mrsluigivargas | Entries tagged with my writing: progress

Today I've been introduced to the concept of "cuddle pollen" and I'm OBSESSED!

(A Fanlore article mentions it! They quote this fic as an example as well~)

It's like it was made for my sex pollen WIP specifically, hurray! Because the quoted fic generalizes the cure for it to dopamine and oxytocin, and there's lots of things that activate those besides sex 🙂 so I can just...borrow that explanation, too, hehehe~

Current Mood: impressed

Look at me, having a postable WIP for Wednesday. That never happens! 😆

Writing this sex-pollen has admittedly stalled because Kamek's got a mini-lore dump that'll be annoying to write, but I've got a few ways of making it less annoying. The simplest of which is slightly adjusting the fic's main premise. For the millionth time. So you know. At least the punchline will be funnier, hopefully.

Anyway, look at the weird-ass narrative voice I started the fic with, lmao. I've got truly no idea where it came from. Writing Bowser's POV just do be like that, I guess.

~~~

( WIP Here! )

Current Mood: pleased

Finally sat my butt down and started in on the pseudo-sex pollen fic WIP. The fun news is that I've got half an outline (~1.2k words so far!). The annoying news is because of where the conversation's gone I have to make up (brief) lore for the pollen itself 😭

So far what I have is —

It's from a plant (obviously)
The plant is rare-ish to find
It grows in a very particular and specific climate that just so happens to overlap with some regions of Bowser's Kingdom
The flowers are edible but you're supposed to, like, have it in teas or soups (or potions) and stuff
Not, for instance, grab a handful from the stems and eat them raw, like a certain someone may have done in this story 😐

I think some of the trouble is figuring out what the plant is supposed to do, if you consume it correctly. It's gotta be something that nudges the gang into thinking it's actually sex pollen, so…maybe it's used in a gimmicky-but-somehow-longstanding trend of couples using it to fix their marriages. Or how couples are the main demographic for that sort of fad. Or how it's an alcohol-free substitute to drink to loosen up before…

…actually, no, that one's too on the nose, I think.

But still, this is a very minor exposition dump and I am trying desperately to put as little thought into it as possible, lmao. And hopefully it'll stay that way! 👍🏾

(Uh-oh, I also need to figure out what the flowers vaguely look like...the pollen can be a fun color like orange or red or purple, tho)

Finished outlining the last of my Sicktember fills last night! This one was unlike my others where it was giving me a ton of trouble for no good reason. It only took mucking around with the fic's timeline and completely changing the setting to get it to flow properly 🙂 So, only a slight deviation from my original plan 🙂 So now I get to move forward in writing my annual 'gen sickfic about two minor villain characters that no one reads because it's a genfic about two minor villain characters' XD (but someone's gotta fill that AO3 relationship tag, so…)

A lot of my Sicktember fills this year only fill one prompt at a time, as opposed to knocking out multiple at once. I'm blaming that on the fact that I'm running out of ideas, haha. I wasn’t even sure that I was even going to do Sicktember this year, but the enthusiasm from some of my Tumblr mutuals drew me in regardless. Sickfic feels unusually restrictive to write, in an illogical way. The only thing I can compare it to is whenever I write romance and a page and a half or so goes by, and then I suddenly go "oh shit aren't they supposed to be blushing or something?" and then I have to go back and strategically place blushes and excess staring and whatnot. It's that except "whoops someone needs to sneeze or something I think". Deliberate in a way that feels a little bit tedious. Also, I don’t get sick very often, nor do I read a lot of sickfic myself. So what ends up happening is that the sickfic tends to have a more general whump quality to it; or at least, that's what my better sickfic feels like (yes, I know sickfic is a subgenre of whump, but the distinction matters to me, lmao). Overall, it makes me feel like I'm bad at writing sickfic. But I suppose that's not a crime, so...on I go.

July: UNO Reverse Kidnapping - I finally get to write a Royal Plumbing Polycule thing OTL this one’s been in my WIP folder for a whole year…
August: Repost Bowsario Rapunzel AU #1 to AO3 because that’s easy to do and I need the month to work on Sicktember and also it’s needed context for a Sicktember fill, anyway
