hello all! i am erin -- one of your mods here at wriye -- and i'd like to welcome you to my virtual living room! since we're all still stuck at home due to COVID and everything else is happening in my apartment, i figured my writing progress might as well take place there this year as well.

this image will always live here, as the first post in my thread, and will update throughout the year as i finish stories to add to my bookshelf, complete / change goals, or earn badges / awards. my doggo might even wander in from time to time to lay on her bed down in the bottom left -- who knows?!

if you're here before i post my intro, or just haven't stopped by to read that thread yet, i'm a 30-something high school english teacher living in central florida with my doggo, laika. i write contemporary, new adult romance and YA (primarily), am a twitch affiliate, and am currently working on creating an epic, traditional-style JRPG game on stream. it's good times and i'd love to see you on twitch sometime.

OMG this is the cleverest thing. I'm so impressed! Wow. I can't wait to see how this evolves over the course of the year. I'm definitely going to have to poke my head in your thread often. Good luck with everything!

W O W !

This thread is amazing. Good luck with your goals!

Holy crap! I love how interactive this is!!! Awesome job~ I'm gonna check back often to see how it goes~

This is amazing! I can't wait to see your progress throughout the year. Good luck with all of your goals!

(Also, I'm loving all of the yellow.)

Your thread is beautiful erin! I look forward to watching your progress this year.

Creating a google slide so you can edit throughout the year? Genius, I wish I thought of that. I also like how cozy it all is, being a living room and all. Good luck with your progress!

I told you off forum but gorgeous <3 I cannot wait.

Very cool!

I love your thread! So cool!

thank you all for the compliments on my thread! i'm not a visually artistic person by nature, but i do enjoy graphic manipulation as a hobby and working in slides / powerpoint is second nature to me at this point, so i can make those look nice and do what i want most of the time.

tomorrow is back to work for the semester, as well as my return to regular streaming (my twitch channel, if you want to hang out around 5pm-7pm EST as least three afternoons a week!), so time will be, once again, at a premium. i'm switching courseloads this semester, so i'm unsure of how i'm going to set up my new routine / schedule, but i'm sure it will fall into place by the end of the month. knowing that doesn't make my anxiety over it right now any better, however!

i've already completed what my word count goal would be for the month, if i were breaking my yearly goal into a monthly amount, since i won wriday on the 1st, so that's nice. now i just have to remember to be realistic with the remaining challenges so i don't burn out. i'm working on writing my luck of the draw short for this week (and have it more or less plotted out already), and am toying around with the idea of writing a horror / thriller for breaking out of your box this year, but i'm not getting a lot of ideas in that realm yet. so i'll have to just keep pondering.

i spent the weekend taking inventory to participate in #shavethestash and Y I K E S do i need to do some major shaving! once i've finished up grabbing the last bits of things i was too lazy to get to this weekend, i'll post my totals here. it's... shocking, to say the least. i collect writing utensils, it seems. xD

all-in-all, off to a great start to 2021.

Your thread is so cool. I love these little slides, anyone who can use powerpoint/similar programs is a wizard to me.

Good luck in 2021!

Love the slides. They are so pretty. Best of luck in 2021!

well, as all of the best-laid plans tend to do... things have not gone as planned this month at all.

my doggo is old and cancery, so some days are better than others. we had tried to start taking her off some of her medication, but it did not go well and her inoperable-tumor ballooned in size again, then ulcerated, and then got infected. so it's been a long month of making sure she's okay. i THINK everything is finally back to "normal" again, which means that i can finally get back to focusing on me again.

with about a week left in the month, i'm not sure that i'm going to be able to get the outlining project finished, but i do have the expectation that i can at least get it started, so i think i'm going to modify that goal. i've missed the progress thread updates and streaming goals completely and there's not really a way to make those up. but i have been streaming again, so... that's been nice. and you know... as long as i update one more time before the end of january, i'll have 4 updates, so i'll count that as a win.

so, revised january focus will be to get the current version of the sky of... outlined as it is, keep participating in wriye challenges, keep streaming / posting, finishing the story bible templates, finish reading my two books... and just generally trying to stay positive and keep moving.