#Word Count Goals

[novella-november]

Weekly Word Goal Cards!

(Source on Pexels)

(Source on Pexels)

(Source on Pexels)

You can make your own custom word goal cards with free stock photos from Pexels!

Template:

[the-wip-project]

SloMo WriNo: Failure Proofing Your Goals

A Novel in one year.

So, what are the numbers for that?

If you’re so inclined, you’ve probably already done the math, and come up with some numbers for yourself.

Numbers like projected length of novel (I’m going to use 80k for this, but don’t get married to that, once you get into it the work with find it’s own length) and how many words a day you would need to write to hit that goal. (220)

That’s all very nice, but the problem with word count goals, is that you can create a situation where your writing becomes a pass/fail situation.

A situation where if you perceive yourself as failing (did I meet my word count goal this week? No? I AM A FAILURE!), and the pressure rises, it starts to feel safer to simply quit, rather than face repeated failures.

I’m against that sort of thing. (The quitting and also the negative self talk.)

So how does one measure progress without creating that sort of situation? How can you win the psychology game of getting words on the page?

Of course everyone is different. But here’s two methods (tricks? hacks?) that work for me at various times.

Low Goal, High Results. (The Min-Max zone)

The idea with this is to set a daily, or per session word count goal that feels too easy.

By now I hope you’ve figured out a good time and place to write. So go there, at that time, and do a timed 15 minute sprint. However many words you got, halve it. Repeat this exercise a few times to make sure you’ve got a good average.

Unless you’re a power writer, you will most likely end up with a number that is below that 220 we mathed out earlier, DON’T PANIC. In fact, for this example lets say that you managed to write an average of 200 words in your 15 minute sessions. Which means that your daily goal is now 100 words.

Of course with that number, even if you write every single day for a year that will only give you 36 500 words. Not a novel. Barely a novella!

The point here is not to write only 100 words a day. It’s making the daily task of writing feel easy and approachable. Not scary. If you know you only need to write 100 words, and you know you can get that done easily in less than 15 minutes, then why not do it? And once you’re writing, writing a little more generally happens easily enough. If getting started is the hard part, this should really help.

It’s a common psychological trick. But it’s common for a reason. It works!

Once you’ve set your (very easy) minimum goal, I also encourage you to set a maximum daily goal too. Especially if you’re the type of person who tends to go on 10k writing binges and then not write again for two months. Set your maximum at what you can comfortably write in 1.5-2 hours. So let’s say that’s 1000 words. Meaning your goal is to write 100-1000 words every time you sit down to write, and consider everything, from barely getting 102 to maxing out at 1002 an awesome, winning, writing day.

What does that look like? On a bad day, a day you don’t fee like writing at all, it means you tell yourself that all you need to do is write for ten minutes. Just get down 100 words (or whatever your minimum goal is.) And then if you haven’t found your mojo, you stop. No guilt or regret. You’ve met your goal, even though you’re having a bad day. You’re doing awesome!

On a power day, when you feel almost possessed by the muses, it means that when your timer beeps, or you see that number on the bottom of the screen hit 1000 (or whatever your number is), you make yourself stop. Yes. Stop mid flow. (It’s painful, I know! But please try!) Why stop? Because you’re learning how to have a healthy long term writing habit.

Write yourself some notes, and come at it fresh tomorrow. The goal is teach yourself that your creativity isn’t actually a unreliable muse. You are not subject to it’s whim. With time and practice your creativity will be there whenever you reach for it.

This is the method that I use most of the time, and I strongly recommend you give it a decent try (6 weeks at least.)

However perhaps you’re really just convinced that particular kind of psychological trickery just won’t work for you, or perhaps you’ve tried it in the past without success. Maybe it creates the opposite effect for you, and you find daily writing skippable because the minimum goal feels so low that you think you can make it up later (you won’t, but ahem, brains are weird.) So here is an alternative method that is also quite effective.

2. Higher Goals to Plan For Misses

Instead of setting your goal ridiculously low, you can try setting it high enough that you can miss writing days while still staying on track.

This will only work if you’ve been able to carve out a larger chunk of time for daily writing, thirty minutes to an hour.

So, lets run the example numbers. Using the 80k novel template, we already know that it would take 220 words a day if you write every single day, and never delete anything.

Writing every day is almost impossible, so you’re setting yourself up to fail if you set 220 as your goal.

So instead you plan for writing 6 days a week. Perhaps you intend to take Mondays off. They suck and you know you usually don’t feel like writing then anyway. Awesome. Let’s make that our schedule. Writing 312 days a year means a daily target of 257 words.

But still, that leaves no margin for error. No time for bad days, illness, that one scene you have to cut because it wasn’t working, etc.

So we double it. Your goal, with a plan of writing 6 days a week, is 500 words a day. And also (and this is the important bit) 2000 words a week.

