Semester Nears, and Fic reshuffling

[davetheanalyzer]

Near the start of another semester and wondering how much I might have to delay my own story writing to accomplish class writing. Since one class is all about writing one long essay, that seems all but inevitable. I might also have to write something long to get into graduate school but that might need to be clarified. It’s been a long time since my mom and I paid any attention to that stuff. On the bright side, both of those things allow for telling stories and I might be able to learn to be more succinct with those, since they can’t be more than thirty or forty-someodd pages double-spaced. Those are on the upper end of my average chapter lengths, and around the length of my longer one-shots, so it might be helpful indeed.

So far, it seems these two classes won’t require any books. The Human Rights class explicitly confirms this while The Senior Seminar still has a “To Be Determined” message. Of course, this could mean we have to buy our own books particular to our research but I wouldn’t exactly complain and neither would the family account. There is a book or two I’m thinking of getting as sources for the essay portion of the paper but I’ll wait to check with the professor. I have little idea of what they have to entail thus far, since neither have opened up their websites on blackboard and posted their syllabus. That might change in the next day or so but in the meantime, all I can do is wait.

Back to storytelling woes, I find that writing in four line sessions instead of two might be a bit more tiring than I care for. I had a bit of an easier time with The Land Before Time story but the Godzilla story was more difficult, since a lot of what I covered was fight scenes. At first I could keep up the pace but lately it felt like it ate up time and needlessly extended scenes. I’m trying to be more succinct in my storytelling, so I went back to two line sessions. Hopefully, that will allow me to pay better attention to each line I’m using. Since a month is around thirty days or so, that would fit with me anyway. My chapter page count averages around thirty pages. My one shots tend to be between twenty and forty+ pages. I mightn’t be putting out fics once a month but I might be able to get out around six a year.

I might experiment with finishing, revising, and posting chapters as I progress at some point. Since many of my multi-chapter stories can be far into the double digits, that might mean I wouldn’t have to wait forever to post them. On the downside, I might come across that I need to majorly change things, sometimes retroactively, in the middle of posting and I’m not sure about the hassle of taking down and reposting a story. You never know if the plot outline is going to work or not until you start writing the story itself. On the bright side, I might use that time to edit and reedit the plot outlines.

I’ve been doing that with “A Refuge, A Home” where I’ve been trying to perfect the middle portion of the story, with the events in the right amount of order and characters acting in the correct way. It’s basically a story where literally all named characters in the valley are against Ruby and Chomper, so I want to carefully make sure no one’s inexplicably taken a level in jerkass and they all express their down in their own unique, in-character way. What Littlefoot and the gang want to do was probably so outside the expectations of the average valley citizen that I need to get their reactions right.

Maybe once I have that just right, I can concentrate on finessing with “We Will Hold On Forever.” That shall be the multichapter I do next after “Forged In Fire and Claw” is posted. Yeah, that’s ambitious, my first multichapter The Land Before Time fic being the 22 chapter one, but it feels like the right one to start with. I might do the same for my next one shot, another The Land Before time story. It would likely be the Ali one. I have a vague plan of posting at least one focus one-shot for each major character. They would be practice in how to write them and there are still some characters I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around that I really don’t want to neglect.

That leaves my Digimon, Godzilla, and Gamera stories kind of neglected with my The Land Before Time fever but I vaguely plan to alternate between the fandoms for my one-shots and multi-chapters. That might mean my stories not related to The Land Before Time would be shorter and have fewer chapters but I’ll make do with that until I could rewatch all those other fandoms. Maybe that could reinvigorate the passions I had for them. Of course, with the limited time I have, that might mean watching the same old stuff over and over again when I would like to see new stories.

That’s all for now. Maybe I should talk about more than my writing but it’s much of my life. I can do show and character analysis or talk about real world stuff but meh. The last point doesn’t grab me as much. Anyway, the next time I post, I shall have done over a month of the semester and the true gauge of the work there shall give me something extra to talk about. So until then, see you!