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June 2025, trying to get back on track
4 months ago
Another month has gone by, and we're still here. Things in the grand scheme of life seem as tumultuous as ever, with small sprinkles of good news sandwiched between larger pieces of continuing bad news. However, as has usually been the case for me, zooming the scale in to my personal life alone, things are pretty much fine. May still ended up being kind of a bad month for me in terms of getting writing done, but it was at least an improvement over the disaster that was April.
EDIT: Within 24 hours of this journal going up, the chair I've been using for years finally broke. I also found out that my insurance coverage for a blood test I did 6 weeks ago got screwed up again, the same as it did last year which I eventually had to pay out of pocket and suspect I will again this time, for like 50% more than it was last year. Oh and I found out that if I pay for my blood tests out of pocket upfront instead of trying to go through my insurance, the total I pay is almost the same as what I pay after what my insurance 'covers', so it's almost no help at all anyway. Uuuggghhh...
As I've alluded to in uploads and before, the biggest problem for me when it comes to doing writing for FA is finding the opportunity to simply sit down and do it. Life lately has metaphorically felt like I'm trying to keep several plates spinning at the same time, and the simple truth of the matter is that this writing hobby had to be pretty much the first casualty in trying to keep things afloat. There's been work, long YouTube uploads I want to keep up with, my other writing hobby of participating in forum games, video games I'd like to play, and spending time hanging out with personal friends, including lately us finally being able to pick up some TTRPG stuff after several months of not being able to. It's been hard to keep the momentum going for writing furry stuff when it's been too easy to get home after work and look at what I have going on and be like, "I won't worry about trying to do any writing tonight; I'll just pick it up tomorrow." Then next thing I know multiple days have passed without a single word of progress done on either the latest long story or another short.
Well, this month I think I might be able to turn things around a bit. One thing I sort of touched on before is that I recently picked up "Ithya: Magic Studies" on Steam. It's technically a video game, but it's really more of a productivity tool made by the same people behind a YouTube channel that I've liked to turn to for calming music that helps me focus while writing. So it's basically that in a contained package that I can use even while the internet is out, which I've otherwise had to just tough out or not write during, since it's hard for me to write in just silence. So with that I'm going to try to be a little bit more strict with myself about getting some- even if it's not a lot- of writing done for this hobby every day, rather than procrastinate and kick it down the road. Excepting only days where I have something big like a doctor's appointment or perhaps giving myself one day a week off free. I don't think I can get back to the comparatively blazing speed I could get stories done when I started here back in 2021, but I'm hoping that I can at least be faster than what I've been doing lately. Though if I can't... Then I must be honest, I may have to rethink how I approach the hobby entirely; taking over two months to finish a story that's less than 7,000 words feels like way too much for me, and at that point I don't know if I would be able to take on requests in good conscience. Telling someone that they might have to wait a whole year- or even more!- when there's less than half a dozen people waiting does not feel good to me.
Anyway, that dry stuff aside, I'll now get to stuff that's a bit more fun in topic. So this last month I finished one short story, and finally finished the long story that had technically been in the works for 10 weeks. Both of them have performed about average for my stories. I have another short that is actually pretty much done, which I just need to do the finishing touches on and write up the description stuff for, which I will probably be able to do in the next couple of days. The only reason it hasn't already gone up is that I've been trying to get my monthly important IRL stuff done first.
For my next long story I've decided I'll keep with the schedule of doing another personal story next. I've been thinking of another narrative challenge for myself like I did with the last personal long story. (The one where I challenged myself to write a story about a couple who were already in a long term, committed relationship when the story takes place.) This time the challenge is to write a story that follows the same kind of set up as I've written before, but from the opposite perspective. It occurred to me that I have a number of stories where one of the two main characters has some kind of plot/scheme going on to end up together with the other main character, much to the other character's surprise, since it's a set up I enjoy. However, in pretty much all of those stories, I've written it from the point of view of the character who is getting surprised, and the plotting/scheming is only revealed after the fact. So this time, I want to employ the same set up again, but told from the perspective of the character doing the plotting; I want to see if I can still make that change in narrative focus just as enjoyable to read.