Wait! That’s 4 days, not 6! Yes. That’s the point. It allows room for misses. To allow you to fail without failing. For days when you can’t reach 500, for days when you don’t have time (and with a larger daily goal like this, that’s a lot more possible.) For days when you just can’t.

Of course if you can only count on writing 5 days a week, or 4, or whatever your life situation calls for, adjust your goals accordingly. Always keep your goal word count about 1/3 higher than needed, to give yourself that cushion. If the numbers gets too large to manage, then it’s time to change the long term goal.

Yes. Really. Change it. Setting a goal that you’re bound to fail at is not going to help you.

Perhaps it’s more feasible for you personally to write your novel in 18 months, or two years. As always, your health is more important than an arbitrary time line, and you’ll still be awesome if you write your novel a little slower.

But what if both of those methods still stress you out, or if focusing on the numbers like that kills your joy?

Here’s a bonus method, that I personally use when things get to be a real struggle.

3. Gold Stars

This is for the times when the thought of tracking word count is just one step too many, and becomes an obstacle for writing at all. However when you abandon tracking completely, it’s often a way to abandon writing too.

So having some sort of way to confirm that yes, you’ve written for the day still helps, whether that’s putting a gold star, or an X on a calendar (you can find printable month/page calendars online for free, or you can buy those little book calendars very cheap), creating an art or craft piece (one time I wrote an entire novel assisted by a scarf where I only got to crochet a row after I’d written for the day), or whatever other way you can think of to mark that you wrote. Having a way to look back at your week or month and confirm that yes, you’ve written most days, is often enough keep you honest (with yourself.) As long as it’s something that feels like a reward and not additional work.

So there you have it. 3 methods for setting word count goals and tracking what you’re accomplishing.

Let me know what you’re going to try, or what sort of tricks work for you! (and feel free to ask me for help figuring out how to apply this in your own life.)

—Maree

Subscribe to my substack to make sure you don't miss a post, chat with me on the WIP Project discord, and tag any posts you make about the challenge with #slomowrino if you want me to see them!

[shards-of-silver]

9044 today, 8035 yesterday. This may be my longest streak yet for a month long writing challenge. More often I fall behind, catch up some, then get behind again to the point it takes a hail Mary I'm unable to muster.

Maybe 2024 can do one good thing for me yet.

[hxneyfarm]

Make Me Write

I was tagged by @steves-strapcollection

The Rules

Set a word count goal for the week.

Create a 24-hour poll with all the projects you would like to work on for the week.

People can send asks or messages about the things they'd like to see snippets of. [I will tag you in the snippets I post at the end of this challenge]

Once the poll closes, divvy the word count based on the percentage of votes each option got!

Optional: By the end of your 7-day writing period, post a snippet for each option.

This means there is no winner or loser. All the fics below will be worked on! This is just deciding the percentage of the word count!!

The Goal

So I really, truly want to push myself this weekend and into next week, and with me having all of Wednesday off to recover from my post concert depression (FOB TUESDAY AAHHHHHH!), I'll have a decent amount of time to really push myself

Minimum WC Goal: 7,000 words Stretch WC Goal: 15,000 words Completion date/time: Sunday July 23, 10:00 PM Eastern Time

The WIPs!

The Tags!

Either to do this too or just to boost and/or enable me! No pressure!

@patchworkgargoyle, @starryeyedjanai, @starrystevie, @sidekick-hero, @legitcookie, @scoops-stevie, @inairbinad, @thefreakandthehair, @flowercrowngods, @kkpwnall, @stobinesque, @artaxlivs

[audrelite]

I recently joined a Dreamwidth community where members set word count goals for their writing and track their progress. The minimum word count goal you can set in this community is 75,000 words.

Given that I wrote around 230,000 words worth of fanfiction in 2023 that I posted (according to the AO3 stats page), reaching a 75,000 word goal should be very achievable for me without much extra effort.

However, since I did not formally track my total word count for works posted on AO3 last year, I did some math to estimate how much I might need to write per month to definitively reach 75,000 words. Based on my rough calculations, as long as I write at least 6,500 words per month of fanfiction that gets posted on AO3, I should easily surpass the 75,000 word goal through the course of the year.

But given my high level of writing output last year, even this per month estimate is likely more than necessary.

In any case, with no concrete tracking of my 2023 total word count, I'll just have to see where I end up by the end of this year. But reaching the minimum community goal seems very feasible.

[transcendragon]

WINNER of Big Word Count Month and Cong-RAT-ulations for Winning Big Word Count Month - For everyone who set themselves a writing goal this November and met it, regardless of if it involved any official National Novel Writing Month stuff or not.

I just got to 50k words tracked by my own Google Sheets and I’m aiming for 60k, so making these was a fun way to celebrate!

