went from one end of the spectrum of human emotion to the other w @vermillioncrown this morning in a matter of minutes

today's writing mood w @vermillioncrown :

as it's december 1st, fanowrimo recap and what's up next

right around 3/4 of my goal of 25k, but whatever, i'll fucking take it lmao (also the official nanowrimo website's word count trackers are my favorite, they make the handy graphs for you automatically.)

i got three chapters out this month which is a HUGE win, and tbh what i really care abt. and if you're looking at the graphs, i started to seriously slump around the middle of the month. the sakura pov ch took me for-fucking-ever...

if i can maintain similar progress in december as i did in november, tcba will either be finished at the end of the year or in january. i'm going to really try for end of the year since that's the goal i set for myself, but ultimately it comes down to the amount of time and energy i have to write. besides the holiday season, i have a full-time job and chronic fatigue--all of which unfortunately matter.

my outline for the last bit of the fic is still a bit rough, but i know where my finish line is and we're close! guesstimating five more chapters (and hoping i don't jinx myself haha).

i also have to give all the kudos and gratitude to @vermillioncrown bc they've been the best sounding board i could ask for and have done so much hand-holding and cheerleading ʕ•ᴥ•ʔっ♡

through gritted teeth: i'm going to finish this fucking chapter THIS WEEKEND

at the 'kind of hating doing this but I SAID I WOULD' portion of fanowrimo discipline-building. I'm not a creature made for discipline, but one made for laxity and indulgence, so this is, as you might imagine, very tough.

ok so like, fanowrimo 2023 reflection thus far, since we're actually p close to the halfway mark which is already a terrifying concept.

total word count, i'm at 9.6k (abt 400 words under target for today but i'm probably not done), so yay! but holy schmokes have i not been consistent in output in the last week lmao. via nanowrimo's stats page, which is honestly excellent:

(nov 5th and 9th were rest days, and even tho on the 5th it says 0, i did still outline. ofc some of what i've written i've since scrapped--tho i've p much made up the difference while editing--and i've also done abt 600 words of not-tcba writing bc my brain needed a break.)

building habits is so hard...

and that's really what it is? historically speaking, i'm not a very consistent writer, i'm more motivated by whimsy. having a structured approach where i wake up in the morning and write for an hour has been good for me, but it's also really challenging bc i am a creature of indolence. normally i take ages to think about what's coming up next, and when i write i have the internal editor in my brain constantly giving me feedback on word choice and word frequency, on consonance and where to break the sentence with punctuation or how to re-word it so that the tone is right and making sure that i mention x and do the lead-in for y. at the same time, when i take a lot of time to percolate is usually when i'm able to do 1-2k in one go and it doesn't need any editing after except for typos. (measure twice, write once...)

so breaking it into writing only, and editing separately has been great, but it's still kind of a struggle bc it's still energy expenditure, just in a different form. but i think the other part of why i've always taken so long to write is that i don't have a job where i can just daydream abt my stories, or sneakily write. i have my commute and my lunch, but sometimes i want to think abt literally anything else. in general, i have obligations that take up enough of my mental bandwidth that it can be really hard to also be creative, esp when i have v strong meta-cognition going when i do write.

idk thus far w this project i've really been trying to give myself a lot of grace, and mostly succeeding. but yeah, if mariko is my wish-fulfillment in any sense it's that she has the energy to enact her stubbornness into discipline way more consistently than i do.

862 this morning wheeeee

I've been p consistent w output actually, which is higher than I thought it would be, and a pace I'm a-ok w maintaining, keeps me to my 25k goal for the month, esp since I'm usually adding a bit in the evenings when I edit

my personal and deranged version of nanowrimo (fanowrimo) begins tomorrow! I am going to finish tcba by the end of the year!

so 1) this morning was v productive, i'm now at 2.6k and 2) i feel like me writing each ch of tcba is an exercise in 'what new way can i make the girlies (gender neutral) scream?'

how very ANNOYING that my brain likes the outline, as a process. how dare this make my actual time writing more coherent and productive. it's almost like knowing what i should write means that i dither abt less when i actually do write, honestly wtf.