FA+
Shop
July 2023 Writing Update: 100% Completion!
2 years ago
Holy shit guys! Holy fucking shit! I did it! For the first time EVER since I started tracking my work with these monthly writing journals, I fully completed every single item on my entire monthly docket this month! I know this Writing Update Journal is actually a couple of days early, but since I finished everything, why not slide it in a few days ahead of the deadline?
It was of course made possible primarily by the fact that my job is unionized and therefore offered some AMAZING time off this month for Fireworks Day. I had July 3, 4, and 5 off, which butted up against the weekend and thus gave me a total of 5 solid days off. That meant that week I only had to work Thursday and Friday, giving me a 5 off, 2 on, 2 off schedule. And through some miracle of miracles directly from Arceus herself, I managed to get a MASSIVE surge of energy and inspiration during those days, leading to me getting nearly 5K words of work done almost every single day off! Then, after the time off was over, I not only still had energy leftover to spare, but inspiration too! I realized I was past 35K at that point and still going, so there was potential for me to actually break my old monthly personal wordcount record, which was sitting at 48,462 from September last year. I decided that I not only wanted to break this 48K word record, but I wanted to do it in style. I wanted to finish ALL the items on my monthly docket while doing it, and even potentially break my monthly editing record too. That monthly record was 88,845 words, from December 2022 when I edited the two final chunks of COTP Desert Wind right before New Years Day. Given I have been building up a considerable pile of unedited words basically all year leading up to now, I knew if I edited all 50K I wrote this month and everything else I've left unedited from the start of the year, I could easily break that 88K editing record too. It's ambitious as fuck, wanting to break both of those monthly records AND pull off my first 100% Docket Completion, but somehow I did it! The magic of having a fully working CPAP, a good job with plenty of time off, and a brain filled with inspiration all came together magically at the same time to result in AMAZING SUCCESS! Let's break it down!
JULY WRITING SUMMARY
So, I'm going to post my editing and writing dockets here and you'll notice they are much bigger than initially planned in last month's journal. This is because I added more as I worked. For example, I only planned to finish the editing on two chunks, but since I completed roughs on way more than that, I added those to the editing docket too. You'll also notice that in the writing docket I have re-added some older chunks, just because I edited stuff from last month and ended up adding considerable sums of more words during editing. So both dockets are gonna seem buckwild. Let's go!
Editing goals:
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 1: 29,138 words edited
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 2: 18,208 words edited
✔️ -Arina is All Chunk 9: 21,740 words edited
✔️ -Arina is All Chunk 10: 22,190 words edited
✔️ -The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: 15,245 words edited
✔️ -Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: 16,872 words edited
✔️ -TOTAL WORDS EDITED IN JULY 2023: 122,040 words!!!
Writing goals:
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 1: 29,138 words - 27,953 words pre-existing = 1,185 new words this month
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 2: 18,208 words - 6,355 words pre-existing = 11,853 new words this month
✔️ -Arina is All - Chunk 9: 21,740 words - 21,604 words pre-existing = 136 new words this month
✔️ -Arina is All - Chunk 10: 22,190 words - 1,933 words pre-existing = 20,257 new words this month
✔️ -The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: 15,245 words - 11,305 words pre-existing = 3,940 new words this month
✔️ -Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: 16,872 words - 2,048 words pre-existing = 14,823 new words this month
✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN JULY 2023: 52,194 words!!!
(Smash Bros Announcer Voice) A NEW RECORD!!!
Monthly Writing by Wordcount: 52,194 words (July 2023)
Monthly Editing by Wordcount: 122,040 words (July 2023)
Wow. Holy fucking shit guys.
I am so. fucking. tired. XD
Seriously, y'all have no idea how much ass I had to bust to do something as buckwild as this. I was at the coffee shop every day of every weekend hammering away, and even some weekdays after work shifts were over. Doing this on top of working my full time job was fucking EXHAUSTING. I am blown the fuck out. But was it worth it? Oh fuck yeah you better believe it. I now have 7 items from my yearly docket done and I'm just entering the second half of the year. And ooooh, let's calculate my yearly wordcount so far!
Going into this month, I still had a year-on deficit of 21,946 words to make up. Applying our new record wordcount for this month not only FUCKING OBLITERATES this entire deficit to put us back in the black again, it means we now have a fuggin surplus of 30,248 words!!! That's significantly more than an entire monthly quota in surplus! I think I've only ever had that much surplus one time before, back last year when I hit my full yearly wordcount goal in November. Hell, I am only like 7k words off of having TWO MONTHS WORTH of surplus, which is also totally unheard of! In fact, I'm calling this now, another new record!
