Revision to "New Decade, New Plan"

Blog Number 85: "Didn't Take Long, Did It?" Edition

My first blog post this year set some targets going forward for the rest of the decade (rather optimistically). In light of recent observation, I'm making some corrections, and I will explain why further down this page.

But first, the corrected list, which is as follows:

---

1. Minimum of 12 fics per year, excluding anthologies and other borderline cases to be identified as and when they become apparent.

2. Minimum of 365k words per year, or 1k a day average, or roughly 30k per month average. To keep this from being too draconian, the count will include unpublished material. Published material should make up the majority, however.

   Minimum of 1 novel per year.

3. Incomplete fics will no longer be posted without a completed story behind them. Trying to write and publish it as I go along has never succeeded.
4. At least 3 fics onto Equestria Daily per year (allows for a 50% failure rate, assuming each submission takes two months to process; no point being overambitious in a situation where I have limited control).
5. Any fic rejected by Equestria Daily does not get a second chance. [ADDENDUM: Unless changes are minor and/or I feel motivated enough to make major ones. Personal discretion is advised, but I'm mostly erring on the side of being strict]
6. All fics should be upvote-dominant within a week of publication. Any fic with a downvote percentage greater than 50% will be removed.

---

The reasoning is as follows:

• I'm getting warning signs this month, especially with regards to consistent fic output, and I'd rather be a little more generous if I suddenly have difficulties later this year. I might increase the first target back to something like 26 fics (the number I managed during one of my best years of writing) or 24 fics (approximates two fics a month). But that's dependent on how I handle the rest of this year, as a test case. I'm actively trying to be prolific without sacrificing quality control.
• The word count target will remain, because I'm not doing too badly there. I'm close to my target already thanks to the burst of recent months. (It's just writing publishable material that's the sticking point).
• Although that said, I might edit that word count target too based on how this year's performance turns out.
• Meanwhile, I think it's needlessly limiting to force most of my output into publication. I want to expand my non-pony and original writing to stop myself getting too narrow in my focus. Call me blasphemous, but there's more to writing than ponyfic.
• And frankly, I want to leave open the possibility I might stop writing here. Not right now, though. So far, my experience on this site has largely been positive, or at least not bad enough to drive me off permanently, and I get along with enough people nowadays. It feels worthwhile continuing. For now. But I'm leaving the back door open, just in case. I don't have infinite tolerance, and that's all I'm saying on any subject. I'm trying to distance myself from some stuff, because I come here to enjoy the positive side of the fandom, and so far that side's been the majority of my experience.
• Also just to clarify: I don't ever intend to quit writing itself. I've too much investment and interest there for that to be likely. Last decade's miseries involved blaming the wrong thing for my problems or having self-inflicted problems in the first place (e.g. overambitious goals or not enjoying a particular outlet such as a competition). I do enjoy the process of planning and writing and modifying stories, and I know now I always have done and will do.
• The novel requirement I'm dropping because it's one of those overambitious goals I can't trust. Much as I still want to be a consistent novelist, I'm starting to wonder if my plans for novels are actually feasible, since it took a massive effort just to do one, and that effort has yet to be repeated. Still working on it, so I'm going to be flexible there.
• I'm lowering the Equestria Daily requirement, mostly because the waiting times are dragging out a lot recently. My expectations will be adjusted accordingly.
• The one-chance rule will remain. There have been a few fics that were rejected by Equestria Daily's proofreaders, ones that I could have modified, but myself I find it a tough balancing act just motivating myself to write and publish in the first place. Making major edits to existing works bothers me more than getting it right for future projects from scratch.
• Lastly, the time specifics of the upvote-dominant criterion were actually a modification I made last time, with Fluttercheer's help, because it was unclear at the time how to apply said voting-ratio criterion re: temporary downvote fads (which has happened once or twice). I modified it in the previous post, but thought it worth official mention in this one.
• The reason for the criterion at all is that I'm wary of hosting anything with too many downvotes. Meanwhile, I'm open to the idea I should just disable them for the sake of encouraging more relevant feedback in the comments, which tend to be my favourite parts of the feedback process anyway (because people are usually more helpful to me there with their eloquent criticisms).

---

Two final items to mention: firstly, at some point I might revive my old statistics subsection of these blog posts, a tradition I let fall by the wayside a while back. I kind of miss seeing them at the end of these blog posts, but I haven't been that motivated to do them for a long while (they tend to be time-consuming and a bit awkward here and there).

Secondly, I'm also pending giving a shoutout to some reviews my works have received this year. A topic for another post.

That is all for now. Impossible Numbers, out.

Comments

[Pascoite]

waiting times are dragging out a lot recently

Tell me about it. For much of our history, if I made a histogram of the word counts of stories in our queue, the peak of the bell curve would sit around 8k words. These days, it's more like 15k. The raw number of 100k+ fics has increased dramatically. I don't know what's made the preference shift over to submitting novels rather than early on when they're just a few chapters. But whatever the reason, longer fics take longer to review. I'm just about to crack into one that's 320k and counting.

[Impossible Numbers]

5319611

I'm just about to crack into one that's 320k and counting.

Holy heck, that's a doorstopper! Shouldn't they submit something like that chapter by chapter?

Ah, I see. Confirms a few suspicions I was holding - my last successful submission had been delayed a fair amount of time, and the pre-reader I emailed told me there'd been an upsurge in large-sized submissions. I'd just assumed it was a temporary anomaly.