How did your writing go? I didn't keep track of how many individual chapters I wrote, but I worked on four stories this year - Doomed (ongoing), Pipe-weed Dreams (complete), the first Tolkienpunk Tale (complete), and 100 Candles for Halloween (complete). I didn't get to quite everything I wanted to do - I wanted to get another Tolkienpunk tale out, and I've had this outline for a game mode S&S story since 2023 - and not everything I wrote quite came out as I'd have liked (Doomed is going the way of Lois Lane's Night Out, despite initial intentions). But, hey. Got words down in fixed form. How did the rest of y'all do this year? Meet your writing goals? Try something new? Making plans for 2026?
Let's see Early in the year I finished the Sanakia Heroine route for Subjugation Tournament Then March to June was spend writing two dozen chapters for The AI knows, a branch I unfortunately abandoned. I was planning on finally continuing Sissy Slave and Catgirl Maids and made pretty decent headway there, before a real life emergency forced me to abandon my writing. Once things had settled down the spark was gone. The last three months or so were then spend preparing for my Harem Hotel season, which I finally started earlier that month and what should keep me busy for the forseeable future And of course, Marcie and Gina Reads remained a constant throughout the year, with the final review of the year still coming out. Pretty mixed year all in all, but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out.
It was... OK? Finished one shortish story that I'm decently happy with. Got 300 hours into a second but I ran out of writing time the last few months, so I had to abandon the effort about halfway through. I learned a valuable lesson though: I shouldn't write branching stories. I like going for depth, not breadth, and branching forces me off-track. As for 2026, I'll be busy for another few months, but then my schedule will open up again. I haven't thought about what I want to write yet, but I'm sure that by that time, something will come up!
My writing (and even my reading - need to get back to your 100 Candles, which I greatly enjoyed) has not gone well, between myriad interruptions, losses of data and the dreaded beast we call, "real life." I finished my branch of Monster Girl Sponsor in a rather pathetic fashion, after having to cobble together half-remembered plans and my other stories are in some kind of hellish limbo. I still write, little by little, every day, however, and I did manage to complete a SFW story on Royal Road. Here's to 2026.
I had a burst of motivation at some point. Started a couple stories that I went to post on AO3 and posted a bunch of stuff on CHYOA as well. But my motivation and energy come and go without any sort of logic or predictability. I've been stuck out of ideas for CHYOA chapters for a while now and the AO3 stuff is on a hiatus as well.
I published two game stories and had to shelve like six others without publishing them because they didn't have the sauce, but hey 1/4 isn't bad, right? Right.
Quite literally getting anything out this year is a win. No matter how much you published, it's more than 99% of the folks who just read and never create anything.
This happens to me all the time. No matter how good an idea for a story sounds in your head, you won't know if it's a banger until you're actually writing it. The best thing you can do is try to figure it out as early as possible, and not get too attached too soon. (And the same goes for reading, honestly. If you're a quarter of the way into a story, and it just hasn't grabbed you, just stop. Life is too short to hate your hobbies.)
