i think i'm gonna take a break from this app i'm still writing. but. everyone who shows up on my feed clearly has their friends, their circles, knows each others stuff, and im on the outs, and i don't feel like talking to a brick wall anymore who can't properly engage with your guys stuff either

Arin. No contest. (He has ADHD. Saying something and immediately going "shit, nope, why did I say that" happens with some frequency) Silver medal to Matt, whose sense of humor is concerning and has a tendency to kill the vibe / make things worse, and who isn't always the best at reading the room

jfc i was so naive "yeah i can churn out draft 3 edit notes in a single afternoon" anyway so i'm on day 1.5, and 6 scenes down, 19 more to go so much for my "start on saturday" plan. shit, my "start sunday" backup is looking grim too

(quick follow) the person who told me "sharing means you wrote for others, if it was for yourself you'd just put it up somewhere for people to find, but not care if they don't" they're the reason i didn't do the character prompt today and the reason im TERRIFIED to even share with my crit partner

genuine question AM i allowed to share my writing AM i allowed to ask for critique AM i allowed to edit based on how it does/doesn't land AM i allowed to try to trad pub because that's all i've wanted. but i've been a wreck a few days because ive been told thats selfish and not writing for myself

well i WAS taking draft three notes but then the cat decided to lay down on my binder so i guess i'm done for the day

guys how much ibuprofen do we think is safe to take in ~24 hours i had about 800mg last night and another 800mg about 7 hours ago and now my headache is back and actively preventing me from prepping for draft 3 can i take more without fucking up my kidneys / dying

am i allowed to say i finished novella draft 2 without someone telling me "if you were writing for yourself, you wouldn't be posting about this, because you're posting this for other people which means you wrote it for other people"? if not: i'm sorry if i am: i finished draft 2

i really shouldn't have shared a prompt snip earlier i know i'm not good at writing anymore. i'm incredibly self conscious. and sometimes i think "maybe it's not so bad" but then i catch myself writing lines that "i wouldn't have done this when i was actually good." because it IS that bad

Gen's safety is people. Her cousin Toni, her cousin Elli, Ophelia, and Matt, in that order (so, her family and her current "favorite person" in the WIP). It's the one exception to her chronic and intense self destructive behaviour, and she actively seeks it out when she's feeling VERY insecure (1/5)

i hate internet writing advice. anyone who indiscriminately preaches "thought verbs create distance! distance bad!" is banned from giving critique until they read 10 books highlighting every time the character "wonders" or "knows" or "realizes" some distance is... how third person limited WORKS

and frankly, yeah i write my novella and "someone reading it one day" motivates me but nights like tonight? when i remembered ive been specifically told never to share my writing, its rude and selfish and not for myself anymore? i kinda don't want to finish. its DEPRESSING knowing no one cares

Ophelia would do a fantastic job. She used to manage a bar and speakeasy including promoting it, marketing shit is already her wheelhouse on top of "she would put 100% into it" Arin... he'd to a fun job. I'll get meta with it and say he's marketing the book he's the protag in, and his (1/3)

update: it was in reference to notes on a blackboard that i dont have the bandwidth for anything that would require world-specific lore (looking at you, history or literature) i said fuck it to the class subject idea, it's just gonna be notes from a debate with the topic TBD lmao thanks all!

i officially hate being a fantasy writer i literally just wrote "english class," took 0.5 seconds to realize what was wrong with that idea, and now i need to figure out how to write around it (or another class that's thematically fitting) why do i do this to myself

people on twitter really trying to argue that "9 year old girl" is somehow a dehumanizing turn of phrase everyone in the comments coming for the reporter's head for apparently "avoiding saying child" as if "0-17 year old person of any gender" is more humanizing than two specific facts about her

past me was wildly overconfident in her ability to make an infodump chapter interesting and not an infodump chapter (i'm finally getting somewhere but it has taken 3 hours and 3 failed versions) (if this version isn't the one i'm just gonna throw my laptop off the roof idk)

Arin, during novella chapter 8 (I was trying to find the one of him giving a thousand hard stare while eating cheese puffs but this will do)

yknow, i DID say that the cure to my burnout was "just stop being burnt out and muscle through it" because i know me well enough to know i thrive off momentum and productivity anyway (checks out the 1k / day pace I've had going the last week) oh yeah we're so back actually, this time 😎

Two chapters of the novella left. Maybe 3,000 or so words. I am ready to be out of draft two. I know I said this after draft one but it's actually true this time. The next one will be easier And then the countdown to "being done-done by September 1" begins God help me

Digging into the supporting cast for this one, that would be Benadic. Mostly because he's also "most likely to pull his gun out in a fight and use it without a second thought" but he's been aggressive from a young age. He starts fights because he knows he can wint hem. (It runs in the family.)

tonight more than most nights i am so glad that one of my main characters has adhd because something that could've been a plot hole is now a character moment in "he just has a shitty memory" thank god, bc i didn't want to have to rewrite the relevant parts AGAIN lmao

obsessed with how i was scared to second draft chapter 8 because i was expecting it to be a shitshow, on top of having to cut out ~400 words anyway turns out it's ridiculously EASY to edit, after i literally just cut out one part of the conversation that was the lone thing making draft 1 shit lmao

I love how Matt has a canon answer (well. it's a funeral. but it has party energy). He just clings to the wall, doesn't eat any food, or drink booze, or smoke a cigarette unless it's handed to him (and won't decline). Makes conversation with whoever comes up to him. Won't be the first to (1/5)

jfc literally the worst thing for me as a writer is how i'm at the "i know more than i'm capable of doing" stage genuinely, do you know how devastating it is to get feedback, get critique, ask for help, just to realize "shit, i already knew that, i just didn't know how to do it" ie, not their job?

