ellie

I have found I just have too many arcs to wrap up and too many thematic things to add in to purely "discover" it to make a satisfying ending to a series. At least so far I haven't managed to.

I regularly take breaks from writing for a month or two. Life just happens, sometimes it can't be helped.

That's the one. The protagonist is in a wheelchair from some later point on, so there's definitely not meant to be any sugarcoating.

My usual approach is to think about the ending once the draft is about 80% done, in terms of page count. That works well for me if it's not the definite ending for the entire series.

It's mostly because I'm a pretty extreme discovery writer. (Not that I recommend it, but it's how I best keep myself going.) Hence I kind of tried to write a more definite ending and failed, twice, which is why there is now a third book. This time I'm forcing myself to do at least the minimum of essential planning about the overall theme and message to actually wrap it up in a manner that will hopefully be satisfying and meaningful.

For what it's worth, the upstream issue appears to be this one: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4120 And it seems like there is some vague interest in this being solved in the medium term feature. So let's not give up hope just yet.

It's cool to see so many people back! Seeing you all productive is amazing.

I've briefly jumped between series since my post last month, and I reworked about short of two books worth of an older dormant series with really extensive changes back to front. But I've since set it aside again. It was a nice breather from my main fantasy series, but both series lack an ending and currently the fantasy series simply has more concrete actionable ideas on how I'll wrap it up.

Currently I'm doing some more revision work however. The fantasy series with the disabled protagonist has quite some dark parts, and some of them are a little overbearing at times. Less so deaths and destruction, but longer ongoing illness and fights. I'm trying to make sure there's always enough of the main plot mystery arc and more lighthearted topics going on to make it easier to swallow.

But I've also had some tech work on the side, so I've been a bit distracted by that. In any case, I'm still hoping to wrap up the fantasy series before 2025 ends, but we'll see.

If you're self editing it's worth learning the use, even if you don't use some of them. The en dash I've largely ignored myself, it doesn't seem to be used much in fiction nowadays.

I honestly thought this was a real headline before seeing the source.

An inbox delete would be enough as far as the user is concerned, it wouldn't need to be deleted on the server side. But e.g. some people send literal gore. Moderation is useful but understandably may often take a while, so until then there should be a way to get it out of sight.

So most of my actual writing is on throwaway snippets or microfiction.

That's super fascinating to me, since I don't really do throwaway writing. Either it's for one of the big projects, or I don't write at all.

For drafting I need the word count to motivate me sometimes, weeks on weeks off, it's always been like that. For editing I don't. I think it's a brain chemistry thing. I use the word count motivation when I have issues making progress without it, otherwise I ignore it.

The research can be daunting for progressive topics since people can be slightly unforgiving. It feels like sometimes you get more anger for a not-fully-perfect representation than not attempting one at all. Test readers help but you can't always find the "perfect" test reader to find all parts somebody might find problematic.

I usually write series of a 2-3 books worth of length. I have found that a single book usually barely allows me to set up the setting and characters and a minor villain, and usually the 2nd one is where things really get started. The middle book(s) are the most fun to write for me, everything is established and I can toy around with things for fun chaos, while I don't need to think super hard about a perfectly conclusive satisfying ending yet.

Are you working on a mixture of short stories, like your post last month indicated? Or on something like a novel? What's your long term project goal, a short story collection, a novel, or are you still figuring that out? Sorry if that's all secret for now, I'm just curious. :-)