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[mare]

Just thought i'd start a thread for anyone who has ideas for a story and wants to run them by people on the board or are in the middle of a story and need support, inspiration or just to vent.

I have no ideas or anything to contribute here at the moment so i'm stepping away...slowly just for dramatic effect. Or is it affect? I always get those two confused! lmao 

[RokofAges75]

Effect is right.    Effect is the noun, like a special effect (or dramatic effect.)  Anything that has "an effect" on you.  Affect is a verb, like something "affects" you.

Good idea for a thread!  I'm not big on posting my ideas before I write them cause I don't wanna ruin the story, but I will say that I got a new story idea on Sunday that I couldn't get out of my head, started writing it on Monday, and have been happily working away at it ever since.

I'm on Chapter 4 already, but I'm unsure about putting it up anywhere because:
1) I JUST started Guilty Roads, and I have two collabs and another story of my own in the works too (not to mention all the stuff I have on hiatus), so I don't wanna spread myself too thin and not be able to keep everything updated.
2) The idea, even though I like it, seems so similar to another story I've already written, that I'm thinking people are going to read far enough to figure out what it's about and go, "Really?  Again?"

So for now I'm just writing it for my own entertainment, to get it out of my system and see how far I can go on it before my inspiration runs dry.  We'll see!

[Rose]

Like Julie, I got inspired again recently. But I have the same problem. Two collabs, a new story going strong. I do have the problem of spreading myself thin. I vowed not to do it anymore. Which has been working. I've been steady with Undead/RMTW chapters with no true delay problems. I even have a new RMTW chapter started.

Now I haven't let myself start it yet, but I keep getting ideas for it that I end up sticking into my "outline" (if we can call it that LOL...more like word doc full of random ideas for one new story). I feel like the moment I let myself start writing it I won't be able to help myself LOL.

[Purpura Lipstick]

I've had a couple of story ideas lately but the next day when I think about writing, I get disappointed in my ideas.  I don't know what's going on but my muse better get out of hiding!!!

[RokofAges75]

That happens to me sometimes too, Lore.  My muse has been really ADD this summer about getting a new idea or suddenly getting really inspired for an old idea I've had sitting around forever, and I'll start writing something or go crazy planning for it and then lose inspiration on it two days later.  I don't know what to tell you... maybe you just haven't latched onto the right idea yet, or maybe you just need to really focus and try to iron out whatever kinks in the idea that are disappointing you.  I hope you can get your muse to come out and play!

[RokofAges75]

Now I haven't let myself start it yet, but I keep getting ideas for it that I end up sticking into my "outline" (if we can call it that LOL...more like word doc full of random ideas for one new story). I feel like the moment I let myself start writing it I won't be able to help myself LOL.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate and say I think you should just go for it!  Write what's in your head!  You don't have to post it, and you don't have to abandon RMTW and Undead (correction: I won't ALLOW you to abandon that one - either of them, really LOL), but at least get it out there and see where it takes you.

I never liked having more than two stories in the works at once, my main one and my back-up.  But then I got to the point where my main one was Broken and then BMS, and they took me so long to write that I put all these other ideas on the back burner to write after I finished BMS.  But then when I did, I'd pretty much lost my inspiration on all of them.  Guilty Roads is really the only one I've had any success with actually writing.  There are others I've started and haven't gotten anywhere with, even though I still like the ideas.  You might as well write while the idea's hot, knowing that the day will come when your muse wants to switch back to one of your other babies LOL, and then you can put it aside and save it for later.

[Pengi]

I've found too that putting a story on a back burner that you actually wanna write really bad makes the stuff you are writing come out kind of crappy cos you're forcing yourself away from what you're actually inspired to be doing. Sometimes just tossing a few chapters into it will end the urge, then when you put it on a back burner it's not driving you crazy with ideas and desire, you write your main stuff better, and you have more than just a couple ideas in a word document to return to the other story with that jogs your memory and your desire to finish the story. That's basically what my goal was when I did the first few chapters of STDFB3 - I didn't want to lose the voice of Nick in the series between stories, but I really wanted to work on HTSAL first. Of course, as you know, I abandoned HTSAL and got obsessive over getting the story to work right and poofed, but that was issues with HTSAL not with STDFB3, and I was looking over the material I have for STDFB3 and it got me excited again to pick it up. If I hadn't written what I have in that story, I never would've been able to pick that series back up again, I would've lost Nick's "voice" for it.

