We all know about the elephant in the room, so I'm just going to say, "That sure was a year, huh?" and cut myself some slack for not achieving what I meant to at the beginning of 2020. Setting the obvious aside, my husband and I also bought a house, which was a serious energy drain.

But! I still achieved some things worth recording. Though I didn't meet two out of three of my goals, I still made progress toward them. And not making it 100% of the way there is not the same as doing nothing, no matter what my dumb brain thinks.

2020 Review

1. Complete the next draft of the supernatural/paranormal-adjacent, fantasy novella project. While I didn't get all the way through this one, I did make 8-ish chapters of progress, and since it's novella, that's a decent chunk of the way there. Hoping I can get the rest cleaned up in 2021.

2. Writing and writing-related activities on no less than 240 days this year. I fell short of this goal, which was also my GYWO goal, by 5 days. Curses. *shakes fist at sky* But 235 days is still pretty good—around 40 days less than I accomplished in 2019, but still a significant chunk of work. It was a sharp drop-off in terms of hours, though; in 2019 I spent about 331 hours on writing/brainstorming/editing/etc., but in 2020 I only spent 187 hours.

I can probably chalk at least part of this up to the lack of any kind of deadline. In early 2019, I pitched a novel to a publisher. They decided based on the query that they wanted to see the full manuscript; I then had to write said manuscript. I wanted to get it done in 2019, so I worked at a fever-pitch that year. Needless to say I was burned out going into 2020 before the rest of 2020 even got around to slapping us all in the face.

I also changed what I decided to "count" for writing output. In 2018 and 2019 I was counting my worldbuilding, brainstorming, session prep, etc. for the Pathfinder campaign I was running; around May/June 2020 I decided to stop counting that as writing time. I don't know if that was necessarily the right call. I think going forward that when I'm doing that kind of really creative prep, I'll count it in the writing bucket, but stuff like map-making/encounter-building can be left out.

3. "Fun writing," in whatever form it takes—and other activities that refill the creative well. I did actually accomplish this! I worked on a couple of fics this year that were sort of purely fun for me. One was an Inquisitor/Josephine fic (Set All Trappings Aside) I'd played with on and off for literally years and finally got the urge to finish. The other was another unexpected Stardew Valley fic (Liminal Grief); I write a lot of little snippets for this universe/this farmer that ultimately don't get posted, but this one coalesced and made it to posting.

But I also heeded my own advice and did other activities to refill the creative well. I read 93 books in 2020. I played so much Animal Crossing, and had such a good time toodling about on my island, changing things and moving things and growing flowers and decorating and then doing it all over again. I played Witcher 3, too, and overall got a lot of enjoyment out of it—especially Gwent. I predictably got back into Stardew Valley as winter came on, something of an annual tradition of mine. I watched some great new Star Wars content and some limited other television. I went for walks and worked out, on and off. Fire season/a truly hellish heat wave at the end of summer kind of put paid to exercise for a while, and then we bought a house and THAT was the final nail in the coffin, but I did move around throughout the year. Somewhat.

All this to say: I did Some Stuff in 2020. Not as much as I'd hoped. But still something. It definitely became a "survive, and try your best" kind of year. Truthfully, I was due for a creatively fallow year anyway; in 2017 and 2018 I wrote over 500,000 words each year, and 2019 was my first major push to get a manuscript on an editor's desk, so I'm not going to beat myself up about the numbers. For posterity's sake:

170,748 words written
187 hours worked
Two fics posted and finished
18 Pathfinder sessions prepped and run from January - July (an actually cohesive arc that culminated in a victory/finale!)

2021 Goals

Every year, my focus shifts slightly. For a long time, I was fixated on word count, and I had the creative spark to meet it—working on a bunch of fanfiction around the clock, combined with new drafts of original projects. Over the last few years I've had to make a shift to quality over quantity. At some point you have to stop starting new projects and actually finish one, theoretically.

So I'm keeping steady on in that direction, with the same GYWO 240 day habit goal. I do feel like I need to work on the habit; there were a lot of days in 2020 where I sat down for maybe five minutes to write just to be able to say I'd done something that day. I want to do better than that, on average. I'm also trying to reassess the best time of day for writing (and a lot of other things) for me, so I expect some trial and error throughout the year as things inevitably change. I need to be more aware of my schedule—what things I expect I have to do, and how does that interfere with other things I want to do? How can I best schedule my time so that I have the physical and mental fortitude to do whatever it is I need to get done?

