You're afraid to be corny, but I was born on the cob

Path: Moonlight Trail
My goal: 20,000
Current word count: 20,402

Wordcount goal: GET!!

I'm super proud of myself!! It's not like the first time I passed a revised goal -- I feel like I worked for it, and succeeded at a challenge. As-of now, I'm also 4th on the Moonlight Trail leaderboard out of 24!

For my last few projects, I finalized my suicidism article, wrote the text for a small zine I'm making about my favorite fanfic tropes, wrote a template for one of those DeviantArt-style "journal memes" for Sheezy.Art (a website I might dedicate a whole blog post to someday soon), and outlined a fic!

Said fic is extremely self-indulgent. I've been rewatching Shugo Chara with my partner lately, because it's extremely nostalgic for me, and it reminded me, in part, how much I love Tadase, but also... God! The Shugo Chara fandom was just so weirdly homophobic towards him! (The first time I ever heard or read the f-slur was actually by a Shugo Chara fan, directed towards Tadase. True story!) So, of course, I've taken to headcanoning him as queer in earnestness, to reclaim All That Shit that I had to see as a latent queer child. Which is basically what the fic is about -- Tadase being queer, treated genuinely, in a "5+1 things" format!

I don't know if I'll ever finish it. The Shugo Chara fandom is, like, super-mega-dead at this point, and Shugo Chara feels a little bit... embarrassing to write for? Especially this kind of fic, where the point is (not to be cheesy) trying to heal my inner child. Although, maybe that's a reason why I should write it. The only reason why I'm embarrassed about it is because it's a really old fandom, mostly for young girls, and the subject is that of queerness. None of that should be considered embarrassing! Maybe considering writing for my elementary school interests is bringing out the "elementary schooler bullied for his interests" in me again...

Writing it all out like this... yeah, I think I am going to finish it! But definitely not right now. I need a break from writing for a while, as I do after every writing challenge. Especially since I went from one writing challenge (drabblefest) right into another (Rough Draft Month)! But I feel like I've earned my break. I'm happy with myself.

Path: Moonlight Trail
My goal: 25,000
Minimum words to hit each day: 834
Current word count: 11,837
Current average words per day: 789

My motivation was temporarily boosted by writing "An Excerpt From the Biography of the Devourer of All Things Horrible" (under the temp title "History Hates Lovers"), and I've gotten more comments on it in just a few days than I have on all of my works combined for the past few months. People are very sweet, and that makes me happy.

But, immediately after that, my mental got bad again. I've been struggling really hard to write. I literally only got out of bed at 6pm today; I spent the rest of the day sleeping. I wrote precisely 33 words yesterday, and that was a bullet point list of low-effort things I could write today. Today, this blog is probably all I'll write, but I might make a small attempt at writing a review of the game Cold Front.

Again, I feel the urge to quit the challenge entirely. But I'm trying to compromise with myself first, see if that's a possible way to go about things. Even if I don't meet my goal, that's okay, right...? I didn't make my goal last year, and that was fine. Or maybe I could adjust my goal to 20k, or maybe even just 15k.

I think what's really killing me is this idea of an "average daily word count". Missing even one day messes with the average so bad, and I feel like I've failed massively every time I fuck up and can't do my 834. Which isn't great when you're currently fighting with everything you have to just keep staying alive.

I dunno. I'm tired, even though I slept in as much as I did... I think I'll consider changing my word count goal the most heavily. I need a win right now.

Path: Moonlight Trail
My goal: 25,000
Minimum words to hit each day: 834
Current word count: 7,659
Current average words per day: 851

It's no secret that my mental health's been in the gutter, so I've been struggling to write. Still, I've managed to keep my average word count per day above my goal. Thankfully, just before The Big Incident, I started a sillier, more low-pressure project to write an article rating all of my pride flags. I just finished and uploaded that to my personal site today. It made for a good buffer while I tried to get my act together. I even had the 2nd highest wordcount out of everyone on the Moonlight Trail at one point, so that was cool!

I'm going to be starting on a project that I'm very excited about next: the one I've temporarily named "History Hates Lovers", until I come up with something better. I hope that doing a project I've looked forward to will motivate me, and not just end up making it come out like garbage. A lot of today was pooling together the research and resources regarding the relevant topics. Research is one of my favorite parts of writing, especially for something like "History Hates Lovers" which largely relies on historical elements, so I'm having fun with it.

Rating: T

Fandom: BAD END THEATER

Characters: The Hero, The Underling, The Maiden (brief)

Relationship: The Hero/The Underling

Words: 960

Content Warnings: Dehumanization, major character death

Tropes: AU - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Relationship Study, Major Character Death

Summary: The Hero valorously returns to the demon castle alone when the villagers don't believe The Maiden's story! He is then not-so-valorously captured.

(An alternate ending which focuses on The Underling and The Hero, written in the style of canon.)

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