Year End Writing Thoughts
Dec. 22nd, 2019 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elrhiarhodanKnow I've been a bit too quiet the past few months, but it's been an oddly difficult season.
Actually, I shouldn't really say "oddly" since autumn is always a difficult season for me, and it always hits me as a surprise when I get down on myself or angry at nothing in particular or my creative juices dry up. Then I remember the accretion of death in this season. My mom passed away in late October 2002, my dad died on Thanksgiving day, 2009, my grandmother died on December 1, 1995, and my nephew was killed by a drunk driver on December 12th, 2012. I put on an electric yartzeit candle the middle of October and leave it going until the New Year.
On top of everything, I'm not really feeling too great. I tore my right knee up in April - there's a high-grade tear in the meniscus that's pretty irreparable. The MRI on my left knee (which had been bothering me for years), shows significant cartilage loss and advanced osteo-arthritis. I'd gotten heavy-fluid injections to each knee, which has helped significantly, but those only last six months and it's time for a refresher. My rheumatoid arthritis is flaring again and it'll be time for another round of treatment for that, too.
My boss is (still) a lovely and compassionate human being and has been letting me work at home almost exclusively since July (I can't remember the last time I was in the office).
So, with all of this going on, writing has been a bit difficult of late. The first eight months, the stories flowed out of me like water out of a high-pressure hose, but since September, I've been struggling. Part of it has been that I simply over-committed myself. 2019 for me was the year of the writing exchange - Chocolate Box, Smut Swap, Age Gap, Just Married, and Pining, plus Poetry Fiction and the Kingsman Reverse Bang were all due by mid-August, and every single story far exceeded the minimum word count requirement by significant margins. I published 290k in eight months.
It took me nearly three months to get out another ten thousand words.
I ran into problems with my Fandom Trumps Hate story. I don't know why, but it took forever to gel and I never really felt happy with it until I got almost three-quarters done with it. Setting aside the emotional difficulties I have in autumn, I think I had just gotten to the point where I wanted to write for myself and I couldn't - so everything just got stalled. I finished it about two weeks ago and am finding myself pleased with the result, despite the hair-pulling.
And despite my desire to write something for myself, I'm writing a story for this year's Kingsman Secret Santa event. Yes, the prompt is not my own, but it dovetailed nicely into a holiday story I wrote this time last year - an everyone's Jewish story (I do this in every fandom). It's a five+one - a format I love and loathe in equal measure. I'm a bit stuck on the fourth scene, but it'll come to me.
I'd also signed up for a gift exchange for the Inspector Morse and related series fandom. While I'd never felt fannish about the original series (it is really a product of its time and filled with everything terrible and wonderful about the 90s, including raging homophobia), I still love and adore the early seasons of Lewis and want to write for it, and finally watched the first six seasons of Endeavour. The jury's still out (for me) on whether Shaun Evans is really convincing as a proto-Morse, but honestly, it doesn't really matter. The H/C all but writes itself (the character canonically hates doctors and hospitals and faints at the sight of blood) and the secondary characters are wonderfully developed.
Since it seems that![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
poetry_fiction is not happening this year (I am having a sad about that), it looks like these will be my last two exchanges and challenges for a while. 2020 is going to be the year I write for myself. My dear anarchycox brought it home in a post she made on Tumblr yesterday about how she really wanted to write for herself and not feel like she had to carry the weight of a contracting fandom. These days, I am nowhere near as prolific as Anarchy (too many other things on my plate right now), but what she'd said about needed to write for herself really resonated.
If I keep signing up for challenges, that's where my focus is going to be, and the ideas I have for my own fics are just going to keep dying on the vine. I have works in progress that I am dying to get back to - one is almost 175k and I haven't touched it in years. Another is 5k from finished. Three others are each close to 30k. I'll never get them done if I am committed elsewhere. As much fun as I had writing for others this past year, I need to think of myself for this year.
Give myself permission to be a little selfish. That's not such a bad thing, is it?
Actually, I shouldn't really say "oddly" since autumn is always a difficult season for me, and it always hits me as a surprise when I get down on myself or angry at nothing in particular or my creative juices dry up. Then I remember the accretion of death in this season. My mom passed away in late October 2002, my dad died on Thanksgiving day, 2009, my grandmother died on December 1, 1995, and my nephew was killed by a drunk driver on December 12th, 2012. I put on an electric yartzeit candle the middle of October and leave it going until the New Year.
On top of everything, I'm not really feeling too great. I tore my right knee up in April - there's a high-grade tear in the meniscus that's pretty irreparable. The MRI on my left knee (which had been bothering me for years), shows significant cartilage loss and advanced osteo-arthritis. I'd gotten heavy-fluid injections to each knee, which has helped significantly, but those only last six months and it's time for a refresher. My rheumatoid arthritis is flaring again and it'll be time for another round of treatment for that, too.
My boss is (still) a lovely and compassionate human being and has been letting me work at home almost exclusively since July (I can't remember the last time I was in the office).
So, with all of this going on, writing has been a bit difficult of late. The first eight months, the stories flowed out of me like water out of a high-pressure hose, but since September, I've been struggling. Part of it has been that I simply over-committed myself. 2019 for me was the year of the writing exchange - Chocolate Box, Smut Swap, Age Gap, Just Married, and Pining, plus Poetry Fiction and the Kingsman Reverse Bang were all due by mid-August, and every single story far exceeded the minimum word count requirement by significant margins. I published 290k in eight months.
It took me nearly three months to get out another ten thousand words.
I ran into problems with my Fandom Trumps Hate story. I don't know why, but it took forever to gel and I never really felt happy with it until I got almost three-quarters done with it. Setting aside the emotional difficulties I have in autumn, I think I had just gotten to the point where I wanted to write for myself and I couldn't - so everything just got stalled. I finished it about two weeks ago and am finding myself pleased with the result, despite the hair-pulling.
And despite my desire to write something for myself, I'm writing a story for this year's Kingsman Secret Santa event. Yes, the prompt is not my own, but it dovetailed nicely into a holiday story I wrote this time last year - an everyone's Jewish story (I do this in every fandom). It's a five+one - a format I love and loathe in equal measure. I'm a bit stuck on the fourth scene, but it'll come to me.
I'd also signed up for a gift exchange for the Inspector Morse and related series fandom. While I'd never felt fannish about the original series (it is really a product of its time and filled with everything terrible and wonderful about the 90s, including raging homophobia), I still love and adore the early seasons of Lewis and want to write for it, and finally watched the first six seasons of Endeavour. The jury's still out (for me) on whether Shaun Evans is really convincing as a proto-Morse, but honestly, it doesn't really matter. The H/C all but writes itself (the character canonically hates doctors and hospitals and faints at the sight of blood) and the secondary characters are wonderfully developed.
Since it seems that
poetry_fiction is not happening this year (I am having a sad about that), it looks like these will be my last two exchanges and challenges for a while. 2020 is going to be the year I write for myself. My dear anarchycox brought it home in a post she made on Tumblr yesterday about how she really wanted to write for herself and not feel like she had to carry the weight of a contracting fandom. These days, I am nowhere near as prolific as Anarchy (too many other things on my plate right now), but what she'd said about needed to write for herself really resonated.If I keep signing up for challenges, that's where my focus is going to be, and the ideas I have for my own fics are just going to keep dying on the vine. I have works in progress that I am dying to get back to - one is almost 175k and I haven't touched it in years. Another is 5k from finished. Three others are each close to 30k. I'll never get them done if I am committed elsewhere. As much fun as I had writing for others this past year, I need to think of myself for this year.
Give myself permission to be a little selfish. That's not such a bad thing, is it?