These designs are also in Redbubble, in case you want to get yourself or the writer in your life a little treat for winning Big Word Count Month. Find them here https://www.redbubble.com/i/mug/Cong-RAT-ulations-on-Big-Word-Count-Month-2023-by-Transcendragons/155361537.9Q0AD?utm_source=rb-native-app&utm_campaign=share-product&utm_medium=ios and here https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/WINNER-of-Big-Word-Count-Month-2023-by-Transcendragons/155361839.EJUG5?utm_source=rb-native-app&utm_campaign=share-product&utm_medium=ios

My original art made in Procreate. Image descriptions in alt text.

[mareebrittenford]

SloMo WriNo: Failure Proofing Your Goals

A Novel in one year.

So, what are the numbers for that?

If you’re so inclined, you’ve probably already done the math, and come up with some numbers for yourself.

Numbers like projected length of novel (I’m going to use 80k for this, but don’t get married to that, once you get into it the work with find it’s own length) and how many words a day you would need to write to hit that goal. (220)

That’s all very nice, but the problem with word count goals, is that you can create a situation where your writing becomes a pass/fail situation.

A situation where if you perceive yourself as failing (did I meet my word count goal this week? No? I AM A FAILURE!) and the pressure rises, it starts to feel safer to simply quit, rather than face repeated failures.

I’m against that sort of thing. (The quitting and also the negative self talk.)

So how does one measure progress without creating that sort of situation? How can you win the psychology game of getting words on the page?

Of course everyone is different. But here’s two methods (tricks? hacks?) that work for me at various times.

Low Goal, High Results. (The Min-Max zone)

The idea with this is to set a daily, or per session word count goal that feels too easy.

By now I hope you’ve figured out a good time and place to write. So go there, at that time, and do a timed 15 minute sprint. However many words you got, halve it. Repeat this exercise a few times to make sure you’ve got a good average.

Unless you’re a power writer, you will most likely end up with a number that is below that 220 we mathed out earlier, DON’T PANIC. In fact, for this example lets say that you managed to write an average of 200 words in your 15 minute sessions. Which means that your daily goal is now 100 words.

Of course with that number, even if you write every single day for a year that will only give you 36 500 words. Not a novel. Barely a novella!

The point here is not to write only 100 words a day. It’s making the daily task of writing feel easy and approachable. Not scary. If you know you only need to write 100 words, and you know you can get that done easily in less than 15 minutes, then why not do it? And once you’re writing, writing a little more generally happens easily enough. If getting started is the hard part, this should really help.

It’s a common psychological trick. But it’s common for a reason. It works!

Once you’ve set your (very easy) minimum goal, I also encourage you to set a maximum daily goal too. Especially if you’re the type of person who tends to go on 10k writing binges and then not write again for two months. Set your maximum at what you can comfortably write in 1.5-2 hours. So let’s say that’s 1000 words. Meaning your goal is to write 100-1000 words every time you sit down to write, and consider everything, from barely getting 102 to maxing out at 1002 an awesome, winning, writing day.

What does that look like? On a bad day, a day you don’t fee like writing at all, it means you tell yourself that all you need to do is write for ten minutes. Just get down 100 words (or whatever your minimum goal is.) And then if you haven’t found your mojo, you stop. No guilt or regret. You’ve met your goal, even though you’re having a bad day. You’re doing awesome!

On a power day, when you feel almost possessed by the muses, it means that when your timer beeps, or you see that number on the bottom of the screen hit 1000 (or whatever your number is), you make yourself stop. Yes. Stop mid flow. (It’s painful, I know! But please try!) Why stop? Because you’re learning how to have a healthy long term writing habit.

Write yourself some notes, and come at it fresh tomorrow. The goal is teach yourself that your creativity isn’t actually a unreliable muse. You are not subject to it’s whim. With time and practice your creativity will be there whenever you reach for it.

This is the method that I use most of the time, and I strongly recommend you give it a decent try (6 weeks at least.)

However perhaps you’re really just convinced that particular kind of psychological trickery just won’t work for you, or perhaps you’ve tried it in the past without success. Maybe it creates the opposite effect for you, and you find daily writing skippable because the minimum goal feels so low that you think you can make it up later (you won’t, but ahem, brains are weird.) So here is an alternative method that is also quite effective.

Higher Goals to Plan For Misses

Instead of setting your goal ridiculously low, you can try setting it high enough that you can miss writing days while still staying on track.

This will only work if you’ve been able to carve out a larger chunk of time for daily writing, thirty minutes to an hour.

So, lets run the example numbers. Using the 80k novel template, we already know that it would take 220 words a day if you write every single day, and never delete anything.

Writing every day is almost impossible, so you’re setting yourself up to fail if you set 220 as your goal.

