Her Life is a WIP

Urgh I volunteered to do something early in the week knowing it was pushing myself a bit and that I'd have to plan for a couple of recovery days after... Instead I collapsed mid-way through the event and my brain has been like play-dough I've been trying to reshape into something cephalic since then. I know I owe a couple of mildly time-sensitive replies, I will get back to you very soon!

General status:

Meanwhile I still managed to squirrel a few moments to work on the snowflake outline for [Redacted]. The snowflake lends itself well to taking a lot of breaks between or during steps while you consider things, so that's worked out nicely. I skipped Step 6 again, but I'm starting to think I expand way too much in the earlier steps anyway, so it's more like the steps gets merged XD

I wrote huh 12k words of outline through this (it's not that impressive, a lot of snowflake is more like stream-of-consciousness freewriting and thinking on paper), but I don't count those words in my yearly tally. I think I have a novel-shaped idea now? For the first time, I tracked the time spent planning too, even though it doesn't really matter because the process needs a lot of breaks and breathing space (with many insights happening during walks, tbh, which I do NOT track). I blame TrackBear ;) Which I am still using. My streak! I don't want to count the words there either, but I'm tracking the time.

In the story, I have to be careful that the politics don't overwhelm the personal too much, because it's neither my strength nor interest. I remember back in the day when reading the Royal Assassin trilogy with a friend... I just tore through the books while she carefully took notes of all factions and named characters to keep track of everyone's loyalties. It felt so proper and clever and right, yet rarely have I so heartily felt "WOW COULDN'T BE ME" despite how much I wanted to be as cool as she is XD

I'm also experimenting with a different kind of magic system, curious how this will work out! I have the foundations established, I'll develop as the story goes.

I learnt that I can never spell betrothed right the first time.

I just started on Step 8/the spreadsheet scenes breakdown yesterday, but it's been harder going than usual. I conceptualise scenes very differently after the last round of structural edits, much more fine-grained, but planning at that level risks smothering the story for me. (Interestingly, while looking for other posts in my snowflake method tag, it seems like with every long project I use the snowflake method slightly differently, and every time I seem to brush against the limits of how much I can plan before the story dies an early death.) I'm experimenting with doing broad strokes and thinking more in arcs for this step, but not sure yet how that will pan out.

Projects:

• [Redacted] Snowflake -- for lack of a working title I'm satisfied with XD The bland one is descriptive but not fun. The plot-based one I used for the Scrivener project is super fun but also unfortunately inspires a completely different story in a different genre when I look at it. The Big Bad's descriptor could be a fun working title BUT when I tried it out, it started evoking yet another different story, like, "but what about a story where the MC has this ability instead???" and so too distracting, too. I'll settle on something before I start drafting!!

A friend recently told me they were rereading my post on "Asking too much of your writing", especially the part on separating writing from finding community, and how had I managed that? And I was thinking, well I kind of failed actually, and the post on the misery and joy of sustaining involvement in tiny fandoms was kind of the indirect follow-up of how that didn't work.

But! That's not exactly true. That "Asking too much" post talked about finding community elsewhere, particularly on Dreamwidth, and that's what's been happening. The tiny fandom post was more... forgetting about that, haha. Although in general, going from a handful of people just as feverishly into the same fandom+ship as I was, to crickets even about canon, was too much of a system shock for me XD As my friend put it: "you were calmly riding the fandom train, stepped on the gas when encountering K-9, and the brakes were pulled harshly when all the people in the tiny fandom disappeared 😞"

I guess I could add Coping Mechanism #7 to the list on that tiny fandoms post, now: take a complete break. ( Read more... )

Focusing on my original work means spending hours and hours and months on something that has an audience of zero outside of me (*), and that was exactly the kind of reset I needed. Also, it means I got to write exactly the kind of polyam I want but don't really find in literature or fic.

I also knew this wouldn't be quite enough on its own to smother all of my fannish feelings. Like, usually my fannish feelings are born out of enjoying specific character dynamics and wanting to see more queer characters. Adding a missing scene or spelunking in a plot hole. Some kissing perhaps. So I (more or less successfully) tried to orient my book reading toward SFF with queer characters, and dusted off my BL collection (which led to reading 300 manga in a few months as previously mentioned XD). Thanks to all that, between my reading and my writing, a lot of my "seeing stories with more of what I want to see" hunger was satisfied, and fewer all-consuming headcanons and fanfic ideas came up to distract me :D

This was all happening end of March/early April, maybe? And late in July, I started getting the itch to go back to some of my K-9 fic :D Which I did once I finished those structural edits. And my expectations generally seem reset properly: I realised yesterday evening that I didn't expect anyone to have read my BBTP fic (as opposed to posting in a more popular fandom, and hoping for at least a kudo or two if not a comment!) and I was right, no one did, not yet anyway XD but I got my "community happy feels"/"connecting with people bits" thanks to people here encouraging me when I wasn't sure if I'd complete the edits in time for BBTP, and celebrating with me when I did :D I'll post the LeopardTree fic when I've done the final proofread, likely to silence also because it's background characters in a teeny tiny fandom (but that's okay, more people are BOUND to start shipping them when we get the anime someday surely XD).

