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December Writing Update: 2022 Year In Review!
3 years ago
Hey everybody! Hope your New Years celebrations were safe and fun! December is finally over and 2023 is upon us, so it's time for my last Writing Update journal of the year! This month I figured I'd do the same thing as I did last New Years, I'd do a full breakdown of all my yearly writing again! It was already kind of a thing last year, but this year even more sites and services have been jumping on the bandwagon, so I figured I'd keep doing it too. I'm going to put this fun little wrap-up summary right in the middle of this journal, between the December-specific segment and the Goals for January segment, so read on!
December was kind of a nutso-bonkers month for me too. I had a lot of fun at MFF as stated in my previous journal, and then I had to deal with scheduling issues with my follow-up dentist appointments afterward. If you remember a few months back I mentioned that one of my wisdom teeth shattered and then got infected, well my Dentist was fairly certain this was caused by severe bruxism, AKA nighttime tooth grinding in my sleep. He recommended I get a mouth guard to prevent me from breaking any more of my teeth this way, but the appointments for this have kept getting messed up and delayed. I had to deal with reschedules multiple times, and I still am now. On top of this, work offered LOTS of overtime again this month in order to drive up our production numbers, and since MFF was very expensive for me this year I felt it necessary to take ALL the overtime offered.
This meant I spent most of December doing absolutely nothing creative, except maybe for the weekends. BUT, somehow, I managed to meet my editing goals anyway! Let's get into it!
DECEMBER WRITING SUMMARY
This month, hyperfocus was the key to my success. Since I didn't accomplish a damn thing on any of my weekdays, I spent my weekends at the coffee shop again, obsessively editing my two finale chapters for the ending of the Desert Wind arc of COTP. I had two types of edits I needed to do:
-Planned Edits: These are changes I realized I wanted to make ahead of time. I often will realize there's a plot hole in the story and need some time to mull it over and come up with an idea for how to fix it, then when the idea hits me I write the idea in my notes and come back to the story to make the change later.
-Unplanned Edits: These are changes I don't realize I need at first, and find while doing a full edit pass. They're mostly stuff like grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, and awkward sentence structure. I typically find these by re-reading the entire chapter to myself out loud, which helps my brain avoid missing them.
Chunks 13 and 14 of COTP had a FUCKTON of planned edits. I realized that I had introduced just mountains of plot holes when I wrote the initial drafts, and many of these plot holes needed some actual serious thought and planning to figure out how to fix. Sometimes I'd need to put the problems on the backburner of my mind to let percolate for a few days before the solutions came to me. There were just so damn many of these to fix that basically all my weekend editing marathons were spent purely working on ironing out and finishing planned edits, right up until the end of the month. But I was determined to meet my goal of finishing them and posting them on New Years, so I spent my extra days off from work for the holidays absolutely MARATHONING through all 80K or so words of re-reading to catch all the unplanned edits! As a result, I met the goals I set for December!
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths Chunk 14: 40,080 total final words after full editing - 36,157 pre-existing words = 3,923 new words this month!
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths Chunk 13: 48,765 total final words after full editing - 48,664 pre-existing words = 101 new words this month!
TOTAL 4,024 new written words in December, and 88,845 words edited in December!
Holy dickfucks! And if you just count the unplanned edits, that big number of 88,845 words edited was all done in 48 hours over the course of December 30th-31st! That may have been the most fucking ball-busting, brain-powersanding, energy-burning editing marathon I've ever done, beating out even my college days! I'm... fucking... tired.
I'm even more surprised at how many more new words ended up plopping out of me this month too. When I set my goals for December as pure editing I intentionally expected to get like, a hundred or two new words at most. Certainly not nearly 4K more! I guess a lot of these new words came from the fact that the gigantic mountain of Planned Edits necessitated adding more content and also rewriting big swathes of content in Chunk 14. 14 was the one with the most plot holes by far and needed the most retooling, so it all fits together. Either way I'd call this a stunning success! Let's move on and expand our summarizing to the whole year!
2022 IN REVIEW
Before I leap in, let's recap the goals I had set for myself at the start of the year. We'll start with the overall content goals first, then do wordcounts afterward.
