Casanova Progress: Oct - Dec 2016

I was going to post a 2016 reflection, but honestly, I don't feel like it. I think we all know how 2016 has been. I don't have anything all that much different to report.

But I do have this I can do! This is at least something I'm proud of from this year.

October wasn't all that productive for Casanova (only 3k words), but I was also trying to stockpile ideas and prevent myself from burning out before NaNo even started. I dedicated a lot of my time into getting all my ducks in a row for November. (Whether or not it was successful is a toss-up, I guess.) 

NaNo itself was a success! This was my second-highest word count in the four years I've been doing it. (The highest was the first time I did it, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to beat that lol.) I followed my outline and was a lot more productive in terms of getting the story itself down on paper, instead of just writing 2k worth of filler / character exploration every day like I did in 2015. 

I was also a lot more productive at staying on task lol. I kept up my word count steam for a couple days even after I won, and I only wrote 3.5k for projects other than Casanova. Last year's chart for comparison: 

 Last year after NaNo I had a really bad burn-out and got less than 5k written during the entirety of December. I was determined not to let that happen again this year (mainly because I've been keeping with my "500 words every day" goal and I'm a sore loser). NaNo and a lot of writers also talk about giving your manuscript some time to rest before you come back to it, so I actually set out at the beginning of the month with the goal to write nothing for Casanova in December.

I was hoping to turn around and start drafting Sugar Plum, which was something I wanted to do last year. That didn't go as planned but at least I got some progress for it.

This screenshot is from the 29th, before I did my writing for the day

I've actually started writing for a couple different newer projects (most of which are just nested under Duality) and I've decided I want to keep going with this theme of exploring new ideas. Usually I don't start writing for anything until I've spent a lot of time brainstorming and such, but it's been fun to just jump into ideas without really knowing where I'm going.

The other day I did finally sit down and try to put Casanova's draft in readable order, since I'm awful at writing chronologically. The only problem is that 24k of it was never assigned a place in the outline and therefore takes some more work to stick into the timeline 눈_눈 I'm hoping to keep working on that soon but I haven't had much motivation since then ... I might just read through the in-order draft as-is and then go back and fill it out with the other 24k and any other writing that I've done in the past and can still use.

All in all, I've written 139,100 words for Casanova this year! I'm really proud of the progress I made towards it in 2016 and I'm hoping to keep that momentum going. I'm gonna try and devote 2017 to revisions and sharing it with other people (which is ......... stressful lol) but I'm definitely looking forward to polishing this mess up!