vamp

Shit's been changing a lot around here. Getting a bit more outdoorsy, over the last year or so. Yep, I started growing things, out in the previously barren back yard last summer, and it went pretty well. What began with one easy care garden bed last September became many, and now I've got plants thriving all over the bloody place.

(It's summer right now in the Southern Hemisphere, of course)

That's pretty much why I chose to not do NaNo this year, because the garden is taking so much of my time, but it's really affecting my writing and fandoming (totally a word) across the board. By the time I do get a chance to sit down at the computer, I'm too fucking exhausted to even think, let alone create. Half the time I just choose to not bother turning on the computer at all. And that's not a major revelation these days, because smartphones and devices and shit, and I do occasionally write on my phone, but it's a bit of a palaver, really only done when I have a midnight plotbunny or something. But I like the old physical keyboard, so.

(a hybrid tablet would be a handy dandy piece of equipment, I'm sure)

Anyway! So I've just posted the last fic I'll sign up to write in a while. It was the SPN Holidays Exhange that I signed up for months ago, and it was, to be honest, one of the hardest things I've ever written, mostly because as the weather got warmer and there was more stuff to be done in the garden, I just didn't have the time or brain-things to devote to it. That was pretty much a sign to not sign up for anything else until the summer is most definitely over!

So, the plan is, the next thing I sign up for will be Camp NaNo in July. That's midwinter here, nothing much will be going on in the garden (except for planting some garlic), and I'll have a good month of frost beforehand to plan the thing!

(then it'll be August, where I'll start gearing up for next summer again, holy crap)

So, yeah. Something had to give, and it's turned out to be the writing. Which I'm kind of okay with, at least with the whole signing up/obligation stuff. That way lies stress and the fear of letting people down if I can't complete things.

I've also retired from modding the FMF comm on LJ, after two years. I'm barely in the Teen Wolf fandom these days anyway, I've still got friends and connections there, and I'm still watching the show and reading the odd fic, but I'm not writing in that fandom at all anymore, so it's a good time to move on.

So, there's some definite shifting going on around here. I'm not leaving fandom or anythign like that, it would be impossible, for one! It's more like going with the flow, really. I'll be around as long as there's shows and books and shit to love :D Right now that's hanging on every fucking episode of Supernatural Season 11...

You know what it's like on Amazon and Goodreads. The rating system that makes me thankful that I don't write OF. It has a point there, despite the potential for abuse (I've heard of authors using socks to rate their own stuff up, of enlisting friends to do it, and of people who don't like the author one-starring out of malice). You check out the ratings and reviews before you shell out hard earned cash. All of the logic.

Thank god this built in rating system will never be a thing on AO3, those who decide these things having rejected that particular new feature proposal in part due to the potential for abuse.

No one has to pay to read fic, therefore there's no danger in flouncing after the first paragraph if a fic is not to your taste.

I occasionally look at bookmarks of my own stuff on AO3. I like to read the comments, I get all fluttery and excited when someone ticks the rec box, and I look for tags they've applied that I might like to add to the fic.

And I wander through other peoples bookmarks, looking for their recs and comments and often add things to my TBR from there.

From time to time I see readers using a rating system in their bookmarks. I'm not particularly precious about my work, I think I've been doing it long enough that I know my limitations and I know that most of what I post (especially lately) is seriously lacking in one way or another. So when I see a low rating on one of my own personal faves, and one of my highest kudos'd works, I can shrug it off without too much of a hit to my ego.

I realise that most of the time these rating systems have little to do with the quality of the work and more to do with the readers own tastes, and for many are likely only meant for the readers own reference. I keep a rating system of my own, but I keep it in Calibre, safely private on my own personal computer. There's no way in hell I'd let the authors of the works I read see those ratings, because they are for my own future re-reading reference, and have everything to do with my own personal tastes and almost nothing to do with quality.

I never see these ratings by a reader with any works of their own on AO3. It's only readers who make these ratings public. I won't say that before they criticise they should try writing themselves because IMO that's not what they're doing. I imagine that the majority of them simply have no concept of how hard it is to create something and share it.

To all those non-writers who use a rating system: Fic authors (and artists, and podficcers, and all the creators in all the media) put hours upon hours of their own time, and blood, and sweat, and tears, into creating fanworks and then share them for free, for love. It's a very vulnerable position, and particularly for those new to sharing, one knock is all it takes to make them not want to share again. Imagine if this happened to your favourite author way back when they began. If they simply gave up before they'd really started, before they had a chance to hone thier writing. Imagine how little fic we'd have to read now!

AO3 is not Amazon, and it's not Goodreads. Public ratings don't belong here.

If we got paid for this shit it might make public rating systems easier to take, but we don't. All we get in return is a few kudos or comments. Personally, I'm happy with that. I don't want to get paid for writing fic, because this way I get to write whatever the hell I want to write, I don't have to please anyone but myself, and I write to my tastes.

And for those readers who choose to rate to their tastes, that's fine, too, but you should keep it to yourselves. Don't put it where the author is highly likely to see it, in places like public AO3 bookmarks.

The ridiculous thing is that it's very easy to make ratings and comments in an AO3 bookmark private. All you need to do is tick the private bookmark box! Unless you're intentionally trying to make the writers feel bad, but that's kind of an asshole thing to do.

