Writing update (and other stuff)

I'm working on 'Moving On' again, but it's slow, slow going. I know fairly well by now what I want to do with that fic, but the plotlessness (in the sense of 'lack of actual things happening') makes it extremely difficult to write. I have a detailed list of themes I want to tackle and a bunch of paragraphs that need to go *somewhere* in that fic, but nothing really hangs together, and I have no idea how to make it hang together. It's all the more annoying because the bulk of the fic, I feel, is already there on the page - much like the bulk of 'Normal' was, an entire year before it was finished; much as the bulk of 'Found in Translation' has been for three years now, with no way of stitching it all together in sight. Gah. Sometimes I really hate the way my writing mind works (or rather, doesn't work).

(A part of me really wants to call for help when a fic of mine gets stalled like this. But I know from past experience that, really, there is nothing anyone can do to help me here. I have to figure it out on my own.)

*

Re: other stuff: have begun trying to catch up with jumping_off, very slowly. I've also taken a look at the other LoM communities and found, to my somewhat sad relief, that fic-wise, the fandom's still developing almost exclusively in directions I'm not really interested in (some/most fics posted to jumping_off being the exceptions to the rule, which is why I *really* need to start giving feedback there again - gotta feed the few authors who produce stuff I'm interested in! *g*) This lack of fic catering to my kinks is actually kind of good for me, because 1.) I don't have much time to read fic at the moment, anyway, and 2.) if a fandom doesn't produce the kind of fic I'm interested in, that just means I have to work harder at producing that kind of fic myself. It's a very good motivator. *g* The only problem is that it's so much easier to satisfy my cravings by 'writing' half-assed mindfic in my head instead of actually working on my *real*, 'serious' fic on paper. You wouldn't believe how much crack I've produced in the privacy and solitude of my brain in the last few months. Endless permutations of Sam angst. It's so easy to gloss over the stuff you don't know how to deal with, or just to drop a scenario entirely and spin the idea it's based on in a slightly different way for a new scenario once you get bored with the previous one, if you don't have to convince any readers or produce a coherent narrative...

*

I also need to get back to catching up with individual LJs. I'm afraid I've spent the last two weeks in a bit of a mental slump.

This is what two hours of work gets me:

"Time passed in a haze of emptiness, at first. Grey was about her, inside her. She felt the walls dissolving when she wasn't looking, the world growing vague. Herself, too. Death, she felt, was a dissolving, a loss of coherence, of focus. It started long before the heart stopped. It was not about the heart stopping at all. It was the world going away, blowing away like so much sand. She could feel it as she sat by the bed, listening to the machine breathing for him: the world dissolving around them."

The fact that that's more or less a complete paragraph and not just a fragment, and I even know where to put it, actually makes this a fairly productive evening, for me.

I want to be able to write faster.

(This is all first draft, of course, so this paragraph will most likely change or disappear in further revisions. Just posting it here to complain a bit more about how frustratingly slow my progress is even when things are going reasonably well. *sigh*)