Disclaimer one: I did NOT mean to write this much but sometimes I just get INTO answering a question, haha, sooooo either I'm sorry or you're welcome, depending on how much information you actually wanted here? And I just didn't wanna downplay or over-simplify my response and potentially make anyone reading it feel bad about not being as stupid-productive at their thing-of-choice as I am at mine, because I am this stupid-productive at my thing-of-choice for SEVERAL reasons and most of them are deliberately-cultivated or deliberately worked-with ones that I like, put a LOT of work into long-term, and the rest are just dumb luck/chance. Like man, I am pushing forty and have literally been very dedicatedly both coming up with and telling stories for longer than I could actually READ, much less write; I have had a LOT of time to learn how to do this shit and I have very autistically DEDICATED a lot of time to learning how to do this shit, hahaha.

Disclaimer two: a SIGNIFICANT chunk of the reason I write so much is a) a convenient dovetail of hyperfocus and hyperfixation, b) I have literally been writing for twenty-five years, give or take some phases of writer's block of varying lengths, c) I'm on my meds and take them religiously, and d) my actual collect-a-paycheck job is only part-time and also lets me write on the clock because there's usually a ton of downtime there. On top of that it's our off-season so we're on reduced hours right now anyway, so I frequently only work two or three days a week and almost always have time to write for at least a couple hours at my desk, and more often have basically my entire SHIFT to write, and frankly I'm probably more productive in the office than I am at home, barring the occasional REAL busy day. Generally when I'm actually locked-in on something I'm working on, an hour of writing time is gonna end up being around 1k in word count for me, and I actually get interrupted less often in the office than I do at home.

Also and VITALLY, I am very much a writer who THRIVES on feedback/communication/other people's interest and I have spent a pretty significant amount of consistent time and effort on doing my best to encourage people on here to talk to me and tell me what they're into and ask me for things on WIP Wednesdays and the writing memes that I do, and the combination of all of that interaction and the AO3 comments I get REALLY fuels me. Like I cannot TELL you how much those things fuel me, hah. Apparently I'm like . . . a decently popular writer, go figure, and I realize this is gonna sound like fake-humble shit but that is genuinely never something I really realize/remember as being a thing until someone gives me a pitying look about how oblivious I am, at which point I realize that no, yeah, most people have way more trouble getting someone to answer their random weird questions about random weird shit at random weird times and most people do NOT get triple-digit comments per chapter on multiple ongoing fics or triple-digit responses on their WIP Wednesdays no matter HOW good the narrative dick is, either metaphorically OR literally.

So like, as stated, I am very appreciation/feedback-oriented as a writer and I get a LOT of appreciation and feedback; I have been very lucky to get a responsive and chatty audience for a lot of my writing, and therefore I write a lot, lot, LOT more than I would otherwise. Legit, I would have gotten bored of/frustrated with SO many of these fics if other people weren't reminding me what I liked about them to begin with and thereby renewing my motivation for and interest in 'em. Like I know EVERYONE has said to death that fandom is a collaborative effort and you don't get fic/art unless you tell writers/artists that you LIKE their fic/art, but if you have ANY doubt of that actually being a thing, I am one of the purest examples of that particular feedback loop that I am aware of, because I write a lot because people engage a lot with my stuff, and people engage a lot with my stuff because I write a lot, so I write MORE, so they ENGAGE more, so it just goes around and around and ends up in insanely prolific amounts of word count and me saying things like "geez did I only write 50k this month, how did I even write THAT little" and genuinely MEANING it.

And like, that's an environment that I have specifically tried to cultivate on this blog, ngl, because I know it's the environment I'll write the best/most in and one that a lot of readers will find rewarding/engaging to participate in and/or follow along with, but obviously it only works because people are willing to do that engaging with me to begin with and thereby are keeping a lot of ideas and WIPs all active in my brain. I have written thousands upon thousands upon THOUSANDS of words because of, like, ONE kind comment or one or two especially invested/appreciative readers peekin' in on the regular or just legit a single friend who likes to cheerlead or that one guy in the back who always perks up when a specific WIP comes up, so like, yeah, very much I am a feedback-loop writer, and very much does the feedback-loop work for my writing process.

