Feels weird to be a fourth of the way through the year!

The year so far...

The year was off to a surprisingly strong start in terms of wordcount... but not so much in terms of progress on fiction. I mostly wrote a lot about my intentions for the new year, as well as reviewing the books I was reading, though I did make some progress on my WIP.

So what about for March?

Well, after looking at my goals and realizing that "plan to work on and complete multiple novella and novel-length projects this year" was not actually completely compatible with "plan on writing 75k words for the year," the goals I set for myself in March were really simple:
- Work on the current WIP
- Finish editing the current chapter of my friend's book

I did the second one, at least! 

Not so much the first. I'm not sure if why I didn't falls more into reasons or excuses territory. I did have almost a whole week spent over at my mom and Taylor's, which made writing time difficult to carve out. Overlapping with that, I had work drama that left me in tears multiple days, and stressed me out so badly I couldn't even contemplate working on something. But also, there've been days that I open up the document, stare at it for a few minutes, then shut the laptop and take a nap. So... was it fair that sometimes I just didn't have the bandwidth for it? Yeah, probably. Were there also days where I probably should have pushed a little harder? Also yeah.

Some thoughts on the current lack of writing:

My current struggle with the WIP, I think, is that I am having a hard time not dwelling on the things I want to go back and change. There are whole scenes that I really don't care for, that I know I want to completely rewrite. There are a couple other things I also plan to change, like a few key aspects of the setting.

It feels like the "right" choice is to keep going, to push through just getting the first draft done. That way, when and if I find more big things that I want to change, I can address all of them in one rewrite. (This is already a rewrite to some degree: I'm fleshing out and connecting a bunch of little single scenes and ideas I've had floating around for years. I also already went back and rewrote a couple chapters during this draft because I abruptly realized that it would be better for me to completely change one character's role.)

I'm glad that I went back and rewrote the bit about the character I changed, because it did directly impact what happened with the parts after it... but I'm torn between whether I should do the same now, or if I should just write the rest *as if* I had fixed the old stuff, and then fix it for real in the rewrite. I'm not completely certain to what extent the planned changes are going to have ripple effects on other aspects of the story. If the answer turns out to be "not much," then it's not a big deal to just do it in the next round. If it turns out that it's a bigger impact, then I don't want to create more that needs fixing... but I just can't tell.

I think that the setting change is probably the former; I'll need to change descriptions, and it'll mean reassessing how long it takes them to get to certain places, but I don't think there'll be much of a cascade of things that need changing. The scene re-dos are more likely to be the latter, I think. I want to establish a very different early interaction between some of the characters, and the whole intent is that it changes the dynamic between them and sets up their future relationship with each other differently.

I *want* to go back and try to fix it. But I'm afraid that way lies too much repeated tooling of the first half and never making it through to the end.

It also feels a bit like... well, if I can't actually get appreciable progress on this story, maybe it needs to be shelved for now so I can move onto something else.

Over the last week or so I have really started to miss having some sort of fandom engagement. It feels weird to have not written a fic in this long! The next fic I was planning to work on is the Cyberpunk AU, so maybe I can start outlining that to scratch the itch. Plus maybe that'll give my brain a break from where I'm stuck on the other WIP while still letting me do something!
(Of course, that means I have to figure out where I want that story to go... it's been in the "periodically daydream about" zone for so many years, the parts I have feel like they're a bit of a disjointed mess.)

So...

Goals for April:
- outline Cyberpunk AU
- maybe write more on the current WIP... if I can push through

Goals for May and beyond:
- finish iddy romance WIP first draft
- start snowflake outline for the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic
- first draft of the Cyberpunk AU
- outline the next iddy romance
- rewrite iddy romance #1

I am having some regretful feelings about how little it feels like the above amounts to. I had such ambitious plans, about so many different ideas, both original and fanfic! I'm just... not really getting anywhere, and it's frustrating.

Now, I have no right to be surprised that I'm not getting anywhere, because I'm fully aware of how many days go by without me typing in a single word! And I can't say that I'm managing my time as well as I wish I was. I have diverted a lot of my time toward reading, but unfortunately, I just don't know where else I can pull time from. Or perhaps the issue is more that I don't have extra energy to repurpose from elsewhere; if I could completely quit giving into the desire to nap, that would net me a few bonus hours each week, but it's hard to do that when I can't keep my eyes open! I know the only secret do getting the writing done is to suck it up and just do the writing... I'm just having a very hard time making it happen.

Setting a lower writing goal for the year, making the decision to focus on other things, was a choice I made on purpose. I'm free to change my mind on it at any time... but I don't think I'm there yet, either. I'd just be happier about doing less writing if it felt like I was actually doing more of the other stuff than I am, I think.

The struggle continues.