[ PRIMARY GOALS ]
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 2: Promised 10,000 words minimum - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 3: Promised 10,000 words minimum - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All Chunk 8: Expected 10,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Serpent's Luster: Expected 10,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
[ SECONDARY GOALS ]
-COTP:DW Chunk 11: Expected 15,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-COTP:DW Chunk 12: Expected 15,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-COTP:DW Chunk 13: Expected 20,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Arina is All: Chunk 9: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 10: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 11: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 12: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 13: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 1: Expected 10,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
Welp, oof. There's definitely more red X's here than there are green check marks. Technically I wasn't planning on holding myself too sharply accountable for failing at any of the secondary goals, so that doesn't hurt too bad. But fucking up and not getting a single word done on the third and final chunk of Rise of the Silver Flight ALL YEAR is definitely a fuckup I'm a little ashamed over. I think I owe lateinshowing another apology for this one.
But, hey, that's not the primary part of my 2022 New Years Resolution at least. My true resolution for 2022 was to break 200,000 words. Of course, if you guys read last month's writing update journal then you know the spoilers, I already met that goal! But let's break it down anyway shall we?
[ JANUARY ]
-Arina is All: 10,072 words
-Rise of the Silver Flight: 10,600 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 5,249
TOTAL: 25,921 words
[ FEBRUARY ]
-Mutagen Origins: 5,199 words
-Serpent's Luster: 1,039 words
TOTAL: 6,238 words
[ MARCH ]
-Serpent's Luster: 7,306 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 16,321 words
TOTAL: 23,627 words
[ APRIL ]
-Serpent's Luster: 39 words
-Crossing of the PathS: 12,314 words
TOTAL: 12,353 words
[ MAY ]
-Serpent's Luster: 4,648 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 11,140 words
TOTAL: 15,788 words
[ JUNE ]
-Serpent's Luster: 2,717 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 6,307 words
TOTAL: 9,024 words
[ JULY ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 25,423 words
TOTAL: 25,423 words
[ AUGUST ]
nada
TOTAL: 0 words
[ SEPTEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 48,462 words
TOTAL: 48,462 words
[ OCTOBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 21,544
TOTAL: 21,544 words
[ NOVEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 14,815 words
TOTAL 14,815 words
[ DECEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 4,024 words
TOTAL 4,024 words
FINAL YEARLY WORDCOUNT TOTAL: 🎉🥳 207,219 WORDS! 🎉🥳
Huzzah! The wordcount resolution was met with gusto! I'd say this year was overall a wonderful success! Fucking up on Rise of the Silver Flight was the only serious black mark, and I do feel bad for leaving Arina is All mostly in the dust, but man it's nice to finally have that Desert Wind arc done!
But what can we see in the data above? Clearly, I had a strong start to the year where I clung firmly to all my overall goals at first, then as the year progressed I lost control over my hyperfocus impulse and just slipped into pure obsession land again. Makes sense, I've seen this happen the last few years too, January and New Years seems to fire up my motivations and make me want to re-commit to finishing everything, but then the year grinds that down and I slide back to my most indulgent comfort zone, which is COTP. It almost makes me wonder how much I did of each. In fact, why not? Let's break down these words per story project:
-Mutagen Origins: 5,199 total words
-Arina is All: 10,072 total words
-Rise of the Silver Flight: 10,600 words
-Serpent's Luster: 15,749 total words
-Crossing of the Paths: 165,599 words!!!
Jesus fuck. Calculating for percentages, that means Crossing of the Paths was approximately 79.9% of all the writing I've done this year. I went back to the last yearly planning breakdown journal I did too, and it turns out I had only planned to do 50K words of COTP too. I even tried to introduce that silly "Buffer Words" concept where I allotted another 40K to be written on anything I liked, in hopes it'd give me space to both hyperfocus on COTP and work on my other projects. I guess this all kinda ended up falling through huh? The Autism Spectrum Disorder fueled Hyperfocus Monster simply does what it wants. Pairing that with the Scope Creep of COTP's growth, and suddenly you go from a planned 50K of COTP to a whopping 165K.
Am I sad that I neglected Arina is All and Rise of the Silver Flight? Yes, obviously. Am I proud of writing 165K on COTP though? Absolutely. This year, while a disaster for controlling my impulses, has been a stunning success in writing quantity.
