Well, fuck. You can tell by that title how this journal is gonna go.

Yeah, after years and years of me Matrix Dodging Covid successfully like a fucking god, my luck finally ran out this month. The infuriating part is that most of the blame rests on my employers. You see, when our lovely government decided to officially end the national health emergency for Covid, it meant it became legal for my employers to then end all special accommodations for anyone who catches it. Before, during the emergency period, my company would let you miss as much work as you needed to in order to recover if you came down with the virus and all of it would be excused time off. But now that the emergency is over, they treat covid like any other everyday bug, meaning we have to spend our normal sick time to cover it if we want to stay home.

Given I've not even hit 5 years of seniority at this job yet, and our employment contract dictates the amount of sick time based on seniority, I do NOT get very much sick time. Right now it's 5 days per calendar year period, which rolls over every June. That's...not even enough for a full bout of covid, let alone a bout of covid and any other potential illness or emergency that could come up over an entire year period. I'm not the only one in this boat either, a large majority of people in the plant where I work aren't above 5 years seniority either, and many people use their sick leave for other things like flus or flat tires or family issues. So this means many people are now forced into the position of either coming to work sick with covid or being written up or even fired.

Understandably, this means a lot of people started coming to work with covid. Which caused it to spread all over the plant like fucking wildfire.

Now to be fair, I should have realized this would happen and started masking while at work the instant they announced the policy change. But I was already busy and worried about taking care of my roommate who was having unrelated health issues at the time and didn't wear a mask. As a result, I caught it as it ran through the plant.

Fuck.

Yeah as you can imagine I've been fuckin' livid about this, but there's not been much I could do about it. I just took SOME sick time, then went back to work while still sick. Whatever variant I caught is really nasty, as it made me REALLY sick for a few days despite being vaccinated. Not hospitalization levels of sick, thank Arceus for that, but the brunt of it had me getting body aches, chills, and the shakes so bad that it caused the muscles in my jaw and neck to spasm. The pain was fucking agonizing. Just moving my head made my neck and jaw feel like they were being bashed with a lead pipe. And even after the worst of it was over, the fucking bug still clung to me for literal WEEKS, keeping me low-key miserable constantly all day for the better part of half of the month. Having to continuously go in to work at my physical manufacturing job while sick only exacerbated this and has undoubtedly prolongued and elongated my recovery period. As of the writing of this journal entry I only have just started to get my senses of taste and smell back.

It's darkly ironic and hilarious that I worked at one of the biggest walmarts in the fucking country during the opening stages of the pandemic, while unvaxed since there were no vaccines yet at the time, and got constantly exposed to thousands of customers, and never caught it once. But now, in a fucking manufacturing plant that's closed off from the general public where everyone is legally mandated to be vaccinated since our plant is government contracted, NOW is when I catch it. Go fucking figure huh?

Still, there is some good news in all this. I only caught the fucking thing about halfway into August. That means I had half of the month where I was happily churning away at my writing. So even if the final half of the month was a complete wash where I was too sick to write, I actually got a really nice chunk of writing done! The momentum from July carried me really well actually, letting me get far more done than I expected. Let's break it down!

AUGUST 2023 WRITING SUMMARY

Good news! Even if I didn't fulfill all my objectives this month, I did in fact somehow meet and exceed my wordcount goal for the month! My friend Nimbus, who I am writing the "Joining the Family" story for, asked to collaborate on it with me and roleplay it out as a rough draft first so I could then story-ify the RP log afterward. This made working on the rough draft MUUUUUUUUUUCH easier, and led to us absolutely POUNDING out a huge chunk of it. Scope creep has ended up expanding the expected size of it significantly but I don't mind that. I owed Nimbus a fair bit, so it was perfectly fine in my eyes to give them a much bigger story. We didn't finish the whole thing, but damn we got a lot done.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
❌ -Joining The Family: Currently 13,891 words out of a goal of 15,000 words for the month
✔️ -Arina is All Chunk 11: Currently 6,584 words out of a goal of 3,750 words for the month

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
✔️ -Arina is All Chunk 11: 6,584 words on a goal of as much as possible, up to the full 15,000 words
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 3: 5,633 words words on a goal of as much as possible, up to the full 15,000 words
❌ -Editing of Joining The Family: 0 words edited of an expected 15,000 words of editing

✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN AUGUST 2023: 26,108 words!

Well, not bad for half a month's worth of work! I am certainly not going to blame or be upset with myself for not meeting every single objective while sick with Covid of all things. If there's any good excuse for missing a personal goal, it's that. Besides, I'm very very happy with that final wordcount total for the month. You know why? I managed to add just enough additional surplus to my wordcount to extend my record and hit a new milestone! I exceeded my monthly quota by 7,358 words this month, and adding it to my ongoing surplus of 30,248 words from last month, that makes our current ongoing yearly surplus total now 37,606 words! This means I have to update my surplus record from last month!

