The it's a loooooong story thread: Support group for epic fan fic writers - poll 6/14 (red)

I just got around to working on Vessel. *poof*

 

sg, that little spoof song was *awesome* Anything with lush!Obi-Wan gets my approval anyway, but great job

ophelia, at least having some goal at all to work for can keep you going. I wish I could say I could help inspire you, but I can't even help inspire me You're doing a tremendous job anyway, though.

Actually I don't think your chapters are too long. I think they're just real novel length, as opposed to the 8-10 pages my 'chapters' usually are, which clearly is shorter than an actual novel. But my story's kind of a collection of novellas so it's hard to determine that sort of thing I guess.

Right now I'm at 79,983 words for SotC all together. 24,328 for this story in the series (which... doesn't exactly have a name, does it? Oy, my sectioning of these things is so confusing ) The thing is, at the rate the story is going right now, I suspect it has about 20,000 words left yet.

The stories in this series are increasing in length each time. I am kind of reworking the first two completed stories for archive submission, so we'll see how that ends up.

-sj loves kevin spacey

 

solojones wrote:

You're doing a tremendous job anyway, though.

Thank you . . . that's always good to hear, especially when I'm this sick of my stupid story.

Actually I don't think your chapters are too long. I think they're just real novel length

I dunno . . . depending on the novel, chapters seem to range from 10 to maybe 20 pages. Mine tend to run 30-40 . . . but whatever. It's not like I've got an editor who's going to come around and complain.

Ohhhhhhhh . . . I officially start chapter 10 "for real" today. I don't want to. I'll get some grading done first, I think.

Partly because that's more important, but also because I'd honestly rather do that. It's bad when I'd rather write "Watch out for sentence fragments" 100 times than my story . . .

I found out one of my students posts to a fanfic site today, although she posts original fiction--to an "adult" site I'm not even allowed to mention here, actually. (Said "adult" is 16, and she swears her stuff is all rated R.) I tried to start a conversation about fanfic, etc., but she didn't seem to want to talk about it. Maybe because I'm the teacher, she's 16, and she posts to an "adult site" . . .

Also, today I got called an unprintable name for the first time . . . a kid wasn't too happy that I insisted he do his work instead of paint his notebook with white-out. They swear "near" me a lot, but he was the first one who swore at me. This kid apparently doesn't take well to new people, so there probably wasn't anything I could have done to avoid the problem . . .

I guess this makes me a "real" EI teacher now? Or maybe I have to wait until somebody pees on me . . .

 

^Yup. That might do it.

I got chapter 20 of Vessel done! Wheee.... Time to go work on Towards Darkness!

I swear I'm about to strangle the plot wolf if he eats one more of my prized plot bunnies. He can have ones I have no intention of writing, but it would be nice if I could get something done around here.

 

Another amazing thing my digital recorder managed to come up with:

"Coffee makes me feel like I want to die," Anakin added.

What, first sand, now coffee? What *does* this guy like?

I don't think this one is as good as the one about unauthorized users downloading data into my lawn, though.

 

He must be a Starbucks customer.

 

Coffee makes me feel like I want to die, as well, but mostly because my friends back home were all addicted to coffee in the worst way and I can't take the smell, anymore.

 

Added the series Return to Naboo to the 100,000 word club.

sg

 

I don't like coffee.

my friends and I were stranded at the airport at one in the morning once. They all got coffees, I had a diet coke.

do star wars characters get Mono?

 

It's possible. George lucas had it when he went visiting the GFFA in 1965.

I once read a 7,000 page story where they had every single health problem possible just for the heck of it. All the really strong women characters had pacemakers because of force lightning. All the guys, however, died unnatural deaths. Women would die of heart attacks or strokes. Guys were the ones who would die with their skull blasted off. Naturally, this was written by a man. Can you tell? And he was obsessed with preeclampsia. It didn't matter who it was, you were going to get it if you were even 5 minutes pregnant. And all bad guys were Ferroan or Corellian. You met the really sensitive therapist that Mara's long-lost twin sister started dating and you knew that because he was Ferroan, you wouldn't be surprised when he raped and murdered her two paragraphs later. You get a Corellian doctor and OF COURSE Kyp and Qui Xux's baby will be found dead and later find out that she was poisoned.

