#I am going to finish this for the quaranthon SO HELP ME GOD

[kanerboo]

posting a little something for the 1988 quaranthon writing sprint! 

(mpreg, but sfw!)

"Hey," he says out loud to Jonny. "Can we stop by Whole Foods?"

"Sure," Jonny says agreeably. "You need something? If you're tired I can drop you home and head to Whole Foods on my own to get what you want."

"No, I just want to check something out."

"Let me guess," Jonny says, as he bypasses their usual turning towards Patrick's condo and keeps heading straight, towards the building where the Whole Foods is. "You want to look at an artichoke."

Patrick swings around to stare at him. "How the hell did you know that?"

Jonny just laughs. "I saw your face at the clinic when Dr. Liu said they were the size of artichokes. You were trying to figure out how big they'd be."

Dammit. Patrick has no idea how Jonny reads his thoughts on his face every single time. He's been doing it since they were rookies. "Okay, fine, yeah, but - no judgment, okay. I'm just curious."

"Why would I judge you for that?" Jonny asks, turning into the parking garage. "I'd judge you if you were like, I don't know, doing dumb shit and endangering yourself. Not for this."

"I don't do dumb shit," Patrick proclaims.

"Remember yesterday morning when you were looking for your phone for twenty minutes and went digging all over the condo, when you were holding it in your hand the whole time?"

"I have pregnancy brain, that doesn't count."

They're still bickering gently as they park the car and go into the Whole Foods; in a way, it's nice, Patrick thinks. It feels normal, like they're still living in the days when they were just rookies trying to save a franchise and all they did was push each other's buttons until they fell into bed together, like all of this - the babies, the marriage - never happened and they're being their usual chirping, fuckbuddy selves. Then he gives himself a little mental shake, because - he'd never wish that the babies didn't happen. That's the one thing he doesn't regret in all of this.

Jonny leads the way to the vegetable section, where they stroll down the aisle until Jonny stops. "There," he says, pointing, and Patrick follows his finger to a shelf of bright green artichokes. 

They look gross to him, like some kind of weird, stunted, mutated succulent - and taste gross too - but he picks one up and holds it up in his hand. It's actually bigger than he thought it would be - bigger than his fist, a little larger even than his spread open hand - and he can't help but marvel at the thought that, holy shit, there are two of these in his belly. His babies are this big right now. 

Jonny's picked up two artichokes, hefting them in his big palms. "Wow," he says, looking at them, and then he puts them right up against Patrick's bump and laughs. "Look at that."

Patrick looks down at the two artichokes Jonny's pressing up against his belly, and tries to imagine how they're fitting inside his bump, which is big, yeah, but doesn't look quite big enough to fit two of these. He puts the artichoke he's holding on top of Jonny's two, and says jokingly, "Imagine if I was having triplets."

Jonny starts laughing again, and after a moment, Patrick joins in. It's ridiculous how happy he is, standing in the middle of a Whole Foods, holding artichokes to his stomach and doubling over with laughter; but maybe having Jonny as the father of his children, being married to Jonny - maybe that's another thing he doesn't regret after all.

[saucerfulofsins]

Does keeping track of your writing like that motivate you or is that just for fun? I've tried spreadsheets but it doesn't do much for me. Your plot is pretty though, maybe I should try graphs. :D

Hey!

Honestly, spreadsheets only work for me when I use them in a very general sense (e.g. “these are the things I want to do today”). Personally, I get huge satisfaction out of crossing things off of “to do” lists and since I’m pretty chaotic/all over the place, it’s good to have something like that to hold on to. 

For writing, it really depends honestly. I use pacemaker for the quaranthon fic because I know from experience (two finished NaNoWriMos) that the combination of a deadline + needing to write a set amount of words per day motivates me. It kind of becomes like a little game to see if I can go past the set word count every day (which clearly I don’t) and to see if I can keep my daily writing streak going (pacemaker, the website I use to track my writing, has an indicator for this). And again, from finishing NaNo twice, I know that more productivity leads to even more? I tend to fall into a slop of doing nothing when I have nothing to do and I really need to stay busy to stay productive, so to say. E.g. during the final NaNo (...I mean this was 2013 but OK) I would write my daily WC and then work on ficlets after that because I still wanted to keep going? So, definitely not just for fun, but also definitely fun! (Whenever you update and keep your streak going you get little fireworks hahaha).

So basically, it motivates me to keep going but that is in part because of the way I work in general. It also doesn’t really work for academic work (I saw your post on your thesis sprint and oh my god that gave me such big anxiety wtf) because of all the research involved and because that process for me is quite different from fic. 

Regardless, though. Pacemaker allows you to track a variety of things including word counts, hours, pages, etc. For me it’s especially nice cause it me offers a very visual input which does work much better than simply writing down WC or even amount of pages. I can see how much I am above the daily count, and how much I am above my projected WC. That all depends on settings, too; you can customize so much to what you’re working on, which is part of why I think it’s a super neat program! 

Check it out here: https://www.pacemaker.press/

Hope that helps!