IWSG I don't think I can today

 

    I don't...

    I'm just really scared right now.

    How am I supposed to write in a world like this?

    I can't even think right now.  I just want to curl up in a corner and cry.

    I'm going to try to write, but who knows if it will work.

NotNaNo '24, Day 5: I voted

     Yes, I voted today.

    I...um...

    ...also...kinda tried to write?

    I only wrote 110 words.

    It just wasn't....wasn't working.  Or something.

    Didn't help that I kept having to do a lot of copy-pasting to and from AO3 for reasons of other things I've already written.

    Also I went out to lunch with my parents and I think maybe something in my lunch did not agree with me because I am not feeling terribly well now.  Though that might just be the lingering effects of my stupid period.  (Thankfully, it's already winding down, but...)

    So, yeah, writing just didn't happen so far today.  Maybe I'll be able to get some writing done on my phone later, but...

    It's hard to focus today.

NotNaNo '24, Day 4: title already not found

     Just a note at the start of the day that I added 422 words to the MDZS fic last night, bringing it up to 8,317 words.  So I won't forget and add that to today's total instead of yesterday's.  😅

    Overall, I think I'm working on too many projects here; they're starting to make things confusing.  I added another 1,114 words to the Sandrock fic before I reached the spot to insert the contest story into it, and from there I added another 754 words after that.  (At least on future days on that one there won't be stuff I wrote a previous day getting inserted into the middle of what I'm writing. 😅)

    Went back to the MDZS fic, and it's at 10,875 now, meaning I added 2,558 words to that one today.

    So....adding the two fics together...that's a total of 4,426 words today, if I am not a total freaking moron.

    And a total of 14,189 written in November to date.

    I decided to just go ahead and recycle the chart system I set up last year with the new data.  So here's today's graph:

    Oh crud.  I forgot to add in the 422 words to yesterday's total.  Okay, so that makes the overall total actually 14,611.  I'll fix the data on the graph before tomorrow...

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 3: Day 3 hates me

     I'm gonna put a read more tag on here straight away, on account of talking about very normal things that make some men squick out because men are just too fragile.

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 2: yup, it's day two all right

     Not much of a title, I know.

    Anyhow, I mean, it was both a good day and a bad day for writing?  (Though something started that really should no longer be a thing anymore at my age, which really, really, really, really, really, really sucks...!)

    I got through a fair chunk of words--over 4k--and through several scenes.  Including, appropriately enough, the scene wherein the ghosts of Wei Wuxian's parents are raised to identify him.  (Since he's still a small child and doesn't remember who his parents were.  Which is canonically the case:  by the time he was found in the streets of Yiling, all he remembered was that his name had a "Ying" in it.)  Which is, of course, appropriate because today is the Day of the Dead.

    On the other hand, I'm not sure if I need to put anything else in there to fill in the gap between him being eight years old and him being fifteen years old.  Since it's at fifteen that the story really picks up, what with that being when the rest of the cast comes to study at Cloud Recesses.

    I figure I'll worry about that later, though.

    Still haven't decided if I want to use something else to keep track of my progress, or even if I want to bother with a chart like I did last year.

    For right now...

    Words written as of yesterday:  2,700

    Words written today:  4,348

    Total words written in November to date:  7,048

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 1

     So...yeah, I could actually be doing this differently this year.  Someone in the writing channel of the game dev Discord server I'm in provided a link with a list of alternative writing challenge/tracking sites for November, and some of them looked pretty promising, but I didn't really feel like actually dealing with any of them today.

    I'm exhausted for a lot of reasons.

    First, the night before Halloween, a tornado warning ripped through here, and I was torn out of my sound sleep at about two in the morning by my phone blaring a tornado warning at me, and I didn't get back to sleep until about five in the morning.  (Ironically, despite being awake, I didn't hear the actual tornado sirens, because the TV show I had going to put myself back to sleep drowned them out.)  So yesterday I was operating on a sleepless night bookended by about two hours of sleep on either end.

