This is just a little question from one new-ish writer writer to a very talented one. But when writing a long story like your AU do you find it easy to stick to just writing that or do you find yourself getting distracted by other little plot bunnies and find yourself to wanting to write them instead, because I’m a fiend for that haha.

Also while I’m here, love the AU, loved what you’ve written for promptober. Haven’t managed to sit down and read the newest one because I’ve been so busy but looking forward to it when I have the time!

Hello fellow writer!

My writing process is finely labelled chaos.

I have the AU outlined in such a way that any little side-ideas I have for it I have to realistically cut because it doesn't serve the story, nor is it attached to the main idea/characters of the story. There's a whole side-plot running in the background that won't get revealed until possibly the last chapter. As such, this gives the allusion of the characters having lives outside of the story as side-plots develop without audience attention. (This doesn't entirely stop me from going "off-script" for certain scenes or ideas, as will become evident when I start posting, but it helps. I think one chapter got so far away from me that it became around 25k words from a 5k minimum. It had to happen. The Chilliad Tram and sketchy apartment break in's were on the line. Nothing could be cut! Character development demanded it!) When I reach a point where my brain starts to unbuckle from the idea of writing for the Red Lights AU, but I'm still in the writing mood, I simply switch writing projects to either a one shot or another long-form collab thing. (or finishing Promptober... I should really do that.)

For any writing plot bunny that I absolutely love but have no current thing to attach it to, I add it to my fic writing idea document so I don't forget it, but also so I can elaborate on it without needing to actually write it. It allows me to get out the bullet points of the idea and see if there's more to it or if it's just one scene I really want to write. Sometimes though, it's just about getting the idea out so you can circle back to it later cause you find inspiration randomly at 5am and need a well defined place to drop your uncoordinated notes to easily find later (in these case, I highly recommend adding as many details as you can at first conception of it because you may not understand your 5am sleep-deprived notes). Currently, the Fic Ideas Doc has around 20 prompts in it; from short one offs to scene ideas and a few AUs including Vampires, Werewolves, uh... a werewolf type thing, His Dark Materials Daemons –– with some more fleshed out than others. (I think I have all of Bondi's Daemons matched up, but I don't have a story for it yet.)

(And when I don't feel like writing fics because of the constraints of characters I didn't create, I switch to working on [Novel] and chip further away at the 400k word count. Eventually I'll get to the epic wedding/invasion massacre where I get to rip a hole in the fabric of time and reality and chuck a few characters into it, but for now... simple chipping.)

Thank you for reading my fics!

-Bull

Hope you don’t mind that I decided to make this its own post, because I’ve got a lot to say and replies have a character limit.

First off: welcome to Tumblr! I noticed that you seem to be a new blog. I would HIGHLY recommend updating your profile pic to something recognizably fandom-related and making a post or two - either writing something up real quick, or reblogging some fandom content. Tumblr has had a big influx of bots for the past few months, so most people (myself included) who get followed by an empty blog tend to block immediately. Customizing your page and reblogging content will prevent that from happening.

Second: you’re so sweet! I don’t know about “talent,” but I love sharing my stories with people and knowing that I’ve reached people in some way. And if I’ve inspired you to try your hand at writing, even better! Your creative endeavors will be very welcome.

On to your question: my writing program/app of choice is Scrivener. I used to use Google Docs, because I sometimes write on my laptop and sometimes write on my phone, so I needed a program that can do both. However, as a longfic writer, Google Docs gets kind of frustrating to use after a while. There’s no particular organizational system - it just organizes files based on whichever one you opened last, which is messy when you want to look through your story as a whole but the chapters are scattered among the dozens of files you have. And putting the whole thing in one big doc doesn’t work, either, because it takes forever to load, and scrolling gets laggy.

Scrivener has a KILLER organizational system where you can store all chapters under their own folder within a single document, and even break things down by scene. It makes it so easy to reference earlier chapters. Here’s an example of how it looks on my iphone:

And then when I click into a chapter…

It also has sub-folders for notes, research, characters, inspiration… it’s a writer’s dream.

However, it does have downsides. 1.) it’s not free. For PC or Mac, I wanna say it’s like fifty bucks, and for iPhone it’s like 25ish. In order for me to switch back and forth between PC and iPhone, I had to spend like 75 bucks, plus a subscription to DropBox to sync the two. BUT unlike Microsoft Office, it’s a one-time payment, not a periodic subscription.

2.) It is not available for google phones. The mobile app is only available for iPhones. I don’t know why, or if they plan on ever coming out with a Google app. Maybe Google doesn’t want to make an app because they want people using Google docs. Idk.

3.) Some writing formatting does not carry over to AO3. So for example, when I italicize a word in Scrivener, it doesn’t paste into AO3. I have to mark each italicized word in Scrivener. Then when I paste it into AO3, I have to manually italicize those words and remove the asterisks.

Whatever you choose to use, I’m sure it will be great!

God I so wish to leave the abysmal hell that is my schools ““DiStAnCe LeArNiNg PrOgRaM”. There’s so many issues.  1. Little to no communication on the schedule! I had to find the schedule myself only to be told that schedule was fricking wrong!

1a. Period 6 is split down the middle, during this split we go eat lunch and then at 12:57 all the students (distance and in person) come back and go back to class. H O W E V E R the schedule lists this as “6th period starts at 12:57″ and doesn’t mention the split Nobody bloody told me about this split Nonsense and now I’ve got 3 absences in that class and all she could say was “oh. Guess the schedules wrong” and left the absences on my file.

