And D. is doing great so far. He’s on target and chugging right along, in spite of the fact that we’ve been doing a lot of painting (walls, floors, trim, random cubby areas). A cheer for my brave husband!
As for me, well, I’m just getting back into a routine that was thrown off by two weeks of a bathroom remodel, an emergency furnace replacement (gah!), family visit, Halloween, and the time change (*yawn*! my body wants to go to bed early but sleep in late–how does that work??).
One of the things that I’ve learned about myself is that I’m solidly a creature of habit. Even small changes can derail me, and unfortunately–because it doesn’t jump up and down screaming to be fed–writing is one of the first things to go out the window.
But now I’m back on track, with nearly 3K words on Rainbird, the unexpected appearance of a negligent mother, a threat of exposure and thickening sabotage. I foresee an explosion in Rainbird’s future. Is it so wrong for me to feel happy about that?
Well, whatever’s got your sleep schedule at both ends has mine too. 🙂
It’s the the third day of nano, and sadly, I haven’t really nano’d much. I’ve got to find out sometime what it is about diving into a fanfiction that is so much easier to make huge progress on than my own creation, which is easier to get lost in. What gives?
On my fanfiction break, I wrote about 200,000 words in the course of six months. In the original fic stage? About 5,000 in three.
:grumbles to self: :prods at the muse to get with it and SHIFT focus already:
Hmm, maybe writing fanfic feels more like play and writing your own stuff feels more like work? Or at least, writing your own stuff is more stressful because you have to put yourself into pretty much all aspects of the story? I’m just guessing here. 😀
I’m pretty happy with my plodding along at 600 words a day for now. No NaNo-ing in for me, maybe until the kids are all grown, or something!
That is so cool that D is cruising right along. That is very exciting!! He’s got a good support team at home!
If only I can keep from asking him how many words he’s gotten every ten minutes or so. 😀
How are you doing?
You know, I think you’re right. :clicking going in my head now: People have EXPECTATIONS about my regular writing, but fanfictions is just play. I can screw it up. It can be dark. It can be angsty. It can be whatever I want it to be, whenever I want it to be that way, and no one in my family reads it, so they don’t have all these things they expect it to be.
Hmm…
Food for thought.
I’ve got to start writing in secret. Nuts! They already know about the story I’m working on.
Will your family get upset if you wrote your own stories and didn’t show them? Because, really, you don’t have to. 😀 Or, you could just tell them that you’re playing with an original story concept and it won’t make sense to anyone until after it’s been through several drafts. Protect those first drafts. Our stories and our egos are so fragile at that point.
I think I should just leave them out of the loop altogether if possible. They have NO CLUE I write fanfiction, and to be honest, it’s much better that way. I’m free to write however I want. When I write regular stuff, they like, but they just have their own ideas of what is good enough (in the moral sense, etc.), and it makes me want to curl up away from everything just to think of what their reaction is going to be upon reading it. I think I’m going to have to just be quiet, quiet, quiet, and pretend they’ll never see it. If it’s published, it’ll be under a pen name and they won’t know who I am. If I can convince myself they don’t exist, maybe I can shake loose from that feeling.
Thanks for talking all this out with me. I’ve never analyzed it closely enough to figure out what was wrong.
No problem! I’m glad you had a chance to probe this issue a bit more. It’s hard enough to write with your own Internal Editor looming over you, without other people’s Internal Editors also in the mix! It’s okay. You’re allowed to keep your writing private.