mistressofmuses | Writing Goals/Calendar: March 2025

It's another month!

January netted a surprisingly high number of words, but mostly not on fiction writing. (It was a lot of stuff like reviewing books I was reading, plus the beginning of the year goal setting.) I did make some progress on my current WIP, though.

Continue working on the iddy romance WIP (ideally trying to finish the draft, knowing it was unlikely due to travel and such.)

I did get some work done on this WIP! Not as much as in January, and not anything even close to done.

Finish edits on my friend's book chapter

I did finish that!

Outline the Cyberpunk AU

This I did not do... I didn't want to shift away from the current WIP for fear that I'd struggle more to get back to it. It sucks, because I want to be able to work on more than one thing at a time, but it just doesn't feel right when I do.

So, this year I set myself a deliberately lower word count goal (75k for the year) because I knew that I really wanted to devote a lot of my free time to reading (and happily, I have so far succeeded!) I didn't want to put myself in a situation where I felt guilty for focusing on one goal over another, or realizing that I would have to give up one goal completely in order to succeed at the other, so I wanted to be certain that I was aiming for things that were achievable even when combined.

While I definitely adjusted my word count expectations... I somehow did not ever connect that to needing to adjust my project expectations.

Considering that my preference is for long fics/short novel-length projects, completing even one project would most likely tip me over the 75k goal. (Particularly once there've been multiple rewrites.) Yet I was still putting together my monthly goals with the expectation that I'm aiming to complete four or five things this year. (And feeling guilty - that feeling I was expressly trying to avoid - for not making progress at the rate that will allow me to do so!)

Oops.

As I was initially putting together this month's goals, I was forlornly looking at the list and thinking to myself that yeah, I guess I'll just aim for... the exact same things that I haven't made much progress on... But actually, I really need to realize that if I thought 75k was a reasonable goal for the year, that means I probably shouldn't expect to complete multiple drafts of multiple 50k+ works. That's not how math works!

So time to adjust expectations for myself a bit. With that in mind...

Goals for March:

Continue working on the iddy romance WIP
Edit the next chapter of my friend's book

...That's it. I don't think it's likely that I will finish the WIP draft, but if I could get at least a little closer I'll be glad.

Goals for April and beyond:

Finish the iddy romance WIP first draft
Outline the Cyberpunk AU
Start the snowflake outline of the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic
First draft of the Cyberpunk AU
Outline the next iddy romance
Continue the snowflake outline of the WFM fic
Reoutline and rewrite iddy romance #1

We will see how much of that I get through this year. It feels wrong to trim the project plans down so much. I know that last year, when I did my idea inventory stuff, I had really ambitious plans on how much I'd need to start writing in order to make a dent in it, and how best to balance the original works that I don't necessarily plan to share at all vs. the fanfiction that I can post, etc. At the same time, I'm not at all mad about the choice to really try to get through more of the reading I've wished I was doing for the last couple years. Unlimited time and energy would be extremely helpful, but alas.

Writing Goals/Calendar: March 2025

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