Ingrid Sundberg's Colour Dictionary - Writing Help

Day 47 (1:23) of rewriting my novel

I finished Part 3 today! Like all the others, I'm sure it's a hot mess that doesn't quite fit together, but it's a first draft and that makes me proud of it.

I've reached about ~57k words, and that's actually the most I've ever written on a single thing, which I'm also proud of.

Today was literally just filler scenes. Mind-bendingly drivelous filler scenes. Well, they weren't just incoherent babbling from me, Somehow, I have to plan out Part Four tomorrow, but I have a big drive tomorrow, too, so I may take a day away from writing. I dunno, yet. Stay tuned.

Usual suspects: @quillswriting @oldfashionedidiot

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glad to see you again! <3

Thanks! Good to be back.

Nothing bad happened to me or something else lol, college just got college-y, but I plan on being sporadically active and periodically updating because I'm a chronic yapper.

Day 9 (12 in base 7) of writing my novel again

I'm almost done with Part One (I think!) I should finish it tomorrow. There are about 10,000 words so far, and I need to write the final coronation scene with plot twist #1!! Izi is the Hero of Cognition!

Also, as soon as I finish that, I'll give it to some of my friends for "alpha" reading, since I'm ready for a first draft of something to get torn to shreds to help keep me motivated.

In the eventual future, I hope to flesh out Zispoel and Ytos as languages enough so that I can create "meme" translations of the novel itself into Zispoel and Ytos. A sort-of "meta-translation," if you will.

I had this problem too, so instead of suffering, I created a capitalistic hellscape for them to run around in and deal with that way. Early 2010s technology, so super basic phones but they have cars! And high speed rail!

writing a high fantasy sucks sometimes i wanna give my silly little guys PHONES, i wanna know what CARS they would drive

Y'know, it's weird how the Egbert house doesn't have a garage or a carport or anything. Surely a paragon of fatherly responsibility like Mr Egbert would know better than to simply leave his car exposed to the elements at all times.

Ok, so, when reconstructing natural proto-languages, those protolanguages are almost never attested. Historical Linguists are basically making educated guesses and throwing darts against a wall when making the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis, it was just that the evidence was so compelling that linguists (and, most humans) believe it. For all intents and purposes, it's a really good guess.

The issue with my conworld? Classical Zispoel and Proto-Ytosi-Itaush are still fully attested languages with exactly 2 and 1 native speakers each, all still technically living.

To make matters worse, Lozerief is kind-of a scientific genius, and Pagjom is the literal Hero of Language. Together, they could reconstruct Proto-Zispoel and see what a god-awful, horrifying shit-show it was.

The idea that my characters could derive my god-awful, good-for-nothing protolanguage is, somehow, deeply disturbing to me. I think they would realize they were in a simulation if they did that.

I'm getting REALLY angry at all "motivational" books / blogs / posts who keep saying things like "Stop watching TV / playing *World of Warcraft* and you will have a few hours a week to create a business / write a book / whatever".

Because I don't watch TV. I watched like two EPISODES of TV series last year. And probably no more than 5 movies of which some I didn't even finish.

I'm not playing video games. I wish I could but I don't have enough time.

I'm already sleep-deprived so don't even start with "Get up an hour earlier".

And I still can't gather more than a few minutes a day to work on my personal projects.

And even if I *do* find some time, sometimes I'm too tired or overwhelmed to do anything more challenging than going to sleep or scrolling my phone. And before you start with "So stop scrolling social media and you'll be able to write", just DON'T. At those times my level of focus is so low that I couldn't put two words together.

And I still WANT to do those projects. I NEED to be creative for my mental health.

So here's to those who - like me - have daily goals to write TEN words. No, NOT ten thousand or even a hundred. Just ten words. One or two sentences. If I'm lucky and can write a few hundred, that's great! But ten words are FINE. Do you know how many words I wrote yesterday? THIRTEEN. I had literally a few minutes.

