Fighting February Writing Goals

I tend to consistently find that February is the trickiest month when it comes to writing. Technically, this is my fault for how I structure my writing system: I set a year goal, divide the work up evenly between the months, then adjust par as I go on. Each month ends up with a share of the work, which I then input into my trusty Excel spreadsheet and let it tell me how much I have to write each day of the month to meet that goal.

I think it’s pretty easy to see how that makes February tricky: it’s the month with the least amount of days, thus each day has more work. Anyone who’s ever done a June or July Camp NaNoWriMo has likely noticed how the usual 50,000 par per day switches from 1667 words to 1613 – a small change, but enough to make a difference on those days where it’s hard to scrape out works. Putting the 50k into the twenty-eight day par for February instead bumps the daily par up to 1786 words.

While this level of chance is tricky yet not impossible, higher word count goals just mean you need more words per day. With my brilliant plan to write 130k words for February, I had a hefty daily par of 4643 words per day – an increase from my January daily par of 4226 words (and even then my monthly goal for then was 131k, somewhat higher). It just goes to show how the loss of a few days really adds up.

Of course, this is the fault of none other than my stupid system for writing, so I should know that I suffer in the early months, which will ultimately add up to make the rest of the year simpler. Thankfully, I was able to keep up on my writing goals, as you can see below.

This month I did have a few days where I fell short of the daily par, but those are because I’m trying to give myself more leeway and rest time, because my self-care priorities are terrible. I didn’t force myself to give up sleep or go overboard just because I hadn’t hit words, trusting myself to have enough of a buffer to reach the month total. The last day of the month was an excellent example, since I had already hit the 130k and just did some work so I could keep up my writing streak.

I found that I was also pretty damn productive this past month. I mentioned previously that I was working on some monthly writing goals with both fanfiction and original project revisions. I’ve officially caught up with the to the date goals for revising This Broken Eternity (which only has a little bit left on this draft). I also made it through the fanfiction drafting goals I had lined up for January, with still some gaps in the February lists. But it’s all good, really.

I did end up prioritizing revising a bit more this month because it’s a bit easier for me to get 2k or so words done in revision than it is to draft out all new content, but I’m happy that I’ve caught up on that line of goals! On the fanfiction side, I honestly was mostly at work on Image Training and Tilling Soil (and I still have some TS to go), but these fics have longer chapters, and I’m proud of the work and planning I did get done.

Because I got a little bit backed up on the fanfiction side, I’m probably going to have some gaps in the updating rotation schedule I’ve been trying. Fics like Catharsis and Reliability don’t actually have their next updates ready yet, even though they would technically fall into March by following the “update everything in order” pattern I’ve had so far. Even so, I’ve decided not to stress myself out by rushing to get those chapters out, and they’ll instead come when their next shot in the update rotation comes around. I’m a bit sad since I know those two projects are popular works and there’s that part of me that likes to see the numbers go up on my view counts, but I’m okay with waiting so I can produce a quality product.

Freelance work is also a big part of my writing count, so that’s a big contributor to what’s going down in my numbers. Sometimes it feels like my work is consuming me, but, once again, I think that’s a big part of my “what is self care and slowing down?” issue. I promise I’m working on it.

Looking forward to this next month, I’ve managed to write enough extra that I can once more peg down my monthly par a bit to 129k! That makes my daily par 4161 words, for which I’m so relieved to see such a manageable number. Is it still sizable? Yes, but it’s not 4.6k every day. I’m hoping that, as with previous years, the work I put down in March and April will really start to make extra progress, then we’ll start to see some relaxation in monthly pars over the summer and beyond. Then again, I’ve never had a year starting off with such a hefty goal, so we’ll see how it pans out.

As for what I’ll be writing, that’s where the next adventure starts. I still have some February fanfic plans I need to fulfill, with Tilling Soil, Ragnarok, Ordinary Life, and Catharsis on the par. I also haven’t set up my March check sheet yet, so I’m not entirely sure what else is gonna be lined up next on that end aside from more Catharsis, a bit of Mothers, and likely some Reliability. There’s really never a shortage of fanfiction things to take care of.

