Well, April sure did its best to derail me. In the end it did at least manage to derail the Writeathon challenge for me, I couldn't quite make the 55K. BUT, I at least beat my monthly regular quota. You know what, I'm gonna call that a win in my book. Given how stressful shit has been this month.

Long story short, I have a lazy asshole coworker on the production line who only does 1 single station while I do 6 by myself. The bosses have finally sat up and taken notice about how fucking unfair that is, and they spent all month forcing him to learn a few more so he could take a more fair split. If he did 3 and I did 4, it'd still be tilted to me doing more work but it'd be a lot more viable, especially since then I'm not a bottleneck on the line's output. I'm busting my ass but I can't put 12+ machines through 6 stations by myself in one shift without any help.

The problem is that this lazy dickhead knew that once he signed off on learning those 2 new stations he'd be expected to permanently take over them and that's the last thing his wrinkly old boomer ass wants. So he spent the entire fucking month dragging his feet and playing dumb, pretending to be too stupid to understand the work, while my bosses have asked me and 3 other people to train him. It didn't take the lazy bum too long to actually understand the work since it's as easy as plugging a USB thumb drive into the machine and clicking "Download all", but he continued to sandbag until the bosses tried to force him to sign off. He refused, instead choosing to get the union involved and file a dispute. I was then asked to fucking testify in that meeting, since I was one of his trainers.

This is a fucking horrible no-win situation. If I told the truth that I think he was intentionally sandbagging to avoid the work then I'd be making a permanent enemy out of him. Since he has literal DECADES of seniority over me and is friends with basically everyone in the plant, he could make my life a living hell. But if I lied to cover his ass, I'd be lying to the union committee and also continuing to get myself saddled with an obscene amount of work, as well as risking pissing my supervisor off since I was the one who asked the supervisor to get me some help with the unfair share of the work.

I was stressing about this shit for weeks, while also dealing with another coworker being a whiny bitch and reporting me to management for having my music up too loud instead of being an adult and using his grown-up words to ask me to turn down my music. Because mature adult communication is too fucking much to expect from these boomers who are often twice my fucking age and would rather expect me to actually be a psychic IRL and know when they're starting to feel irritated.

At least I managed to weasel my way out of the no-win scenario by testifying that "Yes I think COWORKERNAME is smart enough to understand the stations but I can't speak as to how much more training he thinks he needs to feel comfortable signing off" and that managed to avoid making enemies out of anyone. He did eventually sign off, but it took management threatening to write him up if he didn't start doing more than his 1 station before he started actually working. Add all this nonsense garbage onto the usual existential dread and terror over current events and it has been one extremely mentally and emotionally fucking exhausting month that has made me want to dunk my head into a vat of lava. If anything, it's once again a miracle that I got any writing done at all.

APRIL 2025 WRITING SUMMARY

So uh, this month was decent for editing, but for comms, not so much lol. When I was aiming for the writeathon, I figured I'd try to propel my muse forward by writing mostly my own self-indulgent passion projects. That's why you're about to see a cute little pile of Red X's and a bunch of brand new shit added to the queue that wasn't there before.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
❌ -Untitled Comm for ah1987: Wrote 0 words
✔️ -Editing of The Arinafication of House Inagaki Chunk 1: 17,610 words edited
✔️ -Editing of The Arinafication of House Inagaki Chunk 2: 20,805 words edited
❌ -Untitled Comm for lateinshowing: Wrote 0 words
❌ -Untitled Comm for dreadfulart: Wrote 0 words

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 6: Wrote 15,019 new words on a goal of any
❌ -Editing of Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 5: About halfway done editing, don't wanna count the words until it's done.
✔️ -The Other Path - Pyrogenesis - Chunk 1: Wrote 725 new words on a goal of any
✔️ -Tellurium Chains - Chunk 1: Wrote 8,145 new words on a goal of any
✔️ -Granddaughters of Din: Wrote 9,288 new words
✔️ -The River in the Valley - Chunk 1: Wrote 8,701 new words

-WORDS ADDED DURING EDITING-
-The Arinafication of House Inagaki Chunk 1: 64 new words added
-The Arinafication of House Inagaki Chunk 2: 574 new words added
- Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 4: 272 new words added
- Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 5: 4 new words added

✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN APRIL 2025: 42,792 words!
❌ -TOTAL WORDS EDITED IN APRIL 2025: 39,056 words!

So yeah, I was still short about 12K from the Writeathon goal, but passed my normal quota handily. I went over by 15,014 words, specifically. This means my year-on deficit has shrank from the 29,320 of last month to 14,306 this month. That still stinks of course, but it's FAR more manageable. Of course, if I had actually met my Writeathon goal I'd have almost totally wiped that debt clean, but given the unending shit parade that has been my life, I'm going to count my blessings and give myself a check mark for this month's wordcount total.

