#like. have to recharge it at least once while reading a novella to very short novel kind of shit

[caffeinated-bibliophile]

You know how there's stuff like Book Bub and Book Riot's ebook deals emails?

Is there one that's for NON Kindle books like for the Kobo store?

When I finally replace my kindle, I do think I'll try a kobo, but I'm also trying to not buy many ebooks from Amazon anymore.

[loopy777]

I got an anonymous Ask that seems to be inquiring, in a roundabout fashion, about my methods for focusing on a single work and finishing it, but it mentions another author in a manner that I consider to be insulting, so I’m not going to directly reply to it. It also helps that I’ve only sampled that author’s works (liking what I tried) and haven’t had the time to read more, so I can’t even begin to analyze the author or guess at her methods.

What I will do is share my patented Loopy’s 8-Step Guide to Finishing Fanfic Projects! Follow these steps, and you can’t go wrong!

1. Don’t have any kind of social life. This step is critical. Don’t have friends you hang out with, don’t have romances, don’t have spouses, don’t have kids, don’t go to parties. You are allowed to attend geek conventions and celebrate holidays, and sometimes watch Youtube videos, but only about once a month. I am anti-social and the only family I have relying on me are all at least my age, so I can devote all my free time to planning and writing fanfic, if I desire. No, I’m not joking. I’m just wording this in a humorous fashion so that people don’t feel sorry for me. Yoink!

2. Plan it all out The writing phase is no time to be figuring out what happens next. Writing is hard enough. Do yourself a favor and figure out every major portion of the plot, and the vague connecting tissue, so that when you’re writing you can focus on word choice, scene staging, pacing, etc. I find it helps to outline the whole story first. Then I outline the smaller phases in more detail, focusing on the earlier portions because I’m inevitably going to change my mind about things as I write. I outline each chapter as I’m getting ready to write it, and for important conversations, I outline the points that each character needs to hit in between the banter. Having a plan means you have a guide into dangerous territory. It also means you have a plan that you can throw away in a dash of inspiration, and that’s always fun!

3. Stick to a ruthless update schedule I recommend weekly or biweekly updates, because anything longer and I think there’s a risk of readers forgetting what your story is about. But the best thing about making the schedule paramount is that it’s a great way to force yourself to settle for Good Enough. Sure, maybe the writing could be better, but it’s time to update. Maybe events don’t feel natural enough, but it’s time to update. Maybe you need to sit down and completely rework this part of the plot, but it’s time to update. This works out because the dirty secret of storytelling is that quality doesn’t actually matter- at least, not in the short term, as you should also...

4. Design your story to fail Even when things have been going well -- great, even -- you can stumble right into a scene or a plot point that just isn’t providing what you want from it. If you could get over this hill, the story would flow again, but this one stupid scene is critical and it’s holding everything else up. Gah! So, instead of not updating your story until you can make this part work, just leave whatever you have and make the next part awesome. Readers will forget the mediocre part as soon as they get something good. Just make sure there’s more Good in your story than Mediocre, and definitely don’t end a chapter on Mediocre. This is why the planning portion is critical, so that you can line up a whole bunch of great scenes or plot points, rather than trying to play catch-up during the writing phase when you produce flat results.

5. Hide your failures This isn’t the same kind of failure in the previous step. Even if you plan it all out properly (or more likely because you got impatient and just jumped into writing for the fun of it), sometimes your stories aren’t going to work and don’t feel like they merit more of your attention. Maybe the words just refuse to flow with this idea, no matter which scene or part you try to work on. Maybe the plans that seemed so cool in summary or outline become stupid when written out. I might very well have as many aborted stories as the author mentioned in the original Ask, but the difference is that I didn’t post mine. They’re sitting on my hard-drive. Never to be seen. Even though some of them are pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Thus, as far as you people know, I have a 100% completion rate. Because the key to overcoming the odds is always cooking the books.

6. For longer works, train and plan for a marathon A lot of people think writing a novel is basically the same as writing a bunch of unconnected short stories, aside from a novel requiring a little more planning. This is wrong. It is, emotionally and creatively, the difference between running a marathon and running a bunch of sprints. I had to train my way up to writing long works, starting with short stories for a long time, expanding into novellas, and then a novel, and then a Doorstopper With More Words Than The Lord Of The Rings. And, even after I trained up to that level, I still had to plan out breaks. I had to identify which months of the year would leave me less writing time, and work that into my update schedule. I had to figure out which parts of the story would emotionally exhaust me, so that I would have time to recharge afterwards. I had to figure out a balance with other projects, such as Shipping Weeks, that I wanted to take on. I had to decide if I had enough time to even play that 100-hour video game that would be coming out next year, if I also wanted to keep my story updating. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t. Too bad, as people seemed to really like that game.) Writing long works is an endurance test, even if you only write in short bursts. And the only way to find the motivation for it is to...

