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vriddy
vriddyCommunity Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.
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bnha_fans.
Signal boosts:
worderlands' next event at the end of the month will be a daily 3-sentence flash fiction challenge. I know a few people in my circles enjoy that kind of event!vriddy...Just the preps, I haven't started on the actual edits yet XD But I have a roadmap and an extensive list of actionable steps, and I'm glad I do. Working offline using Pomodoro, like I mentioned the other day was super effective.
A disadvantage, I suppose, is that I can't have conversations back-and-forth in GoogleDoc comments, which is something I dearly enjoy doing with fanfic (either as beta-reader or beta-readee!). I think maybe it's just too much, on a turnaround of 40k words at once. Also because I needed to let it rest, folks might not be so interested in a reply 6 months later on a reaction they don't remember having about a story they fuzzily recall 😅 Having said that, I did write to folks after chopping their feedback into the roadmap, to thank them again and share a general reaction to their reactions :D
( Stuff to ponder )
It took me 17h41 to go through all 7 beta-readers' feedback. (Thanks again everyone for offering, I am so grateful :D). I'm going to have a brief interlude now (well, brief is the plan XD). Ideally, I'd like to use that time to write something original but SHORTER so I can bask in the self-indulgence of inventing fun worldbuilding, which I loooove doing. But on the other hand, Wind Breaker Volume 22 just came out and drove me insane with the OT5 vibes so I may have to write something for that instead XD
I 100% intend to break down the work and take regular breaks when I start actually following the roadmap, if only to make the structural changes then giving it a bit of space so I can make sure the major changes didn't break something else important. I expect overall it'll likely take longer than the 17h41 prep time, so I better pace myself! I think I should learn very interesting things throughout the process. I'm already thinking about what to be careful about in the Soul Thief story, when I get back to it.
vriddyStarting to process my backlog of links. Originally, I started collecting this particular list when the allegations about Neil Gaiman surfaced last year (if you've been lucky enough to miss that, but want to learn more, muccamukk's round-up post is still an excellent overview).
It's always hard when stories, songs, shows, etc that made a difference to you turn out to be created by someone who's done or is doing horrible things. I always find it hard when it's followed by a demand to just stop liking whatever it was, as if that's as easy as snapping your fingers to remove the impact of sometimes formative stories from one's life.
Here are a few links that helped me navigate this, whenever it happens, since it happens often. If you only have energy for one link, I'd recommend making that the first one. It's nuanced and practical.
Dealing with Authors Who are Jerks, Bastards, or Downright Evil in Real Life by writinginthedarktw. "But how should we react when a writer we admire, or who we have a personal relationship with, turns out to be a not-so-good person? The short answer, of course, is you can react any damn way you wish. There’s no right way. But I can share with you how I attempt to navigate these rough waters."
vriddyI am 57% into my beta edit preps – not the edits themselves based on the actual beta feedback yet, but the list of action items I intend to go through. I'm more or less following the plan I had set out, though I ended up using Scrivener comments a lot instead of a separate file as I had expected. So I have 3 files/file types:
Having said that, I still had massive, massive, massive issues with getting started. Like, I had built this all up into such a huge thing in my head, and it's in the first time I handle feedback on an entire manuscript at once, and from several people... Below the cut is a list of things I did to finally make myself Just Do It (tm). Maybe there'll be a piece of inspiration for someone else, though mainly I want my future self to remember to check here next time I'm stuck! In my case, it was definitely a process problem, like, just not knowing where to start or what to do.
( vriddy's weirdo productivity tips on actually getting started )
In general, I am tremendously enjoying working offline. I got the feedback back in 3 formats: GoogleDocs, Ellipsus, and LibreOffice with tracked changes. I am loving the LibreOffice one, so much that I downloaded all the GDocs too (thankfully the comments are included!) and work like this for everything. Ellipsus didn't work for me for reasons I mentioned earlier, and as a note doesn't seem to allow exporting with comments either, as far as I could see.
Making progress feels nice! Once I have a system, it's easier for me to let momentum carry me. We'll see if that continues to work when it's time to do the actual beta changes! I do intend to take a short break before jumping in.
branchandrootkrja