Lunae 2021: Have Courage

128,069 / 300,000

I'm back again for 2021 at WriYe after probably the first year where I ever won at my goal. Given the madness that was 2020, I think WriYe saved me more than once over the past four months I've been back in the swing of things. I'm still going to be writing a lot of contemporary fantasy as is my wont, but I see this year as being a very Space-YE year, based on the projects that have called to me thus far.

In light of 2020 being the year where I finished more pieces than I have in years past, between the short stories and the two novels I finished in addition to my first win, I'm hoping to continue that trend by a more focused approach. I have more listed on my spreadsheet, but in case my flighty nature pulls me in different directions, I don't plan to look further ahead than the first quarter, and won't be listing more than one project from each category for the moment. This, as with everything, is subject to change.

As for the reason I named my thread "Have Courage" this year, my primary goal is editing/revising this year, and I have a tendency toward starting the process, getting overwhelmed or self-derogatory in all the wrong ways and abandoning the edit. I have a significant queue that's ready for that stage and is a huge goal of mine for the year to tackle. I have one project I've been working on in December that is incorporating suggestions from my alpha reader, and another that I'm in the middle of the read-through.


Drafting

Title: May You Burn
Series: Personal Magnetism: Black Shadows
Length: Novel
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy (possibly YA)
Word Count: 115,453/ 120,000
Summary: Starr Austin's family has been on edge for over a decade for reasons incomprehensible to her and her twin sister, Storm, but they're content to go along with it until the evening when everything that they'd been preparing for occurs. In the aftermath, Starr finds herself doing things she would never have imagined trying to get herself and her sister to safety. First among those things is trusting with her life the last person she ever would have imagined  before everything had been turned upside down.

Title: Night Turned to Day
Series: Bridge of Silver: Phase Transition
Length: Novel
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Word Count: 13,591 / 50,000 
Summary: When Sage Melton returns to his partner, they both assume the nightmare that had overtaken their lives is gone. However, the moment they relax their guard, they're thrown right back into it once more. Only this time, instead of Sage being in the hands of the monster, it's Teagan and Sage has no insight as to where she may have taken him. It will take persistence, trust in their allies, and belief in the bond that binds him for Sage to bring Teagan home safe.

Title: Hockey, History, and Other Socialist Ideals
Length: Novel
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Word Count: 22,684 / 50,000
Summary: Renita Liatos grew up with Maki Kaspiritin with all his madcap ideas, but she had the opportunity to further her potential hockey career by a special program in the Midwest that she followed without a backward glance. Now she's on the cusp of her junior season at UMD and who's playing net at the Division 3 school just across the state line is her old friend. Their old friendship has a different tension these days, and she has to balance all the balls she has in the air to include him in her life again. She just about finds a way to make things work when everything goes pear-shaped.

Title: Riverside Magicks
Length: Novel
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Word Count: 9,404 / 50,000
Summary: The Tribunal has been keeping dangerous creatures buried in locked containers on the Terran side of the Bridge for generations. When one of those creatures gets loose in a small town in Iowa while forced to take refuge from the chaos her home Court has descended into, Leirana has to find the being and try to help contain it while attempting not to disrupt the site the Network Transferral team is moving the home portal of the area into. At least she tries, until those two actions begin to collide...

Finished

Title: Old Memories
Series: Black Shadows
Length: Vignette
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 199
Status: Posted in RaTs folder

Title: The Confidence Game
Series: Black Shadows
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 5,359
Status: In Revision queue

Title: Haunted
Series: Black Shadows
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 7,500
Status: In Revision (Edit Hike project)

Title: Celebrations of Memory
Series: Black Shadows
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 1,205
Status: In Revision queue

Title: Whiteout Conditions
Series: Bridge of Silver
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 2,392
Status: In Revision queue

Title: Broken Spine
Series: Bridge of Silver
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 4,587
Status: In Revision queue

Title: Impromptu Portal Transport
Series: Bridge of Silver
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 1,459
Status: In Revision queue

Title: Extreme Measures
Series: Black Shadows
Length: Short Story
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 697
Status: In Revision queue

Title: Moment of Weakness

Series: Chicago Triptych

Length: Short Story

Genre: General Fiction
Word Count: 976

Status: In RMFM forum

In Revision

Title: 365 Days
Genre: Fan Fiction
Progress: 23 / 693
Stage of Editing: Incorporating Reader Suggestions

Title: Out of Verdant Green
Genre: Contemporary/Portal Fantasy
Progress: 63/288
Stage of Editing: Read-Through

Title: Of Rival Courts (last 4 chapters)
Genre: Contemporary/Portal Fantasy
Progress: 5/76
Stage of Editing: Clean-up for Critique Group (Edit Hike project)

From the Stacks

(nothing yet)

Life Goals

Crochet - 1 hr / wk
Practicing hand sewing 0.5hr / wk
Cleaning - 1 20/10 session / wk

RaTs

Old Arguments (Star Fruit #24 - "If Momma Ain't Happy...")
It was such a stupid thing to say, but that had never stopped Alek before.

