Author Archives: Sam

Trying to find a solution

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My 2019 creative resolutions mostly boiled down to “be kinder to myself” but after the utter trainwreck that was January I need to remind myself of what I said because I’m not applying it..

This was an actual line I wrote:

forget what I ‘should’ be working on and rediscover my joy in just working on what I please 

and this one

.. to forgive myself when things don’t go according to plan

You see it’s the old ‘I know it intellectually but utterly fail at putting it into practice’ dilemma.

Now half the problem is that I wrote these resolutions during christmas break and even when I try and be reasonable I always underestimate how much of a toll university takes. I hate it, I literally do, there is nothing about it which I like but I’m committed and I wish I knew how to shut off. How to partition my life better so that the negativity about uni didn’t spill over into absolutely everything else making me feel awful all the time. I don’t know if it’s because of my mental issues that I struggle so much at this, or if it’s this hard for everyone (it probably is and I’m just being a wimp).

But anyway, it is what it is and I can’t change the uni part of the equation. I need it too much. I need the student loan and I need the time that loan buys me to get my shit together, which is terrifying me beyond measure because what if I can’t? What if being this utterly miserable and stupid means I don’t, what if this is just a wasted exercise? I feel sick just thinking that. I need to not think about that because it’s too big, it’s too scary and I can’t deal.

Moving on – back to the point of this post which wasn’t to indulge in a pity party, it was to find a solution – “rediscover my joy in just working on what I please”

I was explaining ideas to my friend Marie last night, and I used the words ‘shouldn’t’ and ‘can’t’ several times. I’m still limiting myself, still denying myself, still saying no and it’s logical for me to do so but it’s not working. I’m not working on what I’m supposed to – I’m doing nothing – and so at this point is something – anything – better than nothing?

2012 NaNo comes to mind. I didn’t want to work on Perfidy, I wasn’t feeling it, so I just started typing what was in my head. I wrote 5k of a story which I then abandoned because I went back to Perfidy and wrote the first draft (of that version anyway). So a diversion doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it can lead back to the main road, and if it helps at the time then maybe that’s ok? I can’t even convince myself here.

I still don’t know what to do.

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maplesyrupao3  asked:

40 Questions! 1, 16, 27 😊

Hello my friend *attack hugs* thank you so much for the ask! 🙂

1) Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
Plotty, I like my plot. I mean all fics have to have some kind of plot to move the characters across the page, I guess what I’m saying is plot with stakes? No that’s still not clear. There are fics which are more about a characters personal journey like Painting Layers of Love, and then there are fics where stuff happens to the characters, and yeah they grow and develop because of it but the stuff is more external than internal. I do love PLL obviously but it’s a stretch for me as a writer, and so my comfort zone is with more plotty things.

I’ll play in all sandboxes but my favourite is sci-fi, though Once introduced me to the wonderful world of magic, but still you know – aliens! 🙂 I like my tech as well which magic doesn’t have. Although yeah this is my answer. My favourite thing to do when writing is to smush genres together. I have a particular fondness for mixing sci-fi and magic.

I started my writing career so to speak with detective stories and espionage and I still love, I just like to mix them with exciting sci-fi and magic these days as they feel a touch boring without you know spaceships and stuff.

Oh man my brain is fizzing. All the possibilities!

16) If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
Oh don’t do that to me *falls face down on the floor*

I’m not a one pairing writer. I go through like infatuation periods. I never, ever stop loving a pairing but they do stop being the centre of my writing universe as something else takes its place. I’ve always thought of this as a good thing because it increases the amount of inspiration I have, and opens up my writing to new possibilities. Even if it does I suppose ultimately mean I produce less content for each pairing as time goes on.

Please don’t make me choose /headdesk

I think I probably will go with Rumbelle ultimately because I have the most ideas for them, and I’ve already written far more for them than any other pairing (by a few hundred thousand words). There are so many possibilities for them, I mean they had several AU’s within canon! They are the obvious choice. I’m just a little sad now at the concept of never writing anything else. I like exploring all sorts of pairings 🙁

27) How do you feel about collaborations?
Oh dearie me how long have you got?

I think under the right circumstances a collaboration can be an awesome thing BUT those circumstances can be as elusive as a magical unicorn. You see I’m actually having to do a collaboration project for one of my university classes right now – the thing is a trainwreck! I’ve cried, I’ve had multiple panic attacks and it’s week one. The entire thing is making me want to chuck my whole degree in just so I don’t have to do it anymore.

So collaborations can be bad BUT they can also be good.

I’m one of the mods for the inaugural Rumbelle Big Bang. I wouldn’t have worked so hard with my co-mod (jackabelle73) if I didn’t believe that collaboration as a concept was a good thing. I think it can produce fantastic work, and I think if the circumstances are right (to circle back to the beginning) then it can be a very enjoyable and worthwhile process.

