Writing is Ridiculous and I have the hiccups again

There’s a story I was writing for Shadowhunters about the AU versions of Alec and Magnus that takes place in the club where they first meet. I started the story, got so far and trashed it. Then I started over, got so far and then trashed it. I started over AGAIN wrote the whole thing to the conclusion, began to edit it and just generally hated it. It took me nearly the entire month of April to do that, not to mention that I started it at the end of March. I have worked on that story for 35 days. And okay, that’s not a terribly long time to work on a story, I guess, except for the part where the story is only 1,700 words long. It was an excruciating process, and I still hate the story. Reb, darling that she is, was trying to help me edit it (bless her), and I was looking over her suggestions and generally hating the story when another story hit me upside the head. I didn’t have all the details but I knew how I wanted it to start and I had an idea of how I wanted it to go and I decent idea of how I wanted it to end. So I decided to ignore the edits I needed to do to post the Shadowhunters story in time to call it my “April Story” for my goal of posting one story per month this year and write this other story. 

 

I wrote the other story in less than 48 hours. I’ve done some more editing today and will probably need to do a little more before I post it to AO3 for more easily accessible mass consumption, but it still startles me that it can take over a month to write 1,700 words and then I can end up taking less than two days to write 2,200. How does that make any sense? 

I'm so tired today. It's been a long day. I got up to work out with dad this morning, and then I took a nap after my shower before I went to work, but I stayed up late finishing and posting that story and then got up so early to go to the gym. Even with the nap, it was still a long day with a lot going on. 

And now I have another story I want to write, but we'll see how it goes. I can't write much tonight anyway since I should've gone to bed ages ago. 

The Mighty Kate

I’m trying to figure out what it is I’m going to work on writing this month. Part of me is thinking of attempting the Shadowhunters story again. Maybe scraping what I’ve got and then starting over again or throwing most of it and just keeping a few lines I like. I just I don’t know. I know that part of writing is fighting to write even when you don’t feel like it. There have been stories that I’ve fought to write that I’ve ended up loving, though more often than not I hate them, but what I do find is that if I fight and fight and fight to write--whether that be one story or a bunch of different ones--I’ll eventually get to the point where something just clicks. Once something clicks, it takes no time at all to finish it which is exactly what happened this past weekend with my Natasha and Clint high school AU.

 

Plans are such a fickle thing. Writing is such a weird endeavor. I suppose that any art is a weird endeavor. I’ve never been an artist in the painting, sculpture, drawing, etcetera kind of way so I can’t say that I have the experience to know if those types of artists battle the same kinds of issues. I’m betting they do though. I’m betting it’s a pretty common part of being a creative person in general. I read an article that suggested coming up with 10 ideas a day even if they’re terrible or similar to something else because the more often you work on being creative the more it will come naturally plus the more stuff you come up with, the more likely you’ll have something good to work with which is just common statistical sense. My goal is to come up with a story a day for 31 days, so even though I don’t know what I’m going to work on right now, I am doing what I can to give myself a chance to come up with something.

 

On an entirely different note, I had one of my best jogs ever as far as time goes and the best distance one since I started jogging again. My average pace was 13 minutes and 59 seconds, lol, which I’m excited about because when I took up jogging a couple of years ago, I couldn’t seem to break a 15-minute mile average. In fact, as I recall I had a hard time breaking 16 minutes. Granted I was able to go for longer at that point and I know the longer distance you’re going the harder it is to be “fast” (even if that’s not especially “fast”). My immediate goal is to get to the point where I can jog the 5k straight through. That’s goal one. The next goal is to be able to do it in 45 minutes. I know that I just said my average pace today was at 14 minutes but I only did just over 2 miles (2.22 according to my phone). The app I’m using is the Couch to 5k and it’s a pretty good way to build yourself up. I’m a little stressed about the next step in the process. Today it was “walk to warm up for five minutes, jog for 8, walk for five minutes, jog for 8 minutes, walk for five to cool down” but the next “assignment” is walking five minutes, jogging 20, and then walking five.

 

It’s interesting to me that you have the 5-8-5-8-5 and then you go to 5-20-5 and then the next thing you do is walk 5, jog 5, walk 3, jog 8, walk 3, jog 5, walk 5. The one after that is 5 minutes walking, 10 minutes jogging, three minutes walking, 10 minutes jogging, and then five minutes cooling down and it just seems like to me that the 5-20-5 should come after those. I’m guessing there’s some sort of rhyme to the reason, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is.

But, that’s a mystery for another day, because I need to sleep. I'll be up early tomorrow again to head to the gym. Night y’all!