[march 2024] please don't tell anyone how i live
or: fanauthor workshop applications closing soon, special pricing on my most popular coaching service, and destroying my life with a video game i shan't name
you may have noticed i haven’t put out a newsletter since December. there is a very good reason for that. and that reason has the initials BG and ends in the number 3.
yes, i too have fallen prey to the hot sad vampire and horny bear man and diet coke ebony dark’ness dementia raven way. if you have no idea what i’m talking about, that’s great. don’t. save yourself and your sanity and your CPU.
as such, i’ve had “finish newsletter” on my to do list every day since christmas, and every day i simply do not do that, or anything else for that matter. it started small: i bought the game on a christmas sale. i downloaded it. i made a pretty paladin elf lady who broke her oath by torturing some dude just to gain approval points—nay, ONE approval point—with the traumatized vampire man. then i started over as a ranger and once i got to know the traumatized vampire man, i realized i did not view him in a romantic light because i related to him too much, and subsequently turned my attention to the lorge druid daddy who is so hot for you he literally turns into a bear. look at me, not trying to fix a chronically depressed femboy for the first time in my life. that’s what i call growth.
i finished my first playthrough in 140 hours and immediately started over again, this time with—and this is not hyperbole—75 mods. and then the game updated and all my mods broke and i finally set the thing down for like 10 minutes.
which is all to say, i can’t scrape together enough brain energy to write a coherent essay. i’ve started, oh, 10 versions of this newsletter across the past few months but inevitably i think, “what am i even trying to SAY,” and go fiddle with my BG3MM load order instead. but i’ve answered a lot of writing asks on tumblr these past few months, so in lieu of a whole new essay, i’ve offered some highlights from my writing advice tag, plus a few important announcements and details on my synopsis review service.
it is now march 1st, and i woke up at 8am and read 60 pages of a new book, and i’m hoping that means my motivation has returned from the war. this time last year, i’d written over 100k words. this year, i’ve written however long this newsletter is.
picture depicts Lenny from the Simpsons clutching an open can, in his underwear and slippers, living in squalor, indicative of my past 3 months in a BG3-induced fugue state.
news & announcements
Fanauthor Workshop applications open until March 8th
here’s the copy from the tumblr post, linked below.
The Fanauthor Workshop is a biannual Zoom course for writers of fanfiction. My goal is to create a supportive space for fanauthors to receive constructive feedback on fanfiction, original fiction, or creative nonfiction. If desired, I also provide guidance on moving outside of fan spheres to traditional publishing or other creative writing programs such as MFAs.
Participants of the workshop receive
Attendance in an 8-week Zoom course during which you’ll provide feedback to your peers and workshop one piece of your own work, up to 6,000 words.
Access to the Fanauthor Workshop Discord server, an active community where we host weekly accountability meetings, write-ins, and other events and activities.
A one-hour consultation with me to go over your workshop feedback, come up with a plan for revision and/or publication, or anything else you’d like to discuss regarding your writing.
Open enrollment option in future workshops.
When
The workshop meets on Fridays from April 12 through May 31 via Zoom. You can apply for one of two sessions:
Group A: 12pm - 2pm EST
Group B: 6pm - 8pm EST
Cost
The cost is "pay what you think the experience is worth," with a recommended amount of $300. To be as inclusive as possible, I don't want money to be a deterrent for anyone interested in participating.
Payment can be made before, during, or after the workshop, via PayPal or Venmo.
How to apply
Eligibility
Anyone over the age of 18 who considers themselves a participant of fandom and who is familiar with fanfiction may apply. A stable internet connection is also required. Submissions must be written in English.
Application requirements
To apply, you will need:
A brief cover letter discussing your fan history and goals as a (fan)writer (more specific instructions on submittable).
Maximum 1,000 words of your writing, either original work or fanfiction. This may be previously published/posted.
You can apply via submittable. Applications close March 8. There is no fee for applying.
also, for those who have tumblr, i would very much appreciate a reblog of the announcement to help reach a wider audience! (i didn't bother with twitter this round for incompetent-billionaire-shaped reasons.)
