sootspiders

[sootspiders]

shaking the bars of my enclosure I am in a constant state of wanting to write so badly, wnating the fic to be Done wanting to be able to read it, being haunted by it all day every day at work, having a new epiphany every other week that i'm sure will fix all my stalled progress then getting 2 paragraphs into that ""new version"" and stalling again

this whole thing is hell on my awful adhd riddled 'need gratification Now' brain, the same brain that is also only capable of regurgitating disconnected sick scene ideas that don't seem to fit neatly into any actual story line.

christ my New "new notes" page is 70,000 words long , some of that is probably important and valuable info, some of it has long since become obsolete and a LOT of it is actually just ideas repeated because I knew I had a scene idea but I couldn't find it in the novel length random note document so I had to just write it down again. god knows I have TRIED to tag and organize each snippet so this doesn't happen but it just doesn't seem to work.

devastated to realize approaching this november will be 4 stupid years since I started this project, which is exactly how long the tallstar fic took. and I think I might be less progressed now then I was with that fic at this time. this was supposed to be shorterrrr

i am so tired of how inefficiently useless my brain is!!! i cant believe medication doesn't work At All!!

Anyway!! back when nano existed, july was a challenge month! I will be using it! and I am so sure that this time my new idea WILL fix me, so lets hold hands and disregard the dozen other times i've said that b/c god Fucking help me I Do NOt want this to officially take LONGER than the tallstar fic took me to write!!

[sootspiders]

OK 2 1/2 months and two unrelated firework fixations later i am BACK to thinking about the fanfic again!!

um unfortunately it begins with me still feeling like i must scrap and restart. like i am 40,000 words in and slightly into what should be act 2 (but still feels like an extended act 1 set up phase for some reason....) --- and this is a DIFFERENT epiphany to the last one i had when i said i figured out a new way to go into act 2.....lol....this is a NEW new way.

not to worry i am still commiting to forcing myself to start at the section of act 2 where i keep stopping....

during this i tried to write a separate original short stort just to see if i could complete something. but once again....i was on a role through the set up and the moment i crossed over into what would (roughly, bc it was improvised) be act 2 i just. grinded to a hault and went blank. i dont understand what my problem is or why its always this middle section of a story i just cant. figure out how to write.

in this fic its like, the outline is "protagonist current desire is to prove themselves as (something) to their clan so they need to investigate (event), they meets character B who has their own goal which involves needing to investivate (same event)" like. i should be able to work with this. but i just don't know what they should actually DO i only have their vague goals. boo >:/

[sootspiders]

whooops ok full disclosure gang, I have completely fallen off the wagon, also I got into minecraft

I typically stay away from video games for the same reason someone with a history of addiction in their family should stay away from drugs.....that sounds like a joke, but I am actually kind of serious lol. with the desperate strangle hold I have to have on myself and my focus in order to do ANYTHING instead of being paralyzed in a chair all day, new interests can be debilitating. one of my friends keeps begging me to play stardew valley and I have been staunchly refusing bc the kinds of games with no end that involve collecting/organizing are a hazard. I only tried minecraft bc I thought it looked boring and wouldn't hold my attention, but unfortunately all those annoying middle schoolers were onto something (this game came out + blew up when I was in middle school and several people made it their whole personality)

anyway, i'm fine now, but I did get frustrated with feeling lost in this fic and sucked into a side hyperfixation and started making notes on that instead. I'll get back into this fic soon (this has happened a lot, this is why I write so slow)

guess I should still summarize the last 2 weeks i forgot to make posts for...

Week 8, I was still productive (somewhat) at least half the week and added about 2,850 words. All of that was adding and editing in old draft snippits.