(Smash Bros Announcer Voice) A NEW RECORD!!!
Highest On-year Wordcount Surplus: 30,248 words (July 2023)
Also, I'm dying of curiosity, so let's do an on-year tally of all months so far!
HALF WAY YEARLY CHECKPOINT:
JANUARY: 3,660 words
FEBRUARY: 23,710 words
MARCH: 11,340 words
APRIL: 11,930 words
MAY: 12,796 words
JUNE: 27,196 words
JULY: 52,194 words
TOTAL SO FAR IN 2023: 142,826 words!
Damn! Even with so few of my months hitting the monthly goal, my big months have more than compensated! As of August I am 63.47% toward my yearly goal! KICK ASS! And the best part is that this time, it's not like, 75% COTP too, I'm actually making real headway on my NSFW projects too!
So what next? Well, I'm so blown the fuck out from setting all these records that I'm going to try to be a little more humble next month, heh. Let's move on to that shall we?
AUGUST 2023 WRITING GOALS
Yeah, after getting more than a month ahead of schedule I could theoretically take this entire month off to rest. But I honestly don't want to give up on my current momentum. I know that if I settle too snugly into my chair, I'll be sucked so deeply into Minecraft or Tears of the Kingdom that I could end up losing my grip on my work entirely for several months in a row. There IS a precedent for this happening after all. And frankly, if I'm gonna be entirely honest, I love how much progress I've made toward shaping and training my brain into being a consistent writer. Part of the reason why I wanted to do this was to potentially start a Patreon after all, since I know that if I'm going to start accepting patron money then I NEEEEED to have something to show for every single month. Sure, I also wanted to do comms for people when I started too, and I did decide to cancel this plan. But I also kinda wanna do occasional rare PRIVATE comms for my already-trusted inner circle of friends who won't get upset if I end up reverting back to my slow self. And if I do end up doing a patreon and private comms, I wanna be consistently putting out really good content for them on a monthly basis. Granted, I don't need to be putting out fifty fucking thousand words of that content per month, but I want like, at least one single finished chunk of SOMETHING every month. And to do that, I can't rest on my laurels too much!
So, with that in mind, I'm going to still give myself like, the first week of August to rest, then I'm going back at it. But I'm also going to set sane and reasonable goals for August too. I have a fun idea for how to do this too! It's a new, gamified spin on the old silly "Buffer words" concept from last year. From now on, I'm going to try to break down my monthly docket of writing goals into two primary categories: PRIMARY OBJECTIVES and SECONDARY OBJECTIVES. The idea is to use the terminology and structure from fun video games to try to organize my thoughts and inject some levity and fun. Every month I'll bust my ass to AT LEAST finish all my Primary Objectives, and I won't feel even the slightest ounce of guilt if I don't finish any of my Secondary Objectives. I think this will help light a fire under my ass even more and make the process of tracking my work even more enjoyable. So with that in mind, let's set some Objectives for this month!
-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Joining The Family: Expected a full 15,000 words
-Arina is All Chunk 11: Expected at least 3,750 words out of a final total of 15,000 words
-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Arina is All Chunk 11: As much as possible, up to the full 15,000 words
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 3: Expected any amount of a final total of 15,000 words
-Editing of Joining The Family: Expected 15,000 words of editing
Total Expected Word Count for August: 18,750-45,000 words
Total Expected Editing Count for August: 15,000 words
So you'll notice that sorting it this way changes the organizational structure a bit, but IMO it's still quite easy to parse. I also decided that I'd still allow myself a nice big stretch goal of 45K total between both primary and secondary objectives, since I feel like I very well may be able to keep some decent momentum going. Also, I like the idea of making my Primary Objectives have granular totals, like only requiring 3,750 words of AiA Chunk 11. Means I don't have to make every single entry in my primary objective list an entire whole chunk. This way, if I at least hit that 3,750 on AiA11 I can get my juicy green check mark, and if I get the full 15K I get that delicious check mark on the secondaries too. This is humble and realistic to my quota while still giving granularity and leaving open the door to another big potential win month!
