Slow and Unsteady Starts

April 2025 Writing Production

Howdy, folks!

So April, huh? That was some damn month, let me tell you. In addition to being the first real bit of getting back into new writing (and immediately getting stymied, but we’ll get to that), I also returned to work after being on medical leave for twelve weeks. And immediately got the flu. And then had half my right hand go numb from carpal tunnel and need a wrist brace that’s still on my arm, making this blog difficult to type. Also there’s the *gestures vaguely at everything* going on with the world. So April! Whee.

Anyway, as part of keeping the cobwebs dusted here, I thought I’d start up an old practice I had on a blog on Fimfiction of tracking my writing progress month to month. Not all months are gonna be winners, but the goal is to always have some forward momentum with writing, and having the ritual of blogging adds an air of accountability to myself for maintaining that momentum. So let’s look at where my active projects are at.

Vorstnacht (working title, novel)

So this is the big project I’m working on. Not all of the finished words listed were written in April, mind you, that’s just where we’re at currently. Also the estimated words remaining is a figure best taken with a grain of salt, because I am just dogshit at estimating word counts. Based off the outline, I can hazard 100k words as not being an entirely unreasonable guess, but I might be hilariously wrong. I tend to underestimate things, so if anything, expect it to be longer than this. We’ll see how close I actually am once it’s finished.

For work that was done on it in April, the unfortunate answer is not that much. 2668 words written, plus some time tweaking earlier portions that were written several months to years ago that I went over while dusting this off to work on it. In that writing, I did finish the chapter I was working on, which is something. In addition to the raw word output, I also sat down with the outline (a document that beforehand had several general ideas and, like, vibes, bruh) and fleshed it out to a much more robust and followable place. I’m happy with where it’s at and the progress on it, though it ended up slowing down while I worked on a different project. It’s hard to know what the exact pace on it’s going to end up being, but I’m hopeful to see this going faster soon. Even so, if all I can manage is about 2500 words a month, that means it’ll hit its estimated total in 2 years, 11 months, and that’s a significantly faster pace than the previous novel! Haha. Hahaha. Haaaa … Life is pain.

Poker Game (working title, short story)

So this was a sort of dark horse entry to my writing of the month. There was a specific reason I decided to write a short story, though. See, after spending a huge chunk of my medical leave editing the novel Scars of the Grimalkin: No Pets Allowed, and then starting in on Vorstnacht, a part of my brain really wanted to finish a thing, and not by editing an old thing. See, I do this thing pretty often where mid-novel I decide to take a break and write a short story, because they go fast while novels take forever to finish. I tell myself the boost from finishing something will carry me through the rest of the novel. Then I rediscover that I don't like writing short stories. Womp, womp.

Okay, so I don’t hate them, but the fact that they just aren’t really fun to write for me is definitely something I seem to forget whenever I get mid-way through a novel draft. Listen. I may be stupid.

Anyway! I’m liking this thing, for what it’s worth. It’s a small-scale story about a poker game against Death, with the wager being the protagonist’s life … except the two of them already played for that same wager, some three-hundred years before. It’s a little magical realism story about life. I finished the draft for it, but haven’t had a chance to edit. I may or may not want to alter a bunch of shit with it during the edits, but the fact that I did write it quickly and got a good sense of progress from it maybe explains why I keep doing this to myself. It’s like child-birth, I block out the bad shit with time until I inevitably talk myself into this sorta shit again.

Total Results

So at the end of the day, between finishing a chapter of a novel and a short story first draft, I wrote a combined 7973 words for April. Again, not great, but hey, at a rate of 8k of month, if I just focus on Vorstnacht, it’ll be done in 11 months, which is honestly pretty fast for a novel! I am capable of faster, I know from experience, but I’m also struggling with the whole back at work with a cold and a fucked up hand and also in school so I’m busy all the time thing that life is like, and some months, hell many months, aren’t going to be good months. And that’s okay! If words hit paper, novels get written eventually.

Anyway, that’s it for the April retrospective, next progress update, get ready for the ramen noodle hair, because it’s gonna be May.

TTFN.