WIP Challenge Check-in, Day 1 -- Thursday

[linaewen]

 Hello on Thursday! What kind of a writing day has it been so far today -- or if today hasn't gotten going yet, how did you fare yesterday?

 

       - I thought about my fic once or twice

       - I wrote

       - I did some planning and/or outlining

       - I did research and/or canon review

       - I edited

       - I've sent my fic off to my beta

       - I posted today!

       - I'm taking a break

       - I did something else that I'll talk about in a comment

 

Thursday Discussion:  Today is the first day of the new year!!! Have you made any resolutions/goals/expressed any intentions about your writing?  Any plans you hope to implement that will make your writing better or more effective? Any WIPs you plan on finishing this year?

 

Comments

[linaewen]

I have really only begun my day, so this post is the only writing I have done so far! However, since my goal for this year is to finish my long-running Tolkien universe fanfic WIP, I am going to have to actually do some writing most days if I want get anywhere with it.

So today I will think about it, do some planning and outlining, and then write at least one paragraph for a new chapter.

[evandar]

I wrote, edited and posted!

I want to finish my current WiP this year, so updating it on New Years is hopefully a good sign.

[hoarmurath]

Happy new year!

My 2026 goals are to keep writing, to read more to diversify my vocabulary, to edit more, to post more and to also find WHAT I enjoy writing and HOW I enjoy writing.

I hit 50k of total written words in 2025, so I would gently like to write more than that, but I don't want to place numbers on myself because that usually doesn't work for me.

[igenlode]

I completely failed to finish my one-shot; I took it out for a walk in the freezing cold, but only managed to add one short and unsatisfactory sentence. At this point I'm starting to wonder whether this means that I went down the wrong route and need to go back up, and down another leg of the Trousers of Time :-(

(The problem is, of course, down to to not having a predetermined ending point, exactly as in my last fic, where I eventually went through three 'endings' to the epilogue that I needed to add after coming to the end of all my planned material. After twenty years, you'd have thought that I would have learned not to write a story without knowing beforehand what the ending was going to be -- but the trouble is that these were both envisaged as one-shots without any real plot, rather than as 'stories'.)

The Chapter 2 of that story that I finalised and posted received precisely *two* page-views, presumably because the eight people who clicked on the previous chapter read enough of it to realise that they weren't interested. So I really am putting in the work simply for my own benefit at this point...

Ways to make my writing more effective: don't post in wilfully obscure fandoms! Writing shorter sentences with less labyrinthine grammar would probably help; I have been *trying* to use a consciously simpler style on my current fic to correspond to the 21st-century as opposed to 19th-century take on canon, but my brain keeps on composing in nested sub-clauses. Posting smut would almost certainly help in terms of readership, but I prefer to keep my smut strictly out of public view.
And who am I fooling? People by and large don't want to read what I want to write, just as I don't have much interest in their preferred topics/pairings/ideals, so I need to content myself with the fact that there *is* the occasional person who gets ecstatic over it, which is realistically speaking more than the majority of writers get.
Just so long as I myself genuinely enjoy reading and rereading it...

[winterfirelight]

I have gotten some writing done tonight, so I'd like to think I'm off to a good start this year! I will be finishing my current WIP within the month, barring unexpected disaster. Possibly within the week, even, though I suppose the final edit may take a bit more time.

Other than that, I honestly haven't made any goals, and I don't intend to. I've got enough going on in life these days that once this story is finished up, I may need to take a break from writing for a bit to take care of other things. I don't want to put undue pressure on myself to take on projects I may not have time for. But we'll see! I love writing, so it's also entirely possible that another story idea will grab me by the hair and drag me along for the ride no matter what, which is more or less what my current WIP did. There are worse fates!