I'm not going to set a bunch of micro-goals about which projects I'm going to finish for that reason. I always overdo it on that front. This year, we're just looking for a bit of a reset, and some progress.

Oh, 2020. We had such high, high hopes for you, and already, you have proven us fools. Proven me a fool, specifically.

I jest (mostly). January was just much busier than I'd anticipated, and I was not feeling motivated to write even when I did have the time. This is a continuation of the malaise that started in mid-November, after sending a project off into the ether, and I was hoping to shake it with the clean break of a new year, but...alas. I'm determined to make improvements in February, though.

These are the goals I set for this year, and how well I measured up in January:

1. Complete the next draft of the supernatural/paranormal-adjacent, fantasy novella project.
Obviously I wasn't going to just grind this out in one month, so this is an ongoing thing. I did finally pick up this project again. I reread my entire first draft and what I have of the second draft. I compiled all the external feedback I've received so that it's organized by chapter, and added in my own notes. I started brainstorming solutions to the problems I'd pinpointed in the manuscript. I didn't actually get any new chapters on the page, but all this pre-work was necessary to get going again. I hadn't actually reread the story in more than a year; I definitely needed a refresh.

2. Writing and writing-related activities on no less than 240 days this year, i.e., the GYWO goal.
To be on-pace, I needed to do something writing-related on 20 days in January. I fell just short at 18 days. Given how December went, I'm not going to fuss about this; it's an improvement over the previous month. I'm planning to make up the days in February to get back on-pace (or ahead, here's hoping).

Some related stats:

11,639 words written (really very low for me, to be honest)
~16 hours spent on writing/writing-related activities
Average of 31 minutes per day spent writing

3. "Fun writing," in whatever form it takes--and other activities that refill the creative well.

I tentatively started a couple of fics on days where I could not otherwise bring myself to write, but in reality, most of my "fun writing" this month was campaign prep for Pathfinder; I ran another two games that were still socially-heavy and needed content. Someday I'm going to send my players to a dungeon with no lore and no NPCs and set them loose. Someday.

I did a lot of other things to refill the creative well, though. I read six books, including the absolutely fantastic Unnatural Magic that I picked up while traveling based on staff recommendation at Powell's Books. Seriously, I desperately hoped that book would never end. One of my casual goals for the year is to go back to my roots as an English Lit major and fill in some gaps in my classical education, so I also picked up Little Women and really adored it, even despite some of the underlying religious stuff. There were tears. Technically I didn't finish Frankenstein until February 1, but read the bulk of it in January, and...whew. I know, I know, how does one major in English Literature and somehow miss Frankenstein? Hell, how do you make it through high school and miss Frankenstein? I'm going to blame it on the year of English I skipped in high school; I missed Romeo and Juliet then, too. Anyway, Frankenstein: powerful, moving, quaint 19th-century obsession with frame stories, sure did feel a great deal of outrage toward Frankenstein-the-man for his self-absorbed nature.

I also played a fair amount of The Outer Worlds. I just don't game the way I used to; it sort of bums me out, especially after a nice day like this past Saturday where I accomplished a bunch of chores/errands in the morning/early afternoon and then got to play for five hours and just drank in every minute of it, but my life is more...varied...than it used to be, and that's okay. Anyway. I haven't gotten very far story-wise, only just completed Radio Free Monarch, but have been running around doing a lot of side stuff and exploring, and really enjoyed it. I think I've even sort of adjusted to first-person, which was a big question for me at the beginning.

I finished up Castlevania with a friend. Delightful show. Love the action and animation. Will go in for Trevor/Sypha/Alucard fanfiction eventually. My husband and I are also still keeping up with Critical Role (by the skin of our teeth) and re-watching The Clone Wars in preparation for the final season beginning this month.

