silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
I should probably do a promo for my own comm. Really late, but [community profile] inkingitout is a writing support/encouragement comm. Minimum word count is 75,000 words.

black and white close up of pencil tips with the words Inking It Out, write 75000 words or more in 2015, inkingitout.dreamwidth.org

Challenge yourself to write 75000 words or more in 2015!

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silverflight8: text icon: "Go ahead! Panic! Do it now and avoid the June rush!" (Panic!)
I wrote two fics this year and received two. I defaulted and didn't think I'd get any, so I couldn't believe my luck. You should read my gift fics, if you're in the Old Kingdom fandom! I have two adventure/exploration fics for Lirael and the Disreputable Dog, as they go exploring in the great Clayr library: After Hours by the_antichris and Discoveries to Share by Sheeana.

I wrote A Sea Change (2,868 words) for Phantom ([personal profile] rosabelle) which is fork-in-the-road AU for Jehanne/Moirin, and which I think is pretty unsurprising (I felt extremely not-anon during the entire exchange). I JUST THINK THAT JEHANNE SHOULDN'T HAVE SPOILER ). They are so gorgeous together. Yeah. Not over it. Never over it.

I think Jehanne is really quite perceptive when it comes to people. I wonder if this is why Daniel loved her so much. I want to write something pre-Kiss about Jehanne and Daniel and Raphael, actually.

I also wrote Traveller's Lodging (620 words) for kaesa ([livejournal.com profile] kaesa) for Madness. I got to this point and then went "oh no but how do I keep going". I have to think of some way of reorganizing things so I can keep going!

Conclusion: more research is in order. Also as I was writing this I was researching early medieval Europe which is a very different thing and it was all...14th century! Focus on England! Oh noes!

I would like to say right now that I HATE TITLES. I shall start a Society for the Abrogation of Titles. Or Titles Anonymous, for writers suffering from the terribleness of trying to pick a title. For A Sea Change all I could think of was a pun (and I'm so sorry--but hey I used title case! It was even more pretentious before!) and as for kaesa's, I literally ran out of time and had to slap the most terribad title on. Yeah, about that...

--

2013 writing, including one statistic! I couldn't resist. )
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
The exchange at fic corner has opened!

I will own that I yelped when I refreshed and saw all the "mystery works" magically turn to fics. It's like staring at the Christmas tree, blinking, and then suddenly having the tree buried in presents.

First, my gift! I requested all sorts of things in the Old Kingdom fandom, and Burning_Nightingale totally came through for me. It's a terrific exploration of how Sanar and Ryelle--the twins from the Clayr that Sabriel first meets outside of Belisaere--grew up. It also addresses some other questions I hadn't even though of; what happens when the Clayr have male children? They likely won't have the Sight, what will they do?

Spread Your (Paper)Wings (3443 words) by Burning_Nightingale
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: n/a
Characters: Sanar (Old Kingdom), Ryelle (Old Kingdom)
Additional Tags: OC, Worldbuilding, Backstory, Friendship, Best Friends
Summary:

A story told with the voice of a forgotten minority; this is the tale of Errigan, a male Clayr.



--

I wrote a fic in the same fandom. (That's the second time now!) It's about Sabriel and her post-Sabriel (the book) duties. This is the first fic I've written in a long time that I like. I think it's because it's--at a tiny four thousand words--long enough and has a plot. Writing it was still piecemeal in chunks, but I like how it came out.

By breakwater and river (4150 words) by ivy
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sabriel (Old Kingdom), Elder (Old Kingdom), Touchstone (Old Kingdom), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Action/Adventure, Fights, Work, Missing Scene, Between Novels, Canon Compliant, Magic, Blood
Summary:

Before leaving Nestowe, Sabriel promised that she would come back and help them, and she keeps her promises. Fighting the Dead is what the Abhorsen is meant to do, after all.



I just got home, so I haven't had time to read anything else, but there's a good hundred fic in the collection about children/YA literature, so I definitely encourage you to take a gander!

(On LJ, this is my thousandth post!)
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and userid underneath (Barcode)
I organized a write-in session (current status of yuletide fic is DEFCON: BEARS) with a couple o' other people in the area who I met through Nanowrimo and are writing year round. This started at six-thirty. I got in, ordered a hot chocolate...and proceeded to do nothing, nothing at all, as far as writing went. I had specifically set up this time to work on the yuletide fic, and....

Except I looked up a lot of etymologies. (Lots of words went from Greek -> Latin -> French -> English, with optional French. I hadn't realized quite so many were though! AND Mavros and Amarante's names (Μαύρος & Αμάραντος) were not made up names they actually have a basis (!!!!!) Best discovery of all day, I can use this in my fic. Not yuletide, the other thing.)

