Category: Write Life

Monthly Wrap-Up | April 2023... & May & June

7/1/2023

Well, April was a month.... In April, I worked just under 210 hours... with a grand total of 11 days where I worked shifts of more than 10 hours (and only 6 where I worked the standard 9-5 and actually remained within its 8 expected hours).
  Yeah, April was a LOT.

  And so was May. Between work things still being at a pretty high demand (not nearly as high as April, but all my student employees straight up ghosted me so days that should've been cake-walks turned into nightmares). Also, as a student myself, I also had school demands as the semester wrapped up.

  And then in June all of that hard-stopped so suddenly that I kind of just went reeling. There wasn't actually enough down time for a vacation, but there was a requirement to go to work and effectively very little to do there... Which resulted in a surprising-at-the-time (but really obvious in retrospect) burnout-fueled-lethargy and depressive period.
  Things did not go well.

  BUT.

  I have viable projects to work on now. And not exactly the right kind of motivation to make confidence rational, but enough to hope that I'll be able to actually make progress on some of them.

  One of the biggest things that has come up is the idea that I'm wrapping up my was-a-PhD-then-COVID-now-a-Masters program next summer. And I have no idea what to do after it. My current role has me locked in at my present position for another 4 years of potentially free-ish part-time schooling at a graduate level. I can probably finish another Masters in that time, or I can re-start the PhD I originally wanted and then stick around an extra year or two (or 4) if needed...
  I'm not really in a headspace to set myself any significant goals right now, but I am going to make figuring that out a priority. I've already got a few feelers out to professors and advisors about it, so I hope to have at least a better idea of the possibilities by the time I start drafting the post for the July wrap up.

  We'll see if I can manage it!

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MONTHLY WRAP-UP | February 2023

3/6/2023

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This was another wildly successful month! I'm still not back to the place I was pre-pandemic, either mentally, financially, or productively, but I am so much more stable in my progress towards that these days than I've been in literal years.

This semester is definitely a lot more demanding than I thought it would be, but part of that is that my job-role is in upheaval due to the departure of not one, but THREE, yes, three (3), full-time coworkers (one of whom was on my team directly). So, I am now solely responsible for supervising 40 student staff and overseeing the design, coordination and execution of around 1,000 events a semester. On the upside, I get full control of a lot of things, like this Fashion Show I ran for Homecoming:

Pic is from the rehearsal, total attendance was somewhere around 1,500. We used 3 sub-woofers, half a dozen speakers, and around 50 light fixtures. It was a FANTASTIC event and I'm super psyched about being able to do more things like it while personally being the main driving force behind the designs.

Beyond that, my semester is mostly reading. SO. MUCH. READING. I have 3 separate Norton Anthologies to read this semester. Fortunately, it's a class that doesn't involve too much writing, so if I miss a reading one week it's not a huge crisis and I can catch up the week after with very few consequences. Unfortunately, it's not a class that involves a lot of writing, so my word-count goals aren't getting boosted by my school work like the usually are.

Still, I'm more than on-track for getting back to my old usual of 50k a month without blinking. By summertime, I honestly think I'll be in a legitimately good place on all fronts... Which, considering it's been literal years is something to be truly appreciative of.

Anyway, this past month was almost evenly divided between work emails and school emails for the Astyle Anything Misc category (ignore the 2022 I just noticed in the name, I made it a repeat goal and didn't realize that I named it by year when I first set it up, it'll be fixed for March). And the rest of it was entirely new material for the Dal Segno Star Wars Story!
I'm SO excited about where that story is going and Year 1 of it's timeline is within 3 Episodes of wrapping up! And, startlingly, I'm actually in a good enough place of attention and focus that I think I'll be able to jump right into writing Year 2!
Goals wise, February more or less met the goals I'd set.
I finished out with 37k, so not quite 40, but still way above my minimum, and I got a chapter posted to Patreon and at least 5 to Ao3, so 10 points to Slytherin there. The rest of it wasn't quite up to what I'd hoped for, but I vastly underestimated the time commitment of my class this semester, so I'm not too worried about.
We're gonna keep it just as simple for March:

- 40k in newly drafted material, 50k as a reach goal.
- 2 fanfic chapters posted to Ao3.
- 1+ chapter fic posted to Patreon.