Also, you may be asking me "Hey Lightest, wtf is this 'Joining The Family' story you just arbitrarily added to the docket out of nowhere this month?!" Well I'll tell you! Turns out a couple years ago during the middle of the pandemic I made a big oopsie boo-boo. Long story short, I tried to organize a big group commission and took some money from a few people for it, but then everyone involved, including myself, forgot about the entire project while we waited for everyone else to chip in. I rediscovered this this month and decided to pay my friends back one by one, either by sending them the money or writing them free stories. "Joining The Family" is one such repayment story, for my dragon friend Nimbus. She's the same one I wrote Rise of the Silver Flight for, so you know she loves some incest stories! But this time around I am planning to actually NOT keep her waiting literal years for the stuff I owe her. This time I'm going to try and pound out this entire 15K word one-shot for her in a month flat. Not only will this make me even with her financially again, but will potentially redeem my slowness at writing stuff for her in the past. Plus, I very well may have up to 3 additional repayment stories to write after Joining The Family is done, assuming the other people I owe to decide to choose stories rather than cash. I want to be able to slam out their owed stories at one a month too, hence putting them onto Primary Objectives rather than Secondary. But we'll see, I haven't asked all of them yet whether they want the stories or the cash.
And yeah, I definitely don't exactly expect to actually get 45K words out this month while still utterly reeling from July's 52K. But hey, I set a goal of 49K for July and I did beat it handily, so maybe the muse and my working CPAP will keep me flyin' this month too! Let's see if I can keep riding this train, baby!
And one other thing before I wrap up:
I've always wanted to do NaNoWriMo in the past. For those of you who've never heard of it, it's a yearly challenge where people set a goal for themselves to write a small novel of 50K words in one straight month. I've never tried this before for a myriad of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons was that I never felt like I could ever feasibly pump out that many words in a single month. Well, July proved that I actually CAN! So I'm sorely tempted to actually try NaNoWriMo this year. It'd take place in November too, which would help make it feasible since that month I also get a nice big chunk of extra time off from work for a holiday like I did in July. The biggest thing to determine first is if I can finish all my owed Repayment Stories like Joining The Family before NaNoWriMo takes place in November. So we'll see how Aug-Oct shake out first before I make any decisions.
Whew! This has been another big heckin chonker of an update journal though, so I'll stop for now. Thanks again for all y'all who read my stuff, you're mega appreciated! See ya next month!
It was of course made possible primarily by the fact that my job is unionized and therefore offered some AMAZING time off this month for Fireworks Day. I had July 3, 4, and 5 off, which butted up against the weekend and thus gave me a total of 5 solid days off. That meant that week I only had to work Thursday and Friday, giving me a 5 off, 2 on, 2 off schedule. And through some miracle of miracles directly from Arceus herself, I managed to get a MASSIVE surge of energy and inspiration during those days, leading to me getting nearly 5K words of work done almost every single day off! Then, after the time off was over, I not only still had energy leftover to spare, but inspiration too! I realized I was past 35K at that point and still going, so there was potential for me to actually break my old monthly personal wordcount record, which was sitting at 48,462 from September last year. I decided that I not only wanted to break this 48K word record, but I wanted to do it in style. I wanted to finish ALL the items on my monthly docket while doing it, and even potentially break my monthly editing record too. That monthly record was 88,845 words, from December 2022 when I edited the two final chunks of COTP Desert Wind right before New Years Day. Given I have been building up a considerable pile of unedited words basically all year leading up to now, I knew if I edited all 50K I wrote this month and everything else I've left unedited from the start of the year, I could easily break that 88K editing record too. It's ambitious as fuck, wanting to break both of those monthly records AND pull off my first 100% Docket Completion, but somehow I did it! The magic of having a fully working CPAP, a good job with plenty of time off, and a brain filled with inspiration all came together magically at the same time to result in AMAZING SUCCESS! Let's break it down!
JULY WRITING SUMMARY
So, I'm going to post my editing and writing dockets here and you'll notice they are much bigger than initially planned in last month's journal. This is because I added more as I worked. For example, I only planned to finish the editing on two chunks, but since I completed roughs on way more than that, I added those to the editing docket too. You'll also notice that in the writing docket I have re-added some older chunks, just because I edited stuff from last month and ended up adding considerable sums of more words during editing. So both dockets are gonna seem buckwild. Let's go!
