GYWO 2022 and How I Fucked Up

[seventhe]

no, this is not the post about job search depression. not yet.

I participate in Get Your Words Out every year as something that motivates me to make words, much like NaNoWriMo -- it isn't necessarily about "winning" either, but it's about having a reason to track words, which then becomes having a reason to write. In 2020 or 2021, I forget which, I managed to write somewhere near 350,000 words. What a fuckin' banger. A lot of it was Old Vines, and some of it was work words, and all of it was fun as hell.

The thing I noticed at the end of the year, however, was that my writing was just inconsistent -- I was carrying myself towards that goal with days where I wrote 5000, 7000 words in one day, and then not writing for the next 4 days in a row. So if I could get my ASS to the COMPUTER to do the THING, i usually could get a significant number of words done. So let's focus on that, sez my brain, and we'll be a super-writer.

2022 Sev said well, hey, there's a habit pledge for GYWO, so: I took it, with the rather extreme idea of writing 240 days out of the year. that's like 4-5 days a week. But hey! It isn't wordcount! Although I still fucking decided I was going to try to write 300,000 words. just 300K. Not 350K. lol. I'm stupid.

Then at the beginning of 2022 I lost my content writing job - more like, they hired someone full-time and let all the contractors go without warning, yes, I'm still mad - and therefore lost one of the major impetus for me actually sitting down at the computer to write. Plus, I'd been counting work words as part of the yearly target -- which I think is fuckin fair when you write for a living, yeah?, so.

And then as I realized other work had also dried up and I was going to have to start major job hunting - and then the experience of that job hunting - there was a depression zone where I absolutely dried up on words. Like, nearly completely. Most of my WIPs just kind of hung in space, and I had to start an entirely new Good Omens fic (forth the fifth) to have anything going on, and THEN it was only a super-hyperfixation on Detroit: Become Human that really pulled me out of the wordslump and back into writing things. Getting back to the WIPs has been challenging.

And with my new job, there aren't wordcounts I can tally towards anything -- I'm writing and editing at the same time, and sometimes working on things like how the fuck do we cite this and a surprising amount of meetings, and the moral of this story is that I'm unlikely to make either my formal or informal GYWO target this year -- which again, I don't do it for the win, but boy howdy did I misjudge this year.

And what have I learnt about my writing process this year? Since that was the entire point of trying a new target and a new approach? Well, fuck, I'm not sure I've learnt anything, except that it's more fun to write when people are directly cheering you on, which isn't anything new. As of today I've written about 150K, and 135 days out of the year. I am 69 days behind where I should be and there are like. Idk. 70 days left in the year? So obviously I'm not gonna make it lol.

Anyway this has been a long ramble about things that are only important in my head, with no real conclusion. Clearly I am a professional! And I need to get back to actual work!

Stay tuned for NaNoWriMo, where I try to get my 3 FTH fics out in a month while still updating at least 3 WIPs! oh my god, why am i like this? I'm so stupid?

Talk to me about your 2022 writing (or creating in general, if you're a creator but not a writer!). How did you do. How dumb am I. It is a mystery!

Comments

[althea_valara]

...but is it really dumb to try something new? It sounded like you had valid reasons for believing these goals would work, but then Life Happened and got in the way. You've learned something and that's not a bad thing!

Talk to me about your 2022 writing (or creating in general, if you're a creator but not a writer!). How did you do.

This caused me to go look at my Yearly Challenge on Ravelry. At the start of the year, I said I wanted to make 36 things. I've made far more in the past, but have been trending down the past few years as I have been working on bigger projects, plus I'm aging and my hands need more breaks now. As of today, I have made.... 36 things this year! O_O I had no idea I was so close to my goal, let alone met it! But then again, at the start of this year I had NO IDEA I was going to do a craft fair this year, and that got me making more, smaller things which add up fast.

My big goal for the remainder of this year, craft-wise, is to finish my Peppermint Swirl crocheted blanket, which looks like this. I've made some good progress already but need to make sure I work on it a lot, at the very least, every other day.

Writing-wise... well, it's just been okay this year. I don't write much fic, but I had plans to do a bingo line on one of my genprompt_bingo cards, and that hasn't happened. But! I did write A Softer Barb for the FF Kiss Battle, and that is STILL getting kudos on AO3 so I'm pretty pleased.

[seventhe]

your crafting updates are always fun to read! i have so many knitting projects going on and have been far too scatterbrained to focus on any of them, but i really should start sharing them. 36 projects is impressive!

and you're right re: the writing, it was just more like wow, Sev, why :P