IWSG: Reflections on (Not)NaNo

 So, the same as last year, I didn't take part in the official NaNoWriMo this year, because I am still disgusted by the changes to the website.  (Honestly, I could have dealt with the hideous design scheme and the purposeful destruction of the forums if they hadn't mutilated our past project pages.  But that?  No, I was not going to do anything to give even the slightest tacit sign of approval to that.)  And I did my own thing, keeping tally on my blog.

Unlike last year, this time I went by hour count rather than word count, since I was working on multiple projects, one of which was a rewrite.

I think the biggest thing I learned from the process is that hour counts don't really work for me.  They're hard to keep track of (I kept forgetting to stop or start the timer when I had to get up and do something else for a few minutes, or answer the phone, or whatever), and they just don't feel very satisfying in the end.  In the future, I'm just going to have to try and make sure not to have this kind of project going on when I'm doing one of my off-the-books NaNo equivalent things.

Or rather, these kinds of projects.

I was working on a total of four projects over November:

1. Polishing up, adding images and a glossary to The Cousins, a game expanding on part of the first chapter of a novel I wrote back in 2014.  Most of the text for this game was written prior to the start of November, so all I was working on really was the glossary, edits to the text, all the image stuff, and some coding issues.  I posted the game to itch.io on the 12th.
2. Adding a glossary to my previous game, Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, and fixing the various coding errors in the game.  I got the updated version uploaded on the 17th...though I doubtless still missed some coding errors because it's actually much too complicated a game for my minimal programming skills. :(  (Well, I am a writer, not a programmer.)  There may be something wrong with one of the images, unfortunately, but I can't figure out what...
3. Love Allergy, a parody of the otome dating game genre, in which rather than playing a straight girl being offered the opportunity for a romance with one of typically about five handsome men, you're playing an aroace girl trying to avoid being pressured into a romance with I think it was four handsome men and one attractive character of uncertain gender.  I wrote the basic synopsis of the scenario and some bare bones character profiles, and part of the first couple of scenes, just the "setting the stage" material.  I wasn't really feeling it, so I pretty quickly set it aside and moved on to...
4. The Walls of Troy, or whatever I end up calling it, the full rewrite-as-interactive-fiction of the 2014 novel that The Cousins came from.  (Or rather, that The Cousins should be considered the demo of, since its whole text is wholesale part of this other project.)  This one I've been working on pretty consistently, and have gotten a pretty good length of text into, though I'm nowhere near a good chunk of the way through the story:  the villain hasn't even shown up yet!  (And he'll be making his appearance much earlier in this version than he did in the original version!)

Anyway, my initial hour count goal was 60 hours, but as I started falling further and further behind, I dropped that down to 45 hours, which I only barely met on the last day.  (Total was 45 hours and 18 minutes.)  However, I'm glad to say that if I had been worried about word counts instead, I'd be good!  The glossary for Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? runs 17,733 words, and what I have so far of The Walls of Troy is 38,826 words (much longer than I thought it was!), which add up to a total of 56,559 words, and I forgot to see how many words I'd written for Love Allergy; I suspect that was probably another 5k or so.

So at least I managed to get 50k without that even being my goal! ;)

And I'm feeling good about how The Walls of Troy is developing...although I want to change the title, because that's really not a good title for it.  I want it to be about kinship somehow, but I'm not sure specifically in what way.  I also want to make sure as I go along that I put in enough hints about the scale of the bad guy's plans along the way, because in looking back on it, I feel like the "ha ha ha my plan will kill the gods and then i'll become the father of the new gods" nonsense kind of comes out of freaking nowhere.  Admittedly, he's more than a little crazy, but that's no excuse for failing to provide setup for what's actually going on.

One thing that's bothering me, though, is that I'm starting feel like I'm not "really" being a writer anymore.  I mean, I never counted as a professional writer, since I've never been paid for anything I wrote.  (I'm not sure who it was that set out that qualification.  I'm wanting to say it was Hemingway or someone like that, but I could be totally wrong.)  But it's like, do I still get to call myself a writer in any way if I'm writing a video game, no matter how text-based the game is?

I think this was especially bothering me in the matter of the hour count for this Not-NaNo, because I was sometimes having to count time that didn't contain any writing at all, but instead consisted of me in PhotoShop trying to make the photographs taken on modern day Lesbos look as much as possible like they could be ancient frescoes.  (Sadly, they do not look like frescoes.  Like, at all.)  But it's a problem for me overall, as it makes me feel even more like a fraud than I usually do.

It also feels kind of like a colossal waste of time, since it's not going to get me a new job, but then again nothing is, and I just have to somehow remember what it was like in the days before I got my job at the museum in the first place.  (I would feel less useless if they would at least let me come back in as a volunteer, but they won't even do that!  That really annoys me, considering that I was volunteering there for five years before it turned into employment.)  I mean, at least I have a proofreading gig now, but it's not a paying one, so...well, it's a credit I can put on my CV, so there's at least that; it might lead to a paying gig later.  The writing is never going to lead to anything with money involved, and it never was, so it doesn't matter if I feel "genuine" or not.

Ugh, this has descended into self-pitying drivel now, so I think I'll stop before it gets worse.  I hope everyone else had a good November, and has a great December!