Quick Update

Last month I posted my Brief History of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe article on Retro Network. It was my first assignment for the site; even better, it was paid. Besides my books, I've never gotten any money for my work, so I was pumped to get it done.

Before I started working on it, though, I had to get some edits for Old School Evil 3 done so that I had a couple of chapters ready to share with my critique group until it was done. Now that the article's posted, and you should definitely check it out, I've been back to work on OSE3. I'm still in the first draft, but if you look at the chart below, you can see I've made a lot of progress in the last week (I'm not sure how to get the horizontal access to show the date range but trust me, each one is a day). Luckily, as I edit the stuff I've already written and add it to my newest draft, the numbers will keep adding up quickly.

To ensure I'm making a lot of progress, I've decided to do my own little NanoWriMo. I've competed in the writing event about 6 times and even won 4 of them. They're typically held in November and tasks you with writing a 50k-word novel in 30 days. I'm obviously doing it a little differently though, as I'm giving myself almost 60 days to only write an additional 35k words to the 20k I already had written. In a normal NaNo, the daily writing goal is 1667 words, but I'm a little rusty, so I've only set a 500-word daily goal.

To help me with it, I've gotten back in Habitica. Habitic, previously named Habit RPG, is a task management app that treats your to-do lists like a game. By checking off daily tasks and to-do items, you gain experience points and by not completing your tasks your character takes damage. You can join a party of like-minded people, complete quests to collect pets, and spend gold to buy armor and weapons which increase your stats. There's even a class system that gives you skills that can heal your party or boost their stats. I created daily tasks for my daily writing goal, along with all sorts of other daily chores and health & wellness things. And once I finish that 55k goal at the end of September, I get to check it off and get a boatload of XP and gold! If you're interested in trying out Habitica, it's a completely free app, and my party is called the Reliable Spark Plugs, come join us!