OFIC Mag Issue #8 launches March 31st; Issue #10 submissions open until June 30th
subscribe to our Patreon to guarantee your physical copy of Issue #8! we’ll be sending it to print here soon.
if you have some original work you’d like us to read, be sure to submit to Issue #10, which will be released on September 30th.
changes in 2024
OFIC and the FAW have both reached a steady workflow, so i felt it was time for me to make some improvements.
OFIC Mag
going forward, we’ll be publishing 3 issues a year instead of 4. we’ve removed the January 1 issue so that we’re not working over the holidays.
issue release dates are now March 31, June 30, and September 30 (one day earlier than the current publishing schedule) to better accommodate Patreon’s insufferable quirks.
we’re replacing the summer issue with a tête-bêche of the 2 winning Press Prize novellas.
magazine submissions (up to 15k words) will be open year-round. the cutoff date for the fall issue is June 30th; spring issue is December 31st.
novella submissions for next year’s tête-bêche will reopen later this year.
Fanauthor Workshop
my main goal is to keep the community active between sessions. now we have weekly accountability sessions over zoom, write-ins and sprints, movie nights, and a short story club.
i’ll be running an asynchronous summer session for people who want to participate in the workshop but can’t make the spring and fall meeting times. applications will open later this month.
i have a few other ideas in the works as well that i’m hoping to roll out throughout the year.
me
i’m blonde now! i mean i was always blonde but now i’m really blonde. i went platinum back in 2016 and always wanted to go back to it, but no stylist seemed to believe me when i told them i wanted my hair to be as bright as the sun. this time i said, simply, “BARBIE,” and that worked. it’s nice to finally recognize myself in the mirror again.
better know a coaching service
in this series, i’ll be talking a bit about the services i offer as a developmental editor and writing coach, and offering limited time special pricing for newsletter subscribers.
synopsis review
here are some situations that come up pretty frequently:
“i want feedback on a manuscript, but it’s really, really long,” and
“i want feedback on my outline before i start writing,” and there’s also
“i have an idea for a novel but i can’t make myself get started on it.”
a synopsis review addresses all three of these situations. it involves writing a detailed (but casual) summary of a story. i then read that summary, offer some marginal notes, and we’ll meet over zoom for an hour to discuss. generally i come in with questions over criticisms, with the goal of working toward honing what you want the story to be and how you might best get there.
synopsis reviews tend to be pretty popular because it’s a way for me to give developmental feedback without reading a whole book. by “developmental” i mean bigger than big picture—not just tightening up plot (although there is that), but addressing foundational “what even is this?” sorts of questions, which is great for either early drafting or approaching a major revision. not to mention that sitting down and forcing yourself to articulate your story in summary is a great motivator in itself.
my favorite synopses are ones written in the voice of the author, with the formality of a tumblr shitpost. they can be up to 5k in length and have interjections like, “i don’t know what happens here,” as well as questions, outright explanations of character motivations, and open discussions of intentions. no need to allude or infer. the more i understand your interest in writing your story, the more cohesive my feedback will be.
i’ll be offering synopsis reviews for $75 through the end of May. if you’re interested, you can book on my Calendly. or if you have questions, you can email me at ekweeks@gmail.com or message me on Discord @bettsfic.
writing advice roundup
i’ve answered a lot of writing asks since the last time i did a roundup, so here are some highlights.
to start, there are as many jobs for english majors as there are for anyone else. except maybe, idk, engineering or nursing or something. and if engineering or nursing are things you enjoy *almost* as much as english, then that might be a good option. but an english degree will qualify you for any basic office job and also jobs in publishing, copywriting, copyediting, media and communications, and a whooole lot of other things. publishing is a nightmare, yes, but not more so than most other industries. and with the right amount of hustle, freelance copywriting can be an extremely lucrative profession. if you’re willing to move to LA or NYC, there will be many, many opportunities available to you. they might not be good opportunities, and you might not succeed all the time, but you’ll make do. personally i think it’s better to spend 4 years (and a lot of money) learning something intrinsically valuable to you and risk a more unstable job market than it is to slog through 4 years in a subject you’re less passionate about but that has a clearer career trajectory.