So instead you plan for writing 6 days a week. Perhaps you intend to take Mondays off. They suck and you know you usually don’t feel like writing then anyway. Awesome. Let’s make that our schedule. Writing 312 days a year means a daily target of 257 words.

But still, that leaves no margin for error. No time for bad days, illness, that one scene you have to cut because it wasn’t working, etc.

So we double it. Your goal, with a plan of writing 6 days a week, is 500 words a day. And also (and this is the important bit) 2000 words a week.

Wait! That’s 4 days, not 6! Yes. That’s the point. It allows room for misses. To allow you to fail without failing. For days when you can’t reach 500, for days when you don’t have time (and with a larger daily goal like this, that’s a lot more possible.) For days when you just can’t.

Of course if you can only count on writing 5 days a week, or 4, or whatever your life situation calls for, adjust your goals accordingly. Always keep your goal word count about 1/3 higher than needed, to give yourself that cushion. If the numbers gets too large to manage, then it’s time to change the long term goal.

Yes. Really. Change it. Setting a goal that you’re bound to fail at is not going to help you.

Perhaps it’s more feasible for you personally to write your novel in 18 months, or two years. As always, your health is more important than an arbitrary time line, and you’ll still be awesome if you write your novel a little slower.

But what if both of those methods still stress you out, or if focusing on the numbers like that kills your joy?

Here’s a bonus method, that I personally use when things get to be a real struggle.

Gold Stars

This is for the times when the thought of tracking word count is just one step too many, and becomes an obstacle for writing at all. However when you abandon tracking completely, it’s often a way to abandon writing too.

So having some sort of way to confirm that yes, you’ve written for the day still helps, whether that’s putting a gold star, or an X on a calendar (you can find printable month/page calendars online for free, or you can buy those little book calendars very cheap), creating an art or craft piece (one time I wrote an entire novel assisted by a scarf where I only got to crochet a row after I’d written for the day), or whatever other way you can think of to mark that you wrote. Having a way to look back at your week or month and confirm that yes, you’ve written most days, is often enough keep you honest (with yourself.) As long as it’s something that feels like a reward and not additional work.

So there you have it. 3 methods for setting word count goals and tracking what you’re accomplishing.

Let me know what you’re going to try, or what sort of tricks work for you!

—Maree

Subscribe to my substack to make sure you don't miss a post, chat with me on the WIP Project discord, and tag any posts you make about the challenge with #slomowrino if you want me to see them!

[little-peril-stories]

Camp Nano July 2023

How It Went

Um, not how I expected.

The good:

I managed to write every day. I'll confess here that, because we went on vacation and were all over the place most days, I sometimes updated my word count for the day, wrote more, and saved that 'update' for the next day because I like getting the badges. (All the writing was done in July though! I did all the outlining and planning work between February and June, but I didn't start writing till July 1.)

My outline was helpful. I didn't spend a lot of time agonizing over "what happens next" because I always knew, even if the specifics were a little fuzzy. My process boils down to 'plan hard, but allow for deviation & exploration' and it seems like that is still a system that works for me.

Some of the writing was OK. I mean, it's a writing challenge and I was going fast. She gonna need work. But I often smiled while I was writing, or when I was rereading scenes, and that's a good indicator for me. :)

The , uh, well, you see:

I wasn't always feeling it. Trying to track exactly why I felt this way has been tough. I'm willing to admit it could have been burnout (or something adjacent to it) since Camp Nano began right on the heels of the end of the school year, and I had just finished the whirlwind of writing The Queen of Lies in a month, a Thing That Happened that we may never understand. Maybe I started planning too early and the passion had faded since the height of my enthusiasm as I plotted it out. Idk. Maybe it was being on vacation, constantly being around people and having limited time to myself to really feel the story and the words and the everything. Idk.

The romantic tension isn't there. And this one hurts, because I (personally, as someone who is actually really new to writing romantic tension lol) think I did this really well in TQOL, so what's different here? (Aside from diff characters, diff story, okay I get it, you know what I mean.)

I was distracted. And this one is purely my fault. I was editing chapters of TQOL for posting throughout this time, too, and even though it takes a different kind of brainpower, it was often the task that called to me more.

Overall:

So, I'm SUPER proud of myself for achieving my Camp Nano goal of 31,000 words (1000 words/day) on July 28. But I kind of wonder if maybe it wasn't quite the right time to write this story.

We'll see how the last three days of July go (I want them badges, dang it), but the true test will be in August, when I have no goal set for myself. Will I focus on the finally finishing Book 1 and letting humans read it? Will I just work on TQOL? Will angsty heist wip rise again? Or will the passion for Book 2 (which I was SO EXCITED TO WRITE) return the moment the daily word goal is gone? (lol what a joke we all know I'm gonna write Will's POV chapters for TQOL.)

Thanks for reading this pointless ramble.

