Enter the Jungle-Related Song Reference of Your Choice Here

          The past several months, close to a year now, I've focused mainly on writing short stories and getting them out there, with one memorable divergence for NaNoWriMo—which, granted, I knew I wouldn't be able to finish in just one month (thank you, various health issues, you motherfuckers!), so I planned to start that novel in November and just keep going until I finished it. I loved the characters and story, as I do with most of the things I write or plan to, but because I am a Gemini and my passion for projects tends to die out well before I'm done them, that novel still sits unfinished on my shelf, atop an even longer, backbreaking future rewrite. My notebooks are where good stories go to die, or at least fall into comas until medical science/my brain figures out ways to bring them back and send them off on their merry ways to suffer in the real world. 

          But recently I made a promise to myself: I would finish my most recent run of deadlined short stories and submit them all, and then I'd go back and write a novel—something short and engaging and horrific and violent, right in my wheelhouse—and actually finish the fucking thing this time. The goal was to actually get something solid out there with my name on it (aside from the anthology work I've picked up lately) and to prove to myself once and for all that yes, I can actually do it, which will, in theory, become a self-fulfilling prophecy when I go to write the next novel, and the next, and the next, on and on until my death, which will hopefully be nowhere near as grisly as how many of my characters go out. 

          (Of course, actually finishing something will raise the bar for me, thus turning my life into a real version of the "oh crap, I accomplished something, now they're gonna have expectations of me" meme, but I'll kill that walker when it comes for me.) 

          So two days ago, I submitted my last short story of this round, a little Word Box piece for this unthemed Corpus Press anthology, and yesterday I started the new novel.

          Am I a masochist? Am I just really bad at learning my lesson? Possibly. But I'm going to ride this horse until it throws me, and then I'm going to lie on the ground in agony and cry until I'm able to stand again, and then I'm gonna get back on and do the whole thing over again (Note for non-writers who might be reading this: This is generally what writing is like. This is why most writers in pop culture are not portrayed as healthy, stable, well-rounded people. Some clichés are rooted deeply in truth.). 

          This time around, I've set a goal beyond my general main one of "just finish the damn thing." I've decided to try for 500 words a day, or at least an average that comes out close to that, and since the minimum word count for the publisher I have an eye on submitting this book to is 40k, it should take me about two and a half months to get this done—should, of course, being the operative word. Yesterday I wrote the prologue, for a total of 1,664 words, so I'm starting off ahead in this thing. But you know what they say: "When you make plans, Cthulhu laughs." Or something like that, anyway. I'm tracking my day-to-day output, and trying to keep in mind that some days will of course be better than others; if nothing else, constant nerve and muscle issues have taught me that much. 

          So keep an eye out here for irregular updates, which may be anything from new word counts to screams into the void questioning my life choices and the very existence of this universe to any tips or tricks I might uncover along the way to keep myself going (aside from sheer bull-headed determination combined with Slytherin ambition, which is pretty much how I've survived so far). I'm in the jungle now, folks, and shit's about to get real.