my advice is to write the thing anyway. because the truth is that sometimes our first draft has to be the porn draft, and we can’t make ourselves write anything that’s not at least a little horny. when you’re drafting, you always have to prioritize what’s most interesting to you and what will keep you invested in the story. in the case of those of us who enjoy romantic plots, we have to build our diorama in a shoebox and play with one doll in each hand before we can create a whole-ass dollhouse full of other dolls.
i think a common metaphor for planning is to develop quest markers like in a game. you come up with a plot point and draft your way toward it, even if you don’t know how you’re going to get there.
using the same metaphor, pantsing is the opposite: create save points.
what differentiates a narrative from a lyric is a cause and effect sequence. although it doesn’t have to, generally a narrative begins with an inciting incident that creates a conflict, escalates in tension to a culminating moment and then resolves into a denouement.
it’s not your job to change your product but to find your market. and if it’s niche, you can’t do anything about that except hope you find some freak who vibes with you and wants to sell your book. there may be 99 people who say no but all you need is 1 person to say yes. you can’t think about odds, because the odds are against you. and if they’re not, you’re probably not doing your best work. great art gets shown to the world through the audience of one weirdo with an open mind and a platform.
my definition of a conflict is “establishing a status quo, and something happens to interrupt the status quo.” the third thing/initial escalation is, “something happens to complicate the interruption of the status quo.”
i love process of elimination. you write down “stuff that has to happen” and you make a bullet point list of stuff that has to happen. it doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) in order. if you’re writing a romance, a first kiss probably has to happen. perhaps a happily ever after also has to happen. if you’re writing smut, probably somebody orgasms. even with obvious or small things, you have to do the work of writing it down as a bullet point in order to see what’s not yet there.
you have to start small. you have to. you can’t wake up one day and decide you’re going to lift 200lbs above your head and then get mad at yourself for getting literally crushed beneath the weight of your expectations. you look at the tiny dumbbells and think, i’m too strong for those. but you’re not strong enough for what you want to lift, so you have to start with the lightest thing you can carry. and then you lift the lightest thing a million times.
to render the details of private knowledge, you have to seek out private knowledge, which means reading a lot of first-hand accounts, either fictional or non, and coming up with a way to remember or index what could be relevant information. it’s a lot of work. like, a lot of work. but if you’re planning on writing more than one story in victorian england, then it’s worth it to put the time in. once you know it, you know it, and you probably won’t forget it. you’ll be able to slip your characters into victorian england nearly as easily as you slip them into contemporary life.
we write to think. so that first draft is you just thinking all your thoughts and getting them down. think of it as a jigsaw puzzle. first you’ve got to take all the pieces out of the box and turn them face-up. you can’t be expected to reach in and pull out the bottom left corner piece, and the one that goes next to that, and so on. you have to be able to see all the pieces in front of you, and only then can you start putting it together.
if your plot bunny is about your blorbo, and their conflict involves screen time with a family of OCs, your reader doesn’t have to be invested in them. your narrator has to be invested in them. what matters to the narrator will matter to the reader. the difficulty lies in defining the suspension of disbelief. fanfiction i think has the highest possible suspension of disbelief, but in one place that suspension lowers is with OCs, because they can come across as tonally incongruent to the canon. your reader is entering the fic with the entirety of canon context in mind. but OCs have no context. it can sometimes feel like space jam or who framed roger rabbit—animated characters walking around in a live action story. so you have to build the context at least for yourself.
every thanksgiving, my family just appreciated that i had baked a pie. they didn’t care how i’d baked it or what ingredients i used. yes, the longer and more difficult process created a product i was more proud of than the shorter, easier process. but you can’t taste pride.
when you’re in a place where you’re constantly made aware of your weaknesses and focus only on how to strengthen them, your awareness of your strengths (and the strengths themselves) atrophy. i think all the time about how in a different environment, at 18 it would have been so evident to me that i wanted to be a teacher. and i would have gone to college for teaching and then gotten a job teaching elementary school english or maybe even kindergarten. like if just one person said, “hey you’ve got real Bob Ross vibes” maybe my life would be completely different. but no, i had it in my head that obviously everyone wanted to become an elementary school teacher, so i couldn’t be one, i had to do something no one wants to do, and i became a banker.