The lesson we can all take from this? As long as I allow my brain to write what it wants to write, I absolutely CAN pump out truly ridonkulous amounts of writing, and have it be writing I'm immensely proud of.
And this summary isn't even counting the fact that all 207K of that writing also was fully edited this year, so that's also a mountainous shitload of work too!
So, where to go from here? Let's move on to the next year's planning!
WRITING GOALS FOR 2023
So, taking into account what I learned in 2022, I know that trying to do a hugely detailed breakdown for this year by allocating every single bit to every single story project down to the last word may ultimately be kinda futile. My brain is gonna hyperfocus regardless of what I do. But does that mean I'm just gonna give up on trying to control it or plan? HELL NO. You don't make constant progress by just tossing your hands up into the air and saying "Fuck it!" I'm going to make another plan, just slightly less word-for-word than I did last year. Instead, let's start from the big overall wordcount goal and then just toss a list together of things I'd like to work on!
What's my new resolution this year? I already have it mind. I want to be more ambitious than last year, but not ludicrously so. I won't be repeating my hilarious pie-in-the-sky goal of 365K from 2021. I'm going to take 2022's goal and scale it up by a very reasonable, achievable amount. My goal is to write 225,000 words total in 2023! Just a little bit more than 10% higher than 2022. Broken down into monthly quotas, this means I need to write 18,750 words per month, every month this year.
I proved 200K is doable for me with enough pure grit and determination, and I hit it even with an entire month of doing absolutely nothing when I moved in August. It won't be some sort of cakewalk down easy street of course, but barring something horrific like my house burning down or a parent dying, I know I can do it! And as for what I want to work on, here's my breakdown:
[ PRIMARY GOALS ]
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 3: Promised 10,000 words minimum
-Arina is All: Chunk 9: Expected 10,000 words
-Arina is All: Chunk 10: Expected 10,000 words
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: Expected 10,000 words
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 2: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words
-COTP: Darkness & Light Chunk 1: Expected 15,000 words
-COTP: Darkness & Light Chunk 2: Expected 15,000 words
-COTP: Darkness & Light Chunk 3: Expected 15,000 words
[ SECONDARY GOALS ]
-Untitled Gift Story for Jarnsaxa: Expected 20,000-40,000 words total
-Untitled Origin Story for Lilith Magnusson: No clue how many words this would be
-COTP: Darkness & Light: However many more words the ASD Hyperfocus monster decides it wants to do
There we are! Of all the stuff on my Primary Goals list, only the ending of Rise of the Silver Flight is going to be absolutely 100% set in stone. I'm going to hold myself accountable for finishing it HARD this year. Ideally early on in the year. Other than that, I'll try to prioritize my Primary Goals first and then just dip into the Secondaries as my brain allows. I didn't even bother trying that silly Buffer Words trick this year, and I'm also not going to even try to put any upper cap on how much COTP I write.
And now that my yearly goals are set, let's finally go to the monthly ones for January!
JANUARY WRITING GOALS
Well, you may actually be surprised by this, but I think I really burned myself out on COTP in December. Editing 80K words in such big sprints is fucking exhausting and I actively want to take a vacation from working on COTP for at least a month, maybe two. Instead, I'm going to strive to work on my other Primary Goal projects this month. Let's break that down.
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: Expected 10,000 words
Total Expected Word Count for January: 20,000 words!
Ahhhhhhhhhhh, nice, simple, relatively easy, and attainable. Rise of the Silver Flight is the big difficult one my brain seems to always resist, and The Rebirth of Lightest is the new, more casual idea I cam up with while talking with scarlettv at Aquatifur a few months ago, and should be indulgent and quick like candy. Ideally, getting both of these done will take me right past my new monthly quota of 18,750 words. With the ASD hyperfocus monster pacified by COTP burnout I am cautiously optimistic that this should actually be attainable. Let's cross our fingers and see!
And well, there you have it! This journal entry is now approaching nearly 3K words just by itself so I'll wrap it up here before you fall asleep on me. I want to offer my most genuine thanks to any and all of you who have stuck with me this year and read my stuff! I know following an obsessive nerd with autism who can't reign in their hyperfocus is annoying as hell, and I've left a lot of you hanging on several of my stories, so if you're still with me through all that then just know I appreciate you IMMENSELY! Have all my best wishes for a safe, prosperous, and fulfilling 2023 and I'll see you again at the end of the month!