Starting my morning picking fights with misogynists on reddit, just for the rush of it

i know ai discourse is all the rage rn but writers, can we talk about the large number of people who get pissy if you give them crit they asked for, but get just as pissy if you don't implement every crit they give you? "you just don't get it. but how dare you decline my google docs comments."

I wouldn't say any of them are completely, but all of them are in their own ways? Gen is probably the least health conscious though. She smokes and drinks, puts gas on the fire that is her shitty mental health, but situationally gets a decent nights sleep, eats well by virtue of not being (1/7)

i am up literally way too late because i have one sentence, literally one, left to write before i want to go to bed, but i cant reach my laptop bc the cats in the way

opened scriv to start writing and i'm cackling about how i basically already second drafted chapter 17, i just had a couple placeholders and didn't do the ending i do NOT remember doing THAT much before it made me crash out anyway lmao that makes my life a lot easier

the only scenes i have left to second draft are: 1) the one i fucked up and have no idea what i'm doing with outside of "scrap it, try again" 2) the one that gave me a mental breakdown so bad i got an adhd diagnosis 3) a scene that's not bad but has the same problem as the above 4) the too-long one

chapter 4 is donnneeee and this is the first chapter i've second draft where i *don't* immediately have a slew of third draft rewrite/structure notes AND i cut it down by 236 words when i'd have been perfectly happy with 150 fewer lets fuckin goooo prayer candles lit for chapter 17 hell tomorrow

ohhh i love today's writing session so much i decided to change the setting of chapter 4 (very, very slightly) for maximum angst and i'm actually really digging it (the word count barely went down, fuck knows how because i didn't ADD anything, just cut, but i dig the setting change)

All of the side characters in the novella kinda blur together since they were all just "generic guy number 5" or whatever until the end of draft 1 when they started getting personalities lmao But I THINK, counting only those who make an appearance and aren't just namedropped, the newest would (1/3)

i love writing because the other day i wasted time googling the history of measuring blood pressure and today i wasted a half hour googling what a certain style of fence/gate/barrier is called

Clarice, and I truly don't know why preteen Beanie thought she was a character worth writing lmao She was 14, ginger because I thought being a ginger was soooo cool, and had three personality traits: lazy, whiney, and annoying I did recycle her a little bit and low key make her a bit less 1(/2)

The time someone deadass told me in third person, my pov shouldn't influence the narration. at all. purely neutral & objective with no character Point Of View. zero bias they finished their crit by telling me to hire a ghost writer (honorable mention to the person who told me not to write scents)

chapter 12 is DONE (however many fucking weeks after i said i wanted it to be done?) jesus christ i'm making a burrito and packing it in early i'm so goddamn wiped and i deserve a medal for doing my first 1k word day in ????? months???? WITH a goddamn ear infection (5 chapters, ~9k words left)

hang on i think i found them they were in the fucking iphone notes i've had PULLED UP ALL GODDAMN DAY unfortunately, they require me also having to make a decision about what's currently a placeholder in the main novel so i'm going "fuck that" and ignoring them lmao

IM GONNA PUT PAST BEANIE IN A CHOKEHOLD WHERE THE **FUCK** ARE MY CHAPTER 12 NOTES I FUCKING NEED THOSE I THOUGHT I FOUND THEM BUT THAT'S AN OLD VERSION I'M ABOUT TO START BURNING THINGS SO HELP ME GOD THIS CHAPTER'S HARD ENOUGH WITHOUT THIS FUCKERY (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Canonically, this is "Arin's in jail/prison and got sent to the hole." But "not speaking to anyone" is straight up an impossibility with him, he never shuts up, so more accurately it's "not having anyone talk back, and getting moody about it" Canonically, this is "Gen just got out of jail (1/4)

and now cherry on top of my shitty night i got slapped in the face by writing rules and a brisk "this is how you're supposed to, it's not style it's just the rules" like fuck me why do i bother? i'm doing everything wrong AND the one person i thought actually wanted to read it probably doesn't

goodbye, good mood going to sleep feeling like i'm gonna cry because, no, my crit partner never messages unless i message first i think she just puts in a token once a week appearance but doesn't care and now im embarrassed i've ever talked about my book & thought she wanted to beta for me

posts on my twitter feed are making me feel shitty and entitled for writing again like, i know it's true. not everyone can be a writer. most people are incapable of writing well. we don't have a right to tell our stories but the post i just read boils down to "you're not good, so don't bother"

next time one of you guys sees me crashing out over writing can one of you tell me "it's probably because you need to fix your action beats" / "write something else, you'll fix that one at 2am if you just walk away for an evening" every time. every fucking time (chapter 12 can still fuck off tho)

scrolling twitter and fell into writing discourse got reminded that "having ideas doesn't make you a writer. being a writer is about writing and writing well. anyone can have ideas and write them badly. the writing is in the art" i never belonged in bluesky writing community. i'm sorry i invaded

also the fact that every time i cry over writing, my cat's scared as shit and hides for 30 minutes minimum yeah. i'm a horrible person. i can't in good conscience write or be a pet owner anymore i'm done writing, and i'm going to look into rehoming my cat, because i feel so SHITTY about this

it's actually genuinely so fucking maddening to know i'm not delusional, but that "one day i have a handle on writing, the next day i feel like a lobotomized 4-year-old toddler with a TBI" today is the latter. i am about 5 seconds from either bawling, breaking my laptop, or hiring a ghost writer

Gen: This is changing in the next draft but currently we meet her, uh, in the immediate aftermath of having fatally wounding someone in self defense, and her current first line is "I killed him." This is my first scene but it'll wind up being closer to the end of chapter one, probably (1/?)

what level of depressed is it if you find yourself eating a chocolatine for supper at 10pm