7. Love your ending more than the rest of the story put together A lot of people make the mistake of having the ending of their story only being a tying up of plot threads. That is wrong. Yes, endings need to do that, but if that’s all they’re doing, then both you and the reader don’t have any motivation to actually read them. An ending that provides a satisfying resolution to a plot thread is also an ending that can probably be guessed by someone who has thought about that plot thread. That doesn’t mean you should try to make the ending a surprise or twist (unless you also like to do that, which I do), it means you need to give the ending the punch, the impact, the meaning that makes reading the final product so much more than reading a summary of the same events. You definitely shouldn’t have the best part of the story, the part you’ve been most motivated to write, in the middle. What keeps me going through all my stories is the desire to get to that ending and reveal it in proper form to the world, because I make my endings the point of the entire story. A whole novella about stealing trains is just to properly set up the moment when Mai reaches out to touch Zuko’s face for the first time. A world-spanning epic is just to set up the moment when Aang finds the ultimate use for his connections to other people. If the ending is the best part of the story, the part you believe in the most, then that’s the best possible motivation to get through the rest of it. However, there’s one more critical component that ties into this, and that’s to...

8. Love your whole story Yes, love the ending most of all, but if you don’t love all of it, then you still won’t have enough motivation to write the whole thing. While I am always eager to reveal the ending of my stories to the audience for that final, wonderful impact, I’m also always eager to reveal the next plot twist, the next character introduction, the next joke, the next fight scene, the next clue in the mystery, and so on. Whatever you’re writing is always the hardest part, but knowing that if you finish this, you’ll get to that- well, that’s the track that will get your train to the station. Because the key to writing is not to love writing. No one does, except maybe poets, and who cares about poetry? Writing is awful. I love storytelling, but I’ll never be able to draw and can’t do public speaking and can only admire music from afar (or through ignorant imitation), so I write. If we live in an age where an Old Storyteller would hang out in the town tavern and tell tales to the kids and the young at heart, I’d be doing that instead.

Or, at least, that’s how it all works for me. But I might not be right in the head.

[not-poignant]

Hey Pia! I know you've spoken about this generally in the past, but I wasn't sure if you had ever posted anything specific. I am also struggling with trying to balance my desire to write, and throw myself into writing, with the physical and emotional limitations of disability. I really want to become more serious about my writing, but I don't want to hurt myself. What kind of 'hard limits' do you have to set for yourself to balance your productivity and how do you determine them? Thank you!

Hiya anon!

I’m definitely not necessarily the right person to go to on advice on this. Like, as we speak I’m currently wearing a wrist brace because my Guyon’s Canal and Cubital Tunnel Syndromes are playing up again from me...doing too much...outside of the limits of disability.

So in light of that, I’m shoving the rest of this under a read-more, because anyone who has been following me for a while probably knows that I am the last person to be a role model re: ‘how to work when disabled.’

To be honest, it’s really hard to strike up a balance. Like, really hard, especially if you have chronic illnesses of the kind that shift and change on a daily basis. What you can do one day, week, month, or year, you might not ever be able to do again, let alone rely on with any sort of regularity. Will I ever write 75,000 words in a month again? Maybe. Should I? Probably not. Can I expect that what I’m sticking to this year will be reliable down the track? No. That side of things sucks. One day I might not be able to write anymore and that’s just...how that goes.

I don’t write to a daily wordcount. This just seems folly for my chronic illnesses (of which the primary symptoms are whole body pain and intermittent inflammation, crushing fatigue and brain fog. Writing with brain fog is literally impossible). So I have a monthly wordcount. This means on the good-to-average days I can spin out words, and on the bad days, I have no pressure to attain a wordcount.

You won’t know how much you can do until you start trial/error, and reflecting at the end of say each two weeks, how you feel what you’re doing is balancing against how you feel, and your energy levels.

