Kat's reblogs

"The sex tells the story, so it never felt gratuitous to me. The sex is character development. The sex is what is moving this relationship forward, and watching it change over time."

I'll give you my secrets as a fellow short fic writer who sometimes dips into medium-fic and the occasional long fic.

Be obsessed with your story. This can go a LONG way to helping you maintain your motivation. Daydream about it. Make playlists about it. Talk to friends about it.

Try to make each chapter feel like a oneshot. Give it an opening, a middle, and a closing. Have some character development or achieve a plot point or drop a clue that will be used later in the story. The more you can give yourself the satisfaction you get from a oneshot, the better.

Do jump to oneshots on the side to keep you going through the long fic. Sometimes you really do need to get the feeling of "done" to be able to continue something that's still in progress. Don't deny yourself that feeling just because you think you should. Life needs dessert and short fic writers need completed works.

Embrace a B plot (and a C plot and a D plot). These side plots can last for a single chapter or can be threaded through the whole story or they can bridge from chapter 12 to chapter 18. Whatever their final form, these smaller stories-within-the-story also help to satisfy the need for a short, punchy hit of dopamine when the story is starting to feel huge.

The fic I’m lasered in on at the moment has a lot of relatively short (~2-3k words, with a few exceptions in either direction) chapters, which isn’t how I usually work. Finishing a chapter does give me a bit of an “I did the thing!” boost. When I’m writing a longer non-chaptered story, I pat myself on the back every time I finish a scene, instead. (This has turned into an unexpected perk of using Scrivener as my writing software; having the scenes separated into their own distinct documents in the story binder means a finished scene adds to the “pile.” I know there’s other software out there that also does this; yWriter and Liquid Story Binder are ones I’ve used in the past, though I’m not 100% sure whether LSB separated scenes or just chapters. Been a hot minute.)

Also: Walking helps your creative brain. Like, there’s science. I will absolutely turn scenes over in my head as I walk. At this point it’s become habit enough that it happens automatically; if I’m walking alone, I’m thinking about the blorbos. (If I’m not alone I’m probably engaged in conversation, and I have yet to master the level of brain multithreading that will let me carry on a conversation and mentally put guys in Situations at the same time.)

Inspired by my recent love of the Raven Thrower (it looks like a corvid that you chuck at things!)

Also obligatory reminder that it’s the final week on my Bluminarmour fundraiser. If you want to see me test dumb stuff in proper historical armour please consider pitching in and/or sharing!

Flag Wars Bonus Round