Stephen

So I've been attempting to learn to draw this past few months, and while there's a bunch of practice stuff that I'm not going to bother sharing here - drawing from photos, sticking an object in front of me and drawing it, basic stuff like that (And one monster design that I used as my partner Animon in an Animon Story campaign late last year which wasn't practice stuff), this is the first thing that feels like a 'finished piece of artwork'.

I accidentally wrote a novella to upload as part of my silly weekly shorts thing.

And now I have about a month to edit it.

Oops.

(This isn't the only reason I haven't been around here much lately, but this is the funniest part of the reason)

(This is particularly hilarious to me considering I'm used to writing entire things that are, like, 500-1000 words, even when working with prose. Previously I think the longest piece of prose I'd written was around 3.5k, but I'd need to double check two other pieces to be entirely sure of that)

(Also, not exaggerating about it being a novella. ~21k words. Both Hugo and Nebulas class novella as 17.5-40k words. Which, yes, means that if you participate in NaNoWriMo, you actually are writing a novel. You could write 10k less words and still wind up with a novel.)

I've been playing Animon Story solo using Mythic GME 2e the past couple of days and it's working out really well for me so far.

For about five years now, I've been trying to get back into writing in earnest, on personal stuff rather than 'whatever prompt a writing group I happen to be in gives me'. See, between 2001 and 2004 I wrote a ton. About a year and a half of that was putting stuff out weekly. Less frequently but still relatively active in 2003 and 2004. And while I wasn't really aiming to get back to anything quite as frequent, particularly since most of that writing wasn't prose and prose takes longer than the more script-based stuff I was mostly writing back then (Although I was still also writing more prose back then than I'd been writing since. On top of the weekly stuff.), I was trying to get... You know. One bit of short writing a month, maybe?

While I have so far maintained that goal of doing some writing/editing/prepping for uploading each day and which doesn't count 'writing an idea down to be worked on later' unless it's an actual, honest to god, breakdown of how a scene and/or story is going to go rather than just writing down an idea for a story, I have discovered a small brain trap that might be more insidious than the thing I used to do of 'doing extensive world-building instead of actual writing'

I currently have about 3-4 writing projects on the go (depending on if the project sitting in my drafts waiting for me to do another editing pass on it as active) - The weekly series which I have something of a buffer on but also a the longer, more intricate, chapter is coming up in April so I need to be prioritizing, a work that I've nearly finished the first draft but I need to figure out one thing to write a mid-segment of, and something I just started on and got the first scene written the other night.

...So, yeah. Apparently, I've found a way of procrastinating while feeling extremely productive and exercising the same creative muscles that the actual work would be exercising without actually progressing on the thing I need to be working on. I'm close enough to finishing that I probably shouldn't be too worried - I think there are only about 10-20 segments left to write (and I'm expecting that to be closer to 10 than 20, and when I do get writing rather than planning work on it done I usually get at least one done each day.