And then, in the thirty minutes before Starbucks closed at 11pm, I managed to write pages. WHAT IS THIS, WHY.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Bee)
I went back using tags on my LJ to see if I had recorded names (my physical journals are still boxed and inaccessible) and ended up reading through some of my entries. I usually avoid this. Someday I will write things and not be embarrassed to look at them again - fiction is especially bad. My old fic is still available, it even gets comments once in a blue moon, but I can't look. Even though I probably should remove some of the notes on it, and maybe see if the site has messed up my formatting - nope. I can't do it.

My journal entries of two years ago were okay, even if they were publicly posted and I usually get embarrassment squick from public entries more than anything. If I wrote about CLACSTC's flight line today, I'd probably borrow some of that phrasing.

I really miss my physical journals, actually, especially the entries I made of exceptional events (that is to say, not the entries written during say school, or routine events.) When I went to summer camp for the first time, I wrote nothing. The second time, I wrote one page about arriving, and the chaos of it all; looking back later, I was incredibly frustrated, because a lot of things happened in three weeks and I had recorded nothing. The one entry about arriving was tantalizing but there was no follow up. Time was a problem - I was doing things with the flight all day, then doing homework or working on my uniform during my off-hours, and then lights out was pretty early - but I was bitterly disappointed nothing had been properly recorded.

The third time I went to summer camp, I brought my new, nice journal and was determined to write things down. And I did. I had to sit in the bathroom (they were ensuite) most nights, because the patrolling staff could see the lights in the room, but not the lights in the bathroom, after lights-out. I would write really fast because lights-out was eleven, but we had to get up at five or five-thirty just to get ready, despite our regulated wake-up timing being six o'clock*. I do have records for those six weeks, but, as I said - they're still in boxes, and I hope they aren't mildewed yet.

I keep straying from the point. I'm not sure that journal writing is cathartic or anything for me, but it leaves a trail behind me, which is what I want. My parents made me write a journal from the age of five or six, and they're full of strange things I haven't thought about in a long time. In the beginning, when I was in French immersion they had things like "elle regarde l'oiseau" and then English printed below it, with illustrations. Other parts are repetitive and "I went swimming today" repeated on different days, because I went swimming that day and evidently couldn't think of anything else to say. They are very tame because they were read, but it's fascinating to go back and immerse myself in who-I-was. At some point I got tired of trying to find things to say and started a serialized story about my stuffed animals.

I give up. Despite wanting this to have a cohesive point, I've managed to go off on tangents anyway. *posts*

*(I see waking up at five-thirty as a blessing, because technically we were not allowed to get up before six - the boys, quartered in the barracks, weren't allowed out of their beds til six exactly - but the amount of things we had to do in the morning was ridiculous. I mean, be outside in C-4 with room tidied and bed made within 20 minutes? Scratch that, ten minutes, because we had to be early by ten minutes? Are you kidding me?

To be fair, I think they were mandated to have us sleep for seven hours minimum, but it was still ridiculous.)
silverflight8: text icon: "Go ahead! Panic! Do it now and avoid the June rush!" (Panic!)
Having heard the excellent advice about overcoming writer's block, paraphrased:

Write your words in a different, unreadable font like Webdings, so you can't see what you've written. Then go back the next day and untranslate it to see where to start for the next day, and continue writing in the unreadable font to prevent your internal editor from critiquing.

...I decided to follow it.

The writing went well enough as I dashed off the next piece of my GLORIOUS TALE (subtitled: Pixie Lights). And then I, being your usual impatient fellow, decided to untranslate it without waiting the aforementioned night.

When I switched the font to Times New Roman, though, I ran into a small problem.

Namely, this one. (Illustration, in technicolor). )

Word's inability to translate certain words seems to be random. There are parts of one word translated properly, and parts that aren't. Typoed words are translated properly in some cases and in other cases. So I switched the boxes (which is Word's way of freaking out and saying it can't render the text) back into Webdings and translated them manually.

I am getting good at reading Webdings, but next time, I think I'll just turn the colour of the font white.
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and userid underneath (Barcode)
Surprisingly I'm enjoying writing this essay. Even if I'm still about 700 words behind (oh, the historiography'll have lots of words and I still haven't got an intro/conclusion and I'll manage fine, wordcount is usually not a problem.) For once I understand why the essay as a form is used. It is like waging a war: not guerrilla war of now, but the two lines of armies marching upon each other, like Spartan armies of old. One may delineate one's arguments with absolute precision and backup with sources and throw them THWAP THWAP THWAP at the reader. (Or gently persuade, but I like the in-your-face better.) Fiction is a lot less explicit and it's sometimes only after the 1000+ pages that you see the themes arcing delicately over. I suppose this would be biowarfare: creeps on you without realizing. Or maybe that's just very good undercover ops.

