Serialized Fiction as Public Performance · 8:36am May 15th, 2022
I've remembered recently how much I like blogging. It's nice to be able to talk about the various goings-on in my life in my own way and not have people look at you funny.
Howdy folks. It's been... not too long, comparatively. Just a few months. And I've already published a story again. So much for that hiatus, huh? It's Four AM, and All I Can Think of is You didn't do too well, views-wise, but that's okay. It was very much a "for me" project. (Although you should totally check it out if you haven't yet). It's a story very much written to help me deal with things, as may well have been obvious. It worked, to a certain extent. No such thing as a one stop solution, but that's life. Listening to twenty One Pilots on an endless loop has been nice for that too, but I digress.
Sadly, I'm not really here today to announce the end of my hiatus. It's a bit more nuanced than that. I'm writing again. ANd have a lot of fun with it. It's slow going, as I'm, rather predictably, pretty rusty. It's weird, actually - the better at writing I've gotten, the harder it's gotten in general. I know it's because my standards for myself have only gotten higher with experience, but I do kind of miss the days of slamming out a 2-3K word chapter in an afternoon and just throwing it up with hardly any editing. These days it's more like 500-800 words in an hour, then 2 hours of staring at the screen wondering how to phrase the next sentence or bridge a gap, then giving up and going to bed.
Or writing a blog...
....
Don't look at me like that. I'm not procrastinating. Yes I am.
Something that's helped is writing with the intention of doing multiple drafts. Which... I know kinda sounds obvious, and I've already talked about this in a previous blog, so to plagiarize myself - I don't... write good. Look, as it painfully obvious, I'm not the best writer on the block. I've never taken any creative writing classes or anything. I'm 100% home-grown self-taught. And my teacher? Fanfiction, mostly.
Gee, I wonder why I've developed so many bad habits.
I never had much interest in reading before fanfiction, and didn't have any interest at all in writing. So it was never something I... did. Except the Percy Jackson series. Those books were my jam as a teen.
Anyway, this has resulted in me having no clue what I'm doing and flying by the seat of my pants for this whole wordy-thing. To be fair, I think I've gotten some pretty solid results given that. But, like I said, as my experience grows and I start becoming a harsher and harsher critic of my own work, it just doesn't work anymore.
But planning, and drafting, and writing and rewriting and... it all takes so much time. Time that I can't spend actually publishing anything, and publishing something puts a hell of a weight on my shoulders to... keep it going. Keep the momentum going. Pay no attention to the abandoned fics behind the curtain.
I think Dan Olson from Folding Ideas put it well in his videos on the fifty shades series - "Serialized fiction as a form of public performance". Great youtuber and great videos, by the by. But basically there's an incentive to post work one chapter at a time and engage with your readers on a per-chapter basis. And as much as I claim over and over to write for my own enjoyment, I don't deny that I also enjoy sharing my work and see y'alls reactions to it. Getting a positive review or comment is such a huge boost to my desire to keep working on a project.
And so, here's my dilemma. I want to write things properly, I want to write with quality. I want to write things I can be proud of. But doing it that way is a long, slow process, especially without the pressure and positive reinforcement from the live publishing and audience interaction that comes with it.
I know, I know, it comes down to self motivation and discipline. But to be honest, I'm not exactly great at that. Never have been. But I'm working on it. There's a big push for me right now to just write something every night. Even just a few words on a random project. Something. Every night. Hopefully I can build that habit back up. You might be seeing more blogs in the future as a result of that.
So... what's all this trying to say?
My hiatus is not officially over, but I am writing, even though I'm wrestling with how exactly I want to go about it. Words are being put to paper. Plots are progressing, but slowly.
And so, I leave you with this fun fact - in the last 36 hours, I have slept ~3 hours and consumed far, far more caffeine than recommended.
I'm gonna go pass out now.
Until next time,
Kodeake out
You like Percy Jackson and Dan Olson? Clearly your a man of good taste.
But in all seriousness, I get it. It's like that (fake?) Mark Twain quote: "I hate to write, but I love having written."
Just take your time, and take care of yourself, and I'm sure you'll get back into the swing of things eventually.