Write Every Day, December 1st

[bladespark]

I thought I'd start off December (since I haven't had any time/peace to write yet today) by looking at the goals I had for last month's writing, and see how I did.

Finish at *least* one chapter of Star Tiger. Preferably two.
I feel bad about this, because this story is for my biggest Patron and a close friend, (and is a very fun story!) and yet it's going soooooooooo slowly. I did finish the scene I was stuck on at the start of the month, and another scene, but I'm halfway through the one that will end this chapter, and haven't even started the next.

Write at least a thousand words more on the next Ember's chapter. Maybe finish it?
Success on the thousand words! No joy on finishing.

Finish Untitled Celestia Fic (two more chapters needed.)
Complete success here, it was written, edited, posted to Patreon, and posted publicly. The whole process complete, yay!

Get one bingo on the Trans bingo card. (Four more stories needed.)
Not even close. I wrote about 90% of one story, it's basically done but needs a final coda of some kind. I noodled a bunch of ideas for further stories, but didn't write anything. Oh well, this wasn't vital, but I do still want to keep at it.

I also did some stuff not on the goal list, including a short HFY story, and the intro to a Beauty and the Beast retelling I thought was good, though I've no plans to continue with that right now.

So overall I didn't do as much as I'd have liked, but given how rough the month was, I feel pretty satisfied all the same.

My goals for December are mostly to finish the stuff I didn't do in November, especially the Star Tiger and Ember's chapters, as well as finish another HFY story I've started. I think I'll be content if I can do that much, since I know it's going to be a stressful, busy month.


Written for Dec 1:
auroracloud, bookherd, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness lferion, lilacsigil, nafs, sanguinity, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme

Comments

[trobadora]

Thank you again for hosting! Good luck with finishing things in December. :)

Checking in for the 1st: I made some minor edits on an exchange fic I'm trying to whip into shape. Slow start into the month.

My goals for December: finish three exchange assignments and one treat. Fingers crossed.

[bladespark]

Good luck. Doing exchanges can be so much fun!

[sylvanwitch]

It sounds like you have reasonable, doable goals for December, and I wish you good luck with all of them! :-)

For Day 1, I wrote an 804-word Black Sails fic for a holiday fest.

My goal for the month is to break 200K for the year. This story brought me up to just over 189K. I'm hopeful that I can make it, but life can be unpredictable, so I guess we'll see.

[bladespark]

That seems like an ambitious but very achievable goal.

[lferion]

Day 1 - 300+ words, variously distributed. 100 of them were on my Highlander Holiday Shortcuts (HLH) piece, the rest Silmarillion.

Goals for December:
1. finish my HLH piece.
2. Write at least one drabble (hopefully more) for Yuletide Madness.
3. Write and post at least one thing to each of the 3 Fan Flashworks challenges. (I have an unbroken streak since I started, don’t want to break it :-))
4. Write and post something for the Silmarillion Writer’s Guild (SWG) holiday challenge.
5. Aim for at least 100 words a day.

[bladespark]

That's a lot of writing! Good luck with it.

[china_shop]

2 Nov: 1,380 words on time travel fic #6. I am soooo close to finishing the draft, but I want a bath and my window of opportunity is closing. ;-)

[bladespark]

Awesome! And bath time is precious. (I never knew exactly how precious until I had a kid, and it was "bathe with the kid or don't bathe" many days. Alone bath time relaxing is the best.)

[sanguinity]

Dec 1: got beta notes back and revised accordingly. Maybe came up with a title, too.

Speaking of beta notes, anyone ever had problems with GDocs not showing you comments and suggestions from a collaborator/beta? Because my beta went through my story and left me a ton of comments, and GDocs showed me the first three paragraphs-worth, but no more. If we didn't live in the same house, so I could just sit her machine next to mine and see on HER copy of the file which suggestions she'd made, I would never have seen them.

And if you have seen GDocs do that, do you know what the fix is?

[bladespark]

I've never had that problem. At least not that I know of. That's really weird. But then gdocs *is* really weird.

[sierranovembr]

:waves: Thank you for hosting this month and good luck with your goals!

I'm afraid I don't have specific goals for writing this month. I just want to solidify the habit a little better. Eventually, I would like to write a chaptered fic, but with travel it won't be likely this month.