Challenges

5k Weekend January (2,618/2,500)
5k Weekend February (3,929/2,500)
5k Weekend March (3,218/2,500)

5k Weekend April (2,522/2,500)

31 Day OC Challenge (10/10)
Edit Hike (5,618/18,000)
Full Moon Madness January (1,644/1,000)
Full Moon Madness February (1,140/1,000)
Full Moon Madness March (1,267/1,000)

Full Moon Madness April (1,096/1,000)
Luck of the Draw (Week 2)
Luck of the Draw (Week 12)

Luck of the Draw (Week 14)
Luddite Challenge (22/250 pages)
New Moon Madness January (1,463/1,800)
New Moon Madness February (978/900)
New Moon Madness March (2,509/1,800)

New Moon Madness April (1,886/1,800)
One... Two... Series (Black Shadows)

Resurrection April (9,404/20,000)

WriDay January - (2,681/2,500)
WriDay February (2,463 / 2,500)
WriDay March (3,073/2,500)

WriDay April (2,597/2,500)

Stories Started	11
Stories Finished	8
Stories Remaining	3

Badges

Good luck with the revision! We're all be cheering you on. Also very nicely laid out thread, like it

I like the thread too, but I have a question... don't you find that when you are crocheting, one hour doesn't really give you enough time to finish even a small project, like a hat or a bag? I have finished glove sets in that short an amount of time, but hats take sometimes as much as an hour and a half, and if you are working on something bigger, an hour a week would make the project take all year to finish, and Life will get in the way.

Dec 22, 2020 3:17:48 GMT -5 galactic-pirates said:

Good luck with the revision! We're all be cheering you on. Also very nicely laid out thread, like it

Thank you!

Dec 22, 2020 3:34:19 GMT -5 auroralynneskye said:

I like the thread too, but I have a question... don't you find that when you are crocheting, one hour doesn't really give you enough time to finish even a small project, like a hat or a bag? I have finished glove sets in that short an amount of time, but hats take sometimes as much as an hour and a half, and if you are working on something bigger, an hour a week would make the project take all year to finish, and Life will get in the way.

I am not the fastest of crocheters, so it takes me longer to finish a project. Also, I like long projects like shawls and sweaters. However, more and more as 2020 played out, my crochet had sat untouched. I want to at least get started again, and I know there's a couple of craft and chats that have moved virtual with the pandemic making meeting in person unwise. (Except the socially distanced meetings in one of the local parks, but that's something else altogether.) I just want to get started again.

Once I get started again, knowing me, it will probably turn into something more like an hour a day, but I'm starting small.

Well, that sounds more like it. I can't make enough time out of any given day to do something like that myself, but I do a lot of small projects, saving the big ones for summer when I will have longer days to work with. But when I was in my 20's, my doctor told me, if I didn't crochet a little bit each day, or write, my arthritis would get so bad I would be completely crippled by the time I was 50. I took his advice, and as you can tell, I still have my hands to work with. I may not type as quickly as I would like, or crochet as quickly as I used to when I was younger, but I still get my business done. So I will say, when you are able to get started again, have fun and don't worry about how much time you are devoting to the project in question.
Everything will work out the way it should.

Good luck with your goals!

nice work with the 2020 win!
and good luck for the 2021 revisions.

Welcome back, Lunae! Best of luck in 2021!

I hope you can do what you want. I like the title of your thread and the summary of Untethered I like.

Best of luck with your 2021 goals!

January 16, 2021

I meant to update this before now, but January hasn't gone the way I was hoping.

Since I'm dealing with a work transition, and my insufferable anxiety preventing me from being able to get the dental procedures I need done completed, I'm hiding from the stress by playing too much Animal Crossing, and not doing enough writing. By some miracle, I've only had 2 days off par and only one 0 day so far. (I don't know how.)

I am hiding behind my very "fluffy" h/c WiP (and using those terms probably show that it started out as a fanfic I've brought original) a lot when I do write, but with the exception of a couple of days, I've made sure I have more words from the primary WiP than the fluffy one with the exception of NMM day and one of the mental health days when all I wanted to do was write the fluffy one.

My commitment to the 31 OC Challenge isn't great, as I am currently only at 3/31, but sitting down with the Emotional Wound Thesaurus is helping me figure out who these people are and why they're this way. I'm currently focusing on the characters I'm actively writing at the moment, but I will eventually need to branch out. Might also be the reason why I'm constantly wanting to have a RaTs theme set for one of those characters, and probably won't be the last time that happens.

