tensions and dissatisfactions," huh

* the last fic in that series of Claude backstory fics. i'm... stuck on this one, tbh, and by stuck i mean, i don't even have an outline yet. which is weird! i was so excited to get to this one!

the general idea was, i wanted to tell the story of Claude's mom via negative space—like, the stuff Claude hears in Riegan from people to knew her, the stuff he notices about the way her old room was laid out, old journals, etc. i was thinking about that bit in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, when Yeine finds her mother's old letters/journal or whatever and finds out actually her mom was kind of a bitch... and i love that idea so much, but i don't really have a clear scene in mind, or a rhythm, or a voice, and it feels like i need at least one of those to really get the storymaking process going, if that makes sense? idk. i hope it comes together. because THE ONLY REASON i even WROTE "Deer Among Cattle" was because i wanted to get to this fic!!! oh ironies

* "summer is miles and miles away," the modern AU Claude/Lorenz longfic that i am now apparently writing. i have chapter 3 already drafted, but i have this nagging feeling that not enough *happens* in that chapter... so my current plan is to just go ahead and draft chapter 4, and then read the two chapters together to see how it feels. it helps that i'm terribly excited to write chapter 4, haha, it's where some GOOD SHIT happens. (that being said, lorenz won't make it to SF until... chapter 5 if i'm lucky. sob. why do i do this to myself)

i'm also planning to crack out that Save the Cat book so i can try to make like, a beat sheet, or something??? because it occurred to me that i know so little about structuring longer works, and maybe i should like, do a little bit of planning before blindly pushing out my weird overgrown was-supposed-to-be-a-joke epic....?

* "Coyote Wall." a Claude/Hilda fic that I started writing all the way back in... goddamn September, jeez. Parts of this fic were appropriated into "Where the River Meets the Sea," but I think this fic's trying to tell a different enough story that it's worth shoring it up again. I've got like a 50% done 8k draft lying around; mostly i just need to take a long moment to reread what I've got and figure out what's missing.

(i vaguely remember, the last time i stared at this draft, the problem was: man, depression is hard to render well in fiction. there is a substantial amount of Hilda being kinda broody/antsy/sad for the first half of the narrative, and there's a lot that i think is interesting about that, but it's hard to convey in an interesting way, yaknow?)

* a very silly Golden Deer humor fic I'm doing for a zine that should be some fun sorbet

eta: actually for completeness's sake: i have a feeling my 3-5 parter Tellius bird fic is actually happening this year. just uh. probably much later in the year, since i wanna finish out my Three Houses WIPs first. also, i need to squint at my drafts again to be sure, but i think i'm gonna officially punt on "Move the Chains," that Dragon Age: Inquisition longfic i was writing. i have like 20k written for the next two chapters, and got bogged down trying to edit it because those two chapters weren't working, and... then time passed and i think i've just lost momentum/interest. alas! i was really hoping that'd be my first longfic that would Get To Done. i'll do a draft + note dump here and outline where i was going with it, so it can officially be At Rest, lol

anyway yeah share your own writing woes and/or "how to write longfic" in the comments i guess

lately, i've been trying to be a little more systematic with how i approach my writing.

not in terms of writing schedule, or wordcount goals (though there is a bit of that), more like—i'm keeping a little log of the problems/decisions/tradeoffs i encounter while i'm writing any particular piece, and i'm trying to figure out how i make those decisions, if i can make those decisions faster, etc.

because—look, i'm a slow writer in general, but if i'm in a groove, 1k/day isn't too hard to hit. if i could hit that groove consistently i'd be golden. the problem i often run into, though, is that i'll have a piece mostly done, but then i'll spend like, damn near a week rewriting the same transition over and over because nothing's quite working, and i'll try fiddling with every damn lever available to me (do i need to switch PoV here? does this one scene need to be three scenes instead, and if so, how does that change the overall flow of my narrative? can i word this in a way with the desired conciseness that's still clear? etc), and so on. and i usually find a solution eventually (or, give up, throw hands, and push out something suboptimal), but then two months later i've forgotten all the shit i tried to make that work, and how i decided on the thing i did, because my brain's a damn sieve. and i'm hoping if i record that process, i'll be able to internalize it better, and converge on a solution faster, when i run into similar problems in the future?

