#papaiary

[papaya-inspiration]

Quick! Somebody boop that snoot!

[peripapaya]

November Writing Challenge Retrospective

Ah, December. The season of peppermint, chilly evenings, and breathing a deep sigh of relief that I’ve survived another month of writing challenges! This is my biggest writing push of the year, so I wanted to take a moment to stop, look back, and reflect on how it went.

For those not in the know, for the past five years I’ve done my own personal daily writing challenge across the month of November. Historically I’ve called it a “mini-NaNo” or more adorably my “nano-NaNo”, though with the disgraceful ending of the official NaNoWriMo organization this tends to get me awkward questions these days. To be clear: I am not, nor have ever been affiliated with the organization NaNoWriMo. I just like harnessing the enthusiasm for writing in November to do a fun little thing on my own terms!

My personal challenge goes like this: I set a goal to write a daily minimum of 300 words, and then I try to exceed that. 300 words across 30 days gives a total goal of 9,000 words for the month, but I typically hit about 20k, and then set a stretch goal for myself of 25k. (This stretch goal has historically been pretty hard for me to hit—I’ve only done it [twice] before!) The idea behind this structure is that the basic criteria for success is super low and easy to hit. 300 words is only about 2 paragraphs worth of writing, and you can bang that out in 15 minutes easy if you’re focused. Having such an achievable goal makes it easy to get started every day (the hardest part!) And once I’ve started writing, it’s usually easy to keep the momentum going until I’ve written two or three times my original goal.

One other important piece: Unlike a traditional NaNoWriMo, I don’t restrict myself to trying to finish a single project in November. I write a lot of short stories, so allow myself to jump around to whatever project captures my fancy that day. I’ll typically have one or two longer works I’ll pick away at over the course of the month. But on the whole, November is a chance for me to experiment with new pieces or jump around finishing half-done drafts as I please.

With that context set, let’s talk about how the month went for me!

Goals

I was feeling pretty good heading into this year’s challenge. In September I moved to a new city for a new job, and by the start of November the dust kicked up by that was starting to settle. I was feeling antsy to start making progress again on my creative endeavors, so the challenge came around at just the right time. Since moving here, I’ve also joined a weekly writing group that meets at a local coffee shop, so I had a new community element to motivate me as well.

Heading into the month, I had a loose priority of pieces I want to work on.

Top Priority: I’m writing a sci fi graphic novel with a friend. It follows a psychic astronaut as she explores the subsurface ocean on Saturn’s icy moon of Enceladus. My friend Rainer is doing the art, and he’s waiting on me to finish the script, so it’s important to keep the momentum on this moving forward! We’re expecting the finished project to be over 100 pages, so there’s a lot to do!

Medium Priorities: I have a small group of short stories and novelettes that I would be very happy to push forward to complete (or closer-to-complete) drafts. It wouldn’t be possible to finish ALL of them in a month, but I would be happy to see meaningful progress on a handful of them.

    •    Death and the Doctor Sequel (novelette, outlined but no draft started)

    •    Dragon Hoard Short Story (half-drafted)

    •    An Epilogue for Lady Pole (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fan fiction, outlined but no draft started)

    •    Write a new chapter of Cornifer is Going on an Adventure! (Hollow knight long fic)

    •    Starship Librarians (half-drafted, but needed a lot of reworking)

    •    The 13th Census of Enlightenment City (has a pitch written down, but needed a proper outline)

Low Priorities: These are things that I can easily slot into a day where I don’t feel like working on my heftier projects. Great for filling in gaps or providing an outlet on low-motivation days.

    •    Invisible Cities microfictions

    •    Other fan fictions

    •    Webcomic commentary posts

———

Outcomes

By the numbers, this year’s nano-NaNo was a smashing success. I hit my 300 word goal everyday (except for the last day, whoops) and sailed past my 25k stretch goal. I’m feeling really proud of that, because historically I’ve hit 20k consistently but struggled to reach 25k. My average daily word count spiked in the first half in the month and then tailed off a little bit towards the end, when I was on holiday travel.