Editing goals:
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 1: 29,138 words edited
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 2: 18,208 words edited
✔️ -Arina is All Chunk 9: 21,740 words edited
✔️ -Arina is All Chunk 10: 22,190 words edited
✔️ -The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: 15,245 words edited
✔️ -Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: 16,872 words edited
✔️ -TOTAL WORDS EDITED IN JULY 2023: 122,040 words!!!
Writing goals:
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 1: 29,138 words - 27,953 words pre-existing = 1,185 new words this month
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 2: 18,208 words - 6,355 words pre-existing = 11,853 new words this month
✔️ -Arina is All - Chunk 9: 21,740 words - 21,604 words pre-existing = 136 new words this month
✔️ -Arina is All - Chunk 10: 22,190 words - 1,933 words pre-existing = 20,257 new words this month
✔️ -The Rebirth of Lightest Chunk 1: 15,245 words - 11,305 words pre-existing = 3,940 new words this month
✔️ -Mutagen Origins Chunk 2: 16,872 words - 2,048 words pre-existing = 14,823 new words this month
✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN JULY 2023: 52,194 words!!!
(Smash Bros Announcer Voice) A NEW RECORD!!!
Monthly Writing by Wordcount: 52,194 words (July 2023)
Monthly Editing by Wordcount: 122,040 words (July 2023)
Wow. Holy fucking shit guys.
I am so. fucking. tired. XD
Seriously, y'all have no idea how much ass I had to bust to do something as buckwild as this. I was at the coffee shop every day of every weekend hammering away, and even some weekdays after work shifts were over. Doing this on top of working my full time job was fucking EXHAUSTING. I am blown the fuck out. But was it worth it? Oh fuck yeah you better believe it. I now have 7 items from my yearly docket done and I'm just entering the second half of the year. And ooooh, let's calculate my yearly wordcount so far!
Going into this month, I still had a year-on deficit of 21,946 words to make up. Applying our new record wordcount for this month not only FUCKING OBLITERATES this entire deficit to put us back in the black again, it means we now have a fuggin surplus of 30,248 words!!! That's significantly more than an entire monthly quota in surplus! I think I've only ever had that much surplus one time before, back last year when I hit my full yearly wordcount goal in November. Hell, I am only like 7k words off of having TWO MONTHS WORTH of surplus, which is also totally unheard of! In fact, I'm calling this now, another new record!
(Smash Bros Announcer Voice) A NEW RECORD!!!
Highest On-year Wordcount Surplus: 30,248 words (July 2023)
Also, I'm dying of curiosity, so let's do an on-year tally of all months so far!
HALF WAY YEARLY CHECKPOINT:
JANUARY: 3,660 words
FEBRUARY: 23,710 words
MARCH: 11,340 words
APRIL: 11,930 words
MAY: 12,796 words
JUNE: 27,196 words
JULY: 52,194 words
TOTAL SO FAR IN 2023: 142,826 words!
Damn! Even with so few of my months hitting the monthly goal, my big months have more than compensated! As of August I am 63.47% toward my yearly goal! KICK ASS! And the best part is that this time, it's not like, 75% COTP too, I'm actually making real headway on my NSFW projects too!
So what next? Well, I'm so blown the fuck out from setting all these records that I'm going to try to be a little more humble next month, heh. Let's move on to that shall we?
AUGUST 2023 WRITING GOALS
Yeah, after getting more than a month ahead of schedule I could theoretically take this entire month off to rest. But I honestly don't want to give up on my current momentum. I know that if I settle too snugly into my chair, I'll be sucked so deeply into Minecraft or Tears of the Kingdom that I could end up losing my grip on my work entirely for several months in a row. There IS a precedent for this happening after all. And frankly, if I'm gonna be entirely honest, I love how much progress I've made toward shaping and training my brain into being a consistent writer. Part of the reason why I wanted to do this was to potentially start a Patreon after all, since I know that if I'm going to start accepting patron money then I NEEEEED to have something to show for every single month. Sure, I also wanted to do comms for people when I started too, and I did decide to cancel this plan. But I also kinda wanna do occasional rare PRIVATE comms for my already-trusted inner circle of friends who won't get upset if I end up reverting back to my slow self. And if I do end up doing a patreon and private comms, I wanna be consistently putting out really good content for them on a monthly basis. Granted, I don't need to be putting out fifty fucking thousand words of that content per month, but I want like, at least one single finished chunk of SOMETHING every month. And to do that, I can't rest on my laurels too much!
