March has been the month of trying to have fun. As usual, I am failing miserably at the task, the primary problem being that, for all my thirty-one-and-a-half years, I still haven’t figured out How To Fun. I’m that obnoxious person that thinks “fun” is a word for a useful hobby, like home renovation, learning a new language, hiking until you want to die, learning vehicle repair skills, and on and on, ad infinitum. (I did all of these things for a long time and now I actively hate all of them. Well, okay, if it’s demo on home renovation I’m still down because sledgehammers are fun).
In my college years, I played Final Fantasy games because I finally had control of my finances and could buy a Playstation2 (don’t give up on your dreams, kids!), and I think that was the last time I had genuine fun without strong feelings of guilt attached to it. If I have free time, I feel like I should be working. If I’m not working in that free time, it causes me no end of anxiety. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere about my childhood being a desperate bid for approval I never received, but whatever, that’s what wine is for *lifts glass in toast*.
Anyway, at some brilliant point in January I decided that the way to get around this need for “useful fun” was to write a Trash Novel. The Trash Novel was to be a simply-plotted novel I could tear my way through in record time, going overboard on tropes, cheesy dialogue, cliche heroes and heroines, and generally just not giving a fuck about whether the book was any good.
About 20k in, I became highly invested in the novel and now it’s an actual project *le sigh*. So I’m now 52k into Trash Novel 1 (spoiler alert, it’s a 7 book series) that will probably never see the publishing light of day under my actual name, because it is 75% pure smut that I am utterly thrilled about, but good heavens if my good ‘ole boy, bro-dominated workplace culture ever found it and attached it to me my work life would become so unbearable I’d probably have to quit my day job.
So. I’m on schedule to finish Trash Novel 1 at the end of the month. I finished Valkyrie’s Call at the end of February. It clocked in at 82.5k and I expect to add another 5-7k in revisions. In all likelihood it’ll clock in around 90k, finished product, which is about what Siren’s Song came in at. (Fun fact, if you’re weird like me and have an obsession with wanting to know what the word count of any book is, Kobo’s website will give you this info for any ebook they have for sale. It’s in the About This Book section. I love it so much).
Anyway, once Trash Novel 1 is finished, April is for deciding whether to dive into Aspect Society #3 or Nyx #3, and I just can’t make up my mind on which way to go. Because the editing process for the Nyx books tends to be longer, I suspect I should write it next, and bump Aspect #3 to later this fall. But then a lot of me also feels obligated to wrap up the Aspect trilogy because that series launched first.
That decision will probably be made as soon as I pick one, start writing, and immediately decide I wished I’d gone with the other one. This is how most of my life decisions get made.
And that’s a wrap, for March. I hope y’all are better at having fun than I am (like, seriously, seriously better). Drop a comment and tell me what you do for fun. I’m not going to lie and say I’ll do any of them (because, obvi, the anxiety of not working), but I will totally read them and envision strong feelings of fun and happiness. Maybe my characters will vicariously have fun for me with these activities you mention.
Take care out there.