Lumifern Writes

Preamble

There are a couple things I want to try to post every week on the blog, one of them being a sort of casual “weekly log”—i.e. what I worked on this week, what I struggled with specifically, how this informs what I do next week, and anything else of note about my writing process.

(I also want to do a “what’s next” post every week, too, but as it’s already Thursday, I’ll save that one for later.)

On to the Logging!

Most of the week has been dedicated to getting back into the swing of things. The one-two combo of Post-longfic Blues and a flare-up has meant that writing this month has been a lot slower than usual. I’ve taken a lot of days off, which is totally okay! I also had a lot of family obligations. That’s May for you.

I log my daily wordcount using a spreadsheet (I’ll make a post on that) and typically write using GDocs. This week I wanted to give 4TheWords another try, just to shake things up. I like it, but it doesn’t totally jive with my usual workflow.

Regardless, I was able to ramp up the wordcount the last few days because I was fighting monsters in 4TW. All of that wordcount went to the FMA ABO fic I’m writing!

This fic, tentatively titled “Abaxial,” is challenging for me. It’s a lot more introspective, and thus I’m letting Ed and Roy both be more poetical ‘n’ such than I usual would (at least for Ed). It’s emotionally heavy. There’s a lot of hurt/comfort going on there, which means it’s harder to get the words out. Scenes where “stuff happens” are sometimes way easier to write for me, even if logistics are complex.

Maybe “easier” isn’t quite the right word. I find emotional scenes come forth easily, but they are more draining, more exhausting. Sometimes that translates to less words in a day than an action sequence or dialogue-heavy scene would produce. The emotions themselves can pour right out of me. It’s my brain and body that can’t always keep up.

I also originally set out to write the ABO fic in a series of shorter one-shots. So far that’s not happening, but it’s not longfic-ing either. TBD on that, I guess.

Right! I should mention the other challenging part of Abaxial is the ABO itself. I have never written Omegaverse before and am overall pretty new to the subgenre. Although Abaxial will be a romance fic/series, I want to explore more of the platonic/familial aspects of pack life. So I’m doing some neat worldbuilding for it. For example, right now Team Mustang (Pack Mustang, also, in this case) is co-nesting with Ed and Al as their newest (sorta) members. Nesting is not a mating-exclusive ritual.

So I’m having fun! And trucking along. And I should probably just post some of it to get it out of my system. With my last big project I waited to start posting until I had a big runway of pre-written stuff and then posted on a schedule (hard for the last 4-5 chapters, by the way), but I might wing it this time.

Happy writing, friends!