One Wank After Another

[coalcube]

A blank assignment is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone.

Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

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Comments

how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

I matched on a perfect recipient for me - we both like the same things about the fandom and want the same things from fic, but the problem now is I have TOO MANY ideas, most of which are for pretty long things that I don't have full confidence I'll be able to finish in time because yt coincides with a lot of stuff that has me really busy through the end of the year.

Is it a better idea to start with a smaller, more achievable idea and then if I have time later to work on the longer fic once I know I have something I can post, or to put all my eggs in getting through one of the longfic ideas even if it means I'm scrabbling to either finish or write a replacement short fic right before deadlines.

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

If you write a small fic now, will you actually work on the bigger fic or will your brain go "Hey, you finished this task, everything else has priority now"?

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

I think i'd be fine but not 100%. my recip is a friend of mine who i do want to write the best possible story for, and the stuff that has me busy through the end of the year is time/energy consuming but isn't something I need to actively think about too much (I work in a very ~holiday season~ heavy industry so I'll have time to think but not necessarily do)

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

In my experience, I start the small fic, and it turns out to be as long as I imagine the "long" idea being (which in practice is at least twice as long as I imagine, usually more).

So I would start with the short idea.

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

I did the 'shorter fic first to make sure I've got something at deadline, then longer fic if I've still got time' strategy last year and it worked very well, so I can recommend that! (I did manage to finish the longer fic in time to post it as a treat.)

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

How confident are you that you can accurately estimate how long a short fic will take?

What I have done is start the long fic, but set myself a deadline that if I don't have a reasonable bus pass by X date, I pause the long fic and start the short fic. I set that date early enough to be sure I'll still have time to do a a good job on the short fic. Then I'm racing myself to get the long fic done before the deadline but I know if I fail I won't have to default.

I've done that ... three times I think? Once I finished the long fic in time and let the short ideas go, once I didn't make it, wrote the short fic and then had time after to keep working on the long one and post it as a treat not much after yt, and once I got stuck on the long fic and had to make do with the short one.

The other option is to pick a long fic but structure it so that it has multiple bailout points, which I have also done a lot. Ideally this fic would be a brick-sized fantasy trilogy, but is there a long scene or a small subplot that would work well enough for a yuletide fic? Is there a mini-climax only 5,000 words into the outline where you can stop there if needed and it will still feel like an ending? Get past the first bailout point, and then any checkpoints you cross after that are just a bonus.

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking of this, in the long fic i have mentally sketched out there's a few parts which would probably work fine as a 3-5k story by themselves

Re: how to reign yourself in without selling yourself short

[(Anonymous)]

The one time I tried to do this, I ended up writing three different fics for the same recipient and posting them all, the last one on Christmas Eve. I would not recommend doing this. Go all in on that longfic idea but try and bounce through it so that, if all else, you can post a massively cut down version and pretend you meant to write sparse intellific the whole time.