I think I can chalk up my success to one huge factor: This is probably the calmest November I’ve had in years. This is my first fall after finishing grad school, and hooboy I think that makes a difference. Especially compared to 2024, when I was in the middle of post-doc applications (genuinely one of the worst academic periods of my life) and I struggled to break 12k words and flopped out of the writing challenge a week before it ended. Now I’ve got my own apartment which I can keep as quiet as I want in the evenings, a job that respects normal working hours, and–OH RIGHT THE GOVERNMENT WAS SHUT DOWN FOR HALF THE MONTH. Um. That makes a difference too. I wasn’t furloughed myself, but my workplace was shut down and most of my team was furloughed. I only started my new position two weeks before the shutdown started, so they didn’t have much time to pile responsibilities on me before everything closed up. Functionally, my life turned into Pandemic Part 2 for about six weeks–working from home, not having nearly enough tasks to keep myself occupied, and generally very socially isolated (I had just moved and didn’t have much time to make friends before the shutdown started.) It wasn’t great, but it did mean I had a lot of quiet time at home to get writing done. Silver linings?

So my word count output was great, but when I look at the breakdown of projects I worked on I’m not entirely pleased with myself. I did a pretty good job working on the mid-priority projects. I finished a much more detailed outline of Enlightenment City and completed first drafts of both An Epilogue for Lady Pole (which I’ve had outlined since 2020 but never drafted!), the Dragon Hoard Story, and my first Silksong fic (yay!) Unfortunately, I’m not terribly pleased with the quality of all the words I got down, especially on the Dragon Hoard Story. It turned out much longer than I anticipated and ended up kind of beating the reader over the head with the moral in a way that borders on condescending. (Maybe that’s too harsh, but at the very least it is too simplistic a premise to justify being 8000 words long.) An Epilogue for Lady Pole is mostly fine, but I think I liked the outline version of it better than the finished draft. Oh well. I try not to hold my fic to as high of standards so it’ll definitely still get edited and posted eventually.

The biggest disappointment of the month is my general failure to make much progress on my graphic novel script. I only spent one (one!) day working on it, when it was supposed to be my top priority for the month. This is entirely my own fault–scripting is hard, so it was just too tempting to work on other things most days. But I’m feeling pretty energized about writing now, so I hope to bring some of November’s momentum into December and refocus on getting more of the script done.

There was a dark horse this month, and that was the “Silksong blog post” you can see on my word count chart. I’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong (shock! gasp!) and, predictably, it’s been giving me brain worms. One of the conversations I kept having with people over and over again was about difficulty management in the game, so I decided to start writing down a guide for players who were struggling with the game about things I found make the challenge level more reasonable. And once I started the essay, it became kind of addicting to keep working on--you can see I was regularly breaking 1000 words on days I worked on it! I can see why people enjoy blogging so much, this kind of writing allows me to take an easy, conversational tone that is much easier to stream-of-conscious than most fiction or creative nonfiction. Anyway. The essay is turning out close to 9000 words long, coming soon to a Tumblr blog near you.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m incredibly happy with my progress this year. Sticking to daily word goals was easier this year than it’s ever been, and I think I am genuinely getting better at the BIC-HOC (Butt In Chair Hands On Keyboard) part of being a writer. I’m getting better at pushing through on drafts even when I don’t like how they’re turning out, which is an important skill because sometimes you just need to get that shitty first draft done so you can get feedback and then fix it up. I’m also happy to see a few older stories (especially Lady Pole) get endings. However, I definitely would like to see myself be a bit more responsible about staying focused on high priority projects, and I would like to be better at not wrecking my sleep schedule by procrastinating my daily writing until right before bed. So those are good goals for next year! Until then, I’ll be back to a more intermittent writing schedule, but hopefully still harnessing this good energy to keep projects moving down the pipeline.

Happy holidays, and happy writing!

[papaya-inspiration]

I was today years old when I learned that Morbius actually says "It's Morbin' time" out loud in the movie. I thought y'all were just goncharoving me about it this whole time.

[papaya-inspiration]

I've decided to start collecting blorbos that look like this.

Cecil from The Unbelievable Gwenpool

Jiro from Foreach

Painter from Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

I just think they're neat!!!!

[papaya-inspiration]

Hot Take: Harrow the Ninth is about the experience of becoming a post doc

[papaya-inspiration]

reblog and add a cat picture to make the person you rb'd from smile

[papaya-inspiration]

In honor of Disability Pride Month, I here are a few of my favorite books with disabled protagonists!

Among Others by Jo Walton - A gorgeous coming of age story about an isolated, science fiction obsessed girl in a welsh boarding school, the main character walks with a cane due to an devastating automobile accident that killed her twin sister. The book does a great job exploring how this impacts her life, along with all the other fallout of the accident and various dubiously fantastical incursions into her life. I love love love the story of the book itself, I read this well over a decade ago and it hass stuck with me so much.

Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson - A YA fantasy about an isolated young nun who must partner with a dangerous and misunderstood spirit to save everything she cares about. This is a book I underestimated when I started it, partially due to the YA marketing, but it blew me away! Regarding disability, the main character of this has severe burn scars that significantly impact her ability to use her hands, as well as a suite of old traumas to manage. I really appreciate how the book portrays that the burns consistently impact her life and make simple tasks difficult, but does so matter-of-factly and without it coming across as pitying her.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - This one has TWO great main characters with disabilities and great writing about how their differing relationships to them. Din, the main character, is dyslexic and at first he is constantly trying to keep it under the table and hide it from his coworkers (and pulls off some incredible stuff to achieve this!) Across the book, his understanding of his capacities and his relationship to it evolves, in wonderful lockstep with his overall character arc. The other MC, Ana, is some flavor of on the autism spectrum and is living her absolute best life solving mysteries and making it everyone else's problem.

A House With Good Bones by T Kingfisher - This one is maybe a little more subtle, but Sam's hypothyroidism and weight are background elements that really shape the book! I love the wry humor she has about how the world treats fat people, she talks about it in a really refreshing way that stands in stark contrast to the subtle fatphobic tones that a lot of "body positivity" stuff has. Plus her thyroid condition plays into it too--she overtly doubts the horror elements happening to her because she's been conditioned to doubt her own body's reactions to things. I think that's interesting!

Silent Partner Unfinished Business - This is a fanfic, but I'm sneaking it on the list anyway because it's so good. It's a Death Note fic where Misora Naomi survives Light's attempted murder of her and then teams up with Misa to get his ass. Naomi ends up with both physical disability and expressive aphasia, meaning that while she can still understand everything just fine she is psychologically incapable of constructing language herself (can't speak or write in intelligible sentences.) The story is largely from her POV and does an amazing job showing the deep frustrations that come from living with this condition, as well as all the ways she finds to work with it and still be a stone cold bad ass.

Let me know what some of your favorite books with good disability rep are!

[papaya-inspiration]

@lumsel tagged me in an ask meme game:

rules: in a new post, post the names of all the files in your wip folder regardless of how non descriptive or ridiculous. let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them and then post a little snippet or tell us about it.

Oh hell yeah. Like prev, I don't have a single WIP folder but I'll consolidate. First, from my "ideas" document:

Killing the King's Ghost

The Wyvern in the Well

Dryad Horror

Solar System SETI

Nuclear Fae

The Ghost in the Library

Trapped with an AI

Martian Clock Conflict

The Glitch Gate Setting

The Asteroid Lottery

Ghost Archeology

Ghost School

Ghost Assassin Mystery

Depression Noir

The Florist and the Gravestone

Supernatural Doorman

A Lich's Monologue

Rat Western

And here's my actual WIP folder. Several of them are abandoned lol.

00 Poetry Snippets

An Epilogue for Lady Pole

Ariel's Diary

Asteroid Seeding Story

A Dry Spell

Alabama & Stazia - The Shop

Alabama & Stazia, The Adventures of

Archive in the Stars

Chicago Romance Novel

Cornifer is Goingon an Adventure! fic

Crossovers I will probably never write

Death and the Doctor Sequel

Dragon Hoard Story

Electric Princess (shareable)

False Prophecy novel idea

Galactic Commons Fic

Girl Crossing the Desert Story

guyia Stories

Hive and Honey (Halloween Short Story)

Hollow Knight Fic Fragments

Invisible Cities Prompts

Kasslyne Astronomers Fic

LDR Comic Outline

Life on a hazy planet draft

Machina Western

Man's Last Friend

Murder Timeloop Story

Myla's Song in Many Voices

Novella Reviews

Outer Wilds Best Ending Fic

Quarantine Draft

Rainer + Peri Brainstorming

Realistic Fiction Workshop story

Scenes from Usurper D&D

SNAKE FIC

Subsurface ocean

T Kingfisher Essay

TGE + WftD Tea Document!

The Asteroid Lottery

The Vision on Lake Whilom

Time depot short story draft

Two Time Loop Stories

Unsounded Iori Fic

Zivanka at Baytown Story #2

Zivanka at Baytown NOTES

Zivanka at Baytown WORDCOUNT

Zivanka at Tombstone Market

Zivanka - Other Ideas

I'll tag: @vamonkea, @businesstiramisu, and @kikicandoit