phantomtomato

I finished the first draft of my main fic for Candy Hearts yesterday! 🎉 I’m proud of myself because I’ve been working on it consistently since about the time assignments went out, and while it’s a long fic, it’s still more time than I’d usually spend on that quantity of words. Feels good to be able to put it aside. (Also I’ve felt a bit funny about having written/finished a long treat mostly during sign-ups but not finished the main assignment. Well, now that’s resolved!)

A single-fandom exchange that I’m a part of has a check-in period this month and it’s terrible. The deadline’s still months away but the mods want to see at least 500 (for a 1k min) done, and the expectation is that “[t]he reader can understand the… plot of the story” from the excerpt. Am I perhaps feeling rebellious because this doesn’t mesh with my ideal writing timeline for this event? Undoubtedly. But it chafes, as does the coming check-in for getyourwordsout, and there’s probably a lesson for me here in avoiding things with any check-in requirement beyond “yes, I am still alive.”

My Middlemarch reading group started up and I’m in love. Not with the book—it’s fine—but with having such a rich backdrop for discussion. There’s nothing quite like sitting with a group of people and talking about a novel you’re all experiencing together.

I’m knitting my first sewn-on button band and I got to the buttonhole part, which is simultaneously exciting (so close to done with this vest!) and terrifying (what if the button placement looks terrible once it’s seamed?). My spouse wants an Icelandic sweater next, the type with the colorwork yoke, and I’ve got a pattern for it. Will he pick out the colors or just hem and haw forever? Mmm.

Related to the above discussion of deadlines, I want so badly to get back to writing non-exchange fic. I love exchanges, but since picking them up as part of my fandom experience, they tend to push other things aside—deadlines trump time-invariant writing. But writing one’s own ideas isn’t truly invariant of time! I’ve noticed that if I wait too long past having the initial idea, it gets away from me; I lose the motivating spark that made it interesting. If I’m working on the project that isn’t as much of an issue, because it becomes habit. If it’s only a note in my plot bunnies file, then it tends to whither from neglect. I’m anxious that my current personal WIP hasn’t suffered this fate in the stretch of CHEx and YT before that, and admittedly somewhat afraid to open the document again and try writing! I mean, I will do so, but it’s annoying that this sort of feeling exists.

Entries tagged with personal