Argh, motherland!

[ultranos]

*stabs orig-fic story*

Been working on this sucker all weekend. +6K words should not have taken me this long. It's possible I've not worked on original fic in so long that I got out of practice a bit. I don't think my handle on the main character's character was really solid until the end, so I feel as if I need to go back and retool things. I'm really running into the problem of telling instead of showing, mostly because it's faster and I want to get to the action quicker. The problem is that there are some sections that I kept wanting to write in first person PoV, because it really needed the snarky-deft description. (One of these days, I will write a character who is not a snarky bastard. This day is not today.) But the whole thing is in third person, so that's a little frustrating.

Irritating thing is that the first draft is due tomorrow. What it really needs is about a week to be ignored and then me coming back to it and doing massive retooling. I'm too close to it right now. I can see the weak spots/problem areas but can't figure out how to FIX it.

Also, I really hate writing fiction in Word. If I could get away with it, I'd do it in Notepad++. The only thing stopping me from using LyX is that I don't know how to deal with the stupid headers the instructor is demanding. *grumblemutter*

Comments

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

I hate writing in Word! Even for papers! But I've been using a plain text editor to write stories in since I was about 15, so I'm really, really used to it. Really, I'm just being grumpy.

I like LyX. A lot. The GUI functions a bit like a general text editor, and then it prints out a pretty PDF. I really do love LaTeX, and LyX is just a GUI for it so you don't have to remember all the arcane incants for text manipulation.

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

I'll just use plain text or whatever (I LOVE SCRIVENER) and then copy and paste into word at the end for sharing with people or header formatting or whatever.

I still can't figure out how to get LyX to work. I think I'm trying to make it be more of a text editor than it is.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

I am so jealous that you get to use Scrivner. And yeah, I generally use plain text and then copy-paste into Word to monkeywrench. Thing is, I already did this previously, since I had to turn in the beginning before. And the versions were different.

In short: I was too clever for my own good. I hate it when I do that.

Yeah, LyX has a bit of a learning curve. I've sort of forced myself to learn it, because I've seen it do some really powerful and nice stuff. I can get it to that point right now, but sometimes I do have to go try to hack the package editor to figure out what the hell the LaTeX incant is.