[progressivegraffiti]

National Novel Writing Month 2023

National Novel Writing Month is coming up: Nov 1-30, 2023. Who's signing up? I think I will.

My story idea is about a little dog who falls into the company of #ProgressiveActivists. (Of course!)

[authorkarajorgensen]

March 2023 Wrap-Up Post

This week's blog is our monthly wrap-up for March where I talk about writing updates, what else I've been up to, and all the books I've read. Click here for more!

I’d love to know why March felt like the longest and shortest month. Oddly, this month was busy, yet I spent a lot of the time resting and re-calibrating as I worked on The Reanimator’s Soul. It was sort of a weird month. Not good or bad, just a transitional month between projects and parts of the semester. Anywho, let’s see what my goals were and what I got up to during the month. Read 8…

[liones-s]

one of my favourite techniques (for studying or just for life) is to just start it with no expectations beyond that. read two pages of the reading, write a single paragraph. Heck, just open the document. The next time you come back to it, it’s already opened and you don’t have to go through all those little preparatory steps that can stand in the way. As someone who has struggled with a psychological block about beginning tasks, doing the beginning steps without expecting myself to complete the work has been a major shift. You also get the bonus of saying thank you to your past self when you return to the task, because past you gave future you a little boost to get through the door

[nanowrimo]

Smash Your Word Count Goals in 3 Easy Steps

from our sponsors at Freewrite

Here at Freewrite, we help writers reach peak productivity in order to meet word count goals and create their best work yet. That’s our reason for being.

Today, we’re going to share the three easy steps proven by science to help you reach your writing goals!

1) Set A Goal & Write It Down

The psychology of goal setting is pretty clear. It’s what NaNoWriMo is all about, right? Research has proven that people who set goals experience higher motivation and are more likely to feel accomplished.

However, the type of goal you set makes a big difference to your efforts. Make sure that your goals are (a) clear and specific, (b) realistic, and (c) measurable.

Being clear about your goal will help you hone in on what you’re trying to achieve and ignore distractions. Make sure to write it down, as well. Research by psychologist Gail Matthews has revealed that people who write down goals are 33% more successful than those who simply set a goal in their head.

Next, be realistic. This means being honest with yourself about what you can and can’t achieve based on your other life obligations. Setting goals that you can’t achieve will only lead to frustration and, ultimately, a lack of motivation.

And last, make sure each goal is measurable. “Write 1,000 words each day” is much easier to measure than “Finish this book.” Because we all know it’s difficult to measure a book being “done”!

Breaking these goals down into smaller, simpler steps will help, too. If your goal is to write 20,000 words during Camp NaNo, break that down into 5,000 words a week, and then figure out how many words you’ll have to write each day to reach those smaller goals.

2) Practice Freewriting

Freewriting is thinking. It’s as simple — and as difficult — as that.

While every writer is unique, and there is no one way to be a writer, there are similarities we all share as humans — especially humans in the modern world — that create common obstacles to doing the things we love — like reading, writing, and yes, thinking. There are the obvious external obstacles: social media, email, the internet. But there are sneaky internal obstacles, too — the main culprit being the inner critic.

As humans, we are judgmental. It’s in our DNA. Our brains are constantly assessing situations, imagining outcomes, and making decisions. It’s part of survival at a very basic level. However, that means that when we do anything, including writing, we tend to automatically assess our actions — judging our own words, tweaking and editing them as we go along. That constant evaluation not only hinders progress, it can also stop us from ever getting started. And if we do manage to sit down to write, that inner critic creates an unconscious anxiety that prevents us from experimenting and writing down our most innovative and creative — and weird! — ideas.

We’ve all heard the advice to “write now, edit later.” Or perhaps you’ve heard writers reference “the sloppy/crappy/messy first draft.” Those are just fun ways of referencing the writing method in which you separate the drafting process from the editing process. Or, what we call freewriting.

Many people haven’t written this freely since childhood, but there’s a reason this method is taught in MFA programs. Getting your thoughts down first and revising later increases productivity and yields better, more creative work because it allows you to give your brain fully to each task. It means that when you’re drafting, you’re drafting, and when you’re editing, you’re editing. There’s no context-switching or multitasking.

So, what if you gave yourself permission to write badly at first? And we don’t just mean cheesy or with glaring plot holes — we mean typos, missing words, character names replaced by big Xs because you couldn’t remember them in the moment.

The next time you draft, we challenge you to give it a try. Just let yourself go and give your thoughts and feelings over to the act of creating. Because that’s when the magic happens. 

3) Track Your Stats

OK, you’ve set measurable goals, and you’ve started drafting. What’s next?

Track your efforts!

Here at Freewrite, we’ve created a tool to automatically track important writing stats, like word count, writing days, writing streak, and more! It’s called a Postbox Profile, and it gives you a unique URL that allows you to share your stats with writing friends.

