Please come and talk to me. Just for some general writing chat and support...

[BiglyBadgers]

I am about a third of the way through editing my stupidly long book (this'll teach me for writing epic fantasy) and need some chat!

I really loved the chat and support on the nano thread, but now novel writing month is long gone and I am alone! There must be other people out there bumbling along needing a friend to chat to...surely....I can provide coffee, cake and excellent free WiFi

Oh bugger it. Just started rereading the 53k I've written so far and realised my timelines are out between my storylines by about two weeks! Either need to find a way for one lot to kill a couple of weeks, or speed some other stuff up on the other line.

Then you realise there is a better way but have no idea how to be better. Hah that pretty much sums it up. Been there for years. I do sometimes get that feeling bigly mentioned when I read a bit back and it actually seems ok. Mostly those are the paragraphs that feel like they were written by someone else. But trying to maintain that for a whole novel... getting all the pacing and structure right. Actually getting the whole book to be about the thing it's meant to be about and not just meandering dribbling that never quite says anything ... And everything I write seems so trite and juvenile and unimportant. Not that I want to write Serious Literature but it all reads like my teenage self.

I'm impressed you know your timelines down to the weeks, bigly. I lose track after the first few chapters and just fudge it. "It had been a while since she last saw him...etc etc" Doesn't help that I never write anything linear. There are always lots of memories. And characters suddenly revealing things have happened that they didn't mention at the time. I'd like to think it's a clever literary technique like unreliable narrator 'a la recherche du temps perdu', but really it's just pantsing combined with laziness.

It's the problem with having multiple storylines that influence each other and meet at key points. I have to get the timings down to at least the right sort of time of the right day or it just doesn't work. Epic fantasy where timelines don't match really annoys me. I have one bit where two of my main characters meet, then go off and one spends two weeks having a bit of a montage somewhere and then a big fight, while the other only takes a few days to go to another city before another thing happens from the fight in the first storyline that impacts the second one. I think I'm going to have to give storyline two something to do before they go to the city. Thankfully storyline three actually works better with the slightly longer timeframe, so that's OK. Epic fantasy can be complicated.

I have given up trying to be anything by trite and slightly teenage. Though possibly I can claim to be more middle age and pretentiously morose, but not sure that's any better.

Please 😭 help me control myself. I've just come up with my nano plot in the shower. It's genius. I'm so angry I didn't think of it last year. PLEASE STOP ME STARTING NOVEL NUMBER FOUR!

Carpet.... DO IT

evil laugh

Honey don't encourage me!

All that's holding me back is my nan would tell me off for being mean and using my batshit cousins and aunt as inspiration I can't face a telling off from her. I tend to print things out to read and edit, and she's bloody nosey when she visits and would sniff it out in a second. She's like a bloodhound!

I've decided I can plot it... then shelf it for a few months till November. I'm sure I can control myself for that long!

Save it for November! It will be awesome.

I feel your pain, Bigly. I once wrote a long fanfic where the comedy depended crucially on a number of different story lines converging at precisely the same moment in order to fit the punchline in, and it was a real brain-ache to get it to work.

That's what I think Bigly then I can go full steam ahead with a crazy writing schedule.

I've made a pair of curtains to distract myself from writing it. I don't trust myself to touch the laptop 😂 how's everyone else getting along today?

It is a pain in the backside sometimes isn't it ferments! I really haven't made it easy for myself either. I've juat made a spreadsheet and think I can sort it out by adding a trip to the seaside into storyline two and squishing storyline 1. You a week. Phew!

I'm really thinking I'm going to do a nice simple single POV, self contained thing for nanowrimo this year and I'm really looking forward to it after all this.

...by a week...(stupid typos)

Fermats did I just read the word FANFIC???? Someone else who knows my little world of fanfiction!

Yup, my guilty not-so-secret . I have been out and proud about it on here for years (in RL, not so much...) Actually, there are several FWR regulars who have been known to dabble in fanfic. (And a quite large number of MN users across the board - at one time there was a whole number of rolling threads about it, and there's still a coterie to be found in the telly addicts section).

Oops - the FWR comment was 'cos I'm also on a thread there at the moment where the subject of fanfic has come up in passing.

Did I see upthread that you'd been writing Star Wars stuff? I write in that fandom occasionally. If you don't mind me asking, where are you on the spectrum from "strict canon" to "transformative works"?

Yup star wars. I write.. well, because of my evil space ginger character i end up writing canon mostly but with the odd OC. So sequel canon as much as i can...but going past the last Jedi currently. I research as much as possible.

How about you?

Oh And i may have just written Solo smut ;)

Original trilogy (release dates, not in-universe chronology) and Rogue One are my things. I do love a comic twist, so a lot of what I write is parody - either of the original source material, or of the tropes of fandom itself. I'm a right slacker when it comes to research. I defend this on the grounds that I am old enough to own a copy of Splinter of the Mind's Eye so experienced at a very early age film writers tearing up the spin-off novel and jumping up and down on its torn pages before heading off in a completely direction. Therefore I'm not at all invested in the extended universe and tend to try to pretend the three prequel films don't exist at all. ANH onwards is my "canon" and even then I play fast and loose with it.

Currently writing a chapter set on Coruscant and learning about architecture there.. as well as the leadership of the Guavian death gang.. also now know more than I ever needed to about TIE fighter engines!!!

I'm just going to be here nodding and smiling like I have any idea what you guys are taking about.

