Write first do other shit later (June writing log)

After a very unproductive month of May (as chronicled last time), June was — thank all the gods of story and craft — a little more clement. Unfortunately, I did not meet any of my self-imposed goals, but I did manage to hit > 8 000 words in the proper manuscript currently nicknamed Halfmoon (the below screenshot shows my current word count at 8 466), as well as something like 6 400 words of character sketches, outline notes, etc. (This second category of story scaffolding is harder to quantify since I do so much of it by hand.)

I'm usually someone who loves to outline everything to death (that way, I feel like I'm writing but not actually taking the risk of actually writing, because I'm a gigantic coward very smart at finding ways to procrastinate that still feel "productive"), so the fact that I'm more or less winging it is… a bit surprising to me, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. At the moment, Halfmoon is a bit of a mess. I’m hoping that eventually I’ll have enough building blocks for a solid novel. The current 8 466 words include snippets of conversations and several scenes that sort of sprung fully-formed in my mind, but I'm not really sure what the connective tissue between all of this is going to be. I’m hoping to find it along the way.

My outline can be described by the following screenshot of Scrivener in cork-board mode:

Throughout June (or, rather, since the last writing log), I managed to write 18 out of 30 days, which is almost 2/3 of days. Considering I had a record-breaking (for me) 9 days total lost to migraines and cluster headaches throughout June, I’m taking those 18 days as a win, even if there were days where I really only managed to change a sentence or two. Scrivener tells me my average amount of words written a day is ~430 (excluding notes, research, or plotting). I’ll admit I’d really hoped to hit 35 000 words in Halfmoon’s manuscript by now, but the reality of omnipresent chronic pain and relentless migraines is that you have to learn how to be, in all the constant failure and missed objectives.

I do want to get back to fortnightly updates, as planned, so I'll be back in two weeks with another update on how the writing is going. Among many other things, I’d really like to have an outline for Halfmoon done by then. But I’m trying not to put too much pressure on, as there are mouthy gift horses to be kept happy. We’ll see what happens, so: stay tuned, happy writing, and I hope June was a good (... better) month for you too!

Microblogs posted at times when I was definitely supposed to be writing (feel free to mock me mercilessly when you see me posting when I should be writing):

Super rough first draft but the only bit of my WIP so far that talks about hair at all. ... Should I be talking about hair more?

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— Gersande La Flèche (@gersande.com) June 15, 2025 at 10:14 AM

Just realized I forgot to create a dog character in my current WIP and now am scrambling to insert a doggo.

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— Gersande La Flèche (@gersande.com) June 18, 2025 at 1:11 PM