Anyone with a Postbox account — that’s anyone who writes on a Freewrite OR uses our free in-browser drafting tool, Sprinter — can create a Postbox Profile and track their stats.

👉Don’t have a Freewrite yet? No problem! We have a FREE in-browser drafting experience called Sprinter that helps you shut down distractions and make progress — and gives you access to Postbox. Start writing today absolutely FREE at sprinter.getfreewrite.com.

👉Ready to grab your own Freewrite? Our entry-level device, Alpha, is $50 off this June only! Just use code STARTWITHALPHA at checkout.

[happypeachsludgeflower]

dream curse au outline

Beginning of Chapter 1

While on a joint mission, Mu Qing is hit with a curse and falls unconscious. Feng Xin, worried, takes him back to heaven and has someone fetch someone that might know something about the curse (Ling Wen perhaps?). Before anyone can arrive, Mu Qing wakes up. Feng Xin was in the middle of checking the other man’s meridian’s and is caught by surprise when Mu Qing calls him husband fondly and drags him down for a kiss. Feng Xin, after a moment of stunned panic, breaks away and knocks Mu Qing unconscious again and orders the surprised Xuan Zhen deputies to tell the person they called for to hurry the fuck up. 

Mu Qingfang arrives a moment later to check Mu Qing over. He sends a message to Ling Wen to double check some information (he was asking for some documents about a similar incident that happened from his peak lord days that ended in a bingliushen wedding and is the reason that Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu never ascended to heaven and are still in the mortal realm with their husband, Luo Binghe, to this day) and informs Feng Xin and the deputies that Mu Qing is affected by a dream curse. Mu Qing is convinced he's living his fantasy life and acting as if his deepest desires are true. (In the background the deputies are snickering, and another is long suffering and passes them money.) Thinking back to Mu Qing calling Feng Xin “husband” and kissing him, Feng Xin tells Mu Qingfang that he’s bullshitting him. There’s no way that’s what Mu Qing is cursed with. Obviously, this is some sort of opposite curse or something where the person does a complete reversal of their actual desires. Internally, Feng Xin is upset that Mu Qing dislikes him so much that he’d only dream of calling Feng Xin “husband” in the midst of a nightmare. 

Mu Qingfang gives Feng Xin a polite but patronizing stare and remembers how freaked out Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu were when Liu Qingge was convinced he was married to both of them. After a pause where he exchanges a look with the deputies behind Feng Xin (and probably looks at where Feng Xin is still holding Mu Qing’s hand), he tells him that the “reversal” curse is still broken the same way as the “dream curse”. Mu Qing’s ideal fantasy has to become true for the day or he’ll stay stuck in the curse forever. Feng Xin has to go along with every single one of Mu Qing’s whims until the curse is broken.

After a moment of pensive contemplation, Feng Xin shakes his head and insists that no, there has to be another way to break the curse. He storms out of the room and leaves for the mortal realm to recheck the place they were at when Mu Qing was cursed. He gets there and combs over the area, but all evidence he finds seems to agree with Mu Qingfang’s assessment. Frustrated and flustered at remembering what Mu Qing was convinced of, he returns to heaven and goes to find Mu Qingfang to ask is certain that’s the only way.

Mu Qingfang had waited at Xuan Zhen palace knowing Feng Xin would be back soon (he remembers the bingliushen incident and knows denial is just one of the steps; Luo Binghe was in denial for a while that Liu Qingge wanted him and not just Shen Qingqiu and dragged the curse out an entire week while freaking out) and is having some tea with some of the Xuan Zhen deputies. When Mu Qingfang says that it's the only way to break the curse, Feng Xin asks what to do if what Mu Qing wants to do to break the curse will harm Mu Qing’s cultivation path. Before Mu Qingfang can answer, the deputies snicker and reassure Feng Xin that that won’t be a problem. Feng Xin asks them what they mean, confused, and the deputies let Feng Xin know that Mu Qing changed his cultivation path centuries ago, but never informed the rest of heaven. Feng Xin is very flustered with this information. 

As Mu Qingfang and the deputies leave to let Feng Xin handle Mu Qing by himself (they are all very aware of exactly what their general is probably going to want from Feng Xin), Feng Xin asks them where Mu Qing is. They laugh and tell Feng Xin that Mu Qing is busy preparing a special meal for his husband in the kitchen and refusing to do any of his godly duties. Feng Xin goes to find Mu Qing, still very confused and reminding himself that Mu Qingfang was bullshitting him about the exact details of the curse and that this is Mu Qing’s opposite, not what Mu Qing wants (even though the evidence in the mortal realm says otherwise too). All he has to do is break the curse and get it over with and Mu Qing will be back to normal. Feng Xin is deep in the throes of denial. 

