vamp

A thing just hit me. See, a couple days ago, I wrote a fic of ~1k. Start to finish, done in a day.

Now that might not seem like such a big achievement, and maybe it's not, I mean, on a normal day I'll easily hit 1k of a longer fic, and on a really good day I can do 4. Lots of people I know do more.

But when you've gone as many months as I have without posting anything, while also keeping up a regular writing schedule, finishing something, even 1k, is a big achievement.

Okay, so, it's not actually the first thing I've finished in however many months it's been. I've finished a couple things. Just a few. Longer things, though, and I've either rewritten them until I lost the plot and ran screaming, or filed them away for 'future edits'.

Yeah. I may have finished a couple things, but I haven't finished them, if you know what I mean.

That's almost relevant to what just occurred to me. Almost.

So, I finished this very short thing. And I looked at it, and I thought, well, that's editable. A few tweaks here and there, some line edits and spell checking, and that's postable.

And that, for me, lately, is fucking phenomenal. No rewrites from scratch. No tearing it apart only to completely fail at putting it back together again. Just a quick tidy up and throw it out into the world.

There's a few reasons for that.

1. It's short. It's always going to be quick, whatever you're doing to it.
2. It's pure porn without the remotest hint of plot. There's really nothing to fix.

But then comes the problem I have. I don't think it's good enough to post.

I overthink stuff, I'm told, and yes, I totally do. I admit that. But this...it isn't particularly good. It's passable, I think the grammar is reasonably sound, the spelling doesn't suck, it makes a certain amount of sense. It's porn, and I don't think it's bad porn, I mean, there's no turgid lengths and no one's getting reamed by a horse or anything, so yay?

It just seems flat to me. And, in my opinion, it could be lifted out of that flatness by the addition of some plot.

And therein lies my problem. I don't value this short bit of pwp, simply because of what it is. There's no plot. Nothing happens except for a bit of fucking.

But I know that as soon as I start putting plot into it, it'll balloon into a 30k epic, I'll hit a wall, break it, cry, and shove it into a folder so deep on my hard drive I'll never see it again.

That's just what happens to me lately, but I'm kind of over bitching about it, so I'm just going to leave that there.

My problem here is, I don't seem to value fic as much if it doesn't have that plot.

I used to read and write a lot of short pwp. Loved it, for years and years, that was my bag, baby. I was a short porn activist, even, proselytizing on the form to anyone who would listen.

Oh, how we change.

I still love a good bit of porn, but nowadays I need it framed in stuff happening. I need a fucking reason for the fucking, you know?

So. I don't value the thing that I just wrote because it's short and has no plot, and I do put value on longer fic where shit actually happens.

So I read longer, plotty fics, and I tend to scroll past the short fic marked pwp. Likewise, I only feel confident posting longer fic with plot, because that's what I personally value, but I can't do that right now. And I don't know what to do with this short thing simply because it's pwp and I don't feel like it's worth posting.

Sigh.

Later: I ended up posting it to a sock account I use for stuff I don't want on my regular AO3 account. It holds the really taboo stuff I can't be arsed dealing with wank over, and some really fucking odd shit I've written in the past.

But, hey. I wrote something. And I edited it. And I posted it (even in a really cowardly manner). That's something. It's progress.

What's really fucked up about the whole thing, though, is that just because I don't value it, doesn't mean there's not readers out there that do value short smut, just like I used to, back in the day. Case in point: it's getting a decent amount of kudos, and some really positive comments.

The moral of the story? I really really do overthink shit, far too much, and I need to just suck it up and embrace whatever I'm capable of at the time.

It's time to stop being a derp, and write some more goddamn pwp!

I'm trying to read more. I'm a crap reader lately, for a lot of reasons. There's the habit I have of avoiding recently posted works on AO3 while a season airs (because I got spoilered to fuck by AO3 tags before 3a even started), I don't see recs since I flounced tumblr a while back and don't watch my home timeline on twitter during a season either.

I have a couple rarepair feeds bookmarked, but most of it is OOC and uberkinky, which isn't my bag. The odd fic that is relevant to my interests tends to be quickies, short things that I kind of eat, bookmark, and then I'm out of stuff to read again.

Then there's time. I tend to think of reading as a leisure activity, whereas writing is enjoyable while also feeling productive. And I might be a stay at home mum with both kids at school, but holy crap, there's always something I 'should' be doing.

The lack of reading isn't helping my current writing situation. Nothing in, rubbish out, or whatever. Or fill the tank. Or something. I need to fill my goddamn tank.

What I have done, is resurrected my long-neglected Kindle account. Mostly I think Amazon is a bag of dicks for many reasons, one of which is the fact that I have books in there I frickin paid for but can't migrate to a preferred ereader and format (epub, because freedom), so I'll certainly never buy another kindle book. What they do do, though, is make it really easy to find free (as in beer, not freedom, because Amazon) original works.

I now have a kindle (app) stuffed full of original m/m fic. The quality of which will vary, but so far I haven't been too disappointed. It's the same with fanworks, the quality varies, and it's not like I'm out of pocket if I have to flounce something for crap grammar.

I'm making an effort to review things, too. It makes me think and it's kind of a thank you to those authors whose work is free to read.

Some say writer's block is a myth. I do kind of agree with them. It's not some mystical fog that comes down over our keyboards out of the blue. There's always a cause behind those moments, hours, days, months where every time we sit down to write nothing (or nothing good) comes out.

I think I've been doing this long enough now that I can recognise at least some of the causes behind my own personal blockages.

Right now I'm wading through thick mud in an attempt to finish the final chapter of Something Quiet. The story is basically finished, has been for close to a week, at least as far as the casefic part goes. I'm having trouble wrapping up the 'ship aspect, though.

It always takes a bit longer to get final chapters done as I make sure I'm wrapping up all the bits and bobs, but this is ridiculous. I've gotten maybe 800 words out in the last week of sitting down to write every day.

This generally happens when I'm trying to force the story in the wrong direction. In this case, I'm trying to make these two shag when they're really not ready for it. Or I'm trying to make them do it the wrong way. Or something. Pretty much it means that I'm going to have to trash the last weeks work and venis_envy is going to have my guts for garters.

The last two fics I've written—flash fic to a prompt I managed to complete and which is posted here, and a failed attempt at another square on my SoK bingo—I've had to rip back to a point and start over, as well, so I've got a pattern. Real Life has been busy, my writing routine broke, and I'm not back in the swing yet. I keep trying, and end up forcing it, so the stuff that's coming out is often shite.

So until I get my mojo back, I think I'm just going to have to stay aware of this pattern, and accept that more often than not I'm going to have to tear it apart and start over.

Which I'm totally going to do. Tomorrow.