Get Your Words Out Post: February

[acequeenking]

I'm trying to do a better job of keeping track of my writing this year. As in January, I’ve been tracking my writing on a spreadsheet: how many words got written and in what, and at the end of the month, I’m trying to take stock of what I’ve done, what I’ve failed to do, and what I need to do going forward. I signed up for getyourwordsout at the 200K level with the thought that would be quite a challenge given that this year is going to have a lot of interruptions to writing time.

It turns out that I may have set my bar too low, as at this point I am 41% to my goal. I am still thinking my writing will dry up for a while, but I hope it is after March. I definitively glad I have a buffer, though! I was planning for chocolateboxcomm to be my swan song exchange-wise for a while, but three exchanges I really wanted to do popped up quickly all in a row: once_upon_fic,agegapexchange, smutswap, and hurtcomfortex.

So, uh, I guess uh May will be my swan song.

If you think I haven’t done a pretty spreadsheet for this month, you don’t know my love of color themeing:



Here's wot I worked on in February; if it's blacked out in the picture, it's something that is for an exchange or a fic-a-thon that hasn't been revealed/posted yet. Thankfully that’s not much this time!

Things I didn't count for future-me: anything for the 3-Sentence Ficathon (some< I may turn into longer things), anything for classiclitclub.

Underneath the cut, thoughts on stuff I worked on, and stuff I should have worked on, but did not, in fact, work on, and thoughts on stuff wot I need to do better on.

Shame Corner, aka Stuff Wot I Should Have Written But Then Did Not, and Now Future-Me Must Be Shamed For:

• I did not work at all on my Assasin’s Creed game journal I so badly wanted to write. I thought I did work on it, at least a little bit, but the word count does not lie and it shows that it has not been touched since January 31. Boo. Boo upon my house! I always love the idea of doing games journals, but for some reason I find them kind of hard to do as anything but a retrospective, but if I wait until I finish The Very Gay Adventures of a Spartan Princess Warrior, then I will be about 400 years old and no one will care about this anymore because they’ll be playing whatever the newest equivalent of FortNite is in 2400. Self, embrace the fact you don’t know where the plot goes and type before you forget what this even is. Otherwise you run the risk of it being like Yakuza 0, where you loved the game but waited WAY too long to write about it and now there’s nothing you can write because it would NOVEL LENGTH and who has the time?


• Not only I have not not written any of my ideas for that Yakuza/Tekken crossover (which, starstar, if you’re reading this, we need to figure out how to co-write, because I think we both want to do this idea, and we clearly are simultaneously the target audience and the writers), but I also failed to move on in playing Kiwami 1 at all.


• Also failed, in a big way: Bring Her Heart to Me, the dark femslash ficathon. Despite this being utterly in my wheelhouse, and me spending all of January mourning than none of the darker lesbian novels I’d read had satisfied, I had one fail to get beyond an outline, and another that I got 700 words into and then promptly lost to chocobox having an impending date.


• Didn’t finish any of the Hadestown wips, or work on any beyond Der Giant One and crackfic. Bad worker, bad!

Things Wot I did Work On, And Thus Am Not So Bad That My Feet must be Held to Fire, but What also Wot Still Need to be Improved Upon-ed:

• I did not work enough my Hadestown NaNoWriMo monster of a fic. Self - you wanted this done by April. If that even has a chance of happening, you need to write 50K of this in March or start posting and hope to finish the WIP while it’s in progress (but then of course you’ll lose all ability to do major edits so at the very least you need every chapter outlined, including the ones right now that are like *shrug emoji*). Still, 2K words is a fair-ish amount…if absolutely negligible compared to what it will have to be.


• I posted a bit more on DW but not enough. It’s hard and I miss being a teenager and being like “I will update my LJ every day!” Not enough to go back to being a teenager and thus absolutely bored for eight hours a day, but – I’m trying to be more active. It's just hard to find the time to do all the things I want to do anymore.


