December already?

[dbskyler]

I am once again doing the WIP challenge at writethisfanfic this month, and the good news is I forced myself to work on the story last night. The bad news is, I took out more words than I put in, so I am starting off with a negative word count. Hopefully I'll be making up for that by this weekend. Which reminds me, we don't know the December fic_rush weekend yet, do we? I think I'm going to need it again to pull me out of this hole I keep putting myself into.

Not doing Yuletide, but I did hang up a stocking at fandom_stocking. It seems like a fun community, although it does feel a little awkward to advertise my stocking -- like I'm shilling for gifts or something. However, since there are umpteen gazillion stockings, I will go ahead and point mine out for any of you who are so inclined as to stop by: my stocking is here.

I've been going through the extras on the S5 boxset, and so far I am disappointed by the commentaries and the video diaries. Although it was slightly amusing to see the in-vision commentary for Time of Angels and notice the amazing amount of awkwardness between Steven Moffat and Karen Gillan. Can we please get David Tennant back in there, just for a commentary or two? Or Colin Baker? I bet he'd have some great things to say. So would Peter Davison. In fact, I think I'm going to have to go re-rent Arc of Infinity to remind myself of what a good commentary sounds like.

Hope everyone's December is going well so far, and to those of you who celebrate, happy Hanukkah!

Comments

[dbskyler]

I seem to be incapable of writing without editing -- I always edit as I go along, and then edit again when I come back to something, and I sometimes find myself in a perpetual loop where I write something, get rid of it, write something slightly modified, get rid of it, etc. That's one of the reasons why I'm a very slow writer! I don't think I could ever do NaNoWriMo.

I'm doing a pretty bad job of celebrating Hanukkah myself this year. I found my menorah, but I couldn't find any candles. Then I meant to buy some while I was at the grocery store, but I forgot. Hopefully I'll get it together by the last night! Of course, the fact that there was *nothing* in the store to remind me of Hanukkah had something to do with it. Twenty bucks says that the grocery store manager will put up a little display with candles, potato pancake mix and matzoh in around two weeks, when Christmas is closer and Hanukkah is well and truly over. (Even though no one eats matzoh for Hanukkah, the grocery store managers here seem to think that all Jewish holidays require matzoh.)

[charamei]

Oh, I know that loop well - it usually happens to me with beginnings XD I often go through four or five iterations of setting up the plot before I find one that works and get to move on to the interesting bits.

I think writing-without-editing is just as much of a skill as editing-while-writing, in its way. Neither's inherently better, and most people seem to work best with one or t'other; but they can both be extremely useful depending on what you're trying to accomplish at the time.

Myself, I fix in-scene mistakes, spelling errors and continuity blunders as I go, drop notes into the margins whenever I notice something going awry that a scene doesn't outright depend on, and then do a major line-edit at the end. The scene rewrites that I'm doing this month are all from either my dry spell, where I was just forcing myself to put something down no matter how rubbish, or NaNo, where I was writing fluidly but not editing at all as I went. Generally speaking my first drafts are a bit messy in terms of style, and might have some minor continuity glitches, but otherwise they're coherent.

I hope you can get some candles soon :)