Stackmas

or basically: I never do Nano bc why have structure when you can have chaos?

Photo by Our Life in Pixels on Unsplash

My very good friend, and constant enabler and cheerleader for all things writing,

Kayleigh Bohan

is doing Nano¹ this year. I am not. Never have. Nano however is not the only seasonal creative writing or visual challenge out there. Inktober just passed, which even has variation on the theme like Batober, or MerMay or Swordtember. There’s vlogmas on YouTube and Yuletide for fanfic. Sometimes there’s even Advent Calendar challenges out there in the wild world of the internet. But I’m not doing any of those because:

1. Nano require you to have internal motivation and structure! To essentially “finish” Nano you have to write 1,667 words a day. I haven’t done that since I was hopped up on Redbull and somehow wrote a 20k fanfic in one sitting back in the 2010s.

2. I don’t vlog even tho I think I could be really good at it. And by good, I mean, unintentionally hilarious.

3. Yuletide requires me to think about fandom and then write fic, which while not the taboo it used to be (the livejournal motto was basically: we don’t talk about fanfic), I don’t really have a fandom that sparks that anymore in the same way.

4. Advent calendar = too much pressure

So I’m gonna aim for Stackmas. But you may ask, what is Stackmas?

Good question. I don’t know. I just made it up.

A post a day? Ideally. About what? I’m not sure yet, but I think I have some time to think about it.

I don’t think they’ll be long posts, or at least not all of them will be. And I do think that unlike my normal way of just writing what’s on my mind, I will need to plan some posts out because like Kay has very wisely said:

Why tho?

Honestly, it was just one of wild ideas that comes to me, but I hope this will also help me create maybe a semi consistent habit around writing and this substack. People say it’s takes 14 days to create a habit and 90 days to maintain a routine. I don’t think this has ever applied to me. (I think it’s the anxiety or even ADHD that prevents my brain to because, lol, at 14 days? That’s the general time for my ADHD’s to jump from one hyper fixation to another.)

Of course, I can still do some things for a long time. Sometimes, I think I’ve cracked the code of habits and routines, but then something happens and I lose the code. The Matrix wins again. That habit/routine I thought was ingrained in me has suddenly fizzled away from my brain.

So challenges, usually self imposed, like Stackmas or my Star Trek binge² and Episode Hottie³ sketch project actually help me get through things. Sometimes these things take weeks, sometimes months. Sometimes I do give up on the challenge, and feel guilty about it. So I usually try finish my personal media challenges. To this day I haven’t managed to translate this into personal challenges outside media though, like exercise or sport or reading, but media? Well, it’s my problematic fave of coping mechanisms for the previously mentioned anxiety and ADHD.

As I’m writing thing, I’m wondering if there is already something like Stackmas out there for Substack. I’d love to know if anyone out there who comes across this post would like to share. Maybe prompt list like Inktober has… I guess I’ll have to look deeper into that, because defaulting to talking about media is easy peasy for me, but I want to create a more structured challenge for myself.

And maybe that’s why I’ve not committed to speaking or sharing my thoughts on media I watch yet. It’s maybe too easy for me to speak about, and man there’s so much media out there, that again, I feel I need to have a structure around it that isn’t me just live tweeting what I’m watching on Twitter (or you know, X).

So I have A Plan:

• weekday postings (sorry but weekends are not gonna happen)

• the daily weekday posting will be shorter than these (usually on) Wednesday posts.

• I might be using my Wednesday posts to import a couple posts I made a few years ago when I thought I’d have a Wordpress Blog. Not all of them bc some of them are part of a very very silly tv meme, but there are a couple I’m still pretty happy and proud of.

• content: TBD

1. National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days.

2. I really want to talk about this binge and why I started it, but there’s so much Star Trek and I have no clue where to start

3. Hottie of the Episode challenge aka HOT-E actually came about because of the Star Trek binge but I have yet to start it. Job hunting is tiring.