Warning: Overambition Overload · 1:52pm Feb 15th, 2021
Blog Number 135: Insanity
Plans for 48 to 60 yet-to-be-finished projects from 2019 and 2020.
Plans for a six-part 50-short-story series involving young Main Six.
Plans for at least one major 13-novel mega-series.
Plans for an 18-part novella series.
Plans for several more standalone novels on top of that from preceding years.
Plans to include more and more non-pony fanfiction writing in future.
Plans to include more and more original writing in future.
Plans to do all this at a rate of one novel a month. Or one novel plus surplus work a month. Or one novel and one novel's worth of writing too a month. Every month. For all months.
Oh, and plans to make sure each and every project comes out as close to perfect and polished as possible.
I'm not imagining this, guys: I honestly think I'm cracking up. 💧😰💦
I just need to get this off my back. You have no idea what the inside of my head is like right now, and frankly I want something to get out, get off, and go away.
Impossible Numbers, out.
haha good luck c.c;
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God, this is a relief, though. After a recent talk, I just needed to say something about what was going on before my mind cracked. Think this glimpse is bad? Try living with it.
Believe me, I know this is insane.
Consider allowing some pieces to go out without quite as much polish, if only for the purpose of pressure release.
Um, are you okay, Impossible? That is quite a large number of projects. You sure you can handle all of that?
I have been silent here for a few months because I am so busy with my own writing projects and juggling them with the rest of my life, but now I have to say something, because this makes me concerned.
You know that you have to take a break from writing sometimes, do you? Writing like that constantly, over many months, is unhealthy.
It's easy to write a lot and to forget the time if you are immersed in your stories. I once wrote a story constantly over the course of almost 14 hours without eating or drinking anything and I didn't feel hunger or thirst while writing it and I still wasn't the slightest bit exhausted once I was finished with it. Then there was the time I wrote the final chapter of "Aunt Millie" with an extremely painful gum infection and when I pushed on despite the pain to meet the deadline for the announced release of it. And during NaPoWriMo 2014, I did almost nothing but writing all day for the entire month because of the ambitious goal I had set for myself.
Doing something like this on occasion is okay. A few harsh writing challenges here and there won't break you. They are good for your writing morale, your discipline and your skill. But if you make that a constant approach where you do nothing else but writing anymore for essentially every waking moment of your whole life, and that is how these plans up there sound like, you will burn out and get so mentally exhausted that you are either forced to stop writing because you can't take the pressure in your brain anymore or..... I actually can't tell what would be happening if you pressed on anyway at that point. But the dullness of my brain and the feeling like something that will make it literally explode inside my skull at any moment is filling it when I reached that point, were a clear warning not to go further and to take a break instead.
Don't go further.
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I just needed to get this out there ASAP, and to relieve the stress building up.
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You mean doing lots of regular short projects, instead? Something closer to "Easy Mode", so to speak? In order to take it down a notch?
One problem I consistently have is that intended short projects tend to increase in size the more I try to do some quality control. Not entirely sure what I'd do to solve that: for one thing, I'm still looking at Loganberry's current flashfic contest, and can't for the life of me figure out how to approach that prompt without writing something much, much longer and more elaborate. Yet the simpler a premise is, the less satisfied I am with it. Feels very Catch-22.
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Understandable: I'd been keeping an eye on your blog post output (quite liked the Archer one, by the way, and a good point about her just mysteriously disappearing after a couple of background cameos). I figured you'd got plenty on your plate.
Taking breaks isn't the problem. I've happily scheduled in breaks, tried to be realistic about how much I could do in a day or a week, and so on. The problem's more the moment I try to write anything (as demonstrated by the fact that I have no problem doing anything else in my life, but it seems to go off the rails as soon as I try to write).
That's happened a fair few times to me, though nowhere near to the point it's actually the specific problem, much less any kind of chronic one.
It's more I have a hard time figuring out how to consistently approach my writing when the time comes. Certainly not "every waking moment of my whole life": I'm not that insane.
The problem is the build-up of unfinished projects combined with the lack of relative output. Sure, aiming for 100,000 words a month is unhealthy, but I probably recently spent somewhere in the region of that amount of time trying to build my confidence enough to write anything. Surely, there's a less ridiculous way to go about this while also producing at a reasonable clip?
Believe me, I recognize how insane my overambitions are, and the necessity of taking it easy. A big question in all that, though, is: Where do I draw the line? How do I find the optimum output?
It's all the harder to talk about because there's so much wrapped up in this writing passion that it's too easy to slip into perfectionistic habits. I'm still trying to figure it out.
At a minimum, I wanted to write this blog post to relieve some of the pressure.
I'm not very happy with the way this has been going, either. I just couldn't pretend I could solve it on my own for much longer.
Can't say much, but good luck!
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Thank you.
I'm looking forward to it!!
edit: ofc take care of yourself, mental wellbeing comes before everything, but seriously I love your writing!! just wanted to show some excitement lol
Jeepers, dude. You weren't kidding about the ambition. Best of luck!