rowyn

I actually read a book! This is 100% not the book I would've expected to pick up and read in a weekend, yet Here We Are.

Marie Kondo is a Japanese decluttering consultant, and she's recently become much more visible after doing a Netflix reality show. But I first heard about her a couple of years ago from my friend Ciel on Twitter/Mastodon; Ciel has mentioned using the KonMari method for some time now. He remarked that a lot of the book is Marie saying "I did [X] once [or many times]! It turned out to be a terrible idea. Don't do that yourself." This approach -- that frankness in speaking of one's own missteps along the path -- sounded endearing and I decided to put the book on reserve at the library.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a surprisingly fun, quick read. Props to the author and her translator for taking the boring topic of "how to make your home a better place to live" and making it entertaining.

It's also way more persuasive than I expected. What makes the book special to me is less its tips on process and more "Marie Kondo will now give you permission to get rid of all that stuff you own and don't like and don't use but feel guilty about throwing away." Halfway through the book, I started laundry. As soon as my clothes were clean, I put the book down to dump the clean laundry, all the clothing from my drawers, and a chunk of clothes from my closet onto the couch and proceeded to weed out two-thirds of it. Felt great!

I don't know if I will have my life changed by this book -- it's a lot of stuff to go through, and a lot of the things in my house are Lut's and not mine. One of the charming things about the book, however, is the way it tells you to handle living with other people. "Don't worry about their things. Just take care of your own stuff and your own possessions. That's probably the real source of your clutter-related anxiety anyway." So I can separate out what's mine and go through it and if the place is still cluttered afterwards, that's okay.

Also, it made me realize that almost all the stuff in the bedroom is mine. Trask has his side of the headboard and a few things stored under the bed, but almost everything in their is mine to declutter. MWAHAHA.

If nothing else, I will have 3 fewer bags full of clothing I don't like and don't wear.

Anyway, fun book, recommended if you have a cluttered home and wish you didn't. Especially if you feel guilty for throwing things out. MARIE KONDO WILL ABSOLVE YOUR GUILT. It's great.

I started reading romance novels in the 80s. I was a voracious reader, and exhausted the little branch library's allotment of the genre quickly. I could only afford to buy so many new books, so I bought a lot of used books. The used book store charged half cover price, which made 60s and 70s romances cheap.

After a couple dozen, I stopped reading 60s and 70s romances because even teenage me was appalled by the rampant misogyny in them. These were books for woman, by women, starring women characters, and YET. The female protagonists were often caricatures: helpless creatures, with no ambitions beyond love, marriage, and children.

I was, in one way, fascinated by this, because I read much older books that portrayed women in a far more attractive light. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte gave me independent, confident, interesting women. Why were 60s romances so bad at this?

While I recognized the shallowness of the characters early on, it took much, much longer for me to realize how unhealthy many of the relationships were. It wasn't uncommon to read a romance in which the male protagonist outright raped the female protagonist. I don't mean "this is kind of rapey because she's uncomfortable about having sex" but "woman is saying "no" over and over again while ineffectually trying to push him away, and man ignores her protests and rapes her".

The Flame and the Flower was a 1972 romance showcasing this trope on the lame excuse that the man thought she was a prostitute and I guess prostitutes don't get consent? And this was one of the romances I liked as a teen. I read my favorite parts over and over again.

By the 2000s, most romances had gone from "rape is a good way to get the protagonists in bed because it lets you have your pure female character and sex too" to "howabout we portray the kind of healthy relationships we'd like to be in, instead?"

I love healthy romances. I write about characters who are careful with one another, who consider issues of power and consent, who have an unselfish love for one another. They do not seek to gratify their own desires without regard for the object thereof. Even in Frost and Desire, I cling to that overall tone, despite having a scene of mind control and rape. This trend delights me.

But I feel as if romance is now held to a different standard from every other genre. We don't just say "Wow, that relationship in The Flame and the Flower is messed up": we say "This book is objectively bad because the relationship is unhealthy". When teens say they love TWILIGHT, we fret that they plan to get into abusive relationships.

People, I loved The Flame and the Flower and A Woman Without Lies and I've never been in anything close to an abusive relationship, or thought that abusive relationships were a good idea. I loved reading books about these warped relationships that somehow magically turned out for the best because they were fun, not because they were my role model.

We don't wonder if people who love horror are going to become serial killers, or expect that people who read mysteries will become either cops or murderers. We don't watch Game of Thrones because we long for a return to the War of the Roses.

