News Archive for July 2017

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Taking A Break Helps

Written by Kodi Wolf at 1:51 AM

I decided June would be a break month and I think it went pretty well. I actually increased my word count from the past 3 months without forcing it and most of it (84%) was story text. Even though I was trying to take a break from A Bondage Primer, I still worked on it (over 2,700 words). I also worked on POW (almost 1,900 words) and I got a lot written for Xena: Warrior Slave (almost 8,000 words). I even played around with a couple fanfic ideas for the first two episodes of Xena, Sins of the Past (over 3,000 words) and Chariots of War (just some outlining and notes).

My total word count for June was 18,551, which averages out to 618 words per day. My lowest words per day was 109 and my highest was 3,102.

I think July is going to be another break month. I'm feeling stressed and I need to let myself relax or I'm going to end up blocking myself. I think part of it is probably that it's summer and I really hate the heat (it just makes me even more tired than usual), but then there's medical stuff going on that's freaking me out, too (nothing serious, just my wife's cataract surgery, which went fine last time on the other eye, so it should be fine this time, too, I just freak out about that kind of stuff).

Anyway, I'll still be writing every day because that's important to me, but I'm not going to try to hit a certain word count or force myself to work on anything in particular. Just whatever my muse wants to play with. At the moment, that seems to be Warrior Slave and a new story I've come up with that gets Gabrielle and Xena together that first night at the end of Sins of the Past (S1:E1). I don't think I've ever read a story that gets them together that quickly and I wanted to play around with it.

The other idea I've been playing with is for Chariots of War (S1:E2), but it requires that I sort of ignore Sins of the Past, which requires extra special backstory for why it's different. I'm hoping I can figure it out, but that could be one of those plot bunnies that never sees the light of day.

For now, I'm just going to go play. :)