Well that was fast!

I'm so relieved guys, like you wouldn't believe. I was laid off from my last job at the beginning of January and was hired on at a new company in the same field at the end of February, making it just a brief 2 month stint without work. That's insane for me, like holy shit. Last time I suffered a layoff like this was waaay back in 2008 during the crash and I was without work for like 5 straight years back then. Being able to get rehired after two months feels like... BLISTERINGLY fast by comparison. It also means I get to keep most of my savings intact too, as I had saved up quite a lot of emergency funds leading up to the layoff.

Granted, this new job pays a bit less than my last one, so I'll have to be a little bit more frugal for the foreseeable future, but I can handle that. My biggest worry is the fact that it's a temp-to-hire job on a 90 day contract, so there's a distant chance I may not be taken on as a permanent worker at the end of the three months. But this particular agency structures their contracts basically like a probationary period with the intention of conversion at the end, rather than ones meant to be endlessly renewed with the teasing option of being made permanent that you have to jump through hoops for. When I interviewed at both the agency and the client company, I asked what the chances of conversion to perma-hire were and the answer I got was "Show up consistently on time and put in basic effort and you're a shoe-in." So I'm allowing myself the naive luxury of optimism about my chances. I did almost 6 years at Walmart and almost 5 years at my manufacturing job without any attendance problems, so just showing up is easy.

In celebration I allowed myself ONE single new art commission to mark the occasion. This time it'll be from one of my bucket list artists, lysergide, who I've always wanted to get a piece from! I was MASSIVELY LUCKY in that they opened up for new slots literally the night I got extended my new job offer, AND I somehow managed to catch their opening journal and get a slot in the roughly 30 minute window where they still had openings left. I dunno about you guys but I think amazing luck like this is a good omen for how the rest of this year will go for me. (I HOPE, PLEASE ARCEUS!)

And somehow, despite having spent A BIG portion of February on my job hunt, especially in attending job fairs, UI meetings, and job interviews, I STILL managed to somehow be successful in my writing too! I don't even know how I managed to pull this off, I guess the burnout just didn't come this year. Thank Arceus for that.

FEBRUARY 2026 WRITING SUMMARY

Well, this was certainly a helluva month! Eventful, but exhausting. I got a shitload done, even if there's not a huge amount of check marks here.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
✔️ -Editing of The River in the Valley - Chunk 4: FINISHED! Edited 14,911 total words, adding 424 new words in the process!
❌ -Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6: Wrote 10,270 new words!
❌ -Editing of Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6: Edited 0 words
✔️ -Shanelios in Silver (Comm for DredfulArtist): FINISHED! Wrote 16,907 new words!
❌ -Editing of Shanelios in Silver: Edited 0 words

-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
✔️ -Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 8: Wrote 6,955 new words on a goal of any
❌ -Untitled Gift Story for AuroraLatios: Wrote 0 words
✔️ -Editing of Crossing of the Paths - Multiple chunks: Edited out mistakes across multiple already published chunks, adding 44 new words in the process
✔️ -Editing of Kimíl's New Look: FINISHED! Edited 14,262 words, adding 273 new words in the process!

✔️ -TOTAL WORDS WRITTEN IN FEBRUARY 2026: 34,873 words
❌ -TOTAL WORDS EDITED IN FEBRUARY 2026: 29,173 words

Huh, not bad! Maybe I didn't manage to fully finish everything I set out to, but I got a TON of total words banged out. Mutagen Origins Chunk 6 contains a HUGE turning point for that story, so even though I already surpassed the expected wordcount for the chunk I'm not technically done with it yet. The gravity of the events taking place in that chunk has caused its wordcount to balloon a little bit, heh. And speaking of Ballooning wordcounts, Shanelios in Silver turned out to be double the wordcount that Dredfulartist paid for, but honestly I don't mind. He was very patient with how long he had to wait in the queue before I finally started working on it, so I don't mind giving him a bunch of bonus words. Especially since it turned out HELLA fun to write. I ended up making it a direct sequel to Tellurium Chains, so I took special pleasure in showing Lilith's hellish flight after the end of that story. I still need to edit it, but Dredful has had a shitload of issues spring up in his own personal life too and needs time. I don't mind waiting though, I waited patiently for Kimil to get her edit requests in too after all.