But romances, ah, if they show unhealthy behaviors, it has to be because the author and the readers endorse those behaviors in the real world.

As I built my playlist of dysfunctional love songs for Frost, I found it freeing to realize just how much music glorified terrible relationships. Music is expected to cover the full spectrum of relationships, from happy to broken to dysfunctional. Music is cathartic, not a model of the ideal.

I came up with the plot for Frost in 2015, and I put off writing it for three years in part because "people will assume I think this is a romantic ideal".

And I finally decided to write my messy hurt/comfort problematic romance anyway.

Because yes, it's great that so many romance novels now model strong, healthy relationships.

But fantasies that would make for bad realities have their place, too.

 For anyone worried that I might die of rabies because I didn't get the vaccine: I saw the cat who bit me last night. He's still alive (and still feeling kind of bitey, though he did not bite me). Rabies is only contagious after symptoms show, and dogs and cats will die of it within ten days of symptoms showing. It's been over two weeks. I'm safe. n.n

2018 was the year that I started to look seriously into buying ads for my books.

Book promotion is notoriously difficult. Most books sell based on word of mouth, or recommendations through various media, rather than by advertising. Because the product is inexpensive and even consumers who want it are generally only going to buy one copy, no publisher can afford to pay a premium for individual views or clicks.

Most advertising channels for books are Very Bad at selling books. There are many venues, most of which have negligible impact on sales. Back in 2017, I tried buying a Bargain Booksy ad for Silver Scales in the week after its release, and it had zero impact: I sold three copies the day before the ad, and three copies the day of the ad. That ad was for the book at its full price ($4.99). Bargain Booksy might be more effective at a lower pricepoint, but based on other authors' experiences, they are unlikely to be profitable. In point of fact, I unsubscribed from all but Bargain Booksy's "LGBT" category for my own reading, because Bargain Booksy accepts unlimited numbers of promotions per day and its daily emails are overwhelming: twenty or more fantasy novels in one email. I am not surprised it doesn't work.

I might try E-reader News Today at some point: they at least had a noticeable impact on sales for one author's ad, although not nearly enough to cover the cost of the ad.

The gold standard of book advertising -- the outlet most likely (though not guaranteed!) to turn a profit -- is Bookbub. Bookbub is a discount email newsletter. Readers sign up for the categories they want to see and pick whether they want to get emails daily, weekly, or not at all. (You can look at the site to see what's discounted in your genres instead.) Bookbub runs a single deal each day in each category, for a book priced between $0.00 and $2.99. Publishers pay for slots, with slots being cheaper the lower the price point they pay.

Because Bookbub is a discount-books outlet, much of the profit in advertising through them relies on follow-on sales. The book you advertise is a loss leader, and other books in the series or your catalog (hopefully) make up the difference.

Since Bookbub is committed to "one slot per genre per day", advertising space in their newsletter is limited. They turn down a lot of books: 80% is their advertised standard. I've applied twenty-three times for slots. All of my submissions have been for:

• One book (you can also discount a box set)
• Sale price of $0.99
• Both US & International (you can pick one or the other or both).
• Genre: either "fantasy" or "LGBT".

None of my books have been selected for a US Bookbub, but four of them were selected for international-only Bookbubs. In order:

• July: Silver Scales (fantasy, $188)
• October: Demon's Lure (fantasy, $188)
• November: The Moon Etherium (fantasy, $188)
• December: The Sun Etherium (LGBT, $52)

Conventional wisdom holds that you run discounts only on the first book in a series. Once people buy the first book, if they like it, they'll pay full price for the others. Some publishers make an exception for romance novels, because romance readers understand that a romance "series" can generally be read in any order and that each book is a standalone story. Moreover, since most ad requests are rejected, being able to submit more books than just the first in a series is helpful in getting your books out there.

That was partly my logic in submitting The Sun Etherium for a promotion. The other part is that The Sun Etherium is the queerest of my books: it features two genderfluid protagonists, both of whom most often present as male: one cannot mistake this for a heterosexual pairing. Part of me wanted to submit The Moon Etherium in the LGBT+ category, but The Moon Etherium is an M/F fantasy romance. Yes, the female protagonist is bisexual, and yes, the setting presents gender as a spectrum where individuals determine for themselves where they belong, not a binary that people are born into. But a 40-word blurb for The Moon Etherium is not going to capture why a reader looking for an LGBT book will want to pick this up.