• I’ve still done really badly at documenting stuff I’ve watched, read, etc, though I have done better track of keeping track of it. Things you should write blog posts on,self: Fallout 76, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (you didn’t work on that game diary at ALL beyond half-heartedly flipping through screenshots – shame! Shame! Shame!), Annihilation, and The Good Place: Season 3.

Stuff I Did Work On, and Individual Memories/Evaluations/Wot I Have to Say:

• Overall trend: I really need to reevaluate my self-esteem when it comes to writing. I felt like I wrote not very much this month and that I was lazy. But based on this sheet, I can see I wrote a lot and …really, really wasn’t. Self, stop beating self up. Love self! Self is all you have.


• no holy place existed without us then – Circe alternate ending, written Isis as a chocolateboxcomm treat. I loved Circe but felt a leeettle frustrated by the ending (namely that I love Penelope and she gets left so much behind at the end!), and I was so happy to write the alternative ending with lesbians (what doesn’t get better with lesbians?!). Had to research herbs for this one, which is really fun! I don’t know why I’m big into flower/plant meanings, but I like to think it’s the same part of me that really loves Victorian blouses and gothic cathedrals.


• seas between us broad have roared - written for Gammarad as a chocolateboxcomm treat; one of the first treats I started and the last that I finished because I couldn’t remember if Hades was shown briefly at the start of Wonder Woman and had to track down my copy of it, which would have been easier if I’d actually unpacked some of the boxes from the move. Turns out he didn’t and I had leeway in writing, and it was fun to write! I kind of regret that I started it so early though; Gammarad recced me an older H/P romance novel I hadn’t heard of that I know they are a fan of, and I would have gladly written them that version of the characters instead had I just started on it earlier. Oh well. Next exchange, maybe!


• In Whiskey, Water - Barely started, needs to be finished, but Hawke has already gotten her hands on a cask of whiskey somehow so I feel its leading good places.


• She gathered in my soul from many a thorn- my assignment for chocolateboxcomm. This one was a bastard hard write, and three of the blacked out assignments listed in January being different versions of this assignment (one abandoned version had a fake dating premise that got dropped, because that was going to be EVEN LONGER than this turned out to be;the other turned into something later on the list). I’m not a smut writer by trade and this wound up being 10K of smut, pretty much, and 10K of plot. I like the role reversal here and I am vaguely proud of writing ~10K of porn!


• A Helping Hand- And this would be the other draft of the assignment; I started it, ditched it because I wasn’t sure if the Outsider POV was working, and then completed it after finishing from many a thorn; changed quite a bit in writing it from Persephone demanding a love spell to Aphrodite conning two anxious disasters into making out already, jeez. I really like 'Dite in this, who is all about that hook-up.


• Legendary- Also written for chocolateboxcomm, for ashling; I like the idea that Gods have different faces and their positive traits can be their negative ones, and this is very much a negative portrayal of ‘Dite. Or at least, that was what I was going to say, but then Ashling commented that ‘Dite in this is very Gollum-like, and I quite like this description, so now all I see is Dite rubbing her hands together over Helen of Troy going my precciiiioouuus.


• Post tenebras, spero lucem- Also written for chocolateboxcomm, this time for ellerfu who had such an awesome letter full of amazing things that I had to try to write her something! Another Hades and Persephone fic (I have a theme this month, it seems), this one set early on in their courtship. Different Hades than I am used to writing, but I love how both of them are very clueless about aspects of the other here.


• Tall, Tall Shadow- Also written for chocolateboxcomm, this time for betony.! I have such a hunger for more with Penelope, who waits so long for her man to come, outwitting a hundred attempts from others to lead a coup over her kingdom, yet seems hesitant to believe it truly is him when he comes home. I will forever love, at the end of the Odyssey, when her test to him is that he must move his bed outside their bedroom, and he’s like I can’t woman I MADE IT FROM A TREE DON’T YOU REMEMBER IT’S LITERALLY ROOTED TO THE FLOOR??? And from this, of all things, she’s like *GASP* HUSBAND! I know that it’s because he knew a detail no one else knew since they don’t allow anyone else into their bedchamber, but I absolutely choose to believe its because Penelope recognized his grumbling about the ancient equivalent of the honey-do list.