This is somewhat creative-well related, and definitely productivity related: I got a desk at home, and a space to put it. After we last moved, in early 2016, I tossed my desk and never got a new one; our old apartment had a mold issue that claimed some of our furniture, and honestly, at the time, I hadn't regularly used the desk in a while. It had never been the right height for me to sit at and feel comfortable. Or, rather, it had one of those annoying drawers that prevented it from being the right height. Point being, I've worked off one of those lap desks for a long time now, and my writing space was the couch in the living room. I experimented with other spaces--the kitchen table, the game room--but none of them really worked, and I'd been coming back to the idea of having a desk again and again for the past year.

So, over the long weekend in January, we made it happen. There were a few apartment projects we needed to take care of, anyway: adding another one of those tall Billy bookcases to accommodate the growing Star Wars canon (Legends already occupies one Billy bookcase and then some), getting rid of the broken desk chairs in my husband's office and getting him a footrest instead, dealing with the cluttered mess that the game room had become. We dealt with everything, and now I have a room with both a desk and my piano in it. There are drawers in the desk, so I have space to store stuff out of sight that didn't ever really have a permanent home elsewhere. I got a bunch of the art we'd had just lying around put up on the wall. The whole space is just so cozy now. My husband's office is way better, too, with those old broken chairs out of the way. This has already helped my productivity a ton; I spent a lot more time writing after the weekend that we set up the desk. Plus, I have separation of productive activities/relaxing activities now. Before, I did everything on the couch. Now, when I'm on the couch, the laptop is in an entirely different room and I'm not working, I'm chilling. It's really great.

Anyway, having reviewed all that, I certainly didn't just...sit around in January. Still looking forward to a more productive February, where I'll carry on with those goals set above.

Current Mood: sleepy

I decided that a review of last year's writing progress, and even setting goals for 2020, didn't really belong over on tumblr anymore, but I hope to use this space going forward as a sort of writing log. I started doing that last year, and liked it, until life just went absolutely haywire and I got off track.

Before I even thought about my goals for this year, I needed to revisit the goals I set for 2019 and how they served. At the end of 2019 I set these goals, and the results were hit or miss:

Write, brainstorm, or edit a little bit every day. The spirit of this one is good, but the reality is that I should really adjust my expectations. It would be great if I really could do this every day, even if some days are only two minutes of work, but if I only have time for two minutes, I'm apt to really need those two minutes to, say, lay down on the couch and just breathe for a bit. But! I count it as a victory that I did writing-related activities on 276 days in 2019. I tracked my actual time pretty closely, too, and spent about 331 hours on those 276 days on writing, editing, brainstorming, and the like. That's about an hour and twelve minutes of work on each one of those 276 days. I'm damn proud of that.
Learn some different editing techniques, and practice them. We're going to return to this one down below, but in short, did I do more actual functional editing than I've ever done before? Yes. Was it particularly organized, the way I envisioned it? No. Partial success.
Remember to do your fun writing when you need it. This was not successful, though I don't blame myself. I had my hands so full that even when I had the ideas or inspiration to just play around, writing fanfiction or short drabbles or anything, I was too burned out on the activity of writing to follow through; I needed to just sit down with a good book instead, or some other activity. I did write a few fics when I was really, deeply inspired to do so, and when it was the only thing I wanted to do with my time, so very partial success.

I also set a few more project-specific goals:

