Create Your Own Adventure Exchange

It's end of November, so time to update on the stuff I've been working on until the end of the year. Made some nice progress if anything!

Mandatory stuff

Finished all the exchange fics, reverse minibang fic and another zine fic I completely forgot to mention in the initial post, whoops. If anything, all the important stuff with a deadline was done

13/12 fic

The lovely fic for gregclair day was done, I loved what I did with it. You can see it here. It ended up being a little bit rushed, but I still loved what I did with it. The original idea I had for the 13/12 fic wasn't done, but I will leave it up for Gregor's birthday since it fits the occasion there even more since the focus was more on him.

Tfthy

Well. I didn't get to work on this much. I finished my main goal, so there's that. At least I am happy with how that turned out. I will continue on to work on this fic in the future, tho I wished I planned this out better to have it done until today.

New stuff to work on!

Sighed up for another exchange. Will be a lot easier to work on this time. This is the last one of the year (i hope) so it's a nice way to end it with a cute selfship exchange.

Some new challenges were also added: the Depress December for that angst material, or as I called it, 'Gregor torture month' because of how many prompts I can use with him. That, coupled with the next thing I will talk about, is going to be hell of a month for him when it comes to my writing because I sure do like to put him into situations.

The next event is the Macrocest Bingo Night Edition, which I primarily took for DMNoir works, as I do need to write them more, and IDV overall as it's been a while, but also decided to go 'fuck it we ball' and added some categories for Hermann/Gregor specifically, mainly to challange myself. I then ended up asking for another bingo because I wanted to try and do one just for them, but we'll see how that goes when I get it, as the waitlist for the next one is quite big, for the first one i waited a few days.

Creative bingo

Situation is the same as the last time, nothing changed. I will try to fit some of the prompts from the up events into this one too, as this is a personal thing and not a proper event. Some have a good potential to be done. I to need to finish 'Let me down slowly', that one has been on hold for way too long.

Everything else

One more Lifeless Stars chapter before end of the year. That much I need to do at least. I was hoping to finish it this year but things never go the way I plan it, so that was not a surprise lol. One thing I would love to do is more IDV fics. I've been lacking for a while as I've been focusing on Limbus in the last few months. I also need at least two more Antodrew fics before I can work on my January 5th one that is going to be special this time. At least more special than usual.

Last year around September I wrote a fic for a the no true pair community event that was held on this site. It was this fic, a drabble, something I haven't written before (at least not intentionally). I thought it was a good experiment, as I normally have a problem with fic length. For the last couple of years, for whatever reason, I have put it up for myself that the longer the writing is, the better the fic is, at least when it comes to my own work. As per usual, the author is their own biggest critic, so seeing anything that I would deem 'too short' was not good enough. At some point in 2024, I was rather agitated with some of my fic's lengths, as a lot ranged in the 1k to 1.5k range, with exceptions of commissions that had to say within a specific word count.

Allowing myself to just write something very short, without any worry for the word count not being big because I have a limitation that is a small word count felt nice. I didn't have to pressure myself into stretching something to be long so that in my mind, it was 'good'.

After this, I participated in some bingo events held in the allbingo community. Since they all have a one month limit and are shown at the beginning of the month, I knew I had limited time to do them. This was before my year-long creative bingo was made (which will be important for later), so I only wanted to have some fun with it and do fills for at least 3 prompts to get a bingo. All of the fics ended up being under 1.1k words, with two being under 1k words. It felt nice to get that little bingo and post it in the community, I'll give it that.

Then, at the beginning of the year, I made my year-long creative bingo. A challenge for one of the squares was to get a blackout bingo for some event, not important which one. Because it was early in the year and I knew Valentine's was coming up, I decided that the Valentine's bingo in the allbingo community would be the target for this.

This turned up to be more of a problem than anything else.

All that I've written had been quite short, and while i was happy that I got that square checked off the bingo and the blackout, I didn't feel happy with the fics themselves. They didn't have the same feel compared to a longer one, an exchange fic or even a commission. I didn't get pleasure when posting them as much as I'd get for any other fic, it just didn't work out. Not to mention that I did most of them at the end of the month, with 5 of them on the last day. I got so burned out from it that I didn't write anything the following month (granted I did have an bang fic I worked on in that same month and a commission, so maybe those affected the writing burnout too. I will never know for sure and it's been months since then). Even if it was all short and done, was it really worth it?

I don't hate those fics, far from that. I was simply not happy with them the same way I would be with something a little bit longer.at least.

Until summer, I tired writing some more short stuff, mostly for events held on here, but it simply didn't work well. I wasn't happy with it, simply stopping from another bingo event after 2 fills and not bothering with a longer event I was also doing.

I had then returned to more longer writing, most notably the ficwip 5k event, with the word count being limited to 5k words max. It's an event meant for shorter words to shine, but to me, I had a bit of a different view. Short is usually 2.5k words, so in my head, this was still long or longer at least. A perfect event for me if you want to get more words out, especially after a long line of short works.

Both Pretty little lady and Hold me until I die fit the event criteria, but they were also a way for me to get better with my word count as they were not that short in my head. Not to mention that the latter fic kickstarted my desire to write for my first Identity V OTP after a while of just putting one or two fics a year, of which one was my annual fic for celebrating being in the fandom.

And when September came around... well, let's just say that my fic lengths got longer because I cannot for the love of everything shut up about Gregor and Sinclair as they need so many words to get to the damn point, which is not a negative, but a very welcome thing, especially with how much fun I've had with that.

What am I trying to get at?

I had a serious problem with hating anything I deemed short, but now I don't really do that to a degree. If I can tell a whole story in under 1k words and it looks fine, I won't get upset over it. I can write a short story and not hate it. I just finished an exchange and a reverse mini bang fic which are both under 1k words and I can say I liked writing them. I definitely got better with my word count problem and I'm glad I was able to resolve that.