So, with that in mind, I'm going to still give myself like, the first week of August to rest, then I'm going back at it. But I'm also going to set sane and reasonable goals for August too. I have a fun idea for how to do this too! It's a new, gamified spin on the old silly "Buffer words" concept from last year. From now on, I'm going to try to break down my monthly docket of writing goals into two primary categories: PRIMARY OBJECTIVES and SECONDARY OBJECTIVES. The idea is to use the terminology and structure from fun video games to try to organize my thoughts and inject some levity and fun. Every month I'll bust my ass to AT LEAST finish all my Primary Objectives, and I won't feel even the slightest ounce of guilt if I don't finish any of my Secondary Objectives. I think this will help light a fire under my ass even more and make the process of tracking my work even more enjoyable. So with that in mind, let's set some Objectives for this month!
-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Joining The Family: Expected a full 15,000 words
-Arina is All Chunk 11: Expected at least 3,750 words out of a final total of 15,000 words
-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Arina is All Chunk 11: As much as possible, up to the full 15,000 words
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 3: Expected any amount of a final total of 15,000 words
-Editing of Joining The Family: Expected 15,000 words of editing
Total Expected Word Count for August: 18,750-45,000 words
Total Expected Editing Count for August: 15,000 words
So you'll notice that sorting it this way changes the organizational structure a bit, but IMO it's still quite easy to parse. I also decided that I'd still allow myself a nice big stretch goal of 45K total between both primary and secondary objectives, since I feel like I very well may be able to keep some decent momentum going. Also, I like the idea of making my Primary Objectives have granular totals, like only requiring 3,750 words of AiA Chunk 11. Means I don't have to make every single entry in my primary objective list an entire whole chunk. This way, if I at least hit that 3,750 on AiA11 I can get my juicy green check mark, and if I get the full 15K I get that delicious check mark on the secondaries too. This is humble and realistic to my quota while still giving granularity and leaving open the door to another big potential win month!
Also, you may be asking me "Hey Lightest, wtf is this 'Joining The Family' story you just arbitrarily added to the docket out of nowhere this month?!" Well I'll tell you! Turns out a couple years ago during the middle of the pandemic I made a big oopsie boo-boo. Long story short, I tried to organize a big group commission and took some money from a few people for it, but then everyone involved, including myself, forgot about the entire project while we waited for everyone else to chip in. I rediscovered this this month and decided to pay my friends back one by one, either by sending them the money or writing them free stories. "Joining The Family" is one such repayment story, for my dragon friend Nimbus. She's the same one I wrote Rise of the Silver Flight for, so you know she loves some incest stories! But this time around I am planning to actually NOT keep her waiting literal years for the stuff I owe her. This time I'm going to try and pound out this entire 15K word one-shot for her in a month flat. Not only will this make me even with her financially again, but will potentially redeem my slowness at writing stuff for her in the past. Plus, I very well may have up to 3 additional repayment stories to write after Joining The Family is done, assuming the other people I owe to decide to choose stories rather than cash. I want to be able to slam out their owed stories at one a month too, hence putting them onto Primary Objectives rather than Secondary. But we'll see, I haven't asked all of them yet whether they want the stories or the cash.
And yeah, I definitely don't exactly expect to actually get 45K words out this month while still utterly reeling from July's 52K. But hey, I set a goal of 49K for July and I did beat it handily, so maybe the muse and my working CPAP will keep me flyin' this month too! Let's see if I can keep riding this train, baby!
And one other thing before I wrap up:
I've always wanted to do NaNoWriMo in the past. For those of you who've never heard of it, it's a yearly challenge where people set a goal for themselves to write a small novel of 50K words in one straight month. I've never tried this before for a myriad of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons was that I never felt like I could ever feasibly pump out that many words in a single month. Well, July proved that I actually CAN! So I'm sorely tempted to actually try NaNoWriMo this year. It'd take place in November too, which would help make it feasible since that month I also get a nice big chunk of extra time off from work for a holiday like I did in July. The biggest thing to determine first is if I can finish all my owed Repayment Stories like Joining The Family before NaNoWriMo takes place in November. So we'll see how Aug-Oct shake out first before I make any decisions.
Whew! This has been another big heckin chonker of an update journal though, so I'll stop for now. Thanks again for all y'all who read my stuff, you're mega appreciated! See ya next month!
Congrats! ^w^
