Weekly Update #118 (Patreon)

tl;dr: new chapters starting back up on Tuesday with TQH first as always

I want to die.

Alright, not really. I'll admit I'm being a bit dramatic by saying that. A more realistic statement would be, "I want to smash my head into the wall until it stops working so I never have to edit again," because hot damn am I burnt out on editing.

Weekly Worksheet:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nq4cWVPBHG-BE5gjgd0sZnlZvzOsqMaB/view?usp=sharing

So, since the last weekly update, I have worked for 63 hours and rewrote a total of 66,899 words. That's over three times the usual amount of writing I do in a week. Most of it was dreadful. Rewriting to be in past tense was fun at first, but it quickly became an extreme chore and now I'm reminded of how much I fucking despise editing in general. Like, it's still really fun rereading old stuff and seeing things like Tabitha's introduction (which I was totally fangirling over) and seeing the beginning of the fish waifu weapon meme. I'm really enjoying the part where I read old stuff and get to experience it all over again with future knowledge that just makes it all better. The act of rewriting it, though, is absolutely fucking dreadful.

Now, the first volume of TTE is up to 262 pages in length at a total of 85,589 words.

There are still 51,381 words left to rewrite. I was hoping to somehow complete it this week or at least get to 90% done. I tried, and I'm proud of what I accomplished, but still.

End me.

And this is just the first volume. There are still four and a half volumes to rewrite after this once I get to them.

Anyways, I'm just trying to hurry up and get this first one done since I really want to publish this year. After this first one is done, I'll have like four months to work on the next volume since I think I'll release every four months. Or maybe every three months. Either way, I'll have plenty of time to spread the suffering out.

That being said.

I'm going to take tomorrow off. I've only given myself one proper day off in the past 28 days. So, I'm going to take tomorrow off to just relax and be a vegetable all day. Then I'm going to write TQH and hopefully CORE as well on Tuesday. So, don't worry. You're still going to get all the usual chapters this week. I'm just going to take tomorrow off, so it's not really going to be any different than the few weeks before this where I was posting TQH on Tuesday anyways. I'm just asking you to be patient for one more day, please = P.

I'm also going to take this week off from editing because fuck editing. Don't worry, I'm not burnt out on writing itself. Just editing. I'm actually kind of itching to get back to normal writing. I'm honestly tempted to go ahead and write TQH right now and not take tomorrow off, but I think it'll be better for my mental health if I force myself to do nothing but be lazy for the rest of the day and tomorrow (also I can barely stay awake while writing this). Gotta give my mind a chance to rest because hot damn has this week been mentally exhausting between taking care of my grandma and editing.

Speaking of that, in case anybody is curious - my mum's surgery went flawlessly and she's back now. Though, she can't really lift anything for the next 6 weeks and needs help with a bunch of little things, but that's alright. Helping her out every now and then isn't as distracting as taking care of my grandma who asks the same exact question literally every 5 minutes.

Back to writing talk, I also got a bunch of new ideas for new series this past week. So yeah, I'm absolutely not burnt out on writing. If anything, I feel motivated to write twice as many series as I currently am. Editing, though? Fuck editing and rewriting.

Now, some things I've learned from rewriting TTE's first volume that I'm just going to go ahead and copy-paste from the Discord server since I'm exhausted and don't feel like typing the same thing but worded differently.

 I'm still not cringing at anything I wrote like a lot of people say you "should" when editing old stuff, but fuck me I was definitely worse. So many clunky transitions, so many sudden whiplash-inducing transitions, so much head hopping and telling instead of showing. A lot of the head hopping and telling can't even be fixed without me doing a major revision, which I'm probably not going to do. I think that's generally acceptable, or at least not that many people actually care about it according to most of the self publishing community. It's mainly the shitty transitions that are making me go major yikes. It's just not smooth at all 

I'm kind of happy to see that I was noticeably worse, though. That means I've improved. Or at least, that's what everybody says it means. I still love all the content that I wrote, I just don't love the way I wrote it. But yeah, wow, I feel like I was so much worse back then. I'm going to have to seriously try and improve a lot of the writing once I'm done rewriting stuff into past tense. That shouldn't be nearly as time consuming, though, since it would mostly be adding a sentence here and there rather than having to rewrite fucking everything. It's also pretty surprising to take into consideration that, even when people negatively reviewed TTE in the beginning, they would still usually give me high praise for grammar. If they gave me high praise for grammar back then where I feel like I was so much worse than I am now, then that makes me pretty happy.

Also for this week, I'm going to make the move over to Scrivener and ProWritingAid. These are two programs that should help me better organize all of my writing and also help me with editing as I go. So, hopefully, that'll provide at least a small increase in overall quality while decreasing typos a bit more. Though, I'm already down to only 1-3 typos per chapter. We'll have to see if I can get that all the way down to 0 per chapter. More importantly, PWA should help with things like excessive adverbs, passive voice, and some other things like that. We'll see if there's an improvement once I start writing again on Tuesday!

I'm so looking forward to being able to sit and write new stuff instead of rewriting old stuff.

Now for a few memes 'nd things for anybody who made it this far:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH4LCFmThHE&feature=youtu.be 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-xrKlGtnQg 

That's all for now. Thank you for staying pledged despite not getting any chapters this past week, please be patient for one more day, and I'm looking forward to give you new chapters to read on Tuesday!