loaded_march: (loaded march)
[personal profile] loaded_march
Things have been difficult -- and strange -- writing-wise, particularly lately.  I wouldn't call it Writer's Block, not in any way or form.  It's more of a Writer's Deluge.  Too many ideas, and it's like walking through thick forest to come upon a field of eggs in a marshy pond, they all crack open all at once.  There's all these little ducklings, suddenly, squabbling for attention and wanting to be fed.

Don't get me wrong.  They're awfully cute ducklings.  Fuzzy and soft, with light brown down with deep emerald green undertones.  There's the one with the wicked, devious gleam in its eyes, because it fully plans on stealing all the worms.  There's the sweet one with the golden feather-tips that just wants to cuddle.  There's even the runt, with down so light it might as well be a light blond, and it scratches itself with a little bit of confusion, as if it's not quite sure what it's supposed to do now.

They're worse than plot bunnies.  They're story duckies.

So I gave myself permission to take a break over the Easter weekend.  No writing, no thinking about any stories, no angsting over ACBB, no stressing over all the stories that are ony half-finished and nowhere close to being done.  To ensure that, I set my PC laptop to installing two years worth of updates (whoops) and filled the browser on my Mac with all the longfics I could find, regardless of fandom, because I'm just as much an avid reader as I am an obsessive writer, and I finish everything I read -- unless it's very, very bad (serious plot inconsistencies, for example), or, worse, doesn't have any formatting whatsoever.

My tactics didn't work, not 100% -- I'd pull out a sketchbook and start infodumping new ideas and plots for one of the original fiction novels I plan on rewriting sometime soon, since it was the one that had garnered the most attention from agents when I first shopped it around, years ago.  I'd write notes and sketch out scenes or draw out symbols for hours.

Or I'd knit, and get annoyed with it, and shove it aside.  Or I'd get off my ass, finally, and unpack some of the last few boxes since the move.  Guess what's in those boxes?

Papers.  Lots of papers.  I have an impressive collection of stationery and pens.  I have a pile of moleskins of full-fledged story ideas that never actually got written.  I found a ream of printed sheets for a book I'd forgotten writing but never submitted anywhere.  I found scraps of papers with seemingly random lines written on them -- including on the back of an envelope, the back of a coaster from a local bar, and a sheet of paper that, clearly, someone had been working on before I jerked it out from under their pen to appropriate.

So much for taking a break from writing and everything associated with that, huh?

Baby ducklings.  Worse than fucking plot bunnies, I swear.

Date: 2016-03-30 01:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] alilypea.livejournal.com
I took a break from writing so long that I swear I've forgotten how to do it and I kind of ache because of it.

I just keep an idea list in a Google Doc and when I run out of ideas I go in there, just because there's so many platforms to save and access that in.

Date: 2016-03-30 08:00 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] loaded-march.livejournal.com
The Google Docs thing is a good idea though for some reason I can't bring myself to use it. So I use text editor for that, except I keep forgetting I already have a file (okay, several) called "Story ideas" and keep saving them under a new name, so at any given time I have a bunch of icons on my desktop labelled, "Story idea 1", "storyidea", "stryidea", "STORY", "IDEAS", "Today's Story idea", with no idea of their contents, so I have to open every damn one of them to find out what's in them.

(though I don't dare)

(*pokes you gently to write again*)

Date: 2016-03-31 01:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] alilypea.livejournal.com
I've gone to a few different things, but Docs or Zoho is what I go back to. I rather tragically lost a nano in the cloud once.

Oh gee, I guess I will. I have been feeling some Foggy/Matt feels from Daredevil.

Date: 2016-03-31 08:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] loaded-march.livejournal.com
Ugh, that sucks. I hate that nothing is reliable and that you can lose anything.

(I'm not even going to mention the minor freakout yesterday, where I had to text the Spouse to ask if he'd seen my red USB drive, because that had the latest version of something I'm working on that wasn't saved anywhere else.)

Daredevil! \o/

Date: 2016-03-31 02:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] alilypea.livejournal.com
I know, even paper.

Oh god, that would kill me.

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