Speaking of which: Bookbub writes its own blurbs for every book featured in one of its emails. These are short and punchy, and based on Bookbub's market research of what sells books.

These are the Bookbub blurbs for my ads:

Silver Scales: To escape the legions of hell, Sir Damon Kildare has to succeed in a seemingly impossible quest. But Zenobia, a dragon-slayer’s daughter, will stop at nothing to find the key to saving his soul…

Demon's Lure: When Sunrise agrees to help a team of hunters catch a demon, she thinks it will be simple. But the demon is nothing like she expects — and neither is the future that awaits her… An enchanting fantasy!

The Moon Etherium: On a quest to secure his father’s freedom from slavery, Prince Mirohirokon enlists Ardent’s assistance. Bound by duty, she agrees to help and soon the duo is swept up in betrayal and intrigue — with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The Sun Etherium: Fey immortal Jino, ruler of the Sun Etherium, needs to make sure this year’s Founder’s Festival is a success. But will his trysts at a new club, coupled with his deepening desire for ex-prince consort Kireki, risk everything he’s worked for?

You'll note that The Moon Etherium's blurb doesn't even mention the romance -- it's an ad in the "fantasy" genre, so Bookbub is pitching its fantasy/intrigue plot.

Also, I was totally guessing when I said Bookbub's blurbs were 40 words, but looks like that is around their max length!

Anyway:

Most of Bookbub's subscribers are in the US. The other countries where they have a presence are the UK, Australia, India, and Canada. Their international-only ads usually, but not necessarily, include all four of those countries. In my case, I got all four countries for each promo.

Unit sales from each promo are a little squidgy, because some sales are clearly not from Bookbub and probably unrelated to the promo ("this was an international-only Bookbub and these were US sales"). Others can't be Bookbub but are probably Bookbub-influenced ("Demon's Lure is selling twice as well at its regular price, two weeks after the Bookbub, than it was before the promo.") And whether or not follow-on sales are due to the Bookbub is purely guesswork. So I am giving exact unit numbers, but honestly, they are guesstimates.

Translating unit sales into dollars is even squidgier, because these are international sales. The actual price was 0.99 in the local currency (or 65 rupees for India, but I only had a few sales in India so those have a negligible impact.) Amazon then gives 35% of that 0.99 of local currency to me, converted to US dollars, two months later, bundled with all my book sales in that market. Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble give me between 60%, via Draft2Digital. And while D2D's markets are negligible for my non-promotional sales, they are significant during promos and releases. Kobo is especially a big market for an international Bookbub: in Canada, Kobo is a much stronger competitor with Amazon. The upshot is that a single unit sale could net me as little as US $0.22 (Australian dollars, via Amazon) or as much as US $0.63 (UK sale via Draft2Digital). That is based on conversion rates back in December; it will have changed again by now, and will probably be different by the time I am actually paid. It is theoretically possible to parse out exactly how much each sale made and add it all up, but I have not done so.

July
Silver Scales: 210
Golden Coils: 27
This was a modest failure. I lost probably $30-$40 net on this promotion. I am fine with this: it moved a couple hundred books into people's e-readers and bumped my visibility a touch. I am willing to assume I got some long-term vigorish from this.

October
Demon's Lure: 382
Angel's Sigil: 30
This was a definite success. The sales of Angel's Sigil are especially hard to calculate, because Angel's Sigil had only been out a couple of months and was still benefiting from its new-release bump. But percentage-wise, my guess is that the immediate sell-through on Lure was definitely worse than Scales. Nonetheless, very happy with this promotion and would be glad to buy a US Bookbub for this book.

November
The Moon Etherium: 110
The Sun Etherium: 2
This was just abysmal. Few sales and almost no sell-through. Big money loser.

December
The Sun Etherium: 83
The Moon Etherium: 12
In case you are looking at this and thinking "oog, that's even worse than The Moon Etherium": no, actually this is the best ROI of all four promotions. TSE was promoted in the LGBT category. Bookbub has many fewer LGBT readers than fantasy readers, and the ads are correspondingly cheaper. This ad was only $52, as compared to $188 for the other three. Moreover, the sell-through was unexpectedly good. 15% of readers either looked at the blurb for TSE and decided immediately that they wanted the first book too, or they chewed through TSE in under a day and then bought TME. Last: this promotion was on 12/31, so it's likely that a few more sales will still trickle in. So although this was comparatively low-volume, I'm excited about the possibilities.