Ultimately it depends on the team that is collaborating, whether they are on the same wavelength, whether they want the same things out of the project etc. Also communication, the team has to communicate fully and and in a timely fashion. The team has to gel, they have to work well together and that is not something that can be scripted – it either happens or it doesn’t. I very much hope that for as many participants as possible, the magic has happened and that the Big Bang has been a good experience for them.

Oh and I haven’t even got into how I think collaborations should work. I did ask you how long you had right? :p I think I’ll shut up here because it is a bit of a sore spot right now.

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winterswanderlust  asked:

5, 12, 26, 30

Hey! Thanks for the ask 🙂

5) Share one of your strengths.
Oh man you ask the hard questions! And I’m even going to spare you all the typing I did to try and figure out the answer hehe.

I’m an ideas machine and I can see it in my head. Not sure I can translate it to the page but the movie theatre for one plays very nicely in my brain. You can give me any prompt, any prompt, and I can come up with something. So that’s two strengths ooops. Oh well I was struggling to think of one and now there’s two for the price of one – cool! 🙂

12) Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
Ok I’m going to go with Once as that’s the fandom we share 🙂 and I’m going to break with tradition here and I’m not going to name a Rumbelle episode. I love Rumbelle to pieces obviously but it’s more a gestalt, the feeling of the whole than any individual episode. I’m someone for which things are symbiotic, I find it very hard to see things as parts, I only see them as parts of a whole – connected and interdependent.

So my answer has to be The Bear King – as that was the only episode my beloved ship BraveWarrior got, it stands on it’s own and by merlin I vow I will go down with that ship. One episode is the only inspiration that ship got but it’s enough and I’m taking it.

26) Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
Answered here 🙂

30) Do you accept prompts?
I shouldn’t as they are distraction *cough* buuuuut as Ripper can attest yeah I do, I just can’t help myself.

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mariequitecontrarie  asked:

2, 14, & 15 also 26

2) Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
*screams a little* I NEED TO TELL YOU ABOUT A THING!!

A person in my NaNo region did something incredibly dangerous and they sent me a link to two things, which I had never heard of but for all I know are widely known (I am Captain Oblivious) – Trope Bingo and Trope Bingo Generator and ohhhhhh boy.

I have always struggled with really knowing the trope names. I mean I know the obvious ones like bedsharing, fake dating etc. but I was sure that there were others and I felt like I was in the dark, like everyone somehow had access to a secret list and … wait a minute! Did you all know about this list before hmm? *eyes you suspiciously* :p

But But But anyway that thing is Dangerous – look with a capital D – because I want to write ALL THE THINGS. So I think the answer to “is there a trope I haven’t done yet but want to” is ALL OF THEM!

14) What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?
Ok there was this writing advice book and I read it and had stars in my eyes. I felt like the writer who had penned it was a real person, and a lot of what they said resonated and then they went on to say “if I did it – so can you!” which is the typical spiel of the self-help book but that was incredibly dangerous.

They said a lot of things, but I think the most toxic (for me at least) was the “you either want it or you don’t. If you do want it then you’ll make it happen.” – so basically if you failed, you didn’t try hard enough because you didn’t really want it. The technique he espoused was to get up an hour earlier because if writing was the #1 priority it should be the first thing you do.

I tried, I really did but I get easily tired and I got really vicious on myself for failing. It hurt so much because it felt like I didn’t really want it – but I really did! You see the thing is that advice might be fine for those who are healthy but I have certain issues and my mind and body couldn’t take the strain.

That advice wasn’t for me.

I know this question is supposed to be about some specific technique or something but this experience I had with this writing self-help book scarred me and I wanted to talk about it to say to people, yes the advice might sound perfectly reasonable but everybody is different and don’t beat yourself up if something doesn’t work for you. Don’t destroy yourself because you bought into a line that someone sold you.

15) If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
Between Two Fires absolutely no question about it. I think the visuals of some fics would be great, I mean The Beauty and the Tragedy is the most ‘artistic’ fic I have ever written, but no it has to be my sci-fi/espionage favourite fic because I did so much world building and I can see the movie in my head already – to share with the world would be something else.

26) Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
I beta for a few people and what kind of beta I am depends on what kind they want. I always ask first what kind of feedback they are after, and I will do multiple beta passes if they want that. So I’ll do story feedback (characterisation, plot etc.), I’ll do a soft edit (my punctuation is not good enough to do a proper edit) but I can check for typos, tense errors, grammatical mistakes, that kind of thing. I’ll do a mix of that and I can go deeper, or more superficial depending on what people want.

