dukeenchiladas

Dear Future Duke,

What a dramatic post title, don't you think? Well, it is true at least. June was such a busy month for myself- I went to Pride, a wedding, and a convention for 3 of the 5 weekends, plus one of those weekends I worked my part-time job three closing shifts back-to-back (Saturday/Sunday/Monday). Additionally, I have two tutoring clients! I'll be done with one of them in a few weeks when the summer course finishes, but I'll have the other until mid-August due to the summer program I'm delivering.

At least it's decent money on the tutoring front. I make at least 20 an hour for the tutoring in any case, and only 16 when I work the part-time job. However, I get a lot more hours at the part-time job to help pay the bills. With me adjusting to my summer work schedule, I didn't realize just how busy I would be to be able to do my whole task list for the month. I probably did 50% of the list, and I only went to the gym once, at the start of the month. Technically I should've gone today, but I once again close today and tomorrow, with church service tomorrow morning. Maybe I can get to the gym before my tutoring sessions on Monday. Maybe I was supposed to have this update posted by yesterday, too.

I also celebrated the big 2-6, which means I'm now in the latter half of my twenties! After a quarter of a century of life, I'm definitely not where I thought I would be if you had asked 10, 15, 20, or even 25 year old Duke. I believe that a lot of reflection is in order- time to evaluate what's important to me and how to best achieve those. On the bright side: my TBR is very trimmed down now. I added The Bardess of Rhulon by Verna McKinnon, and I have several audiobooks on hold with the library. I might just bite the bullet and get the physical copies of them instead since it's such a long wait.

I will say, I'm not doing too bad on the writing front! I've written for both What Do You Fear? and The Mentor Games this past month, and I think I can finish The Mentor Games on-time for my posting schedule. As for What Do You Fear? I'm not too sure. I wrote a very fun scene a couple weeks back and would love to get back into the story sooner rather than later. Ideally, I can get back to Ozryn by the end of the month, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have more progress to share next time!

Dear Future Duke,

What a dramatic post title, don't you think? Well, it is true at least. June was such a busy month for myself- I went to Pride, a wedding, and a convention for 3 of the 5 weekends, plus one of those weekends I worked my part-time job three closing shifts back-to-back (Saturday/Sunday/Monday). Additionally, I have two tutoring clients! I'll be done with one of them in a few weeks when the summer course finishes, but I'll have the other until mid-August due to the summer program I'm delivering.

At least it's decent money on the tutoring front. I make at least 20 an hour for the tutoring in any case, and only 16 when I work the part-time job. However, I get a lot more hours at the part-time job to help pay the bills. With me adjusting to my summer work schedule, I didn't realize just how busy I would be to be able to do my whole task list for the month. I probably did 50% of the list, and I only went to the gym once, at the start of the month. Technically I should've gone today, but I once again close today and tomorrow, with church service tomorrow morning. Maybe I can get to the gym before my tutoring sessions on Monday. Maybe I was supposed to have this update posted by yesterday, too.

I also celebrated the big 2-6, which means I'm now in the latter half of my twenties! After a quarter of a century of life, I'm definitely not where I thought I would be if you had asked 10, 15, 20, or even 25 year old Duke. I believe that a lot of reflection is in order- time to evaluate what's important to me and how to best achieve those. On the bright side: my TBR is very trimmed down now. I added The Bardess of Rhulon by Verna McKinnon, and I have several audiobooks on hold with the library. I might just bite the bullet and get the physical copies of them instead since it's such a long wait.

I will say, I'm not doing too bad on the writing front! I've written for both What Do You Fear? and The Mentor Games this past month, and I think I can finish The Mentor Games on-time for my posting schedule. As for What Do You Fear? I'm not too sure. I wrote a very fun scene a couple weeks back and would love to get back into the story sooner rather than later. Ideally, I can get back to Ozryn by the end of the month, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have more progress to share next time!

Sincerely,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (07/05/2025):

Days 54/120
WIP 1 59,500/85,000

Dear Future Duke,

We've not really done anything this past week for writing. Life has been busy- this past weekend got away from us because of volunteering at a gaming convention, not to mention the computer issues- which are now resolved! (Maybe!)