December was kind of a nutso-bonkers month for me too. I had a lot of fun at MFF as stated in my previous journal, and then I had to deal with scheduling issues with my follow-up dentist appointments afterward. If you remember a few months back I mentioned that one of my wisdom teeth shattered and then got infected, well my Dentist was fairly certain this was caused by severe bruxism, AKA nighttime tooth grinding in my sleep. He recommended I get a mouth guard to prevent me from breaking any more of my teeth this way, but the appointments for this have kept getting messed up and delayed. I had to deal with reschedules multiple times, and I still am now. On top of this, work offered LOTS of overtime again this month in order to drive up our production numbers, and since MFF was very expensive for me this year I felt it necessary to take ALL the overtime offered.
This meant I spent most of December doing absolutely nothing creative, except maybe for the weekends. BUT, somehow, I managed to meet my editing goals anyway! Let's get into it!
DECEMBER WRITING SUMMARY
This month, hyperfocus was the key to my success. Since I didn't accomplish a damn thing on any of my weekdays, I spent my weekends at the coffee shop again, obsessively editing my two finale chapters for the ending of the Desert Wind arc of COTP. I had two types of edits I needed to do:
-Planned Edits: These are changes I realized I wanted to make ahead of time. I often will realize there's a plot hole in the story and need some time to mull it over and come up with an idea for how to fix it, then when the idea hits me I write the idea in my notes and come back to the story to make the change later.
-Unplanned Edits: These are changes I don't realize I need at first, and find while doing a full edit pass. They're mostly stuff like grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, and awkward sentence structure. I typically find these by re-reading the entire chapter to myself out loud, which helps my brain avoid missing them.
Chunks 13 and 14 of COTP had a FUCKTON of planned edits. I realized that I had introduced just mountains of plot holes when I wrote the initial drafts, and many of these plot holes needed some actual serious thought and planning to figure out how to fix. Sometimes I'd need to put the problems on the backburner of my mind to let percolate for a few days before the solutions came to me. There were just so damn many of these to fix that basically all my weekend editing marathons were spent purely working on ironing out and finishing planned edits, right up until the end of the month. But I was determined to meet my goal of finishing them and posting them on New Years, so I spent my extra days off from work for the holidays absolutely MARATHONING through all 80K or so words of re-reading to catch all the unplanned edits! As a result, I met the goals I set for December!
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths Chunk 14: 40,080 total final words after full editing - 36,157 pre-existing words = 3,923 new words this month!
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths Chunk 13: 48,765 total final words after full editing - 48,664 pre-existing words = 101 new words this month!
TOTAL 4,024 new written words in December, and 88,845 words edited in December!
Holy dickfucks! And if you just count the unplanned edits, that big number of 88,845 words edited was all done in 48 hours over the course of December 30th-31st! That may have been the most fucking ball-busting, brain-powersanding, energy-burning editing marathon I've ever done, beating out even my college days! I'm... fucking... tired.
I'm even more surprised at how many more new words ended up plopping out of me this month too. When I set my goals for December as pure editing I intentionally expected to get like, a hundred or two new words at most. Certainly not nearly 4K more! I guess a lot of these new words came from the fact that the gigantic mountain of Planned Edits necessitated adding more content and also rewriting big swathes of content in Chunk 14. 14 was the one with the most plot holes by far and needed the most retooling, so it all fits together. Either way I'd call this a stunning success! Let's move on and expand our summarizing to the whole year!
2022 IN REVIEW
Before I leap in, let's recap the goals I had set for myself at the start of the year. We'll start with the overall content goals first, then do wordcounts afterward.
[ PRIMARY GOALS ]
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 2: Promised 10,000 words minimum - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 3: Promised 10,000 words minimum - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All Chunk 8: Expected 10,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Serpent's Luster: Expected 10,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
[ SECONDARY GOALS ]
-COTP:DW Chunk 11: Expected 15,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-COTP:DW Chunk 12: Expected 15,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-COTP:DW Chunk 13: Expected 20,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Arina is All: Chunk 9: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 10: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 11: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 12: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Arina is All: Chunk 13: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 1: Expected 10,000 words - ✔️ COMPLETE! ✔️
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words - ❌ INCOMPLETE! ❌
Welp, oof. There's definitely more red X's here than there are green check marks. Technically I wasn't planning on holding myself too sharply accountable for failing at any of the secondary goals, so that doesn't hurt too bad. But fucking up and not getting a single word done on the third and final chunk of Rise of the Silver Flight ALL YEAR is definitely a fuckup I'm a little ashamed over. I think I owe lateinshowing another apology for this one.