~

The disparity in the performance of the Etherium novels in the fantasy vs LGBT categories makes it clear that I want to market these books as LGBT+. Which is how I've always wanted to market them, to be fair. On the other hand, marketing The Sun Etherium as LGBT+ and hoping people will then pick up The Moon Etherium is not, in my opinion, ideal. For one thing, just the blurb for The Sun Etherium has spoilers for The Moon Etherium. But The Moon Etherium is, as previously mentioned, difficult to position as an LGBT+ book.

So the logical solution to this problem is to write an EXTREMELY GAY prequel to The Moon Etherium, and then market THAT as the first book in the series. n_n

~

Overall, Bookbub works much better as a marketing outlet if you have several books in a single series. I haven't really seen an impact on sales of my other series based on a Bookbub promo. So because I only have two books in each series, I've lost a little money, net, on the four promotions I've bought so far. If I were promoting the first book in a series with four or more installments, it'd be much more clearly profitable. The good news is, I'm finally working on the third book in a series! The bad news is, it's a third Etherium book, and nothwithstanding the successful promo on The Sun Etherium, the Etherium books are my worst-selling series.

I still haven't landed a US Bookbub, and the US Bookbubs have a much bigger impact on sales than the international ones (and are correspondingly more expensive -- they cost about four times as much.) I am still submitting to Bookbub for one of these. Bookbub won't run an ad for the same book in the same market more often than every six months, so most of my catalog doesn't qualify for another international Bookbub yet. Except A Rational Arrangement; I am amused that I still haven't gotten a promo for it, since it's my most-reviewed and most-sold book.

Those who've been following my blog since I first released A Rational Arrangement may have noticed that none of the promotions reach the heights of my first couple of months of ARA's release. Alas, ARA remains an outlier in my catalog. ARA has received no promotions, and has sold three times as many copies as anything else I've written since. On the other hand, outside of promotions and recent releases, all of my books are selling 10 or fewer copies a month at this stage: it's not as if ARA is continuing to outsell the rest of my catalog now. It just has a big head start from 2015-2016. Arguably, I should be writing more books set in Paradise. I have not been inspired to write more books in Paradise, however. Also, Further Arrangements was not a stand out in terms of sales the way ARA is, and even ARA did not make full-time-writing-income money. Hence, I am continuing to write books based on my own interests rather than being strongly influenced by "what's selling."

My general experience with Bookbub has been positive: it sells books and it's low effort on my part. Yes, I have to submit a bunch of books for every one they accept, but the submission form only takes a couple of minutes to complete. There are other advertising options I should try, especially since Bookbub is so exclusive. But since Bookbub is the industry leader and even it has not been consistently profitable, I am still at the stage where focusing most of my effort on "write more books" feels right. Advertising one book will have a better ROI when I have more books to sell after new readers finish that first one.

This is just me whinging like the old woman that I am about my physical complaints.

( You've been warned. )

"Good work, large friend! Gimme one!"



I pronounced this drawing done a few days ago. This is the first time I've done a black and white digital picture and then converted the b&w to color. (There is a specific tool that basically changed the color without changing the values. So you select the areas/layers that have the same color -- "these are all brown skin" -- and just change them, and it keeps all the shading.) I am not perfectly happy with the process. I think I am supposed to do some touch-up work to make it look better. This probably requires looking at tutorials or something. I find tutorials on digital art a bit grating because they're all designed around Photopaint and while I have two art programs and they can do most of the things Photopaint can, they do not do them in the same way so spending five minutes watching someone dig through submenus on Photopaint is not as helpful as I'd like.

For this particular picture, however, I'm calling it here. I didn't have a purpose in mind for it anyway. It's just "I saw this pose on a Senshistock (a stock/pose reference account) and went OMIGOSH SO CUTE I WANT TO DRAW THIS."

Now I've spent 15 hours drawing it and I feel like I should come up with personalities for the characters and write a story for them. I mean, I already have a cover, that's the hard part, right?

It kind of is, actually.

I don't think I like this picture enough to make it a book cover though. Even if there is plenty of room at the bottom to lay out the title and author name.

I am a little tempted to go back to one of my early pictures of Miro and Ardent and try coloring it in this fashion, though. Except the layout on my favorite wouldn't make a particularly good book cover. I feel like, while my rendering skills are weak, my framing skills are [File Not Found]. I can't figure out how to frame things in a dynamic, effective way. Art. So hard.