[RokofAges75]

I agree; sometimes it's nice to have a story at least started, cause if you write the beginning while the creative juices are flowing and it's really good, that makes it easier to go back to and pick up again later.

[mare]

I love that all of you are getting so many ideas this summer! I think seeing you guys jump back into is one of the things that inspired me to write again.

I say to all of you, if you have the idea in your head and have worked out at least a few chapters,  you should just go ahead and start posting it! You might as well. Julie, 4 chapters is a lot, but I know what you mean too. It sucks when you have that much going on because eventually something is going to end up on the back burner but your faithful readers will be happy to see you updated at least one story a week if nothing else. That's what I noticed when I was going strong before I tanked out! lol

At one point I think I had 3 stories going on at once, but after awhile I found myself working on one a week and most people were happy with that. You might lose readers who are only following one of the stories, but if the story is good enough they'll come back when you update!

I'm glad my muse is back. For a long time I was convinced she had hitched a ride to Vegas to become a stripper or something.

[RokofAges75]

^ I'm glad your muse is back, too!  And I agree, I think everyone who's jumping back into it and everyone supporting each other is a huge inspiration!

I never really stopped writing, but I also hadn't really had a novel of my own going strong since I finished BMS - I wrote a few short stories, but other than that it was pretty much the two collaborations .  And as much as I love writing for those, there's something different about having a story that's all yours that you can work on whenever you feel like it, without either waiting for it to be your turn or feeling obligated to get a part written because it is your turn.  So I've really enjoyed working on GR and this new story I started this summer.

My plan is to get through Chapter 6 and see how it's going then, cause that's kind of crucial point in the beginning of the story.  If it's still working out, I'm sure I'll post it.  I finished Chapter 4 today, so I'm starting on 5 now.

[Carter-Orange]

I'm glad you've all got the writing bug

I've had a few ideas in my head for stories, but at the moment I've just put a few ideas down in a word doc and will have a look when I've finished the story I'm currently writing.  I've not been able to write a thing for a couple of weeks because my laptop died and took all my work along with it!  But I've bought a new laptop now and have managed to recover my stuff from the old crappy one, so hopefully I can get some more done in the next couple of days.

[RokofAges75]

Oh no!  Sorry about your computer.  Glad you were able to recover everything, and yay for a new laptop!  I miss having a laptop, but my old one got to be so unreliable, I swore I'd never buy another one LOL.  It completely crashed on me once, and I lost EVERYTHING.  Not fun!

[Pengi]

It completely crashed on me once, and I lost EVERYTHING.  Not fun!

That happened to me once with a desktop PC just before I'd finished an original story that was somewhere between 400 and 600 pages...and the PC got a virus and it was eating the hard drive like it was a sandwich - just chomp chomp chomp... and I hadn't updated my back up of it in something like 150 pages, and I was freaking out that I was going to lose it all... So my mom sat at my computer, which I had to move into the dining room and hook up, and I sat at hers across the room, and she read the pages while I typed them on her PC to update my back up drive. It took literally all night, but my mom was a trooper and we got the whole thing done... I lost a lot of other stuff - music, pictures, files, like five or six website layouts that I loved (and a ton I didn't care about), stories, etc - but we saved that story, which would've been -by far- the biggest loss, because I'm one of those people that if I lose something, I can't rewrite it. It comes out forced the second time (which is why I can't outline, lol).

[RokofAges75]

I'm the same way; I HATE having to rewrite!  It just kills my inspiration.

I guess that's another reason to post as you write, so that if something like that were to happen, at least you've got most of your story backed up online.

[Carter-Orange]

Oh god, that sounds like an absolute nightmare!!

I'm glad I'd saved all my stuff quite recently, so I didn't lose much and that I was able to recover it.  I've bought an external hard drive now too. 

Posting as you go is a very good idea for that reason