WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 15 -- Saturday

[linaewen]

It's Saturday -- but wait, where did Friday go?  :-(  Sorry about missing another day this week.  RL in my neck of the woods has been bordering on impossible.  I'm glad the weekend is here!

Anyway, how is your Saturday going thus far?

Did you write?

• Yes!
• No!

If yes, what kind of writerly activity did you engage in?  If no, what were the obstacles/situations that affected your writerly pursuits?

Today is our day for the weekly chatting/snippet-posting/beta-seeking post! Post a bit of what you are working on if you are in a sharing mood!  Do you have a question that needs answering? Do you need help with something that's giving you trouble?  Do you need a place to vent and complain?  Leave a comment & we'll see what we can do to help you!

For Discussion:  This is an optional discussion topic, to wrap up my "Tolkien week." Tolkien once listed in a letter a mound of personal struggles he was facing: being ill, being overworked and missing his son who was away in the Royal Navy.  He put many of his struggles aside, though, and went to writing.  He had to balance his day job with his desire to write epic stories set in Middle Earth.  He found time.  He made time.  It took him 7 years to write The Hobbit. The thing that he writes about most in this period is his struggle to get the work finished on his novels and to balance teaching and his many duties at Oxford College.  Apparently he found a way.

Do you have difficulty finding time to work on your writing when real life becomes a struggle?  What are some of the things that derail you the most as you try to find time to write?  What helps you keep on task?

Comments

[linaewen]

I finally have some time off tomorrow and Monday, and I plan to make some of that writing time. Today is not likely to be good for that, but I'm going to see what I can do to seize the time, anyway.

The discussion for today deals with my main struggle where I am having trouble -- time management and a busy life that makes me continually deal with what is urgent, and when I have time to myself, I'm too tired to do anything useful with it. Thus, writing loses every time. Tolkien is my one of my main writing heroes, and I find it infinitely comforting that he also had long periods of non-writing activity when things were difficult, yet eventually found a way to work through it and produce something marvelous. I'm going use him as an example this busy month to help me persevere in my writing, which is very important to me, even if it isn't one of those "must do" urgent things.

[crowdog66]

I'm going to weight on in this, if that's okay, even though I haven't been around much the last few weeks and missed the monthly sign-in due to a combination of illness and contract work. :(

As long as depression isn't a factor I can usually find time to write each day; the urge to write, like the urge to breathe, demands satisfaction and will manage to get it. If I'm depressed, however, trying to force myself to write usually just makes things worse, so I tend to let it go when the black dogs are biting hard.

For a snippet, I'll post a bit of a story I managed to write yesterday, "With Something of Angelic Light" (Knight Rider 2000, Shawn McCormick/KITT, PG-13, 921 words).

******************************************************

This is not the Real: it is, rather, a virtually endless City with spires that soar into azure heavens adorned with thin clouds of purest white, and depths that plunge into nightmare shades of bloody black depravity. This is a place where the best and the worst of humankind is refined to its purest elements and celebrated, indulged, cultivated for the good of the species and inflicted on the hopelessly enthralled. This is a realm where the dreams of mortal men and women take on the sublime substance of Immortality, if only for a lost and desperate hour.

For Shawn McCormick, implanted with a cranial chip, this electric landscape is even more immersive than it is for those not so augmented. She slips into it now as easily as a woman entering a marvellous dream and walks its streets with somewhat keener senses than the other ghosts who haunt this landscape, and she is always sharply alert, for patrolling the VR is part of the life of duty she's embraced since her augmentation.

And she does not walk alone. At her side strides an angel clothed in an illusion of humanity more deceptive than any other, his alien power masked by a sharp pale face and narrow eyes the color of a certain scanner that resolutely pierces the veils of the Real. Those with eyes to see in the VR always recoil from his aspect of slender maleness in shock once they perceive the blazing code that comprises his being: AI, they whisper, and then, inevitably, Thank God he's Asimoved! If he wasn't…

Shawn knows how that sentence ends: If he wasn't, he could take the VR apart like a Tinker toy.

And he has. But his aspect on that horrible night had been so savage and so terrible that the tightly composed simulacrum he now wears, the thin smiles and economical movements and precisely modulated speech, could never be mistaken for the creature that had laid waste to vast portions of the City with the merciless wrath of an unleashed God. Yes, his motivational matrix had been manipulated and twisted by an unethical hacker; yes, the anguish he'd felt when he'd been restored to his "right mind" had been all-consuming…

But Shawn knew, and Brad knew, that the relentless and ruthless force that KITT had become had been only a shift in emphasis, not in fundamental character. Vivienne had convinced the AI that the VR was an enemy threatening her and all she held dear, and KITT, coerced into absolutely loyalty to her cause, had acted in perfect accordance with his nature: Pragmatically. Efficiently. And above all, decisively.

And the towers of the City had shattered to dust and flame at his touch.

That, as they say, was then. This is now: Shawn trusts him with her life, and more than that, with her sanity. She was able to bring him back from the reaches of lethal madness with a symbolic reinforcement of their connection, and she has no doubt that he would annihilate himself in an instant for her sake. She has no doubt that he needs her, profoundly inhuman though he is, and that the word "friendship" does not go nearly far enough.

[gramarye1971]

I am so close to done with one of my fics that I can practically taste it. If I can get it done today, I'll have it in the queue for posting (it's going up on my fandom's kink meme) and consider it finished, so I can post it to AO3 (and the writethisfanfic comm!) by next week. Which is good, because Kaleidoscope sign-ups end today, and I'll have to start thinking about that for next month's goal.

RL's intrusion on my writing does vary a bit. I had a bad spate of writer's block for several years, coordinated with some stressful times in my life, but I hit a new burst of fannish activity even when RL was still hectic. Sometimes, the writing is an escape or a distraction. Having a level of accountability keeps me on task -- if I know someone's expecting a fic, as in an exchange or the like, it's an encouragement to keep at it. But it mostly helps to keep plugging away at it whenever possible, even if it's just word-vomit to get sentences down on paper or in an electronic format.

[the_rck]

I did some editing today. That's mostly what I've got left to do on this chapter, lots and lots of editing. It's going to take me a few days at least.

Real life can easily keep me from writing. I'm disabled, and I have a limited physical and emotional resources. Some days, I have to choose between writing and getting things done that I need to do or even just want to do. Sometimes, I simply need more sleep than I'm getting at night, and so I lose hours napping.

[cirque]

I finished my hc_bingo blackout today! I'm insanely proud. 25 prompts in one fic D:

I don't have any questions, except why is finding a beta for the Resident Evil fandom so hard? :P It's practically impossible to find betas for small fandoms :/

[barbayat]

Very little writing - obstacles? How about stupid fu****** headaches that do not go away. *sighs* At least I already reached my goal for this week early on.

I generally do not write at all when I am ill or feel down.