Ready F/F contemporary romance novel proposal materials for submission to a specific publisher by the time they have another open proposal call. "This is not going to go the way you think," ominous old man Luke warns my past self, but alas, she cannot hear Jedi Masters in galaxies far, far away. Basically, I set this goal thinking I was going to have until about May, based on this publisher's historical patterns. Instead, they opened their annual pitch event (separate from open proposal calls but not something I wanted to miss) in early February, with a due date in early March. I still did it! But it was...challenging. I was also wrapping up everything for my wedding at the end of March, and work was exploding, and life was hard. But I got it submitted. And that's worth something.
Complete the next draft of the supernatural-adjacent, fantasy novella project. I didn't manage this one; in fact, I didn't even look at this project in 2019. But there was good reason for that; see #4 below.
Focus on quality over quantity. I did a good job with this particular goal. My hope was to get away from my love of throwing spaghetti at the wall; I loved just sitting down and churning out words and not caring whether they were particularly good or refined (they mostly weren't the first, and were never the second). I wanted to work on actual editing/revising, not redrafting, which I'd done with another project for five years, telling nearly a new story every time I completed another draft. And I did! I still wrote a lot of words (328,427, to be precise), but less than previous years, and most of those words were in service to first drafting, then refining a single story.
Ready F/F contemporary romance novel for submission. I ended up tacking this goal on in mid-April, when the publisher mentioned in #1 reached out to me and requested a full manuscript. I had high hopes for how fast I could get this done. I had the first four chapters, which they'd seen and I couldn't change; I had a synopsis, which they'd also seen and I couldn't change; how hard could it be to write a first draft (a thing I've historically done in two or three weeks when pressed), then revise and polish? I set a lofty goal of getting this done by mid-July, and I missed the mark by a mile. In fairness, I had never really committed to editing and polishing any original fiction before. The editing and revising process has always looked so overwhelming to me. First drafts are easy. No one has to see them. Internal inconsistencies can be cleaned up later. I had never gotten to "later" before, and it kind of kicked my ass. But I made it through, thanks in no small part to my writers' group and their dedicated feedback, and I turned the project in mid-November. This marks the first time I've submitted a novel anywhere since I was thirteen and pluckily idealistic about how great I was. It's been an eye-opening fifteen years since, but here I finally am...and now we continue to wait to see what they say.

Overall, 2019 was one of the hardest years of my life--creatively, professionally, and personally. It felt like everything that could go sideways did, spectacularly. But it has to have been one of the most rewarding years ever, too. I got married! I was promoted at my day job! I put a friggin novel on an editor's desk and they are presumably looking at it with their eyeballs!

So now I have to look forward, at 2020, and figure out what I want to do next.

Complete the next draft of the supernatural/paranormal-adjacent, fantasy novella project. Since I didn't get to this last year, and I want to carry forward the practice of revision and editing, this will probably be my focus this year. It has the potential of getting shelved again, IF *fingers crossed* *knock on wood* *whisper* the publisher says yes to my other project, and a heretofore unknown-to-me process involving further rounds of edits and preparation for publication gets underway...but I have to work on something else, at the very least during the long waiting times, and this is the project on my list that's closest to being complete and sent out.
Writing and writing-related activities on no less than 240 days this year. This reflects my 2020 GYWO goal, a Journeyman-level Habit Pledge, the same as I undertook last year, because frankly the next level up is just not something I can try. I know I'd fall short, and it would bum me out. But this particular pledge level is good for me: reinforces the quality-over-quantity thing, keeps me away from the word count goals that are my siren song, and corresponds to a good level of work throughout the year.
"Fun writing," in whatever form it takes--and other activities that refill the creative well. More than likely, this will be taken up in large part by my prep for the Pathfinder campaign I'm back to running. But I miss posting fic, too, so when inspiration strikes, I want to seize it. However...the reality is that, sometimes, I'll have done so much other writing that "fun" writing is not fun anymore. In those cases, it's okay to do something else to refill the creative well. Read a book. Go for a walk. Play a video game. Watch a movie or TV show. All fine! Sometimes that's what the brain needs.

I'm hopeful about this year, and I like these goals. I think they're useful and obtainable. Major life events are out of the way for now (witness me knocking on wood AGAIN, because the truth is we are very casually house-hunting and who knows what could happen), and work is calmer (*knocking intensifies*), so I'm hoping for less stress and more chill overall.

Current Mood: busy

I really fell off on posting these, though I completely understand why; at some point in February I became Book Proposal Uni and ceased to do anything else. (I mean, I still went to work. And I still did wedding planning things. But that was about it: work, wedding, book proposal.) And in the end, that was all fine, because I got the book proposal in. So now a thing that I made is sitting on an editor's desk, about to be read by somebody who's going to give feedback on it, since that was part of the terms of this event, and...it is hard to believe, really. One of my goals for the year was to get that proposal in, since this publisher regularly has open proposal calls, so I can cross that off my list.

