~LadyLightest

Hey all. Hoo boy it's been a fucking living nightmare of a month hasn't it?

We all know what the biggest elephant *cough* in the room has been so I don't feel the need to rehash it in detail, especially since I've been seriously struggling from its impact on my mental health. Ever since that evening I went into a deep spiral and had to fight to claw my way back, and it was also due to the sheer shitty timing of another awful event.

Specifically, on November 4th, the literal day before election day, my maternal grandmother passed away from alzheimers disease. She was in her early 90s and lived a full life, and had been suffering horribly from the disease for multiple years by this point, so it was more of a mercy that she finally passed rather than a cruelty. I have been grateful that she is no longer suffering in the state that alzheimers had put her in, but it definitely hurt. She was my last living grandparent left, now that entire part of my family is gone. Shit REALLY hurt when it came time to realize that I was going to have to cope with grief for losing my country on top of the grief for losing my grandmother.

Then on top of it, it was confirmed that my financial troubles are going to get worse again this month, with me paying far more in bills again. This was timed at least mercifully with my job suddenly deciding to offer weekend overtime shifts again after almost a year and a half of no overtime. We make A LOT of money when we work overtime at my job, especially on Sundays, so the overtime is going to be vital to my financial safety. It's already paying enough that I was able to continue taking those new Meshpet commissions I've been posting, but I still will have to be judicious with my spending. The big downside of this has been that the last two weekends of November, which were vital time for writing, were taken up by work. I do not write effectively after work due to exhaustion, as we've seen time and time again.

All the grief and sadness combined with these lost weekends sure combined together to make for one colossally bad month for writing, timed perfectly to fuck up my FicWriMo challenge.

So it's kinda crazy I still somehow managed to pull it off.

NOVEMBER 2024 WRITING SUMMARY

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
✔️ -The Granddaughters of Din: Wrote 51,339 words!

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
❌ -Hair of the Dog Part 2: 0 new words this month
❌ -The Arinafiction of House Inagaki: 0 new words this month
❌ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 5: 0 new words this month

✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN NOVEMBER 2024: 51,339 words!

So yeah, while I certainly didn't manage to touch my secondaries, it's a damn miracle I still pulled off the WriMo this month given everything I laid out above. When I set out to do this challenge and made these goals, I was perhaps naive, thinking I could match the 100K from last year's November. I didn't actually consider how badly things could go this month. Thusly I am not going to blame myself for not matching last year's November miracle and am going to count my blessings and be proud that I could actually write 50K words despite my life slowly falling apart around me.

With this, I have singlehandedly totally erased the 11,599 word deficit that I had inherited from last month and transformed it into a 14,740 word surplus! That's still not quite enough surplus to bring me up to par with my year-on stretch goal, but it does bring me back to within striking distance of that stretch goal again!

To hit my regular quota for December I only need to write 10,260 words, which is now piss-easy for me. I could slam that in one good weekend day if my muse was in good shape. To hit my stretch goal though, then that total climbs to 43,260 words in December. Ah, now there's more of a challenge!

DECEMBER 2024 WRITING GOALS

So it's pretty obvious to you guys that I'm gonna go back to prioritizing my comm queue again here, and that's exactly what I'm planning. But while I was indeed having fun working on Granddaughters of Din again, I felt the urge to work on my Mutagen story again, so I think I might add that as a Secondary for some fun this month too. Let's get this shit set up.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Hair of the Dog Part 2: Still have about 10,000 words left to write to reach the 15,000 final total
-The Arinafiction of House Inagaki: Expected 25,000 words
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 4: Expected about 10,000 words to round out the goal

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 5: ANY amount of words

Total Expected Writing Wordcount for December 2024: 45,000 words
Total Expected Editing Wordcount for December 2024: [b]0[b] words

This is very doable, ASSUMING THAT NO MORE FUCKING MAJOR LIFE EVENTS HAPPEN AGAIN THIS MONTH! *Shakes her fists angrily at the gods*

At the very least I'm hoping to finish the new Hair of the Dog chunk since Zaina and Scarlett have been waiting quite patiently for months now. If I can knock out both it and the new Arinafication story for Hyo then I'll have my comm queue cleared AND I'll have fulfilled my stretch goal for 2024!

Granted, I also know that this month could suck. If work keeps offering overtime for the rest of all the weekends in December like my supervisor is trying to get, then I am obligated as a fiscally responsible adult to take every single one of them for the sake of my safety. The extra bills demand it. It'd be self-sabotagingly dumb to refuse it. So if that happens, my writing time on the weekends is essentially kaputsky, and I will be lucky to even make that 10K for my baseline quota.

On the flip side, they very well could choose not to offer any more overtime, corpos are stupid and capricious and they have been unsure of whether it's "Worth the cost". If no more overtime comes, then for sure I'm hitting this goal. Hell, I could go even further, potentially. Last year in December the company gave us some extra free days off work during the week of Christmas since most people tend to blow their vacation time to take those days off anyway and this often means we don't have enough staffing to run the line at all that week. It's not guaranteed to happen again this year of course, but if it does, well that'd be a solid 9 days off in a row, which could guarantee my success with room to spare. Hell, if they ran overtime all month, but still gave us all Christmas week off I might be able to pull it off.

So basically this month is gonna be a crapshoot. "How many days off is Lightest gonna get?" The answer to that determines whether I hit my stretch goal or not.

Cross your fingers. My ideal scenario is that I get overtime all four weekends to help me stave off financial desperation, but then all of Christmas week off so I can still have time to write. Praying to the universe it shakes out that way. In the mean time, peace out! See you dorks in 2025. *Nervous sweating*

Oh and by the way, if you are a chud watching me idly in the background and you take my whining about the election above as a big target symbol and decide to taunt me about politics and the election outcome, don't bother. I will not reply to you. I'm not dumb, I know the old internet adage about not feeding trolls. You will not get the reactions you want. You will just get your comment deleted and your account fast tracked to my block list, as well as a thank you message for waving your red flag clearly at me so I can identify you, block you, and not waste time on you. You have been warned.