And hopefully, we'll be in an even better place by the end of it!

GOOD LUCK to you guys in whatever you're hoping for this month!

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Monthly Wrap-Up | November 2022

12/10/2022

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Well, the boom predicted by the magical end of October managed to sustain itself pretty conclusively through November. I actually managed to get a helluva lot done this month, far more than I would've imagined possible back in September.
On the chart, it looks like the month took a steady downturn, but that's kind of misleading. Much of the confusion lies in just how astoundingly good the first few days were. My average across the month, with that first week removed from the data set, still had me at about 1k per day, which is about 400 more than in the last few months previous.

Also, when making my outlook for November, I conveniently forgot about the existence of Finals Week, which put a huge damper on my writing productivity due to a massive load of research projects and presentations. And those last 4 days of nothing-ness were sick-days. I even called out from work due to the absolutely killer migraine I had... I barely left my bed for 3 days.
Regardless of those seeming tripping points, however, I managed to have my 2nd best month this year so far (the best was August, and I only missed passing that by about 3k, so one more decent day of work without a headache or a pressing research project to take precedence). I got over the 40k line with my word count this month, which, in a normal year would be a slight disappointment, but in a year like this is absolutely glorious.

Goals-wise, I also did pretty good.
I did not post any new chapters of the original fiction story I've been working on, but that's more because I've been forced to recall that, wow my first drafts are rough, and less because I don't have the material. I want to make the stuff I post here at least kinda decent before I subject you guys to it.
I have chapters, and I'd like to get one or two posted in December, so I'll probably give them a quick edit and post them with notes and caveats so you guys can get a peak at my process in the next few weeks!
I successfully posted 2 new chapters of fanfic, as I'd hoped I could when setting my November goals, and I even drafted a little bit more to extend my queue so I still have some material near-ready to post for December!

Additionally, I have done some work on the potential Podcast/YouTube thingy, but wow is that more labor intensive than really viable for Finals Period...
I may have something solid to post in December, but that's a reach-goal.

For December, my goals are simple:
- 30k in newly drafted material, 50k as a reach goal.
- 2 fanfic chapters posted to Ao3.
- 1+ chapter original fic posted with notes to Patreon.
- Symposium Paper draft* (more info to come).
- Master's Capstone Project Outline* (also more to come).
- 3 media reviews.We'll see what happens, but that all seems moderately doable to me.

I hope you guys all have some fun things planned out for the Holiday season and that all your goals get met!

GOOD LUCK!

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Monthly Wrap-Up | March 2022

4/3/2022

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Well, this month might not be one for my record books, per se, it's still the best month I've had in a LONG while. It's the most I've written period since July of last year, and the most original fiction I've written since March of last year. I didn't quite tip the balance over from writing mostly school / admin stuff and reviews over to writing fiction, but I got pretty dang close (I'm only like ~300 words off the mark).

The bulk of what I worked on, fiction-wise, is the Star Wars Fic I'm currently publishing weekly, both here and on Ao3. I'm quite pleased with how well the writing is going and, as always, I am stunned and thrilled by the reaction I'm getting to it!

The original fiction project is one I'll eventually tell you all about, but not until I get a little further along in the drafting process. I'll sit with this story a little while longer and then give you all an assessment of it and let you guys in on how I go about crafting such stories

If you've ever attempted writing a story before you'll know that sometimes, no matter how good the idea is, writing this story now is just not in the cards. I've always found that it's not so much an aspect of writer's block so much as a fundamental misunderstanding of what the story needs to be that will be cured, almost magically, by time and open-minded-ness in processing new media. Sometimes the book / show / song you need to figure out a critical piece of your story just hasn't been published yet and until you stumble across it, you're just not going to be able to make that last bit click.
Honestly though, between midterms last month, finals prep and the scholarship scrounge of this month, and the frantic rush to prep for the upcoming 'busy season' for both of my main jobs... I'm in a bit of a chaotic lurch. Good chaos, though, mostly.
That said, I'm not gonna go over the goals I set for March today (because I do not wanna kill my current productivity buzz) and I'm not gonna set any real ones for April.
All I'm demanding of myself for April is that I draft at least 30k, aiming for 40k, and that more than half of what I do end up writing be something story-related.
(I'd also like to get at least 1 query letter out, but that's not a deal-breaker...).

