CHECK IN: DAY 6

[igenlode]

I have just been doing an enormous mountain of washing-up (about five days' worth; a the hazard of bachelor living!) and vaguely thinking about possibly typing something... How is progress feeling for other people?

Question of the day: what do you do next when you have just finished a fic?

Comments

[glitteringstars]

I managed to write a bit during my break. It's a oneshot that's been haunting me in various ways, so I'm taking the time to flesh it out and it's so much fun!!

Depends on what kinda fic it is. If it's a oneshot, I tend to just move on to the next one. A longfic, though, that's earned itself a sweet treat.

[igenlode]

Writing during snatched moments can work out really well!

[igenlode]

I finally sat down and typed up eighteen hundred words well after midnight, chiefly in order to have something to report (see! accountability works!) The whole story should come out at a couple of thousand, and I'm quite pleased with the beginning of it at least.

what do you do next when you have just finished a fic?

Mainly I feel an enormous sense of relief.
After a day or two it starts to feel a bit odd not to have any manuscript to take out with me ;-)

But I don't tend to jump straight back into writing something else, unless I have some kind of deadline pushing me, and weirdly I tend not to be in any great hurry actually to publish the finished work. The satisfaction is in the *writing* -- publication tends to be a let-down feeling :-P

[fleetsparrow]

"typed up eighteen hundred words"

!!

Very nice!

[igenlode]

That's just literally straight copy-typing from manuscript (well, almost; I did make a few editorial changes along the way) that has already been written, not actual composition. It took me three weeks to write ;-)

I've completed the typing-up now for a final total of 2236 words, and the next stage is the laborious process of getting the computer to read it out loud to me while I compare the whole thing word for word against the original, in order to transfer any changes back into the manuscript... and spot the inevitable transcription errors in the other direction!

[fleetsparrow]

I keep doing a day of writing followed by a day of none writing this week. Which is probably good for my brain to take some time to percolate and/or recover, but it is a little frustrating when I'm like, "ooh, writing time?" and my brain goes, "....no." ;__;

It depends on when I finish a fic. If it's for an exchange and I'm not finishing it last-minute, I take a bit of a break, then reread it anew. If it's an exchange fic and I *am* finishing it last-minute, then it's "attempt to post > stare at screen for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to Summary AND Title > finally post > profit???"

Overall, though, unless I have another fic that's due immediately after the one I've finished, I typically do take a break from writing once I finish one. It might not last long, but I find that even a, like, one night's sleep break is needed to clear my brain enough from the one I just did before jumping into another one.

[igenlode]

Yes, I always forget the necessity for an actual summary until minutes before posting :-D

One year I wrote an actual Christmas-fic as part of a fandom challenge, got it finished by the 21st, then realised to my horror that I was going to have to type up *and* proofread *and* post four chapters in as many days, a process that normally takes several days per chapter! (And this in amongst all the other Christmas preparations.)
I managed it, but... never again :-p


The next Christmas challenge story I did came out severely over-length as of December 21st (six thousand words on a limit of four thousand) and had to be cut by a third before submission, which was a challenge of quite another kind. I eventually got it down to 3800 words, not least by omitting an entire scene that I wasn't too happy with, and was told in private by one of the judges that it had been the best *written* of the submissions... it was just that it was only peripherally relevant to the actual challenge subject, which tends to be my record on this sort of thing :-)
(I use challenges as a motivation to get myself to write a story on a theme that I already have in mind, as a rule, and in this case the canon events in question could be calculated to have taken place within a few days of Christmas if you squinted a bit...!)

I find that even a, like, one night's sleep break is needed to clear my brain enough from the one I just did before jumping into another one
Ooof -- I can't even imagine jumping straight into writing a new story the same day as finishing writing the previous one.
I can't imagine having the *energy* to do it, let alone the desire ;-)