End of Chapter 1 

Beginning of Chapter 2 (here is the post with the beginning of this written)

When he finds Mu Qing, Mu Qing has woken up a while ago, as the deputies had said, and changed into skimpy robes and prepared a meal for Feng Xin that he’s laid out on the table for him and proceeds to be very dedicated to welcoming his “husband” home. What follows is a lot of seductive Mu Qing dragging his husband from one domestic activity to another, interspersed with copious amounts of sex. (Mu Qing has a domestic kink and wants to cook with Feng Xin and cuddle a lot and liberally call Feng Xin his husband.) Feng Xin is convinced he is losing his mind and possibly that he’s the one that’s actually cursed (as opposed to Mu Qing) and that he’s living out his own fantasy of Mu Qing wanting him in a dream. He is convinced there’s no way any of this is actually happening. Over the course of the day, Feng Xin goes through all the stages of grief for the loss of his sanity and finally settles into acceptance that this is what Mu Qing wants. 

More details need to be added on the exact shenanigans that occur. 

When the curse breaks* the next day however, and as he wakes up, Mu Qing remembers everything that happened and freaks out. He’s convinced that Feng Xin went along with it because he felt obligated to break the curse and not because Feng Xin wanted to. Mu Qing is mortified that his feelings were exposed and probably not reciprocated, and that the other day was probably a pity fuck as he reminds himself. He bolts out of bed (they fell asleep together cuddling the night before) and throws on a robe and starts to have a meltdown. Feng Xin wakes up and sleepily asks him if he’s okay (calling him “Qing-er” as he does), at which point Mu Qing loses it completely and starts rudely snapping at Feng Xin about anything and everything he can think of. He tells Feng Xin to get out and, desperate to save face, tells Feng Xin that yesterday was a reversal curse and nothing else. He rudely tells Feng Xin that he would never want Feng Xin of all people and that whoever said the curse was Mu Qing’s true feelings obviously lied. 

Feng Xin is devastated. Over the course of the other day, he had accepted that Mu Qing actually wanted him back and loved him and now he’s being told that Mu Qing doesn’t. He thinks he tricked himself into believing a lie because he wanted it to be true so badly. He manages to stutter out a single “Qing-er” at which Mu Qing grabs a vase and throws it at him and orders him to get out again. The vase shatters and Mu Qing finally actually looks at Feng Xin and notices that Feng Xin is crying and broken-hearted. It is at this point that Mu Qing realizes he fucked up and that maybe Feng Xin actually did want him, but by this point, Feng Xin is stumbling back out of the room and turning away from him to high tail it out of Xuan Zhen palace. Mu Qing tries to take it back by saying “No, wait, stop--” and reaching out to grab Feng Xin, but the door slams in his face and Feng Xin is gone. 

End of Chapter 2

Beginning of Chapter 3 aka Mu Qing’s journey of trying to reconcile with Feng Xin 

Mu Qing slumps to the ground in front of his door that has just been slammed in his face and buries his face in his hands. He starts to cry realizing he’s fucked up. After a few moments of despair, he tries to reach out to Feng Xin through the array, but doesn’t receive an answer. Time passes as Mu Qing wallows in self deprecating pity. A tentative knock comes at the door and breaks him out of his spiral. He wipes his face and takes a moment to compose himself slightly before asking what the person needs. (He does not open the door at this point because he doesn’t want to face anyone yet. Also, he sounds awful. The deputy pretends to not notice.)

A deputy calls softly through the door and asks if Mu Qing is ready for his morning tea or not. (The deputy is actually worried about Mu Qing as they all saw Feng Xin leave in a hurry crying and is trying to ask if he’s okay without saying it because he knows that Mu Qing won’t take well to being asked directly.) Mu Qing quickly tries to straighten himself and his clothing and tells his deputy he’ll be out in a minute. He takes another moment to compose himself before getting up and getting ready for the day. He does all of this in a daze. 

He leaves the room and makes his way to his office where he usually starts his day with tea and paperwork. He sits at his desk and nods to his deputies (they notice his eyes are red and puffy but politely don’t comment). He stares at the tea that’s been freshly prepared for him. A cough breaks him from his focus on his tea and a deputy tells him that Mu Qingfang is there to talk to him (a deputy summoned him when they noticed how fucked up their general was). Mu Qing nods and tells them to see him in. 

