Ren the Ghost

I said I'd write 6k words every week in November and darn it, I did! XD

All in all, I wrote just above 26k words in November, the highest monthly wordcount in quite awhile. My new wordcount tracking spreadsheet is still awesome, and I absolutely adore it. Somehow, I actually like the fact that nothing's automatic? That I have to type in the calculations manually? It makes my progress seem a little bit more real than if the spreadsheet just did all that for me (I've tried that before!), and it's a pretty cool feeling. Also, I just really like the visual design I made :D

Ultimately, I'm insanely pleased with November's writing. Not gonna lie, I thought 6k words a week would be difficult, because it sounds like a lot, you know. But it's not only perfectly doable for me, it... well, it kind of felt pretty easy. Maybe even a bit easier than 5k words/week, somehow?

Anyway, succeeding means I'm moving on to 7k words a week in December! That's very cool! And also now I'm terrified, mostly because I know what the daily average is on that.

Like, I think part of what's working here is that I'm not worrying about the day-to-day wordcount. I don't know what the daily average on 6k words a week is, and I didn't know what it was for 5k a week either. I like not knowing. It means I don't have to worry about it.

My strategy has been just writing as I feel until Fridays, not worrying about my progress (even though I am tracking it!) and not angsting about anything. Then, on Fridays, I actually do the math to figure out how much is left, and if I need to speed up my writing, I buckle down as needed. Just so I'm not left holding the bag on Sundays, needing to write 5k words or whatever, LOL.

So far this strategy has been out!

I am really excited to do 7k words a week, though. Last week was the first time since I started this experiment where I hit my goal on Saturday (I've been hitting them on Sundays all the time), and because I'm not allowing myself to go above my goal, I was honestly feeling a bit bereft on Sunday. A bit "well, what am I supposed to do now, then?"

I wanted to keep writing, but the point of this exercise is to not overextend myself and part of that means stopping once I hit my goal. I want to slowly, consistently raise my weekly wordcount output and I wanna do it without straining myself or burning out. That's why I'm doing the same goal every week for a month; to get used to it and ensure it's actually a pace I can realistically keep up.

Even when I'm sick (November wasn't fun) I can apparently still write 6k words in a week.

It's nice to have that confirmation, even if it means the increase in wordcount is so slow all this sometimes feels a bit silly. But I'm happy with my progress so far, and I am ready for more. (pumps fist)

That said, my NaNoWriMo project ended up at only 4k words of my actual 15k goal. I succeeded a bit too well at resisting the NaNo hype, to the point I got a bit over it, actually. I tipped too far to the other side and ended up not being very enthusiastic about it at all. (That's the nice way of putting it, LOL.)

I don't know, I just feel very strongly that the mentality of "if I can't jump from normally writing 20k words a month to suddenly writing 50k words in a single month, I've lost" is kind of weird :(

Anyway, despite dropping the ball on my NaNo project, I kept the rest spinning through the air.

I'm pretty darn pleased! XD

So yesterday, instead of actually writing, I spent a couple hours putting together a leveling system to gamify my writing (despite the fact that I a. use 4thewords and b. love 4thewords). I had great fun, because I do like organizing things, and I got to level 1 of my new game!

Then, today, I realized that the leveling system is functionally impossible to level up past like... level 15 or so. Eventually, it gets to the point where you literally need billions of points to level up. And just from the word-count to points ratio, it's seriously improbable to get more than 50 points in a day.

So, if you have some basic math skills, you might see the problem.

Insert crying emoji here.

This is STO (Slight the Odds) 3.0. So today I spent some more time to come up with beasts to battle for points like on 4TW, and then I need to come up with lots of quests, and items to boost exp, and... well, it might be *sort of* playable, then. It's still gonna be impossible to get to max level, but it should be playable for much longer, and if the gaming aspect matters more than the leveling aspect (which, I honestly don't know my own preference? huh) then it could be a working, fun game!

I'm also sketching on STO 4.0, which will be virtually identical to 3.0, except for an *actually functional leveling system*. If the leveling aspect matters more than the gaming aspect (or just equally as much), that's the one to use.

I suppose I'll find out my preference if I actually get around to playing them.

I will toss up the game(s) on DW once I'm finished (or if I quit *wince*) just because I've had a lot of fun making these already and I wanna show them off!