And one of my goals for the month of February was to write at least five minutes every day, which I more than accomplished at an average of 76 minutes spent writing daily. That streak of writing daily began on December 28, 2018 and continued all the way through March 4, 2019, the day the book proposal was due. Some personal stuff happened right afterward that killed any desire or ability I had to write for a couple of days. I got back on the bandwagon on March 7, but for wedding-related reasons I know I probably won't be as consistent as I've been through the first two months of the year, and that's okay. I've done a lot, and I can take a bit of a break.

I managed to read four books in February, just barely, so I met my goal there. I got better at tracking my food toward the end of the month, too, and am continuing to do that in the weeks leading up to the wedding. The dress fits right now, so I need to make sure my body doesn't change too much before the 31st.

I'd originally written goals in my planner for March, but honestly, the truest goal is this: I'm going to do what I can between all these final meetings with vendors, various frantic last-minute details and planning, and the huge pile of bullshit at work that is transitioning an entire database and also trying to prepare everything before I leave for my honeymoon. I'm going to do what I can, and it's going to be enough. When I return from my honeymoon in April, I can buckle down again.

Current Mood: exhausted

My goals were:

Write 5 minutes daily - check (average 80 minutes/day, who am I)
Read 1 book - check
Track food consumption - new goal effective 2/12/2019

Well! A Thing happened this week to just light a fire under my ass: a pitch I threw to a publisher caught their eye, and I need to get a proposal for the project to them by March 4. This means at least 7,500 words of the manuscript, a 1,600-word summary of full manuscript, and a query letter. I am Excited and Terrified, mostly about that summary, since I have a fair amount of words-on-page and am relatively confident I can submit the first 3-5 chapters, but making sure I have a concise full-plot summary is a little newer to me. I do outline projects as a rule, but this is a genre I don't have as much practice in, and I'm struggling with a few elements of it. Nevertheless, I will persist.

So I worked on that thing quite a bit. I also ran a final Pathfinder session for the time being, so I did a lot of prep for that; between the proposal assembly and the wedding which is 47 days away, I'm just not going to have the bandwidth to DM for a while. Luckily there's another DM in our group who knew this was coming already due to the wedding, and has a mini-campaign ready to begin in a couple of weeks, so we'll all still play. All in all, I wrote 10,275 words this week between those two projects.

And I've written something every day since January 1. That is pretty great.

I also finished The Broken Kingdoms on Sunday, which I found pretty much just as intriguing as the first installment, and flipped immediately to the final book, The Kingdom of Gods. I don't know where this is going, but I'm in it till the end.

Current Mood: accomplished

Clearly, I'm posting this a week late. It feels like my personal world (on top of the actual world) is exploding lately with all the stuff going on, and I fell behind.

This marks the transition to February, so while two of my goals remained the same, one changed:

Write 5 minutes daily, minimum (same as January).
Read 4 books this month (1 book per week, same as January).
Stay under calorie goal 5/7 days of the week (this is replacing the exercise goal, since time is becoming an increasingly serious issue).

For this particular period (1/29/2019-2/4/2019), I managed the following:

Write 5 minutes daily - check (average 35.5 minutes/day)
Read 1 book - check
Exercise or calorie goal - not even close; I'm already rethinking this goal.

I worked on so many different projects during this week. More Stardew Valley fic, working on the contemporary femslash romance I'm writing, revisited my "big" project, started a Red Dead Redemption 2 fic. I was all over the place. But hey, words on paper (screen?). A total of 7,212 words for this week. In the month of January, I wrote 30,532 words and spent 1,390 minutes (a little over 23 hours) writing/editing/doing writing activities. Pretty standard fair for me these days.

I finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms on January 31. It was...interesting. I was definitely engrossed all the way through and there were things about it I really liked, things that fascinated me. Especially with the Pathfinder campaign I'm running, the world for which I built from scratch, all the god stuff was extremely relevant to my current interests. But I can definitely see how Jemisin grew as a writer between this and The Fifth Season. Still, I liked it enough to start in on the next book in the series.

And, finally, the eating/exercise. For the latter--the weather is making me struggle so hard. I'm realizing how much I hate, hate, HATE working out inside. Videos, the stationary bike, whatever, it is not my jam. This is why I used to be a runner, probably. But it has been barely cracking 50 degrees in the daytime, let alone by the time I get home at 6:30 when it's damn near full dark, so walks have not been an option. I'm not sure what to do about this yet.

