IWSG: NotNaNo Yet Again (2023 ver.)

 

    This year's November 1st is a Wednesday, so I guess my IWSG post for the month gets to double as my first rebellious NotNaNoWriMo post.

    Because (obliquely answering the month's question) I used to participate in NaNoWriMo faithfully, from 2011 until...uh...whatever year it was they redesigned their website.  I'm wanting to say the redesign was in 2019?  Well, whenever it was, I hated the ugly new look so much--and especially hated the way it decided the focal point of our project pages should be cover images (which they provided, outside the rare instances of people who provided their own) instead of, you know, our words, and the way that it scrambled my Camp NaNo data so now it says that all my minute and hour goals were word goals, and that I wrote nothing on my last Camp session (and then they closed down the Camp NaNo site a week before they said they were going to, so I couldn't retrieve the actual data and manually input it to fix the problem!)--that I refused to take part officially again until they repaired the damage.  (I mean, not that I expect them to magically restore my lost data, just that I won't officially participate again unless they, at a bare minimum, restore the project pages to focus on words instead of images.  For a writing challenge, I don't think I am even the slightest bit out of line in thinking what they've done to the project pages is just plain bass ackwards.)

    Well, they haven't, so I'm still only doing NaNo unofficially, using my blog to keep track of my word count.  I do miss the nice graph they provided, though.  😭  I need to see if I can make a nice graph like that in Office or something.  🤔

    This year, I'm doing something pretty weird.  This spring, I started having heart palpitations while working on a game jam script, and being unsure what had caused it, I first dropped out of the jam and then decided to stop working on game dev until the problem was solved.  Well, a lot of expensive and pointless medical appointments later, I think my friend was right when she said it could be peri-menopause, which lets me self-medicate because one of the treatments for peri-menopause symptoms is melatonin, and I already had a bottle of melatonin gummies, and since I've started taking them regularly, the heart palpitations have been greatly reduced.  Not quite gone, but....

    Well, anyway, when I dropped out of game dev activities, I decided to calm my mind by writing some nice, safe fan fiction.

    I'm still writing it.

    Like, the same piece of fan fiction.

    It is crazy long.  (Yes, that's the word count as of Oct. 31.)  But thanks to taking a breather while right at 250k, it'll be easy for me to measure my path towards 50k for the month:  when I hit 300k, I'll have made it!  😆  (The terrifying part is that there's no way I'll finish it before hitting 300k at this point.  It's effectively two full length novels--one a war novel and the other a political drama (I hope), with a novella in between to bridge the stories--but as they're the same over-sized work, I don't have to try to force a feeling of completion (or even semi-completion) on the earlier part(s) like I would if this was an original work that I intended to share with others.)

    I've done an outline that, while probably only about a third of the remaining story (I think), will probably last me through November.

    I do hope the whole thing won't take too much longer to complete, though; I'm starting to feel a little shackled to it.  😅  (Which isn't to say that I don't want to finish writing it.  It's just that I also have other projects I want to work on but I have trouble working on more than one project at a time, outside of periodic unusual circumstances...)

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    Anyway, after today's writing period is over, I'll be adding my first day's word count down here.  😄  (Hopefully with a nice graph, but we'll have to see what I can find...)

    So, today's writing has been completed.

    Total words in work:  253,308

    Nov. 1 words written:  3,308

    (Looks pretty good, right? 😁  Setting it up was a bit of a pain in the neck, but...overall I think it worked out well, except that somehow my calculations were off and so I ended up being ten words over on the goal words.  Not sure how that happened or when an extra ten words got added in, but they're in there somewhere, so suddenly the goal words written for the last day are 1,657 instead of 1,667.  But I figure with numbers this big, ten words are kind of irrelevant...)