Goals

I was feeling pretty good heading into this year’s challenge. In September I moved to a new city for a new job, and by the start of November the dust kicked up by that was starting to settle. I was feeling antsy to start making progress again on my creative endeavors, so the challenge came around at just the right time. Since moving here, I’ve also joined a weekly writing group that meets at a local coffee shop, so I had a new community element to motivate me as well.

Heading into the month, I had a loose priority of pieces I want to work on.

Top Priority: I’m writing a sci fi graphic novel with a friend. It follows a psychic astronaut as she explores the subsurface ocean on Saturn’s icy moon of Enceladus. My friend Rainer is doing the art, and he’s waiting on me to finish the script, so it’s important to keep the momentum on this moving forward! We’re expecting the finished project to be over 100 pages, so there’s a lot to do!

Medium Priorities: I have a small group of short stories and novelettes that I would be very happy to push forward to complete (or closer-to-complete) drafts. It wouldn’t be possible to finish ALL of them in a month, but I would be happy to see meaningful progress on a handful of them.

    •    Death and the Doctor Sequel (novelette, outlined but no draft started)

    •    Dragon Hoard Short Story (half-drafted)

    •    An Epilogue for Lady Pole (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fan fiction, outlined but no draft started)

    •    Write a new chapter of Cornifer is Going on an Adventure! (Hollow knight long fic)

    •    Starship Librarians (half-drafted, but needed a lot of reworking)

    •    The 13th Census of Enlightenment City (has a pitch written down, but needed a proper outline)

Low Priorities: These are things that I can easily slot into a day where I don’t feel like working on my heftier projects. Great for filling in gaps or providing an outlet on low-motivation days.

    •    Invisible Cities microfictions

    •    Other fan fictions

    •    Webcomic commentary posts

———

Outcomes

By the numbers, this year’s nano-NaNo was a smashing success. I hit my 300 word goal everyday (except for the last day, whoops) and sailed past my 25k stretch goal. I’m feeling really proud of that, because historically I’ve hit 20k consistently but struggled to reach 25k. My average daily word count spiked in the first half in the month and then tailed off a little bit towards the end, when I was on holiday travel.

I think I can chalk up my success to one huge factor: This is probably the calmest November I’ve had in years. This is my first fall after finishing grad school, and hooboy I think that makes a difference. Especially compared to 2024, when I was in the middle of post-doc applications (genuinely one of the worst academic periods of my life) and I struggled to break 12k words and flopped out of the writing challenge a week before it ended. Now I’ve got my own apartment which I can keep as quiet as I want in the evenings, a job that respects normal working hours, and–OH RIGHT THE GOVERNMENT WAS SHUT DOWN FOR HALF THE MONTH. Um. That makes a difference too. I wasn’t furloughed myself, but my workplace was shut down and most of my team was furloughed. I only started my new position two weeks before the shutdown started, so they didn’t have much time to pile responsibilities on me before everything closed up. Functionally, my life turned into Pandemic Part 2 for about six weeks–working from home, not having nearly enough tasks to keep myself occupied, and generally very socially isolated (I had just moved and didn’t have much time to make friends before the shutdown started.) It wasn’t great, but it did mean I had a lot of quiet time at home to get writing done. Silver linings?

So my word count output was great, but when I look at the breakdown of projects I worked on I’m not entirely pleased with myself. I did a pretty good job working on the mid-priority projects. I finished a much more detailed outline of Enlightenment City and completed first drafts of both An Epilogue for Lady Pole (which I’ve had outlined since 2020 but never drafted!), the Dragon Hoard Story, and my first Silksong fic (yay!) Unfortunately, I’m not terribly pleased with the quality of all the words I got down, especially on the Dragon Hoard Story. It turned out much longer than I anticipated and ended up kind of beating the reader over the head with the moral in a way that borders on condescending. (Maybe that’s too harsh, but at the very least it is too simplistic a premise to justify being 8000 words long.) An Epilogue for Lady Pole is mostly fine, but I think I liked the outline version of it better than the finished draft. Oh well. I try not to hold my fic to as high of standards so it’ll definitely still get edited and posted eventually.

The biggest disappointment of the month is my general failure to make much progress on my graphic novel script. I only spent one (one!) day working on it, when it was supposed to be my top priority for the month. This is entirely my own fault–scripting is hard, so it was just too tempting to work on other things most days. But I’m feeling pretty energized about writing now, so I hope to bring some of November’s momentum into December and refocus on getting more of the script done.

There was a dark horse this month, and that was the “Silksong blog post” you can see on my word count chart. I’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong (shock! gasp!) and, predictably, it’s been giving me brain worms. One of the conversations I kept having with people over and over again was about difficulty management in the game, so I decided to start writing down a guide for players who were struggling with the game about things I found make the challenge level more reasonable. And once I started the essay, it became kind of addicting to keep working on--you can see I was regularly breaking 1000 words on days I worked on it! I can see why people enjoy blogging so much, this kind of writing allows me to take an easy, conversational tone that is much easier to stream-of-conscious than most fiction or creative nonfiction. Anyway. The essay is turning out close to 9000 words long, coming soon to a Tumblr blog near you.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m incredibly happy with my progress this year. Sticking to daily word goals was easier this year than it’s ever been, and I think I am genuinely getting better at the BIC-HOC (Butt In Chair Hands On Keyboard) part of being a writer. I’m getting better at pushing through on drafts even when I don’t like how they’re turning out, which is an important skill because sometimes you just need to get that shitty first draft done so you can get feedback and then fix it up. I’m also happy to see a few older stories (especially Lady Pole) get endings. However, I definitely would like to see myself be a bit more responsible about staying focused on high priority projects, and I would like to be better at not wrecking my sleep schedule by procrastinating my daily writing until right before bed. So those are good goals for next year! Until then, I’ll be back to a more intermittent writing schedule, but hopefully still harnessing this good energy to keep projects moving down the pipeline.