sethgray

I'm doing this weird thing this year. I'm doing NaNoWriMo. Kind of. Except for the part that what I'm doing has nothing whatsoever to do with NaNoWrimo. I'm hoping to write 50,000 words by the end of November, yes. But I'm doing it as a running total of everything I write between now and then, with the incentive to sit and write every day. Some of the words will be from Dead Boyfriend, and others will be from other projects, short stories, etc. Oh, and I started today instead of on the first.

Yeah, like I said. Nothing like NaNo at all. Anyway, here's my progress so far:

1275 / 50000 words. 3% done!

Nothing earth-shattering but not bad for a day's work. And I may yet pick away at things. Who knows.

Sigh, I have zero motivation and there's a whole bunch of shit I'm supposed to be writing right now. There's no less than three submissions I wanna get done before early October, there's a chapter due on Monday, and I should have had a side story up HOURS ago.

But I'm just...blah. It's a weird feeling, I'm in a good mood, but I just don't wanna write. I have to get it together enough to get the side story up before the day is over. Good thing about refraining from laying down an actual time. Bad thing is I probably procrastinate more than I should. Unfortunately, that's just how I operate. I'm not one of those people who can make the words come if there's nothing there. Lots of authors give advice "just write" but I can't make it work for me. If the well is dry, digger deeper accomplishes nothing.

On a more positive note, I was fiddling around with some songs of mine from back when I wrote songs, and one I wrote just the other day when I was pissed, and recorded them to my computer. Just for shits and giggles mostly. Then last night just before I dropped off, I had a brain blast and more lyrics came to me for two different songs. That was kinda cool.

Maybe my muse got her wires crossed or something. It's less than helpful. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that music is moving in my head again, but I kinda have more pressing concerns.

So I'm gonna do something really mundane and ordinary, like take a shower and go for a walk or something, to try and jiggle the wires loose. Then I'll come back and see what's what. The side story must absolutely be up today, that is imperative. Can't take money for something and then not deliver. I also wanna do some work on those submissions. It would be insanely cool to actually sell a story of mine--even if it's not that much and I couldn't tell any of my family about it. *sweat drop*

I'm feeling like I should hit the table of contents and read back over my whole story just to make sure I haven't gotten off track or lost the flow of things somewhere, and the only way you can do that is to start at the beginning and hit go. But here's the thing. I hate chapter one. I really do. As far as requirements for first chapters go it barely hits the minimum, introducing people and showing us a bit of Regan's personality. I'm not sure there's anything technically wrong with it, I just don't like it.

So the obvious thing to do, then, would be to start at chapter two and hit go. I'm not sure my OCD would allow that, but I guess I could give it a whirl. What I really need to do is sit down and brainstorm what exactly I want an improved first chapter to look like, but in order to do that I'd have to put into words just why the current chapter one is bugging me and I'm not sure that I could. There's just this sense of "wrongness" about it to me, in some vague, ill-defined authorish way.

Maybe I could hit up the other writers on my friends list and pick their brains. That might not be a bad idea actually.

In other writing news, I need to decide what I'm going to about the side story this week. I had a plan about doing a little mini-story in sequential order, but I'm not sure that will be feasible. The stuff I need to come across might be over and done with in the main narrative by the time the side story catches up. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, I guess. More background details to flesh in, while the absolutely imperative stuff has already passed on. I dunno, we'll see.

My whole process is very experimental, as you can probably tell. I've never made it this far in one of my projects before. The only ever thing I've come close to was in one of my previous projects that I churned out 28 chapters of. I only worked on that for maybe two months before I burned out on it. I've already been working on this for over 6 months, 24 weeks plus however long it took me to write up to chapter five before I started posting online.

It's not a stellar amount of progress by any means, but it's a record for me. Small victories, folks. Small victories.

I came across a link the other day to a series of stories about a female-to-male transsexual who liked men. I don't know why, but that whole concept blew my mind. A gay male transsexual. It was one of those things that hadn't quite occurred to me before. Is it because of some lingering threads of my formerly religious brainwashing? I mean, a transsexual is one who is born in the wrong body. So to make things "right" he/she transforms to the other sex's body. It's an effort to put things the way they should be. Do I still retain so much backlogged religion that I parse "the way things should be" as automatically girl-on-boy?

It's a depressing thought, and I'm afraid of what truth it might contain. Religion is a culture, and like all culture it makes up parts of you no matter how much you might want otherwise. I say things like "there is no right, only what we like" all the time, but there are still little secret parts of me that don't quite believe it. Will it always be that way?

I severely hope not. But how does one completely wash the unwanted aspects of a "former" culture away? One can't. Even by immersing oneself in a new culture, there will still be those perceptions and defaults that remain of the former.

I was adding up the word count on each chapter to get the average of it (just for kicks) and the combined total of chapters one and two was 3000 words exactly. O_o

Total word count so far is 15,196. Chapter average is roughly 1381. At least as of right now, but the word count on chapter eleven is still liable to change slightly between now and Monday.

I have my very own listing for Dead Boyfriend at the Web Fiction Guide and their sister site Novels Online. I submitted it a couple days ago, but it was just listed today and already someone has seen the listing and commented because of it. Glee! Hopefully this is a portent of things to come.

Also, I really should shell out the money for more icons. I have no happy ones.

My first story arc would involve Lex Luthor experimenting with various types of animal DNA in the hopes of regrowing his permanently gone hair. During the process, he would turn into a cat-human hybrid.

The arc would be called "Lex Kitten."

So, all ye various peeps on my flist who are fans of my writing, just dropping a note to let you know about Dead Boyfriend. It's the gay vampire hunter story I was talking about in my ranty post about vampires.

Just be warned, it gets pretty graphic at times. There's a sex scene that takes up the entirety of chapter three. Yeah, I didn't waste any time. Only chapter one is up so far, I haven't sussed out what the update schedule will be like yet.

Today I made 2037 words. I think writing in Scrivener helps because you can't see page separations so I'm not consciously aware of how much I'm writing. I'm just writing.

It was, incidentally, roughly four and a half Word pages. Hopefully this continues.

Title: Acquiescence
Pairings: Sam/Dean
Rating: Um, R-ish?
Warnings: power play, pwp, ebil!Sammy (sorta), dirty talk
Word Count: 457
Spoilers: No
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. I make no money and have no rights to the characters etc.

Prompt: Acquiescence, noun; the acceptance of something reluctantly but without protest.

( If Sam laughed his brother would kill him. )