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I've decided I'm going to go ahead and end my Unus Annus challenge. I really wanted to make it a full year, but I don't feel bad about ending at three months.
Part of the point was the challenge to see if I even could maintain daily posting for a year. I really thought I could. But I didn't anticipate a new medication knocking me out for over a month, making me completely unable to write anything during that time. I'm only finally adjusting to it and getting back into the swing of things, but I still want to spend more time asleep than awake. At a certain point I need to just admit that I failed. It was a fun experiment, and at the end of the day, I'm very glad I did it.
The other reason I did the challenge was because I wanted to see what would happen to an account that posted every single day. I learned that it's terrible for the account. But it also made me realise that too much importance is placed on engagement to begin with. Fic has, for many people including me, become the sole means of socialisation within fandom. It puts far too much pressure on fic to be the best in fandom, and creates a really unhealthy and unnecessary competition not just with one another, but with yourself.
And since turning off comments, I actually started feeling better about posting fic than I did at the beginning of this challenge. So in that regard, I did get what I wanted out of it. I'm only ending because I have literally nothing to post, and I want to post work I'm proud of going forward, rather than rushing to get something out because I have nothing ready to go for tonight. I am still doing GYWO, and am still going for 1,000,000 words, and it may now be easier since I can focus on writing, and not so much editing.
So. Going forward. No more schedules. No more routines. I'm going to finish the fics I've started, and then probably post them all at once to AO3 once I've finished. My newsletter and website will be where new stuff goes as it's ready to go out. The sole exception will be God of Outcasts, which is going to remain the only fic that updates as it goes. And that's just because it's the sort of fic that's meant to go on and on forever. I have a lot of plans for it, and I've been putting a lot of time into making sure I know exactly where everything is going. The newsletter this week will have a little more information about what to expect over there going forward.
I'm still waffling on whether I want to shut down comments completely over on AO3, or leave the ones that have them open as they are. I'm kind of leaning toward the first, and using the newsletter as the way for people to leave feedback. I'd much rather just let my fic stand as it is, and use social media for social stuff. IDK. I'll think about it for a while longer. I also leave comments on blog posts here open for two weeks, but after that they automatically close.
If you're not subscribed to the newsletter, it's right here. I'm also working on building a self-hosted archive for it, just so I have more control over my own content.
