22 / OCT / 2025
Progress on Vignettober
It's a Wednesday today, which means that I have to make an update besides Vignettober.
So I'm going to write about Vignettober.
Originally this was going to be posted two weeks ago, and it would have been all about the notebook I'm using to write my entries, as well as the pen I'm using this year vs. last year. The general gist of it was that the notebook I currently have has narrower margins than previous notebooks, and so I've switched pens from the 0.7mm Pilot G-2 07 to the 0.5mm uniball ROLLER. But then I got bogged down by the writing process, which was effectively just fluffing up the fact that the Roller works better in these slim margins than the G-2 07.
I will say this, though: Never buy Moleskine notebooks. My current notebook is an A5 LEUCHTTURM1917 with a hard cover, elastic band, numbered pages, a table of contents, stickers/labels for organization, two bookmarks, and datelines at the top of each page. This all cost me $23 as opposed to a line-ruled Moleskine notebook with none of these features at $35. It's a scam, don't fucking buy Moleskine.
With that said, time to talk about my actual thoughts on Vignettober...
While I've been working on The Valkyrie Program, I haven't had any dedicated method for getting things done. My workflow has been the amateurish nightmare that is "waiting for the motivation."
Never, ever do this. It gets nothing done.
It didn't help that an acquaintance of mine on the STEKI project is writing a webnovel of sorts with the goal being to publish 1-2 chapters every week. That right there is a dedicated workflow, even if it could lead to chapters being rushed. While I was sitting on an almost-finished chapter that had minimal editing to do before being rolled out, this guy ironed out the kinks in 6 chapters that had already been published and just needed some sprucing-up. Knowing this alone was enough to bog me down and make me feel like I wasn't doing enough. Which, let's be real, I really wasn't.
Then came October, a month I'd been looking forward to all year. It's always a fun month, what with the change of seasons and wearing of costumes and all that... but of course, what really had me excited was the return of Vignettober. I was ready to jump back into the practice of writing daily, and there was no better way to kickstart it than with a one-page-a-day writing exercise. 22 days into it, and I have to say I enjoy being back in the groove, and what's more I look forward to carrying on this habit once the month is over. A bulk of The Valkyrie Program's content was written during another writing challenge, after all; one where I had to write 10,000 words a week for a novel. It was for a Winter term in college, and since I had no other classes going on at the time, I had all the time in the world to crank things out. And by God, it was damn well worth it.
As far as Vignettober goes, I've been appreciating it most as a way to focus on ideas other than The Valkyrie Program. If you've been to the Recurring Elements page, then you'll know that a lot of my entries are based in their own worlds following their own characters. These are all settings that I've wanted to write about while working on The Valkyrie Program, but put on the backburner because I felt the need to place them lower on my priority list. So, in a sense, Vignettober has been a way to refresh my brain and let it wander about before going back to work on Priority #1... And if it ever thinks about having fun with The Valkyrie Program in the meantime, then it's free to go ahead and do that. There have already been a couple entries set in that world, and in 2024 I did use Vignettober as a way to draft things out ahead of time (see: Christian as a stand-in for both Kevin and Malik).
I've also been trying to get other people in on it, since I think that everyone has a creative nugget in them that needs to be smelted into something beautiful. Not many have bitten, but my favorite thus far is Antice's entry for "Murky". llillilll has also written some adorable fagslop (even if the syntax is obliterated by his ESL). I really hope he writes about his gay couple adopting some kid from a war-torn country.
In the meantime, I hope to keep the momentum going after October's over. If this all reads as something impromptu... well, that's because it is. Like I said, I had to get something onto the site besides another Vignettober entry.
{ END LOG }
