writing retrospective for 2023

[screechfox]

This might be a premature, but working on the assumption that I'm not going to finish any fics by the end of the year - which, unless I'm hit with a wave of fixation in the festive season, is very likely - I wanted to look back on the writing, or largely lack thereof, I did this year.

I published three fics on AO3 this year:

• bear witness, some Weird Eldritch Experimentation I wrote for the last round of the Bulletproof exchange, for The Bifrost Incident/The Mechanisms in general
• nothing gold can stay and leaf subsides to leaf, my angsty Nie Huaisang/Jin siblings portraiture duology, which were top of the list of the writing I wanted to get done this year, so at least that's a plus!

It's my lowest year of published-fic word count since 2015, when I was a whole-ass teenager (in high school!) and also role-playing on Tumblr for a big chunk of that year anyway. I hadn't actually realised that until checking the stats to make this post, and it's kind of wild to think about. It's been going on a decade since I wrote so little in a year, which is bad-weird for someone who considers writing one of his Big Things.

(I'd also set a pledge with Get Your Words Out to write on 120 days this year. I've hit 58 as of today, with an unofficial goal of hitting 60 by the new year.)

I was going to talk about why this might have happened (and still will!), but then I looked at last year's writing retrospective, and, uh:

I don't know for sure why I had so much trouble writing this year. I can hypothesise: getting into new hobbies or being immersed in old ones, the lack of a solid hyperfixation of a fandom to fix my attention on, a shift in my approach to writing that's meant I've been overthinking or second-guessing a lot of what I write. Life circumstances have also played their part, a lot of upheaval and other things that needed my attention and time.

Yeah, that about sums it up, to be honest. I had yet more Life Circumstances this year, although very different ones to last year; I'm still struggling with not overthinking everything I write; I haven't had a strong fixation on any pieces of media in a fic-writing sense; and oh boy did I get into a new hobby partway through the year. There's also a certain amount that a lack of self-discipline feeds in, if I'm being honest. I can set all the pledges I want, but if I don't follow through because I'm distracted by a new shiny, that won't get me anywhere.

This hasn't been a massively creative year all around, to be honest - with the exception of a bit of bookbinding and some gif-making, most of my artistic pursuits have involved going to workshops to force myself to create things. I know it's not a bad thing to spend less time on a hobby in favour of doing different things that you also enjoy, but it's just... strange.

(The new hobby, by the way, is family history/genealogy. Which I could probably write a whole post about on its own if I could make it interesting and also not accidentally doxx myself doing so.)

So anyway, what about next year?

I'm still going to pledge for Get Your Words Out again - probably the 120 day pledge, because I find tracking my word count to be a pain. I need to find some way of sticking to it, though - I've been using Pomofarm as my timer when I've been managing to get writing done lately, so maybe I just need to try and do a few sessions of that in a week.

I will probably also sign up for the Bulletproof exchange again. The free-form nature of it can be really helpful, and maybe a deadline will also spur me on? On the other hand, if writing just isn't where I am right now, maybe it would be a bad idea to commit to it.

I made a list last year of my "must-finish" (haha) projects for 2023. Clearly that didn't work out, but I'd like to try and set a few goals anyway.

• Finish the Jiang Yanli/Wang Lingjiao non-con whump, which is mostly giving me grief right now because I can't decide whose POV to write it from.
• Decide if I'm actually going to write the F!NHS + JGY arranged marriage fic, because I love it in theory, but the execution of it is proving very difficult, and I keep second-guessing if it's even a good idea. (I'm half-considering taking "write the parts you want to write" to heart and just doing it as a drabble/double drabble sequence. We'll see!)
• Finish my passion project self-indulgent Homestuck fic maybe? It's been six years and I'm not even in the fandom really now, but I just love it so much and I've poured so much into it.

I'm also hoping to participate in a bookbinding event in February, if only to finish off the three books-in-progress which are sitting on my scrapheap of a crafts table. Or at least the two that I asked the authors about doing like two years ago.

We'll see, really. I like to think I've taken a level up in being organised in the past couple of months, it's just whether I can transfer that from Important Life Stuff like doing laundry and making phone calls into what are nominally my relaxation activities.