IWSG: The Longest Write

    (Dumb post title that is an in-joke only to me, and isn't even funny, more just mildly quirky, and will not be even that if I bother to explain it...)

    So, I have been working on one project for a very long time now, and it is stupidly long.  Admittedly, it should be shorter in draft two (there are at least two whole scenes in it that are entirely crossed out with strikethrough, plus a lot of shorter passages and individual words) but it will still be stupidly long even then.

    I'm drawing near to a full year on it:  I just checked the document it started out in (before it got long enough to sap my phone's battery and even cause the loading on my computer to lag, forcing me to move it from Google Docs to Microsoft Word (though at this point it has become so long that even that takes at least a full minute to load)) and I started writing it on the 24th of April.  The fact that it's still going--and that I've been worked on it almost every day in between then and now--is kind of staggering.  Especially when you consider that I'm the type who often writes several thousand words per sitting.  (I did about 90k this past November alone, for example.  My max in a single day is, I think, in the 14-16k range?  Hmm...I had that written down somewhere.  I should check before I post this...)

    I'm starting to feel restless about it, but equally afraid that if I set it aside to write something else for a while then I'll never come back to it.  (Okay, technically I've actually written two other small things since then, one about 10k long and the other more like 2.5k.  Both only took two days to write, so I hadn't set the project down for long.)  It's frustrating on so many levels, especially since I have a stalled project that needs a final edit-and-polish for release, plus I had a fun idea for a cute little visual novel, but if I work on the latter I fear I won't end up coming back to this one, and the former is just...I don't know.

    *sigh*

    It's very stupid and frustrating, especially since it's not even "real" writing in most people's eyes, as it's a fan fiction project that got way out of control.  (I had been worried about how stupidly long it is--a bit over 450k words by now--but then I looked up how long the original novel is, and came across the data that the fan translation of the novel is about 470k, so...I guess that makes it feel a little less weird?  (I'd heard Chinese web novels could get insanely long, but actually seeing the proof is mind-numbing!  All the more so since the one in question, Mo Dao Zu Shi, is one of the shorter novels that have gotten official English translations:  it only runs five volumes, whereas the author's third novel is eight volumes, and The Husky and His White Cat Shizun (which is from a different author) is eleven.  (I probably won't finish reading that one...more because of the content than the length, though...)))

    Anyway, at least the end is in sight on this thing, but...ugh.  I am so drained from writing it, which is kind of ironic since it was supposed to be a lightweight relaxation project to keep my heart under control when my heart palpitations first showed up.  Next time, I need to write something that's actually going to be lightweight and relaxing.

    Maybe I need to branch out into fairy tales for a while.  Those shouldn't be able to stress me out....

    ...though that also sounds kinda dull, so it probably won't happen.  If I can just stick to projects that will actually be short, that should help.

    But!  I realize none of that is of the slightest interest to anyone other than me, so I actually have a question for anyone who happens across this post.  Did anyone take part in the official NaNoWriMo this past November?  (I've been avoiding it since they redid their site and made it so awful.)  I recently got an email from them about all these changes that they're making in how the organization is going to function from here on out, and it sounds like maybe something happened during NaNo this year.  So, idle curiosity (and perhaps a hint of schadenfreude), what happened?  Anything I should actually know about, or just general "the internet" type of stuff?