When I started this blog, it was with the simple goal of forcing myself to write more often, by setting a wordcount goal and expecting myself to reach it weekly. By now it’s clear that this has failed.

In fact, it’s gone so far as to be counterproductive to that goal, as I’ve more than once skipped something because I didn’t want to post trivial stuff until I’d caught up on my requests, or because it would be a short post and it seemed such a pain to maintain the tally for small changes. I’ve now totally lost track, I don’t recall when I last updated the score, so I have no idea how many words I would owe now. I do know that I didn’t post once during the entire month of August, and worse that I’ve been putting off things I might have posted during the last week or two.

So, new rules. For the time being there are no rules. I’ll just write when I feel like it, about whatever subject I have in mind. I’ll probably work out some sort of structure to it later, I’ll certainly try to maintain the “write anything requested” idea, and I’ll update the About page with proper info just as soon as I figure out what that should be. I fully intend to catch up on the Requests someday, but that’s looking like it’s a long way off.

What really undid me was, in a roundabout way, Cyndi’s request for a Stargate fanfic. I was simply unprepared for how difficult that would be, and have enough of a perfectionist to me that I wasn’t willing to just hack out something that clearly sucked so I could get past it and move on. In hindsight, I really should have, I mean I said right there in the rules that I wasn’t setting any standard for quality. But it’s in my nature, I guess.

Anyways, I actually have seen some improvement in my ability to sit down and bang stuff out. It’s probably not obvious to anyone reading, who hasn’t seen me fret and fidget and swear as I try to turn thought into words, but it’s there. So for now I’m ignoring the rules until I make up some new ones, and taking any and all pressure off of myself so that I can write what I damn well like. This will last at least until the end of October.

Hopefully the return of rules will be heralded by posting that damned SG-1 fic. I think it would do me some good to practice writing short stories, since I have a bad habit of growing any idea into a huge long epic. I fear that if I were to become a novelist I’d wind up like George R. R. Martin or the late Robert Jordan, where books three inches thick are full of stuff happening with no plot advancement. Yikes.