Check Out My New Wip

Check out my new wip

@the-wip-project Day 10 (I'm back! I got lost, sorry)

Tell us about ideas you have floating around. Worldbuilding snippets, or ideas for new stories. Just a few bullet points.

I tell you what dear @the-wip-project, this challenge is really working wonders! Not only has it helped me approach my wip with a fresher stance and reconnect with its original soul, but it's also rebooted my creativity, which had been slumbering under the covers of the past year's strain.

In other words, another wip is born 👶 🎉! Just today, it just uttered its first 1k words.

I've come to realise that, as the first wip is gradually reaching its climax, the emotional charge coming with it is getting really heavy and tends to smother me at times. I didn't know I needed a breather until I started my hand at this A/B/O fanfic (my first). I still have to deal with the guilt of sharing my attention between the two but that's a question for later 😅

It's meant to be lighter, despite the serious subthemes of reproductive technology, of parenthood and its challenges, of social changes vs tradition (I did say it's supposed to be lighter, right? Because it really is)

The fun part, for now, is getting to pick the characters' scents. The challenge is not to forget to add these scents as subtexts to a situation, a dialogue, or an emotion.

So yeah, one new adventure 😊

Paradise on Earth

@the-wip-project Day 27

Use at least five adjectives to describe the environment in your WIP.

So, basically in the newly out chapter, the place is peaceful, paradisiacal, luxuriant but also warm, homey and welcoming.

My character is gone to meet some long lost family for the first time in ... Hawaii, USA. The choice is not only for the pleasure of imagining it, nor in some anticipation for my future vacation (well....). There's a historical logic behind this location since my research taught me that after the Korean war, many people fled the peninsula to settle elsewhere. Canada and the USA were often first choices (Hawai, California, British Columbia in order to remain in the west). Hawaii having an important military base, it was relevant to imagine that one of my secondary characters would go and settle there after marrying an American GI, and build a family there.

@the-wip-project Day 29

First, thank you for pointing out ProWritingAid! I'm using it right now and the advice it gives is so much more consistent than Grammarly! The advice is really enlightening; I'm learning important things!

The question now:

What's a common theme in your writing?

There's no way to tackle that question other than directly: Family relationships are central to all my stories, and more specifically, how the individual can let their personality grow, express themselves and fulfil their goals or dreams in and out of the family circle.

One of my school years's reads (and study) had been "Nourritures Terrestres" by André Gide, from which the famous quote "Famille, je vous hais!" (Family, I hate you) comes from. I remember it had resonated powerfully inside me at the time, dealing with complicated relationships with my own family. The theme in the book advocated existentialist theories, advocating an individualistic stance, disobedience to educational principles, on the premise that a family was a closed-off space, where jealousy and pettiness festered, where sexism and other forms of moral violence thrived. The book dates back from 1897 and of course society was not what it was when I was a teen (Good Lord, thank you) but some representations were sadly still current (and still are, to be honest)

It turned out that it took nothing more to shed a different light on what was happening around me. And although I never took such a drastic decision as to disown my family, like Gide advised, I started thinking about what my place was, and what I wanted it to be. Ironically, I decided little about what happened thereafter; I more or less watched things happen with painful clarity, never knowing what to do with what was thrown at me. I'm a firm believer in communication; so nothing is more frustrating than when it doesn't work. Misunderstanding was ripe, division reigned, and living far away didn't help.

In hindsight, I still don't know what I could have done differently, and although I reached an even state of satisfaction in my personal life, my family is the shadow of what it used to be. I did reach that state where I can express myself freely and be at peace with whom I want to be. Outside of my family indeed; but it saddens me to no end.

So, yeah, no surprise my stories are mostly all about family misunderstandings, secrets, division and reconciliation, hurt and comfort.

Day 25

@the-wip-project

Look who's back at it after almost a week MIA 😅 The moodboard is finally ready, by the way. So surprise by the end of the weekend ✨! I couldn't answer the previous questions this week, but know that I read every single one of them and I love them! They got me thinking a lot about my writing and creative process, in more ways than one.

The proof is that I've been steadily writing the whole week!

Back to today's question:

What have you learned recently, about yourself, about your writing, about your story?

I don't know how everybody will interpret "recently"; I'm going to go with the past year, which also happened to have been a tough year for all of us, wherever we are. Ironically, the pandemic and various lockdowns my country has been through have enabled me to reconnect with myself in ways I couldn't believe existed.

And the catalyst of this connection was my writing.

I already knew this activity counted a lot to me, to the extent that I adapt my weekly workload to my writing sessions (and not the other way round). Even though my writing buddy and I are really cool with the schedule, I know that I need it like breathing. And this past year, more than anything.

The lockdowns made me realise how much of an introvert I am, and the extent of 'me moments' I need to recharge: to quiet down my nerves, to ease my social fatigue (which I didn't understand before), even to reboot my work efficiency. Seeing my colleagues struggle with stress while their favourite sports club was closed, I really felt like the lucky one to be able to fulfil my favourite activity at home. Writing took a whole new dimension then. it was my luxury escape, away from anxiety-ridden news, from secluded areas, from masked interactions, from social distancing codes.

So did daydreaming about my story. I no longer try to control the phases I daydream but make do of any occasion I can seize. Just like the writing process itself, I purposefully allow myself to divert my thought to my stories, and turn this gloomy reality where I'm being tossed and turned, hanging by the thread of any overnight decisions on the way I'm supposed to live and act, into something positive, something productive, something I can control. Stories that are about healing, repairing, hope.

Writing has become the safe place, the respite my mind and body need to endure the reality. I don't know how long this situation is going to last; I pray it'll be better soon for all of us. But I've learnt to be resilient inside and to channel my powerlessness into redeeming creativity. And while at some point in my Wip 1, I feared I'd no longer be able to create after that, I was proven wrong and I'm awfully glad about it ✌

Personae

@the-wip-project Day 11

How do you create your characters? Do you make a profile of them? Do you know your character before you start writing the story?

I've tried several tools, from the basic bullet list of characteristics on the first loose paper I could lay my hand on, to an intricate mind map of the story cast with pictures, places, dates, etc.

Since a lot of the creative process goes through an insanely vast amount of daydreaming time, my characters are quite happy with budding and growing in my imagination. Their features existing already, only some details become more precise over time. But overall, I like to respect canon in that regard.

But it's the writing that really gives them the consistency I'd like their personalities to have. And this is when the magic happens because I'd be at a loss to say with precision what they're like before I actually start writing. As the letters, words and sentences flow on the blank document, their profiles take shape; the traits which are meant to be set, revealing de facto those that are going to follow the arc of development and evolve along with the plot.

@the-wip-project Day 31 (I finally understood the question!! Yay! I was waiting to read other replies to see what I didn't get - pardon my English)

So now I can answer: 🔞

What’s a pet peeve you have, that you focus on to do differently in your own stories?

In intimate, or even downright smutty moments, I literally skip depiction of "bedroom eyes", or other "liking lips for entrance", or "liking lips in anticipation". That kind of stuff makes me C R I N G E like nothing else does. It's porn, but it's poor, cheap porn to me and I can't stand to see my favorite characters shown in that light. They deserve better smut!

I don't pretend the smut scenes I write are the best, but as much as I can, I don't objectify my characters, nor do I use what I call unnecessary details that just make the whole thing a mood-killer.