• A Strange Flower, Suitable for Any Occasion -- An actual, multi-chaptered fic from me that’s not for an exchange! :D This is basically emotional porn for my ID: no one in this fic is exactly right, and no one is exactly wrong, either, but everyone is going through hell even though the main event of this is basically a wedding. Dysfunctional family is dysfunctional as hell and I love writing how the Titanomachy's scars linger and even delve into the next generation.


• [Censored] - Exchange fic, looking forward to this one.


• A Game of Chess - a surprisingly smutty story with a more antagonistic vibe than I usually write between Hades and Persephone. But…I like it. May or may not ever be finished.


• And You, Too, Are Damned to Lie in the Dirt - an Andromache/Helen fic where Andromache loses it after seeing Helen trying to help out post-Hector’s death – who does she think she is, this woman who her husband died for, who isn’t even one of them? And then things get sexy. Probably will finish when I finish the Iliad but tabled for now.


• Fake Dating - me trying to figure if I wanted to change the fake dating parts of that aborted assignment into its own fic; possibly? I wrote an outline and about 36 words to replace the other one. But tabled for now because this story is eternal, but I have a lot of higher priority WIPs.


• Demeter Fic Still Unnamed - Demeter noodling that started on a writing exercise posted on getyourwordsout. Last month I said that this wouldn’t necessarily be finished, now I know it will be. Developed an Americana-vibe and became mostly about Demeter and Hades both trying to get along, kinda, even though they’ve got a lot of bad history between them. Persephone is …nervous about this, in both directions; it upsets her status quo.


• At Times, Love Is… - Pretty much been done forever, just needs to be posted, haven’t posted it yet. 25 sentences fic with fragrant abuse of run-on sentences a few times oops.


• 76 Kisses - For fun I’ve been trying to do the kisses in the 76 kisses meme for the Hadestown baes; they’re prickly and thus far it’s 40% I love you more than I love anything else, ever, 50% you’re a fucking asshole you fuck, and 10% actual kissing. So, in short, I think it’s pretty true to canon.


• The Daddy Fic - Terribly named Hadestown fic based on a bad joke, wherein Persephone calls her husband daddy during a family dinner because she's bored and tired and this winds up causing a huge fight because her husband’s ego is, in fact, Very Fragile. Enormously Fragile. SO FRAGILE HE REALLY SHOULDA BEEN GOD OF GLASS, WHOOPS. Has so many Olympians in it that I kind of hope Hadestown readers are also myth readers. Whoops. Oh well, sorry Hadestown readers; I feel bad for using myth stuff in Hadestown since the characterizations in Hadestown are obviously quite different, but on the other hand, it’s way too fun to imagine the Hadestown equivalents of the myth characters, so I tend to just smush them together for Hadestown fic. XD;


• Dulce et Decorum est - Last year’s nano and a huge Hadestown fic that may or may not ever get done. I am hoping it will and am working on it but also it, like the fic above, delves a lot in the Hadestown-equivalent of Greek mythology, and bends a lot of the stories to it. I always worry doing that will make the fic nigh-incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t familiar with the old stories, but I am trying to roll with it. Basic plot is Persephone doesn’t show up on time, Hades, Hermes, and (unwillingly) Orpheus unite to find her, and all of them (plus Eurydice, in time) get drawn into a BIG CONSPIRACY PLOT. Thus far honestly 90% of this fic is Hades yelling at other Gods for all his problems, and others pointing out his problems are his own doing (and they absolutely are). Long and iddy and entirely self-serving, but what is fan fiction if not that?


• Some Other Beginning’s End - fic for doubledrabbles; writing exercise to try to get into writing past trauma for these two. Not going to get into anything longer, not sure if I’ll post it anywhere else since admittedly baby death is pretty badly niche.


• fighting heavy shoulders - 76kisses meme fic for primeideal; they gave me a very cute prompt and I naturally found a way to make it sad. I really need to get back on these, I keep forgetting about them and people picked some very choice prompts!