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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  15d ago (text post)   389 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 5, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Day 5 of NaNoWriMo. Day 1 was surprisingly fluid, especially considering that I didn't start writing until getting home from work, and had only gotten about 4-5 hours' sleep the night before as a result of being a good Samaritan. Day 2 was torture, getting the words on the page was like pulling teeth. Days 3 and 4 have been pretty plain sailing. On the whole I'd say I'm enjoying the process so far. I crossed the 7k mark this morning - perhaps the part of the experience I'm most surprised by is how easily I've found it to write on the train during my commute.

I tried doing NaNoWriMo before, I think in 2021, but gave up literally on the first day as I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted to write about. The difference in this case is that I've had a month's planning going into it, so at the outset I knew what had to happen when, the names of most of the major characters etc. This has made all the difference in the world in motivating me to keep writing.

How do you overcome self-loathing as a writer? In high school I loved to write and I did so unselfconsciously, but in college I started to "try" and found that every time I wrote something that in the moment felt profound, when I read it again the next day I found it terrible and embarrassing. Is there some mental trick to short-circuiting this impulse? I really want to write as I remember it being as enjoyable as playing music.

Also, what are you writing about? Tell me about your story and characters.

All I can say is that it's a numbers game: throw enough shit at the wall and eventually some of it will stick. Most of what I've written in my life I can no longer bear to look at, but there's the odd story here and there that I'm still proud of.

I've only told a couple of people about the book so far and am deliberately not going into a huge amount of detail. The basic premise is that it's set in eastern Europe. There's a woman working for a pharma/medtech company who's working on an invention which has the potential to completely revolutionise diagnosing fertility disorders, but she's concerned that the invention will be stolen from her and used for purposes she doesn't intend.

Thanks. It sounds like anything else where there's no shortcut and you just have to put in the hours of practice to get good.

Will you post any of your stories when they're done?

Probably not under this account, for opsec reasons.

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