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So... this has been a year, huh? It's definitely been one of the years of all time.

Though the end of the year is a very arbitrary mark, it's still a good one for me to try and begin the next one with a clean slate and motivate myself to improve in the areas I can. An arbitrary window of opportunity is still a window of opportunity.

Let me start by what did work for me in 2022: the GYWO pledge. Since this was my first year participating, I took the smallest word count pledge, 75k words, and I managed to complete it by the last day of August! I don't think I've ever written more in a year in my life before, even if most of it isn't ready to see the light of day by now, if ever - I've still managed to post (as of today) 8,860 words of fic on AO3 this year, not to mention all the fic ideas I actually wrote down in some form and which can now be developed further at whatever pace I want to, instead of eventually forgetting all about them as I usually did.

However, I did lose steam by September. It's natural, of course, to ebb and flow a bit in my writing habits, and I might've recovered better in October if it weren't for the nightmarish second round of the Presidential election in my country that month. I'm sure someone's already writing a book detailing everything that happened that month on a day by day basis, and I can only hope by the time it gets published it'll feel far enough in the past for me to actually read through it. (Thankfully Lula won, but it was all extremely nerve-wracking; still is, in fact, as it's going to be a tough road for a long time ahead.) I don't think I had a full eight-hour sleep any day that month, and that carried on through most of November as well. (I also had some family issues going on at the same time.) I had to default or pass up lots of exchanges and events I had been wanting to join because my brain simply turned to mush for ninety per cent of that time. Really, it's only been during the past few weeks that I've truly felt a bit more like myself (thus the making of this post).

In any case, the worst is (hopefully) over by now, and I'll try to get back on my feet, writing-wise, during the next few months. I've even gone for the 150k writing pledge this time around, and I'm optimistic about reaching that goal. As a motivation tactic, the stuff I think I will, later on, feel more thankful for having completed will go to the top of my working pile, at least for now. This is mostly because, though I did write a lot this year, too much of it is still sitting there on my Google Docs as WIPs. I also want to take the latest birdsite shenanigans as an opportunity to take a break from it and have more of a presence here and elsewhere (I'm already more active on tumblr, if anyone wants to find me there). So, a belated happy holidays and new years for anyone reading this! Here's to a calmer and kinder next year - I think everyone wants that.

So, things keep going pretty well on the writing side so far. It's incredible what a little bit of organization of my writing docs can do. Sometimes I don't work on my WIPs because I have no idea if I've reread every single document where I wrote something about it or not. But just a little bit of tagging later and this problem is mostly gone. Then I can calmly reread everything and start writing a lot more.

Last post I'd written about how I wrote more than 4k this month already; well, last night I went and wrote about 3.5k in three hours. All of this was mostly on the MDZS drabble series (two drabbles of which I posted on AO3 this week, by the way; here and here if you're curious). I wrote the seventh one fully, made detailed sketches of drabbles 8 through 12 (those are already half-written now, basically), and jotted down ideas for drabbles 13 through 18. So it should be easier to keep something of a routine of posting them going forward.

Besides that, it's been on my mind lately that I made my first MDZS fanvids almost two years ago. I've been thnking of redoing and posting them on AO3 as well, since the original files were on an old notebook (I might or might not have saved them on my newer one, but I haven't found them yet; I really need to do a lot of organizing).

So, I've always been a bit fascinated by the idea of linked poetry like Renga, where (simplifying a lot here) each stanza has something in common with the previous one and with the next one, but two stanzas distant form each other might not have anything in common at all, so that part of the fun in this kind of poetry is in the quick change of subject matter and in guessing what the connections between parts might be. Also, being the kind of nerd that I am, I'd been thinking on and off for a few months on how to achieve something similar with fics (simplifying massively, of course; that genre of poetry usually has myriad rules regarding what kind of stuff is allowed to go where). In April I've decided on a way to do it, but I wrote almost nothing on May, but now that I've started writing again I actually have some of it written down and quite a bit more planned, so I've decided on posting the beginning of it on AO3 as a series here.

The idea I came up with: it's a (MDZS-themed) drabble series, alternating between triple and double drabbles. Each drabble can be read as a standalone (and no drabble is a sequel or prequel of any other), but also has a theme in common with the next drabble: a word or a small phrase, a character, a place, etc. Each theme connecting two drabbles can't be repeated, so if e.g. Character A is used as a theme in one "link" it can't be used as the link between any other parts of the series, but Character A itself can appear in any drabbles in the series. I'm trying to go for 36 drabbles in total, but we'll see; at the moment I have 4 complete drabbles and 12 more planned, so I should be good for a while, at least.

