Finally finished, at last...

    It's been a ridiculously long haul, but I'm done with (the first draft of) this stupidly long fanfic!  🥳

    Of course, this is still just the first draft.  And the second draft will require a stupid amount of work.  But I get to do other things before I have to deal with that!  I want to get the third book of the God Killers out as soon as humanly possible (hopefully sometime next month), and I have a couple of really short fics I want to write (because I am stupid) and I need to actually go looking at other peoples' April A to Z theme reveals because I want to stop being the kind of jerk who joins blog hops and then forgets to look at the other blogs. 😰  But for tonight, I'm just gonna put up this post and relax.  Or possibly work on the summary of book two of the God Killers, but who really knows what I'll do before I do it. 🤷🏻‍♀️  Mostly, though, I'm  just going to celebrate that I finally finished this massively long work:  the first draft is 494,315 words long!  (Which took from April 23, 2023 to today, March 24, 2024...omg...that's kinda freaky that both dates are the same as their year...)  And that is just stupidly long.  (Admittedly, there's a lot of stuff in there that's been given the strikethrough treatment, but I doubt that contributes more than 10k, if even that much.)

    I still have a lot of problems to contend with in the next draft, like the primary romantic pairing being a lopsided "romance" in which he's in love and she only feels friendship, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Compared to the way their stories end in the original work (he eternally loveless, she long dead) it's still pretty good as an ending point.  I hope. 😅

    Anyway, I really enjoyed how I started the first scene of the epilogue, and I wanted to post it here because it will be a very long time before I can post it anywhere else.  In the final battle, the fic's lead, Jiang Cheng, took a massive injury, but didn't want to relax his guard and get medical care until after his enemy had finished dying...meaning by the time he could relax he was about halfway to passing out from all the blood loss, and ended up being fairly delirious before he finally did lose consciousness.  So then the epilogue starts as he's waking up again...  [...and I should probably point out that even though I'm working with the TV adaptation's canon, I'm following the novel's formatting of using italics to indicate the POV character's direct thoughts.]

            Jiang Cheng was…asleep?  Or maybe napping?  Unconscious?  Resting?

            Is there a difference?

            Whatever he was, his eyes were shut and he was lying down, insensible to the world.  Then the world came barging into the room, screaming and stomping and shouting and smelling like blood and sweat and death and soup.

            Or that was how it seemed to him.

            Opening his eyes with a low grunt, he slowly spotted the cause of the noise:  Wei Wuxian.  Why am I not surprised?

            Wait, shouldn’t I be surprised?

            Isn’t he somewhere else right now?

            Ugh, why does everything hurt so much?

            “Now see what you’ve done?  You woke him up, Qing-jie!”

            “Me?!  You’re the one making enough noise for a whole army!”  Wen Qing’s indignation made Jiang Cheng laugh.  Hadn’t she known Wei Wuxian long enough to know better?

            “Hey, you okay?”  Wei Wuxian sat down on the side of the bed.  “You look half dead.”

            “I feel worse.”  Jiang Cheng tried to sit up, but didn’t manage much.  “Where am I?  How did I get here?”

            “You passed out due to massive blood loss,” Wen Qing told him, walking up behind Wei Wuxian.  “Next time, don’t refuse treatment just because the enemy hasn’t finished dying yet.”

    [Wei Wuxian is the lead of the original work, and kind of Jiang Cheng's adopted brother (though also kind of not, since he wasn't formally adopted).  "-jie" as a suffix means "older sister," and can be used with an actual blood sibling or (as in this case) as a term of endearment (or affectionate teasing) with a woman older than the speaker who is not related to the speaker.]

    Anyway, it's kinda freaky.  When I did a mini-outline for what needed to go in the epilogue, I looked at what I had written and then said to myself  "Ugh, looking at this, it’s gonna be even more than 10k, isn’t it?" and you know what?

    The epilogue ended up being 10,300 words.

    To me, that seems pretty freaky, since I usually cannot judge in the slightest how long something will be from the outline. (Like the time I thought an outline section would be about 50k and it turned out to be more like 150k....)

    I just had to take a screenshot of the final double palindrome of the work. 🤣 Because I'm weird like that. Kind of a doozy, though! 😅

    And this happened earlier this afternoon:

    I have a terrible tendency to do things like the above, where I was writing along and just started typing my own thoughts instead of the narration. I did that a lot in this scene, actually, because I had plotted it all out and written it in my head twice over (consistently) earlier in the day, but when I got to the scene--the point of which was for Jiang Cheng to talk to his love interest, Wen Qing, and establish that no, his grandmother wasn't forcing her to marry him, but that she actually wanted to--it came out all wrong and kind of went insane. To the point where I gave up on it and decided that future me could deal with it.😅 I'm too burned out to write a scene that difficult right now, you know? Besides, I probably need to retool their whole relationship in the next draft, so she's more into him the whole time, and thus doesn't have to have this weird aromantic but somehow still into him even though she only thinks of him as a friend thing going on.

    Anyway, in the case of the above, the problem was that I am just far too aromantic and asexual to write a detailed kissing scene. Because I've never done any kissing, and it just sounds icky. (This is also one of the reasons I cannot write detailed sex scenes.) In this case I was also extra uncomfortable about it because it was hetero, and it's been a while since I wrote anything hetero.

    Aaaaaaand it's dinner time, and I have not stopped working on the computer since getting up this morning. (Seriously, ate lunch at the computer and everything.)