Okay, that was a bit more rambling than usual, and I think I'm done now. If you read through that whole thing, then thank you, and I hope you have a great June. If you didn't read through it, then that's okay, and I still hope you have a great June anyway. =)
EDIT: Within 24 hours of this journal going up, the chair I've been using for years finally broke. I also found out that my insurance coverage for a blood test I did 6 weeks ago got screwed up again, the same as it did last year which I eventually had to pay out of pocket and suspect I will again this time, for like 50% more than it was last year. Oh and I found out that if I pay for my blood tests out of pocket upfront instead of trying to go through my insurance, the total I pay is almost the same as what I pay after what my insurance 'covers', so it's almost no help at all anyway. Uuuggghhh...
As I've alluded to in uploads and before, the biggest problem for me when it comes to doing writing for FA is finding the opportunity to simply sit down and do it. Life lately has metaphorically felt like I'm trying to keep several plates spinning at the same time, and the simple truth of the matter is that this writing hobby had to be pretty much the first casualty in trying to keep things afloat. There's been work, long YouTube uploads I want to keep up with, my other writing hobby of participating in forum games, video games I'd like to play, and spending time hanging out with personal friends, including lately us finally being able to pick up some TTRPG stuff after several months of not being able to. It's been hard to keep the momentum going for writing furry stuff when it's been too easy to get home after work and look at what I have going on and be like, "I won't worry about trying to do any writing tonight; I'll just pick it up tomorrow." Then next thing I know multiple days have passed without a single word of progress done on either the latest long story or another short.
Well, this month I think I might be able to turn things around a bit. One thing I sort of touched on before is that I recently picked up "Ithya: Magic Studies" on Steam. It's technically a video game, but it's really more of a productivity tool made by the same people behind a YouTube channel that I've liked to turn to for calming music that helps me focus while writing. So it's basically that in a contained package that I can use even while the internet is out, which I've otherwise had to just tough out or not write during, since it's hard for me to write in just silence. So with that I'm going to try to be a little bit more strict with myself about getting some- even if it's not a lot- of writing done for this hobby every day, rather than procrastinate and kick it down the road. Excepting only days where I have something big like a doctor's appointment or perhaps giving myself one day a week off free. I don't think I can get back to the comparatively blazing speed I could get stories done when I started here back in 2021, but I'm hoping that I can at least be faster than what I've been doing lately. Though if I can't... Then I must be honest, I may have to rethink how I approach the hobby entirely; taking over two months to finish a story that's less than 7,000 words feels like way too much for me, and at that point I don't know if I would be able to take on requests in good conscience. Telling someone that they might have to wait a whole year- or even more!- when there's less than half a dozen people waiting does not feel good to me.
Anyway, that dry stuff aside, I'll now get to stuff that's a bit more fun in topic. So this last month I finished one short story, and finally finished the long story that had technically been in the works for 10 weeks. Both of them have performed about average for my stories. I have another short that is actually pretty much done, which I just need to do the finishing touches on and write up the description stuff for, which I will probably be able to do in the next couple of days. The only reason it hasn't already gone up is that I've been trying to get my monthly important IRL stuff done first.
For my next long story I've decided I'll keep with the schedule of doing another personal story next. I've been thinking of another narrative challenge for myself like I did with the last personal long story. (The one where I challenged myself to write a story about a couple who were already in a long term, committed relationship when the story takes place.) This time the challenge is to write a story that follows the same kind of set up as I've written before, but from the opposite perspective. It occurred to me that I have a number of stories where one of the two main characters has some kind of plot/scheme going on to end up together with the other main character, much to the other character's surprise, since it's a set up I enjoy. However, in pretty much all of those stories, I've written it from the point of view of the character who is getting surprised, and the plotting/scheming is only revealed after the fact. So this time, I want to employ the same set up again, but told from the perspective of the character doing the plotting; I want to see if I can still make that change in narrative focus just as enjoyable to read.
Okay, that was a bit more rambling than usual, and I think I'm done now. If you read through that whole thing, then thank you, and I hope you have a great June. If you didn't read through it, then that's okay, and I still hope you have a great June anyway. =)