Still at 42 days of writing this year, but I feel good about this upcoming week. Wednesday should be the day I finally get to make an AO3 account, and while I'm not nearly as far into my fanfic project as I wanted to be by now, I think if I push through around my schedule I can dig at it quick enough!

It's late now, so I'm off to bed- and to do some onboarding stuff for that new job I got!

Sincerely,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (05/05/2025):

Days 42/120
WIP 1 59,500/85,000

Dear Future Duke,

The dichotomy of life is such that no one can appreciate the happy things in life without also experiencing the sad things. This is a late update due to a very upsetting event that has happened in my life. My great aunt died on Saturday the 29th of March, 2025. She was 79, having just celebrated her birthday a few weeks earlier. While I know she's in a better place now, wherever that may be for us, this loss pains me unlike any I've experienced since the death of my grandfather. I hope that wherever they are, my aunt and grandfather are reunited with their parents. I know that their surviving siblings and the rest of our family will carry this sadness within ourselves until the day comes when we may get the opportunity to see them again.

With the sad news out of the way, I'm grateful to move onto happier news! Ozryn 1 has finally received all the planned scenes, and my current Betas are going through the whole story as I write this. Since I expect this process to be fairly lengthy, I am planning on doing zero rewrites to Ozryn 1 for the month of April. I will instead focus on outlining Ozryn 2, doing worldbuilding, and writing out some short stories I was inspired with. It won't be until at least May that I start editing and rewriting, pending Beta Reader feedback. That being said, the current end of Ozryn 1 does end on a cliffhanger since my original plan was to self-publish. However, I believe that if I rewrite the conclusion to set up for a sequel, I'd be able to query agents and become traditionally published. So I suppose I'll technically be doing a rewrite of the final scene before I get Beta Reader Feedback, though it's more of an alternate ending that will need to be Beta Read itself.

Sincerely,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (04/04/2025):

Days 30/120
WIP 1 59,500/85,000

Dear Future Duke,

We've made great strides this past week! Not only did we finish the Beta Reader prep for Act 1, but we also did the prep for Act 2! We haven't started on Act 3 yet, but I think we'll just look at a chapter or two a day for the next few days and see where we get. Our best friend gave us a preview at his critiques (we sent him advanced PDFs of both Acts and he's read at least Act 1 twice so far!) and they're pretty reasonable, and my eyes were opened to some possibilities for Ozryn's late draft stage. But I cannot emphasize this enough- we are NOT touching Acts 1 or 2 again UNTIL we finish Act 3's prep.

We also attended another writing workshop, this time for figurative language and we continued the horror story we started last month! I'm pretty excited how it turned out, and we got some nice feedback in-workshop for it, so I think I'll be posting that soon! I won't lie, I might actually try writing out more for that story once I get through Act 3 and am waiting for Beta Reader responses to come in. I might also start outlining Ozryn 2 so I can be prepared for drafting. I know my current plan is to have a 3-year cycle for books I want to write and release, but if I find the time, energy, and money to advance that schedule, then why not do it? Imagine if I actually finished drafting Ozryn 2 this year WHILE working on the edits and release of Ozryn 1, then next year I could at least edit (and maybe release) Ozryn 2 while outlining (and maybe drafting) Ozryn 3!

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this plan goes for Ozryn 1 first!

Sincerely,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (03/20/2025):

Days 22/120
WIP 1 55,900/85,000

Dear Future Duke,

I know you're feeling behind, and I know this is a day late, but on the bright side there isn't any real progress to report on anyways!

Look, I can't help it that our sink FELL INTO OUR COUNTER last Thursday. It took like 5 days to fix it up to be functional- that's tough to do other work on top of learning basic plumbing.

Anyways, I think we can try just writing writing everyday this next week, even if it isn't for Ozryn. Like that scary story we started! Anyways, keep up the great work- you've got this!