I've decided to do a rewrite to restructure what I have written so far, sort out my timelines, and add in the missing stuff. So, version 2 here I come. I'm starting my next nursing placement tomorrow so messing about with making new doc folders and cutting and pasting stuff into different orders is sort of calming me.

Some Zombie books are great - the Feed series by Mira Grant are fun (and more about blogging than gore - set after a zombie apocalypse). I don't like gore in movies and TV but I'm interested in plague stories so occasionally end up reading zombie fiction.

Hope it's okay to join the thread. I've been writing for a long time (mostly unsuccessfully) with a few peaks and troughs over the years. The last year or so I've been writing a lot of short SF/F fiction as there is a lot of forum and market support out there. It gets quite addictive watching what your submissions are doing on The Submission Grinder. I've had a couple of flash stories published as a result (after hundreds of rejections) but I'm coming to the realisation it may not be the best use of my time.

I want to get into novels again. I do have an old fantasy draft complete but I got into a block while editing it (hence turning to short stories for a while) and I wonder if the block is because the plot is simply a bit faulty!

So for now I'm rebooting by writing a contemporary fic/romance book which I never thought I would end up writing. I'm about 12k in and really want to push myself to finish AND edit!

Come on in Generic. I read my first ever zombie book thanks to the good people in this thread. It was world war z and I enjoyed it once I got onto it. I liked the depth of thought and detail in it. When I say read I actually listened to the audiobook, which worked really well as I found it had the feel of a podcast series.

How have you found going from fantasy to contemporary fiction? I'm a fantasy person myself, would like to do some SF, but find the idea of writing in the real world sort of terrifying and also think I would miss being able to create my own world.

I was going to do some editing this afternoon, with two out of three of my children out. However it's been disrupted by a beautiful cat coming in and mewing every time I stop stroking it.

In awe of you doing nursing bigly. Nurses are just amazing. Hats off to you.

Hi generic. Are you me? Well, except for the publishing success of which I've had none I also wrote a fantasy novel a while ago which I gave up on due to plotting issues. Now switched to contemporary romance/women's fic. I actually find there's almost as much world building in contemporary fiction as fantasy. Lots of research to make it believable- you still have to construct the world the characters live in, their jobs, lives, families, past, city etc. I always found in fantasy I felt safer just making stuff up whereas if I'm talking about a lawyer/chef/software engineer I really need to do some research to make it realistic. Likewise if character x gets the tube in London from Oxford Circus to Stratford at 11pm on a Sunday I need to get that right, instead of saying, 'They rode for four days through the wooded lowlands of Madeupsville because that was the length of time Tippety deemed necessary for these characters to realistically bond enough to reveal plot point C and she likes writing descriptions of woods and dappled light.'

Thanks for the welcome all :)

So the things I find tricky about SF/F despite being an avid reader is that a) I can't really write SF at all as have no science. So I stick to little robot stories or space opera that goes nowhere. b) With fantasy, I find it difficult to get ideas that work in short form. They feel a bit naff. In my novel draft, I wrote about a world where tea-trading is massive but I've since realised it's basically a depiction of colonialism and now I have to get that right and it feels too 'big' for me. It might not be our world, but you still have to get issues like race right. Also the main issue is the plot - I had this idea of sisters being separated and desperately trying to get back to each other but it just falls apart at the end.

Research-wise, I feel like I know NOTHING about any period of time, despite being vaguely interested in history and doing history a-level aeons ago. So I stick to medievalish world and feel that's hugely cliched and hard to get right these days. I guess my latest one was more like Regency world but even so. Pah.

You definitely still have to do research for contemporary writing of course, but I feel like I have an easier starting point. The dodgy truth about why I'm doing it is that during one rough spell years ago I wrote fanfic about a m/m pair from Hollyoaks (the shame) and a couple of ideas from that period have never gone away and when I started to explore what that would look like in a longer form (and perhaps boringly making it a m/f pair instead) it seemed like it could work. I will say that I found doing fanfic for a bit really healing.

For many years (20?), I've 'identified as' (the phrase seems to work) a fantasy writer and it's been surprisingly hard to take a look at myself and my work and say 'hey, what if you LOVE sf/f, but you're actually much better at writing something else'? That's what trying this contemporary fic is all about. I might well return to fantasy afterwards, but I wanted to give it a try. I'm aiming at 'contemporary fiction' rather than specifically women's fic or romance HOWEVER it is essentially a romance and I know it's basically the marketing departments that decide such things. Hey ho!

Hope everyone is well. My husband's away and my son didn't fall asleep until 10 so I don't think I'll get many words down before bedtime today.

I always found in fantasy I felt safer just making stuff up whereas if I'm talking about a lawyer/chef/software engineer I really need to do some research to make it realistic.

I like making stuff up. Though I do get a bit obsessive about my world working and distances being consistent and correct, which results in a surprising amount of research.

I know what you mean about SF generic. I don't feel like I am smart enough to go anything but dabble. I would definitely be a space opera person in the Iain M Banks style if I wrote SF. I did a feeling short piece a while ago I would sort of like to build on when I'm feeling ready.

I do adult epic fantasy and am avoiding reading any while I write (reading lots of SF and Terry Pratchett right now) or I find I get tied in knots a bit. As there aren't many female writers of epic fantasy with adult characters (lots of YA, but few grown ups) I figure I can allow myself to find my own way of doing it to a certain extent. I focus on the small stuff and let the bigger stuff sort itself out when it comes to the big themes. We'll see how that works out.