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Same Old Update, Now With New Format!
Weekly update time! I am going to attempt not to let this entry devolve into one long panic scream about my writing schedule and about trying to meet the big bang deadlines, but... There's a really good chance a large percentage of it is going to be screaming about the big bang. The posting date is first week of August! Come first week of August -- ideally -- I and also you will be free of big bang hell!
On the work front, I feel like I've been playing catch-up ever since fourth of July. Thursday and Friday weren't enough time to make up for being gone for a week so I spent the entire NEXT week getting caught up, and I did! Succeed! But now it's a new week and I'm swamped again because this is a busy time of the year and I'm dying. It's great. It is absolutely an unwise choice to devote a chunk of my work day to writing this update but my brain needs a small breather so I'm doing it anyway.
On the exercise front, I've been trying to bike every Tuesday and Thursday, and to go swimming once a week if I can manage it. I made myself a little exercise calendar where I can mark off whether I did one or the other and see my color-coded activities, and being able to look at my efforts that way is Very Satisfying, even if I've yet to stick to my schedule 100%.
I was too tired Thursday after I got back from Boston to bike, but I did go on a looooong bike ride that Sunday. I finally figured out the turn-offs for other parts of the trail system I like to ride on -- the problem is that there are two whole other branches but they each go across an actual road and I thought those turn-offs were road access, not more trail -- so I celebrated by doing the Northwest Branch trail and biking 28 miles in total. It's the longest I've ever ridden in one day since starting to bike again a few years ago and like... I know it's nothing compared to competitive cyclists who bike 50 miles a day just for training, but for me it's! Genuinely really impressive!
I bike for leisure and to clear my head and keep myself grounded more than I bike for exercise (although that's a nice side benefit) and I have no intention of getting into racing. But I'm just... Really glad I got back into doing this activity I always loved, it makes me happy and being outside and being active is definitely doing good things for my mental health.
I also biked on Tuesday and Thursday of last week even after grocery shopping and getting home late both days, because I was determined not to skip out on something I wanted to do. Both times it was getting dark when I biked home but I have a little headlight and tail-light on my bike so... It's fine.
On the swimming front, that dovetails into the family update. Friday before last was allergy shots with my mom and Saturday was my aunt's annual summer pool party, so I went home with mom after shots and we drove to my aunt's together in the morning. It was a small group compared to some years because a lot of people couldn't make it, but it was nice seeing my cousin and her young kids and just... Hanging out in the pool and eating good food and seeing my family.
On the driving front, I drove with mom that Friday afternoon, on a route we'd done before. I feel like I've hit a plateau in my learning to drive; the highway is still a bit much for me, but driving on state roads doesn't feel very challenging. What I'm practicing is just, merging and changing lanes and turning while remaining aware of the cars around me and it feels like such slow going. I need to get better at judging when I have the space and time to turn in front of another car, or change lanes in front of another car, and those are things my aunt and my mother have been doing for decades but which they STILL have trouble with and are STILL cautious about.
I know I shouldn't be frustrated with myself when these things take time and practice, and I'm not, not really. But my goal is to be able to take the test for my license after a year of practice, so I just have this constant low-grade awareness of how much of that year I've already used up, and the vague sense that at the rate I'm going, I won't be good enough at the time I hope that I'll be.
Even so, there's not much else I can do. I'm practicing as often as I can and I'm enjoying it and I'm not going to give up. (And I realized I probably could have driven home from my aunt's, on route 50 going over the bay bridge, because as highways go it really wasn't bad. It's just the part on 495 afterward that's kind of gross.)
And I guess that brings us to the writing front. I didn't write on Thursday or Friday after getting back, but I did write on Saturday at my aunt's and a bit more at home, and on Sunday. Monday I fell on my fucking face and Tuesday I ended up talking with Ciry on the phone for the entire duration of what would have been my writing time (it's fine, it was important) but I did write on Wednesday in Teaism in DC, and on Thursday, and on Friday at the park near my work.