It's coming up the busiest time of year for me, for a lot of people, I guess. Christmas is on the horizon, but that's something I barely give a passing thought in October. November is the big month for me, it'll be my 5th NaNoWriMo this year, so it's definitely become something of a habit, and all non-essential things just go completely out the window until after it's over and I've taken a few days to recover.

And in time honoured vamp tradition, NaNo is approaching while I'm in the midst of one of my horrible extended not-writer's-block periods. Which is actually a good thing, because I generally come out of NaNo with a hiss and a roar, the not-block having been forced away by the necessity to consistently write a stupid amount of words each day.

So that's good. I'm looking forward to November, because NaNo for me is a kind of reset button for my writing habits.

If it's not psychic fuckery causing me to get kind of kripked, or just being jossed because I'm writing last season while this season is airing, both of which make me freeze up bad enough, it's my not-writer's-block.

I've abandoned WiP fic in a previous fandom. I don't feel too bad about it now (except for this fic, but that's more about my own attachment than any letting people down feelings), because I'm done with writing in that fandom, it's of the past.

A current fandom, though? Ouch. Okay, I pretty much abandoned Ruined because of the aforementioned psychic fuckery and my absolute horror at having written an ending with so many parallels to canon, but the ending is sitting on my hard drive. With a season's worth of distance, I'm thinking I might just post it, with a disclaimer swearing that I hadn't seen or heard anything about 3b while I was writing it, just to call it done.

Somewhere Quiet is my current WiP. I've let things distract me (both fandom and RL), unfortunately, which disrupts the momentum, and leaves space for second guessing. Is the boss fight dire enough? Do I retcon the already posted chapters for a canon detail that didn't exist when I wrote them? Do I trash the final few scenes again because even this third version just doesn't feel right?

I do get distracted ridiculously easy. I have this rule, one fic at a time, but I've been lax about sticking to it lately. Inflection Point is another WiP, and despite it's status as my stress-free happy place, so is Wake Up Dead. And I've just signed up for Teen Wolf Holidays, NaNoWriMo is looming, and Remix is on the horizon.

I'd like to get Somewhere Quiet at least out of the way before NaNo, which, considering there's just this one chapter left to post, shouldn't really be too hard. But I've been kind of panicking, because I knew that what I had written (it was technically done just a few days ago, now, not so much), wasn't right.

But the lovely thraceadams gave me a bit of a pep talk, and I shoved it away in a folder, determined to take a step back and concentrate on other things for a while.

Less than 24 hours later, I was fishing it out again. That disconnect, the letting go, gave me just enough distance to realise that I probably did have to trash most of what I had of the final chapter. Right now I'm concentrating on the first scene of the final chapter (it's with venis_envy right now), making sure the resolution to the casefic part of the fic is right, and then I'll worry about the shippy parts, which, honestly, is what I find hardest right now.

I have gone through and retconned that canon detail (Parrish has a first name now, and even though the fic is firmly within post-3b/pre-S4 canon, it felt weird to call him anything other than Jordan).

So, yeah. I have direction. At least a little bit. WiP's can be a problem for me, though. If I'm writing them when I'm particularly prone to distraction (like now), they tend to stack up. And while I've got WiP's in my past that haven't ended in laggy failure, it's a big risk to start posting before the whole fic is done.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes the simple fact that it is a WiP is what drives me to complete the thing, but that has to happen when I'm not prone to this constant second guessing.

Nervous.

September is HP Month. Just a thing venis_envy and I are doing to turn back time a year or so and write some Harry/Draco fic. It probably should have been titled H/D month, but whatever.

Everything I write sucks right now. I have no 'flow'. To achieve my intent with a story, I'm having to go very slow and very careful, often pulling back several hundred words to restart.

And I'm starting a lot of really, really rubbish things. Watching my dropbox fill up with badly executed plot bunnies and my AO3 subscriber count drop every time I post something I actually finish.

So my confidence is in the toilet. Which is an unpleasant place to be, but oh well, not like it hasn't been there before and come back again. Annoying, though, right when I want to write some H/D, a pairing I really enjoyed writing around the epic block of 2012.

I was very new to writing HP at the beginning of that. I finished a couple first drafts, started some others, planned some more. And six months later when I finally came out of it (longest.block.ever) it was Harry and Draco that I wrote.

Then Teen Wolf happened, and I've been sort of consumed by it since. I occasionally branch out, I wrote some H/D during NaNo (that's coming up fast, too, another reason to freak the fuck out, but if I'm prepared to write it off as another never-shared NaNo Novel it's guaranteed to break the block—NaNo always does) last year, I've written some Buffy and some Supernatural fic, but Teen Wolf is very comfort zone/main fandom for me.

But it looks weird on my AO3 dash. I feel like I was in HP fandom for some time, I feel like I wrote a lot, and I feel comfortable with Harry and Draco, but looking at the works count you wouldn't think so. I recently posted my 69th Teen Wolf fic, and HP count is like, five.

But. There's an everloving crapload of half finished HP fic in my dropbox. There's at least two finished fics (one's still on paper, and it went to the US with me in 2012 and I haven't looked at it since. I imagine it needs a lot of work, but editing, I can do). I have my Season of Kink Bingo to at least make an attempt at before the deadline at the end of September.

I can do this. I'm going to fucking do this.

*tries to ignore the gnawing guilt over neglected (but not abandoned) Teen Wolf WiP's*