Discouragement
15 March 2025 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI think my marigold seedlings probably got frosted last night; they are not looking at all happy. I suspect the trouble is that they were still in the shallow tray. Fortunately I had not put the tomatoes out -- although since the surface of the balcony is currently warm to the touch in the sunshine and the indoor temperature is still only 55F, I have them outside at the moment!
I have typed up about half of Chapter 2 of "Ashes", and it is clearly going to be far too long (four and a half thousand words already, and we have at least three more major plot points to cover; in fact very little has actually happened yet). It will almost certainly need to be cut heavily and/or split, but I don't think that simply splitting it is going to solve anything :-( I suppose I shall need to go through yet again and try to pare it back to focus on the actual original vision for the scene, as opposed to all the embellishments that seemed like a good idea at the time...
It is incredibly depressing when you have spent so long on something -- and care so much about it -- and then all that effort is just counterproductive... And then of course there is the question of why on earth you would put all that effort into writing a fic for which you know in advance there is no market; and we have had the answer to that one already, of course (fanfic is the only form of writing that is aimed at the author rather than the reader). The solution is obvious in that you either write fanfic for a larger audience -- which, in this day and age, probably doesn't include the "Phantom of the Opera" fandom any more -- or else you take all the trouble to write and market original fiction in order to build an audience of your own. And if you are not doing either, then objectively you deserve whatever you get. (I have not even *tried* to market Arctic Raoul, having been in effect using this fic as a means of procrastination; at this point I might as well simply have uploaded each chapter as I typed it, and got half a dozen readers or so.)
Pages on AO3 continue to fail to load on a regular basis, which is particularly awkward if you are trying to submit any kind of data (e.g. edits or reviews), but apparently the problem is not actually at this end for once... ("known performance issues")
I have typed up about half of Chapter 2 of "Ashes", and it is clearly going to be far too long (four and a half thousand words already, and we have at least three more major plot points to cover; in fact very little has actually happened yet). It will almost certainly need to be cut heavily and/or split, but I don't think that simply splitting it is going to solve anything :-( I suppose I shall need to go through yet again and try to pare it back to focus on the actual original vision for the scene, as opposed to all the embellishments that seemed like a good idea at the time...
It is incredibly depressing when you have spent so long on something -- and care so much about it -- and then all that effort is just counterproductive... And then of course there is the question of why on earth you would put all that effort into writing a fic for which you know in advance there is no market; and we have had the answer to that one already, of course (fanfic is the only form of writing that is aimed at the author rather than the reader). The solution is obvious in that you either write fanfic for a larger audience -- which, in this day and age, probably doesn't include the "Phantom of the Opera" fandom any more -- or else you take all the trouble to write and market original fiction in order to build an audience of your own. And if you are not doing either, then objectively you deserve whatever you get. (I have not even *tried* to market Arctic Raoul, having been in effect using this fic as a means of procrastination; at this point I might as well simply have uploaded each chapter as I typed it, and got half a dozen readers or so.)
Pages on AO3 continue to fail to load on a regular basis, which is particularly awkward if you are trying to submit any kind of data (e.g. edits or reviews), but apparently the problem is not actually at this end for once... ("known performance issues")