Anywhoo, it's Spring and Things are happening and most of them might very well turn out to be not-awful. There's still plenty to be hyper-stressed about, but I'm trying to fixate on the positives. It's really not any healthier (or potentially less life-destructive) than fixating on the negatives, but I'll at least feel slightly better about all of it.

I DO have just a little bit more time to figure things out before they go nuclear, and I'll tell you about them once I either get them settled or start my final approach on the point of no return... In short, I can currently cover my financial bases, in no small part thanks to my amazing Patrons, but there's a bit of well-timed juggling involved that doesn't look like it's going to be able to maintain its precision over the summer...
But that's not a critical problem for today and for the moment I'm okay.
We'll have to see what happens in the next 6 weeks or so.

In the meantime, I hope everything that YOU GUYS are up to goes swimmingly!
GOOD LUCK!

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Monthly Wrap-Up | January 2022

2/5/2022

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January was a month full to bursting of time-heavy demands on me and my meager reserves of energy and attention. I am in the process of transitioning to a new role at one of my jobs and also of shifting course within my COVID de-railed academic career, so I've been hella busy (in a GOOD way, something way better than any other sort of busy, over-worked-ness that I've been subjected to in the last few years.)
That said, I still managed to get within a negligible distance of my word-count goal for this month. With respect to the fact that I am still recovering my creative groove after the past summer's burnout, I aimed for simply not backsliding. I've been slowly getting back to the 50k a month I usually produce, but in small spurts (ie, 5k in October, 15k in November, and 24k in December). So my goal this month was 25k

I didn't quite make it to 25, but I made it to 200 words over what I did in December 2021, so I'm still counting it a success.

Especially because the bulk of that word count came from new creative work rather than from analytical writing or administrative drafting. This is the first time that balance has tipped towards where I want it to be since July of 2021.
I'm gonna take that win.

Not great, certainly, but also not too bad.

I have plenty of room to improve, but I'm trying not to beat myself up about anything here because I'm still doing better than last month and since progress is not a destination but a trajectory, and as my current trajectory is still pointing in the right direction, this month is a success. It's important for me to keep focused on that part of it.

And to start looking forward towards a brighter future, because next month is full of particularly amazing promise.
It's more exciting for me in the immediate future than it can be for you, but I am embarking on the production of a short-vlog sort of new content! It's part of a semester project and will be posted on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, but only after I post it here, of course. It's hopefully going to be part opinionated media-review and part informative cultural/historical analysis, and I'm very excited about its potential!

I probably won't finish scripting / filming / editing any of it until at least March... but I'll likely start up with posting in-production pics and teasers almost immediately after I get the pitch approved by my professor!

Aside from that, I'll almost certainly be able to finish up with posting the Multiverse Mishap story (both the BatFam version and the SPN one). And I should even be able to gear up for posting a brand new story, but that's a secondary goal and won't be at all plausible until at least three weeks yet...

So, LOTS of stuff in the pipeline and it's all really exciting!
But, as always, we'll just have to see how things play out.
In sincerely hope it goes well, so me, and for whatever you guys have on all your plates at the moment!

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE!!

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[Write Life] June Wrap-Up & July 2021 Goals!

7/1/2021

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Whelp, June did not go as planned. I definitely felt very rushed and cornered because I bout of depression-based executive disfunction caught me by the throat (this whole post-pandemic job-search thing is really starting to get to me...). Beyond that, Star Wars has kind of taken over my life a bit, which is a new obsession that I've allowed myself to dive headlong into because it was something to be excited about (while everything else I've been attempting to work on was feeling like it was predetermined to end in failure).

