Welp. I had intended to participate in the Event Formerly Known As NaNoWriMo again this year, but... well it just didn't happen. Okay, it sort of barely and abortively happened in that I did write an utterly negligible two hundred and thirteen words on November 21, but yeah, that's hardly even worth mentioning.
So what went wrong?
Well. My original plan was to write the first fifty thousand words of a multivolume epic set in the world of Curcalen. However, there was a lot of preparatory work that I wanted to get done first. I wanted to get some more development done on the world of Curcalen, especially the particular continent where I had decided the epic would be set; I hoped by the time November came around I'd even have gotten around to rewriting and expanding the Curcalen article, as I'm gradually doing with all the old articles. And of course I hoped to have some planning done for the story itself, to have worked out the major characters and at least the broad outlines of the plot.
None of that happened. Well, okay, the first part partially happened. I haven't gotten to the rewrite of the Curcalen article, unfortunately, but I have put in some work to developing Curcalen, particularly its climate patterns, and to detailing the geography of the continent in question. I'd already made some attempt to work out Curcalen's winds and currents and how that affected its climate, but it was a bit iffy, and I decided to try to do it with a bit more rigor—of course, Curcalen is in a different cosmos with very different physical laws so things wouldn't happen the same as on Earth anyway and I had maybe a bit of wiggle room, but I wanted to at least try to make some attempt at providing a reasonable basis for its climate, using a graphing website called Desmos to figure out where the climate zone would be based on certain assumptions.
As for the story, I had concepts (but not names) for a few characters, but little more than that. I had decided last November that I was going to start an epic set on Curcalen this year, and I figured with a whole year to plan and lay the groundwork, I should be well prepared by the time this November came around, but, well, I very much wasn't. I suppose I didn't see it as all that urgent; did I really need a full year of preparation? And maybe I could have been sufficiently prepared in only a month, if I had that month free. But as it turned out, my October was very busy. Between 24-Hour Comics Day, my trip to the World Expo, and a several-week out-of-town job in a mountain village, I was away from home more than half the month, and during the time that I was home I had several issues I had to deal with. I just didn't have a lot of free time in October to plan out the story, or for much of anything else.
So by the time November rolled around, I was not ready to start writing. I thought at first that maybe I could spend the first week or two of the month finishing the prep work and then dive in, but the beginning of November proved not much less busy than October; at the start of the month I was still at the job the aforementioned mountain village, but even after I got home I had other work that was more than usually demanding of my time and attention, and the few days that I did have off I spent largely catching up on the sleep I wasn't getting. By the second week of November, I had resolved to try a different tack. I hadn't put in the preparation and planning I had intended, but maybe I could start anyway and just dive in and write, making it up as I went along? What I ended up with might not be of the highest quality and might require even more revisions and rewrites than usual, but still I'd at least have something I could fix and polish later. This method has in the past not been a recipe for success for me—as I said in a previous post, all the previous times I succeeded in The Event Formerly Known As NaNoWriMo, I had an outline in place before I started, and had already named the major characters. I had never finished a novel during November that I started writing without a detailed plan. Still, there's a first time for everything, and maybe it was worth a try... right?
But despite my telling myself I would do so, I never really did get around to actually trying. Again, I was still kept very busy on the days I was working, which was most days, and too tired to do much on the few days I wasn't... but even so, I should have been able to find a little time. The thing is, though, that I think at some level I was still wanting to prepare more before I wrote. Heck, I didn't even know enough about the languages spoken in the area where the story was supposed to be set to know what kinds of names to give the characters. I could just start writing anyway and use placeholder names to be changed later, and placeholder just about everything else too I guess, but at that point would it really be worth it?
So by about halfway through the month, I came up with still another plan. I'd write a story that I made up as I went along, sure. But it wouldn't be set on Curcalen. The story set on Curcalen was going to be a multivolume epic, and for that I wanted to make sure I had all the pieces in place before I started. For November, well, I could write a one-shot story on a different world. I didn't expect to end up with anything great, but maybe I'd have something that could be turned into a decent story with a bit of work. And at the very least writing a story set there would help me flesh out the world a bit. After glancing over the options, I chose to focus on the world of Kadis.
