Things I'm Losing Sleep Over [March]

So I've decided that instead of giving you guys a list of all the progress on all my stories, Imma just give you the one I've spent time working on the most. It may be the same story several months in a row, only to have a few months where I don't put a word down on paper at all. Shit happens, after all, and my Muse loves playing hard to get.

Furthermore I'll list the current book I'm reading. I've long since noticed that I tend to naturally adopt the writing style of whatever I'm reading at the time, so it's just a personal paper trail for myself.

And, last but not least, I think I'm gonna gradually tiptoe back into reading fanfiction again. So, it may from time to time show up on the list too. I've kept away from it for a very long time because for a very long time I felt like it had nothing to offer me.

See, I'm someone with very, very high standards when it comes to reading fanfiction. If it fails to capture me within the first fifty words, I get bored and go back to what I'm doing. It is, I think, the curse of fanfiction, that everyone knows these characters you write about so they are less patient with you than they are with regular fiction, where it takes time to establish characters and circumstances and plot.

But whatever. Right now all I'm holding out on is the sequel to The Laughing Shadow, which is a month, no, two months, late.

So, without further ado:

Currently Writing: Unravel [10k out of 150k finished]
>>>The first story of the Pretentious Pentad series. My own head cannon on this one, and no fucks given. Set in the same universe as Bloodlines, Curfew, and Legend of the Shotgun. It's... A Hot Mess. Focuses on Stormee. Not much else I can say, except that it's going to be looong and stupidly contrived.

Currently Reading: Can You Forgive Her? By Anthony Trollope. [~313, 411 words (according to Google), 2150 pages on my iPhone]
>>>God. This freakin' story. It's long: the longest thing I've read (and I've read Atlas Shrugged), and, apparently, it's only the first book of six.

But whatever, bro, I'm a solder. I gots this. The book itself is literary fiction, and written in the 1800s, so it's not for everyone. But, I tend to adore, truly, the shameless tell-more-that-show writing style of that time period. It goes to show you that you can build hard-hitting, legendary works by not adhering to that one particular rule that all writers nowadays seem to scream and shake their heads about.

Current Fanfiction Reading: Diplomacy [Dragon Age: Inquisition] (for those who don't know the game, feel free to skip, naturally)
>>>Right. So, this is one the better pieces of fanfiction I've read lately. Or, it was. See, the romantic pairing was supposed to be Trevelyan/Josephine but at about chapter 20, the writer realized that the way she had built her characters was no longer compatible to the romance, or, the romance was no longer compatible to the characters she'd built.

I call bullshit. When you take control of a character who is pretty much a blank slate (as Trevelyan is in the game) and you promise your readers that it would be a romance between them and [insert] it's now your job to follow through. You can't just say that, "oh, the characters developed to the point where the romance seemed impossible." It is you who lead them there, to develop to that point. Were you asleep? Were you jacking off with one hand and writing with the other? No? Then don't give me an excuse and expect me to continue to read your shit. I would quit reading, and I largely have, but there is another romance that the writer had developed that I'm quite interested in. So I just read those parts.

I could rant on and on, but I won't. All I'm saying is now that I can't focus on the actual story cause I have no interest in it, I instead nitpick about the writing style, and the grammar, and no one wants to read about that.

Take note, dear elementary writers, that up there is what you're not supposed to do.