The original end is where things are gonna get a bit more complicated. I’m genuinely at the end of the draft for This Broken Eternity. Yes, there are still things to fix, but I am itching to be writing some new original content. Last year, aside from some one shots, all my original work was in the realm of revising.

This year, I planned to mess with two original projects: Encoding and Fever. Fever is likely going to be my [Twelve Shots of Summer] entry (because I like making my life complicated), and Encoding is the project I had the full idea for first. Thus, it looks like March will be the month where I do the work to flesh out my outline for the story, then I dive into drafting it! It’s been so long since I started an original project that I’m a bit nervous, but I’m hoping I’ll get back into the vibe easily enough.

With everything going on here and with my other work, it looks like March is set to be a challenge, though in different ways than February. Still, I’m always a fan of seeing how I can settle down and make words come to life, so we’ll keep moving forward. What sort of goals do you have for February?

January Writing Round-Up

With January wrapped-up and February already getting started, it’s always a good time to see how things are moving along at the beginning of the year. As I talked about last month, my year writing goal happens to involve writing more than 1.5 million words for 2019, which means that I have some pretty high daily pars to work on.

Not a perfect par per day streak, but I did keep up on writing every day, so there’s that!

With a daily goal of over 4k words, a lot of projects and the like got some serious attention, and it’s been an adventure to find the right ways to keep up with that par as we move forward. Thankfully, I’ve had some revision projects to keep myself busy. Combined with fanfiction drafting and freelance work, I hit the monthly par with a few couple thousand words extra, helping me stick on par with my goals.

The first set of projects and work I wanted to deal with were some goals I made for December, but ultimately set aside in favor of getting some hard earned mental recharge. Partway through the month, I was able to complete the entire spread of work for those goals, which involved drafting Exception, Aviantei, Reconstruction, and Jokes, Whims, & Coincidences. On the revision side of things, I completed the second draft of Anderson Hall and sorted through updates to the first chapter of This Broken Eternity.

Since I don’t know how to slow down whatsoever, I didn’t just stop at the December goals, but made some extra checkpoints on top of those for January proper, which contributed once again to my work progress. While I didn’t complete everything I had laid out for myself, I did do some more work on Jokes, Whims, & Coincidences, wrote the bonus episodes for Strength, drafted some more poems for Noise, and finally got through that chapter of Image Training I got stuck on back in October and ultimately gave up on to start writing Muse. TBE revisions have made it all the way through chapter five, albeit with some struggles regarding updating character information that changed in the drafting process.

While I didn’t meet my par every day (I’m doing this weird thing where I stop working at a certain time so I can sleep and function like a human being), I don’t feel too bad about the few days where I fell short. I was able to make up the word count later on, and I’ve kept up my writing every day streak, so that’s what matters. I may have dropped the ball on a few of my other resolution-style goals, but I can pick those up and start again with a fresh slate this month.

Surprising no one, my major goals this month are to finish up the January daily goals I didn’t get to, as well as dive into the new set of project pars I’ve set for February. I plan to do work on Image Training, Tilling Soil, Ragnarok, Ordinary Life, and Catharsis on the fanfiction side, as well as keep on trucking through TBE‘s revision. While none of my fics are going to end in this time frame (watch one of them prove me wrong), I will be coming up to the end of revising TBE, which means that March will be when I can finally draft a new original project!

As exciting as all that is, I’m trying really hard not to get too far ahead of myself, since that’s a bad habit of mine. The real challenge of this month is that it’s February, which means less days to hit a word count par, which then means higher daily goals. I can feel that some days are going to be a struggle to reach par, but I’m still going to do my best, since I’ll get there eventually. Thankfully, since I already finished playing Kingdom Hearts III, there are less distractions in the world moving forward.

Overall, I feel like I made a pretty good start to the new year, and hopefully everyone else’s writing goals and projects are doing well, too! Now to get on that goal to better promote myself through Twitter this year…

[Obligatory New Year’s Post] 2018 ==> 2019

I feel like lately I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection/rumination, so making a big sappy post digging into everything isn’t too much of what I plan to do in this post. But even so, it’s been tradition to hit up a happy new year post, so it’s what I plan to do.

