Hi there! It's been some time between the making of this website and the writing of my first blog post, but I've been finishing up my studies and resting during that interval. Now that I'm rested up, I'm going back into my story ideas and drafts to do a general overhaul of not only the stories themselves but also the way that I write. Part of this process is journalling a little bit after I feel satisfied with the writing that I've done for the day, just to do a bit of mindful reflection of the work I've done and my progress in writing.
For my second major project (with "Claimed by the Captain" being my first) under this pen name, I'm focusing on a story with a title that's still yet to be decided. It's a slow burn romantic fantasy featuring the forbidden relationship between a werewolf and an angel as far as the romantic portion of the plotline. More details and teases to come after I finish this draft and revisions.
I'm making this draft a challenge for myself—to work on it every day with increasing goals until the draft is finished. For each week, I'm going to make a minimum goal that I have to reach for that day and a "maximum" goal. The max goal is less of a number where I'll force myself to stop writing no matter what and more of a point at which I'll be at peace with myself to stop if I start having to force myself to write. I could be perfectly happy writing 5,000 words in a day and only have to stop myself because of time restraints with a "maximum" of a much lower number.
For this first week of July, my minimum goal is 500 words a day, with a maximum of 1,000 words. Today, I reached that! This goal is lighter to ensure greater possibility for me to complete it and ease myself into writing more every day.
Admittedly, the goal is lighter because I'll also be refining and working on my story outline to clean it up, especially because outlining ahead of a chapter or even within a chapter helps me to reinforce the plot and emotional beats while I write, which of course makes writing easier.
As far as today, I've reached the goal with 1,015 words! Here is a snippet of the section I wrote today from the document:
Looking back on today's writing session, I'm hoping that I was struggling outside of doing two writing sprints simply because I'm easing myself back into the habit of writing and not because of energy struggles. If it's energy struggles, I can't address that very well because my work and fitness schedules are what they are, and will change based on forces outside of my control.
After cleaning up outlines and fine-tuning details about the story itself, I'll definitely have more time to devote to pure writing, so I'm also aiming to finish that organizing work up by next week so that the rest of drafting time can be easy. They're not fully necessary for the initial chapters because I unfortunately have a lot of the conceptual work done in my head rather than on the digital page, so I am able to get away with working on the first couple chapters without those finished up yet.
I've never written a blog before (apologies if that's shown for you as a reader before this point!), but I'll leave this here looking towards the rest of my challenge. I feel like this first week will be especially manageable, but I will be kind to myself if I'm not perfectly on top of my goals. Should I accomplish those goals, I've got to come up with a reward for myself! I'm thinking of some kind of sweet treat, but I'm not completely sure. Maybe a couple pieces of saltwater taffy for every day I complete a specific goal, maybe a scoop of ice cream.