marvelouscity

Previous poll review
In the Stoic hurt/comfort poll, 44.2% of respondents prefer the stoic character stoically/reluctantly/awkwardly providing comfort, vs 41.9% who prefer them receiving comfort (pretty sure that's within the margin of error, though); and 27.9% said it depends. Three people (including me) checked "I'm not into hurt/comfort." <3

In ticky-boxes, appreciating being able to breathe through your nose came second to hugs, 62.8% to 79.1%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
I finished The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley, read by Sid Sagar, a m/m clockpunk fantasy novel set in ancient Thebes. I especially enjoyed the Theban POV, and I grew increasingly more engaged as it progressed. Might read it again sometime in text.

Still making my way through Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. I'm up to the advice for third drafts.

Andrew and I finished Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Grover Gardner, while polishing off a jigsaw, and have started The Vor Game, in which Miles is instructed to learn to respect authority, and immediately sets out to manipulate everyone around him.

Kdramas
The same four as last week: Phantom Lawyer, You're Beautiful (ahhhh!), Love Scout, and Lovely Runner. The latter involves the female lead time-travelling 15 years into her past self, and she seems weirdly unaware of the age gap between her and the school-age male lead. Maybe this isn't a romance? (Writing this made me consider an alternate version where her contemporary self just sends her diary or something to the past instead, so her teen self would be armed with all the knowledge but still age-appropriate.)

Other TV
Finished Paper Girls (argh, permanent cliffhanger ending!) and Connections (BBC). Still watching The Pitt, Rooster, and Scrubs. Zoomed through all of Big Mistakes, a Netflix romp starring Dan Levy, which ended with a set-up for season 2.

Fringe (which is losing the plot, wow) and Bluey with my sister.

And we saw Hoppers at the cinema, and had a great time with it. Aww! Such an optimistic view of the world.

Audio entertainment
Dreaming Against the Machine (new podcast by Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever), episode 1: "Futurists, with Reo Eveleth". The podcast is about "envisioning a realistic and hopeful future", and this episode was really great. I found it via the Better Offline episode "More, Everything, Forever with Adam Becker".

(Aside: something about DAtM made me think that podcasts are the blogs of today: thoughtful people making their ideas and conversations public, very voicey and intimate in a way. And presumably just as hard to break into (in the English-language sphere) if you're not a confident user of the English language...)

Writing/making things
Getting back into the swing of writers' hour now it's moved to 8am for the winter -- which is timely, because I have a 520 Day assignment fic to write. (I was aiming for short, but it's already over ~~1500w~~ 2300w, with at least two scenes to go. Which is what happens when you mostly read novels, I guess.)

Life/health/mental state things
We've had a few days of gorgeous weather (and next week is looking dire), which has meant a lot of biking. Plus I have builders working on reputtying some of my windows, which is disruptive and dusty, so I've been out a lot; yesterday I worked on my 520 fic at our newly re-opened central public library. All of which is to say that my arms are pretty mad at me. Bluetooth keyboards are great, but so is my home ergonomic setup. And I can only handle so much biking atm.

The window work is in a race against the weather, and weather forecasting has got less accurate since some @#$#*ing incompetent shitheads @#(*ed up the US Weather Service. So who knows if my house will be weatherproof next week? No one!

I'm not as cranky as this sounds. Just a bit stressed, and my house is covered in a fine layer of dust. Guess I'm looking at a thorough ~~spring~~ autumn clean once this is all done.

Had a flu jab on Wednesday.

Link dump
Get your Letter to the Editor published. Every. Time. | AO3 admin post about Spambot Comments on AO3 (different types, and what to do about them) | Remarkable survival after hawk trapped in car grille | Mom cat shows her kittens the German shepherd is safe (Youtube, via

starandrea).

Good things
Lovely weather. Mobile technology and ebikes. Writing!! Friendly builders. Andrew and Halle and friends and Dreamwidth.

Poll #34482 Fanfic vs Profic

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

View Respondents

Do you have different prose standards for reading profic vs fanfic?

