Write Every Day, December 2nd

[bladespark]

Yesterday I did what I now know is called an alibi paragraph. :D

Today I have not yet written. My brain is being eaten by toddler stuff and life in general and I have no spoons, so I don't know if I will.

On which topic, I hosted this partly because I'd like to be a little more social, so I want to reply to everyone and talk about what people are writing and so on, but that takes energy and today I am so out, so I may not be responding to check-in comments unless you have a question for me or something of that sort. (I mean, don't worry about asking questions, responding to that isn't as spoon heavy as coming up with interesting things to say or asking my own questions about what folks are writing, you know?)

Anyhow, hope you are all having good luck so far. :3



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


Dec. 2:
alexseanchai, auroracloud, bookherd, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, lilacsigil, nafs, sanguinity, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme

Comments

[sylvanwitch]

I can completely relate to not having the energy to socialize but wanting to. :-) I'm sending you warm, fuzzy thoughts and the rest you need to feel most yourself.

I wrote a 585-word Steve/Tony story that was half an excuse for shower sex (the prompt word was "shower") and half an exercise in describing a post-bombing scene. My brain is weird sometimes.

[bladespark]

That's great! I find the mixing of gratuitous smut with serious things to be really fun, personally.

[alexseanchai]

I wrote a few sentences both days.

[bladespark]

Awesome. :3

[yasaman]

Day 2: 211 words on the Yuletide fic, plus I refreshed my memory on some canon moments to draw on for this fic.

[bladespark]

That's great. :3 Sometimes the excuse to go back and re-watch canon is fun to have.

[nafs]

One of the best parts about the internet, something we tend to forget with all the fast-paced social media stuff like twitter and tumblr, is that its a form of asynchronous communication: both parties do not have to be online at the same time for a conversation to take place. So take the time you need, and when you've got some energy, the comments will still be here to be as social as you like (or don't like) in them.

Don't have a particular word count today. There was a decent amount of typing up of stuff from the summer, some moving around of scenes, some adding and deleting to smooth things out...progress has been made. I may or may not get away with writing the next scene I need to without setting out more of the characters' daily schedule... we'll see what tomorrow brings.

[bladespark]

You make a good point about the asynchronicity (wow, my spellcheck knows that's a word.) Which is why I'm replying to things this morning instead of last night. I've generally been in the habit of dealing with DW comments as soon as I get them, but when you're getting one or two a week it's a different matter than when you get one every few hours, which for some reason hadn't occurred to me when I volunteered to do this!

[lferion]

Day 2 - 100 words of HLH. Feeling out what this story is and where it is going.

[bladespark]

Sounds great. Good luck figuring it out.

[china_shop]

3 Dec: 488 words, giving me a completed draft of time travel fic #6. It needs a thorough read-through, but still. \o/!!!

[bladespark]

Wooo! That's awesome.

[cornerofmadness]

I see you have books. I'll have to check them out (I also have some gay vampire novels roaming about).

It's been a horrible day so I wrote to avoid the pain. I ended up with 4463 words on Come Undone (and I get it, the energy thing. I won't be upset if you don't respond to my every tally post)

[bladespark]

You know, brains are so weird, I had a "holy crap, oh no, a real author is going to look at my stuff?" moment on first seeing this comment. Which is silly, I'm a "real" author myself. Imposter syndrome is a hell of a thing!

That's a great wordcount, I love days when I can get that much done. Though I'm sorry your day was awful. Hopefully today is looking better.

[cornerofmadness]

I get you, Believe me! Imposter syndrome hits me every time (like right now with two new Christmas novellas coming out)

Thanks. I do too. I wish it were better. what I feared last night is coming true. I have to put my cat to sleep later this week

[bladespark]

That is a really awful thing to have to deal with, I'm sorry to hear it.

[cornerofmadness]

It is. It's the best thing for him at this point but it's hard. Thank you.

[sierranovembr]

Checking in with work writing today. After I checked in I did a little more than 400 words on my fun fic. Yay!

Hope you're feeling more energized soon! No need to reply. :)

[bladespark]

Well, I'm doing much better this morning, thank you. And that's great!

[sanguinity]

Minor revisions + publishing the story I finished yesterday.

[bladespark]

Publishing is so great. Congrats!

[sanguinity]

I wish I was happier with the story, but sometimes a story is what it is. And I've been around this block enough to know that my dissatisfactions with a story in no way prevents people from finding enjoyment in it. So it's all good -- or good enough anyway. ;-)

[bladespark]

Oh yeah. And if you work on them until they're perfect, you never publish anything, because they're never perfect.

[sanguinity]

EXACTLY. And not only would I never publish, but I'd work myself into an ugly mental state while I was failing to publish! I've put a fair amount of work into not pulling head games on myself about my writing, so yeah: sometimes I gotta tell myself that it's good enough, put it out there to give someone an opportunity to enjoy it, and move on to the next project.

[auroracloud]

I totally sympathize with / relate to not always having energy for socializing, even if you want to do more of it.

