Cerulean Mornings

Hi all. It has been a couple of months, and I have written 0 words and have done 0 brainstorming for my writing projects, and other projects in general. Why? Well, let's just say that I have finally, officially been diagnosed as someone who is not neurotypical. Pretty severe forms of it from the look of things, and I have been prescribed new medication to try to tackle my symptoms. It made my life in the past few months complicated, to say the least. So many side effects and revelations about myself! But, but but but! I also think, for the first time in my life, I'm approaching what "normal" people feel everyday. I stopped freaking out and spiraling over every little (and big) thing, for one. And hidden within the depth of my neuro-atypical brain, there is now a tiny glimmer of motivation that had not been there before. At least not for the past decade or so. So there is progress, just coming very, very, very slowly.

So yeah, I didn't have the capacity to get up from my bed on some days, never mind working on a fic. I've diligently checked in with the GYWO monthly checker but I put a big fat 0 for progress. Will still be a 0 for this month too, but maybe next month something will have changed. I am hopeful. Until then, I guess. When I finally began any brainstorming I will update here. It'll be an important milestone even though it's probably a miniscule amount of progress. I still would like to celebrate it as an achievement for myself.

Hi! Yes yes, I disappeared again for a while. That seems to be the trend, eh? Disappearing for a few months at a time but never actually abandoning this journal. I consider this a win ahaha. Used to be if it gets consistently like this I'd just delete the whole thing and start over fresh. But for some reason, I always come back here after a while, no matter what. It's been 6 years and this journal is still here, active and paid for, so yeah, let's keep this one around, eh?

I do have some excuse for the past month to not be back, because I had my in-laws staying with me this entire time, and they were very stressful! Since this journal is mostly about me writing in fandom, well, obviously I did not get any writing done with that much stress. I didn't even get any fandom reading done, let alone anything else. So that's my excuse for being absent in the month of September. However, the months from May to August I had no excuse. I think I was trying to write ChengXian but then I got stuck plotting, and then life happened so I never got to the actual writing part. It's 100% my fault, and now, when it's almost October, I want to rectify that for realz. But! But but but. Not with ChengXian.

Why? Well, first of all I haven't read in fandom for a while, and I've never actually wrote in MDZS, so I am a little bit trepidatious about the whole thing. Second, I am trying to restart this whole "writing" bit, in general, and so I think trying to write characters accurately is stressing me out haha. I think it's better if I have a blanker slate, so yes, I could do my own characters and work at my actual novel, but that is even more scary as I haven't written in that for a long time either. *sigh* Anyway, the point is, I'm going to try to write in a fandom where it's more, forgiving, shall we say? In that it's a dead, small fandom and nobody cares if the people I write becomes a bit OOC. (Or at least I hope not 😅). Yeah...... Remember a while ago I talked about Saint Seiya? No? Good! Because I want to start off there! (It's in my tags if you actually want to bother finding out.) I actually brainstormed a crapload of plot - even got a pretty good Notion board out of it, but like with my ChengXian plot, I never put any words down. I think I've been paralyzed with not writing so long I've forgotten how to do it. Well then! That won't do! No time like the present to try to get back. It's a skill, right? Practice makes better (never expect perfect, that's just counter-productive thinking).

So hopefully I will talk about writing and fandom more here. I had started a writing side blog hoping to track my progress, but I think it just ended up being way too much. So I'm going to delete that blog and talk about writing here. I'm not sure what to do with my gaming side blog, either. I do use it but not nearly enough to warrant a whole blog for it, you know? I have a habit of starting many things and never finishing them, which is terrible, so I'm going to try to break that. The first step is to pare things down so I don't have too many obligations haunting me. They're very counter-productive in my case.

One last thing, I really want to join getyourwordsout this year. I missed the sign up by like a day or something last year. Will set myself a reminder for December. 

Hi. It's been a while. I have a good excuse, though, and that is that my medical issues did not get better. In fact, it got pretty bad for a stint there, which also contributed to my depression, and so I pretty much took all of April off from, well, everything. I stopped blogging; I stopped journaling/planning; I stopped writing/working. The only things I managed to do were some essential household chores like dishes and laundry. And, yeah, that was why I disappeared for the past month.

However, I have recovered! At least physically. Mentally it's another issue, but I'm taking steps to get it addressed, so not the most pressing right now. I am getting back to my regular routine, so hopefully soon I will be able to go back to writing. I am tackling coding today, though. There are just so many other things I have to do now that I took a month off. Most are large chores like vacuuming the entire house, dusting the entire house, organize all the stuff I haven't been able to get to, cook, plus I have life chores like make more doctor appointments, go to the DMV, you know, annoying bureaucracy things. Sometimes, seriously, I wonder how anyone get anything done in the short daytime hours. Just a few things could take up so much of your time that you felt like you've accomplished nothing even though at the same time you felt like already tackled a mountain. Oy.

Sidenote: I am considering restarting posting monthly playlists again. I did that before, listing out all the music I've got in the background in the course of a month. Nowadays I listen to white or brown noise more often than not (because I've got this annoying tinnitus!), but I have been delving into full albums (the new Taylor Swift and Beyoncé ones, at least) again, so perhaps I should post them for myself, for fun, again?