Mu Qingfang enters and greets him politely and sits down at the table. A deputy pours him some tea. The two gods sit in silence for a moment, before Mu Qing asks why Mu Qingfang has come to see him. Mu Qingfang informs him that he has come to check on Mu Qing health and his meridians to make sure he is recovering from the after effects of the curse. Mu Qing tells him that he’s fine and that’s unnecessary. Mu Qingfang asks that Mu Qing humors him and takes Mu Qing’s wrist to check his meridians. As he checks Mu Qing, Mu Qingfang starts reminiscing out loud about the time when he was a Peak Lord (before ascending to godhood) when his martial brother, Liu Qingge, experienced the same curse. He tells Mu Qing all about the shenanigans that Luo Binghe, Shen Qingqiu, and Liu Qingge got up to for the week that Liu Qingge was cursed and the messy fallout of when the curse finally broke. Liu Qingge had been very embarrassed about the whole thing and fled. He had disappeared from the Sect for months. Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu had been very upset by the whole thing and Liu Qingge might have not come back at all if they hadn’t gone looking for him to make it clear that they wanted Liu Qingge too. 

Mu Qing quietly asks how Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu were able to forgive Liu Qingge for hurting them. Mu Qingfang hums and tells him that they did because they loved Liu Qingge and he apologized. [ “Even if he was avoiding them?” ] (Mu Qing is asking about bingliushen but really thinking about himself and Feng Xin; the two situations aren’t a perfect parallel, what with them being different people and reacting differently, but they are similar enough.) Mu Qingfang points out that all Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu had to do was find him and the rest worked itself out. Mu Qingfang lets go of Mu Qing’s wrist and tells him that his meridians seem to be fine and he’s recovered well. He gets up and bows politely and says he’ll see himself out. Mu Qing continues to sit there thinking about what Mu Qingfang said. (Mu Qingfang didn’t actually come to check Mu Qing’s meridians--he knew they’d be fine. He came to tell Mu Qing about the bingliushen incident to try and help Mu Qing figure out what he should do, but he figured saying it was for the meridians would make Mu Qing let him in.)

Tentatively, Mu Qing attempts to activate Feng Xin’s communication array again, but he finds that the password has been changed. He thinks about bingliushen and comes to the conclusion that he’ll have to go to Feng Xin. He gets up and gives some vague orders to the deputies to take care of his godly duties for the day and leaves to go to Nan Yang Palace to talk to Feng Xin. When he gets there though, the deputies tell him Feng Xin has left for the mortal realm. 

Need a more detailed outline, but basically, Feng Xin keeps avoiding Mu Qing and Mu Qing keeps trying to find Feng Xin to apologize. Feng Xin has his deputies prevent Mu Qing from entering his palace and changes his communication array password. At one point, Mu Qing even goes to Xie Lian for advice and possibly goes to meet with bingliushen to ask their advice too since they’ve experienced the fallout of the curse before. (Shen Qingqiu saying that love is more important than dignity would be fantastic and delicious and I need it.)

Eventually, Mu Qing comes to the conclusion that if he can’t get Feng Xin to talk to him, he’ll have to do it in public even if it means losing face in front of other officials (which is actually his worst nightmare--appearing weak in front of others) because it’s the only place Feng Xin can’t avoid him entirely. So Mu Qing catches him in the middle of the street with many onlookers (who are very excited to witness Mu Qing’s embarrassment because they’re gossipy bitches like that, and Mu Qing wasn’t wrong about the majority of heaven’s opinion of him; the officials that don’t like him begin projecting the event of “Xuan Zhen’s disgrace” into the dreams of their believers in glee that everyone will get to see Xuan Zhen be embarrassed) and admits that he lied and that he loves Feng Xin and that he messed up. He begs Feng Xin to talk to him again and give him another chance, but says that it’s in Feng Xin’s right if he doesn’t want to forgive him. He starts crying at some point in the confession and can’t even look at Feng Xin through his tears so he doesn’t get to see Feng Xin’s expressions go from surprise to softening into fondness. 

Feng Xin approaches Mu Qing and takes his face in his hands and wipes his tears away. He leans his forehead against Mu Qing and whispers softly, “Qing’er, of course I’ll forgive you.” He then kisses Mu Qing. 

In the background the officials that thought they were about to witness Mu Qing’s embarrassment are starting to realize that maybe projecting this into their worshipers' dreams was a Bad Idea ™. But alas, they can’t undo it. In the mortal realm, the legend of Xuan Zhen and Nan Yang’s romance becomes one of the most famous love stories and becomes the focus of many many plays and poems for centuries to come. 

[daisywords]

hey uh does anyone have a recipe for Potion That Makes You Write

has anyone actually gone from not being able to write that often to a more consistent output and if so how did you do that

[bloodlessheirbyjacques]

2025 Writing Goal!

My goal is 12,500 words a month for 150k total for the year! I'm hoping it'll help me finally finish Draft 2 of Book 1! I'm about halfway through now, and got the bulk of that done last year so this is definitely a doable goal! Wish me luck! Gonna keep myself accountable by reblogging my monthly word counts!

[universalfanfic]

JUL: 8,820

2024 Word Count Tally (Goal: 100k)

JAN: 24,871