Today I wrote an alibi paragraph before I had to go see to the dishes. :)

[bladespark]

Writing would be so much easier if life didn't happen, wouldn't it?

[cornerofmadness]

Good luck with your goals. Mine are to finish Come Undone (a Prodigal Son fanfic), do my spicy advent story and work on my nano novel.

I got 997 words on Come Undone so that's a start.

[bladespark]

I know nothing about Prodigal Son, but I do like the sound of a spicy advent story. Is that one original?

[cornerofmadness]

Thanks. Prodigal Son is my new favorite drama. The Spicy Advent will be Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The original is a novel I'm working on

[yasaman]

Thank you for hosting this month!

My goal for the month is to write my Yuletide assignment, plus maybe a treat or two, and to continue editing a draft of a longfic I've been working on for a while. Might work on another couple WIPs too if I need the break from the other projects.

Day 1: I did some research/canon review for my Yuletide fic, came up with a possible title, blocked out the basic outline for it, and wrote 143 words. Taking it pretty easy today, since I wrote a ton yesterday.

[bladespark]

That's great. Recharge days are definitely a thing.

[nafs]

You Got Things Done in November, go you! Good luck with December.

I started off December with just typing up more previously-written stuff, and discovering some other stuff that I thought had been typed into the "new parts to be used or discarded later" file had not been so if I don't have any inspiration tomorrow (checks clock) later today I know what I'm typing up next.

As to goals - get through the month feeling like I was productive. Low bar, possibly, but last month I didn't make that. Knew I probably wasn't going to, work at this end of the year is rough, but I would like to end off 2019 feeling like I have Made Progress this month.

[bladespark]

Sounds like you hand-write things? That's neat, I never could manage, at least not for anything longer than poetry.

[nafs]

Yeah. Typing works for fanfic or editing (mostly. If I had unlimited amounts of paper, I'd probably print out and go over things with a red pen as only a woman raised by teachers can) but for the novel it has to be paper. I even have a favourite pen. I'm a fast typist and sometimes typing stuff up leads to either thinking about the scene a new way or musing about some other scene and then out comes the pen and notebook once more.

[carenejeans]

Thank you for hosting!

I'm going through a bit of a rough patch right now; my husband had unexpected surgery last month, and I haven't been writing much, and was too stressed to check in.

But on most days I did manage to write an alibi sentence (or do alibi-sentence levels of work on a nonfiction project). I'll probably be doing that for a bit longer. He's out of the hospital and much better, but it will be a while before things get back to normal-ish.

So today's writing is an alibi sentence. I hope to manage a drabble by the end of the week. ;-)

[bladespark]

I hadn't heard the "alibi sentence" thing before finding WED, but it's definitely something I do a lot.

[lilacsigil]

December 2nd: finished editing fic (about 200 new words) and posted it!

[bladespark]

That's awesome!

[st_aurafina]

Checking in for Day 2: 200 words on an idfic I want to finish.

[bladespark]

Nifty! Can I ask what an "idfic" is?

[st_aurafina]

Id fic is the kind of fic you write with your id prominent - all feelings, no logic. It's very satisfying to write like that after pushing through NaNo which was all plot.

[bladespark]

Ah, that makes sense.

[auroracloud]

Thanks for hosting us in December! Good luck with your writing goals!

In November, I managed meet my goal of writing at least 100 words of my novel-in-progress every day, regardless of other writing I did or did not do. On some days it was just over 100 words, on some days it was a few hundred or several hundred, and I'm fairly pleased with how writing that draft has felt like. So for now I'm going to stick to that goal, but if it starts feeling difficult or I stop knowing what to write, I might take a few days off from that, either to have a break or to ruminate and brainstorm. I want to stick to that project until I've got a finished draft, but I also want to be flexible and listen to what it currently needs.

I also have a Yuletide fic to write, and there's an original short story I'd like to try submitting for an anthology call, and I've started one possible story for it. I'll try to finish either that or another suitable story.

Anyway, on the 1st, I didn't get a lot of writing because my brain chemistry was very much against me getting things done or enjoying myself; but I did get 111 words of novel and a few sentences of the short story, so that's a win.