At the very least I can fall back on the lovely knowledge that I easily more than met my goal for the month's general word count...

I wound up with a final daily average of 2,608 and a final count of ~78,250, which is technically a better result than last month, but I got less of the goals I'd set for myself even half accomplished... It means I'm both mildly pleased and disappointed in myself for it all, but here's how it breaks down:

Literally all I worked on this past month. at all, were my job applications and my new Star Wars obsession story... It's not even a single story, it's a hodge-podge of like 3 potential stories that all have the same theme (and currently the same title) that MAY eventually take shape enough to be posted on Ao3... Basically, I just wanted to run through a head-space hop-scotch game of the Clone Wars characters as Ahsoka Tano proves herself to be rather more grown up than the others would like to think of her.

I am quite fond of what I've come up with for this Star Wars thing, but the stories will need a lot more work to be even half presentable as legit fics. And I'm mostly focused on whipping the BatFam / SPN crossover story into shape for posting. If I get a bit more of that finished and polished up, I should be able to start posting 2 chapters per week (so each story will get a new chapter once per week instead of how I currently have them alternating)... But that's a thing I won't be able to manage until at least August.
Also, Sun & Stars unfortunately is slipping off the table, because it is just too difficult to keep up with all the research when I can't pass any of it off as classwork. When I had a class focused on material objects and how human culture builds itself around them I was able to pick the Crusades as my area of focus, but now I'm in a fairly intense Linguistic seminar and this fall I have Literature, Ethics, and Human Rights course that's gonna be mostly focused on the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries... So yeah, that Crusades research is just gonna be a lot harder to keep up with. Especially, if I don't get a higher-paying job and need to scrounge for extra shifts like I have been so far this summer... It's tragic, but it is what it is, and I would like to come back to it eventually. I do still have a few unedited / not-fully-fact-checked chapters in my word doc, that I'd like to finish cleaning up at get posted, so I'll hopefully be doing at least one of those this month, but that's about all I can offer for this story for the foreseeable future.

For now, I want to reaffix my focus to getting Assassin's Game published, so I'm aiming for another big push in query letters to lit agents. And of course, that whole getting-a-decent-job nonsense...
So, those are my two big focus-points for July.

July 2021 Goals:
- Query 9 Lit Agents
- Post 1 Chapter of Sun & Stars.
- Post 4 Chapters of Multiverse Mishap.
- Post 8 Media Reviews
- Make 3 other kinds of Post (special release, culture crit, write life, etc)
- Submit 12 Job Applications

**- Draft ~30k in [Star Wars] Not a Kid...

July 2021 Schedule:

Monday: Post new chapter of Multiverse Mishap. (Bats Vers.)
Tuesday: Post new chapter of Sun & Stars. (Hopefully)
Wednesday: Post Media Review.
Thursday: Special Access, Write Life, or Culture Crit posts.
Friday: Post Media Review.
Saturday: Post new chapter of Multiverse Mishap. (SPN Vers.)
Sunday: No Post.

It's not an excessive amount of work, at least not in terms of accomplishing the main, normal goals, but (as evidenced by the tacked on extra goal) I am also quite sure that I'll be posting a lot of new words as being part of the [Star Wars] Not a Kid semi-story, so hopefully I'll get at least one piece of that sorted out well enough to being posting it as a current project on Ao3... We'll just have to see what happens.
So, hopefully, we'll see something happen that shifts things towards a brighter future. But if not, I've at least got a handle on myself enough to know I tried... (It's really difficult not to feel like a lazy piece of shit when like 80% of my day often involves sitting on a couch, and then just a short bit of shift work... but I absolutely cannot focus on anything like a job app after a shift at one of my jobs... ADHD brain says when the shift is over the day is over... even if I get out of work at like 11am, which means to compensate and actually get shit done with my days I've been waking up at like 2am on the regular...).

