wolffyluna

A kind of problem I keep running into different versions of "I want to keep progress and momentum with my novel, but it keeps falling off the back of the priority queue in favour of other projects, especially because it doesn't have a deadline."

For example, in the short term I'm facing:

I want to write another fic for the heartscord exchange (an event a friend is running for her discord server, where we all write fics for a certain set of fandoms, post them anonymously, and then try to guess who wrote what.)
But before that, I want to finish a different fic, because I want the fic that takes me over the half a million words on ao3 mark to have Symmetry with my first fic
I am thus spending several days not writing my novel, and in a twist that will shock pikachu, that leads to my novel staying unprogressed.

And like. This is not the first time it happened. The best solution I can think of is maybe come up with a goal like "write X words of novel per month" where X is Realistic but requires Putting Butt in Chair and working on that.

But then there's the longer term problem: I am about to, all in a row, do:

Inktober
NaNoWriMo
Yuletide
Travelling To America
Christmas

(...Laying it all out like that is making me go "ah. hmm. Houston, have you thought this through?")

Now, Inktober is not incompatible with also writing my novel, but [points to the thing where I work 11 hour shifts for 21 days in a row, and how that might make writing daily and arting ... difficult.

I could work on the novel for NaNo, if I decide to go "look, I will finish the first draft of the second half for NaNo. That's reasonable, right?" (Though I do wonder if it being an already partly started project might slow me down.)

But. Um. That's a lot.

Not sure how to handle this self inflicted problem.