Another New Year
Jan. 1st, 2017 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firethesoundHere we are again at the start of another new year, and for once I'm really struggling to feel optimistic about it. 2015 was fuck-awful for me, and one year ago today I said, with my rose-colored glasses firmly upon my face, "2016 is going to be a good year."
Yeah, I know.
It really wasn't all that bad for me personally, despite the raging crapfest that's still ongoing globally. Mostly 2016 was a year of stagnancy--nothing really went wrong, but nothing really changed either. Which, after the turmoil of 2015, I'm certainly not complaining about. Still, 2017 is going to be a year of big changes and I'm really looking forward to it in that regard. Mr FTS is finishing up his degree this summer, knock on wood, and we'll be moving out of state shortly thereafter. He'll be starting a new job, I'll be starting a new job, and then is going to come the whole lengthy ordeal of settling in and building new routines and making new friends (or settling back into old friendships, if we end up moving back to PA) and... it's going to be a lot. I'm someone who doesn't deal well with change, but I know that I'll be much happier after it happens, so. I think it'll be okay.
As with the rest of a my life, this was also a year in which I didn't make much headway in fandom, either. I finished and posted a total of 4 fics, and contributed to a 5th, for a total of 194,362. Which sounded a heck of a lot more impressive--almost double what I did last year!--until I realized that 160k of that was finished and posted by March.
I wrote a total of 270,662 which is down from last year (294k in 2015) and I added 21 new WIPs to the WIP Folder of Doom. Some shuffling around of word docs and combining ideas brought that down a little, but it's still high. I'm starting off the year with 106 WIPs for a total of 345,173 unposted words. Which is... yikes. Just yikes.
I set some very reasonable goals at the beginning of the year, and didn't do so great meeting them:
----Be more active in fandom - I did okay with this one, I think I was more active than I was the previous year, but not by a whole heck of a lot. I've been reading more HP fic recently than I have in a while, so there's that.
----Do two and only two fests - Check, and check. Remix and Erised. I had signed up for Stucky Big Bang, but I was fighting through writer's block for most of this year and ended up dropping. Honestly, this is one case where I'd rather have failed at my goal for keeping to only two fests, because by dropping I totally let my writing partner down.
----Finish and post the rest of Don't Think Twice - Another year with this hanging over me. But it's at the top of my writing queue and I currently don't have any deadlines, so I'm optimistic that I'll get it done soon-ish.
----Focus on finishing WIPs - Ah, another fail. All of the things I finished and posted this year were new fics.
----Comment Replies - I am still working on these, but I'm making progress!
This year I my goals are very similarsince I didn't complete a bunch of the things I need to accomplish
----This is going to be another Year of Very Few Fests, and I think I ought to stick to prompt-based fests if I do decide to sign up for anything this year. I really really love exchange fests, but they come with a lot of stress I don't think I should be adding to my plate this year, and Erised sign-ups in particular will be happening right around the time I should be moving, so. I guess I'll wait and see how things go. Right now it's kind of nice not having any deadlines!
----I absolutely need to finish comment replies because at this point I have outstanding comments from over a year ago and the longer it goes on the more guilty I feel over it. I love my readers, I love that they took the time to leave me a comment, and the fact that I haven't responded to so many makes me feel unappreciative. For a while pre-holiday madness I was putting in at least 30 minutes a day on it and had started to make some good progress. I need to get back to that and finish it up.
----I've set a writing goal of 300k in 2017. This year a bunch of people I know have signed up to do![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
getyourwordsout so I went ahead and jumped in on that as well. I signed up for the 300k tier, since I come within spitting distance of making that each year and thought that a little bit of external motivation might help.
----I want to get my WIPs back down into the two-digits because one hundred and freaking six is entirely unreasonable. This is very doable as long as I can get myself to focus on it--I have a lot of short things started, and a lot of half-finished things that it won't take a huge amount of work to get finished--and I want to get at least seven of them done and posted this year.
----And in that vein, I want to continue with WIP Wednesday posts because it's working better than I thought it would. A lot of the time when I'm having trouble focusing on writing something, I'll start browsing through the WIP Folder of Doom and adding a little bit of words here, a little bit of words there. Knowing that if I add words to something I have to admit to it in my next post has really made me think twice about it. It's also cut down on the starting of new fics, and when I think of a new story I want to write, lately I've started adding it to my Great Big Doc of Fic Ideas rather than pulling up a new word doc and writing out half a scene before I lose interest.