The elevator broke so I climbed up to my 23rd floor room after dinner. And then the fire alarm went off and I, being just then at the study room, climbed down 28 floors. As devil-possessed awful as the elevators are, I am really glad they exist <3

(one poor fellow I spoke to said he'd been doing his laundry. On the basement floor. He got off the twenty-first floor.)
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and userid underneath (Barcode)
Earthquake happened, and it is so far out of my experience that I thought it might be people on the roof, doing construction. Or something. I just never expected to be in the midst of one, and so it was so very weird.

Haven't anything else to say, except that I'm still on track with writing (omg, \o/), and at 13,500 words.

I keep trying to read the book The Court of the Air (Stephen Hunt): it's a steampunk sci-fi, I suppose you could say, and I keep putting it down. This is because it reminds me frequently of my own book - the settings are entirely different, and the characters, too - but it has that first draft feel, and the dialogue is dead. The author dumps information on you. One of the main characters shows up in the first chapter and then is absent for the next half-dozen. It skips from what should be a horrifying act (someone just got killed in front of her, hello?) and goes to somewhere else entirely.

I find myself comparing it always to the books I've just read - in this case, The Ladies of Grace Adieu (by the incomparable Susanna Clarke, who wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) and Sherlock Holmes's last few chronicles. The distance between those two works and The Court of Air is enormous. In Clarke and Doyle's books you don't have the sound of the author's voice ringing in your head - Hunt's work feels as though I know what he's thinking as he writes it, adds a bit of dialogue-tag to round it off; in contrast, Clarke and Doyle's writing is confident, and it sounds like the narrator. Watson, as the narrator, sounds like a separate entity - even with the random intrusion of footnotes (I've got an annotated copy), it is always Watson speaking, not Doyle. I want to like it, and I like the premise very much; I can't get past the prose.

(This is sort of like reading Star Wars: Shatterpoint (Matthew Stover, he of the admired Episode III: Revenge of the Sith book adaptation; I deeply admire his ability to use new lines and punch you with the formatting of his prose), and something like Terry Brook's Episode I adaptation, which, frankly, was pretty much the movie narrated in a flat voice with a few extra scenes. (I read it, and if it hadn't when I was a week without internet and the first day I got books, it would not have been read.) The first one has vitality and movement (Shatterpoint evokes the Vietnam War, from what I understand of the conflict, very strongly). The second is just a retelling, and the movie, as much as it was criticized, was probably better.

*

So deeply behind on reviews I cannot even say. And I owe denise a thousand apologies because I still haven't finished those FAQ-revisions - they're almost done, and they keep getting pushed off *blushes really badly*
silverflight8: bee on rose  (writing)
a lightning-fast post

declaring this publicly. (I need imperial Roman Capitals for this, but sans-serif will do on DW for me, I guess, for now ;)

I HAVE STARTED A MANUSCRIPT INVOLVING DRAGONS & COURIERS AND IT'S GOING TO BE AT 60,000 by SEPTEMBER 30, 2011, AND I SHALL WRITE DAILY.

There. Feel free to bug me upon the subject. I'm hoping public humiliation of forcing myself to admit I failed, oh horrors will be motivation for that dragging middle bit.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Bee)
taking the royal purple: porphyra I found it. After arduous googling :D My mind goes around the phrase "taking the purple" to represent ascending the throne, but perhaps it's from a semi-AU novel that revolves around the Roman Empire. Anyone recognize it?

I have also just gone through and invited a few people to silverfic where I'm putting writing stuff into. I keep forgetting to do so, and as the community is on Dreamwidth - if you have not been invited and you want to have access, PM me or whatever, and I'll add you (I have gone through and added people who I have met through writing comms only). If you only are on LiveJournal and want access, you'll have to have an OpenID account - all you have to do is comment on this entry with your LiveJournal credentials so that it exists on Dreamwidth and I can enter it into the invitations column (use the OpenID option and enter your LiveJournal address, http://username.livejournal.com *, and allow Dreamwidth to verify.)

*replace with appropriate name ;)
silverflight8: Different shades of blue flowing on a white background like waves (Fractal)
dear flist:

Anyone know of interesting journals/blogs that write in either French or Chinese? LJ, DW, off-site entirely: I am looking for reading material. Things I am interested in: (erm) books-reading-language-literature-words. Anyone who you think has really good writing. About themselves or the world or anything you find interesting, really; I can always pick and choose. I'd just rather not have image-heavy ones, if possible, since I'm after the words and reading comprehension :)

*puts plate of cookies out*

I saw a robin red-breast yesterday and I've heard the geese honking (and the seagulls crying, which always makes me think of the sea, poor landlocked-city!). Also today there was ten centimeters of snow and equal parts of slush. :P

