Post Mortem; Rogue Deck Ritual

The Open Novella Contest has been running on Wattpad for a number of years, but I only heard about it last April.

Starting in February and ending in April, the goal is to write a novella of 20-40k words, based off the prompts provided. There are word count goals to be met every month and winners selected through the three rounds, not just the end.

But ew, that’s wattpad!! you might be saying. Bros I so actually don’t care. It was a fun writing challenge with a supportive community.

Did I need to do it? Don’t I have two other short stories that became novellas? What happened to Cryptmother?

No, I didn’t need to.

Yeah, I really really thought I would have at least finished one of those by now.

She’s coming back soon I swear.

I wanted to do ONC because I was hoping the spirit of competition or whatever would carry me on through to a relatively quick finish. Maintaining the will to keep drafting something is hard. I thought it would motivate me, I thought I could do it with relative ease, and even if I didn’t, at least I would have some amount of a novella to finish, polish, and throw somewhere else.

The ONC prompts were organized into the genres that the facilitators thought would suit them. There were 104 prompts to choose from, they could be combined and changed so long as they were still recognizable.

The prompts I went with were 25. You’re not the shy, bookish girl who bumps into the star athlete and wins his heart. No, you’re his girlfriend - the blonde, confident cheerleader destine to be the cliche ex. But this time, you’re rewriting history and taking control of your story. and 67. A trading card game company creates real-life versions of their creatures. What started as fun and games quickly spirals into something far more dangerous.

25 grabbed me immediately as an excuse to write a villainess story and 67 let me pick at a deckbuilder litRPG. So,

First milestone, 2,000 words. Easy. Got it done in like 2 days, wound up writing 5k for the month.

Second milestone, 8,000 words. Harder because my laptop was in the shop, but I got it back and eeked out the 3k the day before the deadline.

Third milestone, 20,000 words. I had really thought I was going to write a ton more in March, but due to a series of rough days (and admittedly some totally avoidable distractions) I only managed to add 4k more words.

I don’t think like the way I set up the isekai aspect of things. I think since the villainess is who I was most interested in, I should have found a way to just write from her POV.

On the other hand, I do like the way the POV thing shook out. I think it became a pretty interesting power struggle in the short term and I did manage to “fix” it by the end.

Coming up with a TCG is hard. Naming cards is hard. Deciding what they do is hard. I think for something that was meant to be quick, that was too much decision making and I know I burnt myself out on it for a while, which contributed a lot to the April slump.

I don’t know how I feel about the other litRPG elements. Since it was based off otome games, the majority of mechanics in play were dialogue options and relationship bars, which I thought was interesting and haven’t seen done in quite this way before. The magic system was simple as hell, partially to combat the fact that I needed to pull a whole TCG system out of thin air, adding a complex magic system would have killed me right out the gate.

And the big thing with all these wish I would have fixeds... I don’t know if I want to fix it. I don’t know if I want to let anyone read it, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of ‘even if you don’t win or finish on time, at least you get a novella out of it that you can throw up on other places’.

As it stands right now it’s weird. I could use it as a prologue and continue the story, or I could just... not. And let it rot on my hard drive.

I really liked the three months with scaling word count goals and check ins. If I ever get around to the summer writing challenge I think about hosting, I will definitely try and do something similar.

If I had been smart, I would have timed it with one of the various camp NaNo-alikes, but I had really really thought I would be able to get it all done in March and work on a different project in April.

I used to be able to do 2,000 words a day comfortably. Through this, I am back up to around 750 comfortably, 1,500 if I push and take some days off after. It is slower than I like to be, but it is an improvement and I am happy to see that.

So! That happened!

This post mortem thing was nice, I have no idea if it was helpful to anyone but me, but it was helpful so... That’s where I’ve been.

Back to picking at Cryptmother and Feral Godmother

kthnxbai✨