I'm often writing on my phone because turning my computer on would eat up all the time I have to write. I don't have any special ritual with scented candles or special tea because all this setup takes too much of my time.

I'm writing all this because maybe you need to hear this.

Maybe you need to hear that setting tiny little goals is OKAY. You don't need to write thousands of words a day.

Maybe you need to hear that watching a movie or scrolling your phone when you're overwhelmed is OKAY. Having free time does not equal being able to do a task, especially a creative one. You can't be always on your 100% capacity.

Maybe you need to hear that there's someone out there (me) who is doing even less than you. If you add 20 words to your current WIP today, you're still ahead of me. So if you see those writers making amazing progress each day, just think there's me who's struggling to do 1% of that.

And that's OKAY.

Day 44 (1:20) of rewriting my novel

Today I didn't log many words, but that's ok.

Today I continued my journey in writing Part Three in reverse. Instead of writing the long, boring car scene, I skip to the good part-making the plan to convince Governor Bunthun to help, only to have the plan ripped away violently from underneath the New Heroes. Classic storytelling, but interesting nonetheless.

I don't know why, but the idea of post-novel canon has been living in my head rent-free. Like, I think I know how I want the rest of the novel to go:

the Coalition grows in number,

they take Ir Nouzonif only to find that President Sluwfa has run off with the remaining two Old Heroes' magics,

Izi and Tagif go and stop President Sluwfa while Hota and Lozef remain to keep the remains of Ir Nouzonif stable,

and Izi and Tagif return and restore the Old Heroes, balancing Magic and bringing Meiste back to having a physical representation when They want it (don't ask.)

The outcome of all this is a couple things:

A bunch of power-hungry warlords control most of the Old Confederacy

The situation in Odapir is particularly dire, considering the country will have been in full-blown civil war for several weeks.

But, as of right now, I'm not sold on writing a sequel.

Writing process taglist: @oldfashionedidiot

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Day 27 (36 in base 7) of re-writing my novel

I started Part Three today. Progress still in progress.

Part Three will be particularly hard to write because of how loosey-goosey it is right now, but I'm nailing the plan down. At least the first several thousand words should be planned-out, for now. This part may be very long, like 30-40,000 words.

But it starts off in a particularly dark place. Spoilers ahead, for anyone who cares.

Part Three begins with Iziser reconsidering why he ever trusted Lozerief to begin with, and why she would turn on them. He initially believes its his fault. He also jogs a memory from being back in the only place he ever called "home," and he realizes Lozerief was fighting for him on the sidelines all the while. Why, now, would she go and take his magic?

But Lozerief comes around out of necessity in the end of Part Three. Will I use Lozerief to answer every question? Definitely not, there's still one more Part! And she doesn't have all the answers, only most of them. Including some of the biggest ones that she keeps hidden away from everyone...

Day 29 (41 in base 7) of re-writing my novel

Yeah today everyone remembers that, all the way back in Part One, Lozerief offhandedly said that Izi could render the Constitution of Zeneste completely void if he said so. I find this very amusing for several reasons.

The President is (effectively) the Emperor after she removes Iziser as Emperor.

If Iziser renders the Constitution void, the President and the two houses can write a new constitution which doesn't include the Emperor as a role, or any connection to the Hero of Life.

Furthermore, they can write the role of Vice President out entirely and hold special "elections" (mass voter fraud/suppression) and oust Lozerief, the only sane politician left, while she's isolated from the other two (three) Heroes.

This is a rather Orwellian (see 1984) take on how this will turn out, but President Sluwfa has to then convince the masses that a) this is what the Hero of Life would've wanted, and b) In Iziser, the rice farmer who became Emperor, was actually an enemy of the state the whole time. As a result, policing in Ir Nouzonif (both the city and the state) increases drastically, but (as you may already know from my previous posts,) many remain sympathetic to In Iziser, anyways.