The eating: I'm stress-binging a lot, and not tracking it, so I have no idea how bad it is, but it's probably not...great? The day I'm writing this (February 12) I'm trying to reset and, even if I'm not doing great on the calories themselves, make sure that I'm recording it so that I know. That's really the trouble with me: if I don't know, I can pretend it's not that bad. But, uh, there's a wedding dress that I've been measured for that I need to at least maintain those measurements for, and I'd probably feel better if I would drink some more water and eat some more green things, so. Revising the last goal up there to just "make sure you record what the hell you're eating."

Current Mood: productive

My goals were:

Write 5 minutes daily - check
Read 1 book per week - check
Exercise 3 days per week - not quite, only got two walks in

Better week than the last, though I'll admit, it all passed in a kind of blur. I went out of town over the weekend and didn't bring my laptop, so on Saturday I only had a notebook and pen to get my five minutes of writing in. It was after midnight because damn, my family stays up late these days, and I was running on very little sleep. I worked on a number of totally scattered projects--campaign prep, Stardew Valley fic, picking up an old Rebels fic that is still in progress. No major forward momentum on anything, but I'm clearly thinking about a lot of stuff. 6,353 words total, average of 37 minutes per day. I haven't broken the streak of writing daily at all this month.

I finished Rebel Rising this week and oof. That was a hard one. I can't figure out what else to say about it besides that. I couldn't put it down, and I couldn't help but feel like it twisted the knife of Rogue One that much deeper. Decided I could use a break from new canon and picked up The Inheritance Trilogy, starting with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I'm now totally engrossed in.

Still not doing great with exercise. The travel and the wedding planning and the workplace exploding is really sapping my energy. I hope things will improve as the weather does.

My goals were:

Write 5 minutes daily - check
Read 1 book per week - check
Exercise 3 days per week - only exercised once, going for a long walk on Saturday

It was a generally less-productive week all around. I averaged only about 23-24 minutes of writing activities daily. Part of the drop was due to not having the usual Monday dedicated to writing; since yesterday was a holiday, we had other plans, mostly involving figuring out more wedding stuff. At least it was a fun outing, dedicated to choosing wine, though I think overall I'd rather not have spent five hours doing that. Still, I got in and even exceeded my minimum writing time on most days. Weeks like this are what that minimum is for. I managed to edit and post another fic (Green Sauce, another Shane/Farmer Stardew Valley piece), work some more on that Josephine/f!Adaar fic, and noodle around with the Drolbir campaign setting some more. Only 3,208 words in total.

I finished Catalyst this week no sooner than 11:30PM on Saturday night; it took me some time to get through. Definitely was not as enthused about this one as some of the other new canon books I've read. I finished the book with, I suppose, a more detailed understanding of many of the players in Rogue One, but I also felt as if the movie had already done a great job of conveying everything I needed to know. Based on Krennic's interactions with Tarkin, you know there's a history of rivalry there; I don't need the exact details. Based on Krennic's comments about Lyra right before he kills her, you know there's a history of her "interfering" between him and Galen; I don't need the exact details. Etc., etc.

On the flip side, I also started and finished Guardians of the Whills, which was probably similarly unnecessary in terms of context for Rogue One, but that I enjoyed a lot more because of the particular characters involved. I don't feel much investment in Krennic, Tarkin, Galen, or Lyra, but Chirrut and Baze are delightful, so reading a pretty well-contained story about them was really pleasant. Even if the story itself was unmistakably sad. Still. At least someone escaped Jedha.

I was bad about exercise this week; the ongoing rain we've had didn't help, but that's no excuse. I should have trotted out the exercise bike a couple of times. The truth is, though, we're doing our damnedest to get through Red Dead Redemption 2, and I'm loathe to give up any play time at all. We're going to be out of town this coming weekend, and there's no way we're going to finish before then, so I might as well allow play time to slow down a bit this week in the interest of getting some exercise in.

