I know how I am with deadlines, so why do I keep signing up for ficathons and exchanges???

[edenfalling]

That took WAY TOO LONG.

It is, of course, at least 85% my own damn fault -- I'm the one who chose the story, and I'm the one who is terrible at time management and kept getting distracted by other things -- but even so. TOO LONG. (The word count is too long as well -- and yes, it did end up longer than "What Isn't Broken," because apparently I enjoy torturing myself.)

I was starting to go nuts Thursday and Friday night, when I couldn't get more than 500 words a day. Normally that is a good pace for me, but here? Not nearly enough. Tonight (I have not gone to bed; therefore it is still Saturday; shut up) I realized the problem was that I had written an entire scene that shouldn't be there, yanked it out, and wrote around the information that had been there. I also tweaked the beginning slightly so it at least pretends to match the ending, inserted several references to what ended up being kind of a major plot point, so it seems to grow organically out of the story instead of being something I pasted on about two thirds of the way through, and did a bit of pruning for commas and general wordiness.

And it is SENT IN.

Gah.

...

Now I just need to get started on my Femgenficathon story... *cue ominous music and Liz running away screaming*

Comments

[edenfalling]

Oh, I am going to edit the living daylights out of this story once it's no longer anonymous! Right now, the first third or so has been beta-checked once, the second third is at the stage where I would normally send a story beta and/or post it to see what reaction I get, and the final third is a hastily-written mess, which normally I would have set aside for a day or three until I could come back with a bit of perspective and a better sense of how it fits (or doesn't fit) in with all the preceding scenes. I mean, the conclusion works, more or less, but it's horribly sloppy. :-(

I have a love-hate relationship with fests and exchanges. On the one hand, I am terrible with deadlines, but on the other hand, I think I also do some of my best writing when I am handed some constraints and forced to bash through any problems right now instead of setting a stalled fic aside for six months until something unlocks in the back of my head and I know where to go with it. The craft of the writing suffers, but there's a certain "aliveness" to the results that I can't always get with stories that I take more time to write. *shrug*