I've also got a flamingo. From 750words, I mean; that's one of the badges you get when you write for ten days in a row. A flamingo! Sadly, the next one will take another twenty days (the amazing albatross) so there's time yet for me to accidentally miss a day. Or for OpenID authentication to go down, which amounts to the same thing.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (writing)
I would like to buy seventeen weekends in a row, or just time, if you've got any in stock. Sleep-time. )

eta: and now I wonder if there's a bug [prev open, post to prev, backbutton works, etc: GET/POST error; replication tomorrow]
silverflight8: Different shades of blue flowing on a white background like waves (Fractal)
1. If you wish to make an argument and also would to preface with a disclaimer that you are not talking about x, or that you understand y,

2. then your subsequent argument should not make me doubt that you understand y. In fact, if you find that you disclaim z and then override this again and again in your argument, it's not very persuasive.

2a e.g.: I KNOW that x is OK, but x is wrong wrong wrong. What are readers reading into rapefic? It can be rape fantasy, not evidence that everyone believes rape=love is true.) Question of the day: why are there always so many rants started "I know about rape fantasy, YKINMK etc." but then quickly devolve into "Rape fantasy is icky and gross and harmful!"

At least make your argument make sense, please. I can't even argue with you because you've muddled it all up first. I have no idea what you're trying to say, and I haven't the patience to try to go through. Either disclaim m, or don't.

-

If it's okay with all the historians on the planet, I'd like to move the dates of the Seven Years' War up about fifteen years. I need some way to kill off an OC (convincingly) so that the dragon Praecursoris can meet Choiseul properly. Anyone else have suggestions...?
silverflight8: bee on rose  (writing)
Currently quite frustrated with myself, because I have got ideas and ideas for stories (I feel like the quintessential kid in the candy store; also, the idea of having bilingual stories is really, really appealing) but I'm not writing. Which is no-one's fault but mine, but aggravating.

It's snowing gorgeously outside. I mean the lightest snow, that covers up everything and makes the world sparkle under the streetlamps. The kind of snow where you can see every individual snowflake.

(I always get poetic about weather. I do not know why.)

I've discovered, by accident and then by Google searching, about the wonderful, wonderful shortcuts for Microsoft 2007's equation editor. It's amazing how much faster I can input equations now that I don't have to hunt and click around for formatting options and operators and Greek letters; typing is so much quicker. Microsoft, your documentation for this is terrible. The help files were no use at all.

Lastly: I will do my utmost to avoid a job that requires customer service.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)


I'm currently waffling between joining or not joining (it might help procrastination, and since all my fandoms are almost completely non-existent, why hello there book fandom that is not LOTR or HP! there is practically no chance of ever getting an artist to do a fanfiction big bang). One half is saying that it will be a wonder if I emerge out of this semester alive, and the other half is the kind that got me in trouble. For doing reckless things. Anyway.

Finished reading Parfum yesterday. Spoiler:(skip) I did not expect an orgy in the middle of that, of all things. To Süskind's credit, though, it doesn't come across as gratuitous at all.
Very good book, i.e., left me dazed and half-out of this world. :D Will tear apart in review, I hope, sometime soon.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Nanowrimo 2010)
*blinks* Now I know what they mean by plot bunnies. I have been viciously bitten by several now. Yuletide, OMG...I want to write so many! There is no time!
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
-30 Celsius today, and with windchill it went into negative forty. Waiting for the bus has become a horrible experience. [especially when you can see that the same route has had two buses come by already, and not even one for you...]

It has been a week of very, very cold temperatures (we used to get these in January? Oh, whyyy?) and also frenetic typing as I attempt to finish my novel. I find that trying to accomplish a big project only provides fuel for other smaller plotbunnies, so my notebook now has another story. (Intriguing, but I really want to finish this story! I mean, start the actual action, since my setting is so very long, and I need to cut it down!) D:
silverflight8: Different shades of blue flowing on a white background like waves (Fractal)
Obligatory Yuletide squee post.

OH MY GOD I HAVE MY ASSIGNMENT and IT IS SET IN A WORK I LOVE. *\o/*

Aaaah! So many things to write! So exciting! *must hunt up book*
silverflight8: Different shades of blue flowing on a white background like waves (Fractal)
I've finally satisfied my urge to completely! go! bonkers! over tagging. Tagging with colons to form wonderful little straight subheading thingies on dw (I am very pleased with the multi-level list thingy), tagging for what I can see I might write - organization! ZOMG . (Sadly, not for this journal. I don't think I could stand going through that many entries, and suppose I added more tags! It would never end.) I realize I like this compartmentalization of stuff I anticipate will be unwieldy. I hate having all my writing scattered on my computer - they're in one folder, mostly, but chapters are split up, there's no way to tell what's going on, and they're all labelled differently.

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