Despite being one of the first worlds posted to the Wongery (it was the fourth, to be exact, after Dadauar, Curcalen, and Vlastach), Kadis remains seriously undeveloped. I mean, nothing in the Wongery is where I wish it was; to an extent I could say everything on the site is underdeveloped, but some things more than others, and Kadis is definitely one of those some things. I think a big part of the reason for that is unlike Dadauar, Curcalen, and most of the other worlds I've created for the Wongery, Kadis is a science fiction world rather than fantasy—and for me, science fiction is a lot harder to write, or to come up with ideas for.
I would say that I have neither the intelligence nor the scientific knowledge to write good science fiction. I really should have more scientific knowledge. I took a lot of science classes in university, but I don't know that I really understood most of the material, and even most of what little I did understand I think I've since forgotten. I have multiple bookshelves full of books on biology, physics, mathematics, and astronomy, and while I can't honestly claim to have read all of them cover to cover, I have read a decent fraction of them—but reading books is one thing, and comprehending and retaining their contents is another matter entirely. So my scientific ignorance is not for a lack of interest or of effort; like my failure to learn additional languages that I touched on in a previous post, it's apparently mostly for lack of intellectual ability[1].
(When I was a child, I was convinced I was some kind of supergenius. That is quite possibly the stupidest thing I ever thought. And I thought a lot of stupid things.)
Perhaps somewhat ironically, the longest story I ever completed writing was science-fiction, a 150,000-plus-word novel I finished when I was in my early twenties. (Yes, that's way too long. There's a reason why when I tried to shop it around to agents I didn't get any bites. Well, there are many reasons, but its length was no doubt one of them, though not necessarily the biggest.) I make no claims, however, that it was a good science-fiction novel. There was very little actual science in it, and despite its being set centuries in the future the society depicted in the novel was far too close to that of western nations of modern-day Earth... rather than actually making a serious attempt to fix this problem, I clumsily tried to patch over it with a copout throwaway bit about how this particular planet was unusually socially conservative for some unexplored reason. I have written (but obviously not published) other novels since then, but they've all been firmly in the field of fantasy; I haven't returned to trying to write science fiction, not because I don't want to but because I have a much harder time coming up with ideas for it. Well, okay, I did have an idea for a young adult science fiction novel I still kind of hope to get around to writing, but most of what I write has been fantasy.
Anyway, though, yeah, I didn't get anything done on the Kadis novel beyond the aforementioned two hundred and thirteen words. As late as the morning of the 30th, I was still telling myself maybe I'd get it done, maybe I'd devote all day to writing (I wasn't working that day) and maybe I could make it to fifty thousand words, but... yeah, that clearly wasn't going to happen. Yes, last year I did write more than twenty-seven thousand words in one day... but this would be almost twice that, and that was when I had done some planning by then and knew more or less where the story was going. Maybe if I devoted the entire day to writing, I could manage to churn out fifty thousand words of meandering gibberish, but I don't think that would have been very helpful for anyone. And besides, at this point even if I could exert myself and write fifty thousand words of gobbledygook in one day, there wasn't really any reason to do so beyond being able to say I did. (So I ended up pretty much frittering away the thirtieth and getting not much of anything done instead. I am an idiot.)
The title of this blog post refers to goals in the plural, however, and indeed my intent to write fifty thousand words this November for The Event Formerly Known As NaNoWriMo wasn't the only goal I failed to meet. On January 1, I posted a list of goals I hoped to meet for the Wongery this year, and while the year isn't over yet, I think it's pretty safe to say that with less than a month remaining I am not going to meet any of those goals either. Dagnabbit. I'm not going to even come close to the hundred new and hundred rewritten articles I'd hoped to get done this year, nor have I... well, nor have I done anything else on that list. My failure is impressively complete.
