I was really kind of hoping to never have to do this

Photo by Amanda Horitz on Unsplash

Longtime readers are doubtless already aware of my tendency to be wildly overambitious in setting my annual goals. This is intentional - failure doesn't really bother me, and feeling like I'm behind does motivate me. I also have this tendency to go "But what if...more productive?" so I'm more likely to make time to, say, play video games, if I have an unreasonably high goal for reading and writing, but a more reasonable one for video games, than I am if I just set a reasonable goal for reading and writing, meet it, and then play video games at my own discretion. 

But I have officially out-overambitioused myself on one of my goals this year: fanfiction chapters. In August and September, I was starting several new fics, and first chapters are just inherently faster than subsequent chapters. As someone who has started and abandoned a lot of novels over the years, I'm very good at writing the first chapters of things, and the first chapters of fanfiction, at least the way I do it, tend to be driven by sudden inspiration or a similarly urgent impetus, and short enough that they're done and posted before that initial spark runs out. In any project, you eventually reach a place where going farther takes you into the realm of things you don't already know how to do. The work gets harder, and therefore slower, and if some of the story is already out in the world, you're doing it while carrying the weight of continuity and reader expectations. Winds of Winter syndrome comes for us all eventually, is what I'm saying. 

 

Anyway, as it turns out, when I'm not mostly writing first chapters, putting out one chapter approximately every two weeks is not just unrealistic but laughably unrealistic. Trying to get even close is interfering with my other work, far more than my too-high blog post goal last year ever did. So we're not going to do that. It may take a couple days for everything to be updated in all the places, but this is the official announcement that we are reducing the Fanfiction goal from 25 chapters this year to 12. This is not expected to have any meaningful impact on the rate of release for The Dragon's Peace, New Life Has Lumps In It, or the Stepin Gaidin series. 

 

Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!