I walked to work on Monday. This was the first time in months that I did so. I biked a lot in the summer and fall, and even several times in November. But otherwise, I've been driving. On Monday, it was around 30 F, with a dusting of snow: enough to frost the ground and cars, but not enough to stick to the roads. I could've biked, but decided to give walking a shot instead. I walked a little more than usual, in order to hit a couple of pokestops that are a half-block or a block out of the way each. I soon realized why I haven't been walking to work: after buying the car and especially after getting my new no-physical-keyboard phone, I've been in the habit of bringing my tablet computer to work, so I can write using it during lunch and breaks. Carrying a messenger bag with a tablet computer in it is a lot more annoying than just carrying a lunch bag. If I try walking to work again, I will probably put my tablet and lunch into a backpack or a grocery tote instead of the messenger bag. The messenger bag has a lot of compartments and is heavy even empty. Also, like a big purse, it tends to accrete Stuff because it's big enough to hold Stuff. I do not need to cart all of it to work, though.

That aside, the walk was fine. When I got to work, one of my coworkers let me in and whispered, shocked: "why are you walking? Is something wrong with your car??"
Me: "Oh, I haven't been exercising as much as I used to and figured the walk would be good."
Coworker: "Oh. But it's too cold to walk! Let me know when you're leaving, I'll drive you home."
Me: "No really it's fine, I chose to walk. Thank you for the offer!"

I am still amused by how people react to the idea of going somewhere on foot, even when the distance is pretty short.

Ironically, while I don't walk to work, I've been walking outside for exercise anyway. If I notice that one of the two pokegyms near work has a raid I can solo and it's after 11AM, I take my lunch break and use it to walk over to the gym and do the raid, and hit any other pokestops I have time for. After work, I go to a tiny park near the bank, which has a pokestop and a pokegym and a teensy exercise track.

The walking path is ridiculously small. It's like 1/7th of a mile for the entire loop. I walk around and around it in the evening, spinning the pokestops and getting a little exercise in. I like it better than walking to and from work because of the pokestops, and also because I don't have to worry about traffic, or lugging my tablet computer around.

On Thursday night, I was thinking about the fact that I really don't get nearly as much exercise as I did during the summer, when I was biking to work, and usually half an hour for lunch, plus an hour after work. Now I walk for 30 minutes at lunch and 30 or 40 minutes after work. It's less exercise total, and a less strenuous form of exercise. But I really don't want to use the exercise bike in my basement: I can't spin pokestops there, and Google Fit won't track stationary biking automatically, and the basement is cold and dismal. I also don't want to drive any more than I have to on a work day. I am willing to drive to the park next to the bank for exercise because it's only 2 blocks out of the way from home, and some days THAT seems TOO FAR. I could drive another two miles to walk between four pokestops instead of two, and I don't because DRIVING TWO MILES UGH TOO MUCH.

Jogging would get me more exercise than walking and I could do it in the same place, so the only problem with that is jogging is terrible. Some years back, I got pretty good at jogging, in the sense of "I could jog very slowly for over an hour". But I always disliked it, and while I increased my stamina, I couldn't seem to increase my speed. It was always the slowest jog, like 4mph or even less. I don't technically walk faster than I jog, but it's close.

I tried interval training a few times: the idea is something like "run for 2 minutes, walk for 2 minutes, repeat 10 times". It was the only thing worse than jogging.

But as I was walking the loop, it struck me that my reaction is less "I hate running" than "I hate running for a measurable length of time". Running for 2 minutes is like 90 seconds too long. BUT! The first 30 seconds of running is actually fun. What if I ran until it stopped being fun, instead of until some arbitrary amount of time had passed? So I ran for one side of the tiny loop -- 1/15th of a mile! -- and then slowed to a walk for a while. And then repeated that cycle three more times.

It turns out the speed difference was large enough for Google Fit to measure! It recorded me as doing a "high-intensity activity" for a total of 3 minutes.

This also had the benefit of warming me up and getting blood into my hands so that they were no longer cold, so that was nice.

Saturday, I repeated this pattern again -- "walk a while, run until running starts to feel like work, walk a while until I feel like running again" at the little park near Panera. This time, I added in running from the start, so I did 8 whole minutes of running, and around 45 minutes of walking. I guess the pattern is something like "run 30 seconds, walk 3 minutes".