(Smash Bros Announcer Voice) A NEW RECORD!!!
Highest On-year Wordcount Surplus: 37,606 words (August 2023)

You know what really makes this special though? That surplus is just BARELY above two whole months worth of surplus! Two fuckin months! I could absolutely spend all of September and October doing literally no writing and still be on track for my 225K word yearly goal! That's fuckin BALLER, yo! I'm more than happy with this now even if I didn't quite manage to clear all my objectives this month.

You know what? I think I may actually even extend my goals for the year. Or at least keep my primary wordcount goal intact while adding some stretch goals. But that's something to set up in the next section, so let's get to it!

SEPTEMBER 2023 WRITING GOALS

So this month I'm gonna absolutely finish Joining the Family, no exceptions. Since I'd say I'm about 90% recovered from my bout with the 'rona now, I can already feel my muse stirring back to life. I'm going to set some reasonable additional goals to go with it, as well as some nice optional stretch goals.

Also, I think I'm going to continue to set the standard that my Primary Goals should be hardcapped at the monthly minimum quota. This is because anything beyond the minimum quota is a stretch goal, and stretch goals should ONLY be put into secondary objectives. So when you look at the Primary Objectives from now on, you will see me setting hard caps to keep their wordcount at 18,750.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Joining The Family: Currently 13,891 words out of an expected 20,000 words = 6,109 expected words this month
-Arina is All Chunk 11: Currently 6,584 words out of an expected 20,000 words = 13,416 words to finish, but only 12,641 of which is expected for this month to meet the hard cap

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Arina is All Chunk 11: The rest of the chunk beyond the hard cap, 775 words at least to meet the expected final total of 20,000 words, but more is allowed
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 3: Any amount of the rest of the chunk, up to 9,367 words to at least meet the expected final total of 15,000 words, but more is allowed.
-Editing of Joining The Family: Expected 15,000 words of editing
-Editing of Arina is All Chunk 11: Expected 20,000 words of editing

Total Expected Word Count for August: 18,750-28,892 words
Total Expected Editing Count for August: 0-35,000 words

Ok, phew! So you'll notice here that my expected final totals for stuff has significantly expanded AGAIN. It's funny because I used to consider 1 Chunk of any given story to be about 10K words total, but now it's ballooned to double that size for a lot of my projects. Honestly I'm not upset about that, I do enjoy being a wordy motherfucker after all! It's just funny that this month's stretch goal is slightly smaller than last month's despite my total chunk size estimates getting bigger. Ah well, I suppose it's natural. Any month where I'm starting whole chunks fresh with 0 words to start are naturally going to be more ambitious.

This month though I AM going to try to keep my focus honed more sharply on my Primary Objectives first before starting my secondaries. Obviously in August I didn't exactly EXPECT to come down with Covid, which is why I felt comfortable working on COTP early in the month while planning to finish Joining the Family over the period of the whole month. This month I'll be trying more to finish Joining the Family and AiA Chunk 11 first before even touching COTP.

And hey, I am excited for my stretch goal this month, even if it's not quite as ambitious! To be honest, I think I'm going to set a new set of stretch goals for myself for the year!

YEARLY STRETCH GOAL 1: Try to always add to my surplus every single month for the rest of the year rather than just meeting minimum quotas or going into deficits
YEARLY STRETCH GOAL 2: Try to hit a yearly wordcount total of 250,000 words!

I think these are both quite doable goals as long as I am not hit with any additional major life crises like unemployment or hospitalization. Stretch Goal 2 only requires an additional 25,000 words beyond my standard yearly goal of 225K. Given I'm now 37,606 words above and beyond my quota year-on, as long as I can keep hitting my minimum monthly quota every month for the rest of the year then I'm EASILY on track to meet this stretch goal as is. I'm hyped for it too because a cool quarter milly in a year means that I only need 4 years of work to hit 1 million words! How fucking baller is that? I mean sure, it's no Steven King level of output, but I think ol' Steven is a statistical outlier among writers for just how absurdly huge his output is, lol.

And who knows? If I hit the stretch goal of 250K words this year, maybe I can raise my REGULAR yearly goal for next year too? Maybe 300K with a stretch goal of 333K, to go for a third of a milly, and 1milly in 3 years? It's ambitious as fuck, sure, but I've been on a constant upwards trend for my yearly wordcount outputs! There's probably a lot of factors that have gone into my slow growing successes as a writer but I'm fairly certain that my determination and ambition are definitely some of them. So I'm going to keep at it and stay determined, Frisk-style, to keep it up! If all my various life crises up until now haven't been able to stop me, then I doubt much else will!

Once again, thanks for sticking with me and reading, as always!