Scheduling Malarky

My schedule is a mess, and the fact I want to do creative things is throwing a spanner in the works. I realise it’s only been a little while since I last did this, but righting it all down and hearing your feedback really helped.

So here’s a list of things I plan to do this month, that I probably won’t be able to do all of.

1. Unfortunately, University

…yeah, this has got to be my highest priority, (as much as it would be nice to have other ones!). While I’ve mostly knocked over two big pieces of assessment, I have one normal exam, two finals, a couple of presentations, and the horror that is the Economic Geology final report to go. So, other things are gonna have to work around it.

2. Exchanges!

I have got the assignments for the two exchanges I’m part of (Black Emporium and Innumerable Stars) done! (Things would be somewhat awkward if I hadn’t!) But I have some plans to write a treat or two for Femslash Exchange, because there are some nice looking prompts there.

I’m also thinking of making a thing or two for some of the Black Emporium pinch hit-ees. I can’t be sure I have the time to do a pinch hit, so I don’t want to claim any yet. But if I make a thing for one of the pinch hit-ees, and the pinch hit hasn’t been claimed, I can claim it. And if it’s already been claimed, now they’ve got a treat!

(Yuletide could be fun to join this year, but also so not happening! I have finals and NaNoWriMo and I love myself at least a little! Also, character matching might make me break out in hives.)

3. NaNoWriMo

I did a not!NaNoWriMo last November, and came tantalisingly close to 50k words. I want to try and do a NaNo properly this year– but I am going to have to rebel. It’s the only way I could even hope to make the wordcount. For me, writing a lot of words in a short time requires a detailed outline. And for me to get to 50k words, I’d either have to write that outline during November and have it count as my first draft, or I’d have to write the outline ahead of time.

I have two ideas kicking about for NaNoWriMo.

One is an original romance, with an arranged marriage in a fantasy setting. The Male Lead is magical researcher and prince, who was meant to be the spare but now is the heir, who cares about doing the right thing but has a tendency to tie himself in knots to try and find it (which is why he was trying to avoid politics, thank you very much!) The Female Lead is the princess from a foreign country, who firmly believes that forgiveness is better to ask for than permission, and who wants to get political influence for her safety and securities sake (and she thinks Male Lead is cute, sure, but goddamn is he wishywashy.)

There are two potential issues with this idea. Firstly, while I do like romance novels, I haven’t exactly read many of them, which could cause problems. Also, while I have a great idea for a conflict and resolution between these two, I don’t know how to concretely make that happen. (There ends up being a point in the relationship where FL needs to take a political leap of faith and rely on ML if she wants to relationship to be more than just a political arrangements, and ML fully intends to support her but balks at the last minute, and his grovel involves actually doing political things and supporting her without her prompting. Don’t know what the political shenaniganry will be though!)

The other idea would be to NaNoWriMo the Tar-Miriel/King’s Man femslash. (Which would probably end up being a horrifying mutant version of a romance, that ends at the black moment with no grovel of HEA. Because I like messing with formulas to mess with my audience’s feelings. Exploiting and screwing with three act structure to emotionally affect the audience is *chef’s kiss*.

4. Inktober

I want to do inktober! It’s an excuse to use my markers! I just didn’t expect it to be happening so soon. I have no idea what I’m going to do. Silmarillion characters? FE:Fate characters (I think I’ve got the colours for Niles, at least?) Dragon age? Just go ‘screw it, I’m doing doodles of flowers, you can’t stop me?’

(Feel free to throw prompts at me. Seriously. Otherwise it’s going to be all carnations, Maeglin in geological fashion, and Niles.)