Regarding January's Exclusives

TLDR, to get ahead of any portents of doom: I should be able to get all three January exclusives out before the 31st ends, but things over the past week and a half have inhibited my ability to write.

Longer version: I hate writing posts like this because it has the feeling of me making excuses for failing to meet my obligations to my supporters.

This is not an excuse, it's an explanation. And also venting, because there's been a lot of crap going on in my day-to-day life lately and I can't blame anyone specifically, so I need to instead howl at the universe.

After finishing The Big Sister earlier this month I started working on a sequel to Expectations Become Reality. It should have been a simple story, Kita becoming an adult and falling 'victim' to her own reality-warping power to grow incredibly fat and gluttonous. But as often happens when I'm writing I kept circling around the actual heart of the story, spending time and recounting the first story or explaining her power instead of getting to the actual growth.

In doing so I set up a different story entirely, where Kita is friends with two supersized classmates, both envious of their size and head over heels in love with both of them. While I did eventually get to the growth proper I also felt obligated to follow up the unrequited romance angle, and what should have been a straight-shot 'skinny to fat' story now took a detour into a confession-by-text scene that, again, I skirted around for a while before actually biting the bullet on.

Except it took forever to get to the confessional scene, let alone to get past it, because almost two weeks ago I started an 8-day block at work. Something like that is never ideal to begin with, but for reasons I'm not even sure of I've lately had very little patience with one particular coworker, and so days that otherwise weren't demanding physically or mentally left me more exhausted than they should have.

I continued to write, but only a couple sentences here, a few paragraphs at most there.

Then I made it to the fifth of eight days; I was over the hump and starting to look forward to not only the weekend but an entire week off (9 days, actually) thanks to some vacation time I had requested back at the start of the month.

This is when the heat went out in my house. There had already been a problem of it blasting cold air now and then for about a week prior, but now the system went out entirely because the motherboard had died. The company that installed the service said they would put in an order for a new motherboard and tentatively penciled in the following Wednesday (that is, tomorrow, the 29th) for installing it.

But if it arrived earlier they would schedule installation as soon as possible. So I began crossing my fingers that we would get work Thursday, Friday, Saturday...

Now we, the family members I live with and I, had to find a place to stay because we have no space heaters and because the temperature had been down in the teens and 20's for the past few days, including some new snowfall earlier in the week.

We got a room at a motel through Friday morning, which had the convenience of being close to where I work but the inconvenience of being subpar in many respects. No reason to go into details, but I did not get a good night's sleep any of the three nights there, which made the rest of my shifts at work a pain to deal with which only added to my mental state not being in the 'Write about frivolous fetish stuff' space.

Hell, our room didn't even have a chair at the writing desk, so when I did try to do some writing I had to sit on my bed and rest it in my lap. Not my preferred set-up.

Friday we moved hotels, because I didn't need to be close to work but the others would benefit being closer to their jobs, and also because, as I said, our first hotel left much to be desired so let's spend a bit more money for a nicer place.

So it seemed like things would be at least a step up as I started my vacation, but Saturday was not what I needed. Even though I was staying at the hotel all day, just reading and hopefully writing, I guess even that was too much to ask of myself. I tried to let myself sleep in, I didn't do anything physically strenuous, but all the stress and other problems that had been building up over a week and a half couldn't just vanish after one night's sleep.

Hell, just going to a restaurant next to the hotel ended up being so overstimulating because of the noise and multiple TV screens and my lunch ended up being too much food. I was just miserable in so many ways.

When I sat down at my laptop to write I ended up staring at what I had already written or screwing around online because I couldn't concentrate. I got a couple hundred words down, pushing forward on the confession scene, but that was it after multiple hours.

Sunday was better. I went to bed with a terrible headache, but managed to get enough sleep. Had a full breakfast, took my time showering and doing some reading, then I sat down to finish Expectations 2. It took hours, but I got it all done. First January exclusive was complete.

Except not really because, as I said up above, the story ended up being something different from what I thought it would be. Which isn't necessarily bad, I'm happy with what I got done, but as I kept thinking about it, even while writing it, I got the idea of changing this to be its own original story. Change the heroine's name, take out any references to subtle reality-warping or the like and make this a fresh story about a young woman getting fat and starting a polyamorous relationship with her friends.

So the story is not completely done just yet. But I'm almost there.

This brings us to Monday, yesterday, which I could not commit to writing because I had pre-existing plans, time-sensitive ones. So that day was a wash in that regard.

The good news, though, was that the motherboard for the heating system came in and an appointment to install it this morning was set up. Since my family members had decided to not book the hotel past Monday morning, to instead get some space heaters and tough it out at home, this was wonderful news.

Except not really. After managing to get just enough sleep last night I woke up this morning with the plan of showering and leaving to get breakfast and run some errands, coming home either to the heat working again or the technician being here and at work.

What happened instead was that as I was in the shower the power went out. Because a couple weeks ago the power company informed everyone in our neighborhood they were going to be doing some work on the lines and they would need to cut off power for about six hours. Including the entire window of our appointment to get our heating fixed. And this had been forgotten by my family member who had received the notice; understandable, given all the other shit we've been dealing with.

Could the heating company reschedule us for this afternoon, after the power was back on? No, but they could schedule us for tomorrow, which they have. 8 days after the heating went out entirely, and until it's actually back on I'm half-expecting something else to go wrong.

That is where I am now. I'm at home, no plans for a hotel tonight, working on my laptop instead of my PC because I'm paranoid about using any electronics after a week of frigid temperatures inside the house. I spent much of this morning and early afternoon running errands just to get out of the house, but once I'm done with this I'm going to start work on the second January exclusive, a story I have a much firmer outline of than Expectations 2, so it should be easier to stay on point and get a complete story out in one, no more than two sessions.

Revising Expectations 2 into a fresh story can wait until the heat is back on and I'm at my desk and PC proper. Right now I'm just trying to get first drafts of two more stories done as soon as possible.

(I haven't even gone into the problems with my hand, but that's mostly behind me so I won't bother.)

Needless to say none of this is how I wanted to spend my time off. While I've done what I can to make the best use of my time and resources the past few days, it's day four of my nine days off and I don't expect the status quo to be back until the exact middle of my break. This means I'm running up against the end of the month, just three days from today, to meet my exclusive obligations for January.

I won't mention the other stuff I wanted to get done this week, the reading and gaming and movies to watch, because none of that matters to any of you. But just to have things once again come down to the wire with my writing, it's so frustrating.

I imagine none of you like it, but I don't like it either. I want to make that clear. I'm not shirking my work here, I want to be more productive, but right now things have been coming at me from multiple directions and I'm trying to push myself to catch up without overwhelming myself.

If things don't work out and I don't get all three stories up before February arrives I apologize, but please understand there is a reason things turned out this way.