I don't know if "run until it's not fun" will let me get any better at running. Maybe after a while I will work up to running for a full minute without wanting to stop? On the other hand, it's something I am actually willing to do. And the best kind of exercise is not the kind that is most efficient at building muscle or burning calories or increasing stamina per minute. It is whatever exercise you will actually do.. I stopped at 53 minutes thinking "this is fine, I could do some more but I'm out of time" rather than "oh thank heavens I can FINALLY STOP that was awful".

So I will keep at it for a while.

Saturday was Community Day in Pokemon Go. Actually, this entire weekend has been a kind of make-up session in case you missed any of the previous Community Days. As it happens, I missed all of the community days prior to August's, because I started playing at the end of July. So I had been keenly interested in getting in some extra Pokemon-hunting time. I have also finally made a dent in my oversupply of pokemon items. I had been at the point where I had to throw away normal pokeballs to make room to give and receive gifts. (My pokemon leveling strategy is highly dependent on giving and receiving gifts, so doing so is important to me outside of the actual contents of the gifts. Also, you often get things from gifts that I am not oversupplied with).

My usual Pokemon behavior is "just catch absolutely everything you see", so I've been doing a lot of that. But I've been most focused on catching Dratini, Larvitars, and Beldums. Dratini and Larvitar are because I hadn't gotten the most evolved form for either of those yet, and they are both good combat forms that I have often wished I had. Beldum's most evolved form is Metagross, and I got four Metagrosses during the Community Day in October. But I only got one with Meteor Mash and I deeply regretted that, so I'm trying to make up for it now.

Anyway, all the critters are spawning all weekend long, but the hours for the Community Day bonuses (XP, Stardust, and hatch distance) were 1PM to 4PM on Saturday. So I went to the Plaza for those hours like I usually do. The weather report said "50 degrees and cloudy" when I left the house, so I wore a sweater and a light jacket. The actual weather was "45 degrees, drizzling, and windy". It was surprisingly unpleasant. I was sorely tempted to call it quits an hour in. But I stuck it out anyway. I got into five raids, including two for Cressalia, who I failed to catch. Fooey. I don't know if Cressalia will still be around for January's Community Day. I have not yet been motivated enough to try meeting up with the Discord Pokemon players for raiding outside of Community Days.

Because the Community Day spawns were still spawning, it didn't really feel like the event was over at 4PM. I went home anyway, to check on Lut. Lut wanted fast food for dinner, so I went back out for Arby's, and then stayed in the rest of the night because inside was warm and outside was not.

I watched episodes 11 and 12 of the new She-Ra. I am almost done with the entire season! This is the first show I have successfully watched by myself since I stopped watchng My Little Pony alone. (For the first four or five seasons, I watched some MLP on Youtube and the rest with Terrycloth when I visited him. Then Hasbro started telling Youtube to pull down any episodes posted and I gave up. Netflix has MLP now, so I might pick it up again, I dunno. I still watch Terry 's favorite episodes when I visit, but I haven't visited as often so the show developments feel much harder to follow.) Anyway, the new She-Ra is fun. A lot of my friends comment on the "lesbian subtext", but the thing that struck me more was the lack of heteronormativity. To be specific: like the original 80s show, the new She-Ra has one regular male cast member, Bow. Bow is not presented as a love interest, however. He has been Glimmer's best friend for years, and there's one episode where he goes with a different character to "Princess Prom". The B plot of this episode is "and Glimmer is really anxious and jealous over this". But there is nothing remotely romantic or sexual about her jealousy. Glimmer is afraid she and Bow will grow apart, or that Bow will leave her behind because he has made new friends and he will like them better. Absolutely no one says "yes, Glimmer, this is a reasonable concern and we will validate it because clearly You Love Him and you should feel threatened that He Loves Another and people can only love one person. So you need to Win Him Back, or Let Him Go."

No, the tenor of the B plot is "Glimmer is overreacting, and while her anxiety is understandable, it's normal for people to have multiple friends and it doesn't mean Bow won't like her anymore."

Some people discussing the show have said that Princess Prom proves there are canonical lesbian relationships because some of the background couples are FF pairs. But in fact, everyone at Princess Prom refers to their date as a "plus one", and most of the relationships the audience gets any insight into do not have any more romance to them than Bow and Glimmer's. Seahawk is the only character in the entire show to speak in an explicitly romantic fashion about anyone, and the object of his affections openly disdains him.

