A list of things I’ve encountered while writing my first fic · 8:40am Apr 30th, 2016
I published my first fic. I had this apprehensive feeling, a mild case of butterflies in my stomach that came with doing something new. I skimmed through the story, made edits as I went along. Read the Submit Story popup window thrice. Spent three hours three minutes looking up synonyms or anything I could use as puns for the title. Wrote some catchy description that didn’t reflect the tone of the story.
However, I suppressed it enough to just click the ‘Submit’ button and worry about everything later. It’s a nice attitude to have. Do it, worry later.
So there you have it. The story’s likely to pop up on my profile sometime within the next few days.
As for the title of this blog, I’ve got a whole list of them.
→ Writing descriptions is an arduous process. I can imagine a scene perfectly fine, but the moment I try to put it in words… yeah. It’s difficult!
→ Focusing on writing is difficult when there’s any noise, especially music. I wouldn’t hesitate to listen to Kapustin, though. Seriously good jazz. Or Ravel (see also: Jeux d’eau). Debussy. Chopin (although the piano is incredibly flat). Oh, and don’t forget Rachmaninoff. Romantic period and twentieth-century are best periods, period.
Wait, I forgot to mention the absolutely insane In Dahomey. Seriously, so many ossias. Make up your mind, Grainger!
→ I have my utmost respect for authors of long fics, especially those >200k word ones. How they can put their mind to working on such a long story is a mystery to me.
→ Desiccate (misspelt as dessicate) and occurrence (misspelt as occurance/occurence) are difficult words to spell. Occurence or occurance? I sometimes ponder. And then I look it up and it turns out to be neither. 
→ Mould-mold. Colour-color. Hourse-horse. Splendour-splendor. Sombre-somber. (One of the spellings is made-up)
You know you’ve been reading too much fanfiction when you start unconsciously using the American spelling instead of the proper Commonwealth spelling. See also: double quotation marks or single quotation marks, and having spaced en dashes or non-spaced em dashes.
→ I spend too much time worrying about apostrophes and quotation marks facing the right way.
→ Chapter views count even when the chapter is unpublished, and the story is unsubmitted. Ended up getting 25 chapter views by editing and reloading. Weird.
→ My Firefox English (New Zealand) dictionary could do with some improvements. It’s missing some words, like timeline (though it has time line and time-line) and handleless (though it has handle-less).
