Hi everyone!
The quarter has ended, so it’s time for a Currently on my art post. This time, I have announcements to make and things to discuss.
Let’s start with the biggest news: Following reflection on what I want to do with my projects and how much less resources I have to give to my creative projects nowadays, I’ve decided to put two projects on indefinite hiatus and discontinue one project. The projects going to hiatus are Lyokostar 1 and A Wandering Aura, while Greenfield is getting discontinued.
Why did I come to these conclusions with these projects? Well, Lyokostar, as the project that kickstarted my writing hobby, is one that I’m going to stubbornly keep going. Right now, however, I simply don’t have the energy to tackle the arduous work of tearing story 7 apart and rebuilding it. As for A Wandering Aura, I’m hesitant to pull the plug on it after all the plans I’ve made for it. The biggest issue with it is that I’m nowhere near as passionate about Pokémon as I was when I started that project, which is the biggest hindrance that project is facing. Rationally thinking, I’m probably stuck in a sunk cost fallacy with it, but for now I’m not ready to give up on it. I’m planning on considering resuming at least Lyokostar 1 once my master’s thesis is finished, at which point I should have more time and energy for tackling that.
Greenfield, on the other hand, is a completely different beast. The current version of it is heavily based on its original form that I created when I was in my early teens. For some time during my twenties it was a story I wanted to write, work on and tell but as time went on, I lost my passion for it and the patchworky world I built and later refined to make a bit more sense. When I look at it after a long break and with much less available creative energy, it’s not something I care about anymore. I suppose I outgrew the characters and the world somewhere along the way, and now it’s clear that Greenfield is like a building that’s cheaper to tear down and rebuild from the ground up than try to renovate. Hence, like with Exceptional Jedi, it’s for the best to break out of the sunk cost fallacy and put the project to rest.
This leaves The Fate’s Way and Navigator’s Glove as the only active writing projects I have, and between working part-time, spending most of my week working on my master’s thesis and living that’s plenty. As the statistics ahead will show, the two of them have been suffering one way or another lately from my workload increasing as I’ve ramped up the time I spend with my thesis as well as both Flash Fiction Month and Tribble Month taking place in this quarter.
Speaking of those two projects, how are they going? The answer is “fine enough”, I suppose. Neither is at risk of discontinuation (or close to ending); TFW has plenty story left that I want to tell while Navigator’s Glove keeps on snowballing; combing through the world of Persona 5 for my thesis has given me even more plot bunnies that I want to incorporate, come the reworking phase, meaning that not only is it going to get even bigger, but it’s also going to take a lot more work to make it what I want it to. Funnily enough, it feels like I’ve been writing a P5 vanilla version of my fic, while the rework will be the Royal version. We’ll see where it goes when I get to reworking, but I’m looking forward to it nevertheless.
As for my thesis, I’m trying to at least finish it during this year (the deadline to get it graded before the end of the semester is sometime in November, which I might not be able to reach, depending on when in November it is and how I arrange everything around gathering data). I’m not taking much pressure from it since I’m not running out of studying time anytime soon.
In other news, if you’ve been reading my posts for a longer time, you know that I’m interested in archiving digital media. One example of the fact that not everything put on the internet is there forever is a browser game called Pokémon 2000 Adventure, which for long was only partially archived on the Internet Archive. One night this week, however, I came across a headline about a missing Pokémon game having been found. Upon reading the article, it turned out that it was indeed the same game the partially missing state of which I had previously lamented. All the files for the game have been found and the restored version of it is now on the Internet Archive!
I have yet to play the game myself, but just knowing that a piece of lost media that seemed doomed to remain only partially found was blessed with a miracle that completed it makes me happy. (It also reminds me that I should get around to posting on Reddit to see if a miracle would happen again and I’d find someone who has saved a couple of lost fanfics I’ve been looking for.) It also serves as motivation for dealing with the subpar state of my backups; I was able to buy a new, bigger external hard drive for backing up my files recently, so I’ve been working on transferring stuff there and cleaning up my data hoards at the same time. I’ll need to buy an HDD or two for my NAS at some point too, but that’ll be a thing for Black Friday or some other sale. I need to get my current hoard of data in an order before I can think of doing data hoarding/archiving more consistently.
Before we go into the statistics, I want to discuss Tribble Month a little. I ended up taking part in it despite how rough FFM was and I managed to finish it, although the results were middling at best. The decrease in quality that plagued my FFM stories also plagued the TM stories, perhaps even more so than during FFM. I’ll probably gather those stories into a collection too – since I’m self-publishing, I don’t have much to lose in that, after all – but I will definitely hold off on flashficcing for some time now that Tribble Month is over.
I’d say that’s all I have to say for now. Let’s go to statistics. Here’s the Tribble Month stats:
As you can see, this was a weak Tribble Month number-wise just as much as it was quality-wise; this was my weakest Tribble Month so far, 2022 notwithstanding since I did not take part then at all. The Q3 stats look a bit better, fortunately, especially since wordcount-wise TFW actually did better than Q2, as you can see here.
Now that the statistics are done, let’s see how things are going with my projects, as per my project widget:
- The Fate’s Way: Chapter 82 is in editing. I still need to redraw the regular Alyssa and also Alyssa’s friends and family and the other important people, like Matti, someday. I need to revise chapters.
- Off-DA projects: Nothing notable here. My master’s thesis progresses slowly; I’m a bit over one third done with gathering data. The project picked up speed a lot during September, as I shirted to working part-time.
- Greenfield: Discontinued.
- Lyokostar: The second part of story 7 is still waiting for alphareading, but that’s a thing for once its indefinite hiatus ends. This story is in need of massive reworking, so it’s going to take a long time to finish when I do find the time and energy to resume it. References need to be done.
- A Wandering Aura: On indefinite hiatus.
- Navigator’s Glove: What is currently known as the epilogue is being fleshed out drastically before splitting it into multiple chapters and then editing them. Once editing is done, I’ll be reworking to add a considerably big plot bunny into the fic and lots of smaller plot bunnies in the form of the background characters I’ve been researching for my master’s thesis. I wrote 47208 words during Q3.
- Gaming: Habitica and Pokémon Masters EX keep on going. I’ve also played the remaster of Persona 5 Royal for my master’s thesis quite a lot lately.
- Other stuff: Tribble Month 2023 came and went. I’ll start working on the FFM 2023 collection at some point. I have been reading fanfics mostly. I still haven’t gotten started with IDW’s Transformers comics and at this point I might just postpone them to tackle some other stuff I want to read since the ones that I’m missing are no longer available digitally as far as I can see. I did read Persona 5: Comic À La Carte since I got my hands on it recently, and finally finished How Not to Get Eaten by Ewoks and Other Galactic Survival Skills, though.
- Personal life: Not much, mainly just work and master’s thesis stuff. Not really anything else.
That’s all for this post. Thanks for reading and take care!
WindySilver 