Writing

[elen_nare]

On the one hand, I'm trying to write an original fic in Spanish for a contest. It's organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology, so, of course, the story has to have a scientific and/or technological basis. I wrote one for this contest before, in 2006, using the Twin Paradox, and my story actually won a prize! Since then, they either haven't run it, or I haven't heard about it in time.
This year, I went with this as a basis, but it's driving me round the bend. Partly, because my brain seems determined to think it writes better in English than Spanish. Way to help, brain. Partly, I don't like certain conventions of Spanish formatting. In particular, I hate using an intial dash to mark speech, like this:

- Annoyed, don't you think this is a horrible way of marking speech? - asked Grumpy.
- Yes, I do! Especially because it's hard to distinguish when a dash is separating parts of speech - like this - and when it means the writer is adding a speech tag - sniffed Annoyed.
- By the way - said Grumpy pedantically - if this was Spanish, you should have an exclamation mark at the start.
- I don't care! Also, it makes Word attempt to format every single bloody dialougue bit as a bullet list! I hate it! - Annoyed complained.

...You get the point. Also, the fact that pronouns are gendered in Spanish is annoying me. I can't just have "the biologist", I must have "La bióloga" (f) or "El biólogo" (m). Which means I have to be careul about balancing genders on my team of scientists. I suppose that's a good thing to have to think about, but it's also hard not making it too heavy-handedly "See, there are equal numbers of male and female scientists on my team!", which isn't what the story's about.

I could go on about the dfferences between writing in Spanish and English for a while, but it's enough to merit a separate post (maybe sometime...)

There's a minimum 1200 word count. I've got a 1000 words, about 80% of which I don't like. And the deadline is Feb 18. Oh Joy.

And I have an exam on the 14th for which I've barely started revising. On Maths Analysis - differential equations, complex calculus, Fourier... Oh Greater Joy. (Yes, I can take it on the 3rd of March instead. Let me moan :P liebedance , I know you like calculus, but bear with me!)

Anyway... this was supposed to be about writing.

The second writing-related thing going on in my brain is a Swallows and Amazons plotbunny. It started out as a nice little missing moment scene from Great Northern? Then I started thinking abot the historical period (1934/5), got curious about a few things, and posted on little_details . The folk there were really helpful, and made me consider a lot of things I hadn't thought of, as well as coming up with some amazing research sources. This unortunately fed the bunny, which now wants me to write pretty much the whole lives of all the main characters in the canon. Not. Happening. Any. Time. Soon.
To appease the beast a little, I was thinking of doing one of those themed drabble challenges I've seen at times. I've found a few theme lists, but if you have any awesome ones, they're always welcome :) I will not do this until after the exam, though, I swear. Let's see how long that resolution lasts...

There's also my poor languishing nano effort, I still have half writen scenes floating around in my brain. I must get my laptop fixed, the original files are mainly on that (lucky I have an LJ  and GoogleDocs backup!).

Finally, there's a Luna Lovegood + Taylor Swift's Lucky You bunny that has being waiting remarkably patiently, so I suppose it should get written a some point.
 
I will not write fic instead of revising. I will not write fic instead of revising. I should not write fic instead of revising. I probably will write fic instead of revising...
I'm hopeless. And quite a bit bonkers. I'll stop wittering on about writing and actually do some writing instead, now there's a novel idea ;)

Comments

[liebedance.livejournal.com]

That calculus sounds difficult. More advanced than any I've taken, at any rate. Good luck!

Just speak in the plural all the time. Los biólogos hacen cosas.Or something... No scientist can work alone!

But, yes, the dashes bothered (read: confused) me when I was learning Spanish... because nobody explained it to me.

And 1K is almost at 1.2K :)

[elen_nare]

Thanks! <3

I try to do that, but it would look rather odd in dialogue, don't you think? Two or more people saying the same thing at the same time. And it annoys me in a different way - why must the default be masculine if you ahve people of both genders? I'm hard to please ;)

It would be confusing if nobody explained it! Silly people, I'm a native speaker and it still puzzled me when I was small (I did learn to read in english first, so that was part of it).

It'll get there eventually, I suppose. I'm at about 1.1k, but we've had powercuts that rather interrupted the writing. I'll try and get the first draft done tonight.

Did you decide anything about hp_canon_fest? I'm going to sign up tonight, if there's still time.

[liebedance.livejournal.com]

I think they're just at prompting, now. Claiming hasn't opened yet. So, I think I'll do it :)

[elen_nare]

Awesome! :) I'm going to post a prompt because I just thought of one, I might do more tomorrow, and I think I will claim a prompt - and immediately panic about it. Hey, it's part of the fun ;)