Weekly Check-in

[aurordark]

This is your weekly check-in post. How are your works in progress coming along? Any bunnies put to bed, or are new ones popping up?

I meant to get this post up on Wednesday, but this week has been crazy for me. I'm really sorry about that. It's the week before spring break for me, and as if being sick wasn't enough, my professors decided to make sure we all came to class this week by assigning papers and giving exams.

Camp NaNo starts up in April. Has anyone signed up, or thought about it? If anyone is interested in forming a cabin group or two, we could do that.

This week's (totally optional) discussion topic is about bunny selection. What makes a bunny something that gets written, or at least started in some fashion? Do you pick and choose which ones you work with, or is it more a matter of bunnies biting your ankles until you give them attention?

Comments

[the_rck]

I've signed up for Camp NaNo but have promised to join a friend's cabin. I need to check back with her about that. If she's not setting one up after all, I'd be interested in one for this group, but she was pretty definite about doing it.

When I'm not writing for a deadline, I end up going a lot by how I feel in terms of which project I work on. I've started four stories since the beginning of the year and haven't finished any of them. One of them needs more time to stew. One of them is in a fandom that I don't actually know, so I'm not sure I should do more than write enough to get it out of my system. The other two stories are more solid, and I ought to work on one of them, but the one in the fandom I only know by osmosis is singing a siren song...

I start a lot of things, I guess. I counted last week and had about twenty five partially written stories. Some of them are twenty or thirty thousand words at this point and just getting started, and some of them are things I haven't touched in fifteen to twenty years. Maybe I should just kill those? But, when I reread them, I get excited again about writing them.

Anybody else have trouble letting old projects go?

[gehayi]

I don't know what Camp NaNo is, though I'll admit to being leery of anything with NaNo in the title. Could you please explain what Camp NaNo and "cabins" are?

What makes a bunny something that gets written, or at least started in some fashion? Do you pick and choose which ones you work with, or is it more a matter of bunnies biting your ankles until you give them attention?

It's definitely a question of bunnies biting my ankles. I have a perfectly good story that I could write up up for publication...but unfortunately I know exactly what happens. So I don't need to tell myself the story to find out how it ends. I don't need to correct an error in canon or to point out that a character that the fandom hates is NOT the epitome of all evil.

In fact, I'm running into my biggest problem in writing--the awareness that what I want to read doesn't seem to be what anyone else wants to read, either in fandom or in original writing. (Unfortunately, the hit count for most of my stories on AO3 supports this conclusion.) And most publishers seem to expect the writer to sell the book nowadays, not the marketing department. Since I don't know how to promote books professionally...well, that means that even if I sold something to a publisher, the book wouldn't make any money. Publishers don't like that.

Writing a book that no one wants to read and that I don't know how to sell seems like a lot of work for nothing. So I don't try. But that makes me feel depressed and sick inside. I don't know what to do.

[the_rck]

In April and July, the NaNoWriMo people do a challenge where participants can set their own word count goal (I picked 15000 which I'm pretty sure I can do) and work on whatever projects they want to, including established WIP, non-fiction, several different stories.

A 'cabin' is a support group of between two and twelve people who agree to interact over the course of the month to encourage each other. There's no critique involved (I suppose one could request it, but I'm not sure it would be a great idea). People can either form their own cabins and only include people they know and trust or form a cabin that they open up to randomly assigned folks or tell the website that they want to be randomly assigned to a cabin (they can narrow it down based on their age or the particular type of writing they plan to do).

[falkner]

Hiii, I haven't been around these parts in a while (mostly because I did very little writing in the past year).

I've recently got a pretty insistent plot bunny, and so have been trying to get back into the whole actually writing stuff thing. It feels very nice to put down words on paper again after so long, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up.

re: bunny selection. Most of the time I just bounce them around my head for a little while, and if they start growing I'll give them a chance and try writing them. But if I get a plot bunny that I think might develop into a longer story, I'll do some brainstorming and actively work on expanding the idea from the start.

[lassarina]

I signed up for Camp NaNo to do editing hours - 30, to be precise. If I'm lucky, that'll let me bang through the current biggest project and maybe two chapters of another. (in fairness a "chapter" of that one is like 8k words, so.)

Re bunny selection - it's a bit of both! Sometimes I need to work on something to meet a deadline, or because I'm in the zone of that story and don't want to lose it, but most often it's a case of cycling through the list until something looks good and opening the relevant file. I just started organizing my list via Trello, which I'm hoping will let me move stuff around and see at a glance what I have everywhere.

Plot bunnies

[dialecticdreamer]

Are overrunning me. I have no idea how to choose which one to work on next, even when I've got three or four different story lines with specific plot bits which should fall right in line 1. a. b. c. d. should be EASY-- except that isn't what happens. Many times, I finish 1a, get distracted with story details that turn into 2, 3, 4, and 5.. By the time I get 1b FOUND again, writing on 2A has created 6, 7 and 8!

Good GRIEF!

What's Trello?

[butterflydreaming]

First priority goes to ideas that I think I can finish, but I know if I think I know the whole story start to finish, it will evolve while I'm writing. So now, first priority goes to any plot idea that I can incorporate into a stalled or in-progress story, as a subplot or to shore up a tale that wasn't working for me.

That makes me sound deliberate and organized, but it seems more like the bunnies choose me, rather than the other way around!