ceruleanmornings: (Default)
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.
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ceruleanmornings: (Default)
Yes, I'm five days late already to say happy new year. But, whatever. Happy New Year!

I have finally joined [community profile] getyourwordsout this year. I have no idea what to expect for myself. I want to get back to writing again, and I want to write for myself, mostly, so I'm not even sure I want to post what I write anywhere. Well, all these thoughts are counting the chicks way before they hatch, though. I first need to write something, and then I can think about posting, yeah?

I like that [community profile] getyourwordsout gives you a good structure to work with. I signed up for the lightest habit pledge - only need to write for like 10 days a month. Doesn't even have to be actual writing - working and thinking about what I'm going to write counts, too. So if I fill three notebook pages brainstorming you're damn straight that counts for me! Like what I said in my last entry, I am definitely trying to delve into Saint Seiya this year. Don't care that the fandom is small and possibly dead. (I'm actually not sure how active it is, because a lot of the fics are not in English, and they've been importing from Stayka's Saint Seiya Archive as one of their OpenDoors projects, so I'm not sure how many people are creating new fics vs. importing their old ones over.) Doesn't matter, again, I'm not even sure I want to post anything in the end. I just want to write a long complicated romance between the Bronze Saints, i.e. people no one cares about haha because you know the Gold Saints took all the personalities/drama/flair/fun/plot/etc. Like, I'm actually making one of the Bronze Saints that the original manga mentioned maybe twice ever and making him a fairly important side character with depth and stuff. So this whole adventure is sort of like "original characters light" with my own plot thrown in.

I also want to write some decent smut. Been too long since I wrote those, so that alone is good enough reason for me.
ceruleanmornings: (Default)
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 [community profile] getyourwordsout this year. I missed the sign up by like a day or something last year. Will set myself a reminder for December. 
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ceruleanmornings: (Mo Dao Zu Shi)
Taylor Swift's "imgonnagetyouback" has huge ChengXian energy.

Just saying.

Link to lyrics.
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ceruleanmornings: (Default)
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?

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ceruleanmornings: (Default)
First of all, and off topic, but Spotify finally put out a mini player for us desktop folks. Wow. Only took like 15+ years to catch up to iTunes. Like WTF Spotify? I suppose better late than never but still. With that said, I do like it. It's very flexible compared to iTunes. Although I wish there's a way to make it not always appear on top of my windows. Sometimes I just want a choice, you know? Maybe in another 15 years they'll add that function in. 🙄

Anyway, I am super behind on writing because of medical issues; just could not summon the motivation these past few weeks. But I'm picking it back up now! I definitely don't think I'll be able to start writing the fic on April 1st like I had planned. NaNoWriMo the org is dropping the ball hard, so I don't think I'll be joining it on the official site either. Instead, I'll continue to work on the plot/outline portion of it at a normal pace, and whenever I finish it, that will be the first day of my own Camp NaNo count. So if I finally get everything sorted out on April 10th, then I will run the 30-day challenge from April 10th to May 10th. I will not be attempting to write 50k in a month, though. It will be a much smaller goal, but the point is to write/work on it every day those 30 days. Maybe I'll scrounge up a tracker of some sort and post it here too.

I've also decided that, as soon as I start actually putting down words for this fanfic, I will join the ChengXianCheng Heaven Discord. Just too tempting ahaha. Also I probably need character writing help for Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao. It's so hard to differentiate them and pin them down but they're so important in a plot point of view. If Jin Guangyao were not crazy and soaked in revenge how would he behave in a political setting? What if I want to make him conniving but not evil? What if I want Lan Xichen to be calculating and not evil but also not quite so benevolent as he appeared in canon? How do I differentiate between these two, especially in an AU? Questions, questions. (Well, not sure exactly how a ChengXian place would help with these, but someone there's gotta tried to write these guys at some point right?)

But those are conundrums for another day. Today I just want to lay out plans for my late-start April. Wish me luck.
ceruleanmornings: (Default)
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.
ceruleanmornings: (Mo Dao Zu Shi)
I have thought through my writing dilemma, and have decided that, yes, I will focus on fanfic for the next...however many months I want to devote to it. I'm starting with two, March and April. Will reassess by end of April if I still want to continue or switch to something else. It's just that I really want to write this fic haha. I started a Scrivener file for it, because I'm not a fan of putting things online all the time and I haven't found any offline Notion alternatives that I like. So Scrivener it is!

My goal for this fic is two folds. One is that, come on, we all could use more ChengXian, especially long, intricate plot-heavy ones, so why not write one myself? I've been reading Qiang Jin Jiu (in Chinese, mind you. Hoo boy, never has the built-in Chinese-English dictionary in Safari been this useful!) and my head is filled with political intrigue, so that's what this ChengXian fic is going to be about. It's NOT cultivation related. The setting is a historical AU of some fictional, pseudo-ancient-Chinese-Warring-States-era epic. Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying are not adopted siblings; in fact, they don't even meet until the story starts. And there're a lot of major changes that I will of course, talk about later, after I actually start writing and posting it. And that leads to goal two. I've never been able to keep to a good deadline. Like, I would set out to do writing, but instead of actually writing I would just get obsessed with planning everything, but in my head only! So in the end nothing is ever actually written! I am aiming to change that now. I have setup a plan, and I am sticking to this plan of writing every day (with reasonable breaks). Literally sitting down for an hour or two every day until my goal is met, instead of just waiting for the muse to strike or just work out details while taking a shower or eating or doing chores and then write nothing down, and therefore waste all the creative effort my brain went through. Yeah. If I succeed in getting this not-short story (at least novella length, which is about 20k words) out in a reasonable fashion, then I think I can probably apply the method to writing my novel. And maybe I'll actually accomplish something this year.
ceruleanmornings: (Default)
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 [community profile] 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. 
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ceruleanmornings: (Novel)
That title was a quote said by someone somewhere, definitely not my own words, but I'm too lazy to look up the exact source. Just know that I'm borrowing it because it is super fitting, because today, I am announcing that my writer's impediment (not writer's block, will explain below) is over. I am going to work on my novel again this year. After all these months (maybe years? I lost count, seriously) of hiatus, I finally feel removed from the craft enough that I am finally, tentatively, ready to dive into writing once more.

I say my writer's impediment is over, in that I was so stuck on everything that the idea of even thinking about the novel for one more minute was preventing me from writing anything altogether! I tried to work on fanfic to "clear the air," but was also super stuck there too, despite all my Notion planning and random plot sessions while taking baths. I was sick of writing fiction, period, and a clean break was sorely needed. Now, today, I am happy to say I want to write again, especially on my novel, which is a miracle. However, my writer's block is not over. I define writer's block as being stuck on specific parts of the novel that I can't think past. That particular dilemma is still going on, but that can be worked through. The loss of desire to write anything at all, however, is a different issue.

So in the future if I get so discouraged I get writer's impediment again, I will simply stop writing altogether. I will read more and do other things, but it seems that not doing any writing, not even thinking about writing, for a set amount of time would reset my brain. Had I just given up on shambling along with fanfics earlier I might've gotten back to writing the novel sooner. So, lesson learned. I am a bit sad with not writing fanfics, but I was definitely putting way too much effort into those when my energy could be spent on writing the novel instead. And I will do exactly that in 2024.

I don't want this novel to be "the novel." I want it to be my "first" novel, which implies there'll be a second, and third, and many more. It's not easy to try to start new things again when I'm literally "middle aged" now, but eh. People go at their own pace, right? I mean Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings after he retired, soooo, I still have time, I hope.
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ceruleanmornings

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If you came here from various fandom links where I write fan things, well, hello! We should be DW friends!

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