NotNaNo '24, final day

     Well.

    I've decided to stop writing for the day because I can't really come up with what to have the characters say next.

    This fic is so far so much talking that even by my standards it's mind-numbing to have them talk so much.  If I ever finish it, massive sections of it will have to be torn out and replaced with something that is less...well....boring.  The amount of infodumping is especially awful, but because I'm working with alternate history and alternate versions of the work it's a fanfic of, it's going to be very tricky to find a way to get that information out there without it just being an infodump.  But I guess I can worry about that if and when I finish the first draft.

    Anyway.  I wrote 2116 words today, all on that one fic, which is now up to 16,033 words.

    My total for the month is 57,696 words, which may be the smallest number I have ever written during November since I started doing NaNo in 2011.

    The final chart for my progress is:

    And the day by day chart is:

    ...which is just really alarming to look at.  At least, that's how it seems to me, anyway.

    Although maybe it's not too much worse than last year's:

    ....nope.  Nope.  This year's is much worse, no matter how you look at it.

    I don't know how much of it is due to the horror of real life events, and how much is because I didn't have a strong project to work on.  (A small amount of it is due to not-necessarily-horrible real life events intervening, but there's really only a few days like that.)

NotNaNo '24, day 23 - breaking silence

     I haven't wanted to face the permanence of a blog post for quite a while.  Still don't, really, but...

    Anyway, I have still been writing every day, though there were a few days that I didn't even reach 500 words.  One day I didn't even reach 100.

    I've accomplished little things, though?

    I started the month trying to be hopeful and upbeat, so I was working on a happy fic, an AU for MDZS in which Wei Wuxian was raised at Cloud Recesses and so got to spend most of his life with Lan Wangji, and it was a No War AU, so everything was happy and hopeful all the way through.  (Which actually made it sort of boring after a while because that removed the entire plot of the novel and most of the conflict, but...)  I finished it a while back, and it rounded out at 19,513 words.

    I was also working on a pre-existing My Time at Sandrock fic, but that's been sort of...meh.  I don't know if I'll ever finish it, because it's turning out a little too much like "here's the plot of the game" and not sufficiently "here's my own story about the game's characters and world."

    After finishing the WWX-raised-in-Gusu fic, I decided to do a canon compliant AU based on The Untamed's version of MDZS, one in which Wen Qing survived, having been held as a prisoner by the Jin Clan for the last sixteen years.  (And which also ends with Wei Wuxian confessing his love to Lan Wangji, who of course has loved him from the day they met, so happy romantic ending there.)  That one I finished a few days ago, and it came to 11,177 words total.

    So, after puttering around pointlessly on the Sandrock fic for a while, yesterday's words were actually all just brainstorming words for the new fic I started today, which took some working out, because it's a massive and complicated idea.  (No idea how long it will end up being, but the idea is still massive and complicated.)

    It's a crossover between a modern AU of MDZS and Velvet Goldmine, inspired by the anime Ya Boy Kongming, in which a dying Zhuge Liang is transported to modern-day Tokyo (and youthified in the process, thankfully) where he helps a young singer with her career.  As I was watching that show, I had wanted to find a way to do that with MDZS, making Lan Wangji the one to be transported to the modern world.

    I figured out a way, and it's a multi-fandom crossover event, in that there will be a lot of other bands who are cameos from other fandoms, but the Velvet Goldmine connection is major, because Wei Wuxian's band is trying to enter a contest that will net them a contract from the record label owned by the now-septuagenarian Curt Wild.  And Wei Wuxian lives in the Chinatown of a fictional city that is actually the setting of my first visual novel, A Song of Warriors...just because.  (That visual novel was itself heavily inspired by Velvet Goldmine, which is kinda meta in and of itself, but...)

    I bring this up because it's particularly mind-boggling in connection with what happened today.

    There's a tradition in my family of family visits on the weekends.  Used to be on Sundays only, but it gets moved around a lot these days, and so today my brother and I went to visit my parents even though it's Saturday.  We made the rash decision to eat out for lunch instead of getting take-out somewhere, and that was crazy because there were mobs of people everywhere.

    After we ate, we went back to my parents' house to watch some TV together, because for some reason that's what we do.  And what we watched was the first episode of the Hulu show Interior Chinatown.  Which is set in the Chinatown of a fictional city.

    After that, my brother wanted to watch the 1980s-styled opening credits for the Obi-wan Kenobi mini-series that someone had put on Youtube a while back.  And that starred Ewan McGregor.  Who played Curt Wild.  (And the present-day sequences of Velvet Goldmine took place in the 1980s.  As did my visual novel, in fact.)

    This level of coincidence is just too weird, you know?

    Kinda freaks me out.

    It's like proof that we don't live in the real world, we live in a Matrix-like fake world.  One that I suspect has a very nasty virus.

    Uh.

    Yeah.

    Anyway.

    Here's my current NotNaNo graphs.

Current total is 44,048 words.  The by-the-day chart, though...

    It just shouldn't look like that.

    At all.

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...))