This past year of writing turned out to be completely ridiculous. While I set out to pass 2017’s count of 570,369 words, I ended up shooting way past that. About a million words past that, with my year total coming out to be 1,571,142 words. It was absolutely a wild ride.

Part of that count was definitely thanks to me finally wandering into the world of freelance work. I managed to get out of my previous job of making food, and I now support myself entirely by writing articles and teaching English, which was definitely a goal of mine for 2018. In either event, all those articles no doubt contributed to the monster amount of words I was able to throw down, too.

In terms of projects, I managed to make some headway as well. On the original fiction section, I got Twelve Zero Zero to a satisfactory enough point that I sent it out to beta readers for revision, and hopefully that’ll push forward soon as I get replies in. On the fanfiction side, I finished up three projects (All Things Fanciful and Free, and Strength, Pursuing Our True Selves), kept up with weekly updates, and even got my long in production The World Ends with You fic Muse into production.

Moving forward on the original front, I really want to keep tidying up completed drafts, like Anderson Hall and This Broken Eternity. I’ve also been craving getting myself into drafting some new projects, especially since I have some ideas that are pretty damn solid if I say so myself. Encoding is probably the highest on the list, considering it has a complete outline and character designs ready to roll. Of course, if I could completely clean up 1200, I’d be happy with that, but we’ll see what we end up working on.

For fanfiction goals, I would like to keep up the pace of finishing three fics within a year, though I’m not entirely sure which three those would be at this time. Image Training is rather close, and I think I could wrap up Mothers if I sat down and stared at it long enough. Picking out a third fic to complete is tricky, since a lot of what I have left to take care of has a lot of material left on it, but I’ll sort things out as I go along.

In addition, I want to try and make more regular updates than I have been doing. While I’ve been writing on a lot of different projects, I end up with some pretty nasty gaps between updates (two years at times). The plan is to hopefully keep updating things in publication order and rotate through the rest of them. The more fics I finish, the more quickly everything will update (in theory), so I’ll keep moving forward and see what I can do.

With all that in mind, there’s no shortage of things to write and words to compile into hopefully surpassing 1.5 million. Surprising no one, that’s my main goal of the year, along with some art goals and other personal improvement things I want to work on. As per usual, we’ll keep moving forward, so let’s all have a productive and fulfilling 2019!

[NaNoWriMo] 2018 Wrap Up!

As per usual, December first is the day where I go and scream a lot about how NaNoWriMo went, so you can have a pretty easy idea of what to expect out of today’s blog entry. So let’s start with some charts!

As you can see, I managed to hit my goals, but this month wasn’t an easy one for me. I had a lot of work and family stress tossed around throughout November, which made setting up NaNo into a nice pretty and even chart like I would prefer a little tricky. This is also the first month in quite some time where I missed out on my daily writing pars, though I did get words down for the day.

Part of the challenge with writing everything out was no doubt because I wasn’t aiming for the usual 50k, but instead 66k to surpass my previous NaNo’s highest word count. That meant 2200 words per day instead of 1667. altogether, this isn’t too bad of an increase, but keeping on my personal par became tricky when some days I just couldn’t get all the words I needed on the paper.

However, I managed to succeed through my usual stubbornness and willpower, and even shot past 66k into 80k. As you may be able to guess by my NaNo chart, that involved several days of screaming very loudly as I tried to get my brain in gear.

While my original goal was to slap down 66k words of new Muse content, that didn’t quite come together they way I had planned. While most of what I wrote was fresh words, I made it up to the tenth chapter before mental fatigue started to get to me. So I switched gears over into editing up the content I had to make it clean and postable.

When I started writing Muse, I had been planning on making it my [Shibuya Operation – Story Storm] project, releasing the whole 21 chapter project over ten weeks. While I know exactly where the rest of the story is going, I’ve decided to make Muse a two-season [SOSS] project, with the first ten chapters coming up this year, and the other coming up next year. This not only gives me time to breathe, but it also means I can go ahead and focus on building a complete queue of both fics and original content for 2019!

