For The Wip Challenge: I Wish I Could Just Ask For Every Wip In Your Post But I Guess It Will Be Too

For the wip challenge: I wish I could just ask for every wip in your post but I guess it will be too long 🙈 so I start with these two lovelies 😌

Korean Myths & Destination Seoul

HELLOOOO <3 thank you @orphicpoieses for the ask!

ahhh you can ask anything you want! just letting you know that 12:01 has already been answered in my previous posts hehe.

ooh, destination seoul. the project that has my heart and also the project that drives me insane. basically, it's: a fake dating ya romance set in Seoul, Korea where a teen tries to escape the blind dates her chaotic family sets her up on for her aunt's wedding. mostly it touches upon going back to your roots and really accepting it, as i've seen (and felt personally) more of a trend where as people are pulled between two cultures, they struggle to choose both, and think that they can only choose one. I just hope it represents the idea that it's not too late to accept your culture, and you don't need to live in a place to accept your family's origins!

anyways. onto the korean myths because this is still in the work and an interesting one. the premise is still in the works, but it's based on the tale of the abandoned princess in one of the folklore there, and possibly with a mix of beauty and the beast.

an abandoned princess sets out to find the cure of a disease plaguing the kingdom while it is on the brink of rebellion in order to prove her family's worth and save her father from treason. the cure: a dragon's pearl, except the owner of the pearl - the exiled prince - is cursed to turn into an imoogi, a beast of war and destruction. one desperate to save her family, and the other desperate to prove his worth, they set off to the depths of hell to truly find the plague's origins, and who caused it.

and that's kind of what i have for now? i'm still plotting act 1, but there's definitely all kinds of mythical creatures (gumiho, dragons, etc.) and betrayals and themes of worth and found family woven in!

Art by 宝林本迟

Olontsev Andrey

Writing and Anxiety

There’s this psychologist called Ian McGregor who has done cool research on creativity and anxiety. Here’s the gist of what he says:

When you believe you’re doing well, working feels great. When you believe it’s not going well, you get anxious, which makes your mind search for alternatives to whatever you’re doing. This is mostly a feature, not a bug: for instance, you might recognize some element of your story isn’t working, and the anxiety that sparks makes you look for a different approach. Anxiety in small doses is productive: it makes you want to switch gears, and that gear-switching helps us solve problems, forces us to get creative.

The anxiety can get intense enough that you switch gears all the way over to “not writing.” Which relieves the anxiety, albeit without solving the problem that caused it. But even that response can be productive. Sometimes your mind gets stuck in a narrow band of possible solutions to a problem, and doing something else for a while lifts your mind out of the groove it’s been wearing and exposes it to new stimuli. This ensures that when you return to the problem, your mind won’t just recycle the same ideas.

After a point, though, as we know, this useful anxiety can turn toxic. Some people’s gets so overwhelming that they stop writing entirely and don’t ever want to start again. And that’s perfectly reasonable, given their experiences: they remember how awful writing felt and have no reason to believe it will feel any different the next time.

These kinds of anxiety seem qualitatively different to me. Productive anxiety is about the problem: you detect it and you want to fix it. The toxic kind is about you, about your inherent capabilities and adequacy to the task. If you believe you have failed every time you’ve written, the “problem” must be you, right? That’s what makes it so unbearable: the sense that the problem can’t be solved.

If you get this kind of anxiety, your reasons for it are deep. They go way back, and I can’t tell you how to untangle them. I can only help you understand what’s happening when you get that awful, hollow “I’ll never be able to write” feeling. Everyone gets anxious when they do creative work, but your mind attributes the cause to you, not to the difficulty of the work. This spikes your anxiety and erodes your faith in yourself. You can’t see what resources you have inside you. You can’t trust time and the creative process, because your anxiety tells you you’ve lost the game before you’ve begun.

I get this. And I know you can’t fix it just by “giving it time” and “persevering” and “believing in yourself.” This kind of anxiety affects your ability to think, to be flexible and exploratory. It shuts down your mind - literally. And that’s not your fault, nor is it permanent. You aren’t incapable, you’re weighed down by very heavy mental chains. If people just tell you to throw them off and you can’t, you lose even more faith in yourself. But there are things you can do.

The drafting techniques I recommend don’t focus on “pushing through” the anxiety or making you feel more positively about yourself. That might be too big of an ask right now. The purpose of these approaches is to help you relax, to quiet down your conscious mind and give your anxiety a ball to chase so your creativity can work in peace. Freewriting accomplishes this. Writing so fast you can’t premeditate what you’re writing helps with this. So does writing in unfamiliar ways - out of order, in fragments, in a chatty conversational voice, dictating into your phone, whatever. There are lots of strategies you can try.

This is all good news. It means you don’t have to wait until you feel awesome and confident. You just need ways of throwing a steak to the guard dog of your anxiety - the bad kind of anxiety - so the rest of your mind can come out and play, which is how problems truly get solved.

i have spent two days thinking and rethinking and rewriting this SCENE and how it can entwine with the story and i am driving myself INSANE.

Art by Richard Lay