almach | GYWO 2025: let's break even!

tl;dr I'm doing a 180 day habit pledge for getyourwordsout 2025. Yay!

So apparently it's going to be 2025 in a few days already. Jeez.

Anyway, at the end of 2021 I very confidently took a 200k word pledge for GYWO 2022, for which I made a detailed plan which I then proceeded to fail spectacularly to follow through on. I don't have the tracker spreadsheet in front of me right now (and frankly I'm disinclined to pull it up) but I think I wrote like 70k or so words and dropped out in September. Then at the end of 2022 I knew 2023 was going to be kind of hellish, so I didn't even think about signing up again, and at the end of 2023 I was so busy trying to keep my RL life from exploding (as in, on this day last year I was literally living out of an Airbnb, although it wasn't quite as bad as that makes it sound) that I wasn't even thinking about writing goals for 2024. I didn't post a single fic in 2023.

But over the course of 2024 I've gotten back into some aspects of fannish life (helped massively by finding a new fandom to obsess over when I watched the Narnia movies at the start of the year), and I'm feeling… moderately ready for a challenge, I guess? I've stayed subscribed to the GYWO comm, and I signed up for their casual "year-end marathon" where I committed to write 30 total days in November + December this year, and that's been going… uh… somewhat poorly actually, I hit 14 days in Nov but have only written on 4 days in Dec so far at the halfway mark of the month, but horrible unexplained health stuff + being unusually busy at work has been the cause of a lot of that, and I think writing on roughly half of all the days on average over the course of the year sounds about right.

I'm not counting "chatficcing something I'll realistically never actually write as a fic" or "fidgeting with a draft for a few minutes and adding a sentence or two" as writing days; what's getting counted are actual proper sessions of writing, editing, or planning/outlining/worldbuilding/research/notetaking.

To be honest, I strongly considered taking a wordcount pledge and only counting the words I actually post to AO3—I probably should do that, since the main skill I want to improve at next year is actually finishing and posting things instead of having something like 80% of the fics I start end up as abandoned WIPs—but the only word count pledge that would be realistic for that is the 75k one, and I don't really like the shade of pink associated with it. :P