I usually like to think my posts through a bit more before I ship them off into cyberspace but my "possible future DW posts on whatever" notebooks (... Yes, plural, there are two of them) are currently occupied by incomplete texts and so I must type on here directly (*shivers*) to release the thought from my mind.

My pause from writing like a madwoman is going well. Despite an exception here and there, namely the two little ficlets I posted to femslashfete last week, things have been pretty calm. As mentioned in my August round-up post, this overall pause I'm taking is quite probably the reason why I felt capable of writing those ficlets in the first place, so the slower rhythm has been doing me good.

Yet there's one writing challenge I haven't stopped in the meantime: stocking up on the Jillian/Suzanne drabbles with which I am trying to fill up a whole table of one hundred prompts.

I can work on them at a good pace, maybe one or two per day when the muse cooperates. I've been nigh-religiously posting them once per week over on Tumblr and on AO3 for the last two years or so. Now, though, I want to finish the job -- I want to take my break from writing for WN seriously and I cannot do it as long as there are pending fills to those prompts. Sure, I could go cold turkey and just leave everything up in the air until I felt it was time to come back, but I'd much rather get to the end of the thing I set out to do and gain the satisfaction of having triumphed. Besides, it's not as much of a burden as it might sound (it has been in the past, once or twice, but not now; now I'm just having fun again). There are only three to go (!!!) as of my writing this post, meaning there will be enough weekly drabbles to post up until mid-December.

The point, though, is another entirely. I just had to mention the intense drabble writing because it's what led me to think about the subject at hand.

I've said time and again that I handwrite everything (case in point: the notebooks mentioned above). That includes drabbles. So yes, I count words one by one, manually. That's not the interesting part.

What is, what constitutes the actual heart of this post now that all the digressions are done, is how those drabbles are written: I use a different style of calligraphy for them.

This is me wondering whether any other hypothetical handwriters do anything similar!

For regular prose, unlimited in word count as it is, I usually write in cursive because the speed of the wrist running across the page is more akin to the flow of the sentences coming out of my imagination. With drabbles, I never write in cursive. It's 100% print. The text goes through an extra step of consideration before it gets written out on paper, the process staggered precisely because there is a rule to follow as far as space goes, and I need to be aware of how much of that space, how many of my words I've used up already so as to gauge what kinds of things I can write next, in what order, subtracting which classes of words, finding which shortcuts to better convey a concept in such a laser-focused manner. I always leave a little void on the left margin of the page where I take note of my numbers, there's always a moment where I recount and rearrange and strike out and add something in... That comes with the form. It's the shifting handwriting in itself that's the curiosity: letters made individually, carefully, hesitatingly at times, in very short, precise bursts as opposed to the longer, more fluid ways of writing less restrictive stories.

Is this weird? It seems rather logical to me...