I’m going to hopefully use this again. Life and working more on actual work and potential novels has taken up a lot of time and energy, but stuff is happening. Anyway, brb
Look at me finishing a thing! Between Rubble and Ruin clocks in at 11,407 words, surpassing the shorter-than-I-remember Chime and Mignon’n’Shere but losing out to Grane (14,814) in the longest thing I’ve actually finished contest. Before I get into if I think I did a good job or not, this one took a whole lot less time than my other short story/novella type things, and that feels very good. I’m writing daily (and professionally outside of my dumb fiction here no one reads) which is really helping my productivity, if not my skill. Yay me?!
BRaR feels like a nice addition to my “Young girls having an amazingly shitty couple of days” collection of works. I absolutely hated it as I wrote it and felt like I failed at every level, but now that it is done I think it’s pretty okay. It doesn’t match Grane in quality in my mind, but I’m hopefully slowly getting better at writing dialogue. I’m also very fond of the ending, which at first accidentally tied into the “end of childhood innocence” theme really well. It wasn’t my plan at first, but hey! I’ll take it.
Between the first half and the second half, I did a lot of work on my book (We Used to Be Someone) and will be returning to focusing on that now. Can’t wait till this piece of shit is done so I can move on.
YAY BYE
I exist, and starting today I’ll have a lot more time to stop being depressed and start writing more, so yay! Two chapters of my newest novella “Between Rubble and Ruin” are up in the short stories section. It is a grim and bloody tale of two young sisters in a post apocalyptic hellscape. Fun! Also going to go through all my shitty poetry and remove the bad ones.
I just haven’t uploaded anything newsworthy. Some teasers for things I might never write as well as some dumbo poems. Work continues on We Used to Be Someone, but it is progressing fairly slowly. Stuff will happen eventually!
Grane is finished! You can read part six here or read from the beginning here.
I’m pretty proud of how it went. It has its ups and downs in quality as anything I write over a larger period of time tends to, but I think I’m getting better at fighting that. I’m getting better at focus. Improvement is improvement, woo!
I don’t have a huge amount of things to say about Grane. The finale is as apocryphal, dreary and strange as the rest of it and that’s always what I was going for. The dialogue in the last day is strange and that is by design. There are some big moments there that not a lot of prose is payed to, and that’s always been something I wanted to try with Grane. It doesn’t pay mind to much, it just pushes forward how it wants, just like the titular huntress it follows.
~PRETENTIOUS NONSENSE~
I think Chime might have been better, but I’m not sure. Super proud of myself for actually for real finishing another thing, in any case!
Day 5 is up and there will be a day 6! Ramblings will be up with it, hopefully in short order.
Day 6 will be called “…and Crumble” and will end the tale.
Grane Day 4 is done and posted in the short stories section.
This one started off pretty bad. I didn’t like it, but I figured out where I was going with it and I think it turned out okay in the end. It whiplashes suddenly and unceremoniously reveals plot twists, but I think the way it is written fits the no-nonsense bleakness the prevails the title character and the story as a whole.
I’ve been afraid that forcing myself to finish the first part of my book before doing the rest of Grane has ruined it. The dialogue heavy We Used to Be Someone and the description heavy Grane are two different modes of writing, and I’m apparently bad at switching. The damage though, I think is going to be minimal. I don’t regret forcing myself to focus on one thing, because focus is something I need to learn.
Coming soon is Day 5, which is called something. I’m not sure what yet because I’m not sure if Days 5 and 6 are going to be separate like I originally planned or if I’ll combine them into one. So next is the penultimate or ultimate chapter.
Thanks for reading, the one of you who did!
Grane day 3 is up in the short stories section. It is an odd chapter, I think. Perhaps duller in its subject matter, but it gives a little insight into Grane’s experiences, outlook and personality. I think that’s important to the ultimate end of this tale, and while this might be a weaker segment I think it’ll enhance the thing as a whole.
The next part of Grane is called “Desiccated Souls.” and is as dreary as you would expect a Grane chapter to be and also more of a return to form.
Little update to say We Used to Be Someone chapters 1-3 rough draft is done. I’m sending it to some nice folks for review and looking for a few more nice folks to give opinions on it. I’ll be revising it later and posting it as a preview of the (hopeful) final booky project.
In the meanwhile, I’m going to stop ignoring Grane and get to work on Day 3. I really quite like Grane and it deserves to not be thrown to the wayside. I’m shifting focus to completing all 6 parts of Grane whilst throwing WUTBS at people for review. Work on that won’t resume until Grane is done, so expect actual real things soon!
Also two new shitty poems are up like usual. Just sayin’.
It isn’t like no progress has been made, but I’m unable to get myself out of bed most days. When I do write its just futzing with the same pages over and again. I can’t get things to where I like them and I’m slowly losing the will to continue bothering with anything. I suppose that’s what separates amateurs like me from the pros. Maybe I’ll eventually get it right, WHO KNOWS. I just know my desire to complete this bit of We Used to Be Someone may have very well ruined Grain by taking away my momentum. Hope not, but I’m determined to learn to stick with one project so I’ll keep beating myself in the face with it until it goddamn works or I die.
Happy Post.
(Also I wrote a bunch of shitty poems which isn’t worth mentioning but at least I can feel like I’ve done something.)