    I think I need to just hit "publish" on this post and leave it a jumbled mess and worry about the rest later.

    Like tomorrow. After I've eaten and slept and done other vital functions that I have been putting off.

    Because I have finally finished this %$^#$in' long thing and I deserve a rest! 🤣

April A to Z Theme Reveal

     So, this is something I haven't done in a long time--and have never done on this version of my blog, having only done it back on the Wordpress version--but I'm thinking about taking part in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge this year.

    I even have a theme!  (Of sorts.)

    My theme is going to be "characters I have written about."

    Which sounds pretty dumb when I actually write it down, but...

    Some posts will be more talking about the character as a character, and some will be more focused on excerpts of my writing.  (Which sounds astonishingly arrogant now that I'm looking at it on the screen...)

    The characters are going to be a mixed bag (I don't have them all picked out, but I have at least a few candidates for almost every letter), some being truly original characters from things I've written, some being mythological figures I've written about, and some being other peoples' characters I've written fan fiction about. 😅  I might be especially looking forward to that last category, even...

    I plan to talk about what the characters are like, and why I've chosen them for the blog post, whether that's why I like them, why they're important to me, or whatever other reason I had for picking them.  (In one case, it may be "I couldn't even find any other characters whose name starts with the letter U".)  Some of them even have art I can post.  (Mostly the fan fiction, but a few of the originals, too...)

    For the most part, I'm hoping I can fulfill this challenge using works I've already released online, or plan to release eventually.  If that doesn't work, I may have to dip into older works that I would otherwise like to pretend don't exist due to sheer cringe.  (The letter "V" might require that, unfortunately...)

    Anyway, I'm hoping that this will both help me get back into the spirit of more regular blogging (instead of a frenzy of blogging in November and barely even doing so sporadically the rest of the year) and maybe also help me to start visiting other people's blogs again.

    Oh, final thought, re:  "adult content."  My blog itself does not contain adult content, but my fiction often contains swearing and sometimes contains what would be called "suggestive material" if it was in a movie.  So while my posts are totally SFW, their links may not be wholly so.  I think that leaves me okay to not click the "adult content" marker on the actual challenge form (when it's available to fill out) but if I'm wrong about that, please let me know now so I don't make that mistake later!  Thanks! 😆

IWSG: The Longest Write

    (Dumb post title that is an in-joke only to me, and isn't even funny, more just mildly quirky, and will not be even that if I bother to explain it...)

    So, I have been working on one project for a very long time now, and it is stupidly long.  Admittedly, it should be shorter in draft two (there are at least two whole scenes in it that are entirely crossed out with strikethrough, plus a lot of shorter passages and individual words) but it will still be stupidly long even then.

    I'm drawing near to a full year on it:  I just checked the document it started out in (before it got long enough to sap my phone's battery and even cause the loading on my computer to lag, forcing me to move it from Google Docs to Microsoft Word (though at this point it has become so long that even that takes at least a full minute to load)) and I started writing it on the 24th of April.  The fact that it's still going--and that I've been worked on it almost every day in between then and now--is kind of staggering.  Especially when you consider that I'm the type who often writes several thousand words per sitting.  (I did about 90k this past November alone, for example.  My max in a single day is, I think, in the 14-16k range?  Hmm...I had that written down somewhere.  I should check before I post this...)

    I'm starting to feel restless about it, but equally afraid that if I set it aside to write something else for a while then I'll never come back to it.  (Okay, technically I've actually written two other small things since then, one about 10k long and the other more like 2.5k.  Both only took two days to write, so I hadn't set the project down for long.)  It's frustrating on so many levels, especially since I have a stalled project that needs a final edit-and-polish for release, plus I had a fun idea for a cute little visual novel, but if I work on the latter I fear I won't end up coming back to this one, and the former is just...I don't know.

    *sigh*

    It's very stupid and frustrating, especially since it's not even "real" writing in most people's eyes, as it's a fan fiction project that got way out of control.  (I had been worried about how stupidly long it is--a bit over 450k words by now--but then I looked up how long the original novel is, and came across the data that the fan translation of the novel is about 470k, so...I guess that makes it feel a little less weird?  (I'd heard Chinese web novels could get insanely long, but actually seeing the proof is mind-numbing!  All the more so since the one in question, Mo Dao Zu Shi, is one of the shorter novels that have gotten official English translations:  it only runs five volumes, whereas the author's third novel is eight volumes, and The Husky and His White Cat Shizun (which is from a different author) is eleven.  (I probably won't finish reading that one...more because of the content than the length, though...)))

    Anyway, at least the end is in sight on this thing, but...ugh.  I am so drained from writing it, which is kind of ironic since it was supposed to be a lightweight relaxation project to keep my heart under control when my heart palpitations first showed up.  Next time, I need to write something that's actually going to be lightweight and relaxing.

    Maybe I need to branch out into fairy tales for a while.  Those shouldn't be able to stress me out....

    ...though that also sounds kinda dull, so it probably won't happen.  If I can just stick to projects that will actually be short, that should help.

    But!  I realize none of that is of the slightest interest to anyone other than me, so I actually have a question for anyone who happens across this post.  Did anyone take part in the official NaNoWriMo this past November?  (I've been avoiding it since they redid their site and made it so awful.)  I recently got an email from them about all these changes that they're making in how the organization is going to function from here on out, and it sounds like maybe something happened during NaNo this year.  So, idle curiosity (and perhaps a hint of schadenfreude), what happened?  Anything I should actually know about, or just general "the internet" type of stuff?