no brain, only ooze coming out my ears now
A day early, even. (Mostly because I decided I was going to hit 2k/day this weekend until the damn thing was done.)
As I've mentioned (ad nauseam), this year was pretty challenging for me in a lot of ways. One of those ways, weirdly enough, was trying to take it easy on myself. Obviously, paladin helped a lot with that since he pre-assumes that in November I'm not really doing much of anything useful and will, therefore, do more cooking and such than is the usual division of labor in the household. (Which is not to say that the division is usually unequal; it's just that he takes on a substantial chunk of my stuff and/or indulges me with more ordering out, etc. than we would normally do, and just accepts that I'm going to be buried in a novel instead of doing fun things with him.)
Things I learned from this year:
* When your strengths, as identified by the person probably most familiar with your writing overall, relate entirely to characters and dialogue, trying really hard to write a novel in a way that doesn't explicitly play to those stregths is hard. Doing it on a deadline is worse.
* I need to write to a timer. Sitting down with a 20-minute timer, which I started doing toward the end of the month, was usually good for 600-800 words at a stretch. Attempting to sit down and patiently make words mostly resulted in fucking around not doing anything. (I have a lot more thoughts on this but they're going to have to wait because my brain is gooey and said thoughts deserve a more coherent brain.)
* Yes, I can still hit 50K while not constantly squawking at myself about how I'm an insufficient number of days ahead. Goalposts: shoved back in the other direction, dammit.
I want to have more to say but my brain and my wrists are Very Done, Thank You. So I am going to go play visual novels until I recover enough neurons for the FFXIV Heavensward finale, since I got level 60 yesterday and am now patiently sitting outside the research facility.
And I am taking two days off from words, dammit.
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