I wrote a couple of poems, which I haven't done in a while. And one of them is actually fanfic? Fan poetry? (Except that sounds like it's poetry about me being a fan, which is not the case. I mean poetry that's a fanwork, written as from the POV of one character in the canon.) I then managed to write a little over 200 words on my novel, so that's progressing.

[bladespark]

Social energy is so odd. Somebody below commented with strategies to not burn energy coding updates, but that doesn't stress me out at all. There's something different about typing when it's to another person that's really different from typing in update codes or whatever.

Fan poetry is nifty, I don't see much of it. That's really great.

[bookherd]

Day 2: couple of alibi sentences. No response necessary -- really appreciate your hosting regardless! If it weren't for WED, I wouldn't have written those sentences. <3

[bladespark]

It's a very useful thing that way! :3

[st_aurafina]

Checking in for Day 3: 370 words on a fic for navaan's Spicy Advent challenge.

[bladespark]

That's great!

I'm wondering how people count words. I only have such exact word counts when I start something new and can just look at the document total. Is there a "count as you go" program, or do folks just note the word count when they start writing? I never remember to do that.

[sanguinity]

I write in GDocs, and if you highlight a portion of the text before running the word count function, it'll give you wordcount for both the highlighted section and the document overall. So if I've added a chunk of new words somewhere, I just highlight them to get my word count for the day.

[bladespark]

Hmmm. I wonder if Scrivener can do that? I shall have to go see!

[st_aurafina]

I keep a spreadsheet and keep it updated as I go - I put in the starting word count each time I sit down to write, and add it up at the end of the day.

[silveradept]

Wrote my December Days post, then did a lot of erranding and food, and then finished a story set in an ongoing series after a few false starts and having to write my way out of a corner to accommodate helpful information the brain provided right at the end.

[bladespark]

Sounds like you're busybusybusy with writing. :3

[trobadora]

For the 2nd:

Lunch break writing - spontaneously wrote unplanned fic (well, fic snippets) completely unrelated to anything else, which is something that hasn't happened to me in ages. Yay!

Evening: More exchange fic editing. Slow going because I don't have much brain left in the evening. (I totally hear you on the lack of energy.)

[ysilme]

Wohoo, that's awesome! ***\O/***

[trobadora]

It really is! :D :D :D

[bladespark]

I love when spontaneous stories just happen. It's such a great feeling.

[trobadora]

It really is! :D

[ysilme]

663 new words for me for the 2nd, plus some time spent with research for the novel project and checking the proofs for an original story for a Christmas story project before printing.
I can totally relate to be spoon-less, or very low on them; I'm often operating on the barest minimum or less. I hope things will look better for you soon!
But if I might give you a little tip for hosting WED? You don't have to comment in-depth on every tally report, we all know well enought that sometimes there are no spoons for this! But please try to give everybody at least a short, positive answer; it can be as simple as a "Glad to hear you wrote!" or "congrats to the word count!".
For some participants, having a place to check in is all they need. But for others, even the smalles bit of feedback makes a difference, or they might be going through a different writing period and just your comment might make a difference. I've had this happen when I was hosting and had a hard time finding the energy even for these small answers, and felt horribly repetitive since I mostly only managed what I just listed above. But at the end of the month, one participant said they've been in a bad place, writing-wise and in general, and my small encouragements had made a real difference for them.

On the other hand, as we're talking about spoons, you absolutely don't need to keep a running tally of the current day and edit in everybody who commens as they do it. Silveradept did it this way, but I think they've been the first to do it, though I'm not sure. But usually, we post our tally entry, and on the next day, collect the reports, make the next tally entry, post that. Some of us comment on the reports as they come, others do it in one setting, any way is perfectly fine, of course!

What I'm also personally doing to make the coding part most efficient (as I'm chronically low on spoons and love efficiency *g* ), I have a simple txt file in a plain text teditor with prepared code I can just copy and paste. It took me a couple of hosting months to perfect it, and I'm sure the way I'm doing it won't work for everybody. But if such an approach is your thing, it might be an idea to try it out.

Sending lots of energy your way!

[bladespark]

Thank you! That's a lot of great info.

I actually find the coding/updates part of this to be relatively non-draining. It's not opening the window and typing that's the problem so much as the constant kinda low-level anxiety whenever I'm interacting with another human being that makes replies take some energy. Am I saying the right thing? Am I being encouraging or sounding dumb? Am I talking too much about myself and what I'm writing like some kind of narcissist or is sharing my similar thoughts connecting with people? So many things to worry about! They're all silly, of course, I'm sure nobody else is picking apart my words to make certain I'm saying exactly the right thing, but all that bounces around in my head all the same.

[sanguinity]

For the record, sometimes I really enjoy dumb encouragement: those options are neither mutually exclusive nor bad. Please feel free to say "Good job!" or "Yay!" or "Hooray!" to me and leave it at that, any time you like. ;-)

[alexcat]

For Dec 1 and 2, I had some surgery so I did 10 words each day just to get some words down.