[bladespark]

Those are some great goals. I'm curious what the anthology call you're submitting to is? I've had a lot of fun doing those in the past, though I find the process of submission, waiting, editing etc. to be really frustrating.

[auroracloud]

I didn't actually mention that I'm not a native English-speaker - while I write my fanfic, DW journal etc. in English, I do my original writing in my small European language (Finnish). So anyway, the anthology call is for stuff in Finnish, so you probably aren't familiar with it. :-)

I don't submit a lot of short fiction, for the reason that I don't manage to write a lot of non-fannish short fiction - most of my original ideas are born novel-sized. But as I've been reading somewhat more short fiction in the past years, I've been thinking I could try to write more, and maybe occasionally submit them. It would be a way of exploring ideas or genres without committing to a whole novel about them, and maybe a way of practicing story craft as well. There aren't a lot of magazines and anthologies in my language that take short fiction, though, so I'm not imagining it would get me published very often, but it would be cool to try. Might be good for my craft to make myself complete stories more often, at least.

[bladespark]

Oh, that's interesting! I mean, I didn't expect to have heard of what you're submitting to, short fiction markets are huge and varied, and unless they're furry and long-running I probably haven't heard of them.

[bookherd]

Hello, and thank you for hosting! I'm back after a month of logging my writing on the NaNo website instead of here. My writing for today (Day 1) was not up to my usual levels of abundance, but it happened!

[bladespark]

Writing is writing. :3

[ysilme]

Good luck with your writing goals for this month! Being satisfied is good, I think; so often RL is happening in the most unhelpful way, and it's never easy to carve out the time and energy for one's projects. I also hear you on the story-for-most-deserving-people issue, this happens to me all the time. I think the reason often is the desire to give your really best plus something more to it, which can be quite a stopper at times.
My tally for the 1st is 1,5k, partly for my current drawer fic and partly a letter about writing issues to a close friend. Personally, I count for my daily writing anything that is either creative or has in any way to do with writing, which sometimes might be a looong comment or letter about writing to one of my writing buddies, or something similar.

[bladespark]

1.5k is a lot of words! For my goals, if I count writing blogs/comments I guess I'll be writing every single day this month for sure. :3

Can I ask what a "drawer fic" is? (I feel like a fandom noob sometimes, even though I've been doing this forever, because until recently I didn't really connect with any fannish communities outside of MLP which has its own weird culture.)

[ysilme]

I don't know if drawer fic is also a fannish term; I've heard it first here at WED by a fellow participant, and it fit what I was doing all my life so well I happily adapted it. "Drawer fic" is fic you write just for yourself, for whatever reason, stories which remain firmly in the drawer, never to be seen of other eyes than yours. (Which doesn't mean it stops being drawer fic if you show it to somebody else, it's the intent behind/ the purpose the fic was written for.) Fic written just for the joy of writing, or for scratching an itch you absolutely need seen to but don't have the time, energy, or motivation to do in a proper writing manner, to fill your most secret story desires or whatever... ^^ or if you just want to write something but don't bother with proper this or that needed to otherwise make it fit for posting.
For me, drawer fic used to mostly be emotional and psychological comfort food, where I wrote parts and fragments of stories or just scenes I needed to deal with things, and with life. Since I've started to write in eaernest, I'm also using my plethora of drawer fics in all kinds of stages as writing exercises or to improve on something I'm not good at. You could say today it's a combination of practice writing with a healthy dose of soul-pampering thrown in.

[bladespark]

Aha! I have a whole folder full of drawer fics, then. Mostly things about personal issues where the characters are a little *too* me. And I have a shortlist of close friends who end up seeing some of them, but they're certainly not written in order to publish on any platform.

[silveradept]

Thank you for hosting this month. December's goals are mostly to have the December Days posts done on time, and to make sure that I keep feeding the content machine over Elsewhere.

In actual writing, finished and posted a linklist, and the first December Days post, and some noodling on a thought about negativity on fandom, and wow up another Grief post that is almost completed.

[bladespark]

You're welcome! And that's some good writing, I enjoy your blogs. I should really comment on them more, but you know, spoons and things.

[silveradept]

Ah, if only the spoon supply was infinite. It's okay that people don't comment.