*hugs* wishing you all the best. Every time I hear people talk about RaTs I think "I should do those". I hope you find joy in them. My thoughts are with you. Good luck!

Feb 5, 2024 11:51:05 GMT -5 galactic-pirates said:

*hugs* wishing you all the best. Every time I hear people talk about RaTs I think "I should do those". I hope you find joy in them. My thoughts are with you. Good luck!

I do enjoy writing them. I use RaTs usually as a means to get a mental break on the larger projects in an attempt to not focus on them overly much. Well that, and when I'm looking for character insights, I'll do them to get a little bit of perspective.

Thanks for all the luck. It's so appreciated. <3

This week was a little bit of an off-week. I spent part of Wednesday getting a CT scan done so that there's a new baseline for the treatment I need to have done, and it took a lot more out of me than I was expecting. I think it wasn't until Friday afternoon/evening where I felt even close to my normal self, and really not until the weekend.

A lot of sleep happened.

With that, I spent a good chunk of this week working on the scenes I wanted to work on in Hockey/History rather than what was happening chronologically because I'm hitting a really rough part of the story. I also picked up those beloved characters I mentioned in my last big update, wrote a story with them for NMM. That's added to the revision queue now, too.

This weekend, I volunteered to demonstrate spinning cotton at a little showcase our Spinning Guild was doing, mostly for our own members but open for the general public to wander in and test. That did happen, so I was happy to see more people interested in the craft. A lot of kids, too, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. Saturday, I wandered out covered in cotton fluff, and today, I spent a lot of time talking to one of the other members about spinning different types of cotton.

It was a continuation of a conversation we started mid-2023 as she had a sample of the type of cotton she was referencing then and she gave me some so I can figure out whether I like it. (Spoiler alert: Oh, it's so much fun to spin!)

One of my favorite members sat down with me and talked me through figuring out what I was doing wrong trying the supported spindling, and the Guild President demonstrated Andean plying.

It was one of those sessions that felt really satisfying and inspiring. So I don't regret doing that.

Spinning! Wow. I think I remember you saying in the discord about it once or twice. Have I already asked you if you use a wheel? Haha. I'm sure you get all the Rumplestiltskin jokes but seriously that's just so cool. I love offbeat things like that. It's like I said to mum earlier today when she showed me some knitting - something exists where it didn't before. The act of creation is magical and I can just imagine how good it would feel to turn fluff into thread, and know that thread could maybe even make something else. It's a wonderful thing.

Feb 12, 2024 13:18:17 GMT -5 galactic-pirates said:

Spinning! Wow. I think I remember you saying in the discord about it once or twice. Have I already asked you if you use a wheel? Haha. I'm sure you get all the Rumplestiltskin jokes but seriously that's just so cool. I love offbeat things like that. It's like I said to mum earlier today when she showed me some knitting - something exists where it didn't before. The act of creation is magical and I can just imagine how good it would feel to turn fluff into thread, and know that thread could maybe even make something else. It's a wonderful thing.

I don't actually get the Rumplestilskin jokes as much as you'd think. I make them sometimes to myself because it makes me giggle.

Alas, still no gold.

I do use a wheel but it's a non-traditional one. Well, I do have a more traditional one sitting in the corner of my bedroom, but it's made out of recycled PVC. I just haven't touched it in a while because I fell in love with my electric wheel. I can sit it on a table, set the speed to where I'm comfortable, and spin away. I have enough trouble with my hips that sometimes the peddling gets a bit much.

I just need to spend more time with it.

I tend to collect hobbies like these. I knit a bit too, but mostly crochet. I'm getting a loom, too, so I can weave as well.

(Also, I'm sorry. I know you asked this in February, and it's May now, but I got a little behind on my progress thread.)

So, it's May.

I got caught up in the whole back and forth I was mentioning back in my posts in February. To be honest, things are only now just starting to settle down, but I know that's likely going to pick up again, because there is still a good many questions as to next steps. I'm also in therapy now, which is helping me try to wrap my mind around all this, because it's all huge.

It's just also touching on things that I have not dealt with that is likely coloring my reactions. Likely far overdue.

I am going to likely be posting the "final" count from the first quarter sometime today, and making the post for the second quarter I should have done last month, since I wanted to kind of look at things from the perspective of the quarters of the year this time (and I kind of got overwhelmed by the whole thing in one long post).

In March, I was drawn into the challenge from Get Your Words Out where, based upon word or image prompts, you write stories that are tallied up like a Yahtzee game. I wrote almost 6.5k on that during the month of March, and the rest of my words largely went into Steppestone Lavender. As of the end of March, that novel is sitting at 101.6k.