View Answers

no, I'm pretty relaxed about prose quality if other aspects of the story capture me
2 (25.0%)

yes, I'm more picky about fanfic
0 (0.0%)

yes, I'm more picky about profic...
4 (50.0%)

... with the exception of certain genres
1 (12.5%)

no, I'm picky across the board
3 (37.5%)

other
0 (0.0%)

ticky-box of to read makes our speaking English good
6 (75.0%)

ticky-box full of podcasts
2 (25.0%)

ticky-box of how many rivers must an otter swim down before you can call it an otter
7 (87.5%)

ticky-box full of 42
4 (50.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
4 (50.0%)

carenejeans

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 15

This is my last day hosting for this month! Tomorrow, head over to sanguinity's place. See you there!

Quote of the Day:

"Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic."

— Jim Jarmusch, quoted in Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist.

My Check-In:

Alibi sentence! Because, er, I was lazy! ;-)

Tally
( Days 1-13 )

Day 14:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora

Day 15:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, 'When I get busy, I get stupid.' Ain’t that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts—it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, 'Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.'"

Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (Workman Publishing, 2012)

My Check-In:

Some work on the Neverending Project...*thud*.

Tally
( Days 1-12 )

Day 13:

annavere,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 14:

china_shop,

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

I dunno, Monday the 13th sounds scarier than Friday. ;-)

Quote of the Day:

(Another go-to author…)

"A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, hold a chair at the thing and shouting 'Simba!'"

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper & Row, 1989).

My Check-In:

Alibi sentence. But for a better reason this time… We had some friends come visit at the bookshop — it was closed, so it was a private party! Very nice relaxing lunch, conversation, and books. 8-)

Tally
( Days 1-11 )

Day 12:

annavere,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora

Day 13:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

(Another quote from Elizabeth McCracken, because it's what I'm reading and because I ran out of quotations and don't have time to look for more elsewhere. I really recommend her book; it's weird and contradictory and funny. Before the quote below she's actually arguing against having to feel like you have to write every day, heh.)

"And yet I persist in believing that I’m a real writer. I’ve never doubted that I am. My work, yes, I have doubted. My work ethic, and my reputation. Not my identity. I write; I am a writer. My qualifications are that I say so."

— Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (HarperCollins, 2025).

My Check-In:

A good chunk of the Neverending project.

Today there is no adulting! I insist!

Tally
( Days 1-10 )

Day 11:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

(Another quote from Elizabeth McCracken.)

"Any writer’s ideal craft manual must be bespoke, like a suit, made to measure. Write a manifesto aimed only at your own work without worrying whether it applies to or offends anybody else in the world. Address, in your silent heart, punctuation, plot, character, all your picayune concerns and grandiose plans, all the things that made you want to be a writer. Make it living, an armor-clad list that might change. It will be dearer to you than any other guide."

— Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (HarperCollins, 2025).

My Check-In:

Alibi sentence! An angry one! Adulting, gah. It's also why I'm behind on comments. 8-(

Today should be better!

Tally
( Days 1-9 )

Day 10:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

— E. L. Doctorow

My Check-In:

Neverending Project! It was a soothing break from the adulting, at least. 8-/

Tally
( Days 1-8 )

Day 9:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book."

— Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. HarperCollins, 2025.

My Check-In:

Neverending Project is neverending. ;-)

Tally
( Days 1-7 )

Day 8:

annavere,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

china_shop

Previous poll review
In The whooshing sound as they go past poll, 25.6% of respondents said they generally find deadlines motivating, 28.2% want to hide from them, and 64.1% find them manageable in moderation or under specific circumstances. In ticky-boxes, sunbeams dancing brightly on leaves in the breeze came second to hugs, 66.7% to 87.2%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Still listening to The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley, read by Sid Sagar. There's an interesting tension between my being 90% sure the POV character is unreliable, and 10% aware that he is familiar with the ancient world and its mores, while I am not, so what if all his wrong interpretations are right?

I'm up to the second-draft section of Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell, and I am somewhat despairing. In brief, he recommends: discovery write your first draft for raw material, reverse engineer an outline from it, fix the outline, then write the second draft from the revised outline from scratch. Which makes sense if a) you need to discover your characters and worldbuilding along with your story, and b) you can write from an outline. But when I've tried this in the past, I kept editing the outline until it was a completely different story from my first draft. Also, I don't want to rewrite my fics from scratch, and even if I managed to, I'd end up with a differently not-working draft and have to do it all over again. Tl;dr, there is a lot of good stuff in Refuse to Be Done, but it's not the magic bullet for my writing woes that I'd hoped. Oh well.

Maybe I should give the method a try for something shorter.

