pearwaldorf | Fictober: end of month evaluation

I did better than I thought! I finished all of Ineffable Fictober and 26 prompts for Drabbletober. Last year I did five days of drabbles and just stopped because it was too hard to catch up.

Things I have learned:

You have to stay on top of your prompts or catching up feels psychologically impossible
Externally imposed structure is not a thing I deal with very well. I feel like I need the ability to set my own pace, even if it's only nominally different than what everybody else's timelines are
Some fills/prompts you just can't do anything satisfactory with, and that's okay
Corollary: you don't have to post everything as long as you did it (that's why there's only 25 fills for Drabbletober)
Some days you will be thoroughly sick of doing this, and some days it will be incredibly satisfying

Mostly it was nice to be able to switch off between a fandom-specific list and one that wasn't. The only problem with that was when you're not feeling it, it doubly sucks.

It's nice to be able to add little bits at a time to a world. I did this a lot with the Vox Machina high school AU, to the point where it mostly exists in the drabbles.

It's nice to be able to revisit fandoms I'm not actively writing in right now (MCU, Star Wars), just for a little bit. The word limit helps because then I have to move on.

A fandom specific list is great because:

it allows you to think about aspects of the work/relationship you probably wouldn't have considered if it hadn't been brought up
It's great for scratching itches that you don't want to write a whole big thing for
Seeing other people's interpretations of the prompts is fun

It feels a little bit like a devotional, in the sense that people are all doing the same thing at the same time, that ritualistic sort of connection. and the way you explicitly set aside time each day to consider this thing. The communality is nice.

Can't say I'm sad to be beholden only to myself again though, even if it was a very productive month word-wise. Now, to finish up all the stuff I was hoping to get done in October.