It's hard and annoying to admit, but I am in a writing slump. I think it's the accumulation of things. No job, a terrible combined 4 months in Taiwan (honestly, stop asking me how my trip was!), a stressful graduate school apps cycle. Living with my mom the entire year has been suffocating, but what other option is there? There's also the state of fandom/treatment of ficdom and my existing bad habit of jumping WIPs (I had over 60 for dojae two years ago, and most of them were from 2020-2021).
Fandom/ficdom has been kind of a weird place. Most people prefer to not make new friends if they have a fixed set of people to talk to. I feel like this is less of a problem (to me) since I also yell in the same five people's DMs all the time because these are people I know better, and they understand what I like. The real problem is how other people react to ficdom. Everyone seems to be going on a puritanical outrage these days, and though NCT is untouched for the most part, people are still weird about RPF in writers' mentions and inboxes. So in general, I think that part is demotivating, even if I'm barely posting on AO3. There's also the quarterly report of a new evil scraping AO3 fics for an AI dataset. I've permanently locked all my fics because most scrapers do not bother logging in to grab the data.
While the idea of writing is appealing to me, I haven't been able to produce anything in ages. I get an idea, but as soon as I open that document, the words don't come out. I think one of the solutions is for me to read fic to spark joy, but it hasn't exactly worked. I read a fic, I loved it, it was good. I thought of a rarepair, went looking for a fic, got annoyed that I couldn't find what I was looking for, decided that I would take this into my own hands, opened a document, and … nothing.
The other solution is to read books more, which also isn't happening. I have two YA books borrowed from the library, mainly because I liked Marie Lu in middle school AND it might be good (or terrible) reference material for one of my many dojae longfics. Why am I not reading it? I'm in the middle of reading At Her Mercy, which is fucking long and stressful to read. The combination of 1.2 million words and political intrigue is such a headache, and I have not been in the mood to read anything. I won't entertain the idea of reading just to pass time, only to forget everything a few days later. I've got about 65 chapters left to the main story, which is only a lot because I'm taking notes every chapter. I also am not trying to read something else because I know it'll take me forever to come back to the book if I do.
I also have a hard time settling on what to write. The dojae PWP? I'm struggling on the actual porn section. The jaemrenyang? My brain is blanking on the SOL portion somehow. The jaemyang exes to lovers? Too new and fresh of an idea, and I only have two scenes I want to write at the moment. My supposed magnum opus? I did some math for it. There are 32 parts, each consisting of the same time frame. I have outlined 20% of part 1 in detail, which has 10 scenes. Whoa. Each scene is around 500 words. If you take the 500 words and multiply all that, you get 800k words. Girl what the fuck? So … I needed to take a break from that, despite the fact that I don't really see myself hitting over 200k with this one. That being said, I've never been good at estimating word count. I thought the PWP I'm writing would be around 3k, only for it to blow up to 7k, and I'm still not done. On the other hand, I thought my 00FF fic would be 50k, but it was only 35k.
The very last thing is my mindset with respect to fic writing. It's something I find fun. I treat it as something that makes me happy, until I start overthinking my craft. Did I give meaning to this fic? What is the purpose of writing this? Is it introspective in any sense? Sometimes the answer is "no," which isn't really a problem, but I tell myself that I'm not doing enough. Even when I step back to tell myself that I don't have to be so harsh on myself, I end up thinking, "But I don't want to end up encouraging consumerism and the idea that fic is consumed rather than something you should engage with." And if I write fic that can only be consumed, am I even doing what I want? Am I defeating the purpose of creating art? In any case, this is something I seesaw back and forth on, so I'll have to somehow stop my overthinking from clashing with my ability to create.
What I AM doing is ramble everywhere. Here, in my drafts, in DMs. I have a few posts I'm behind on (supposed EOY stuff and the ningrina fic reflection). I'll probably talk about my time in Taiwan and attach some restaurant rankings. There's a piece on MTL, and my remaining are all related to NCT. Mostly up to my mood and what I feel like, except for a post dedicated to my 10th year with SMROOKIES/NCT.
Enough yapping! I've hit almost 1k words just whining about my writing. Hopefully I become a little more productive in the coming days now that I've let it out.