Crochet is touch and go, and probably has the hardest hit activity from the hiding in Animal Crossing.

I'm looking to get back to the editing for a couple of days now that I know that the dental work has been pushed back to next month, where we're giving it another go with the addition of anxiety medication this time. I haven't touched it since early, early in the month.

Have finished rewriting chapters 7-8 of May You Burn, and have come to terms that the rewrite/completion (I do this far too frequently) of the draft likely won't happen by the end of the month at this rate.

That was always a stretch goal. It just would have been nice to have book one of the series I plan to focus on this year (at least the early part of this year) out of the way and able to focus on the next ones.

The Luddite is going well. Am almost to page 10 for the year, and the real inciting incident I've been building towards is about to happen. The events after that are laid out in my head, so it's really the only thing I've wanted to write for the past couple of days.

Cleaning... hasn't happened at all, but the occasional sketch has. I do need to get back on that soonish, though.

i found that even when i wasn't feeling mentally well enough for writing,
i could still manage a page or two in my luddite last year.
it just hits different to do it by hand for some reason.
*hug*

Running a little late, but here's my January wrap-up.

End of Month Word-Count: 39,278

I worked primarily on May You Burn and Night Turned to Day through most of the month, which wasn't what I really foresaw when I was planning out my January at the end of last month. I've tweaked the first post to reflect the stories I actually ended up working on. I also added the story I plan on focusing on for KWIF.

For short stories, I started 1 non-RaTs short story this month, and um, 5 RaTs. 2 of those are finished. One is posted on my thread, and the other is waiting for me to finish revising it.

The Luddite is 16 pages in, which is lower than the 23 I hoped to get, but I'm still happy with the progress and the direction the story is heading in. I fell far short of my original goal of 31 characters for the OC challenge. I managed the 10 I edited my goal for by spending the last two days doing those pretty much exclusively. I wasn't planning on including them in my word count since I usually only count fiction words, but since it ended up being around 6k and I spent a couple of days this month working on them and not much/nothing else, I decided to go ahead and include it.

Full Moon Madness was a success this month, although I fell short of my goal for New Moon Madness.

This was surprisingly a productive month in light of continuing to spend far too much of my free time playing Animal Crossing. I'm starting to spend less time doing so, which leaves me more time to write.

February Goals

• Write at least 25,000 words (0 / 25,000)


• Write at least 15,000 on Hockey, History, and Other Socialist Ideals (0,000 / 15,000)


• Finish and Revise RaTs stories in progress and post them on the thread


• Finish Whalesong and post in RMFM


• Start HTRYN course on Exit Dusk
  

excellent work in january!
keep up the great work in february and you're well on your way to an amazing year!

Reviewing February Goals


• Write at least 25,000 words (27,023 / 25,000)
• Write at least 15,000 on Hockey, History, and Other Socialist Ideals (12,071 / 15,000)
• Finish and Revise RaTs stories in progress and post them on the thread
• Finish Whalesong and post in RMFM
• Start HTRYN course on Exit Dusk

I meant to check in more frequently, but February has been a slog.

Most of my words, as I intended, have gone to my KWIF novel Hockey, History, and Other Socialist Ideals. (The title is based off a conversation they were having about their history classes in one of the early drafts. I don't know if the conversation will appear in this one, but I liked the phrasing, so I turned it into the title.) At 12,071, I'm short of the 15,000 I committed to for the challenge, but with the near 3,000 words on the RaTs novel, which is a portal fantasy romance, it looks like it may count for the challenge. I'm hopeful because hitting 3300 any given day this month has been a stretch, and I don't have writing muscles for contemporary romance yet.

I added more words to May You Burn and Night Turned to Day. 

I did finish two RaTs stories this month. Haunted started out as an answer to one of the Luck of the Draw prompts, but it's dancing on that edge between short story and novelette. I'm leaning toward novelette. Celebrations of Memory was a short Lunar New Year romance story I'm debating whether I should post on the thread or not. I likely will, but not before I edit it.

Instead of finishing other things, I started another RaTs story I need to finish.

Unfortunately, I haven't touched Whalesong since the day I started it. I'm adding it to the list of goals for March. Nor have I started the HTRYN for Exit Dusk, but I'm pushing that off to April since I have other editing projects taking precedence this month.

March Goals


• Edit 18,000 words for Edit Hike (spread between 3 projects: Of Rival Courts, Celebrations of Memory, The Confidence Game)
• Write at least 25,000 words
• Finish and revise RaTs stories already started. Try not to start any new ones.
• Return writing focus to May You Burn and Night Turned to Day