Speaking of Kimil's story too, I got the final changes in from her this month too. They weren't difficult, I just had to tweak some names. This required me to go through the whole thing again to make the changes, hence why I'm counting the entire story as words edited again even though some might consider it double dipping after I counted them in a past edit count. I think this is very fair, especially since I ended up doing a few more grammatical tweaks that added new words anyway. I also took the time this month to clear out a long backlog of planned edits to various parts of COTP too, which you can see by the "Multiple chunks" entry in my secondaries. My friend ZeldaTheSwordsman has been reading the entirety of COTP off and on for months and leaving me extremely useful comments. (Shout out to you, thanks!) He often left genuinely positive and handy bits of critique in those comments that I had filed away in my Notes files for the story and not gotten around to actually implementing until this month. I got every single one of his suggestions incorporated into the fic now, and I think the story is better for it.

So, with all that done, let's calculate our year-on progress! We beat the monthly quota of 29,167 words by a beefy total of 5,706 words! Adding that onto the 13,947 word surplus from January gives us a beautiful new total surplus of 19,653 words as of this month! Goddamn, talk about a rip-roaring good start for the year now. I have no idea how I have managed to pull this off. Usually the first couple of months of the year are so damn rough on me, and unemployment has been so fucking stressful too. I guess the years and years of practice and hard work are really paying off. It's especially nice seeing me managing to do so well at keeping up on the edits so far this year too. AND balancing my output so evenly between personal work and comms. This may be my most balanced year so far. Let's see if I can keep up the momentum into March, shall we?

MARCH 2026 WRITING GOALS

So this one ought to be easy to predict! I have more than half a COTP chunk done and a Mutagen chunk that's like 80% done, so Imma prioritize finish them along with starting AuroraLatios's story.

-PRIMARY OBJECTIVES-
-Untitled Gift Story for AuroraLatios: Expected 4,500 total words
-Editing of Untitled Gift Story for AuroraLatios: Expected 4,500 words to edit
-Editing of Shanelios in Silver: 22,805 total words to edit
-Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6: ANY amount of words to finish out the chunk. Maybe 3,000 words left? Rough guesstimate.
-Editing of Mutagen Origins - Chunk 6: Expected 20,000 total words to edit


-SECONDARY OBJECTIVES-
-Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 8: ANY amount of words to finish out the chunk. Maybe 15,000 words left? Rough guesstimate.
-Editing of Crossing of the Paths - Book 2: Darkness & Light - Chunk 8: Expected 40,000 total words to edit
-ROULETTE SPIN SLOT!!!: ANY words!

Total Expected Writing Wordcount for March 2026: 30,417-40,000 words
Total Expected Editing Wordcount for March 2026: 47,305-87,305 words

Yeah this is an interesting set of goals. I actually HAD to include a Roulette Spin Slot here, since the total expected words before that didn't reach the 30,417 stretch goal threshold for the month. I am SORTA feeling more Blightwrath this month, but the comms/gifts and Mutagen are gonna come first. We'll see how I feel once I get those done. The editing goals are a bit ambitious too, but the upper end relies on me finishing the next COTP chunk this month and that MIGHT not happen, depending on my mood, hence it being in the secondaries.

The one potential hiccup I predict MIGHT hit me this month is a slowdown caused by stress from getting acclimated to my new job. By now I've already told y'all that I'm on the autism spectrum, and one of the struggles of my brain's unique blend of neurospiciness is a difficulty in handling changes to comfortable life routines. I can think of very little that is more disruptive to routine than learning an entirely new job. I start next week (as of this posting) so ideally I'll be able to spend the first half of the month acclimating to my new job and then the second half relaxing and getting back into writing once I've settled into a comfortable new routine. I'm just crossing my fingers that my new bosses and coworkers at this new job will be decent people and won't treat me like shit. I'm cautiously optimistic about it since my contact at the staffing agency bragged about how great the work environment is there and how hands-off management is there. I'll know by next weekend. Until then, wish me luck y'all! Next time I write one of these journal entries I'm sure I'll have plenty of news updates for you from the land of gainful employment once more!