At the end of the first quarter, where I should have been sitting at 125k, I was sitting at 100,322. So, all the medical stuff put me slightly behind for the first quarter. (Knowing what happened during April means that I am more okay with this number than I was at the end of March.)

I am also learning the value for myself in doing at least some planning because it takes less energy for me to figure out what the direction is. After years of fighting that, during this period of low spoons, I'm discovering it vital. It's helping me finish things, which was probably the entire point.

It's not always going to line up with one of the traditional methods cleanly. I spent too many years doing this by intuition for that, though that may change as time goes on. After all, I started as the type of plantser that was probably more pantser than not (I planned my characters and my setting, but never my plot. That has occasionally led me into trouble.)

Doing this is still a learning process, especially when the characters don't go in with the kind of conflicts I expect, or as in the situation I'm finding myself in with one of my books right now, the timing I expected isn't quite lining up with what the outline indicates. So, I'm having to take a step back now that I know what the timing is and reassess and doing some minor rewrites/edits before I get back to the drafting because my mind won't let me postpone it until later.

I'm trying to keep from falling into that cycle of editing midstream that sets me into a cycle of endless rewriting rather than reaching the end of the draft. I am stating this for the record in the hopes that it'll help me keep myself honest. It's an experiment, and it might not work, but I won't know until I try.

For a number of reasons 2023 didn't turn out at all the way I wanted to. It was a more low-energy year than I was hoping it would be, and I didn't get back to some of the aspects of things that I was hoping to, even with the lesser wordcount I chose.

I'm going to try again in 2024 for some of the goals I was trying to reach in 2023 and also some different goals that I discovered this year I would be interested in tracking, but because of the limitations I placed on my word count in 2023, I wasn't technically able to count. (I mean, I could have, but I like to remain consistent, so I noted it on my spreadsheet after I started working on it, but otherwise didn't include those words in the larger count.)

What I would like to do this year creative-wise is to get back into those habits that I had going, and hopefully get better about tracking things, because I know I was productive this past year. I just stopped tracking it around March when everything went downhill so drastically.

Second Quarter: 65,871 / 125,000

Novels:

Title: Steppestone Lavender
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Length: Novel
Word Count: 106,660 / 150,000
Summary: Everyone has been telling Renet that Calla is dead, but if that's the case, why can he still feel her as though she's right by his side? And if she is still alive, who will be the Royal in charge of Stiwen?

Novella:

Title:: The Loremaster's Apprentice
Genre:: Contemporary Dark Fantasy
Length: Novella
Word Count: 34,149 / 34,149
Summary: Nova Firan was a normal high school student until she found herself persuading a tornado to leave her neighborhood mostly alone. What happens afterward makes her the target in a familial civil war that had been going on for generations.

Title: Invader
Genre: Science Fiction Romance
Length: Novella
Word Count: 38,890 / 40,000
Summary: Rosha's memories have been in tatters for years. All she knows is that she doesn't belong in this place, and where she does is somewhere amongst the stars. She doesn't expect the person she's been waiting for to come literally crashing out of the sky, disrupting not only her life, but the status quo the society has come to depend upon.

Shorts:

Title: Wild Hair (Strawberry Banana #6)
Genre: General
Length: Short Story
Word Count: 4,347 / 8,000
Summary: Max wants more than anything for Birgit to follow her dreams, but how will he cope from leaving their friends behind again to start a new life in Ottawa?

Title: Diviniation Services
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Stage: Mark-Up
Starting Word Count: 4,575
Ending Word Count:

Title: The Confidence Game
Genre: Slipstream
Stage: Initial Readthrough + Markup
Starting Word Count: 5,352
Ending Word Count:

Title: A Princess for Wintertide
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Length: Novella
Summary: Ellisande is a Low Ring Bard, and he knows it. It's only because of his talent that Lady Calla called upon him to entertain the Court at her next gala. The last thing he expected was to having his attention caught by the potential Heir to the throne. Darinae's mother has warned her about the dangers of Bards from the moment she hired the Bard to perform at the gala. She didn't expect for that warning to be relevant.

World: Eisa
Articles Completed: 4
Word Count: 6,932 / 50,000

World: Toreda
Articles Completed: 1
Word Count: 4,392 / 10,000

World: Here Be Dragons
Articles Completed: 0
Word Count: 516 / 10,000

Peanut Butter - (2% completed) - A cabled crochet sweater out of sport-weight yarn from Blackberry Ridge

Whooo that's a lot of words, well done!! *cheers* In the past with fanfic I wrote off prompts and sort of took each chapter as it came. Is not planning your plot something like that? I'm such a planner (possibly over-planner) with my novels I'm struggling to wrap my head around it. Still it's what works for you, and if it works then fantastic! Good luck with the rest of the quarter *waves pom-poms*