Also, I've actively considered myself a writer since I was like fourteen and even before that was already drawing comics/storyboards/sequential art basically from the day I STARTED drawing, and I was ALL the way a "play through storytelling" VORACIOUS reader of a kid, I KILLED every reading challenge I ever did in school/at the library and like, there were literal NARRATIVES to my playtimes, my playtimes were actually straight-up EPISODIC, haha. I legitimately read so much that strangers at the library would low-key try to shade my mom for letting me check out the multiple literal stacks of books that they thought I wasn't gonna get through by their due dates, and meanwhile we'd taken out at LEAST as many the week before and I'd already been bored for two days before we came back for this week's batch. So I am very well-read and very narrative-oriented and really, REALLY experienced at both constructing a narrative and just the actual act of writing, so at this point I intuitively/instinctively know what works to tell a story and have a pretty strong grasp of grammar and spelling, and I know what ( usually ) works to make me write.

I've also done a TON of text-based roleplay/co-writing with people in the past, which definitely has made me a faster and more responsive writer and also taught me a lot about dialogue/exchange and how to avoid weighing a narrative too heavily around one person/point of view even when they're my special fave, hah, and about the concept of unreliable narrators and also, like, just finding somebody to match your freak being WAY more engaging than writing stories that are watered-down one-size-fits-all and therefore not particularly memorable. I also had a "very into poetry" phase during a lot of my more formative years right when I first started writing prose, which I realize SEEMS off-topic, but the poetry phase definitely helped a lot, because, like, it gave me a much better sense of . . . rhythm, let's say? Pacing? So I kind of have a baked-in "beat" in my head to follow when I write, typically, and that helps me write both smoother and faster and just more effectively in general, and also makes it easier for me to get across the mood/emotion/feeling I'm going for.

I also don't edit my stuff all that much most of the time; I'm usually just checking for continuity errors and typos and occasionally adjusting the rhythm/flow of paragraph breaks or swapping out over-used words. Otherwise, though, a LOT of my fic just goes up with zero changes from the first draft, or maybe just a few added sentences to clarify some details and corrected typos. So like, that also means that I spend a whole lot less time on rewriting and editing than a lot of other writers do, which therefore means I have more time to pour into More Words. And I have ascended beyond being over-precious about my writing, FINALLY, and therefore am fine with writing things I think are junk just to get them out of my system and/or make progress in a story and then can revisit them a few days later and be like "actually this is pretty damn good, wtf were you so annoyed by, self, did you just need a snack or something, whatever, WELP we're puttin' this one up!!"

Also: ADHD and autism. It is amazing what ADHD and autism can get out of a guy, for real. Like god DAMN does the ADHD and autism one-two combo really bring it home for me personally, because I am juuuuust autistic enough to not need or want a lot of social out-of-house time and to have incredibly dedicated life-long hyperfixations and I am also so ADHD that my diagnostic paperwork specifically says I have more ADHD than a whole-ass ninety-five percent of the ADHD population and my new psych literally did not believe that anyone would prescribe me as much Adderall as makes me temporarily ALMOST "normal" until we worked our way up to it, and WOW does correctly-channeled hyperfocus really, REALLY pay off in the art of getting real good at doing something and real good at doing that something a LOT.

And eight million words of answer later, yup, I do track my word count! My memory is all over the place ( that being one of the LESS useful aspects of my personal flavor of ADHD/autism, hah ) but I like to have a rough idea of how productive I've been so I don't wither up and die of imposter syndrome. I actually keep a whole-ass yearly spreadsheet with a page dedicated to each month that I update daily with how many words I wrote in which stories, and then I add 'em all up at the end of each week and add 'em up again at the end of the month just to give myself a rough idea of how I'm doing in general.

Which, speaking of, I'm actually WILDLY underproducing this week, seriously, it's already Thursday and I've only written like 6.7k. Which, for reference, I have not written less than 22k a week in the past THREE weeks, and on average I'm usually up in the 16-18k area. Like, if I only write 10k in a week or write less than 2k in a day, that seems like not all that much to me, and I write EVERY day. Like. Every day. Literally every day. Every day EVER, or I get the friggin' itch about it and get cranky; it is legit a compulsion for me at this point in my life. I wrote when I had fucking COVID last month and only missed any days that month at all because I had to drive four hours out of town immediately after recovering from said COVID, and that was the first time I'd missed even a SINGLE day in I'm pretty sure LITERAL months, and I STILL topped out above the high end of my usual monthly word count, which is on average about 70-75k. And last year I only tracked my word count from mid-June to December, I actually wasn't keeping track at all before that, but I wrote 410k in those six-ish months.

So like . . . I did mention the ADHD and autism, yes? I mentioned those things as being things?

No reason. Just wondering.