Schedule and Clarification

[kalloway]

Hi! I hope everyone has had an insightful and enjoyable week of rounding up their personal herds of plotbunnies. If you are still herding, don't worry - our first check-in and second activity is still more than a weekend away!

Since there seems to have been some confusion and misunderstanding in regards to the community's 'scheduled' posts, here is the basic schedule for this month:

~February 1st: Community Intro Post, First Activity
(a Brainstorming Post)
~February 9th: Second Activity, First Check-In
~February 18th: Second Check-In
(maybe another Brainstorming Post)
~February 25th: Third Check-In, possibly something else but that is way too far away for me to think about.

Each check-in post has mutliple sections - instructions to check in if so desired, a link to the current Brainstorming Post, and encouragement to meet deadlines and an offer to give deadlines. If you need a deadline or reminder for a deadline, please comment to the post. I'll ask if you'd like a public deadline and if so, I'll add it to the check-in template. If you'd rather a private deadline, PM me and I'll put a sticky up on my wall and remind you a couple of times as it approaches. There are no penalties for not meeting deadlines or anything - some people just work better with dates attached and that's cool.

Check-Ins are scheduled for ~Wednesdays. This means somewhere between Tuesday evening and Thursday afternoon, probably Wednesday morning (mod-standard-time) once I'm caffeinated. Because getting from a project starting on a Sunday to weekly check-ins on Wednesdays involves some tinkering, the first couple weeks run funny. I won't tell if you don't. Also, if it's gotten to be Friday and there's no post, send me a PM. I probably just lost track of days - it happens about twice a year. ^^;

Every part of this community is optional. Do what you find comfortable; ignore what doesn't work for you. There are no sign-in lists, no spread-sheets, no penalties and no nagging. Your goals, projects, and everything else are solely yours unless you've requested and agreed upon things like writing buddies, deadlines, etc.

Please, if you are unsure on anything or would just like clarification, ask me in any post tagged !admin: questions or PM me.

A Brainstorming Post will go up either tonight or tomorrow and hey, I've not seen any personal intro posts, so maybe I'll get mine up. ^_^; Have a fantabulous weekend.

Intro - Kalloway

[kalloway]

Hi! I'm kalloway. And I'm not just president of the hare club; I'm a member, too.

I have a long plotbunny list. I keep it in a half-sized notebook, which gets copied over whenever it fills up. I don't have the list online anywhere, possibly because it's hard enough keeping up with one version of it. Most everything on it could be written in under a thousand words and I think a whole chunk is actually a drabble sequence or something. Right now it's sitting at 770 with about 70 checkmarks, but I am also still compiling.

This year, I want to finish off some editing projects and work on a lot of long-dangling multi-chapter WiPs. I can apparently write three chapters of anything before getting distracted by the next shiny thing...

I also want to write a few hundred of the short things, which sounds sort of like a ridiculous goal but at this point I don't know if that even covers the lurking bingo cards...

Mostly, I write for various anime/manga and video game fandoms, though I write some original and semi-original/meta-fiction stuff too.

My main problem is that my brain is pretty much always zipping along at warp-speed. That means that even though I'm supposed to be finishing a nearly-done (and quite due) story for Project 1, it's already thinking on Projects 2-5 and wanting to review canon and ramble and generally ignore Project 1 because that's so five minutes ago! So aside from vast quantity of projects, I'm working on refining my abilities to focus. ^^;;

I look forward to chatting with everyone who's returned from previous years and getting to know everyone new to the comm. I will do my best not to accidentally breed any of my plotbunnies in your direction. ^^;; results may vary

Intro — Silverr

[silverr]

*waves*  I've been here since the comm started two years ago, and I guess I never did an intro either!

The fanfiction I've done since 2002 (under this pen name or as Animom) is my second bout of fandom; I was also fannish in college in the late 1970s, in the preinternet days of printed fanzines for Star Trek and Star Wars. Now I primarily write for anime/manga and videogame fandoms (though I'm eyeing some comic book and television fandoms).

In a way, compared to kalloway I'm at the opposite end of the plunny-shaped curve. I have only a few bunnies, but they are ancient and large. I cede squatter's rights to anything still hopping around in my brain after 2 or 3 years; at that point I feel obligated to write it.  For example, I spent most of 2013 finishing up stories that been conceived / outlined in 2004, and my current WIP, a long chaptered story for the Warcraft fandom, is a story that I've been mullng since 2007.

Kalloway and I do have something in common, though (actually I'll bet most of us here do): I am too easily distracted by the Shiny and New… which wouldn't be a problem if it didn't make the old seem dull. To combat this I literally will not allow myself to read/watch something I think I might like if I'm still wrestling with a longform WIP, a deprivation that amuses friends and family no end. (Okay, I must confess that now and again I "cheat" on my current fandom, but only for pinch hits or oneshots. Quickies!)

What else? I like Scrivener as a writing tool. Sometimes I blast things out on a single sitting, but most of the time I produce works by accretion—little snips of scenes and bits of dialogue get arranged and rearranged like a mental storyboard, and then I make pass after pass through the draft to fill in the rest. (Yes, I'm a compulsive editor. I like doing the line by line wordsmithing as much as I enjoy sketching in the first draft of a story with broad strokes.) ~ This means that I usually spend weeks or even months tinkering with a piece unless I have an inflexible deadline.

What I enjoy most about this comm is that a) it's low pressure, entirely lacking in "Have-To" imperatives—I already have enough of those in my life—and b) it's a general comm for discussing the writing process that embraces both fanfiction and original work on an equal basis.

May we all be scribbling for years to come!