While I had some rough patches, I’m proud of what I managed to pull together for this month, especially with all sorts of life changes and adjustments that have happened at the same time. There’s still a lot of personal things I need to catch up on, but I feel like I’m getting there. In terms of writing, though, I’m just getting concerned with what trying to match this year’s pace is going to look like for 2019…

Heading into December, I’m thinking of trying out some new writing patterns while thinking of some new posting patterns for the coming year. Aside from tidying up Muse chapters, I’m hoping to work out some new updates for the fanfic queue, plan out my original content posting schedule for next year, and get started on revising Anderson Hall. If I’m lucky, I wouldn’t mind working out some revision plans on This Broken Eternity, too.

Even with all that in mind, I’m still focusing on taking things one step at a time and working on keeping up my writing every day streak. While I already passed the “write every single day for a year” point back in May, I just need to keep things up in December to have written every single day of a calendar year for the first time, so I’m looking forward to hitting that milestone, too! Especially since I’m shooting to take a vacation at the end of the year, I’m looking forward to most of December, really.

Here’s hoping that everyone else had a successful November/NaNoWriMo and that you’re all ready to wrap up 2018 right!

NaNoWriMo Again!

October’s been a rather hectic month for me (haven’t all my months been hectic lately, though?), so writing has been happening in very small, concentrated bursts. Part of that is due to the amount of work I have, the other part is because The World Ends with You -Final Remix- released a few weeks into October. Since I’ve been waiting for new TWEWY content for years, you can guess how things have been going during my free time (hint: I’m almost at 100% item collection).

While I could ramble on forever about why I love TWEWY, I’m going to focus on what it means for my writing. One of my currently open fics is Noise, a TWEWY poetry collection that touches on various snippets of the game and its characters. It’s because of this fanfiction that I met Chronic Guardian and ultimately joined the [Twelve Shots of Summer] community. Both of these were good things.

TWEWY is also a series that I’ve had a fanfic in mind for a while (surprising no one). I’ve also been unnecessarily teasing it to my writer friends for years, and I’m sure they’re all sick of me. I had originally planned for Muse to happen after I finished up the rest of my open fanfics, but replaying the game overtook my brain, and one thing lead to another, and before I knew it I had started writing Muse. Whoops? I’ve decided to make Muse my [Shibuya Operation – Story Storm] project for this winter and hope all goes well.

Since I’m tackling Muse for [SOSS], it’s also going to be my NaNoWriMo project so I can hopefully build enough content for what’s looking to be a hectic release schedule come winter. Considering I have a rough outline of the major events and characters, plus the opening nailed down already, I think I’ll be fine.

My other goal for NaNoWriMo this year is also to surpass my word count for the previous year! This means I’m going to need to write around 65k words on my project. Doable, but I still expect some hectic close calls. We’ll see how well my shifting work schedule accommodates things.

For the time being, though, I have some work-related tasks to take care of before stocking up on groceries and heading to a write-in tonight, so I’ll be off! I hope NaNoWriMo treats everyone well!

[Update] Screaming at September

As you may have noticed, this blog update is coming in a little but later than usual. With my move, busy work days, a bad cold, and other things, September was a rather hectic month that left me dragging behind on some of my plans, which just so happened to have dragged over into October.

In terms of word count, September was an all around successful time, clocking me in at a little over 150k. A lot of that was for freelance work purposes, naturally, but it’s nice to have a steady source of work to ensure that I’m always working on something.

When it comes to fiction I worked on, I did make some progress. Part of my plans were to complete some more chapters for Ordinary Life and Aviantei, which I did. While both of these fics are ones that have a long way to go before they hit the end point, making progress with the plots was nice. OL is still steadily working its way through early setup, while I finally got to write an interaction I was looking forward to in Aviantei (plus finally constructed my damn massive playlist for the story).

Aside from those updates, my next planned fic to try and finish by the end of the year is Image Training, which was where I started running into issues with carving out the free time necessary to work on it. My original plan was to dig in and try to draft the rest to the end within September, but that didn’t happen in the slightest.