I suspect my main problem is that for whatever reason, my taste has grown hyper-specific ( Read more... )

Meanwhile, I'm likely gonna be poking my nose again in my original projects, and let my other fic ideas percolate in the background till it's time to sweep the dust off the WIP drawer again :D

(*) and eventually, when I'm lucky, the handful of people who are willing to beta-read it :D ♡

In my quest for a grammar checker that doesn't flirt with generative AI, either in doing genAI analysis you don't want or feeding your words to their training data, I thought I'd try Ellipsus Plus and their "Writing Insights".

This morning, I fed it about 10k words worth of fic I'll be posting soon. Hoping to throw into it a couple of chapters of both my original novels later during the week before the trial ends, too. (Edit: didn't lead to any different insights, although it did confirm reports like the echoes are less useful/harder to wrangle on long chapters!) I guess first, my bad: it doesn't look like this is actually a grammar checker. More like a style checker? But word echoes, sentence lengths, etc are still very useful things I try to fix during my final "proofreading" phase ahead of posting fic or sending a doc to beta-readers, and I liked a lot of their tools.

Also, please allow me to emphasise again how customer-friendly and user-friendly Ellipsus is: you don't need a credit card to start the 7-day trial. Not only that, but they offer a "lifetime" one-time payment plan if you don't want a subscription. And not only-not only that!! If you pick the subscription option, it builds up toward a lifetime licence, so after a couple of years the subscription ends and you own it. I can't think of any other subscription-based service that offers that (or if they do, it sure isn't as obvious and clear as Ellipsus makes it!)

Now, what worked well for me, and what I'm still unfortunately missing. Note that this is obviously based on my personal grammar and prose weaknesses.

The good!

• I really like how it highlights all sentences e.g. if you click Preview on the passive voice section, you'll see all of the passive sentences -- and only them -- highlighted. So you can scroll and focus on those only.
• Even though my computer is old, the reports and highlights load pretty fast! (I wouldn't modify stuff while the highlights are on, though)
• Repetition in sentence starts: "'She' starts 3+ sentences in a row" -- I do need that check!
• The word echoes are good. Again, it highlights all the sentences, with a darker highlight on the word repeated (like "around", which I apparently use way too much in smut). Note: I copy-pasted one chapter or scene at a time. I suspect the report might get overwhelming and not be as useful if you run it on a full novel or a very long doc.
• The sentence lengths report is also great! This one highlights your entire text in 4 shades of blue (for short/medium/long/very long sentences), and it makes it easy to see where there's variety, and more importantly for me, where there are too many big ass long sentences. I do my best to break those up during editing (before that final proofreading pass!), but I always miss a few. It's super cool how obvious it is when you suddenly have an entire paragraph entirely dark in the middle. (Long-ass sentences probably don't help with my pacing issues btw XD)
• Note that the passive voice check isn't very good (a lot of active sentences with the verb "to be" picked up, e.g. "We're fighting, then?") but that's fine and pretty common with these checks in my experience. It's still an easy report to scan through.
• The adverbs and repeated phrases reports are nice for a quick scan too. I didn't go in-depth with the adverbs, mostly checking there weren't too many repetitions, but for the repeated phrases I nearly always modified something when I had 4-word (or more!) repeated phrases, so it's quite neat. (Edit: repeated phrases looked even more interesting on my OW, where I seem to be prone to even longer ones)

The bad? Well. Many of the actual grammar bits, unfortunately, but that's on me!

Turns out Insights is not actually advertised as a grammar checker, that was my misunderstanding. Whoops.

Stuff I can mitigate

( Read more... )

Real problems I do need a grammar checker to help with :(

( Read more... )

I was building this list for myself as I tried it all out, then figured I might as well make a post out of it so I can refer back to it later? It's also a handy list of stuff to check as I continue on my quest for grammar checkers. What tools do you use for grammar? Any rec under the "no thanks AI actually" column? Or tips to remember the rules better in the first place? ;) Then again, some of my problems are rule issues, but just as often it's just distracted typos that happen regardless of knowledge...