But, hey, that's not the primary part of my 2022 New Years Resolution at least. My true resolution for 2022 was to break 200,000 words. Of course, if you guys read last month's writing update journal then you know the spoilers, I already met that goal! But let's break it down anyway shall we?
[ JANUARY ]
-Arina is All: 10,072 words
-Rise of the Silver Flight: 10,600 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 5,249
TOTAL: 25,921 words
[ FEBRUARY ]
-Mutagen Origins: 5,199 words
-Serpent's Luster: 1,039 words
TOTAL: 6,238 words
[ MARCH ]
-Serpent's Luster: 7,306 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 16,321 words
TOTAL: 23,627 words
[ APRIL ]
-Serpent's Luster: 39 words
-Crossing of the PathS: 12,314 words
TOTAL: 12,353 words
[ MAY ]
-Serpent's Luster: 4,648 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 11,140 words
TOTAL: 15,788 words
[ JUNE ]
-Serpent's Luster: 2,717 words
-Crossing of the Paths: 6,307 words
TOTAL: 9,024 words
[ JULY ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 25,423 words
TOTAL: 25,423 words
[ AUGUST ]
nada
TOTAL: 0 words
[ SEPTEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 48,462 words
TOTAL: 48,462 words
[ OCTOBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 21,544
TOTAL: 21,544 words
[ NOVEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 14,815 words
TOTAL 14,815 words
[ DECEMBER ]
-Crossing of the Paths: 4,024 words
TOTAL 4,024 words
FINAL YEARLY WORDCOUNT TOTAL: 🎉🥳 207,219 WORDS! 🎉🥳
Huzzah! The wordcount resolution was met with gusto! I'd say this year was overall a wonderful success! Fucking up on Rise of the Silver Flight was the only serious black mark, and I do feel bad for leaving Arina is All mostly in the dust, but man it's nice to finally have that Desert Wind arc done!
But what can we see in the data above? Clearly, I had a strong start to the year where I clung firmly to all my overall goals at first, then as the year progressed I lost control over my hyperfocus impulse and just slipped into pure obsession land again. Makes sense, I've seen this happen the last few years too, January and New Years seems to fire up my motivations and make me want to re-commit to finishing everything, but then the year grinds that down and I slide back to my most indulgent comfort zone, which is COTP. It almost makes me wonder how much I did of each. In fact, why not? Let's break down these words per story project:
-Mutagen Origins: 5,199 total words
-Arina is All: 10,072 total words
-Rise of the Silver Flight: 10,600 words
-Serpent's Luster: 15,749 total words
-Crossing of the Paths: 165,599 words!!!
Jesus fuck. Calculating for percentages, that means Crossing of the Paths was approximately 79.9% of all the writing I've done this year. I went back to the last yearly planning breakdown journal I did too, and it turns out I had only planned to do 50K words of COTP too. I even tried to introduce that silly "Buffer Words" concept where I allotted another 40K to be written on anything I liked, in hopes it'd give me space to both hyperfocus on COTP and work on my other projects. I guess this all kinda ended up falling through huh? The Autism Spectrum Disorder fueled Hyperfocus Monster simply does what it wants. Pairing that with the Scope Creep of COTP's growth, and suddenly you go from a planned 50K of COTP to a whopping 165K.
Am I sad that I neglected Arina is All and Rise of the Silver Flight? Yes, obviously. Am I proud of writing 165K on COTP though? Absolutely. This year, while a disaster for controlling my impulses, has been a stunning success in writing quantity.
The lesson we can all take from this? As long as I allow my brain to write what it wants to write, I absolutely CAN pump out truly ridonkulous amounts of writing, and have it be writing I'm immensely proud of.
And this summary isn't even counting the fact that all 207K of that writing also was fully edited this year, so that's also a mountainous shitload of work too!