At the end of the story, he has a little memorial made to all the people who died and the memorial paragraph takes up more space than all of his emotional or medical descriptions. But that wasn't hard because it was all "OH, GOSH, LUKE, THE PAIN, THE PAIN!" no matter if you'd blasted your own leg off or just had murdered your incestuous brother.

I never knew GFFA could be such a soap opera until then.

 

Yay, RTN finally made it! Thanks, sg!

That one sounds like it almost would be funny to read, Ishy. (Says the person who has made Luke suffer a biological terrorist attack, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and a minor stroke. )

Kristeh

 

It was very funny. I wrote the guy to kindly ask if he wanted a beta if he was going to do a new draft and he said, "Naw, I quit my job and wrote that thing on welfare for 2 years." You know how people say "don't quit your day job?"

 

I've been trying to psych myself up to continue my old abandoned stories. I thought of sharing these 3 observations that might help anyone who might/have run into the same problem:

1. Don't start posting until you have a backload of at least a quarter of the bulk.

2. Don't post too frequently. Feedback is lovely but if you post too frequently and run out of chapters, you tend to run out of feedback.

3. Post regularly. Once a week. Once a fornight. Monday nights. Tuesdays and Fridays. Have a schedule and stick to it. Making an actual obligation to your story - taking it as a sort of job - helps to push away the dreaded Writer's Block. Approaching your story professionally convinces you that you MUST write even when you don't feel like it. hobby, it

 

Yeah, I definitely try to do those things, l_n... except the writing ahead thing. I can't manage well for some reason. I either have to write the whole thing ahead of time or just write week by week I think. Arg.

Ish... it is extremely sad that this is what our welfare money has gone towards


-sj loves kevin spacey

 

I updated Vessel every day for a while with three-page chapters.

I finished my first novel-length work writing four pages a day and then posting that day, too.

I need a life.

 

I usually update with 3-4 pages also, but only if i have a good place to stop. Still, i keep a good pace usually. Unfortunately, a combination of summer laziness and a lack of a stable internet connection at home (see, i'm away from home during the school year) gave me a big updating gap i'm trying to work over.

Leia - That's some good advice there. Especially the first bit. keeping some kind of backload is important or you end up ruining the pacing. So it really goes hand in hand with number 3. Planning. That's important for posting stories on message boards.
The posting too frequently thing, i don't know about that. I understand what you mean, that one shouldn't go at a pace they can't keep up with, but If you can do it, i say post as often as you can. Maybe frequent feedback is a given if you have "k/j, m/l, l/h, z/b, k/z, f/m, b/p, 1/2" etc wrtten on your post, or you're established as a credible writer. but otherwise, most people get, on average, one response for every three updates. or something similar.

Hell, i've seen entire halves of stories, Eight posts and four months in the making, and the only response is mine, and only because i found it by accident. It's not because they're bad (well, not every time) they just get lost in the torrent of Everything Else. (and it looks so nice and calm not being able to see it happen in real time) So if updating quickly is getting you responses, work with it i say. Take it while it lasts. At the very least one should take it as incentive to make the writing process more efficient so that you DON'T run out of chapters. (now if only i could follow my advice...)

Ok, my quasi-rant is over.
SO...10k club, yeah. not even close.

 

*bounce* MADE IT! *bounce*

I reached the 100,000 word mark only moments ago. And the word that put me over the top is the last word in the following line:

Luke groaned. ?I?ve got a really bad feeling about this.?

 

FELICITACIONES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

::Runs to see if it's posted yet and if the long-awaited moment has arrived.::

 

It wasn't at the time, but it is now.

 

Added On the Shoulders of Giants to the 100,000 word club.

sg

 

Attention fan artists! Okay so I was thinking of maybe making a few SW related buttons with 100,000 Word Club on it for people to use in their fics. I can upload it to my server and let people link directly if they don't have space themselves so that's not a problem but I wouldn't mind some help making a few buttons. They should probably be 160x120 to fit properly on the page and not take up too much bandwidth. They should also be jpg because I sometimes have trouble downloading gif images properly, not sure why. :/ Anyway, if anyone wants to help PM me.

sg

 

I made this:

[image=http://members.aol.com/opheliamac/wedgie.jpg]

 

I want that as an icon.

 

Oh, that's great! I love it!

Kristeh

 

Niiiice!

Keep 'em coming, everyone. what I'll do is make a page for them and put a link the first post for those who want to use them.

sg