A little insight into my writing process · 4:40am Jan 17th, 2014
Alternate Title: Why it's taking me so long to update The Mane Six Discover Human Music
You see, I do a lot of my writing and the majority of my plotting while away from my computer. Whenever I'm at a restaurant waiting for my food, on break with nothing to do at work, or a passenger in a car, or any other time with nothing to do, I'll take out my phone, open google drive, and start typing away. Or, if I'm in a situation where I can't use my phone, I'll be playing scenes in my head, perfecting the dialogue and such. For normal stories, this seems to work quite well.
The Mane Six Discover Human Music isn't quite a normal story, however.
The beginning of every chapter is like normal, and can easily be planned ahead of time. It's when the actual song starts that thing get difficult.
As some of you may have noticed, I do make some effort to make the mid-song dialogue time up properly with the song itself. Doing this basically requires me to have the song up on youtube in another tab while I write, and involves a lot of switching back and forth between tabs.
because this is something I can't easily do on my phone, I can't really write these parts of the chapter while away from the computer. And because I can't accurately play the song in my head while simultaneously playing out the accompanying scene as well, I can't really plan out anything ahead of time, either. So this means that 100% of the work that goes into these parts needs to be done at my computer.
The thing is, there's a lot of distractions on my computer. All of my games are on there, along with derpibooru, the TVTropes forums, and yes, even fimfiction and other fanfics (I just finished reading The Sword Coast the other day! It's really awesome, you should all totally check it out!).
so yeah, I'm really sorry about how long The Mane Six Discover Human Music is taking. I haven't abandoned it or anything, I just keep getting distracted. I'll try to get the next part finished before the month is up. I pretty much have only the song portion left to do.
Look up the lyrics online, either print them out, memorize them or write them down. Ain't that hard.
What aspect of flipping back and forth differs from the desktop so much?
Would a folding full-sized keyboard like the Jorno (coming in April) and some kind of app to set up keyboard shortcuts along the lines of Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab help?
(I'm generally good at suggesting things when I understand the problem but I don't have much experience with smartphones. My portable computing device is an OpenPandora and it just runs an ordinary Linux desktop where I can grab the song with youtube-dl, play it in a regular media player, and have keyboard shortcuts for play/pause, rewind, fast-forward, etc.)
Are we like, clones or something?
As a point of interest, iOS or Android? And if Android, what's your preferred keyboard?
Personally, I've always preferred swype-style input for most things, but recently learned that no matter how careful I am, it's just not accurate enough for writing long passages of text
I've been trying other keyboards and have been learning one particularly weird one, but I'm curious what other people who type on mobile use.
Hope you find a method that helps you write much easier--yours is not an easy task, but from the 1500 plus comments y'know you're doing a great job.
Why not just transfer the songs onto your phone and listen to them until you memorize the lyrics?
1729144 ...I had an amusing response to this but I don't want it to be taken the wrong way...
1995236 You can PM it to me if you like to; since you mentioned in advanced I know you're not intending any real harm.
1996278 Here is it anyway: "Either that or 1500 people wanted to say just how bad it was!"
please don't think that I'm insulting anyone it's just what can to my head when I saw that... I think that the story is not bad at all.
1996436 Fair enough. You took the time to make sure you didn't insult anyone and that's what matters.
1996458 This has brightened up my day, and I needed something to cheer me up after my cat had to be put down today... thank you...
1996472 Hey, I've so totally been there. When my kitty had to be put down after fluids developed in his chest I wept like a little girl--we say that a lot but then I knew what it fdeally meant.
We all can relate to loss in some way, shape, or form...
1997474 He was still just a kitten... He was doing great then he started complaining every time we touched his neck. We sent him in for an X-ray and found out that some of his vertebrae had fused. We were going to just adjust some things so he wouldn't have to bend his neck so much to eat and drink then he started stumbling around (at this time it was about 2-3 days ago) so we took him in again and this time X-rayed his whole back not just his neck. Turns out his spine had fused not just at his neck but in other places. the next day his hind legs were essentially paralyzed... This all happened in about 3-5 days tops...
Telling this to someone that I don't even know and having them respond back is actually surprisingly helpful in coping... it helps that I wasn't the one that he "chose". My sister sometimes volunteers at the local animal shelter and Zeus (the cat) came up to her and fell asleep in her lap...
Sorry for the rambling... Almost done I promise...
To be honest... One of the reasons I finally got an account on this was because I knew that I needed something else to distract me from the coming loss...
1999280 Not at all. You invested time and emotion into that animal whom did the same for you. It's okay to feel sad. No one here will blame you for that.
1999294 I was worried more about how big that comment was getting than anything else (in terms of people reacting to me, but we won't go into THAT backstory...)
And I will miss that sweet kitty...
Rest in Peace little guy...