“The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.”
Tumblr, help :O I’m trying to start a little collection for the new project—Anyone out there got a favorite (or a few favorite) really cheesy pickup line? The only one that’s coming to mind right now is *holds out hand* Hey, can you hold this for me?
dig up stalled project, reread, get excited about idea again. start working on it then remember why it was abandoned last time. spend X amount of time feeling sorry for self & working out work-arounds to get story off the ground. finally come up with solutions, go to implement them, realize gotta reread the story anyway because forgot where all the details are gonna change. fall in love with the original flawed idea and second-guess the new fixes. stall out & debate which version to go with. give up in indecision, pick up another project.
Dang, ya’ll’ve been productive. I should probably pick up the pace. When I say I’ve done literally nothing but play Secret World & go to work this past month, I’m not exaggerating. Did get promoted back to being a supervisor, though, so there’s that?
(Last time I was with this company I was a sup for three years, refused to move any further up the chain because they would’ve taken me from my store. This time I’m actively trying to move up. Gotta attain financial stability one of these days…)
This is hopefully the weekend where Things Get Done:
– the fox paperbacks, which I completely forgot about again. I was remaking my bed and I knocked Raven King off the end and had an oh yeah oh shit moment.
– reading for @mysoulforcoffee, which I promised to do like a month ago but I am trash, my bad, if you want to resend the file so I have all the new things I promise I will actually read it
– make concrete notes for Mono.
I mentioned that I figured out a possible fix for Monochrome. In short, it involves erasing one character, swapping two genders, changing three sexualities, and reworking four relationships. I blame Halsey’s “Strange Love” and Ed Sheeran’s “Photograph” for finally triggering the what-if of a fix. Those two songs are theme songs for one of the reworked relationships. ((The fact that both songs are talking about the same relationship just makes it all the better.))
About the eighth or ninth time through it, I started liking Badlands. (I bought the album on word-of-mouth because istg my entire dash is in love with it? but tbh the first time I listened to it I just missed my money, haha…….) And by saying “I started liking Badlands” I mean “I really like these two tracks right here in the middle and the rest will be background noise for driving.
The good news: after listening to these two tracks on repeat for a while, I think I know how to fix Monochrome so I actually give a damn about the plot and the characters.
The bad news: it means gutting at least 85% of the original draft.
The best news: good time I don’t have to deal with this nonsense anytime soon, since I’m in another blissful no-writing phase.
I was complaining to aionwatha about how I stupidly love all my secondary characters more than my main ones. It’s frustrating having to wait 2~3 chapters before I can introduce the character I wanted to write about all along.** Told her I needed to get out of that habit and start making MCs I actually like.
She said “But then you’d want to hurt them, torture them emotionally and physically, then possibly murder them.”
I responded, “I do all that anyway. I just can’t enjoy it when I don’t like them very much.”
** ((Neil is the exception to this unwritten rule; after falling out of favor from drafts #3-#???, he came back into first place in the last two rounds of rewrites and outranks even Andrew.))
wasdplz : So I was scrolling through tumblr looking for updates and stumbled across your Ask. Skimmed it and I’m remembering why I don’t read your shit & why I haven’t read Foxhole Court
me: BUT THERE’S ONLY ONE TRAGEDY
wasdplz : child, you and I have v different ideas of what “tragedy” entails
me: ………………. This isn’t the story where one MC gets skinned alive and the other two die?