Week 9 (last week) I was super out of it and making notes on a different fanfiction so there's only about 380 new words

here's to hoping I get it together soon-ish

[sootspiders]

week 7: good news: i think I have thought of a better way forward into act two

bad news: it would involve scrapping and rewriting the last 25,000~ words because I need to change the inciting incident and thus most of those events need to happen elsewhere or don't need to happen at all

I am still committed to NOT starting over right now, i'm just going to try to summarize the new act 1 and then just write act 2 already in case I come up with yet another way I'd need to rewrite act 1 to make act 2 work later down the road. it's going to be a little rough because a lot of my clarity and momentum comes from continuing off the scenes I just wrote, but being slightly disoriented for a few act 2 chapters is better than starting over again

this is why I can't comprehend how people just. write fanfictions chapter by chapter and post it as they go. what do you mean. what do you mean every step forward doesnt trigger yet another way the beginning needs to be rewritten. I have never written anything where I didn't have to write the beginning last lmao

edit: i'm writing this at the end of the week, anyway, i also added about 3150 words. a lot of those were old draft re-works (i only have maybe 2 or 3 more useable first-draft scenes left I think? and the final climax+epilogue, which has never changed (bc its what the whole fic was based on))

but idk. i mean, i DO feel slightly better about act 1, but ive felt that way several times. i don't feel like I ever really got unstuck after my initial progress slow-down around the start of january. going into act 2 makes sense, but not after i'm in it. like I have multiple ideas for what happens next but they dont seem to fit together or flow into each other in my mind :/ im certainly adding words but somehow still feel like im not getting closer to figuring out act 2. im trying really hard to just keep ignoring all my splintered ideas, even the ones that ARE important, because i cant figure out where to put them until i make a path to the end first. but god.

i just want to know what happens in act 2. i have been hitting a wall in roughly this exact same place since 2022. every draft and outline always flies off the handle here. i dont understand why or where to start with it. its not like im refusing to change it, it has changed directions entirely several times but every new angle is confused in different ways. i am stabbing darlings with wild abandon but none of the bloodshed has Fixed Me yet.

[sootspiders]

ok I'm going to switch this journal to weekly updates (hopefully every sunday) bc I keep forgetting. I think on saturday and sunday I got roughly 300~ words altogether?? I am still stuck b/c the executive dysfunction has been really bad the past couple weeks 🫠

[sootspiders]

ok I've gotten a little lost and only done a 100-200 words the past two days, but I've done some revision notes...there was an event that I had for some reason moved to act 2 that I really needed to happen in act 1. but I think I know where I would put it. I'm not going to let myself edit/rewrite that right now but I think I will have to go forward pretending like that's the version of the story I wrote lmao

[sootspiders]

ok somehow i wrote 850 words today and I dont even know how I managed that because I woke up late this morning and had resigned myself to 'ok im not gonna have time to do more than a couple sentences today before i have to drive to school' but instead i blacked out and finished the chapter in less than 20 minutes so 👍👍👍

[sootspiders]

ive been low on time recently, yesterday i got 200 words, and today about 170. mostly down im starting to feel like i dont know where im going again, trying rly hard to just ignore my preconceived ideas of what the story is "'supposed"" to be and just focus on a singular 'episode'..

[sootspiders]

1,480 words this morning, and then realized too late im about to run out of outline to go off of oops

[sootspiders]

yesterday I got 1,693 words in like an hour and I'm about to ACTUALLY be in act 2 😎

[sootspiders]

apparently i wrote 740 words today, which was a surprise considering it was only like 15-20 minutes 👍

[sootspiders]

fell behind again, yesterday i was on a different plane of existence so i only wrote a couple sentences i think

[sootspiders]

added like 1,600 words, editing older scenes 🎉 (i no longer have memory of writing these scenes but i still mostly like them surprisingly)

[sootspiders]

I fell asleep last night but I got another 900~ words 😎 and finally finished writing the summaries of what I wrote so far

[sootspiders]

900 words today, which is pretty good considering I am back in school now

[sootspiders]

wasn't able to rush much new stuff today, still reading it over so far and taking a lot of "to revise in next draft" notes on a separate doc

[sootspiders]

added about 400~ words, but most of today was rereading and doing chapter summaries of my draft so far (i need chapter summaries to actually hold the story in my head and see where certain story beats should be moved around in the editing phase....i was suppose to summarize each chapter as i finished it but I put it off lol)