Tumgik
#i actually feel so bad always because a combination of adhd + general mistrust means i don't usually read longfic
thegeminisage ยท 2 years
Note
hey quick writerly question (your fic writing masterpost has been an invaluable resource to me, btw, it's helped me soooo much): when you started broken road did you know how long it would be, ballpark guess?
WAAAH thank you <333 im so glad its been helpful.... to answer your question: sort of. it's actually a running bit between me and my friends (especially poor @callowyn with whomst i cowrite @cambionverse) that whatever my initial estimate is, that's way too low. so when i set out to do broken road i figured, "ok, somewhere between 50k and 75k. MAYBE 80k or 90k if it really gets out of control!" and then of course it wound up being nearly 110k, which is more than double my lowball estimate. it happens with every single longfic i write - i always underestimate my own verbosity. i don't like to cut things so there's basically no "deleted scene" stuff for me, almost everything that gets to prose format goes into a fic
broken road is an extreme case though, because the idea for that story, when i first conceived it in feb 2019, was to make it gen, because the dean/cas felt like it was slightly off-topic and too big to reasonably tackle while the john stuff was going on. when i picked it back up after nov 5 2020 i had OBVIOUSLY changed my tune because if i didn't write deancas i was going to die, but i also changed my mind about it being off-topic - john is inextricably tied to the feelings dean has about being queer and those feelings are also inextricably wound up in his relationship with cas. (i talked about it in this post and this post, but they're pretty heavy subjects so mind the content warnings.) you can't pull at one of those threads unless you plan on untangling the whole mess.
all that to say, i also frequently joke that a gen version of broken road would have been 30k-40k shorter, lol. so maybe my initial estimate wouldn't have been so off after all!! but yes, i know it would be pretty long but i didn't think i'd hit 100k. and then. i did ๐Ÿ’€๐Ÿ’€๐Ÿ’€
6 notes ยท View notes