    Needless to say, I was a total wreck yesterday.  And although I did get a good night's sleep last night, that wasn't really enough to make up for it, so I'm still not on top of my game today.  (Even worse, there's no leftover Halloween candy!  The local grocery store had already gotten rid of it all by this past Monday, and I of course went to my parents' house as usual so I wouldn't have to personally deal with trick-or-treaters, and they didn't buy enough so they actually ran out.  So I get no candy today! 😭)

    Then my brother and I went and tried to vote early.  It took us forever to find a parking place--literally the last one there--and then we went inside past the stupidly offensive signs (the anti-abortion people are desperate and making up the dumbest lies to encourage people to send us sliding down along the path towards The Handmaid's Tale)--and found that the line inside looked like it was at least an hour and a half long.  We were neither of us in any condition for that, so we just got the heck out of there.  Apparently the early voting will also be available over the weekend, so we're hoping that maybe it won't be too bad on Sunday morning, but...

    Anyway.

    Only by lunchtime did I manage to start writing for the day.  (Though I did actually write the first scene on my phone before lunch.  It's only a bit under 600 words, though.)

    It's a promising start for the fic.  (I decided to go with an AU where Wei Wuxian is raised among the Lan Clan.  Probably been done lots of times before, but...🤷  Probably most MDZS AU ideas have been done before in some capacity or another.  But it's not like any two fanfic authors would ever put exactly the same spin on the same idea, so I figure there's no point in worrying about it.)  I don't think it's shaping up to be very long, which is very good considering how long the last one ended up being!

    Anyway, I'll worry about how to properly keep track of my progress tomorrow.

    For the moment, I'll just use words/numbers on the screen:

    Goal for the month:  50,000 words

    Today's words:  2,700 words

    Total for the month:  2,700 words  (obviously!)

    And now I finally get to play My Time at Sandrock for the first time in about a month, because the 1.4 update is finally out on the PS5, so hopefully Fang will actually deliver his special line at the end of "The Goat," as that bug is allegedly fixed in 1.4.  (If he doesn't, then there wasn't a heck of a lot of point to me waiting all this time.  Though at least this way I'll get his romance mission from the new DLC before marriage instead of after.  Which is something, I guess.  Wish my Builder didn't have to be quite such a tiny little guy, though.  It's hard for Fang's mouth to reach his lips.  I shudder to think of the contortions they have to put the really tall love interests like Owen and Logan through!  (Though I'll definitely do a Logan playthrough eventually, so I guess I'll find out in due time...))

I feel like I should be worrying

 It's what, the 29th of October?

And I'm still not sure what I plan to do for NaNoWriMo.  (I mean, other than my usual "participate unofficially" thing.)

I could try writing prompts.

I could try one of the fanfic ideas from my massive file of them.  (Leaning towards the one where Wei Wuxian is raised by the Lan Clan, but not sure yet.  I could also try the other CQL-canon fic idea I had, but...dunno, that one feels sorta meh.)

I could try writing the idea I have for a (possibly hybrid) VN that would be loosely inspired by the story motifs and general atmosphere of danmei novels (but in an invented world that while inspired by ancient China would be distinctly not actually ancient China (you know, like Avatar:  The Last Airbender)) only it would be a romance between two women instead of two men.

Or...

...um...

I could try writing prompts.

Or I could try picking up that partially-written MDZS fan VN, but I don't know if that would work.  I mean, pretty much the whole reason I never finished it was that it just wasn't gelling with me.  (It would have helped if the artist who made the sprites available had released more characters. The ones I have to choose from I don't have much to say about, not without more characters being in the mix.)

Or I could try writing prompts.

Or, I mean, truthfully, I could just not bother, but...

...I've been doing NaNo (officially at first, then unofficially for the last...like five or six years?) since 2011.  Stopping now would feel pretty pitiful.  Or wrong.  Or empty.  Or something.

Gnh.

I just got nothing, you know?

And it bugs me that my phone has started thinking my common typos due to my big fat fingers and the teeny tiny phone keyboard are things I want to write.  😰  It's actually started "suggesting" things like "somethibg" because my fingers have a tendency to hit one letter over pretty frequently.  😭  (I should add a screencap showing that later. Can't do it now because they've changed how pictures are added and that prevents me from adding them on my phone. 😭)