i don’t think you get over it, really. i think it’s a need that gets filled eventually. i like to think of it as a well. some people come to writing with a completely empty well, and that’s part of the reason they write. they want to make something from themselves and put it into the world so it can be loved and they can be loved. and when that thing is valued and appreciated, when it’s welcomed into the world and finds a place to belong, the well fills up just a little.
you can’t really control what your reader sees in their mind’s eye. you can only control what details they attend to (and why they attend to them). and when you think of it like that, what you want your reader to pay attention to, then relevance becomes easier to discern. if the teal formica table has a crack in the corner, and that crack has a story of how it came to be that would lend context or insight into a character, then by all means, the teal formica table becomes relevant. but otherwise, it goes.
i think good writers (and i use that term loosely, because we all determine good writing based on our personal tastes and the art/media we’ve encountered in our lives thus far) draft these kinds of sentences [see post] for the sake of knowing where their characters are in time and space but eventually cut them, even if they love the image of the C-ration fruit cocktail can. but if you love the C-ration fruit cocktail can, you can lend it meaning. you can honor it by making it matter to the narrator. here it’s just kind of thrown in along with the other details, like a valuable antique thrown into a pile of junk. that antique deserves to sit on a shelf and be admired.
all creative pursuits are a choice you have to make for yourself when you’re ready to, when you’ve decided your own barrier for entry into that identity. because there is no formal structure, no one else gets to define that identity for you. and so when people say, “if you write you’re a writer,” what they’re really saying is that the only true measurable difference between someone who is a writer and someone who isn’t is the act of writing itself.
the good news is that in writing fictional characters, instead of focusing on feelings, you can focus on the evidence of those feelings: attitudes and behaviors. instead of describing a feeling, consider how it would distort or define the opinions of your character (attitude) or what it would cause your character to do (behavior). consider also what is expected and what is unexpected, and what happens when you do the unexpected thing.
here are the two main lies i tell myself:
“this is the best thing i’ve ever written,” and
“i’m almost done.”
being a little delusional is a huge benefit as a writer. if you’re too honest with yourself nothing can get done. but i’ve always had a natural talent for convincing myself of things that aren’t true and although that’s gotten me in a lot of trouble in all other aspects of my life, in writing it keeps me just far enough away from reality that i can finish things.
the process is something like this:
vague story idea!
will probably be very small, the shortest story i have ever written in fact
begin writing
feels good, feels organic
no no that’s not right, bad vibes
start over
ohhh i see what i’m trying to do
outline the tiniest, easiest outline i have ever made. five bullet points. this happens, and then this and this, and the story ends. EASY
will finish by tomorrow, probably
write write write
will finish by tomorrow, probably
write write write
definitely tomorrow, almost done
check word count. 25k. uh oh
doesn’t matter, almost done. have *checks* four out of five bullet points to go
write write write
five point bullet outline no longer effective
re-outline. five points turns into five pages. uh oh
check word count. 60k. big yikes
but! almost done! will finish tomorrow, probably
write write write
get stuck? how? but the outline…
the outline is ineffective. re-outline.
check word count. 100k. :(
almost done :)
a plot knot arises. spend six hours staring at a wall to undo the plot knot
plot knot is more insidious than expected. open new document. start over
*now* i’m almost done
rewrite, restructure, reorganize
check word count. 20k. :(
write write write
check word count. 200k. :((
weeks-long fugue state during which i am god
awaken to filthy apartment. i have not eaten a vegetable in many days. i have not seen the sun.
eat a broccoli
go outside
am i living? am i truly living? is this all life is? am i loved? am i worth loving?
return to safety of fictional world to avoid existential despair
write write write
will finish by tomorrow, probably
for the stuff i skipped, check out my profoundly unwieldy writing advice tag. i hope to god i get these posts into some manner of order so they can actually be navigated and found, and i won’t get so many repeats of questions i’ve answered before. i don’t mind getting repeat questions, but i very much mind not being able to find where i’ve answered them so i can just link to the other post and expand on it rather than rewriting it.
anyway, please wish me luck in resuming a functional existence where i’m not spending hours a day thinking about complicated multiclass builds for a game i will never be good at. if i’m successful, i’ll talk to you again in a month! if i’m not, you can probably find me in a foam-mouthed delirium posting anonymous prompt fills in the BG3 kinkmeme.