Saturday I saw Lin! I almost forgot to mention seeing Lin! We always try to see each other when she's in the DC area and usually fail, and then she got HIT BY A CAR so it looked like we wouldn't manage this time, either, but in the end we made plans just to have a chill, low-effort day. I met up with Lin and Abby and we got Panera for lunch, then just spent the rest of the day hanging out at Abby's house and chatting and crying about sports boys. Abby writes and does do fandom but she's not into sports anime at all, so it was very touching how permissive she was of our horrible, incomprehensible tears.
I also got to show Lin the sanayuki toothbrushing doujinshi, which is all I've wanted to do with Lin for months. I'm glad she enjoyed it. :')
Abby went to dinner with her parents and just left us in her house (we promised not to burn it down or anything...) and had almost geared ourselves up to write together, when Abby texted to say she was on her way home and saved us from productivity.
I'm a little sad I didn't end up writing with Lin and Abby because I feel like that would have been Very Satisfying, but it was just... Such a nice friend day even so. Lin apologized for being out of it and not necessarily good company but like... I was on my period and enjoying my customary bleeding-time headache so I was spacey as shit, too. We were definitely on the same weird wavelength and there's just something comforting about being in the same almost-an-altered-state frame of mind with a friend.
And then on Sunday Mels bullied me into writing, and on Monday I finally bullied myself into writing, so of the past... Twelve days, I wrote on seven of them. That doesn't sound like very good odds but those are about the odds I've been maintaining for the entirety of the big bang work period, so I guess I can be happy with it.
As far as overall story progress goes, I did finish my outline! I filled in the entirety of the empty space in the final main part where I hadn't sorted out the sequence of events, and I did that on Friday at my mom's rather than writing, and did some of it on my way home on fourth of July, so those days KIND of count as writing days, right? The entire outline is fifty scenes and I've written twenty-nine of them. I have twenty-one scenes left to go. I'm technically over the hump with the story but I know I won't really FEEL over the hump until the second of the three main sections of the story is done, and I have THREE SCENES LEFT!!! for that part. I've written 45k words.
I'm expecting the current part to require another 3-5k words, maybe slightly more, and then if I'm lucky the third main part will only be 20k words. More realistically, it'll be 23k or 24k words, based on the rate at which I've been overshooting my word count estimates so far. And then the epilogue will be like, maybe 5k words.
So yeah, I probably have another 30k words to go, and my story will probably be 75k maybe 80k words by the time it's done. 30k words in another two weeks... It's not impossible, but it means writing at a faster rate than I've been doing. I've been writing one scene a day and not writing EVERY day, but even if I wrote every day, I have 21 scenes left. I don't have 21 days left.
I keep chewing on all this useless math and then closed mouth screaming about how I can't possibly get it done, but. I'm not giving up. I have two more weekends, I have determination, if I can just lock myself into one more writing hell gauntlet day where I trap myself somewhere for hours and write until I drop, I can hopefully get enough scenes down that the rest becomes manageable. What's left to do still feels like an enormous undertaking but it also feels DOABLE, I feel like the end is in sight and it's reachable and that's really! exciting!!
I'm also really aware I'll have absolutely zero time for editing and it makes me sad to think I won't be able to polish this and make it the best story it could possibly be after already pouring SO MUCH TIME into it, but we're just not going to think about that too much.
I really want to write an entry just about my writing process and like, the trajectory of the story's main plot versus the trajectory of Yukimura's character arc, and my feelings about whether my pacing of these plots accomplishes what I want, but. I could write as much about that as I just did about my life and I so do not have time for that. Suffice to say: it's really hard knowing what I'm trying to accomplish with Yukimura's character growth and with the emotional beats of the story, but not knowing if I'm ACTUALLY succeeding in those things just because the story is so BIG and that makes it hard for me to gauge the entire progression of events at once.
