I have found I just have too many arcs to wrap up and too many thematic things to add in to purely “discover” it to make a satisfying ending to a series. At least so far I haven’t managed to.

I regularly take breaks from writing for a month or two. Life just happens, sometimes it can’t be helped.

That’s the one. The protagonist is in a wheelchair from some later point on, so there’s definitely not meant to be any sugarcoating.

My usual approach is to think about the ending once the draft is about 80% done, in terms of page count. That works well for me if it’s not the definite ending for the entire series.

It’s mostly because I’m a pretty extreme discovery writer. (Not that I recommend it, but it’s how I best keep myself going.) Hence I kind of tried to write a more definite ending and failed, twice, which is why there is now a third book. This time I’m forcing myself to do at least the minimum of essential planning about the overall theme and message to actually wrap it up in a manner that will hopefully be satisfying and meaningful.

For what it’s worth, the upstream issue appears to be this one: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4120 And it seems like there is some vague interest in this being solved in the medium term feature. So let’s not give up hope just yet.

It’s cool to see so many people back! Seeing you all productive is amazing.

I’ve briefly jumped between series since my post last month, and I reworked about short of two books worth of an older dormant series with really extensive changes back to front. But I’ve since set it aside again. It was a nice breather from my main fantasy series, but both series lack an ending and currently the fantasy series simply has more concrete actionable ideas on how I’ll wrap it up.

Currently I’m doing some more revision work however. The fantasy series with the disabled protagonist has quite some dark parts, and some of them are a little overbearing at times. Less so deaths and destruction, but longer ongoing illness and fights. I’m trying to make sure there’s always enough of the main plot mystery arc and more lighthearted topics going on to make it easier to swallow.

But I’ve also had some tech work on the side, so I’ve been a bit distracted by that. In any case, I’m still hoping to wrap up the fantasy series before 2025 ends, but we’ll see.

If you’re self editing it’s worth learning the use, even if you don’t use some of them. The en dash I’ve largely ignored myself, it doesn’t seem to be used much in fiction nowadays.

Cool 🎉

I honestly thought this was a real headline before seeing the source.

An inbox delete would be enough as far as the user is concerned, it wouldn’t need to be deleted on the server side. But e.g. some people send literal gore. Moderation is useful but understandably may often take a while, so until then there should be a way to get it out of sight.

So most of my actual writing is on throwaway snippets or microfiction.

That’s super fascinating to me, since I don’t really do throwaway writing. Either it’s for one of the big projects, or I don’t write at all.

For drafting I need the word count to motivate me sometimes, weeks on weeks off, it’s always been like that. For editing I don’t. I think it’s a brain chemistry thing. I use the word count motivation when I have issues making progress without it, otherwise I ignore it.

The research can be daunting for progressive topics since people can be slightly unforgiving. It feels like sometimes you get more anger for a not-fully-perfect representation than not attempting one at all. Test readers help but you can’t always find the “perfect” test reader to find all parts somebody might find problematic.

I usually write series of a 2-3 books worth of length. I have found that a single book usually barely allows me to set up the setting and characters and a minor villain, and usually the 2nd one is where things really get started. The middle book(s) are the most fun to write for me, everything is established and I can toy around with things for fun chaos, while I don’t need to think super hard about a perfectly conclusive satisfying ending yet.

Are you working on a mixture of short stories, like your post last month indicated? Or on something like a novel? What’s your long term project goal, a short story collection, a novel, or are you still figuring that out? Sorry if that’s all secret for now, I’m just curious. :-)

I’m continuing work on my dystopian/contemporary setting cozy fantasy series. I started it in 2022 and it’s a trilogy, so it’s keeping me quite busy. There are contemporary elements in it that require quite some research, and I try to have representation that’s somewhat progressive so I want to get those things right. But most of the work simply is due to the fact that I currently do most editing myself based on a bunch of test readers, letting it sit for a few weeks, working through it back to front once more, and repeat.

Recently, I decided to format a specific kind of non-verbal communication that occurs in the books differently. Such changes require my own sort of style guide decisions, and then I have to go through every single paragraph to adjust things. It’s both meditative and a bit tiring, but at the end of the day I love that sort of busywork and it’s always a good learning opportunity.

The third book draft still lacks an ending, but I’m not in a huge hurry to finish it. This year has been busy with some side job things, and I usually prefer to take my time and get it right rather than rush. Since I have multiple books to work on, I also like to jump to whatever motivates me the most, so no time is really lost even if I don’t work on the final ending at any given point in time.

I used to track word count to motivate me, but it’s always an on- and off thing. Currently I simply work based on enjoying sitting down and getting lost in the pages. But perhaps to push for the final ending I might start tracking words again for a short while. It can help me with drafting, the editing part I usually manage without much of a competitive pressure but for drafting I need it sometimes to keep going.

(If anybody’s curious, I also switch between editing and drafting on often a weekly or even daily basis. It can be both risky and rewarding, kind of depends on whether that causes you to never get anything done or whether it keeps work fresh and interesting for you. I’ve been busy with this for years so I usually welcome any change from the usual boring flow, so I have found that it helps me more than it hurts.)

There’s the “Fetch Community” button that’s meant to work around this I think. But it seems to be broken.

So there have been rumors of a premium one that are more substantiated? Is there any known timeline?

It seems like the SSD slot was cut for cost reasons. That means if there will ever a Pi 500 version with SSD support it would naturally cost more. I’m okay with paying that extra cost, I’m simply curious if there has been any news.

That worked, thank you!!

For what it’s worth, I mainly thought of putting that rule since it seems more relevant for larger writing communities, and might be slightly harder to enforce later if it hasn’t been really been a thing earlier. But perhaps I was thinking too far ahead. I imagine at this community size it’s really not an issue.

Sounds like a great idea! There could be a monthly or quarterly post to encourage people to link (or quote, if not too long) the various things they want feedback on in the response comments.

I did in a previous writing community run into the issue that people would, when somebody discussed general writing approaches, point back to their own previous feedback posts and find flaws in the posts to try to “prove” to them their more general thoughts on writing approaches was wrong. Which in my opinion scares people away from daring to post their work, when it later comes back at them in a more general discussion.

Therefore, I would only request people stick with “3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts” which I suggested as a rule for that reason.