Quill and Ink Corner: A writing thread for the Cobbies.

I actually welcome our asexual friends, I have some questions I will ask down the road, PM me if you'd like to give your two cents. I want to do a good job of portraying an asexual character. After reading and watching many a review of bad portrayals of asexuality and LGBT characters, I want to get it right.

I don't think there's a specific right to get; make it character consistent and just a fraction of their life... and bingo. <shrugs>

Much like the key to writing a solid female character is not to emphasise they're a woman every three seconds.

But how can Hollywood make memorable characters without one note FlatCharacters?

Thanks for the good advice.

edited 29th Oct '15 10:57:51 PM by TairaMai

Any other Cobbies out there doing Na No this year? I doubt I'm going to hit 50,000 words this year, what with everything else going on for me right now, but I'm trying to write at least a little bit every day.

Sort of. I already did Nano in spirit when I wrote 100k in a month, back in June. I wanna try and churn out another 50 this month though.

It's a bit draining though.

I'm doing Nano, but only to get my hand back into regular writing practice.

I started Na No Wri Mo yesterday. Belted out 5200 words. Have tried to write some more today, marginally successful so far at 800.

But then, I end deployment on the 23rd. Kind of feel like if I haven't hit my 50k by then, I'm not going to finish. So write like mad for the first two weeks and then see what I have left.

Unlike last year's, however, I will not be posting up chapters as I write them. Mainly because our internet right now is so shitty I'm astounded I got this page to load ... after an hour and a half of hitting refresh quite often just to get to the "add post" part.

Woohoo! I'm ahead of schedule on the first day!

That's awesome.

Meanwhile, I'm still slogging through the same dumb chapter I started weeks ago. It's creeping toward 2500 words, but a lot of it is just notes, and I think half of it is actually going to have to go in the next chapter.

I have had very, very little time to write lately — like seriously some weeks, it's been one hour. :P That should settle down a bit this month, though.

I had to give up on Nano this year. Too much time spent rehearsing. But I can still keep writing regularly, either in my journal or for the storyline I'm supposed to write.

... I have 3600 words left to write.

... we're in visual range of Oahu. If I can't finish before we're pierside, I won't be done until we leave.

It's only November 15th!

Technically, having gained a day from sailing across the dateline^note we got to live Friday The Thirteenth twice, aren't we lucky? I am on day 16.

... and I hit 50,813 this morning around 10am or so. Couldn't get off the boat until almost 1130.

Closing up my laptop for the holidays, feeling a little sad.

I've been working on the transition into a new story arc, and it's going slowly — not just slow writing, but also just getting from A to B is taking more story bricks than I had hoped.

I'm super impatient to get into this new arc, and I really wanted to get the transition finished by now, to get to a nice stopping place for myself. As is, I'm going to open this half-finished chapter in January and it's gonna be all, aw maaan... I'm still way back here.

Spotted on a writer-focused FB group: The Ugly Truth of Publishing & How BEST to Support Writers

TLDR is a brief summary of the history of publishing, followed by advice for current or would-be authors on getting paid for their writing.

Behold: My actual quill and ink◊!

It's a bit harder to write consistently since it's so light and the nib is so flexible that I have to be very mindful of flourishes. A little twitch goes a looooong way. If I change the angle the wrong way, a whole drop of ink spurts onto the paper and bleeds through. Or it doesn't write at all, despite me dipping it three seconds ago.

However, it is much easier to clean than my usual pen! No rinsing forever with lukewarm water, I can just take a damp tissue and wipe off the nib.

Why would you get a quill?

Matter of fact, where did you get a quill?

Because reasons and a number of places will sell writing quills. Might as well ask why places sell Calligraphy pens when machines do the same thing.

I got a quill because my hobby is calligraphy and I've always wanted one. It being the holidays, I decided to splurge.

I got it at a calligraphy shop by my school.

That's cool. I never got the hang of pen and ink; I have trouble enough with fountain pens.

It kills me that Pride and Prejudice and the Constitution and Hamlet and everything were all written with a fucking feather. :D

Here is a bit of simple writing I did for amusement and part of a joke with one of the guys at my work space. Thought I would share with you folks for the giggles and it is of course a simple form of creative writing. Anything between > < is a substitute. Now the background for this bit of writing is as follows. When we started having folks lock their office doors this guy kept forgetting. It wasn't really mandatory yet but they wanted it done as a force of good habit. So I joked with him that if he kept it up he would find a Live Chicken in his office. This was month's ago. This last month I finally delivered on the joke. They guy got a big kick out of it and shared it around with some folks.

edited 6th Jan '16 5:56:45 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Nice. My kid will love some of those.

You know how fiction has to make more sense than reality? Like it has to be a lot less random and coincidental, or it won't be believable. If a person dies on the same day they were born in real life, we go, "Wow, what a weird coincidence" and wonder what that might mean, but in fiction, we'd scoff at it as implausible, heavy-handed, and/or contrived.

So... There are few important dates in my book, but I'm using a non-Gregorian calendar, so I have to sometimes do a lot of work to figure out the conversion. It's the sort of thing that won't really matter to the reader, but I have to get it right.

So I picked one important date, sort of at a random — it has to be in that month, but the exact day doesn't matter. Then I did the work to figure out a less important date — I had to start at the summer solstice and work out a month here, eight days in transit, seven days here, three days in transit, aaaaand... Shit.

Guy dies on the day he was born.

And the thing that kills me is that it was, in fact, totally random coincidence. And now I have to go re-arranging things because totally random coincidence is too implausible for fiction, god dammit! XD

You can keep a few of them. Maybe people will figure out your non-Gregorian calendar and go "what's the meaning of this?" and you'll "nothing, it just happened XD"

Working on another sex scene... Already over it. I just want to write, like, And then they have sex for story reasons.

This does not bode well for my chances of becoming a topselling erotica author. ;D

Just write "And then he put his thingy into her thingy and they did it".