Kdramas
I'm currently watching four Kdramas, woohoo!

Andrew and I are watching Phantom Lawyer, which is goofy and kind. I would probably enjoy it even more if I hadn't recently listened to a bunch of episodes of Movie Briefs podcast; now I'm very conscious of the rampant unethical lawyering (your client being guilty does not mean you get to turn evidence over to the police, omg; you can't lie to a client about their case to spare their feelings; etc). Anyway, I'm kind of hoping it doesn't develop a romance; I like the leads as a platonic odd couple.

Pru and I are still watching Love Scout. More this evening. (And I showed my brother episode 1 on Friday, though he chatted through it; is that how normal people watch TV?)

I slipped and fell into a rewatch of You're Beautiful, the 2009 "nun undercover as her twin brother in a boyband" drama that was my gateway drug. It is still ridiculous and adorable. Neither of the leads has two braincells to rub together, and I love them. The second lead is still annoying.

spoilers

The lead is arrogant, impatient, and rude, but when he accidentally overhears his new bandmate talking about keeping the fact she's a woman a secret, he immediately confronts her, demands that she go to the manager and confess, and generally engages with her as an (annoying, accident-prone) person. Eventually he ends up helping her and conspiring to keep her secret. Meanwhile, the second lead guesses from Mi-nam's physical attributes that she's female (which reads very differently to me in 2026 than it did to my clueless younger self!). He doesn't tell her he's guessed, just goes out of his way to befriend her and invite her confidence, and he gradually gets jealous of the first lead. He's "nice", but I do not like him.

Hwang Tae-kyeong's reluctant self-embroilment in the deception makes me laugh a lot,and I'm permanently earwormed with the theme song. I feel like in a modern remake, a) the other boyband members would be more androgynous looking too, and b) the management would be all over everything. A.N. Entertainment is one ramshackle operation.

I also started Lovely Runner, starring Kim Hye-yoon (Extraordinary You) as a Kpop megafan whose idol dies by suicide. She time-travels back 15 years to when they were both in school and proceeds to be extremely in-his-face, leveraging her encyclopaedic fan knowledge of him to try and change the course of history. Kim Hye-yoon is always delightful, so I'm enjoying it so far, but it's early days.

Other TV
The Pitt. Ahhhh!!

Rooster (why do writers on TV never actually sit down and write? or read, for that matter?), Scrubs, Cheers, and about ten minutes of DTF [location] which was enough to know it's not for me.

Fringe and Bluey with my sister.

spoilers for Fringe

We've reached the terrible part of Fringe. Wow, I'd forgotten how bad it gets. I mean, why wouldn't you have one of your lead characters choose to give up her entire personality, life history, and all of her friendships and social and family connections for romantic love? I mean, none of that meant anything much, right? Wow. /o\)

Paper Girls and Connections with Andrew and Ed.

Audio entertainment
Bill and Frank's Guilt-Free Pleasures' episode "Crowded House: 'Don't Dream It's Over'". A bunch of relistening to RNZ podcast Conversations with my Immigrant Parents as research for a fic I'm not writing.

Online life
520 Day assignments are out, woohoo! The Slo-Mo Guardian rewatch is kicking back into gear this weekend. I've started a new browser window (window #4) where I'm camping out; it currently only has thirteen tabs. I'm failing at keeping up with Dreamwidth, but hopeful that will change now Writers' Hour is at 8am instead of 10am.

Writing/making things
The last week has mostly been modding, squaring away my Yuletide fic for when I get back to it, making notes for a thing that I'm not going to write after all, and alibi sentences. But sometime in the next couple of days, I'm going to start my 520 Day assignment. This is my resolve face.

Life/health/mental state things
( Cut for length. )

House
I am optimistic that my kitchen windows will be re-puttied next week sometime, weather permitting.

Link dump
Why Greenland is an Island and Australia is a Continent (via

starandrea) | Losing Self-Control (5-minute short film about gay love in a Big Brother-like dystopia (with happy ending), which is actually an official music video for Minute Taker; via

mific) | Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (via

tinny) | London Writers' Salon are having a free 24-Hour Sprint 7pm 24th to 7pm 25th April UK time (you just go to whichever hours you want) | Migaku language-learning app (via

tinny) (note to self: come back to this next time I'm in a language-learning phase).