I feel like most likely, I've succeeded well enough that my story will be enjoyable to people interested in a space opera escape-the-foreign-planet plot coupled with an alien meetcute romcom plot, but that this is where editing would help me. I suspect that entire scenes in Yukimura's part are not best serving the plot and that if I REALLY wanted to do a good job, I'd have to identify what parts of this section drag and what needs to be cut versus what could use a substitution. But I'll be lucky if I have time to do basic proofreading and simple line edits. I absolutely won't have the time to revise and rearrange entire scenes, so there's no point in thinking about it.
I know that once I post this fic it'll be "out of my hands" and I won't want to do these sorts of large scale edits. People will have already seen my messy starting product, so what's the point of polishing it? But I at least want to know HOW I would have polished it and WHY some of my ideas didn't work, so I can make better decisions in the future.
It's been a really long time since I've written longfic -- the last time was daiya big bang and that was kind of a mess, the time before that was my yowapeda Halloween fic which was similarly a mess, and then before that I hadn't written long in ten years -- and I'm rusty. I've always struggled with pacing more than anything else because there will be character interactions I want to see, so I'll write them and get attached to them and won't be able to accept that they slow down the action and maybe need to be reworked or cut. I know I want to work on balancing "action" and "conflict" with downtime, and without inserting SO MUCH downtime that the story drags. The big bang is letting me practice that so even if it's not perfect, I'm working and I will improve!!
Yeah, this was a long writing tangent after all. But is anyone really surprised?
ANYWAY. I was finding MY OWN day-by-day method of writing updates to be tedious, so I decided I'd try something different. I'm not sure if breakdown by subject is more enjoyable for OTHER people to read, but it was a nice change of pace for me, at any rate. Overall I'm just... Keeping busy. I often get the feeling that if I stop moving (the depression will catch up to me) I'll drown, so I fill my days so full I don't have time to worry about it. Sometimes doing that becomes too much and I burn myself out, but I think I've finally begun to strike a good balance with it? This pace of work and life and exercise and writing is one I feel that I can live with.
But I also keep waiting to reach the end, so that I can't tell whether the problem is deadline stress about the big bang or an indicator that living this way is sustainable, just not indefinitely. I'm excited to finish my story for that reason, too. In a sense, I want to see what's on the other side.
So yeah! Thanks for sticking with me, y'all. Wish me luck -- as always -- with the hell fic. I love you. ♥
On the work front, I feel like I've been playing catch-up ever since fourth of July. Thursday and Friday weren't enough time to make up for being gone for a week so I spent the entire NEXT week getting caught up, and I did! Succeed! But now it's a new week and I'm swamped again because this is a busy time of the year and I'm dying. It's great. It is absolutely an unwise choice to devote a chunk of my work day to writing this update but my brain needs a small breather so I'm doing it anyway.
On the exercise front, I've been trying to bike every Tuesday and Thursday, and to go swimming once a week if I can manage it. I made myself a little exercise calendar where I can mark off whether I did one or the other and see my color-coded activities, and being able to look at my efforts that way is Very Satisfying, even if I've yet to stick to my schedule 100%.
I was too tired Thursday after I got back from Boston to bike, but I did go on a looooong bike ride that Sunday. I finally figured out the turn-offs for other parts of the trail system I like to ride on -- the problem is that there are two whole other branches but they each go across an actual road and I thought those turn-offs were road access, not more trail -- so I celebrated by doing the Northwest Branch trail and biking 28 miles in total. It's the longest I've ever ridden in one day since starting to bike again a few years ago and like... I know it's nothing compared to competitive cyclists who bike 50 miles a day just for training, but for me it's! Genuinely really impressive!
I bike for leisure and to clear my head and keep myself grounded more than I bike for exercise (although that's a nice side benefit) and I have no intention of getting into racing. But I'm just... Really glad I got back into doing this activity I always loved, it makes me happy and being outside and being active is definitely doing good things for my mental health.
I also biked on Tuesday and Thursday of last week even after grocery shopping and getting home late both days, because I was determined not to skip out on something I wanted to do. Both times it was getting dark when I biked home but I have a little headlight and tail-light on my bike so... It's fine.