Love,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (03/06/2025):

Days 15/120
Words 10,700/40,000
WIP 1 54,900/85,000

Dear Future Duke,

We've made new progress at least. I think we've written two or three times and we're at over 54k! We've added 10k in the last several weeks alone! I know we started with 46 or so, but we did have to cut a fair bit. I'm happy with how it's going though. We're also down to very few brackets, which means we'll be able to focus on Act III soon.

The plan is to finish the initial rewrites of Act II, then re-read Acts I and II as they are and add NEW brackets! With what I have planned after that, I'll be able to really tackle the Act III rewrites, hopefully without any new brackets.

Then, I'll fill out the brackets for Acts I and II, and THEN- we finally get to enlist Beta Readers! I'm sure we have at least a few friends who can read for us. We'll probably advertise on reddit or actually use the GYWO Discord server for once.

February goals are going well, too! Your to-do list is shrinking by the day now that I'm gamifying it. I simply take the list, number a handful of tasks 1-6 or 1-8 or something and then roll the appropriate die! With this, we've been able to get through 2/3 of Holy Rollers, read an article aimed at your dissertation, and even applied to a couple of new jobs. Of course we've also written a couple thousand new words for the WIP as well, but I figure that goes without saying.

By the way, you probably should get to work on the March to-do list for March Duke to accomplish. I suggest getting through whatever brackets you add to Act I on your read-through. Also maybe advertising for Beta Readers (assuming you make good progress!)

Whatever you decide to accomplish in March, I know you'll do it well. Good job, keep it up, I'm so proud of you and me and all of your past selves in what we're doing here.

Sincerely,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (02/20/2025):

Days 12/120
Words 10,100/40,000
WIP 1 54,300/85,000

Dear Future Duke,

You're making some good headway! You've now either written or done work directly related to your WIPs 5 days since the start of the new year! That means you've added 2,500 words to WIP 1 so far- only another thousand to go for the month's mini goal! Unfortunately it's not exactly a net gain, since a good chunk of stuff had to be deleted. But you've written 2,500 words that absolutely matter and are relevant to the story!

Keep up the good work, I am so proud of you and I'm rooting for you everyday! Talk to you next week!

Sincerely,
Past Duke

Duke's Personal Progress Tracker (01/23/2025):

Days 5/120
Words 2,500/40,000
WIP 1 47,900/85,000

Hi! My name is Duke and this is my second journal due to a typo in the name of my first journal I've decided to have two ongoing projects regarding my writing for this year, and I'm hoping that my pledge will assist me in sticking to my overall writing goals for 2025!

My first goal is to add about 40,000 words to my existing manuscript. It's an urban fantasy mystery novel set in the mid-2030s. The protagonist is an AMAB enby gay, like myself, and discovers that they are a witch on their 21st birthday. While I've written the story from point A to point Z, it currently sits at around 46,000 words, but I want to reach 85,000 total before I actually edit.

My second goal is to fully outline the sequel to this story and to be able to start drafting it next year at the latest. In fact, I just finished the first part of the 27 chapter beat outline and aim to finish the last two acts' outlines by the end of January.

To answer some questions ahead of time:
1) This is a series of 5 planned novels. The first two take place before the last three, though the adventures for the last three will have varying overlap along the story's overall timeline since they'll be from the points of view of the secondary protagonists.

2) The series name is The Ozryn Files and focuses on new adult Zakary "Zak" Carmine-Reid and their two friends: Terrane di Skai and Mika Vogt. The first three books of Ozryn will follow Zak's perspective solely. Book 4 will follow Terrane's perspective, and book 5 will follow Mika's.

3) The series is intended to be read with books 1 and 2 being first, and in that order, with the remaining three being read at the reader's discretion once all books are published.

4) I take writing advice seriously from few people, mainly Creative Writing students who lead workshops through my university, and author of The Savior's Series Jenna Moreci. Please do not offer writing advice to me without prior solicitation.

5) I have Autism Spectrum Disorder and may come across as mean or blunt, but it's either because I didn't have a filter for the situation and/or didn't know that I needed such a filter.