sarcasticsciencefictionwriter asked:

For the Writing-WIP ask game, 23 and 37, if you don’t mind? 😊

23) Do you make your own wip covers?

Yup. It’s actually an ambition of mine to get good enough at drawing to be able to make all my book covers properly. Not there yet and I might never be but it’s a dream. Anyway for original novels I just do quick temp covers with a vaguely related royalty free stock image + text, nothing fancy. For fandom it depends I have done photo manips, I have done drawings, and for Sanctuary I did quite a few gifsets. I generally like to provide some kind of banner image to liven up the post whatever it is 🙂

37) Name a series you’ve abandoned writing

Ok I’m going to take the word ‘series’ loosely here. For the most part I am relatively good at finishing what I have started posting. Dredging my memory I think I have only abandoned 4 fanfics in my /cough 20+ years /cough. The first I was about 12 and it’s a very long story to explain. The second I was 19, it was a self-indulgent crossover and I wrote part 1 (it ended on a cliffhanger), but then I could not work out how to keep it going with the crossover element. It just failed the logic test of why everyone would still be included and so I posted all of my notes/thoughts as an epilogue (this was on ff.net) and gave up.

Where I start to feel guilty is with the more recent ones. I wrote for Once Upon a Time for a year or so and I really wanted people to like me, I wanted to feel included. So I jumped on every prompt going. My desperation could probably have been seen from space 🙄. Anyway I wrote two chapters of a rare… crossover pair (hard to explain anyelle quickly but basically that) and then I had so many WIPs in those days that it just constantly fell to the bottom of the pile and when I ran out of steam and stopped, it’s what was left undone. The other one I feel even more guilty about as I actually won a fandom award for it. That was called Painting Layers of Love, and the problem with that is I poured far too much of my own anxiety into one of the characters, and then obviously I wanted the character to be happy which meant dealing with their issues. Problem is I don’t know how to “fix it” as I can’t fix myself. So I stalled as I couldn’t see a way out and eventually just officially abandoned it /guilt /guilt.

For original novels… I struggle with the ‘abandoned’ part because I might go back to it, or I will cannibalise it and use parts elsewhere. I mean sure technically there is a series. I actually indie published Book One. I thought I had been so sensible as I had waited until I had drafted Book Two but I was behind and it was only a first draft. I should have had it fully ready, and if I had waited I would have known, but I had booked promotions and so couldn’t delay. Anyway when I went to revise Book Two it just fell apart. I tried redrafting it from scratch but I could just not make it work. Fortunately nobody had been all that interested and so I took Book One down quietly and decided to chalk it up to experience. I later indie published the first two novels in another series and had to also take them down (this time due to a mental breakdown) buuut that’s another story. And that series really isn’t abandoned as I do intend to fix it up and republish eventually. But yes I suppose the time travel crime series is abandoned. I get nostalgic for it but I don’t know that I will pick it up again. Never say never of course. But my original ideas are many (I could write solidly for a decade and not be done) so it’s not like I need to go back to it.

Thanks for the ask ❤️