As mentioned, one of the biggest problems on that front was a dwindling amount of free time to write, even when I was making time for it (tl;dr, working three different jobs takes up a lot of time). I managed to write about one and a half chapters of IT last month, which is still good progress, but I had hoped to do a bit more.

However, there’s still plenty of time to try and turn IT into my fourth completed fic this year, so I’m going to try my best to work that out during October. I’m currently working on one of the two remaining arcs in the story, which is surprisingly flowing much more smoothly than I had imagined. This arc is fully plotted out, but I’m still a bit uncertain about the exact pacing of the final arc, even though I know how I want it to end. All the structures and patterns for this story mean there’s lots of rules I need to follow, which makes planning a bit tricky. I’m hoping that finishing the current arc will give me the insight I need to finish things up. If possible, I’d really like to finish this fic during October.

I’m sure at this point that everyone else is deep in the midst of NaNoWriMo prep, but I’m choosing my battles at the moment. While I plan to do NaNo, a lot of the things I get done this month will impact what I’m working on, so I’m just choosing to leave that open for now. Even though I chose not to do an October art challenge this year, there’s still plenty that needs done before I’m even remotely ready to tackle November.

Another creative thing that’s been on my mind is English fandubs for songs. While I don’t plan to dig in too deep to that realm anytime soon, I have been thinking about my take on the lyrics for UVERworld’s “ODD FUTURE,” so I’d like to mess around with that this month to try something a little different.

While I’ve planned on October being a catch up month, there’s still a lot of things I need to handle before I feel even remotely prepared to handle my to do list and what’s to come. But, as for usual, it’ll just be a series of taking advantage of the time I have to take care of what I can (like using my lunch break to write this blog, for example), one step at a time. Hopefully by the end of the month, things will have settled down enough that I feel on top of things again!

 

 

Finishing Fics and Other Goals

August ended up being a little busier than I had anticipated, but all managed to survive. I was at work on finishing up teaching my summer class, then I had to switch gears into teaching for fall, plus freelance writing in the progress. While it’s manageable, I did end up with a little less leeway than I had anticipated. Adjusting to these new schedules is tricky, but ultimately worth it. For a breakdown, here’s how the month looked in terms of word count:

Considering the regular workload I’ve been getting, hitting regular word counts isn’t too much of a challenge, especially since I’ve already crossed the path of my goal for the year. For the moment, I’ve been more focused on keeping up my regular writing streak and seeing what projects I could dig my nose into.

After July and finishing up my draft of 1200, I decided that some time working on fanfiction was in order. I went ahead and drafted out updates for Alive and Reliability to fill in gaps in my updating schedule first. Somehow, though, I had a bit more slots to keep the year’s queue filled than I expected, so I started shuffling around to finishing up projects.

In some weird series of events, I managed to finish up Strength in short order. After that, I went ahead and messed around with poetry for a bit, somehow also finishing Pursuing Our True Selves before the end of the month was over. Yep, that’s two fanfics finished up in the same month!

Considering how close I was to the end on these two fics (or, rather, the less intensive work of writing short bursts of poetry rather than chapters with thousands of words), I don’t know how much praise really fits into the equation of finishing them up, but I’m glad that I was able to do it. When combined with All Things Fanciful and Free, that makes three completed fanfics for this year, which matches the number I finished in 2017. AKA, I hit another one of my goals for the year, and there’s still four whole months left.

I do feel like 2018 has been going well enough to a point that some pessimistic part of my brain is thinking “Isn’t this going too well?” Maybe that’s what I get for being an author, I automatically start to think of all the ways that things can go wrong. But I feel like life is going well for me, both with writing and outside of it. If nothing else, I’m proud of my progress (if not in abject disbelief), so that’s a nice place to be.

As for where I’m going next, I’m gonna keep filling in those stubborn holes in my fanfiction posting schedule. Ordinary Life needs some new content now that I’ve worked my way though its queue, plus I want to do a little extra content for Aviantei since everyone’s been so kind with faves and the like. Since it seems that I’ll still have some spaces left after that, though, I’ll probably move onto trying to finish another fic (what madness is this?), which is looking like it’ll be Image Training, since it’s the next closest to being done. If all goes well, I may have that story sorted out by the time September’s over, then I’ll have completed fics running all the way to the end of the year. Wild.