I've decided to post the first three at once so people can see what I'm going for, and I'll try to post three more each week, 12 per month, to give myself enough time to plan and write the next few ones. But should I also post all three of the next ones at once, or maybe space them out during the week? Also, what do you think of this idea in general? Since I'm terrible at finishing longer fics, I think this is at least a good way of getting myself in the habit of completing stuff and putting it out there, not to mention it should keep my writing habits going for a while.

I've just read tenlittlebullets and vriddy's posts (and some though not all of the comments, so apologies if I end up rehashing something already discussed) on DW comms and how community culture changed from the LJ days even though DW was meant to be something like a direct successor to it (here and here, respectively) and wanted to share my two cents. Now, I've never been part of LJ fandom culture, so I can't comment on that, but I have a few thoughts about modes of interacting on Tumblr, Dreamwidth and social media more generally.

Mainly, I think vriddy's comment on people being intimidated by Dreamwidth because of its big text box is slightly incorrect. I think DW is intimidating for some simply because it is a text box. Most of my Twitter timeline consists of retweets (less so on Tumblr, but even then that's just because scrolling through the dashboard takes a lot longer than on Twitter, so I curated who I follow a lot more there), and I'd wager the same is true for almost everyone. In fact, I think most fandom interaction on social media can be divided into three categories: "look at this thing someone else made" (a meme or image or video on Twitter, gifs or images or small shitposts on Tumblr), "look at this thing I made", and "shouting at the void in one or two sentences", in decreasing order of frequency. (There are also likes, which are the simplest way of interaction, which DW lacks. If I want to do something similar here, I'd have to comment, which... sure, I can just comment a heart, but I at least always feel some internal pressure to say something interesting about the post, which I don't always want to or have the energy to do.) I think most people simply don't want a text box - that is, a social media which is more about having conversations with people, which I think is what DW does best. And if they do? Well, everyone's on Discord, so that's where people go. This leaves DW in the position of being a (usually) slower, longer-winded alternative to Discord to people who don't like the way Discord is effectively a black hole for fandom memory. It's also interesting to me that the more active parts of DW, like FFA, also feel the most Discord-like to me.

But there were more people on LJ than there are on DW! Sure, but that was because that was the main place where fandom stuff happened (I think?); once Tumblr and Twitter started people moved there. Not only that, but it might be that they became more active than LJ because LJ lurkers finally found a place to participate without having to write. Writing is always more onerous than pressing a few buttons, so these kinds of places will always be more popular than text-heavy places like DW.

Anyway, I'm not really sure of what conclusion I have here, except perhaps for the fact that most people in fandom don't really want to have constant conversations with other fans - we'll always be something of a minority. Also, if we want to bring more people here perhaps Discord is a better place to try to draw people in than Twitter or Tumblr, and we should try to make the place more Discord-friendly, perhaps (encouraging shorter posts? it's too bad we can't make communities more like forums - say, making all community posts appear as a list and the ones with the most recent comments appear at the top).

The first two months of the year weren't really that good for me in the writing department. Sure, I wrote a lot more comparatively than I used to write in 2021, and I even participated in and wrote some treats for an exchange in February, but writing was an intermittent, often grueling affair - I only wrote for nine days in January and six in February. Summer in the southern hemisphere didn't help either: week after week of heat left me with very little willpower to be more consistent (or to get out of bed at all some days, to be honest). This all meant I'd already started to fall behind in my writing goals for the year, so, after the first few days of March when the heat finally started to subside, I decided to put all my effort behind writing every day I could. And it worked! Last month there were only seven days I didn't write: the first five and two days later on when I wasn't home. To no one's surprise, writing at least a little bit everyday is much more sustainable than trying to force too much writing to happen in 24 hours with mixed results, so not only I got back on track relatively quickly for my writing goals but got ahead of them by basically a whole month. And some of the momentum has transferred to this month as well: as of yesterday I've already written more during April than my monthly goal - not to mention that, while March was the first month ever (I think) where I had a 2k writing day, April has barely begun and I've already had a 3k writing day! So basically, good news all around.

By making sure I put in constant effort into writing every day I think I've finally started to internalize and act upon a few things which I kind of already knew, but which I had difficulty applying despite that knowledge. Maybe these observations could be helpful to others as well:

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Hey there! It's been a while since I wrote something for this blog. In fact, while I thought February would end up being a very productive month for me, well, stuff happened, and it didn't work out that way. Except... it kinda did?

First of all, the first few days of last month were still too hot for my brain to function properly. Then summer got milder just in time for my birthday on the 9th (yay!), which I took as an opportunity to rest and recharge for a few days... And then, on the 16th, I finally got my booster shot (yay again!) but felt a little under the weather for the next few days, so I had to recover from that before having the motivation and good spirits to start writing again with any kind of regularity.

And if you're somehow wondering why neither came back for the rest of the month, it's probably because you're a time traveler from far enough into the future to not immediately know about recent events. I wonder what that would be like. I hope, dear time traveler, that your timeline is better than ours.