On the swimming front, that dovetails into the family update. Friday before last was allergy shots with my mom and Saturday was my aunt's annual summer pool party, so I went home with mom after shots and we drove to my aunt's together in the morning. It was a small group compared to some years because a lot of people couldn't make it, but it was nice seeing my cousin and her young kids and just... Hanging out in the pool and eating good food and seeing my family.
On the driving front, I drove with mom that Friday afternoon, on a route we'd done before. I feel like I've hit a plateau in my learning to drive; the highway is still a bit much for me, but driving on state roads doesn't feel very challenging. What I'm practicing is just, merging and changing lanes and turning while remaining aware of the cars around me and it feels like such slow going. I need to get better at judging when I have the space and time to turn in front of another car, or change lanes in front of another car, and those are things my aunt and my mother have been doing for decades but which they STILL have trouble with and are STILL cautious about.
I know I shouldn't be frustrated with myself when these things take time and practice, and I'm not, not really. But my goal is to be able to take the test for my license after a year of practice, so I just have this constant low-grade awareness of how much of that year I've already used up, and the vague sense that at the rate I'm going, I won't be good enough at the time I hope that I'll be.
Even so, there's not much else I can do. I'm practicing as often as I can and I'm enjoying it and I'm not going to give up. (And I realized I probably could have driven home from my aunt's, on route 50 going over the bay bridge, because as highways go it really wasn't bad. It's just the part on 495 afterward that's kind of gross.)
And I guess that brings us to the writing front. I didn't write on Thursday or Friday after getting back, but I did write on Saturday at my aunt's and a bit more at home, and on Sunday. Monday I fell on my fucking face and Tuesday I ended up talking with Ciry on the phone for the entire duration of what would have been my writing time (it's fine, it was important) but I did write on Wednesday in Teaism in DC, and on Thursday, and on Friday at the park near my work.
Saturday I saw Lin! I almost forgot to mention seeing Lin! We always try to see each other when she's in the DC area and usually fail, and then she got HIT BY A CAR so it looked like we wouldn't manage this time, either, but in the end we made plans just to have a chill, low-effort day. I met up with Lin and Abby and we got Panera for lunch, then just spent the rest of the day hanging out at Abby's house and chatting and crying about sports boys. Abby writes and does do fandom but she's not into sports anime at all, so it was very touching how permissive she was of our horrible, incomprehensible tears.
I also got to show Lin the sanayuki toothbrushing doujinshi, which is all I've wanted to do with Lin for months. I'm glad she enjoyed it. :')
Abby went to dinner with her parents and just left us in her house (we promised not to burn it down or anything...) and had almost geared ourselves up to write together, when Abby texted to say she was on her way home and saved us from productivity.
I'm a little sad I didn't end up writing with Lin and Abby because I feel like that would have been Very Satisfying, but it was just... Such a nice friend day even so. Lin apologized for being out of it and not necessarily good company but like... I was on my period and enjoying my customary bleeding-time headache so I was spacey as shit, too. We were definitely on the same weird wavelength and there's just something comforting about being in the same almost-an-altered-state frame of mind with a friend.
And then on Sunday Mels bullied me into writing, and on Monday I finally bullied myself into writing, so of the past... Twelve days, I wrote on seven of them. That doesn't sound like very good odds but those are about the odds I've been maintaining for the entirety of the big bang work period, so I guess I can be happy with it.
As far as overall story progress goes, I did finish my outline! I filled in the entirety of the empty space in the final main part where I hadn't sorted out the sequence of events, and I did that on Friday at my mom's rather than writing, and did some of it on my way home on fourth of July, so those days KIND of count as writing days, right? The entire outline is fifty scenes and I've written twenty-nine of them. I have twenty-one scenes left to go. I'm technically over the hump with the story but I know I won't really FEEL over the hump until the second of the three main sections of the story is done, and I have THREE SCENES LEFT!!! for that part. I've written 45k words.
I'm expecting the current part to require another 3-5k words, maybe slightly more, and then if I'm lucky the third main part will only be 20k words. More realistically, it'll be 23k or 24k words, based on the rate at which I've been overshooting my word count estimates so far. And then the epilogue will be like, maybe 5k words.