Good things
Hair! My 520 Day assignment! Kdramas! Social occasions (I guess). My sister mended my favourite slouching-around-at-home trousers and made me Brazilian cheese bread. Halle and Andrew and the fact it's not raining or cold.

Poll #34458 Stoic hurt/comfort

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

When dealing with stoic characters, how do you prefer your hurt/comfort?

View Answers

stoic character stoically/reluctantly/awkwardly receiving comfort
18 (41.9%)

stoic character stoically/reluctantly/awkwardly providing comfort
19 (44.2%)

anyone and everyone hurt!
16 (37.2%)

anyone and everyone comforting!
15 (34.9%)

it depends
12 (27.9%)

none of my characters are stoic/reserved/clams
0 (0.0%)

all of my characters are stoic/reserved/clams
1 (2.3%)

I'm not into hurt/comfort
3 (7.0%)

other / it's more complicated than that
5 (11.6%)

ticky-box of having multiple browser windows open right now
24 (55.8%)

ticky-box full of story structure is my nemesis
11 (25.6%)

ticky-box full of a red panda circus troupe performing for grapes
15 (34.9%)

ticky-box of appreciating being able to breathe through your nose
27 (62.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
34 (79.1%)

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

— Stephen King

My Check-In:

Alibi sentence. I've been doing some adulting, mostly because another member of the family isn't. Sigh

Tally
( Days 1-6 )

Day 7:

annavere,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

luzula,

ofmonstrouswords,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Imaginary worlds are the best worlds."

— Alicia Valdes-Rodriguez (Substack note)

My Check-In:

I wrote a drabble! Whoo-hoo! 8-)

Tally
( Days 1-6 )

Day 6:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

ofmonstrouswords,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

ysilme

Day 7: china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion — that’s plot."

— Leigh Brackett

My Check-In:

A bit of work on the Neverending Project, and some poking at drabbles. The prompts are a lot of fun. But I'm out of practice!

Tally
( Days 1-4 )

Day 5:

annavere,

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 6: china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Oops, I got interrupted when responding to check-ins on Day 3 and forgot to finish them. So some of my comments will be out of synch, sorry!

Quote of the Day:

"If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences."

— Eric Hoffer

My Check-In:

More Neverending Project… All the prompts people offered sound intriguing, thanks! And

dswdiane, the Princess and the Pea on The Couch is hilarious. I've already got several lines for that! 8-)

Tally

Day 1:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

the_siobhan,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 2:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 3:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 4:

annavere

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

trobadora

Day 5: china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Switching to a Highlander icon (see my check-in below). Hope I don't confuse anybody! 8-)

Quote of the Day:

"But you know what? A lousy draft proves nothing. Rough drafts are rough — everybody's are. Being a writer isn't like being a musician. You don't have to get it right every day. The wonderful thing about being a writer is, you only have to get it right once. That's all anyone will ever see. The only bad draft is the one that doesn't get finished."

— Lev Grossman, The Halfway Point: A Pep Talk on his Substack, Last Stop Corbenic.

My Check-In:

More editing and re-arranging and Etc. Etc. Etc. on the Neverending Project.

But, inspired by

dswdiane, I was looking at some old Highlander drabbles I never posted, which smushed HL with fairy tales and folktales. So far I've got The Frog Prince, Goldilocks & the Three Bears, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella and Rapunzel. I'd like to write five more to make an even 1000 words. I could use some prompts. Anyone have any old folk tales or legends you'd like to see in the HL-verse? 8-)

Tally

Day 1:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

the_siobhan,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 2:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 3:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 4: china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

RE: yesterday's quote,

sylvanwitch mentioned that as a tween she worried about the way she was always describing things in her head as they happened, until she realized it meant she was a writer. 8-) That made me think of another of my favorite quotes along the same lines, so I'm reprising this from an old WED post from 2022:

"Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head.
In your head.
Did no one ever tell you this?"

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing. Knopf Doubleday, 2012.

My Check-In:

More work on the Neverending Project — I made a lot of progress yesterday, meaning I jettisoned a bunch of stuff (repetitious & duplicate info). Gone!* Whee!

