Diary 2019-02-13

By Max Woerner Chase

I believe I did some more Erlang today. Memory's a little fuzzy, and I can tell I'm feeling stressed.

Recently, I've been trying to come up with some crossover AU stuff between a few fandoms that Some People love to complain about. I've come up with various Cool Things, but I'm having trouble fitting a lot of it together, and I believe one problem underlying this is a lack of theme. Interesting character designs, but when I think about it, it currently kind of just amounts to bouncing action figures off each other inside my mind. Maybe what I need in terms of writing is to figure out how to use themes in succinct writing, then gradually expand.

I'm not sure that makes sense. I guess what I'm hoping to do is to write a bunch of rough drafts of micro-fiction, and try to figure out what works in terms of developing and conveying themes. The idea of working with short stuff is to try to reduce the volume of text to produce and analyze for a single cycle of iteration. Basically, I think I should be able to expend the minimum effort required to write a story, and then apply any further effort to making it shorter.

I'll try to get started on that kind of thing tomorrow, but if it's not in me then, it's not. I think that's probably the way to deal with stress? Make an honest effort at stuff, and accept whatever the outcome is? I don't actually know.

Anyway, it's not incredibly late, but I'm still tired. Good night.