So, where to go from here? Let's move on to the next year's planning!
WRITING GOALS FOR 2023
So, taking into account what I learned in 2022, I know that trying to do a hugely detailed breakdown for this year by allocating every single bit to every single story project down to the last word may ultimately be kinda futile. My brain is gonna hyperfocus regardless of what I do. But does that mean I'm just gonna give up on trying to control it or plan? HELL NO. You don't make constant progress by just tossing your hands up into the air and saying "Fuck it!" I'm going to make another plan, just slightly less word-for-word than I did last year. Instead, let's start from the big overall wordcount goal and then just toss a list together of things I'd like to work on!
What's my new resolution this year? I already have it mind. I want to be more ambitious than last year, but not ludicrously so. I won't be repeating my hilarious pie-in-the-sky goal of 365K from 2021. I'm going to take 2022's goal and scale it up by a very reasonable, achievable amount. My goal is to write 225,000 words total in 2023! Just a little bit more than 10% higher than 2022. Broken down into monthly quotas, this means I need to write 18,750 words per month, every month this year.
I proved 200K is doable for me with enough pure grit and determination, and I hit it even with an entire month of doing absolutely nothing when I moved in August. It won't be some sort of cakewalk down easy street of course, but barring something horrific like my house burning down or a parent dying, I know I can do it! And as for what I want to work on, here's my breakdown:
[ PRIMARY GOALS ]
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 3: Promised 10,000 words minimum
-Arina is All: Chunk 9: Expected 10,000 words
-Arina is All: Chunk 10: Expected 10,000 words
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: Expected 10,000 words
-Mutagen Origins Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 2: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words
-COTP: Darkness & Light Chunk 1: Expected 15,000 words
-COTP: Darkness & Light Chunk 2: Expected 15,000 words
-COTP: Darkness & Light Chunk 3: Expected 15,000 words
[ SECONDARY GOALS ]
-Untitled Gift Story for Jarnsaxa: Expected 20,000-40,000 words total
-Untitled Origin Story for Lilith Magnusson: No clue how many words this would be
-COTP: Darkness & Light: However many more words the ASD Hyperfocus monster decides it wants to do
There we are! Of all the stuff on my Primary Goals list, only the ending of Rise of the Silver Flight is going to be absolutely 100% set in stone. I'm going to hold myself accountable for finishing it HARD this year. Ideally early on in the year. Other than that, I'll try to prioritize my Primary Goals first and then just dip into the Secondaries as my brain allows. I didn't even bother trying that silly Buffer Words trick this year, and I'm also not going to even try to put any upper cap on how much COTP I write.
And now that my yearly goals are set, let's finally go to the monthly ones for January!
JANUARY WRITING GOALS
Well, you may actually be surprised by this, but I think I really burned myself out on COTP in December. Editing 80K words in such big sprints is fucking exhausting and I actively want to take a vacation from working on COTP for at least a month, maybe two. Instead, I'm going to strive to work on my other Primary Goal projects this month. Let's break that down.
-Rise of the Silver Flight Chunk 3: Expected 10,000 words
-The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: Expected 10,000 words
Total Expected Word Count for January: 20,000 words!
Ahhhhhhhhhhh, nice, simple, relatively easy, and attainable. Rise of the Silver Flight is the big difficult one my brain seems to always resist, and The Rebirth of Lightest is the new, more casual idea I cam up with while talking with scarlettv at Aquatifur a few months ago, and should be indulgent and quick like candy. Ideally, getting both of these done will take me right past my new monthly quota of 18,750 words. With the ASD hyperfocus monster pacified by COTP burnout I am cautiously optimistic that this should actually be attainable. Let's cross our fingers and see!
And well, there you have it! This journal entry is now approaching nearly 3K words just by itself so I'll wrap it up here before you fall asleep on me. I want to offer my most genuine thanks to any and all of you who have stuck with me this year and read my stuff! I know following an obsessive nerd with autism who can't reign in their hyperfocus is annoying as hell, and I've left a lot of you hanging on several of my stories, so if you're still with me through all that then just know I appreciate you IMMENSELY! Have all my best wishes for a safe, prosperous, and fulfilling 2023 and I'll see you again at the end of the month!