I’ve learned that it’s good to stop while things are going well. As in, don’t stop when you run out of words or have nothing left or are exhausted. I don’t always listen to this, but what I’ve learned is that if you stop before the well is dry, you’re a) less likely to feel like shit re: specifically writing the next day and b) you’ll generally know what you want to write when you sit down at the computer (notepad/ipad/laptop/whatever) again. This is good advice for anyone, but especially good for people who need to pay attention to spoon expenditure. Sometimes it can be good to use pacing - i.e. work out how much you can do without hurting your energy levels at all, reduce the number even more, and then try and stick to that. Googling ‘pacing / fibromyalgia’ is a good way of seeing how to get an idea of what your limits are.

Be prepared though, for this process to involve finding your limits, which of course means...sometimes getting sick because of hitting them. It might be that editing takes more spoons than you thought, or reading things for research (something a lot of writers do, and that I do) is draining, or posting things / polishing things for publication is exhausting more than you could’ve known. For me, marketing makes me hit the wall in about five seconds. There is no ‘safe’ level of marketing, if I have to market something outside of say, this specific Tumblr, I can expect to have about two weeks of not being productive at all. That’s just...the way it goes.

Which is why my ‘official’ writing Tumblr/Facebook/etc. are all dead. The cost is too high.

I hate pacing (seriously, I did a chronic conditions management course and it was my least favourite part. Like I said, I’m kind of not great to go to about this stuff since I frequently push myself too far and get really sick.) But pacing is very useful, and there are a lot of good guides about it now.

I tend to boom/bust with what I do. I do expect burnout? It doesn’t always come when I expect it, and sometimes it pounces when I least expect it and have been really careful with my output. So I think it might also help to have a plan in mind for if/when you do hit burnout. And also know the signs of you hitting a flare / burnout / whatever language fits here. Write them down somewhere, check in on that list sometimes. If your symptoms fit the list before you’re too exhausted to write, take a break until the symptoms lessen.

Also, plan ahead. Like, once you have an idea of your monthly wordcount - say it’s 10,000 words a month (that’s conservative, but not unrealistic with chronic disability), that’s 120,000 words a year. That’s one book. Or two very short books. Or one short book and a few oneshots. Or one book and one novella, etc. That doesn’t include time put aside for editing, or formatting, or anything else. 

And that assumes that your wordcount remains consistent. That there’s no unforeseen disasters re: health, or long periods of burnout re: health.

Think about what you really want to be spending your time doing, because you’ll need to stay accountable for stray words etc. if you have goals in mind re: wanting to be a writer.

Also, plan breaks. Like, idk if you already are someone who finds it easy to take breaks, but let’s say you hit your wordcount for the week/month/whenever, take a break afterwards. Don’t use all your energy towards the next project immediately, use some of your energy to take a break and recharge a bit.

Um, be patient with yourself (I’m literally giving you advice I don’t follow, lol), and also, it’s important to remember your overall end goals. Are they to make an income? What kind of income? (Realistically, most full-time writers who are releasing 3-4 books per year only ever make around $8000 a year (it’s gone up!), so it’s not a great career for like...income). Is it to have fun? Is it to prove something to yourself? Are you only wanting to write fanfiction, original fiction, or both? Like, all those things I don’t know from your Ask, but are good things to sit down and brainstorm answers for. Because writing for income may produce a very different plan vs. only writing for fun vs. only writing fanfiction.

And it also really depends on your symptoms too. Everyone’s chronic illnesses / and/or disabilities present in different ways, even if two people have the same illness. I’m writing this advice based partly on my restrictions, but my advice would be pretty useless for someone who might have a lot of energy, but is blind, and really just needs advice on what software/hardware they need to help them write. (Actually my advice might be pretty useless anyway, I am not someone who has this figured out - I am like, learning as I go, and usually the hard way. I would be great for ‘how not to fail at this - a lesson learned by example. Over and over again.’)

Personally, I would just...give yourself some time to feel out your writing limits and like, set an alarm or something every few weeks to assess how you’re feeling as a result of writing / editing X amount. If I were less of a workaholic, I think I would’ve done things a lot more slowly. But my personality is the kind that just likes to dive deep into things and deal with the crushing burnout / increased illness afterwards, and hope it doesn’t permanently alter my energy levels.

And sometimes I’m not lucky enough for that to happen. I’m as sick as I am now, in part, because of two decades of going too hard, and not pulling back fast enough (not just in writing, across all things). I think regular people are better at bouncing back, but I wouldn’t know, I’ve always been sick.

I should follow more of my own advice. ;)