Sara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

Time for a #WritingGame to get some work done! I need to knock out a couple things so I feel comfortable relaxing the rest of the day.

Here's how it works:

I'm going to put on a YouTube playlist of music I like. Every time the song changes, I'll come to this thread and post the last line or two.

I have to keep writing so that I don't embarrass myself in 4 minutes and 33 seconds by having nothing to post. :)

So here we go!

(Starting with Placebo - Running Up That Hill)

#writing #amWriting #writingCommunity

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

His hooves were exposed. The pauldrons had been left to hang in a nearby tree.

(N.E.R.D. and Rihanna - Lemon)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022
A stripe appeared on the other faun’s back. Blood slithered down her spine.
(Sam Smith, Kim Petras - Unholy)
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

<<Did Amalwe: ever watch you do this? Did he like it?>> asked Ildas.

(The Weeknd - Save Your Tears)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

The fur on their legs was groomed neatly so that they shined. Each of them had down-turned faces concealed by hair. None of them were the faun Esor had seen with Corvin the other Night.

(ODESZA - A Moment Apart)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

“You recall the story of Eriskidon’s forging of Redspine,” said Corvin. “How he murdered much of our bloodline, and thousands of others besides.

(M83 - Midnight City)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

There used to be more fauns in the Republic. Amalwe: used my skills to find where they were hiding, and we…removed them. Many of them.

(Faithless - Killer's Lullaby)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

“What does it mean?” asked Corvin, his voice betraying a tremor.
“It means we love one another,” said Esor.

(Woodkid - Iron)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

“Two hundred,” he murmured. “Expensive gift for your Low lover.”
Magistrate Corvinde:, only weeks from his accession, kneeled naked at Ildas’s feet.

(M.I.A. - Bad Girls)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

They were alone in Ildas’s Ralen office, built into the oversized skull of an ancient dire elk. If they had walked down the muzzle’s interior toward the inside edge of teeth, they could have looked through the sinuses at the Great Thicket, but they stood underneath the crown where it was most sheltered from Light.

(Grimes & i_o - Violence)

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

“I want more churches built before the end of the century, and I want the largest of them on the edge of the Aslas Barrens, where missionaries may strive to convert the filthy heathens of the dust.”

(Elderbrook - Inner Light)

Show threadSara Marie Reine

He wanted this thing to be quiet so he could think, but the food did not silence her, and she would not eat. Ahnor simply bowed over with her head to her knees and kept crying.

(GUNSHIP - Ghost)

Dec 26, 2022 at 9:33pmWeb
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 26, 2022

It's been about an hour. I added 750 words to the manuscript, but I was doing some cutting as I went along, so I think I wrote more like 1000 words. It was mostly filling in holes or else I think I'd have been speedier at it.

I'm trying to get myself amped up for this hard part I've been putting off writing for a couple weeks. For the moment, I'm taking a break.

Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Dec 28, 2022
@skimgoth Looks like things were pretty intense! I'm glad it seems to have gone well, depending on how you define it.
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites This whole part of the book is *so* intense. I'm building up to the climax (finally) after almost 270,000 words now, and everything gets very bad. I'm definitely leaning into the horror part of gothic horror!
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Dec 28, 2022
@skimgoth Oh wow, that sounds exciting but hard! How do you feel about getting toward the end?
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites Honestly, at this point, I kinda just wanna get it done and out of my head. I'm starting to write "uglier" in the rough draft after progressing slower through the early bits just to fit it all together and see what it looks like. I'm not convinced it's going to work? I guess I'm feeling uncertain, then.
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Dec 28, 2022
@skimgoth Sounds more than valid for a first draft tbh. The climax to ending can really feel like a tightrope act for me haha. Fortunately one with as many rehearsals and refinements permitted as necessary, but the nerves argh.
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites There's so much to pull together. And I traumatize the hero *really* hard between now and the end, so I'm thinking, do I want to do it like that, at this point? Most of my books have major trauma, but I wanted this one to also exemplify healing, so putting trauma right toward the end is like. hmm. I'm not going to extend the book too much if I do this? I hope? If I go too far beyond 300,000 words I will actually lose my mind, lmao.
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Dec 28, 2022
@skimgoth Well, if leaving the protag/major character permanently traumatized with only the barest nod toward healing worked for The Hunger Games, Sense and Sensibility, Lord of the Rings and others... xD but yeah, I can totally see just wanting to be done at this point. Maybe that's why those other authors didn't get into a full healing arc for their protags lol.
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites Great point! 😂 I just started making it a priority to think about things in terms of eventual healing after one of my mental hospitalizations and a therapist said, "You don't have to identify with your suffering." And I said, "My entire career is built off of trauma and suffering? Trauma is my thematic branding?" I've been thinking about it relentlessly ever since. How do I subvert my own thought processes about people and what happens to them so I'm not just identifying with the suffering bits? And I am also putting recovery and healing into the themes/characters/plot, so that maybe I can heal too? This is definitely one of those areas where I am literally the only person who will know or care, but it's personally meaningful!
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Dec 28, 2022
@skimgoth Wow, those are some big thinky thoughts to think *while* writing a novel! :O I think it definitely means something to readers for a work they read to have themes about hope and healing, too. Healing can look different to different people too, of course. For some it will mean a restoration and new start, for others it may mean learning to live with the parts of themselves they've lost, accepting a different kind of okay-ness. Maybe it means both of this and more for the same person. It's certainly a complex subject.
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites I've always seen my books as a way to deep-dive into my feelings. They're autobiographical through elaborate metaphor, and I'm always trying to confer some kind of information. Like my early books were pretty much "reject patriarchy, stab it in the eyeball." And I cut off my abusive dad because he wasn't getting better and he just hurt me. When I almost died giving birth, my books got *darkly* bleak. The resolution was choosing to live, at all. (The series I wrote right after giving birth, some people refuse to read it, which I take as a mark of pride in how well I expressed my emotional condition.) Now this particular book is a reaction to waking up to America's Christofascist right-wing and how deeply entrenched it is, and what it means to grow up petite bourgeoisie within that system, complicit, and how even liberalism within the system from non-revolutionary lumpen means making ugly cruel choices that exploit people. So...lol god that sounds really obscure. I GUESS THE BOOK IS OBSCURE lmao
Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites I had a complete breakdown when Tr*mpism won in 2016, through the 2020 pandemic and seeing how incredibly frail the society I take for granted is. And this book is entirely that. That's why it's gotten so big in scope and scale.
Show threadAuthor-ized L.J.Dec 28, 2022

@skimgoth Haha it's a deep cut for sure but I guess I'm just the kind of audience to understand! xD Probably not a coincidence that you're one of the like 5 souls active on a tiny out-of-the-way instance whose admin's politics might be described as "liberatory" and the federation policy, reflecting that, makes the server commercially useless.

Of course, the beauty of fiction is that people don't have to be versed in Marxist theory to understand. They get to vicariously tremble (with rage or fear? both? does it matter?) at the violence that razes over everything beautiful, the grief-struck admiration for the perilous vulnerability of a flower with petals raised like fragile swords before a sweeping storm. We get to speak to people who aren't extremely online (TM) or up with it leftists (TM) in a common language, the language of emotions and existence, where our roots touch and entwine regardless of how our branches might diverge.

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022

@ljwrites I often think anarchist movements have a major PR problem. It's all too obscure for most people to understand. It's nice that you do!

It's not going to be this book, but I do aspire to write more accessible anarchist fiction to help convey the concepts in a way average people can understand. One of my future goals is to write a fairly comprehensive Anarchy 101 book under the guise of commercial fiction (psychological suspense, maybe?) so that it can be used to book club the concepts among folks who don't realize there is life and a world outside of our system. Sort of a red pill, used in The Matrix's trans-liberatory sense, not in the incel movement sense.

This fantasy project is written in language loosely echoing the romantics and it's dense for other reasons, so this one is not gonna help accessibility at all. 😂

Show threadSara Marie ReineDec 28, 2022
@ljwrites Just the fact that non-revolutionary people are called "lumpen" (which obviously sounds like lump, even if you don't speak German) in the literature is so hostile to recruitment efforts. AND I GET IT, it's frustrating to coexist with people who can't see outside the system and don't want to. But I used to be one of those people (many of us were!) and I'd love to be a gentler hand to help people over. It's really better over here.