awritingcaitlin reblogged
it-is-only-a-novel-deactivated2
Reminder to self:
What do you mean?? I took one whole day off! Why am I not immediately recovered from years of barely scraping by at subsistence level???
awritingcaitlin reblogged
I love the phrase "they get along like a house on fire". It's perfect. You and me have perfect chemistry and it's setting off the carbon monoxide detectors. People are calling emergency services to get us to stop being so chummy. Someone died
awritingcaitlin reblogged
guys help i can’t stop thinking about characters
awritingcaitlin reblogged
Bonus: If I buy a book I get to keep it! The publisher can't turn up at my house at random and confiscate all the books I bought.
awritingcaitlin reblogged
there is something so crazy and powerful about having art of your oc that was made by anyone other than yourself. like oh my god you actually exist outside of my own brain that's WILD
awritingcaitlin reblogged
reminder that coming up with some fake little dudes and creating intricate storylines in your head is a completely free and fun way to pass the time and the government can't stop you
awritingcaitlin reblogged
the narrative: *starts the third act by repeating a scene from the first act but now it has a totally different context*
me: ohoHOhohoHOHOhoHO
awritingcaitlin reblogged
Can't believe writing is actually a muscle that can atrophy. Terrible news for me
awritingcaitlin reblogged
sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though
awritingcaitlin reblogged
someone should pay me a lot of money so i can take a year off work and spend all my time baking and writing and working out
awritingcaitlin reblogged
“we were lovers in a past life” trope but the current incarnations are enemy-to-lovers trope. when.
To be clear. I don’t want “our past love ended in betrayal and anger and now we hate each other.” I want “we died in love and in each other’s arms” but the current incarnations do NOT remember and they ARE trying their best to End the other one and these new sudden flashbacks to lovingly holding each other’s hands is EXTREMELY UPSETTING
awritingcaitlin reblogged
More than that, you’ve got to actually spend your time doing this stuff on the off chance that the algorithm picks it up and people care about what you have to say. You’ve got to spend your time doing this even though it’s corny and cringe and your friends from high school or college will probably laugh as you “try to become an influencer.” You’ve got to do it even when you feel like you have absolutely nothing to say, because the algorithm demands you post anyway. You have to do it even if you’re from a culture where doing any self-promotion is looked upon as inherently negative, or if you’re a woman for whom bragging carries an even greater social stigma than it already does. You’ve got to do it even though the coolest thing you can do is not have to. You’ve got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are. In a recent interview with the Guardian, the author Naomi Klein said the biggest change in the world since No Logo, her 1999 book on consumerism and inescapable branding, came out was that “neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security. Plus social media has given us the tools to market ourselves nonstop.”
Oh hell yes. An article that supports my half-joke that a corporate app's demand for constant self-promo is technically classist.
I had this in my to-post queue and was resisting posting it... because it's so painfully accurate, and nails some of the things I hate most about what social media's become.
I was about to give TikTok one last chance after a poorly performed "feel good" short I made by just slapping text over a clip of my sleeping cat--shit that TikTok should eat up. Everybody loves sleepy kitties. And it didn't *bomb* but it didn't do as well as the videos that take me hours, where I'm filming myself, all for 3-4 mins of content, because I have to figure out what I want to talk about, then condense it down into the absolute bare minimum of an explanation, 2 sentences max (where I can essay all day on here and my followers love it).
So with that unremarkable video already out today, I had one in my queue and one more idea I wanted to film. After 2 dry runs just talking to my phone's stopwatch, getting a dry throat from like, 45 mins of practice, it started to thunder outside and I just fuckin' gave up.
For like, the first 20 mins of practice it was fun, but I'm not a natural on camera. Filming yourself is how you get noticed on that platform. Even thought I knew acutely how addictive socials can be going in, in less than a month I could literally feel the anxiety of "check your views and engagement for a dopamine hit also here's a bunch of influencers with hundreds of thoudsands of likes if you don't have this you're a failure" cementing in, and I KNEW IT WAS COMING.
The algorithm ceiling could not be broken, no matter what I did, and I refused to give into the sunk cost fallacy. So I quit, and already I feel so much better.
If a Tumblr post takes a long time to make and doesn't get likes/reblogs/comments, it doesn't matter, because I still had fun making the post. But if a Tiktok or Insta post fails, when I already went out of my way doing something I hate to appease an audience I don't understand, it just feels like a slap in the face.
I'm a writer. Trying to make something shiny to entertain an audience with the attention span of a goldfish just does not compute. If I don't like what I'm making, then I can't make it authentically, therefore, I won't like making it or the end product.
awritingcaitlin reblogged
Anonymous asked:
I'm sorry your writing strategy is WHAT?? I'm going to need a thorough explanation of this because I'm FASCINATED
[brian murphy voice] I DIDNT SAY ANYTHING WEIRD!!!
okay i did. but also! if it ain’t broke…
here’s how this crumbles cookie-wise. sometimes (as is currently the case) i feel like i am trying to hold onto a whole novel in my brain at once. this does not feel particularly good because the novel doesn’t belong in my brain it belongs Out There. so i make a very detailed outline and then i start at chapter 1, and i write to 100 words (give or take a few). then i move on to chapter 2 and write to 100 words. then to chapter 3 and so on until i have at least 100 words in each chapter. then once i’ve run through the whole book, i go back to the beginning and make sure each chapter is up to 200. then i’m usually in the Meat of each scene so i’ll get everything up to 500, then 1000, then 1500 and then usually i clock out of chapters around or just under the 2k mark.
this appeases the hyperactive part of my brain by making sure i’m never bored, and helps the project manager in my brain so i can keep track of many moving parts in the novel and also ensures that scenes at the end speak to scenes at the beginning since i’m (sort of) writing the whole book at once.
NOTE: sometimes i get lost in the sauce and write way past 100 or wherever im at, and that’s fine. it just means i probably skip that chapter during my next pass since it’ll be past my goal wc for each chapter of the run.
that is all. try it, if you want. i honestly don’t know how to write books any other way
I’m always saying people need to develop a writing process that works for their own brain.
This looks absolutely off the rails to my brain but clearly works for theirs.
I do not have time to muck about with my process this much or frankly I would try it just to see what happens, as a person who likes to study brains.
awritingcaitlin reblogged
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awritingcaitlin reblogged
i do enjoy "living weapon" characters but specifically living weapons who did in fact do absolutely horrific things which at least a part of them enjoyed and thought was good and right at the time, and that no amount of not knowing any better or guilt they feel in hindsight will ever make up for. i love living weapons who are "irredeemable", and no it's not their fault that they were made that way or pointed in the directions they were by the hand that wielded them, and yes they are victims, but so were their victims. living weapons who some people will never be able to forgive, but who still wake up every day and try to do better than what's expected of them. a sword that uses its blade to cut wheat to make bread for the people who once lived in fear of its arc falling on their heads.
awritingcaitlin reblogged
[talking about my favorite characters] okay so THESE two come in a bonded pair and if i think about them too hard i start taking poison damage