1b. We have an extended schedule sometimes that usually happens Wednesday’s, this was again never mentioned on the schedule even thought it has separate boxes for Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday and so it’s got plenty of opportunities to say “hey Wednesday different” so o just assumed it was like gone to keep students from being in one place to long or whatever. This made me late to m u l t I p l e c l a s s e s.

2. Tech Issues! The audio quality is worse than my 3rd grade Minecraft channel! So is the video quality! They show us YouTube videos and three things happen 1. No audio 2. Broken audio and jumpy video 3. The audio has an echo. My school issued laptop crashed when I opened google docs during a particularly laggy zoom. I’ve also had it where zoom won’t stop loading or says the teachers never started the zoom.

3. The teachers! There are multiple problems with them so imma break it down

3a. They literally don’t interact with us, they start the zoom and walk away to teach the rest of the class and they get away with barely teaching remote students because there’s like 3 max in a class usually only 1 or 2. Of we have questions, half the time they don’t get answered until we send an email that they respond to hours later about an assignment that’s late because it was posted at 1:47 and due at 3:20 The same day. Sometimes they just straight Up don’t respond which is just g r e a t.

3b. Specific incidents! I showed proof via multiple screen shots of my zoom that included a time stamp. She said, “you have been late many times before” I had been late one other day in that class. Then she counted it as an absence even though the email convo was DURING THE CLASS AND SHE COULDVE LET ME IN BUT NO!

in conclusion I might go and risk going back to school and getting sick even though I have multiple different health issues because I simply cannot take this shit anymore

The woes

So I promised the story of trying to format my book for publishing. 

Here goes.

I planned out the last few weeks somewhat loosely, I’ll admit. Most of the time, I guessed, would be spent on finalizing the book’s content-- plot, style, structure, grammar, spelling, that sort of thing. And that did take a while. I spent more or less 11 hours in the library every weekday except fridays, when I could only spend about 7. On the weekends I showed up about 5 hours before my shift at the bookstore so I could sit in a nearby cafe with a slice of chocolate cheesecake and slog through lower-key edits. I also took a healthy amount of time before-- and during work-- sussing out the character and plot arcs of the next few books in the series so I could squeak in all the necessary foreshadowing before I published.

About a week-and-a-half before Do-or-Die-Day, I compiled my individual chapters-- 19 at the time-- into a single master document on Google Docs. This actually took quite a while for two reasons. Firstly, for whatever reason, copy-pasting in google docs eliminates any bolding in the copied text, so “I wanted her to see me” turns into “I wanted her to see me”. It took about twenty minutes per chapter to go through the master document and fix this (because a two-hundred-fifty page book being edited on public library wifi can get a little-- more than a little-- laggy). Secondly, for another reason entirely beyond me, when I copied the individual chapter texts into the master document, strange double-spaces appeared between certain lines, with no consistent pattern. Naturally, I took some time to go through an fix this as well, but after a few hours of work I had symmetry between the master doc and individual chapters.

One of the decisions I made during this time which turned out to be uncharacteristically prescient was the choice to maintain that symmetry as I went through my edits-- that is to say, every change I made to the master document I would replicate in the corresponding individual chapter document. No particular reason, it just made me feel safer.

Anyways.

I leave formatting for the last two days. My cover was already done. The text was solid. The blurb was set (though I’ve changed it a few times since). All that was left was converting my mastercopy into .rtf and uploading it and leaning back and cheering silently in the little cubby/carrel at which I toiled. So I downloaded my google doc as an rtf. That’s when the problems began. My formatting was gone. My special fonts were gone. My page breaks were gone.

And those mysterious double-spaces? In this new file there was now a space missing everywhere those eronious double-spaces had been.

Ok.

What to do?

The first thing to do, obviously, was to switch to html. This solved the graphical issue-- I thought-- but the spaces were still there (or, to be precise, not there).

I had already been sitting and working at this for about four hours, which for me is the critical “fuck it” threshold. To clarify, this is not the threshold past which I say “fuck it” and give up. This four hour threshold is the point where I say “fuck it, I don’t want to put any more refined thought into this, time for brute force”. My mother’s “fuck it” threshold is about seven-and-a-half seconds, for comparison, so I consider myself relatively restrained.

This, of course, is where the individul chapters re-enter the story. My solution at the time was pretty simple and-- for someone with my level of patience-- almost elegant. “Almost”. I had no record of where the double-spaces had been in the master document. There was no formatting indicator in the individual chapters to show where they might have come from. But I knew from experimentation that copy-pasting the same individual chapter multiple times gave the same mysterious spaces in the same mysterious places. I didn’t want to recompile the entire mastercopy again because of the bolding issue, so I decided to create a holding document and recopy each individual chapter one at a time, find the double spaces, and replicate them in the mastercopy. 

Fast forward two hours. I reconvert the mastercopy into html and look at that! The spacing is fixed. Ok, great. I rule. I deserve a milkshake and a nap. So I upload my book to the kindle page-- takes about six minutes to process, give or take, and I preview it. Spacing’s fine. Images are all there. 

But the special fonts? Gone. Extinct. Kindle doesn’t support special fonts.

After the sobbing-- and there was a lot of sobbing-- I decide it’s time to brute-force it again. So I use google drawings to download pictures of my words in the proper font (I only use them here and there so it’s not too much work). Then I open the pictures in GIMP, crop them, and reinstert them into the text as image files. And then finally, finally, I publish.

But that’s just the ebook.

Paperback story incoming