We'll have to see how it all works out.
I hope you guys have a great July, a FANTASTIC 4th of July Weekend, and as always, if you think of anything you'd like me to write about, just drop me a line and I'll work it into the schedule post haste!

GOOD LUCK, Y'ALL!

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[Write Life] May Wrap-Up & June 2021 Goals

6/1/2021

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It was an odd month, not least because of how my A/C died on me... We honestly think it was sabotage... We had a couple of people come out to give estimates on getting it replaced soon-ish (because it was old and would need replacing soon so we wanted a ballpark on its cost), but it was working fine after 2/4 people checked it out and then the 3rd guy left and immediately it crapped out... And dude #3's company called us 26 times in the next 30 hours...).

I even stayed nice and focused on just a couple of projects this month:

The Gatewatch blip is an original fiction plot bunny that wouldn't leave me alone last month and still wouldn't quit this month, so I gave it a few more hours of note-making and free-writing, but it's probably not going to evolve into anything very exciting (at least not for a long while yet). The Star Wars story may continue into something worth watching for a future story to be published, though. It's focused on Ahsoka finally proving herself and developing a grown-up kind of respected reputation before & during her time as Fulcrum. (There may be time-travel involved... and or de-aging... ) XD
But the bulk of what I worked on this month were job applications, query letters, and (most substantially) the revamping THIS WEBSITE!

SO, lots of drama, but I squeaked out my word-count goal right at the end there! I actually managed to stay on track for most of the first half of the month, only falling off the band-wagon for about a week in the middle there. After a few days of basically nothing I got back on track with my normal daily-count, but it wasn't quite enough to make up the difference until I had a few good days at the end.
I wound up averaging ~1754 per day, which is actually just about perfect (the requirement for average daily count to meet my monthly goal is usually about ~1680-ish in a month with 31 days). I was worried because it kept hovering around the ~1430 mark for most of the last 2 weeks, but that last burst of awesome was just enough of a boost.

I'm actually really excited it because I like at lot of the formatting possibilities better than what Patreon offers and I can link certain posts through Patreon to ensure that they remain Early Access or Patron Only. No real changes will be seen in my posting schedule here, but I do think the website will be able to help me get more exposure. ^_^
Anywho, I wasn't really able to meet... well any of my May goals writing goals outside of word count, but technically I did send my query letters, make my job apps, and post my chapters / reviews on time (thank goodness for prewriting and substantial queues!)
But all that aside, I've got high hopes for June:

June 2021 Goals:

- Query 3 Lit Agents
- Post 2 Chapters of Sun & Stars.
- Draft 1 full chapter of Sun & Stars.
- Post 4 Chapters of Multiverse Mishap.
- Post 8 Media Reviews
- Make 3 other kinds of Post (special release, culture crit, write life, etc)
- Submit 12 Job Applications

June 2021 Schedule:

Monday: Post new chapter of Multiverse Mishap. (Biweekly)
Tuesday: Post new chapter of Sun & Stars. (Hopefully)
Wednesday: Post Media Review.
Thursday: Special Access, Write Life, or Culture Crit posts.
Friday: Post Media Review.
Saturday: Post new chapter of Multiverse Mishap. (Biweekly)
Sunday: No Post.

Unfortunately, the Sun & Stars story has caught up to me in terms of being a little too difficult to research / write on any kind of schedule and since the BatFamily story is both easier to write and receives more audience enthusiasm... I'm transferring my focus to Multiverse Mishap. It'll likely be a best-choice option even if it currently feels like giving up. (I always hate leaving WIPs as WIPs, but sometimes it's inevitable).
We'll see what happens, but I've got a very good outlook for it!
I hope you guys have a wonderful June!

GOOD LUCK!

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Monthly Wrap-Up | April 2023... & May & June

MONTHLY WRAP-UP | February 2023

Monthly Wrap-Up | November 2022

Monthly Wrap-Up | March 2022

Monthly Wrap-Up | January 2022

[Write Life] June Wrap-Up & July 2021 Goals!

[Write Life] May Wrap-Up & June 2021 Goals

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