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Monday, September 2, 2019

Would anyone like to pre-read/proofread something for me?

Shortest version:
Willing to read something for me and give feedback?  Leave a comment to that effect.

[Story description after the first asterism ("⁂" symbol).]
[Short but not shortest version of what's going on after the second asterism.]

So, this is a little different.

Deadlines can be very helpful to me, provided they're not ones I set myself.  External deadlines I have no hope of changing can help me to break through my blocks and actually write.

I think I started writing for My Little Pony (Friendship is Magic and Equestria Girls alike) because I was hoping to use that fact with regard to the first annual Sunset Shimmer Shipping Contest.  It didn't work, and my attempted Sunset/Luna fic for that never got written enough to actually share anything.

Now, I called it the "first annual" but at the time it wasn't, to my knowledge, scheduled to recur.

The second one produced this, which I like a lot even though it's a prologue without a story attached.  (I would love to write the whole thing someday.)

We're now in the thick of the third, and quite possibly last one, and I have kind of a problem.  I'm actually writing pretty well, but I can't sustain writing without feedback, and I'm not ready to publicly share anything.

The short version is that the word count limit is killing me.  I write long things.  I squeeze absurd amounts of description into small in-universe timeframes.  When I do dialogue, for example, I talk about pauses that other writers would never even make note of.  To tell the story in 15,000 words or less I'm going to have to butcher the ever-loving fuck out of things in the editing process, and I don't feel right about putting up chapters that I know I'm going to have to massively rework.

That's at Fimfiction.  He're I'd just leave the old versions up and it'd be no problem (why I have three versions of the second chapter of Life After), but I don't know if it's precisely kosher to post the story to another site before the contest is over on the site where the contest is taking place.

So . . . If I can get some people giving me feedback now, I think I can finish the story before the September 15th deadline, but I don't feel comfortable publicly posting the "I'll almost certainly have to change this, quite possibly in extreme ways" first drafts right now.

Thus I'm asking for prereaders.  I'm going to put the details after a break just so I can make them easier to find.


Since it's a shipping contest, it needs to include a romantic relationship.  The theme is "endings" and that specifically (explicitly) means that the romantic relationship in question has to end.

This is the plan for the story:

One character has lost her friends and is being bullied by the entire school, this is left her in a deep, at times suicidal depression (there is no actual self harm in the story, just thoughts of it and considering it.)

The other, partially because she's shy, but mostly because of a magical artifact, has never had much of anything.  She's pretty much completely isolated, and at this point it is (because magic) difficult for people to notice her in the first place, and difficult for those who do notice her to remember her.

(Both of these things make sense in universe.)

At the start of the story, they're already dating.  They thing that's because they have romantic love for each other, it's actually an unconscious coping strategy for their depression.  It's basically non-pharmaceutical self-medication.

That's actually, mental-health-wise, a dangerous thing, for a variety of reasons.  That's not really going to come up, though.

The story is going to be about the two of them getting better, and (as they do) seeing their relationship fade away.  That'll be kind of angsty for them, since for a long time it was the only thing that kept them going, but it's (supposed to be) a positive story, which will end with them realizing that:
     a) it's not a bad thing (they're just discarding a no-longer necessary cooping mechanism),
     b) they still make good friends, and
     c) when their choice in romantic partner is based on "This person and I actually have a romantic spark" instead of "This person is the only thing that makes me happy because they're the only one to care about me" things are actually a lot better.

So, that's the plan.

[aside]

My hopes of researching/brushing up on the ways that things go wrong and are unhealthy (without being anyone's fault) in depression-based pseudo-romance haven't worked well.

Apparently it's much easier to find information on "How to have a healthy relationship" than it is to find "These are the patterns usually present in this very specific kind of unhealthy relationship."

That said, I have heard first person accounts in the past (and while I haven't done that specific thing, I am intimately familiar with depression) so hopefully I can do that part without being massively insensitive.



The short version:

I'm writing a story; the goal is for it to be done by September 15th; I'm the kind of person who needs feedback to keep writing; I'm not ready to release any of it publicly.

As such, I'm looking for pre-readers.  Do you want in?  Make a comment with your preferred method of being privately contacted.

(If all else fails, I'll just give you my email address; I'm trying to post it less frequently, but any email finding spam thingy probably already has it.)

1 comment:

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