in a way this feels not-unlike when i was learning mathematical theory—i was playing catch-up in college on that front, trying to figure out how proofs even worked, and of course the kids who'd been doing this stuff for years couldn't really explain their process. "idk, i looked at it and it felt like an inductive approach would work, so i just did that" i managed to catch up to them only when i started thinking of math in terms of tools—you've got a bunch of math widgets and theorems and axioms lying around, can you use any of them in some fun way for this problem?—and i'd just grind through trying shit out until something stuck. and that works! eventually you internalize some things!

so, hopefully being explicit about my thought process will help me figure out why sometimes the words come fast and why sometimes it's a slog. we'll see!

* * *
at some point i got annoyed at Writing Advice Books, because so many of them focus on more basic elements of craft, or writing prompts for "inspiration", or religious adherence to some Fixed Way Stories Much Work—but maybe there's some book that addresses this sort of thing? stuff like "if you're having an issue introducing a character [x] given [y] complicated situation, here's some stuff to try that you may not have thought about?"

maybe what would be helpful is something like that "writing as a craft q&a" that Ursula Le Guin ran online for a while. (maybe i should pick y'all's brains more...!*)

* i've also toyed with the idea of posting some of the stuff from my "writing decisions" log, but i somewhat suspect that'd only be of academic interest and/or only of interest to me, so

or maybe i'll discover something entirely new about "when the words come easily" vs "when words are horrible"; i'm reminded of this old bit from Virginia Woolf:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

anyway yeah that's what's up in writingtown lately, thoughts welcome

(This post is spoiler free!)

So I don't like Game of Thrones.

I had so many friends who were screaming about it for so long that I figured there must be something to it, and I was finally compelled to start watching when I wanted to know what the hell everyone in the office was blathering about all the time.

The briefest, simplest way to explain my dislike is this: everyone in this universe is either (1) so unlikable that I don't care whether they live or die, or (2) so fucking dumb that I know they're going to do something super-dumb and die at some point, so I don't care¹. (If any of the dumbfucks do happen to live, that won't improve matters; I'll just be thinking "okay he's a fine guy but Jesus who the fuck let him hold power what the hell.")

But the root of my discontent lies deeper, I think. When people explain to me why they like the show/books so much, they generally say something like, "It's fantasy, but it's more realistic, you know? It's not hokey or good-versus-evil, and there's not even that much magic," and I get all frownyfaced.

( oh god how did this get so long )

Fandom secret: a large part of my motivation to start writing fanfic was simply to force myself to finish a lot of stories. Prior to my fandom debut, I'd written very little for about two or three years, and it occurred to me that, while I had lots of half-finished stories lying around, I had very few actually-finished stories lying around, and I didn't feel like I had a great grasp on how I could brainstorm, outline, and produce something coherent when I did come up with something I wanted to write.

So, thoughtdump on what I've learned about my writing process so far!

Lua's General Algorithm for Story-Writing

1. Have a vague idea for a character or plot point you'd like to write.


2. Write down basically all the possible scenes/ideas/etc you have that are related to that character or plot point.


3. Figure out what the "central tension" is going to be.


4. Write down a bunch of scenes that could plausibly be involved in that central tension.


5. Write these scenes and awkwardly mash them together until coherency happens!

I've subconsciously followed some version of this algorithm for most everything from Remnants of Restoration chapter two onward; I have no idea if it is similar to or different from most folks' writing processes. It's hard for me to "just write" before I have something resembling an outline, and when I'm outlining, I make some effort to make sure that every scene goes toward developing whatever the central tension is (to the point where I'll sometimes make notes in my outline that explicitly describe the point of the scene: "this scene develops Volug's affection for Nailah," "this scene introduces a frightening, previously unknown aspect of Tellius," etc).

You can sort of see the first few steps of this process in the earliest notes I have for "White Like Bone":

( White Like Bone (long) )

( Delicately, Madly )