As for the new stuff, I did a lot of editing as you saw! COTP:DL Chunk 4 was already finished, for example, but I identified a fantastic new addition to it that involved adding a few corrections and a small scene rewrite here and there. I would have finished the editing of Chunk 5 too if I hadn't also identified yet another scene needing a complete rewrite there too. Which is like... the fucking FIFTH major revision this chunk has needed now. As the month wound down and I ran up close to the Writeathon deadline I actually got so mired in writer's block for the Chunk 5 revisions that I made a snap decision to just swap over to writing new content for Chunk 6 instead so my muse could keep producing words. Better to put editing on the backburner and come back to it later when I wasn't under the gun.

I also brought Granddaughters back out of cold storage briefly to add a few new minor scenes and then a whole nother chapter. But then stopped to move on because I ended up discovering that at least a couple scenes in there needed heavy rewriting too, and that was just as poisonous to the muse as the COTP rewrites.

Then, at some point during the month, I was listening to some really old New Age music from my childhood and reminiscing about it. I listened to a song that kid me associated with Princess Ruto from Ocarina of Time, since I was playing OOT when that song first came out. While reminiscing I reflected on how much I wanted to bang adult Ruto from the adult link portion of the game, then had an epiphany. I didn't have to just pine for Ruto's wet fish tiddies, I could write smut about them now! So I spontaneously decided to start on a smut story about Ruto! Though childhood me used to fantasize about pairing Link with Ruto and using Link as a stand-in for me, now that I've hatched my egg and come out as a transfem, I decided I wanted a more sapphic pairing for Ruto this time instead. So, I did what my predictable Gerudo-brainrotted self would do and decided to pair Ruto with Nabooru for this fic! It's called "The River in the Valley" since I wanted an elegant reference to Zora's River passing through Gerudo Valley. It'll probably be a mid-sized story for me, which means probably 50-100K ish words across 4-ish chunks. I want my big bouncy fish tiddies in large quantities, damnit!

And of course, I made decent progress on Tellurium Chains and The Other Path. I've slowed down a fair bit on ToP though, as I've been adding so much to it as I go that I've almost entirely diverged away from what was in my paper notebook and this has been a struggle to manage. Still, breaking 10K words already on the first chunk of Tellurium Chains is exciting, since I am gonna likely finish it this month and post it already! More Lilith fun is always enjoyable!

And hey, managing to finish up and post Hair of the Dog Part 2 and both chunks of Arinafication of House Inagaki was a big plus! I feel like I want to go back to comms again this coming month, but I also wanna keep them spaced out like before so I can still do fun stuff too. So, onward to planning!

MAY 2025 WRITING GOALS

So, how to split this up? I am absolutely fucking DETERMINED to finally finish COTP:DL Chunk 5 once and for all this month so I'm moving it up to a primary. I think I can finish Precious's comm quickly since it's a shorter one, so I may do it and one other. Then, the rest? We'll see how things shake down. I'm gonna try to leave a range for myself this month.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Editing of Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 5: About 18,000 words left to edit
-Untitled Comm for ah1987: Expected 7,500 words
-Untitled Comm for lateinshowing: Expected 15,000 words
OR
-Untitled Comm for dreadfulart: Expected 15,000 words


-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Tellurium Chains - Chunk 1: At least 5,000 more words to finish the chunk
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 6: ANY wordcount
-The Other Path - Pyrogenesis - Chunk 1: However many words come out of finishing transcription out of my paper notebook
-The River in the Valley - Chunk 1: ANY wordcount

Total Expected Writing Wordcount for May 2025: 27,778-30,000 words
Total Expected Editing Wordcount for May 2025: 18,000 words

Well, I think this is doable! The money I made from the Arinafication of House Inagaki went right into my bills and was super mega fucking useful, so big thanks to decripte for that! I do think I'll definitely TRY for two more comms here too since the bill issues are STILL FUCKING ONGOING and every penny from comms helps with that immensely. I may just go over this quota if the muse strikes too, I'd love to fully wipe out my wordcount debt entirely this month if possible. River & Valley has been really damn fun to write so far and I get the feeling it's gonna be just as easy as COTP to hyperfocus on. And once I do finally finish rewriting that scene in COTP then I feel really energized to pump out Chunk 6.

Sadly I'm still gonna be slow to post art this month. I do still have a few backlogged pics that need to be posted, but financial issues are still lingering so I don't feel safe buying a ton of new art comms yet. Gods, my job keeps feeling more and more scarily tenuous, if I get laid off right now...

Ugh. Best not to think about that.

Wish me luck, lovelies! I'm really hoping this month tones down the psychic damage, especially with the car and work anxiety. But the fact that I still managed so much last month through that hell has me hopeful. Crossing my fingers!