So yeah, I probably have another 30k words to go, and my story will probably be 75k maybe 80k words by the time it's done. 30k words in another two weeks... It's not impossible, but it means writing at a faster rate than I've been doing. I've been writing one scene a day and not writing EVERY day, but even if I wrote every day, I have 21 scenes left. I don't have 21 days left.
I keep chewing on all this useless math and then closed mouth screaming about how I can't possibly get it done, but. I'm not giving up. I have two more weekends, I have determination, if I can just lock myself into one more writing hell gauntlet day where I trap myself somewhere for hours and write until I drop, I can hopefully get enough scenes down that the rest becomes manageable. What's left to do still feels like an enormous undertaking but it also feels DOABLE, I feel like the end is in sight and it's reachable and that's really! exciting!!
I'm also really aware I'll have absolutely zero time for editing and it makes me sad to think I won't be able to polish this and make it the best story it could possibly be after already pouring SO MUCH TIME into it, but we're just not going to think about that too much.
I really want to write an entry just about my writing process and like, the trajectory of the story's main plot versus the trajectory of Yukimura's character arc, and my feelings about whether my pacing of these plots accomplishes what I want, but. I could write as much about that as I just did about my life and I so do not have time for that. Suffice to say: it's really hard knowing what I'm trying to accomplish with Yukimura's character growth and with the emotional beats of the story, but not knowing if I'm ACTUALLY succeeding in those things just because the story is so BIG and that makes it hard for me to gauge the entire progression of events at once.
I feel like most likely, I've succeeded well enough that my story will be enjoyable to people interested in a space opera escape-the-foreign-planet plot coupled with an alien meetcute romcom plot, but that this is where editing would help me. I suspect that entire scenes in Yukimura's part are not best serving the plot and that if I REALLY wanted to do a good job, I'd have to identify what parts of this section drag and what needs to be cut versus what could use a substitution. But I'll be lucky if I have time to do basic proofreading and simple line edits. I absolutely won't have the time to revise and rearrange entire scenes, so there's no point in thinking about it.
I know that once I post this fic it'll be "out of my hands" and I won't want to do these sorts of large scale edits. People will have already seen my messy starting product, so what's the point of polishing it? But I at least want to know HOW I would have polished it and WHY some of my ideas didn't work, so I can make better decisions in the future.
It's been a really long time since I've written longfic -- the last time was daiya big bang and that was kind of a mess, the time before that was my yowapeda Halloween fic which was similarly a mess, and then before that I hadn't written long in ten years -- and I'm rusty. I've always struggled with pacing more than anything else because there will be character interactions I want to see, so I'll write them and get attached to them and won't be able to accept that they slow down the action and maybe need to be reworked or cut. I know I want to work on balancing "action" and "conflict" with downtime, and without inserting SO MUCH downtime that the story drags. The big bang is letting me practice that so even if it's not perfect, I'm working and I will improve!!
Yeah, this was a long writing tangent after all. But is anyone really surprised?
ANYWAY. I was finding MY OWN day-by-day method of writing updates to be tedious, so I decided I'd try something different. I'm not sure if breakdown by subject is more enjoyable for OTHER people to read, but it was a nice change of pace for me, at any rate. Overall I'm just... Keeping busy. I often get the feeling that if I stop moving (the depression will catch up to me) I'll drown, so I fill my days so full I don't have time to worry about it. Sometimes doing that becomes too much and I burn myself out, but I think I've finally begun to strike a good balance with it? This pace of work and life and exercise and writing is one I feel that I can live with.
But I also keep waiting to reach the end, so that I can't tell whether the problem is deadline stress about the big bang or an indicator that living this way is sustainable, just not indefinitely. I'm excited to finish my story for that reason, too. In a sense, I want to see what's on the other side.
So yeah! Thanks for sticking with me, y'all. Wish me luck -- as always -- with the hell fic. I love you. ♥