2018: Year of the Writer

It's that time of year again! When I use any excuse to try to hit the reset button. To be fair, though, in regards to my writing, I haven't been doing so bad. I haven't been doing as good as I would have liked, but I haven't been doing bad either.

This past week was probably one of my worst weeks, actually. Ironically. Between a day or two of being in a deep, angry funk for no apparent reason, Hubby trying to cheer me up, Valentine's Day at-home date-night followed by an actual date-night late in the week, and ironically Writers' Group, taking up all of my evenings, I didn't get much writing done. I also had no time at work, even during lunch. Mostly because lunch was the only time I had to get any reading done to not fall behind there.

So, I'm on par with where I want to be with my reading challenge at least.

Writing time, on the other hand, took a back seat this past week. Instead, Hubby and I had a "bad movie night" and watched a couple of movies on Netflix with some terrible reviews. We then watched "Black Panther" at the local theater on Saturday. Yesterday we watched the live action Fullmetal Alchemist movie on Netflix. Backtrack to Friday, Hubby had us watch "Z-O-M-B-I-E-S" on Disney Channel. It was cute for what it was, a Disney Channel Original movie. It did give me a new song addiction, which I happen to be listening to now:

Quick explanation. In Z-O-M-B-I-E-S a lime-soda induced explosion at the power plant created zombism. For me, the lime-soda is important for explaining why the zombies all look like Batman's Joker cosplayers. Anyway, the point is, in this movie, zombism is more a mutation than the reanimation of corpses. They still have superhuman strength, are aggressive, and crave flesh - more specifically, "braaaaaaaaiiiiiins". However, the government was able to design Z-Bands, wristbands every zombie wears that calms their flesh-eating urges and their aggression while also dropping their strength to average for humans. Now that zombies are "normal" they can live side-by-side with humans, sorta, they're stuck in the zombie slums called Zombietown. The story then follows the attempt to integrate zombie teens into the "normal" high school.

Again, it's cute. A bit heavy handed in putting exposition in dialog, and late in the movie, during a song the main character Addison sings, they visually recap the movie YOU JUST SAW in a flashback montage, which Disney seems to be big on lately. Those were the two main flaws I saw, but otherwise I'd recommend the movie if you have Disney Channel.

Back to my writing though.

I didn't give myself a lot of time to just write. Instead, this week was more "self maintenance" week, trying to spend time with my hunny, figure out why I was so randomly angry all the time for two days, taking long showers, and watching non-serious movies as pick-me-ups. It was important to do this maintenance, because I definitely feel much better this week.

I did manage to still keep my chapter-a-week pacing, though. At this rate I will never have all of "Peeping Tomcat" set to send to my betas by mid-March. However, most fanfiction writers only have a detailed outline, will write a chapter a week, edit THAT chapter, and post for weekly updates. So, I'll be sort of ahead of the game because I'm trying to have the whole story done first and edited as a whole entity. That way, if something later in the story adjusts something earlier in the story, I can do so instead of trying to dance around plot holes.

You know, like what I did with What Is Truly Meant To Be. I knew what I wanted for this story. I had a fairly detailed outline for it. I knew what would happen in each chapter. I did what most other fanfiction writers do: write a chapter, polish it, post it, work on the next chapter. Then I discovered the devil is in the details. Once I got into the actual nitty gritty of dialog and inner monologues, I stumbled upon plotholes I had to fill. It would have been a lot easier to have written the whole thing out, found those plotholes, and changed the earlier chapters to avoid them, instead of trying to pull a solution out of a hat later on, after I couldn't change things. Lastly, writing chapters took me way longer back then, so updates weren't nearly regular enough. And I eventually fell away from the story.

I want to avoid "Peeping Tomcat" falling into the same pattern as this last major project I was working on. Which is why I want to have it completely done before I started my weekly update postings. However, it looks like I'm going to fall into a sort of half-way between the two. I should have the first ten chapters done by the end of the Winter Challenge, which means I'll have all but the last five chapters edited. I might even get as far as the eleventh chapter, actually, since chapter ten is already pretty close to the best I can do without beta notes. That's over 60% of the story re-written/edited and ready for my betas. I also have a fairly firm grip on what I want for the tail end of the story, complete with the chapters already having a first draft written thanks to NaNo.

I could send the girls the first two-thirds of the story as edited as I can get it on my own, and then a detailed synopsis of the final third so they know where I'm going with the story. They should be able to give me notes on each chapter and the story overall based on that. I'll start posting the finalized chapters on time, and I'll have about two months to finish the last four or five chapters, get them beta'd and then polished, before I would fall behind. I should be more than capable if I stick with my current pace. In fact, I should have a month leeway to start working on "One and the Same." I probably won't be able to start posting it the week after I complete "Peeping Tomcat" though, unless I lock myself away for a weekend or something and just write the whole first draft in one go.

We'll see how everything goes. I do need to work at a faster pace, but for right now, I like the rhythm I have, and it is an improvement over the past. I'm happy, and I can work to increase my productivity for "One and the Same."

I might even have something to read at group again.

I've been avoiding it for a couple of reasons. First is that my betas haven't read any of the story yet, so I don't know what their input will be, and I don't want to read the same chapter multiple times to the group. Second reason is that my chapters are LOOOOOONG and I'll probably take up at least 45mins of the two hours we meet up every other week. It could even be as much as a full hour, and I feel like that is taking too much of everyone's time. Especially if I do that fifteen times. Third is because no one is into the fandom. They seem to enjoy the story anyway, but they also seem kind of hesitant to critique. Mostly they just have questions on how x-y-z works, which I guess does help because it means I need to explain things a bit more so non-fans could enjoy it. I just need to figure out the happy balance between non-fans enjoying the story, and possibly be tempted to watch the show based off the story, and not putting in so much explanation that the fans get bored, since they knew all of it already. My final reason is that it's 15 chapters, read every other week. I won't be done reading the story to them until around September. I should be done posting the chapters online by then. Any critique they would give me would be moot unless I wanted to go back and update chapters already posted and read. So it would just be me reading for the sake of having a captive audience for my story.

On the flipside, though, I'll be doing a second Miraculous fanfic right after this one, am I truly not reading anything at group for a year?

I mean, I still want to post something new every month, so maybe every other writing group I'll read that? I need to write something for this month still....

I dunno. Thankfully, we ran out of time last group, so I didn't have to worry about whether or not I wanted to read something. Instead, I tried to pass the turn over to Omnibladestrike.

YEAH! Haven't seen that name for a little bit, huh? Well, he's writing again! Check the above link to see his latest. He's been coming to writing group too. This past Sunday was supposed to be the first week of our writer's dates, but it was mostly me reading his latest edits and then five hours of us watching YouTube.... we're good at this.

But he's writing again, and regularly! So exciting! And I'm not doing too shabby either. ChibiSunnie has been working really hard on her first children's story, and she should have at least the bare bones, if not the whole thing ready to publish, by the end of the college semester.

Over at Writers’ Huddle, last year's winter challenge was basically week after week of all of us going "yeah, I wasn't able to do much :(". This year's winter challenge has more people, and most of us are commenting about our progress. Even those who were sick, taking care of sick family members, were on vacation, or were otherwise distracted from their writing - much like me this past week - are commenting about getting SOMETHING written at least.

So, perhaps 2018 will be a good writer's year.

I guess I need to get started on chapter 8 to find out.