I think boredom is extremely useful, especially for creative types like writers.

Time away from everything, just sitting or lying, doing nothing but letting my mind wander. It's critical for my writing. I need that time in order to think about stories and characters, to visualize scenes over and over again, making changes to see what works, to 'listen' for interesting dialogue.

Boredom is awesome! (Even if I'm not technically bored. )

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I am still writing!

But it's slow going and I don't have anything to publish, damn it.

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An insurance company has hired me as an email & front-end dev and while this is wonderful for my financial situation it is also eating up most of my days. 1.5 hour commute in the morning, 8 hours at work, 2 hour commute home. Such is life.

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I'm going to link here to a pretty good sounding article about dealing with the difficult middle part of a story: Habits & Traits #158: Getting Unblocked in the Sticky Middle

I'm currently sort of stuck like this on three different stories... four if you count Dæling With Yt.

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A short followup to my previous post about footnote abuse: Footnotes in a story

Why not consider the parenthetical aside instead?

Footnote
Rainbow Dash's train ticket was totally not stolen.⁽¹⁾ And the conductor punched it.

// many paragraphs of story here //

_{(1) Not from RD at any rate.}

Parenthetical Aside

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Don't.

Please?

Pretty please don't put footnotes in a story.

If you can avoid it, please, please, please avoid it!

If you have to use them, for the love of your readers (and me!) -- DON"T USE THEM CONSTANTLY!

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Though I haven't posted anything in aaages, I've been writing like a mad mare. I'm 150,000 words in on this new story I've been working on and I guesstimate I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the plot. Once it's finished I'm going to post it... probably a chapter a week or something, rather than all in one go.

I've been poking at my other stories a bit, but nothing to post yet.

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It's been a while since I last updated either of the stories I'm currently posting, so I thought a short 'update' was in order.

I read Gentleman for Mares (NSFW!) and it inspired YET ANOTHER PONE STORY in the fertile folds of my grey matter. Trying to write notes for characters, sequences, plot points, etc. in GDocs was killing me.

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This is a sad post, so if you don't want to deal with that sort of thing I encourage you to skip it.

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I have a sinus headache and don't feel up to working on any of my stories. So here are three tips based on things I've noticed in some of the stories I've read here. I don't know if anyone might find this useful--or even read it. This is probably just shouting in an empty room.

Digits in Dialog

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