September: Seven Entire Sicktember Fills
October: That WIP I have where Kamek passes out from exhaustion and Bowser’s sad about it
November: One of the other RPP fics in my WIPs, probably. There are at least five of them to choose from~
December: I dunno! Maybe I’ll finally get a chance to do one of those writing prompt ask games. Those look fun and I’m a bit jealous of everyone who’s got the time to do them, tbh

This is assuming I don’t get any fun new ideas in the meantime, of course. But I’m glad the whole “post at least one fic a month” goal I’d set at the beginning of the year is looking so achievable 😁 I’m already half done! Future me is going to be SO amused I can't wait~

(UNO reverse is going great btw, I have 2 out of 5 chunks of it second drafted already! It's a very silly and light piece (that hopefully won't be too long))

Three for three on the little "one fic a month" goal I set for myself this year mostly as a joke (because last year shook out to almost a fic a month by pure coincidence). This month’s fic was supposed to be the one where Kamek gets shrunken down, but I realized that past me had no idea what a hydroelectric plant was when she’d written the outline back in 2021 so I had to overhaul one of the last scenes, lmaooo. It’s not even that important, but it stalled progress nonetheless 😔 Hopefully I can finish it in April instead 😊

I think the only issue with this goal of mine is that at some point in the latter half of the year I’m probably going to run out of the quick shorter WIPs and there’ll only be longer stuff left. But we’ll see when we get there; some additional smaller ideas will surely pop up along the way!

April can be Tiny Adventure; May is Zine Fic (might be posted in June tho? idk how that's gonna work); June maybe I'll go back to the aroace!Mario angst; then there's the handful of RPP stuff i've got, and the fic where Kamek passes out, and one or two miscellaneous ideas, and THEN its the longer stuff! So hopefully I should make it through the year! (It's okay if i don't tho; i'm mainly trying to do this because it'd be funny to look back on.)

Luigi reached up and nudged Bowser. Bowser's growling cut off, and he looked down at him. "Hey, it's just Mario," Luigi reassured him with an amused smile. "What's he gonna do from all the way over there, wahoo you to death?"

This line is so tonally slightly-incorrect that I must replace it. And yet. For one thing, it's hard to find a replacement. And on another hand, personally I think Mario should be able to wahoo people to death, actually. But eh, what do I know?

EDIT: I posted this to Tumblr and people thought it was hilarious, so…I guess it's staying!

Over the past week I've been distracted from working on my one-shot by 1) another multichapter WIP because I realized there's nothing stopping me from self-inserting myself as a background character to chat with my blorbo between scenes, 2) the new Splatoon 3 update, and 3) me randomly getting an idea to make a AO3 work skin to add clickable buttons to one of my already published fics. I kinda feel bad because this one shot is so so close to being done, but that's just how some things are, I guess! 😅

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Home
Listening to: One Way Dream - Nathan Sharp

...I've realized I didn't link my Sicktember stuff here. I'll get to that eventually.

But yeah, I have three (3) Whumptober fics I'm trying to write this month. It's a combined 7k words so far, and I haven't written the first draft of the third yet ^_^; That one should be easy though; it's mostly dialogue and brief action beats. Hopefully I can draft it by next weekend?

Although I've had fun writing these fics, a really big part of me wishes I'd done Flufftober instead. It would definitely be more up my alley anyway; whump is like. Kinda scary? Like the prompts are all Gun to Temple and Waterboarding and Going Into Shock and here I am feeling bad about giving a character a panic attack. (Well, I know there are alternative prompts and such but. still.) Oh well. There's always next year!

But the other good news is that after this I can finally get back to working on my Blizzard sickfic! OTL my favorite WIP, sitting neglected for months...such a tragedy...it's gonna be an absolute banger though I'm excited~ ^_^

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: Home
Listening to: Fishing Frenzy 2 - Splatoon 3

I finished my Sicktember fics last weekend!!! 🎉 ...Aside from some minor edits, of course. I think I have every prompt accounted for except for Chronic Illness. I had no clue what to do with that one. I had a lot of fun writing them, even though I had no idea what some of the prompts were (Coddling? Heartburn??? Cold sweats?????). But that's what ~~Google~~ DuckDuckGo is for! :)