So apparently NaNoWriMo is imploding from the inside. If you want to know the tea may I suggest the nanowrimo subreddit. I myself don't really know too much about it, but I'm sure the folks there will have great summaries and such. All I know is that the org is in disarray and community managers are quitting left and right, so that means...I'm not going to really participate in Camp NaNo in April, I guess? 

Well, I'm still going to participate in my own pace, because I got a long fanfic to write, folks! But I'm probably not going to use much of the site resources. They still haven't put up any Camp NaNo 24 official art anyway. I can find word trackers elsewhere. Heh, maybe I'll go back to the good old days of posting a sticky entry and paste a word tracker there that I update daily. (Ah, LJ, how I miss you.) Except nowadays I'm not sure where I can find a word tracker that I can just insert. I have my own trackers but they're not really public, or easy to paste-and-use. I'll look around and see if I can find anything in this day and age.

Speaking of fanfic, I have been thinking of my ChengXian plot bunnies. I have a few kicking around, like everyone does, though I am making sure I only focus on one right now. Anyway, I've been thinking of the major themes in each plot, and I realized a couple of points:

1. I like writing from Jiang Cheng's POV. He's easier to inner monologue, and in most cases he's the one with more power than Wei Ying in the political sense, and I love me some political intrigue than out-and-out fighting. Wei Ying is a wild card, a whirlwind who obeys no rules. It's much more fun writing as someone who reacts to him than Wei Ying himself. Also, there's more complexity. I can put JC in a very difficult position so he can't do what he wants, but has to maneuver around it (mostly to save WY lol). It can get juicy! I'm not saying WY is not complex. I'm just saying I find it easier to write complex JC for an entire fic than complex WY. 
2. I currently have 4 major plot bunnies (yeah...don't even....I don't think I'll be able to write all of them, seriously). They neatly fall into different relationship dynamics. I seriously did not realize this until just now, as I'm trying to figure out their major points. They are:

• One is JC and WY get together, but circumstances force JC to give WY up. WY still comes back to him in the end, though.
• One is JC and WY mutually decide to give up on each other, and then later both regret it. They fight against the urge to be together but, alas, they fail, and a lot of shit ensues because of this.
• One is JC and WY are not together, and everyone are actively against them to be, but they fight on regardless, and never give up.
• The last one is different, in that JC and WY are side characters in a mostly NieLan story. They do end up together but with some significant caveats, but overall it's still ChengXian. The NieLan side, however, is a whole different ballgame. That is all I'm saying about this one.

The fanfic I'm currently on is the first one. Don't worry, it really isn't a spoiler because it is ChengXian after all. Plus, by the time I finish and start posting it'll be like months later, so you're probably not gonna remember this anyway lol.

The second one is a giant epic that I probably won't write. It'll be controversial because, uh, there's cheating involved. I'm not sure I want to face that wrath from fandom, yet. If I ever actually write and post this I will make sure to tag it clearly so people can avoid it if they want.

The third one I will attempt, after I finish the first one, because I really like it but it's gonna be devastating and hard to write so, we'll see when I'll be up for it.

The fourth I love, and will write, because it's a series of connected short stories and not a giant novella. I will at least write two stories in it. The NieLan is going to kill me, though.

And that's enough writer talk for the day haha. I do hope NaNo sort itself out soon. At least let there be an alternative so I can keep my yearly tradition with a little bit of community.

Yeah...so there I was in, in my last entry, all waxing poetic I'm going to write my novel and not do fanworks and blah blah blah, and then my period hits so I'm in bed with painkillers and a hot water bottle, and I thought, okay, I haven't even read any fanfic for a long while. Let me just open AO3 and take a small gander...

...and of course, read like a madman for like a few days and now I'm like, yeah, I really want to write this MDZS thing because goddamnit ChengXian deserves more fics! (And NieLan deserves even more fics but I can only focus on one couple at a time). Okay, so wanting to write fanfic does not mean not wanting to focus on novel. In fact, I should be looking at novel right now and not posting on DW but, anyways. I'm very torn about this. I really have an itch to write this fanfic - got sort of a plot going and everything. But like, if I just stop all my fanfic thinking right now, cold turkey, and just go to my novel, I feel like I could also jump right into the novel if I just give it enough thought. It's just that my thoughts are all occupied with this fan idea right this moment, it's hard to see otherwise. I don't know what to do!

Sidenote, I just learned about this community called getyourwordsout today. One day after their cut off deadline to join. Great. At least I can still subscribe to it? A shame.

I'm also trying to find an off-line alternative to Notion. I actually am really digging using Notion for fanfic plotting, but I don't really like the always online aspect. Sometimes I want to not be connected to the Internet on my laptop, you know? (Or can't, if I'm behind some country's firewall *coughChinacough* while traveling.) I've heard Obsidian is a good alternative but I just downloaded and it's like, not at all similar to Notion? Maybe I just haven't learned how to use it yet. I'll dive deeper in it before judging.