KJ

Days written: 20/31
Words written: 7,172
Words of fic written: 1,389
Stories worked on: Three
Stories posted: One

( Charts knew it would be bad, but not this bad. )

Specific goals:

1. Write an average of five days per week, including while traveling. I was on track for this until the business trip, which was more tiring than expected, and then my travel back got royally screwed up, so I spent the weekend recovering.

2. Between unfinished monthlysupergo prompts, whatever that community does for March, the Final Fantasy Kiss Battle, and a bingo card I requested from GYWO but haven't gotten yet, write at least four flashfics. I got one completely drafted and one mostly written, both for the GYWO bingo card, but I didn't post any of them.

3. Write and post story for picfor1000, a 1000-word fic challenge I signed up for in January (due March 31st). Success!

4. Post at least three times a week (including Lady Business posts). Nope! I haven't done a Lady Business post that wasn't contributing to a group post in awhile, and I need to get back on that.

Mere words can hardly express how little I want to check in with my annual goals today, but it must be done nonetheless.

1. Sign up for getyourwordsout with the intention of hitting the 150k goal. Boy, am I ever behind on this one. Not so far behind that a good push on a Big Bang or Part Three of Wardens of Ivalice couldn't catch me up. But still.

2. Keep up the regular linkspam posts in my journal; write at least one, ideally two posts for ladybusiness every month; and stay on top of contributing to ladybusiness anchor posts and group projects. I've kept up the linkspam, averaging one post every week and a half, and I've done a good job of keeping up on the regular Lady Business features. Unless you count the Hugo recommendations post, an effort I co-led with bookgazing, I've not written a single post for the group blog this year, and that's pretty sad. At the very least, I need to get back on the TBR feature.

3. Participate in at least one Big Bang and two fic exchanges. Of these, at least one of these should be new to me. Not yet.

4. Once Wardens of Ivalice Part 2 is finished, pick a month to prioritize writing a first draft of Part 3, with a goal of getting it posted sometime in 2018. I posted the story in February, and am planning to get back to it sometime over the summer (depending on what happens with fic exchange and Big Bang options).

5. Find a fic prompt community I like and participate regularly. Recommendations welcome! I'm going to count monthlysupergo for this, even though I've only done one month so far (and didn't even finish that month's challenge). Last month wasn't a writing challege, so I feel that I can excuse myself a little.

Regarding April, I'm about to leave on a week's vacation in a few days, and I don't want to push myself to write while I'm gone. For the rest of the month, I want to try something a little different.

1. Write or edit (see below) at least six days a week when not traveling.

2. Finish up the second story for GYWO bingo and draft the third and fourth (it's a smaller card, 4x4).

3. Post at least twice a week and write at least one stand-alone post for ladybusiness.

4. Clean up and repost my first epic story, A Guardian's Legacy, to AO3, in installments, starting after I return from my trip. This is my most significant work that's not on AO3, and I held off on moving it in part because it's not really a story I would write today -- my concept of Auron as a character, and to a lesser extent Spira as a place, has evolved quite a bit over the years. That said, A Guardian's Legacy was an enormous undertaking, and it remains the longest story I have ever written (46 chapters, almost 150k words), and I'm still really proud of it. So my plan is to republish it over the next month or so, one chapter every few days, lightly editing as I go. I recognize that this project will do almost nothing to add to my total wordcount for the year, but I was never going to catch up to that in one month anyway, and I'm hoping that removing the pressure to create anything new for a little while will help me reset my writing headspace. Rewriting is also writing. And I want to take on a larger project that I know is doable. I've never set a goal anything like this before, so I'll be interested to see how it works out.

18. Favorite antagonist and why!

I had thought at first that this would be a hard call, but actually it didn't take much thought to come up with an answer: Kinoc. Partly because I haven't written about many of the other canonical antagonists in my fiction -- Seymour makes a couple of appearances, as does Shuyin, and I wrote a short about Dr. Cid once, and I supposed Cid Raines counts as an antagonist, but in the latter cases, the stories were from the antagonist's point of view, so I wasn't really writing them as antagonists, if you see what I mean. But I have written Kinoc both as the hero of his own story and as the villain of Auron's, and I am fascinated every time.

Kinoc is a character who has always interested me. His first appearance in the game instantly raises questions about his past, about Auron's past, about the workings of Yevon. I wondered about him and Auron, especially: what kind of history lays between them, that Auron seems so contemptuous, to the point that he states flat-out that Kinoc would be willing to execute a friend... and yet he can still be moved to avenge Kinoc's death? As much as anything, it was my need to work out the answer to this puzzle that drove me to write A Guardian's Legacy.

I suppose what I like about Kinoc is that, in some senses, he's just so ordinary. Evil as middle management. He has no super powers, no secret headquarters staffed by minions, no mad schemes to destroy the world. All he has is ambition and the will do to what it takes to satisfy it, regardless of whom he might step on in the process. I find it very easy to, if not sympathize with him, at least to get a feel for where he's coming from, to write through his eyes, much more so than, say, a Seymour. kunstarniki once speculated that I might not be able to write a "thorough-going villain", and I agree, beyond a certain point. After all, most villains see themselves as the hero of their own stories; who, in the real world, wakes up and says "I think I'm going to do some evil today"? They have their ideals and their reasons, too. I may not agree with or sympathize with them, but especially when writing fiction I have to at least have some understanding of them.

30 Days of Writing: Complete list of questions

1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.