Where things stand, I’m honestly not sure what my NaNoWriMo or even [Shibuya Operation – Story Storm] projects will be, so I’m just kind of leaving that up in the air for the time being. Hopefully things will work out as I keep moving forward. Until then, we’ll just see what happens in September!

 

[Camp NaNoWriMo] Twelve Zero Zero Done at Last

I’ve been working on Twelve Zero Zero for a ridiculously long time. Back in summer of 2012, I started on another, and another. As of this Camp NaNoWriMo session, I have completed the sixth draft, and I’m finally satisfied with this thing.

Camp Stats from the 30th, when I hit the end of the draft

Seeing I started this novel during my second year out of high school, I like to think doing so many drafts was reasonable. I did a whole lot of unnecessary things with the initial story and, after finishing my MA in Creative Writing, I like to think I’ve grown since then. Regardless, I’ve ironed out most of the kinks (and holy fuck there were a lot of them), and I’m satisfied.

This was the first draft I didn’t give chapter six a major rehaul, if that says something.

In any event, I finally started to feel satisfied with the plot, the sub plots, the character arcs, the descriptions, and the narration balance. It’s not quite on the same level as This Broken Eternity, but it’s more than satisfactory. I’m happy with it, and I feel like I’ve given Garreth and the others a book that’s worthy of their journey.

Naturally, the next phase is to go through beta readers, which I’m sure will reveal a crap ton of other things I need to fix up, but I’m willing to deal with that. For the time being, I’ll let myself feel accomplished and start the search for beta readers after a few days of celebration.

What’s next on the lineup? I, with all my being, am having an intense craving for writing fanfiction. While [Twelve Shots of Summer] has been giving me a great opportunity to write one shots (many of which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed), it’s nothing quite like writing multi chapter stories.

The next task is to build back up the queues of the fics that have updated since my last writing spree, which, at the moment, are Alive and Reliability. These will also help to fill back up the posting queue, which has fallen a little bit below the year-mark I’ve been striving for. I also need to organize my plan for Patreon content after TBE’s draft concludes. I have plans, it’s just lining it up for myself.

My current focus will be on those fanfiction updates, and hopefully I’ll be able to build my [Shibuya Operation – Story Storm] content, then work my way towards finishing up fics for this year. If nothing else, I’ll be trying to keep updates in line, so we’ll see how things all pan out.

In terms of original fiction, I’ve been kicking around more ideas for Trey + Whiskey (did some character art lineups a few weeks ago), but it’s not quite ready to roll. And though I have the entirety of Encoding outlined and ready to go, I’m going to hold off on drafting anything new for just a while longer.

Because my next original project will be to revise Anderson Hall. In theory, after that, I’ll also revise TBE (or keep revising 1200 when beta reads are finished). I really, really want to put the final lid on these projects so that I can get into querying and (hopefully) publishing sooner rather than later. Once those ideas come together, I’ll go ahead work on other original stories, but I wanna buckle down on revision for now.

In terms of freelancing, things have been going well. I’m fortunate enough to get regular work, and while there are some days where I end up frustrated by the process, it’s a huge improvement over working in food. It’s nice to stop in the middle of writing and realize, “Oh. I’m getting paid for this.”

That being said, with freelance, revision, and drafting one shots, I handled almost 300k words this month…so my year goal of over 570k is already complete! In fact, it’s been murdered. It looks like I’m on track to cross the one million mark this year, so that’s something. I’ll be focusing on maintaining my daily streak and getting updates in line more than numbers from here on out.

All the numbers, really.

This has easily been one of my most productive months in a while, despite some delays in when I worked on what. But I’m adjusting to the new schedule, so I hope to keep the ball rolling. Onward to August!

Brief June Update and Camp NaNo

I had originally planned to post this blog entry yesterday, but I managed to get food poisoning and totally lost all semblance of energy. So, we’re here with a quick update before I dive into my very hectic July.

In short, I wrote a lot.