My goal as a beta is to support the author – it is NOT to tear them down. So I don’t sweat the small stuff, I’ll let certain things slide sometimes because it’s not important. What is important is that the author feels good about the story they are putting out AND also feels like it’s their story. My job is not to destroy their voice, or to inject my vision – it’s to help them achieve their vision.

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I feel like the album Astro Lounge by Smash Mouth and the Ocean’s movies have a soundtrack in common. I’m not a musician so I don’t know what it is but everytime I hear certain songs on that album it instantly brings the Ocean movies to mind.

Satellite in particular I think.

#90sNostalgia

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I wish commenting on stuff was allowed sometimes. I mean I get why it isn’t but it’s harder to make commentary.

Anyway – this Leverage gifset – needs talking about.

It shows a scene from 4×15: The Lonely Hearts Job, which I actually watched the other day so perfect timing for it to show up on my dash. In the one I have linked it’s a scene which wraps up what happened earlier. You see Nate asked Parker to “start a fight” and so she started a fight – she punched the person in question, knocked them to the ground and then Hardison pulled her away. Sophie went “Parker he meant start an argument not a fight!” Then in this scene, Nate promises that next time he’ll use the word ‘argument’.

So why is this so important to me?

a) because Parker took Nate literally. He said fight and so she started a fight, that kind of literal thinking is one of the many traits that makes me headcanon Parker as autistic.

b) nobody is cross with her. They go variants of “oh man that’s not what he meant!” but nobody says Parker is stupid for misunderstanding, nobody says that she should have understood and express credulousness at her mistake. Instead there’s acceptance and a promise to try and be more accommodating in the future. I suppose what I’m getting at is they all support Parker and accept her as she is.

Leverage is a show that has a palpable feeling of home. I watch it to comfort me sometimes because it is a comforting show. That is true for a lot of reasons but this is one example of why – that unconditional love and support for a character who isn’t neurotypical. I just sorry for getting on my soapbox but seeing the gifset felt like a sign, and so I’m just letting my feelings out.

Go watch Leverage y’all!

2019: January Report

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I started this post on tumblr but I just can’t bring myself to post it. I never posted my goals for 2019 on there because I had an attack of the self-consciousness and kept them to myself. I’m desperate for support, desperate for somebody to say something, but I can’t put myself out there. I’d be screaming into the void anyway, as I don’t think there’s a community in the world that could actually put up with me. I just want someone to tell me it’s not my fault I guess, even though I really do think it kinda is.

Anyway, things aren’t going well, things are going pretty damn awful actually and I don’t really know what to do with myself. My goals for January were:

  • Word Count: 2,363/16,000 (15%)
  • Chapter 11 of Painting Layers of Love
  • Divided finished
  • Big Bang Art finished

And you can see what happened ^^ which was not a lot basically. Those words were on Painting Layers of Love so I have half a first draft of the chapter. I guess you could argue progress was made but it’s nowhere near what I needed, and I was being super lenient with the goals in my opinion. They should have been achievable so this failure is all the worse for that.

University is going terribly. I’m not attending my lecture as I can’t cope with it, and I missed doing my first formative assignment for one of the modules. In another module I’m finding a project incredibly hard to deal with, and so I’m barely coping with that. I think #NotCoping or #BarelyCoping is kinda the theme for the month which is just pathetic.

So let’s try this again. February Goals:

  • Word Count: 0/16,000
  • Chapter 11 of Painting Layers of Love
  • Divided finished
  • An art piece finished

I’m not exactly reaching for the stars there as it’s basically the same as January but I don’t know what else to put. I have to do the January stuff, and as I didn’t do it in January it gets shifted. I just hope to merlin I put my big girl pants on and February turns out better because I can’t bear the idea of shifting the same tasks to March. I mean that completely undermines the point of a deadline. I suck so much, I really do, I’m awful and just yeah, this is hopeless really but I’m going to try.

Existential Crisis

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Time is finite. It is a universal truth that we never have enough, but I certainly don’t feel like I spend what time I have wisely.

The truth is I’m overwhelmed so much. It’s easier to ‘check out’ and while away the hours doing something mindless, than it it to dig in to something important.

It comes down to two conflicting issues
– Priorities
– Spoons

I get easily distracted and side-tracked – probably because I’m so terrified all the time – and so things I should prioritise, like my writing, often take a backseat. It’s like the thing I care about the most, and should therefore do the most, is what I don’t do due to the fear. So is it a failure of prioritising? Or is it that simply I’m not capable of doing the thing due to spoons?

I wish I knew how much was my fault, and how much is just something I can’t control. I know that it sounds stupid saying I can’t control myself but mental illness is like that. Normal people can just grit their teeth and dig deep, but I have already dug as deep as possible and there’s literally no more gas in the tank to push on. Having said that mental illness also does this trick of suggesting there is more you can do “if you just try harder” after you’ve given up as like a sick guilt-trip. It’s hard to know the truth, did I give up too early? Or was I truly incapable of doing more?