I won't prolong myself too much; I want this to be a space where I (and anyone reading) can escape at least for little bit into happier subjects, as we all need from time to time in order to keep us reasonably sane. In fact, for the past week I've been just trying to claw out of the endless spiral of dread and horror that we call "keeping up with the news" while who else but our old friend, Mr. Summer, decides to have another go at frying my brain for a while! Only for the past two or three days I've been actually been able to feel enough like I'm not in some kind of 24-hour sauna for at least part of the day, which is why I'm writing this now.

And well, given all of that, I didn't write nearly as much as I thought I would last month. However, I was surprisingly able to still write slightly more than I did in January! Mostly this was due to the chocolateboxcomm exchange, for which I posted four fics, 2980 words total, including the first over 2k fic I've ever posted on ao3. This was all written on the beginning of the month — the only day I managed to write anything at all after the 15th was on the 28th — but it's still cause for celebration, at least for me, and reason enough for me not to be too harsh on myself. Life happens.

I updated my intro post a bit for the first snowflake challenge, and you can find it here.

The second challenge is about setting goals for the coming year. This is already something I tend to do (although either weekly or monthly goals, usually), so that's nice.

My goals are pretty fandom-oriented, but a few are also applicable in a more general manner.

First of all, I've joined getyourwordsout, so the simplest, most complete goal is to write at least 75k words total this year. Towards this goal, I'm counting not only fics but also more long-form blog posts (such as this one), some quasi-essays I write sometimes to get myself in the mood to write something else, background information or worldbuilding for fics, etc. I'm not counting any diary writing (for the simple reason that I do it by hand and I'd get tired of counting how much I've written) or some of the smaller posts I might post here (such as recs or link piles or similar stuff). I'm not sure yet whether I'll count book reviews and such... In any case, I also have a secondary goal of posting 75k words worth of fic on AO3 this year. I'm much more confident in my ability to reach the former goal than the latter, but we'll see how I fare!

My second goal is, basically, to save everything I read or want to read. I've recently discovered that there are 12 fics I've bookmarked that have been excluded on AO3 and I don't even have a clue at the moment what most of those were about... I really should be more consistent with downloading stuff.

Relatedly, my third goal is to be more organized - in general, although it applies to fandom stuff as well. I already feel like I have a good folder scheme for the stuff I have, I just tend to put too much stuff in the "organize this later" folder. I really want to waste less time searching for that photo or music or pdf that I know I have somewhere on my pc. Same goes for bookmarks, both on AO3 and on firefox.

Also related: this year I'll try to put every book, manga, series and album I haven't yet go to read/watch/listen in a big spreadsheet and then methodically go through it. The biggest factor in how much of a chaotic mess my folders and bookmarks are is the fact that I save something for later and then just forget about it. There's a lot I haven't yet gotten into or even watched the first episode or read the first chapter but didn't continue because I started something else and felt lost afterwards, for example. I've already started the spreadsheet and I'll start going through it soon. (Making no promises here on whether I actually finish the whole spreadsheet because I have the feeling that there's not enough time in the year even just to read all the books, let alone all the other stuff...)

Finally, I want to try and be more sociable this year. In fandom spaces, this means participating in getyourwordsout and the snowflake_challenge and other communities and fests and exchanges, commenting more on fics I like, being more present on discord, etc. However, this is one of the goals that also applies in general - I feel like the last two years I've become a lot more timid than I was, simply due to the fact that opportunities for seeing my friends have become extremely limited (fingers crossed for things getting better this year), and I should keep better contact with people.

At the beginning of November I decided to finally try something like NaNoWriMo. I've seen posts everywhere year after year, and it piqued my interest, but I've always managed to forget to actually do it - and then I would have to wait for next year, when once again I would forget. Well, not this time.

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Honestly, Twitter, Discord and even Tumblr sometimes can be a bit overwhelming for me, so I've been lurking around here for a while now. I'd rather stare at bigger, but fewer blocks of text for most of the day than at 50-to-100 tidbits or images or videos all about completely different things... I just wish more of the people I follow on those places would think the same way and move over here, but hey, be the change you want to see (or something like that), so here I am.

I'll try to post regularly ^{(famous last words...)}, even if it means sometimes only posting links to a few interesting things I found. Oh, but I haven't even said anything about what I'm likely to post about, so: mostly fandom-related stuff, fic writing, making fanvids, that sort of thing (I'll post something about my main fandoms soon). Maybe sometimes game-related posts as well. Probably not much in the way of journaling, as I already do that on my own.

Now I'm off to figure out a bit more about tags and interests and fixed posts and start actually subscribing to people and maybe commenting (half the reason I made this intro post is just so there's something to look at here if people find me somewhere else on DW)...