Hey all.
The last … um… Autumn has been a bit nuts.
New therapist! Tried three new ADHD drugs (#3 might be a winner). Got sick for most of October (probably drug #1). NaNaWriMo and a new wordcount record in November.
Then Wednesday my dad had surgery to clean plaque out of his carotid artery.
So uh. It’s been a pretty nuts season.
Dad is okay, by the way. As I write this – technically I’m talking this to speech-to-text as I drive home – as I write this, he is in recovery after they removed an 80% blockage from his right carotid artery. Which, I got to tell you, watch a video, it can make you want to jog or, something. It kind of makes me want to jog. And I really don’t like jogging.
Anyway, Dad is in recovery and is going to be as fine as a 69 year old man who has had a heart attack and won’t stop smoking can be. Which, yeah, I may be a little pissed about (The smoking, not the okay!). But, life is life. Dad is Dad… that is that.
So (I have no idea what I was saying here. The Speech to Text totally mangled whatever I meant to say.).
Well, Dad’s in recovery, I’ve got the new meds, and I have new records in wordcount. Yes. I was going to talk about that and about NaNoWriMo!
By the way, I don’t really like this particular speech to text app, but I’m still working my way through them looking for something that actually functions without losing large portions of my text, or just turning off while I’m in the middle of a sentence, over and over and over again.
For NaNoWriMo I had a lot of fun! But I probably won’t do this particular plan again, ’cause it was kind of a pain, trying to get prompts. As it turns out, people aren’t as thrilled about prompted when it’s only if you donate first. I can see that.
(I should really look up why I is the only pronoun in the English language that is hyphenated no is capitalized. I don’t think it’s capitalized in any other language, is it? Je in French isn’t; Yo in Spanish isn’t. I don’t speak a lot of other languages and since ASL is a signed language it doesn’t have capitalization….)
So I don’t think this really worked as either a fund drive, or a Patreon drive – BUT on the other hand, I got two new patrons & two new tips during the month. So!
I’ve posted 19 stories, 2 or 3 more that aren’t posted will be ready to go and at least two more aren’t complete but will be completed and posted.
I had 13 themes available for prompting, all of the themes from the last year and then Demifiction for this November (Because I wanted to write it~~). I got prompts in 8 of those themes. (Gates and Borders, Arts & crafts, Tír na Cali, Gardens, Friendship, Rebuilding the World, Demifiction, & Research).
I’ve written or am writing 2-3 stories for each prompter who prompted more than one thing & 1 for those who, well, prompted one thing. Some of these are going to take longer, as the length of the story is based on the amount of the tip/Patronage.
In addition, I did a couple really fun things on Mastodon, because Mastodon allows for a larger character base than Twitter, and this means you can actually fit a reasonable Iength flashfic into a single toot – that being a Mastodon post – where it’s a lot harder to fit a fit into a single Twitter Tweet, even with the 280 character limit and not the earlier 140. Or maybe it’s just harder for me?
Anyway, what I did was start a new storyline in the same universe with many of the same characters in my neglected Toot Planet series, about the ship having been transported to a new sector of space by forces they still don’t understand, the things that they found there, and how they cope with loss of records and memories, as well as handling some of the colonies who were going to find themselves without a ride home.
In addition, Thanksgiving and Black Friday – that being this past Thursday and Friday – I offered to anyone on Mastodon that if they boosted a specific promo toot and left me a prompt, I would write them their own toot-fic. The part I really had fun with was putting a little Easter Egg in the alt text tof the image.
I did this for a lot of the a lot of the Explorer logs and Captain’s logs, too; that’s actually how I got the idea. Frankly, for me – I’m really wordy. I mean, this post is already, as I’m just sitting here talking to my phone… how long? [It was 700 words]. On top of that, sometimes nanowrimo brings out a slightly more wordy style of writing for me. Getting a story into 500,1000 characters, plus jamming in one or two hashtags so it’s findable, it’s not all that easy for me.
So I wanted to cut out the “Captain’s Log, Star Date blah blah blah blah blah”, and sector of space, or “Explorers Log, planetary date blah blah” and planetary number and so on, get those characters out of the text, so I did those did those as an image – it’s a crop of the tablets they’re using to write their logs, which in a couple cases was actually a notebook.
But ALSO, I’ve been on this accessibility kick, which means that every image needs a caption.And if there’s text in the image, well, it needs to be in the captions. Which led me to think, well, there’s more characters available in the alt-text than there are in a readable image of the top third of a tablet or notepad.
SO
Most of the Toot-Planet stories on Mastodon, if you look at them, there’s longer text – oh! Rowyn gave me the phrase for this. It’s the same as XKCD – MOUSEOVER TEXT. So most of those stories have mouse over text in the image!
AND THEN it occurred to me that I was doing this follow-up toot to each of these stories that said something like “this story was written because of Rowyn’s response to my Tootfic here -” and a link – because I really like it when people leave me suggestions about what people in my stories might be doing offstage, or say things to my characters. Like Rowyn said “Keep it together, Researcher!” so I wrote a fic about the researcher pulling it together.
So ANYWAY I have these toots at the end like the end of a YouTube video (I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts on YouTube lately. It’s really fun for when you’re doing something in the other window like, for instance, crossposting all your Patreon posts since like 2014 to WordPress. Or playing Minecraft) – you know, it’s like “if you liked what you’re hearing, remember to click like and subscribe,” except instead it’s “if you like what you’re reading, check out my Patreon and Kofi and don’t forget my Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call!” so I tagged on my image for that (the balloon, after the theme for this year’s Nanowrimo on the website (Which is its own problem, Le Sigh)) and then filled the alt text with a little add-on story.
Lots of Easter Eggs, and I had a blast.
OH and I was talking about November numbers.
I wrote 121,000 words in November. That’s not only a new monthly record, it blows the previous record (last November, 97,006) out of the water.
I reached 600,000, 666,666, and 700,000 words for 2019 in November but I’m still working on the perfect cake for the 666,666 milestone.
(2018’s total was 750,018 words. It looks like I’ll reach that around about 12/13 this year).
Nanowrimo – the combination of catching up on Patreon, the Nanowrimo Prompt Call stories, and the tootfics posted on Mastodon promoting my NanoWrimo – reached 51,892 words.
Oh, and after an idea of Anke’s, I tried tracking “blorts” (a writing increment). A year ago, maybe even 6 months ago, those were generally aimed at 250-300 words on a given topic at a time.
In November, I averaged 11 blorts on workdays, 6 on days off, and 440 words/blort
(or, in other words, I could very nearly get my 4TheWords Streak goal of 444/day in one 10-15 minute session a day).
Go new drugs?
I am also $9/month from my next Patreon milestone – that would be a second chapter of Nimbus/The Expectant Wood a month, at a good time for it, since I got more than caught up during November and Nimbus’ life is just getting even more interesting.
I’d say it was a pretty good month, Writing-wise.
Now let’s see what December brings!
The biggest problem is that time travel is impossible.
I mean, the BIGGEST problem is that I just got thrown back in time to 4 days before the apocalypse & as far as I can tell, everything is going exactly the same as it did before.
99% of humans will die. Half the animal & plant populations gone. Whole nations destroyed.
If one asshole pushes one button.
I have 4 days to get to him & stop it.
And I’m 13 years old, grounded, & reading up on time travel science & theories.
Fuck.