So the simple truth is I don’t know. It’s the end of January today, I had goals and I’m nowhere near them and that hurts me. I despair of myself, of life in general, I feel like things will never get better – and that’s my fault! Because I’m not trying hard enough, I know what I should do and if I want things to be better, then I need to be better and do more and actually make it better – it’s not going to get better on it’s own!

It’s just so frustrating because I can’t seem to make it work. Is that because I’m lazy? It that because I prioritise the wrong things? Or is it just that I do the best I can, with what I can manage (even if that’s not what I should be doing) because that’s all I can do? I have no idea. I don’t know if I should blame myself or not, but I kinda am and I do feel like shit which is quite self-defeating because the worse I feel, the more I’ll slip into the abyss of despair and the harder it will be to dredge up the spoons to do anything.

I’m sad, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do.

WIP Wednesday

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OMG I nearly forgot again!

I super want to do this because I’m hoping I can pump myself up, you know get pumped! Because I want to do all the things but just bleugh heh, the old fake it until you make it right? 🙂

So let’s do this thing!!!!

Ok friends, what shall I talk about this week? I mean it’s super tempting to blather on about everything that I really really hope is upcoming but hey let’s not split the focus too much, let’s bring it down.

PAINTING LAYERS OF LOVE

Ok there you go, that’s my thing, that’s what I’m going to try and get pumped about this week, whoop whoop!

Guys, guys, guys, I can’t say it’s been 84 years because it’s been 2 years or longer, quite frankly I have lost track at this point but but there has been movement. End of October I planned out probably around the next 5 chapters I think I reckoned. Then beginning of THIS month I wrote the first half of the next chapter.

Yup that’s right, there is half a chapter after 2 years *rolls eyes at self*

No, no, no negativity self, glass half full and all that, half a chapter is better than no chapter. So what’s upcoming? Let’s try and get excited! But without spoilers! Yeah this is hard.

Ok so we left things with a looming trip to an art studio. Actually considering it’s been so long should I do more of a recap? Hmm ok. The story – Neal made a deal with Gold that if his dad took a 3 month sabbatical off work, then he would go back to college and finish his degree and let his dad pay for it. So Gold moves into the cottage next door to Belle in the picturesque countryside of an indeterminate location (there are lavender fields and that’s kinda it, pick your country of choice *cough*).

Belle was in a car accident a couple of years ago, she lost her mother and her eyesight. Her dad was driving and couldn’t take the guilt and she hasn’t seen him since shortly afterwards as he can’t face her. She vacationed in the cottage as a kid and moved in and basically never left. She spends her days painting and reading, in a nice little bubble where nothing upsets the controlled environment she has created for herself – but then Gold arrives.

Gold’s arrival makes Belle confront issues she had been avoiding, and she in turn makes Gold take the sabbatical more seriously. He had just been doing it to pacify Neal but he starts to realize that maybe Neal had a point. Anyway change is hard, there are arguments and meltdowns and lots of tears and tea. Both Belle and Gold decide that they want to try to face what scares them and personal growth. Hence Belle’s decision to take Gold up on his offer to go to this art studio, which is where we left things in Chapter 10.

As for what happens next? Shall I try and do an episode tagline thingy because #NoSpoilers. Erm ok – next time on Painting Layers of Love Belle’s world threatens to shrink even further, Gold calls Doctor Hopper and makes a mistake which will echo out for the next few chapters probably (I have a sort of arc planned).

So yeah this is still a thing. Coming ‘soon’ TM, to a screen near you 🙂

Thoughts on that trailer!

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Ok so Coulson is in space, either mind-wiped or pretending/undercover and May totally knows with the “more than we thought we would” line.

I wonder if this ties in with Captain Marvel? Like they go into space to find Fitz and in true Earth explorer fashion find enemies and then bring them home (that always happens – see Stargate: SG1). It definitely looked like Daisy was fighting in an alien bar?

Jemma found Fitz whoop but what is she doing freezing herself? Could she not work out how to wake him early so is freezing herself to wait for him? I will totally cry if that’s the case buuuut as it’s TV someone will fix the problem and bring them back within an episode or two – they are main characters after all.

I wonder how Coulson didn’t die? Did he get abducted? I suppose that is totally possible because the season 5 finale took place concurrently with Infinity Wars snap, so Fury hit the panic button for Captain Marvel, we know that they team-up in the 90’s (as Coulson is in her movie) so maybe she looked up an old comrade – who better to catch her up on the past 20 years. Captain Marvel became an elite kree soldier, kree can resurrect humans, Coulson didn’t want that but maybe he had no choice?

OMG so many questions really but sweet Merlin it looks action-packed. They are having space adventures – I love it! 🙂