----And last but not least, I want to be more present in fandom. You all are fantastic and I adore you. This year I'm going to be better about showing it <3
Yeah, I know.
It really wasn't all that bad for me personally, despite the raging crapfest that's still ongoing globally. Mostly 2016 was a year of stagnancy--nothing really went wrong, but nothing really changed either. Which, after the turmoil of 2015, I'm certainly not complaining about. Still, 2017 is going to be a year of big changes and I'm really looking forward to it in that regard. Mr FTS is finishing up his degree this summer, knock on wood, and we'll be moving out of state shortly thereafter. He'll be starting a new job, I'll be starting a new job, and then is going to come the whole lengthy ordeal of settling in and building new routines and making new friends (or settling back into old friendships, if we end up moving back to PA) and... it's going to be a lot. I'm someone who doesn't deal well with change, but I know that I'll be much happier after it happens, so. I think it'll be okay.
As with the rest of a my life, this was also a year in which I didn't make much headway in fandom, either. I finished and posted a total of 4 fics, and contributed to a 5th, for a total of 194,362. Which sounded a heck of a lot more impressive--almost double what I did last year!--until I realized that 160k of that was finished and posted by March.
I wrote a total of 270,662 which is down from last year (294k in 2015) and I added 21 new WIPs to the WIP Folder of Doom. Some shuffling around of word docs and combining ideas brought that down a little, but it's still high. I'm starting off the year with 106 WIPs for a total of 345,173 unposted words. Which is... yikes. Just yikes.
I set some very reasonable goals at the beginning of the year, and didn't do so great meeting them:
----Be more active in fandom - I did okay with this one, I think I was more active than I was the previous year, but not by a whole heck of a lot. I've been reading more HP fic recently than I have in a while, so there's that.
----Do two and only two fests - Check, and check. Remix and Erised. I had signed up for Stucky Big Bang, but I was fighting through writer's block for most of this year and ended up dropping. Honestly, this is one case where I'd rather have failed at my goal for keeping to only two fests, because by dropping I totally let my writing partner down.
----Finish and post the rest of Don't Think Twice - Another year with this hanging over me. But it's at the top of my writing queue and I currently don't have any deadlines, so I'm optimistic that I'll get it done soon-ish.
----Focus on finishing WIPs - Ah, another fail. All of the things I finished and posted this year were new fics.
----Comment Replies - I am still working on these, but I'm making progress!
This year I my goals are very similar
----This is going to be another Year of Very Few Fests, and I think I ought to stick to prompt-based fests if I do decide to sign up for anything this year. I really really love exchange fests, but they come with a lot of stress I don't think I should be adding to my plate this year, and Erised sign-ups in particular will be happening right around the time I should be moving, so. I guess I'll wait and see how things go. Right now it's kind of nice not having any deadlines!
----I absolutely need to finish comment replies because at this point I have outstanding comments from over a year ago and the longer it goes on the more guilty I feel over it. I love my readers, I love that they took the time to leave me a comment, and the fact that I haven't responded to so many makes me feel unappreciative. For a while pre-holiday madness I was putting in at least 30 minutes a day on it and had started to make some good progress. I need to get back to that and finish it up.
----I've set a writing goal of 300k in 2017. This year a bunch of people I know have signed up to do
getyourwordsout so I went ahead and jumped in on that as well. I signed up for the 300k tier, since I come within spitting distance of making that each year and thought that a little bit of external motivation might help.----I want to get my WIPs back down into the two-digits because one hundred and freaking six is entirely unreasonable. This is very doable as long as I can get myself to focus on it--I have a lot of short things started, and a lot of half-finished things that it won't take a huge amount of work to get finished--and I want to get at least seven of them done and posted this year.
----And in that vein, I want to continue with WIP Wednesday posts because it's working better than I thought it would. A lot of the time when I'm having trouble focusing on writing something, I'll start browsing through the WIP Folder of Doom and adding a little bit of words here, a little bit of words there. Knowing that if I add words to something I have to admit to it in my next post has really made me think twice about it. It's also cut down on the starting of new fics, and when I think of a new story I want to write, lately I've started adding it to my Great Big Doc of Fic Ideas rather than pulling up a new word doc and writing out half a scene before I lose interest.
----And last but not least, I want to be more present in fandom. You all are fantastic and I adore you. This year I'm going to be better about showing it <3