July update; August goals

Days written: 30/31 (!!)
Words written: 26,927 (...I kind of can't believe it either) (117,801 for the year)
Words of fic written: 13,467
Stories worked on: 6
Stories posted: 2 (both for Porn Battle X)
Stories I had to recreate from scratch after they were eaten by my web browser: One. *insert angry face here*

( Behold, a graph! )

Thanks largely to the 30 Days of Writing project, not only did I catch up on the getyourwordsout pace, I'm now ahead by over a thousand words. So there's that. Where I didn't fare quite so well is...

Specific Goals

1. Write at least 6 days per week. Done and more than done. This is just the right level of goal in months without outside constraints.

2. Significant progress on Mega Flare story. A draft would be ideal, or at least the bare bones of one. Got a good chunk written, although it's not nearly a draft yet. Will need to kick this up a notch next month.

3. Work on "Aftermath". Let's say at least a thousand more words. Also complete and post the in-progress Chocobo Down story. I did poke at "Aftermath" a bit, but nowhere near a thousand words. I didn't even open the other one.

4. As time and inspiration permit, work on the crossover. Progress made, including a breakthrough on the plot, but I ended up dropping this and everything else to write the Porn Battle stories and a brand new fic for the Alphabet Meme. Which might have been ready to post, if my clumsy fingers and a stupid mistake hadn't caused me to erase the whole thing. I've been working on reconstructing it, but boy is that disheartening. It's much harder to motivate myself to rewrite like this.

I am coming to the realization that I am somewhat whim-based as a writer -- I write what comes to me rather than what I need to work on. Which is fine, but I do tend to leave a lot of half-finished WIPs littered around my hard drive as a result.

So, August:

1. Write at least 6 days per week (exclusive of my trip to San Diego that's coming up in the middle of the month).

2. Finish something approaching a draft of the Mega Flare story.

3. Complete in-progress Alphabet Meme fic.

4. Non-fic goals: Finish 30 Days of Writing meme and write long-planned co-review with renay.

Just because I didn't put Aftermath or the crossover or any other in-progress story in this list doesn't mean that I can't work on it. It just means I deprioritize them. And for now anyway, that's okay. (Or so I keep telling myself.)

"What use is a book without pictures or conversations?"

I can't do the pictures, so it'll have to be the conversations.

20. What are your favorite character interactions to write?

Dialogue. It's all about the dialogue -- it's my favorite thing to write, and I like to think that I'm reasonably good at it. It almost doesn't matter, beyond that, what the interaction is, as long as the characters are talking to each other and I get to play with voices and nuances and body language. Body language, especially; how people say something is so much more important than the words they use to say it, and while it's hard to convey the totality of body language in a written work, I like to at least try. I think this is part of why my stories end up on the longer side: it takes many more words to write a conversation when I describe where people are situated in space, what they're doing with their hands, how they're interacting with each other physically. I hope that doing so makes the dialogue more meaningful and realistic, even if it does make drabbles and other short-shorts really hard for me to write properly.

30 Days of Writing: Complete list of questions

In others news, I got a ridiculously cute pair of shoes for cheap today, and so my weekend is a success.