( Me blabbing about my writing, ft. word counts )

Now that I'm done with these, I'm going to put them away for a week or two before going back to edit them. And as much as I want to work on my Blizzard sickfic, I've been staring at long-form sickfic for the better part of the last few months. I need to write something else. I have a couple non-sickfic one-shots in my WIP folder; I can work on those instead of trying to figure out wtf I should be titling my Sicktember fics.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Home Home
Listening to: Ai No Supreme

Finished drafting Chapter 3 of my sickfic last weekend~ *does a little dance* Two more chapters to go! I'm trying to draft the whole thing before starting to edit it for posting. Don’t want another multichapter fic to take 10 years to be finished (looking at you, Cinderello). The only other true multichap I've written took me 9-ish months, with an IRL friend group cheering me on. I've been actively working on this fic for…5-ish months now? I started drafting it in March. The Google Doc has existed since…Dec 2020. Hm.

Anyway Chapter 3 ended up full of parallels to Chapters 1 and 2 and to itself, which was interesting. Most of them were unintentional. One that was intentional was that early in Chapter 3 Mario jokes about carrying Kamek down the hallway, and then later in the chapter Kamek passes out so Mario has to carry him down the hallway ^_^. Very simple, yet very fun~. The only thing so far in this fic that I can see being annoying is that I decided to engage with a magic system to explain why they were in the house, but now I have to make up a magic system :/. It's just runes, but I think I have to make up a word/phrase or three and write half an infodump. But that's a problem for Future Me~.

Also I had to make a new Tumblr blog for self-shipping stuff because apparently it never sunk in that I've been self-shipping for years until I'm sitting at my desk trying to write Kamek lying sick in a recliner and I'm persistently getting the urge to, like, run a hand through his hair or something. Which I can't do, because he's fictional, and Mario and Luigi won't do, because they aren't inclined to. So, uh. Whoops? I love learning new things about myself. /hj

Current Mood: lazy
Current Location: Home
Listening to: Penny's Theme (Instrumental)

So I think I have a game plan for fic writing:

Do the technique I discovered for my main WIP, the blizzard sickfic (I've been referring to it as blocking, like blocking scenes in a play or something, lol). I'm going to block out all 4 chapters of it, and then I can start writing and editing and finalizing and posting one chapter at a time.

( AND THEN - )

Also the sickfic I'm writing is brought to you by Wendy Rocket's incredible and exquisite sickfic catalog. I've never been sick enough to know what its like to be sick in bed for more than a few hours so I've been reading their fics for inspiration, lol

Current Mood: complacent
Listening to: Find the Pieces - Tryhardninja

So I have two fics I'm working on right now: there's a sickfic where Mario, Luigi, and Kamek are stuck in a cabin during a blizzard and Kamek gets ill that I really wanna write, and there's a smut fic featuring Kamek and Mario that I've sorta been avoiding.

Guess which one I stayed up two hours past my bedtime to outline scenes for! 🙃

Not for lack of trying! I had my Google Doc for the blizzard sick fic open since dinner, and I wrote out a scene (kinda)! My brain just won't let the other fic go, for some reason.

The Balloon Meme, with me reaching for a sickfic wip and being grabbed by a smutfic wip

The Balloon Meme, with me reaching for a sickfic wip and being grabbed by a smutfic wip

(It was kinda funny - I had my main WIP open on my laptop, and the other fic open on my phone. I think I was writing two scenes at once at some point)

But anyway it seems that the way I write fic has evolved! Instead of going from outline to detailed outline to prose, I've more recently been going from outline to bracket text to prose! (Or in the case of the blizzard fic, we skip the initial outline entirely because I'm that enthused with the idea)

(i.e. This:

A section of the outline of my fic, Blizzard Blues

A section of the outline of my fic, Blizzard Blues

turns into this:

An excerpt from my fic, Blizzard Blues

which is very fun)

