May progress post

[chacusha]

Happy May Day everyone! If you can believe it, we're two-thirds of the way through the creation period -- we're now entering the final stretch with TWO months left to go.

This month, we're celebrating snickfic and vanyalanthiriel who both finished some works:

• doughnut hips by Snickfic (Oasis (Band))

• Entangled by Vanyalanthiriel (聖剣伝説３ | Seiken Densetsu 3 | Trials of Mana (Video Game))

Congrats! 🎉

Let us know how your April went, and what are your plans for May! Feel free to share a short/small snippet if you like. Also, feel free to encourage people in what they're working on too. (If someone is venting/complaining about their WIP, though, please don't assume they want advice unless they explicitly ask for some!) And of course, sign-ups will remain open until the end of the event for those who are on the fence or discovering this event late!

Comments

[maevedarcy]

okay so, I fucking lied when I said I would crack this wip by early April. I have barely even looked at it. However, I'm starting to feel the pressure and I feel like May might be the month where I get cracking.
I think I could use tips on how to get back into writing a WIP whose joy has diminished thanks to a lack of comments but that you still want to finish because you are the target audience for it. So if anyone has some of those, I'm reading.

[vanyalanthiriel]

I'm not sure if this helps but for me when I'm stuck I like writing the part that's the most exciting for me to write. So for example if I'm stuck writing a transition from setting A to B, I just jump to the kissing scene and see where that takes me hahaha. Good luck!!!

[maevedarcy]

ok this is actually useful and something I hadn't thought to do with this project. I'll give it a try!

[chacusha]

I don't know if this helps for your situation, but one thing I've noticed when people are posting chapters of fic as they go is that sometimes just when the story is heating up and accelerating (like, events within-story getting exciting), comments suddenly drop off, which can be really discouraging because it's such a key and exciting point in the story and the one you were hoping people would have the strongest reaction to, but then... crickets. But from what I've observed, I don't think the lack of comments necessarily means that people aren't reading anymore or are bored, but more like they just might not have much to say at this point in the story.

So if part of the difficulty in finding motivation is because comments have died off, I try to keep in mind that no comments doesn't necessarily mean people aren't reading or have lost interest but rather the story's in a part where people don't have much to say other than like, "Wow, wonder how this is going to end up" or "(holding breath in anticipation)" which ARE engaged sentiments but don't make for particularly great comments.

It might just be me tricking myself into thinking there is an audience still waiting for me, and I know some people would prefer to find motivation within themselves to write rather than rely on other people, but it's something I keep in mind when I'm posting a story I'm excited about and am getting the opposite reaction from I was expecting -- sometimes people are just waiting for the other shoe to drop before sharing their thoughts, and so that motivates me to get the next part out regardless of what reaction I'm currently getting so far. Maybe it will help?

[maevedarcy]

this does help my situation a bit! I think it's hard to not get caught up in your WIP not getting attention but it's true that sometimes people are just waiting to have something more significant to say. I just wish people would even comment with an emoji or a 'can't wait for the next update' because it feels like someone is reading. It is, however, not the healthiest mindset, I know.

Thank you so much for your comment!

[veronyxk84]

Congrats on finishing, guys! 😍

Me, I hit a bit of another snag on the AU that I had in mind when I signed up—it's really a big project and life/work stuff have been kicking my rear more than I expected.

BUT! In the meantime I found the right inspiration to dust off a different (older) WIP—a much smaller project too—that was sitting in my folder since April 2025 with just over 200 words worth of content.
Now 3 chapters are fully written, and I'm working on a fourth (I'm thinking final, too). So I'm thinking I'll be cracking this WIP by the end of May for sure. 😎

The other one will most likely take a lot longer. But that's okay. With everything going on in my life atm I just don't have the right mindset for so much worldbuilding. Sometimes one just gotta know when to hold on or let go. :)

[chacusha]

Wow, three chapters! :O Congrats on the progress, and I hope you end up cracking the WIP this month. 😎

And yeah, sounds like a good idea to put the other one in a drawer until when you're ready to worldbuild. It can be a surprise for later :)

[chacusha]

I got a surprising amount of work done on my WIP this April. My goal was to write 200 words a day = 6k words total. Throughout the first half of the month, it was not going particularly well -- I was making progress but at a pace about half of what I needed. But then got past the difficult part in the story, cleared some other projects from my plate, and bam, ended up writing 6.5k (actually a little bit more because I removed something like 2k of words from the manuscript that were outdated/replaced by newer writing and still ended up 6.5k words up).

I can't post this WIP for this event, but my goal is to get to 50k by the end of June, and I'm currently about 10k away from that. I would need to keep roughly the pace I did in April for the next two months, which might be pretty difficult, but it's doable -- I might make it!

[maevedarcy]

woohoo for getting under 10k left from your goal!!!