My favorite writing universe is the first one that I created: fleshing out the Final Fantasy X universe for A Guardian's Legacy. In the process of giving Auron a backstory, I had to improvise details about Spira, its small towns, Yevon, the warrior monks, the other characters... And since half the story was written in Spira's future, I had to build the world in that direction, as well. I enjoyed the process a lot, and was quite happy with the world I came up with. Unless the idea I'm writing is incompatible with the AGL continuity, every FFX or X-2 story I write is, in my head, set within that iteration of Spira. (Aftermath is probably the most important example. I even re-used original characters.) I find it helpful, to have done all the world-building already, but also I think it's a pretty decent intepretation of the world we discover in the game. There are a few inconsistencies with Ultimania, but I can live with that.

An entry on my favorite projects would not be complete without a mention of the Death Shall Have No Dominion AU that I wrote with the late, great kunstarniki. Although I am proud of the story we created, my fondest memories are about the process: sharing ideas, the awesome clarity of being on the same wavelength with a collaborator, surprising and delighting one another as we fired snippets back and forth. Collaboration is an amazing creative high for me. The Confessional was a similar experience, and even more intense: I have never written a story that quickly before, and I don't expect to ever capture that kind of exciting creative madness again.

If we're talking more recently, I think my favorite is probably Political Considerations, the FFXII pinch-hit I wrote for the 2009 round of Final Fantasy Exchange. That story threw some pretty difficult political and character curveballs my way, and I was quite happy with the way I handled them. I was still getting the ground under my feet in that fandom at the time, too, so the fact that I got it all to come together under time pressure was something of a rush.

30 Days of Writing: Complete list of questions

So my fic archive is pretty much complete, if not completely up-to-date -- I need to post the stories I wrote in June and July still -- with one huge exception.^*

A Guardian's Legacy.

Converting and reposting 46 chapters is not a small task, but once I get started it should go quickly enough -- it only took me a couple of days to post all 35 chapters of Death Shall Have No Dominion, even with the formatting errors I had to fight, and by now I have the conversion process down cold. But that was just a straight re-post, except for fixing a typo here and there. I have this idea that I ought to do a no-holds-barred edit of AGL from beginning to end: tighten a few things up, tweak some of the characterization, and so forth. I like to think I've grown as a writer quite a bit in the last three years; there is a lot to improve this story. But that would be a huge project, and kind of daunting. So I keep putting it off.

So the question is, should I bother? I know I could make the story better, but that's true of everything I've ever written, and I didn't do serious edits on any of the others. Would it be better to just repost it, perhaps fixing egregious errors but otherwise leaving it as a historic document, a testament to where I started and a touchstone for how far I've come? On the other hand, much as I've enjoyed so many of the stories I've written, AGL is still my baby. It was the first, the longest, the most all-consuming. Shouldn't it be the best it can be? And the idea of diving back into it after all this time is really appealing.

I also still feel like my writing is still very sluggish. I'm producing more than I was, but that's not saying much. Almost every story I've posted in the last while is a old WIP I've dusted off and polished up. And I'm not sure whether spending lots time on editing an old piece is a good way to jumpstart the urge to sit down and write on a regular basis, or whether it's just a way of avoiding the issue.

Thoughts, oh ye many writers and editors on my flist?

*This is not strictly true because I also haven't brought over "Aftermath" yet, mostly to avoid the question of having an active WIP on my archive site, since I'm not exactly sure how I want to handle that. And kind of avoiding it entirely. Damn you story, why won't you write yourself like all the other big stories did?

Title: Landing
Fandom: FFX
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 1017
Characters: Rikku, Wakka
Pairings: Wakka/Lulu, sorta; past Wakka/Rikku implied
Spoilers: Minor
Notes: "Deleted scene" for yuna_flowering, who requested a conversation between Wakka and Rikku, set during A Guardian's Legacy. For anyone familiar with that story, this fits between the cracks of Chapter 17.

( Rikku bounded up the stairs from Luca to the Mi'ihen Highroad, hurrying to her destination. )

New chapter is up. The editing on the others is going very well. The end is most definitely in sight.

A new AGl chapter is up.

Two more, I think. Plus an epilogue. (Which is actually part of the story, not a separate piece as my Confessional epilogues were.)

I really cannot believe I am almost to the end of this.

The next AGL chapter is finished and posted.

This is the very definition of a transitional chapter I think. It came out well enough, I suppose, but it's not terribly exciting. Now once again I have to make a decision about what events to cover. I am feeling like I want to detail less rather than more, but will the story feel incomplete if I leave too much out? Decisions, decisions.

Two chapters in one week! AGL 40 is posted. And 41 is almost done -- just one scene to write, then an overall polish. I'm really hoping to get it finished and posted before I leave for the East Coast next week. Maybe I'll have time to do that this weekend.

We're getting close to the end, I think. Whoa.

I have been trying to make this photo into a userpic of Tori all morning with no success. Because I took it without a flash, it's just too orangey and dark. But everything I do to make it brighter washes out the color too much. I am not a natural with image manipulation software. I'll keep working at it though. It's just such a cute picture of her. Then I need to make another userpic or two of Lexi, because he's falling behind on image count. Don't want to favor one kitty over the other. It's not his fault that Tori is more photogenic.

The next two chapters of AGL are entirely and mostly written, respectively. My goal is to get at least one of them done before Thanksgiving. I think that's more than doable, assuming I get some time to work on them tonight.

Last night I made brownies for the office Thanksgiving party. I haven't made brownies in ages. I use the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, which is excellent. I think I may have used a pan that's a bit too large, though -- they're a little flat. I'm planning to frost them. Maybe with mint frosting, maybe peanut butter (Cook's Illustrated has a peanut butter buttercream recipe that I want to try, it sounds yummy). Unfortunately, I won't get to eat them until Wednesday. Fortunately, that's what the bowl is for.

Also last night, I made a new music game. That'll go up in a couple of hours, around 9:30 PST or maybe a little before. See you then.