*Well, you know, I mean, backed up… ;-)

Tally

Day 1:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

the_siobhan,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 2:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 3: china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

china_shop

Article 48 [Restriction on Acceptance of Engagement] (7647 words) by china_shop [Teen and Up]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 당신이 잠든 사이에 | While You Were Sleeping (TV)
Relationships: Han Woo Tak/Jung Jae Chan/Nam Hong Joo
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Threesome - F/M/M, Getting Together, Prophetic Dreams, Found Family
Summary:
“Woo Tak, you haven’t left home yet, right?” Hong Joo’s voice comes down the line with the familiar confidence of long-standing friendship. “Don’t drive. You’ll get stuck in traffic, and you’ll miss your test.”
Woo Tak momentarily forgets his place in her life. His crush is usually manageable, but this morning, taken off-guard, he can’t suppress a kindling warmth, nor the smile that accompanies it. “Nam Hong Joo, have you been dreaming about me from all the way over in Australia?”

This request came up for pinch hit around the time I defaulted on Yuletide, and I thought, well, if I can't manage my assignment, I'll at least do a treat. Especially since I'd nominated While You Were Sleeping (one of my long-standing tiny Kdrama fandoms). But in the end, this foundered too. Turns out partners having operations is not great for my writing productivity.

So since mid-February (I think?!), I've been finishing the draft, re-writing, and re-re-writing. I came up against successive problems, and I want to document them here, because I know these issues are cropping up in my writing generally, of late.

Internal/external consistency: one of the big problems with my first few drafts was: Character A decides to do X and continues to believe they're doing X while actually doing Y. In other words, the external dialogue and actions contradict the internal monologue in a way that is not deliberate and just comes across as confusing and nonsensical. ("I've decided not to tell them how I feel... except that I keep hinting without acknowledging that.") I'm sure there are deliberate ways to do this that can be very effective. This was not that.

Solution: step outside the POV and look at what the character is actually doing. Then signpost reversals and the reasons for them.

Cue words/flow: one of Matt Bell's newsletters a while back quoted Robert McKee talking about cue words:
[E]very reaction[...] needs an action to prompt it.

Therefore, ideally, the last word or phrase of each speech is the core word that seals meaning and cues a reaction from the other side of the scene. [...] A miscue happens when a core word is placed too early in Character A’s line and prompts a reaction from Character B, but because Character A has more words to recite, Actor B must swallow her response and wait while Actor A finishes performing his speech.

In prose, this isn't just about external reaction, but internal reaction too. If the POV character's internal monologue isn't reacting to the last thing that happened/was said, then the reader is left scrambling to make connections with something that might have happened lines or paragraphs back, or which might not be there at all. I find I'm particularly prone to this when I have a lot of meta thoughts I'm trying to include in the POV's internal monologue.

Solution: restructure so that the reactions directly follow on from the thing that caused them, and make sure that meta thoughts flow naturally, each one prompted by the last, in a way that fits the overall arc/direction of the scene (keeping in mind that it's perfectly fine to have reversals).

Location of conversation/theory of mind: I've been finding lately that my POV characters often conduct a huge amount of the story just inside their heads, even when there's someone else there. They have all these thoughts and feelings to process! It's a lot! And then occasionally the other person says something, setting off a new cascade of thoughts and feelings. But most people have theories about what the people they're talking with are thinking, how they're feeling, what they're trying to achieve. Conversations, especially romantic ones, usually work better when the focus is shared between the POV character's internal thoughts, and their assessment of what is happening externally.

Solution: make the other party to the conversation more active. And make the POV character react to them, as well as their own internal stuff.

Direction/progress of scenes: I touched on this above, but it deserves its own point. Because I discovery write, I find it easy to take a very meandery path from the start of the scene to where I want to end up. In fanfic, this isn't fatal because we all enjoy spending time with our characters. But it can undercut tension and test readers' comprehension. It's something I want to work on.

Solution: structure scenes so that there's a sense of progress, with only one or two reversals, not flip-flopping every few paragraphs.

Anyway, things to think about. Things to work on. I'm super grateful to

teaotter for multiple beta rounds, helping me figure some of this stuff out. And I'm looking forward to applying these lessons to my current WIP, which oh dear, really needs it. ;-)

Reading

Navigation

Me-and-media update

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 15

This is my last day hosting for this month! Tomorrow, head over to sanguinity's place. See you there!

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 14

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 13

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 12

The case of the missing notifications

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 11

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 10

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 9

Me-and-media update

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 8

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 7

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 6

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 5

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 4

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 3

While You Were Sleeping fic, and writing meta

Profile

May 2021

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags