Into February

I forgot that January exists past New Year’s Day, and February always feels more like one day instead of an entire month. The weather dares me to go out walking, but I’ve been cold before, and I do not care for it. It feels like actual hibernation to me: nothing much gets done, nothing much can get done.

So I’m especially proud of myself for the over 60,000 words I’ve collected in my manuscript, and the nearly-1000 hits my fanfiction has on AO3. I opened tarot commissions through Ko-Fi (link in the bottom left-hand corner of this page!), did a bunch of research, wrote some poems, had a bunch of dreams. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve also played a lot of Horizon Forbidden West, which—like its predecessor—got its teeth in me like a snapmaw.

I think this draft of the manuscript will come out around 90,000 words. I already marked sections that need editing. But, as they say, you can’t edit an empty page, and so I just keep dumping words onto page after page. I have an outline, which evolves as I go, and I flesh it out as I know more about what I want to say. I write whatever scenes I really want to write first, then go back and fill in the blanks after. It’s like dumping puzzle pieces onto a table and trying to fit them together, except the picture is blank, and I need to draw on the pieces as I go.

Which is to say, distracting myself with video games is a totally appropriate response to writing.