rowyn

I almost forgot to post about it. It's a polyamorous romance about a human witch, a crow-human shifter, his adopted dragonling daughter, and the dragonling's uncle who knows a young dragon should be raised by dragons and among dragons. And how to resolve this dilemma.

I'm particularly delighted by this book because: 

• The characters are skilled in their own areas of expertise, but not extraordinarily powerful, either politically or personally
• The story's conflicts are nonviolent and personal, not world-saving

I love these aspects in fantasy but I hardly ever use them in my own writing. But I did it here! Yay!

~

Unrelated: I've been playing/using 4thewords.com, a writing gamification site, since 2016. This year. they've kicked NaNoWriMo to the curb like everyone else (some reasons to stop using NaNoWriMo here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ae33g5/writing_discords_forums_and_a_decades_worth_of/ ). Instead, they're doing a 44-day-long event: "Weathercraft Terrarium". It runs for 44 days, starting today. 

They have word-count quests for the event, with lengths varying from 5000 words up to 250,000. The word count quests are timed, with the timer starting on the day you take them. So you can take them any time before the event ends, and you'll have until 44 days after that to finish them, rather than the timer running the exact length of the event on the site.

I took them all. Including the 250,000 word one.

Writing 250k in 44 days means an average of 5682 words per day.

My highest one-day word count for fiction is 6070, on November 1, 2021. My second-highest is 5781, on November 2, 2023. Other than those two days, I've never written as much as 5682 in one day.

...yeah I don't think this goal is realistic for me. :D

To make it sort of remotely achievable, I am reconsidering what I count as "words written" for this event. Traditionally, I only count:

• Fiction
• On the current project for the month (meaning "sometimes split across two stories, but only if I finished one novel and started a different one in the month")
• Words added to the total document count at the end of the day

But this isn't a novel-writing event; I can count whatever I want. So I'm counting:

• Words written. 
• yeah that's it, literally any word written counts.
• also I can give myself illustration credit (I'm gonna hold this in reserve for the end; I want to do the challenge with words if possible, but I'm willing to count this).

That means I'm counting this post. And I'm not just counting the total for the post: I'm writing this in 4thewords, and 4thewords counts everything I type. Even if I delete it five seconds later. I often rearrange words while I'm writing, a process so instinctive I don't count it as editing. As of this moment, this post is at 331 words, but my "words written" for the post is 399. (4thewords does this automatically when I use 4thewords to write; I would absolutely not try to manually include deleted words. o_o;;)

Even counting deleted words, blog posts, toots, Discord comments, etc., I don't think 250k is realistic for me. For one thing, I don't think my wrists can take it. Maybe I'll try transcription software. It's pretty good these days, but I've never used it because my speech is so disorganized compared to my writing. But maybe there's something that will let me edit the text as I dictate it, and which would be easier on my wrists than typing everything without being such incoherent word vomit that I have no use for it.

One reason I'm interested in "writing whatever" is that my focus on "write fiction" is sometimes counterproductive. It helps to just start typing, even if the words I write have no long-term purpose. Beyond that, I like having a record of my days, so blog posts are constructive for me and I don't write them often enough. I feel like writing, say, 50% fiction and 50% blather, would be an unconstructively high level of blather. But I'm curious to see how it works, and also I can just stop if it's not working.

In any case, I have no intention of spending 44 days writing blog posts. I'm mostly interested in writing fiction. I plan to finish my Apothecaria playthrough (finally) and start a new novel. The working title is "Be That Way", and the elevator pitch is "A werewolf, a catgirl and a goblin walk into a coffee shop. Now with 200% more lesbians!" It is as lighthearted as it sounds. Very rom-com. It's in the same setting as A Dragonling's Family, but with new protagonists. There'll be some cameos from the protagonists of Dragonling. When I finish that (yes I plan to start and finish it in 44 days, I think this is completely reasonable. I've even done it before! Once: I drafted The Moon Etherium in 38 days), I'll work on "Koysko and the Witch" (also a working title). I don't have finished outlines for either of these, but "Be That Way" is in pretty good shape, just needs some more work on the resolution and a bit more fleshing out. 

To put this in bullet-point format

Goals

• Complete outline for "Be That Way"
• Write 50k of "Be That Way" in November 

Stretch Goals

• Finish writing my Apothecaria journal
• Finish illustrating same
• Finish writing "Be That Way"
• Complete outline for another book (this will probably be "Koysko and the Witch" but if I decide something else is easier, I'm fine with that)
• Start writing that book
• Write 250k words total, counting literally everything
• Occasionally remember things other than writing exist