Another thing that I intended to do but didn't was cancel my Microsoft 365 subscription before it autrenewed. Oops. I kind of thought I'd be okay because I could just have my payment method set to a card that didn't have enough available credit so the payment wouldn't succeed and I'd have a bit of extra time before it canceled, but apparently I failed to do that and the autorenewal went through. And the email that I received informing me that the renewal went through said that I could cancel and get a full refund within 30 days of the payment, but I apparently misremembered when the payment was and, well, that thirty-day window has passed. Anyway, I still intend to cancel that Microsoft 365 subscription as soon as I've settled on a replacement for OneDrive (and to that end have started backing up all my files currently on OneDrive to an external hard drive); it's kind of tempting to say that maybe it'll make more of a point to cancel an ongoing subscription than to just not renew one, but honestly I don't think Microsoft is going to care either way. Still going to cancel, though.
That's not to say this year has been a total wash. I got very little done on the Wongery, but I'm in a much better shape financially than I was a year ago. By next week I expect to have paid off half my credit card debt; it looks very possible that by the end of 2026 I'll have my credit cards entirely paid off. And that's even after having spent a not insignificant amount of money on an international trip, which is something I've realized I can actually do. Still, I'm definitely not in a financial position where I can take more days off work, let alone transition to a different (more creatively fulfilling) job, and my work is still the biggest thing taking away time that I'd like to use to work on the Wongery (and other creative pursuits). So... that's one thing I ought to try to focus on, maybe even more so than the Wongery for now: making progress in one of my creative projects that, if it takes off, may enable me to spend less time on my current job.
As for my 2025 resolutions for the Wongery... I think they were good goals, and I'm going to carry them over to 2026; let's see if I can actually get them done this time. (And I'll probably make another post about that in January.) And heck, I think even writing a novel set on Kadis that I made up as I went along wasn't a bad idea; maybe I'll still try to do that—there's no reason of course that I can only write fiction in November, especially now that NaNoWriMo is officially not a thing.
But I didn't get much done in November; what makes me think I'll get more done in the future? Well... I said the reason I didn't get more done in November was because I was just too busy and tired, but honestly... I think I was so tired in part because I had all these tasks hanging over my head and didn't want to do them—not just the Kadis novel; I had other things too I wanted to do but was putting off. In fact, maybe that's part of the problem; I had multiple things I wanted to get done and was feeling overwhelmed not knowing where to start. Really, I could have found time to get more done; I just... didn't.
The thing is, though, this is a problem that has a known solution. Last year, I discovered (and yes, this is one of those discoveries that maybe sounds obvious and I should have discovered a lot sooner, but, well, I am dumb) that setting myself a specific schedule for what times I would devote to different projects... actually worked. Not on days that I was working, of course, but on days off, or even on days with short workdays... if I set myself a schedule and planned out the use of my time, I would more or less stick to that schedule and actually get things done.
And yet despite having found this method to help my productivity, I haven't been using it. Why not? I don't know. Again, because I'm just stupid, I guess. Really, I guess it's because there's still that initial unscheduled step of planning out the schedule, and my executive dysfunction is such that I have a hard time even making myself carry out that relatively trivial task. But maybe if I make the effort to do it consistently and make it a habit it will get easier. So... that's something I'm really going to try to more of going forward. Schedule my time, and see if doing that I can actually get more done.
Starting today. I already have my schedule planned out for what remains of the day, and I'm going to try to stick to it. Here goes nothing...
- ↑ I recently read the book Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, a classic of "hard" science fiction; the book explores in some depth the methods that its characters use to colonize and terraform Mars, and makes fairly detailed scientific extrapolations of the consequences of its events based on the chemical and physical principles involved, and as I was reading it I couldn't help but think... wow, I could never write anything like this. I mean, I'm sure this isn't all stuff Robinson knew off the top of his head; I'm sure he did a lot of research and maybe even consulted with some scientists, but even so it takes a certain level of understanding and acumen to put it all together and work it into the story—not to mention to know what specifically to research and what to ask—and I don't think I'd ever be capable of reaching that level. Granted, even for hard science fiction Red Mars is on the hard end, and most science fiction doesn't go that in depth, but I'm not at all confident that even without trying to delve as deep as Robinson into the scientific weeds I'd be able to avoid obvious goofs.