This started when I banged out Red Green Colorblind in 2 hours because I didn't even write an outline for that one. It was just the brackets. And I was like 'oh the outline is secondary I can just do this' but also outlines are helpful when you're too lazy to even think of filler prose so. And you don't have to worry about the tone of the fic or whatever you can just make little jokes and stuff.

I think this is also mainly because i can't commit to anything lmao. I write a sentence down and I'm like 'wait is this wording good what if I wanna change it later' and when that happens I put the section I'm unsure about in brackets. So the whole fic becomes brackets. Oops.

Current Mood: bored
Current Location: Home
Listening to: Kings and Queens - Ava Max

Ok so I just wanted to share that in one of my WIPs, I managed to get this:

An excerpt from the outline an upcoming fic

Down to this:

I revamped my highlighting system after the last post and it really made things much, much easier! Yellow is general stuff to look at, green is word choice, and orange is implied or background stuff. The orange, in particular, helps a lot in getting me to focus on the important bits.

Current Mood: creative
Current Location: Home
Listening to: japanese math rock to listen while strolling around in the cherry blossoms

So I had a fic that I wrote in 2015. It was Cinderella but with Sonic the Hedgehog characters (Sonic is Cinderella, Amy is the prince, etc.). I started in 2015, and I've finally uploaded the second to last chapter just a few days ago! So that's exciting. The fic has definitely gone through some downsizing so that I could actually have a chance of finishing it.

I think something I struggled with the most is like, focusing on too much detail? It was a problem with other drafts of stuff I'm working on too, where I try to fit, like, half a character arc in one line of dialogue when I really don’t need to.

For example, in my notes for A Short Rest in Shangri-Spa I have this: An excerpt from the outline of my fic "A Short Rest in Shangri-Spa".

But the final version is this: An excerpt from my fic "A Short Rest in Shangri-Spa".

And this bit:
An excerpt from the outline of my fic "A Short Rest in Shangri-Spa".

Isn't even in the fic at all!

I tend to go pretty deep into the "why would this character do this"/"what are they thinking when they do this" aspect of things, but the reader…doesn’t really need to know every detail of that, I think. So then its like "OK, exactly how much of this should shine through this dialogue", but I want al of it but then nothing flows right if I keep all of it but then I have to figure out how much I can get rid of and still keep the underlying sentiments, and…yeah. I'm literally having this exact problem with a different fic and it sucks.

Also I think I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, lmao. I've gotta have the perfect word choice™, in particular. Honestly, that’s what made updating this story so interesting, because yeah I could quibble over whether a smile is tight or regal or detached or vacant for a day and a half, but this is 2015 writing! 2015-me was (presumably) less good at writing than I am now! So I could just let myself not worry about the words as much, because the standards are a bit lower. Also it's a Cinderella retelling, so I can stick to surface level stuff because the plot beats and structure are a bit more important.

(I'm still happy with what I wrote though)

Now I just need to write the last chapter, but I think I'm going to hold off on that because I still have to write my PMTOK stuff, lol. And maybe some other Kamek-related stuff too; I got a couple of Ideas a week or so ago… ^_^

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: Home
Listening to: Pokemon something or other

Apparently this wasn't a new fact to my dad? So now I'm just baffled. The Wikipedia article provides no definite answers, either, so I guess this is another one of life's mysteries~

[Link to fic in question]

Current Mood: indescribable

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Mrs. Luigi Vargas

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Page Summary

The more you know!
WIP Wednesday
why is sex pollen lore so difficult to create for no reason
Sicktember!!!
Ok so fics for the rest of the year —
Steady progress on my goal...
The pain of editing...
Why is it so hard to stick to one thing at a time...?
Meanwhile in Fanfic Writing Land...
Sicktember 2022!
Slow and Steady Progress~
Its nice to make a plan once in a while
why do i have so many wips
Writing Ruminations Update
Cinderello & Writing Ruminations
Me writing Faceless:

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Entries tagged with my writing: progress

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