Current Mood: sleepy

My goals were:

Write 5 minutes daily - check
Read 1 book per week - check
Exercise 3 days per week - not quite from Tuesday-Monday; only 2 times by those parameters

I ended up doing a lot more DM prep than I think I'd planned on at the outset of last week; I started putting more of the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding stuff together in addition to session prep. Not that I don't have a ton of that already, but it's an entire world I've been creating for almost a year now, and it has a lot of space to fill! Other than that, I cleaned up and posted a Stardew Valley fic (Last Year's Language) before it could get too out of date, since it was written as a New Year's Eve fic.

I fiddled with some other Stardew Valley fic and an old story I've never managed to get off the ground, too--a Josephine/f!Adaar fic that would cover their transition from friendship to romance. It's a fic I've had on the backburner probably since 2015, and every six months or so I get aggravated I haven't finished and posted it, pick it up, add something to it, and inevitably put it back down again. I have a long break from outside responsibilities (my writer's group doesn't meet again until February 3rd, my Pathfinder group not until February 9th), so I might manage to make some significant progress on it in between working on other stuff. We'll see.

Lower word count this week of 6,811, for a total of 19,086 so far this month. I'm also averaging about 65 minutes spent writing per day, though this varies from the 5 minute minimum (that's happened once this month) to more than 3 hours one notable day.

I read Thrawn: Alliances and started Catalyst this week. Steadily working my way through new canon. Part of the reason for this is that I'm trying to spend less money overall, and these books were already purchased over the course of six months or so last year. I'm so guilty of being That Person who buys books even when they still have stuff they've already bought to read, so I'm trying to rectify that. Even though so many other books are calling my name.

Finally, between the 8th and the 14th I technically only got two days of actual exercise (walks on both weekend days) but I also made a point of getting up from my desk every hour while I was at work and taking a 5-ish minute walk, which usually gets me pretty close to my step goal for the day. Still not bad.

Current Mood: sleepy

I've decided to keep a weekly writing log, of sorts. I used to post these on Tumblr, two years back, but since I steadily drifted further and further away from posting fanfiction, it started to seem out of place over there. Now that I'm doing the GYWO Habit Pledge (240 days), I want to keep a better record of what I've been working on and do more reflection on the whole process. This'll also be a good way to get me used to Dreamwidth, in case Tumblr really does manage to collapse and I need to exist elsewhere on the internet.

So, to the log.

I made a goal for January to spend just 5 minutes writing every day--enough to get me back in a regular habit. My discipline definitely dwindled toward the end of 2018, with a combination of holidays and burnout and wedding planning and work nonsense. But the first week of January was a good time to get back to it: I only had to work two days, I had a couple of days home alone, and I did a ton of writing. 5 minutes daily, easy. All but one of those days, I wrote more than 30 minutes. I worked on a bit of fanfiction for Stardew Valley; all these random ficlets are really piling up, and I hope I'll get time to clean some up to post soon. Mostly, though, I worked on the F/F contemporary romance (fondly code-named "Sandwich Lesbians" due to one character's familial sandwich shop) that I'm putting together a proposal for. Finally figured out a couple of the things that caused me to stall out on this at the end of last October, and got well underway with two chapters written. Total of 12,275 words, though I'm trying to focus on quality over quantity this year.

This week, I need to focus first on getting my DM prep done for our Pathfinder game this weekend; it'll be the last one for about a month, our longest break to date, due to scheduling conflicts. I have a lot of the content left over from last session, just need to make sure everything is shipshape before barreling into the game this Saturday. After that's set to rights, I'll go back to working on the romance, or maybe polishing up a ficlet or two for posting.

I have some other goals in January, mostly health related: make sure I'm reading a book per week (mental health) and getting exercise 3 times per week (both mental and physical health, honestly). I read 2 books this week, and exercised on 6 days, either by getting a long walk in or finally making use of the stationary bike while it was raining over the weekend. My legs...are a little sore.

In summary:

Write 5 minutes daily - check
Read 1 book per week - check
Exercise 3 days per week - check

Onward.

Because existing in multiple places on the internet has some sort of appeal. Not sure yet what I'll be posting here, but here it is, anyway.

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todisturbtheuniverse

todisturbtheuniverse

stuck in the sunshine riptide

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2020 Review

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2019 Review/2020 Goals

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Writing Log, 2/5/2019-2/11/2019

Writing Log, 1/29/2019-2/4/2019

Writing Log, 1/22/2019-1/28/2019

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