Check-In Post #8

[slashmarks]

Week seven is now complete! (Plus an extra day this time.) Each week, I'll make a new check-in post with a few optional discussion questions. You can use this post to update us on our progress, complain, celebrate, or talk to other participants! Also feel free to discuss each week's questions in our discord server.

Comment to share how your week went!

Optional Discussion Questions

0. How's your project coming? How did this week go?

1. Is anyone reaching the end of their project? If not, do you know how your story will end?

2. What was your most successful previous project (whatever that means to you)?

3. Do you usually work at a certain time of day?

Comments

[sansigma]

0. How's your project coming? How did this week go?

The good news is that I wrote about 500 words every day this week. The bad news is that what I had to do to be able to manage that became increasingly farcical as the week went on.

I already mentioned on Discord that I had a medical issue (since resolved, yay!) that meant I couldn't sit at my computer, and thus started writing on my phone instead, which worked fine but led to a lot of fun typos – but it would get even worse! You see, in time, writing on my phone also led to me overexerting my poor wrists. So now I have temporary resorted to using voice input – and as English isn't my first language, the results are not great.

I can only hope that my wrists will be back to normal in a short enough time that I can still remember what it was I meant to say by "the Queen threw herself off her hipster" or "The queen carried her Jungle daughter all of the way" or "Everybody knew that this was not a Joyce location" when I sit down to edit.

1. Is anyone reaching the end of their project? If not, do you know how your story will end?

I am very far from the end I believe and hope that I am reaching the end of the first chapter with this also the first quarter of the story but fart from the end yet. I do however know how the story will end, to an extent. That is, I know the three interconnected things that will tie up the plot and the two lead characters' character arcs, respectively. I do NOT know, on the other hand, in which order to present them and how to tie the full story up.

2. What was your most successful previous project (whatever that means to you)?

As my current overall goal with my writing is to learn to write longer stories to increase my experience until I'm ready to one day write a novel, I guess my longest finished story is the most successful one. That would be the She-Ra story Something to Purr About, which is 20,420 words long. It's a Catra POV Catra/Glimmer AU retelling of the first season in an alternate timeline where Adora was taken in by Bow's dads instead of the Horde.

That was my first longer work where I applied what I've learned in recent years about story structure, which helped a lot with pacing. (I have written another 20k+ word story before that, but that was a remix which means I had a lot of the story structure already given to me when I began.)

I wrote it for Fandom 5K, thinking it would end up at around that length, lol – and hilariously my project for this event is a re-worked idea that I got for Original 5K. I clearly can't judge story length for shit...

It feels weird to think about that story as successful, though, as the recip never commented. They seem to be a general non-commenter (and serial defaulter) but it still hurts a bit that I wrote so much, and so tailored to their prompts, and they didn't even kudos.

3. Do you usually work at a certain time of day?

I sometimes give myself a good start to the day by writing about 150-ish words in the morning, but I do most of my writing in the evening usually after six o'clock.

[(Anonymous)]

Omg there's another hilarious voice input "typo" in this but it's so funny in context that I won't edit it out...

[chacusha]

0. How's your project coming? How did this week go?
Chugging along. I admit I am allowing myself to get distracted by other art projects. Once I finish all my multifandomdoodle treats, I swear I will focus on my FOC project. <:D

1. Is anyone reaching the end of their project? If not, do you know how your story will end?
Not even close -- still in the "just started" stage. ^^; I do have the ending written, though.

2. What was your most successful previous project (whatever that means to you)?
For comics, I don't think I've ever finished a comic that was longer than a page... My most successful comics, therefore, are brief 1-page comics that I actually managed to finish and which I was thankful I had the art skills to convey what I wanted to convey, because I don't think the joke would work in any medium other than a drawn comic. I now actually have multiple examples of this "1-page humorous gag comic" that is within my abilities to do:
- https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/651475590278430720/the-reason-why-kevin-and-charlotte-are-the-best
- https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/659343003566161920/art-i-drew-as-a-followup-to-this-fic-this-is-what
- https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/716237958935609344/star-trek-deep-space-nine-season-4-episode-4 (this one I made as a test pilot for my FOC project)

So yeah, right now, comics are apparently all about allowing me to deliver jokes with the right timing...

For fic, I finished a 58k fic for my OTP last year. I still don't know how I managed to do that -- it is very out of character for me to write and finish longfic. But this OTP somehow is magic for me and makes me take on and finish projects that I wouldn't think feasible before actually writing them.

3. Do you usually work at a certain time of day?
Late at night after dinner is the usual fanwork time. But I've also been doing morning work sessions, which I like but they're short!