Something that I’ve been struggling with this year is motivation, especially in relation to writing.

It’s something that I have dealt with my entire adult life, since college anyway. There are times that I can write for days, weeks even, all sorts of different things. And then there are months that I just stare at a blank screen wondering why I even bothered getting my degree in Creative Writing, because I’m so zapped.

Even when I was working on Febuwhump, which was one of my most successful writing ventures since getting majorly back into writing fanfiction back in February 2021, there were days that I just didn’t even want to look at anything, or even think of writing. (And this, friends, is why I started working on my Febuwhump prompts in early January, after the prompt list dropped.)

But then I noticed something.

Because of my job search, I ended up checking my email a lot. And something that always gave me a real serotonin boost was seeing the daily kudo email from AO3. And I thought about it, and I came up with an idea.

But before we get to that, let me explain. Something Archive of Our Own does is once a day they email you a list of who gave “kudos” to your works. It lists each work separately, and it can sometimes be crazy to see almost 50 names next to one of my works. (Of course, nothing will ever beat the day I got 199 kudos for one work on the same day, and no I’m not joking, I have the screenshot to prove it, which I may post on TikTok one of these days just to freak out about…)

Anyway, I came up with this idea. If I wanted to get writing, I needed some motivation. So I made a spreadsheet using Google Sheets (so that I could look at it on my phone if need be). I’d include screenshots, but this isn’t a brag post. I’ll just try to be as detailed as possible.

On the top row, I made a column for every day in 2022. Each day is color coded by month, starting with the first to whatever is the last day. Along the left side is every work that is currently on AO3 that has received kudos this year. They are in alphabetical order. Any work published this year is color coded to the month it releases, mostly just so I can see how much writing I’m doing (or not, in the case of March and April). But the top row and column are frozen so that they can be seen while I’m scrolling.

Each day, I go through the email and input the previous day’s kudos, filling in any blank boxes with zeroes for calculation purposes. It looks kinda messy, but at the same time… it helps. (I also tally up each individual day’s kudos, but that’s for my planner, and I’m going to leave that for another discussion post.)

At the end of every month, I use a simple formula to see how many kudos each story received during the month, as well as which days were more popular. It’s always interesting. I also just see how well the works I’ve posted for a particular month did. I also copy the list from the main sheet and move it to its own sheet, so that I can hide the month on the main sheet and not have the file crash on me. It helps with organization too. Currently I can only see April on. On May 1st, I’ll transfer everything and then I’ll see May. But I’m not deleting anything. If I need/want to, I could expand all of the columns again and see them all.

For example, in January, I got over 200 kudos for new works posted, which I think is pretty good. That was spread out over eleven fics. In March, I got 42 kudos for the lone story that was published on March 1st. And in February… I almost cracked 2000 kudos for 28 works being posted. No, you read that right. February was absolutely my best month this year.

Like I said, this isn’t a brag post. But the numbers keep me motivated.

I’m planning on continuing this all year, right into the new year. I’m curious to see if my currently popular fics stay popular, or if others will sway into that popularity. It’s been interesting to watch. I know most people aren’t into breaking data down, but it’s kept my mind moving, and that’s always a plus.

Unless it comes up in passing, I’ll keep the numbers for this to myself until December. I’m curious to see just how much changes over the course of a year.

Until next time!