Stuff

I owe some people here replies, have been owing them replies for quite a while, in some cases. Will try to get to that... soon... ish. Things are... odd, here, right now. Busy, strained, and unpredictable.

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I've again taken to visiting lifein1973 occasionally, recently. Bad idea. I'm hearing the siren's call of fic (the reading of it, not the writing of it). Yet I can't really jump back into that before I've finished at least one, possibly even more than one 'big' LoM fics; I promised myself that years ago. There's too high a likelihood that reading would kill my writing dead. (Taking one very quick look at Loz's most recent offering proved the validity of that fear to me again. *sigh*)

Back to the Future, still the closest candidate for that first 'big' fic, will be four years old and nearly nine and a half pages long (not quite 5,000 words yet), soon. The first digital version of it I have is from March 21, 2007. There were slightly earlier ones on paper, I think, but only by a few weeks, if that much.

It's tantalisingly close to being finished; maybe a page still to go. But, of course, I'm kind of stuck. Again. (Actually made a bit of progress over the last few days, before I got stuck again.)

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To anyone new here: Yes, that's four years of continuous work, not four years of burying the fic in the virtual desk drawer. Did I mention I'm slow?

A process post, of sorts

Since Back to the Future is a fic I've worked on more or less continuously for the past four years, I have lots of files of different versions of it lying around on my disk. I'm a bit weird (maybe): I tend to write in the same file as long as I feel I'm mostly just adding to what was there before. However, the moment I feel I'm making some kind of important change, I tend to save the result as a new file. I tend to number the files, but will not always give a file a completely new number. Instead, I'll sometimes opt for something like "10b" or "10.2". I'm currently at version number 14, for Back to the Future. Here's a list of the days on which the latest versions of previous versions of the fic were saved:

03-21-07 (Length: 218 words)
04-06-07
11-27-07
09-28-08
11-18-08 (Bad year for fic: I was writing my MA thesis)
02-21-09
03-06-09
03-21-09 (Two-year anniversary! *g* File length: 1768 words...)
03-23-09
04-06-09
04-07-09
08-16-09
08-20-09
10-22-09
05-02-10 (Close to the third anniversary. Length: 3221 words.)
05-08-10
05-17-10
05-21-10
06-25-10
06-26-10
09-27-10
10-10-10
10-11-10
10-24-10
10-26-10
11-13-10
11-15-10
11-27-10
02-27-11 (Close to fourth anniversary. Current length: 4781 words)

ETA: Okay, I feel a bit ridiculous for asking this, but: is there anyone here who works in a similarly slow way when writing fic? It would be nice to know, in a 'shared pain' kind of way...

I'm sorry, I'm in a "bitch about writing" mood.

It happens, especially when I'm so close to finishing something yet can't.

You know, one thing that's normal for other fic writers, and central to their writing process, from what I've heard, never happens to me: I don't hear the characters having conversations in my head. Never ever.

In fact, I have to fight hard for every line of dialogue from them. What comes to me is only images and emotions. Never dialogue. And if I want to write something entirely in a character's voice? That never comes easy to me, either. Normal was such a struggle... I've tended to stay away from first person POV since then.