With freelance writing as my job now, it seems rather obvious to say that, but it’s the truth. It’s definitely a different approach to my days before, but I am enjoying it. In between, I’ve been working on more [Twelve Shots of Summer] pieces, both with keeping up with the current pieces, as well as trying to finish up my old prompts.

I (once again) didn’t quite manage to finish all the old, unattended to prompts. I have one last piece left that’s inching towards the end. The tricky thing with this piece is that it’s an old one I started without a proper end in mind, so I’m just struggling to tie the loose ends together. It’s even harder because the themes and such aren’t really what I work with any more, but I’m getting there.

I’m hoping to finish up the last old one shot soon so that I can focus on other things.

Camp NaNoWriMo is also this month, so I’m taking another crack at the Twelve Zero Zero revisions. I feel like I’m almost there (though I may just rip out my old opening and redraft it because I am beyond frustrated with trying to fix the old scenes at this point). After I did draft five I felt like I just needed one more draft to go; this month we’ll find out how true that really is.

Normally I’d have a lot more to say, but I’m still feeling rather drained, so I’ll close this monthly update off here. Hopefully everyone has had a better weekend than mine as we move forward into July!

[Updates] Short Story Month & Freelance Work

I don’t even know how else to start this post other than to say that last month was absolutely wild. Generally, I would talk about whatever word count goals I hit, but something else seems more important, so I’ll begin there.

Last month I mentioned that I would be doing part time freelance writing work. And I have. The work I was getting was enough for me to switch over to part time at my food service job, something I’d been trying to do since I graduated with my MA last fall. As I prepared for that transition, I kept applying for more work, trying to see if anything stuck.

Spoiler alert: something stuck.

I received a couple of additional assessments for different positions I had applied for. In the process, another writing company asked me to become part of their team. When I went through their basic overview training, I realized the work I could take on would be enough for me to pay the rest of my bills without having to rely on food service. Once that was settled, instead of switching to part time, I put my two-week’s notice in and worked my last day there yesterday, the end of May.

Today, June first, I got up and went to work, continuing my training period. It was my first day that I didn’t have to take care of food service to earn my living. And holy crap it feels good.

There’s still a heck of a lot of adjustments to be made (figuring out a daily routine since my work is remote, double checking budget considerations, general life stuff that comes from switch jobs), but its a change, and I’m so ecstatic. Work doesn’t feel like work, it feels like something I enjoy and look forward to doing and learning more in the process.

So yeah. Life achievement “Earn Your Living from Work in Your Field” has been unlocked.

With taking on new writing work, that means a lot more time during a day where I’m putting words on paper. There’s no sense in counting them as separate since words are words, no matter if they’re for work, so my writing chart shot through my goal like hell this past month.

I ended up writing almost 70k words last month between freelance work and personal words, way past the 18k par I needed to stay on track for the year. That makes June’s par of 8k look rather flimsy (and I’ve already written half of it with my work today), so I’m hoping to reach my goal for the year by the end of July!

Some other goals didn’t quite work out so well.

Unbeknownst to me, last month was Short Story Month. It was fitting since during May I was aiming to write my missing [Twelve Shots of Summer] prompts to celebrate this year’s fifth session. There were nineteen short stories I aimed to write. In the end, with juggling job transfers and some crazy work weeks, I managed to only write thirteen of what I had hoped to work on.

I recognize that thirteen is an impressive number, so I’m satisfied regardless. I have all the material I wanted for the first half of summer lined up, so getting down to business and writing the other six one shots during May shouldn’t be a problem. I’m starting out with this goal for June, plus the upcoming one shots for this summer’s prompts.

While I have no doubts about reaching my word count goals, I’m a little concerned about hitting my daily pars. This month I’ll be attending an anime convention, which will take up a reasonable amount of my time. Last April I went to a con and didn’t write a single word, but this time I want to maintain my carefully cultivated year (plus one month)-long streak of writing every day. Thankfully my con mates are also writers, so I’m sure they’ll keep me in check, but here’s hoping I don’t lose my streak over anything silly.

In any event, June is looking like an exciting month as I move into a new stage of my life and writing. Here’s to success!

Aviantei can be found screaming on Twitter in regular bursts. Patreon and Ko-fi are great places to support her writing.