August word count: 11786
Year to date: 86151

Though a lighter month than last month in raw word count, it's felt like a very productive one. (The current project is two companion longfics, Harsh Light and Gentle Dark, set during FFXIV's Heavensward expansion, one from my character Ariane's POV and one from from the POV of Urianger, my favorite NPC in the game, who will be shipped with Ariane but not until later!) I pushed onward through Gentle Dark, the Urianger fic, and got its final chapters written, which I'm very happy about! This does not mean that the first drafts are completely done, as there are some interlude bits I still need to write and which I deliberately saved for last. I'm working on those now, and on getting the chapter breaks finalized. I'm planning on posting these fics concurrently, alternating chapters by week, so matching chapter counts would be ideal.

As September approached, I was thinking it would be my first year doing FFXIV Write, a daily prompt-based fic writing challenge that's been going for many years. I struggle with even the idea of writing and posting in a single day with minimal editing, but I figured it'd be a good challenge for exactly that reason. However, it was recently announced that FFXIV Write will be taking a hiatus this year, as one of the organizers recently had a baby (a good reason!) and needs the time off. Some fans have decided to undertake the challenge anyway using prompts from previous years, and some have made and shared prompt lists of their own.

Personally, I've taken it as a reason to just keep going on the current project. My hope is to get the drafts into my beta's hands sometime this month; I think that's a reasonable goal, but we'll see how it goes! Either way, it's so exciting to see completion approaching. While I've posted a few one-shots for FFXIV, most of my fic-writing energy for the past couple years has gone into this, and it'll be my first longfic for this fandom. I'm really excited to get it out there!