Regardless, I really liked the way the show handles Bow and Glimmer's friendship, and just the overall indifference to setting up an overt romance between anyone. The show's important relationships are those of family, friends, rivals, allies, and opponents. I love seeing these take precedence. I am not going to object to lesbian or straight romance in the show in the future, but I like the flavor of it as it stands.

Today, I wanted to go to Panera to eat breakfast and write. I asked Lut if he wanted me to bring him anything back, and he said no, so I drove happily away and had a nice breakfast and a frozen mocha and wrote 1200 words of The Twilight Etherium because I felt like it. I decided I'm allowed to write while I'm taking a break, if I feel like it. I'm just not allowed to feel bad if I don't write.

Wait, wait, why would I ever be allowed to feel bad for not writing? *eyes that last sentence suspiciously*

Apparently that's supposed to be more like "I'm not allowed to guilt myself into writing while on break."

*still kind of dubious about the value of this method of inducing productivity*

I left Panera around 10:30 to pick up Lut's meds and to check on Lut. He was awake and hungry when I got home, so we went out to Applebee's for lunch. Applebee's turned out to be out of their Triple Chocolate Meltdown dessert, which is sad because it's my favorite of their menu items. But lunch was fine.

After lunch, Lut took another nap and I snuck out to go to the mall to mall-walk for exercise and also Catch More Pokemons. I walked for about an hour, then sat with my laptop in the group of comfy chairs inside the mall's main entrance. I wrote most of this entry there, in between spinning stops and catching pokemon.

When I got home, Lut was awake again. We cuddled up and watched Ant-Man and the Wasp again. After the movie, he went to bed, and I walked across the street to sit in the hotel lobby by their pokestop and finish this entry. And write a few hundred more words of The Twilight Etherium. I will probably go home after my current lure runs out, since it's getting late. And evolve a bunch of pokemon so that I can get pokemon with all the limited-availability moves before I run out of Community Day weekend.

Altogether, I am happy with my weekend. It feels shorter than usual, because I spent so much of my Friday of in the car. But it's worth the drive to see Jenn. ❤️ I think some of my "the weekend feels short" is because next week is the first time in four weeks that I have to work four days in one week, instead of three. I really want to drop to three days a week as my actual schedule. I should just do it. It'll be a bit of a financial hit and probably mean that I will have to withdraw money from my retirement accounts early. But that's a doable thing if it turns out to be necessary. And the last few weeks have reinforced how much nicer it is to work three-day weeks instead of four.

Health/Fitness

It's getting colder and darker, so I haven't done as much biking this month. Pokemon GO is still giving me a reason to get out and walk most days, however. Niantic is also adding a feature to have Pokemon GO autosync with a fitness app, so that Pokemon GO will count you as walking even if you don't have the app on screen. I suspect this will add a little motivation boost for me, as there are times where I'd be more inclined to walk if Pokemon would count kilometers walked while I was using Evernote or Discord or Chrome.

Writing

The first draft of The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince is DONE. AT LONG LAST. I wrote 15,800 words and the final total is 134,928. That will change. I don't know yet if edits will make it longer or shorter.

I wrote another 11,800 words of Frost, bringing it up to 120,381.

I created a rough outline for The Twilight Etherium. It could use some more refining, but it's solid enough to make a start.

The Business of Writing

Final edits on Frost and Desire are now complete and I've handed it off to Alinsa for layout. It'll probably come out in December or January. December would be nice because then I'd have four releases for the year, just like a normal year for Maggie! January would be nice because then I will have a head start on 2019's releases. Realistically, I do not think I am a four-books-a-year writer at this stage of my life. If I didn't have a Day Hobby and/or Lut did not have cancer, then maybe. As it is, three books is doable, and two books is definitely reasonable. We're ten months into this year and I have drafted two books and edited three. Drafting another complete book this year is probably not happening.

Art/Other

I put together the cover for Frost and Desire. This did not involve much new art, just me squidging about with how to crop the picture and how to get the title on there. I am mostly content with it now, though I might futz with the picture a bit more.

Gaming

On Community Day, a guy handed me a business card for a Pokemon GO Discord channel for raiders in my area. So I now have a way of talking to locals who play! I have not had time to exploit this ability at all, because I do all my Pokemon GO during the week in the area around my house, which is not a good area for raids. I don't want to spend forty minutes commuting into the city, where the good areas are, on a weeknight. And last weekend I went to Seattle. And next weekend has Gengar Day, and the weekend after that is November's Community Day and also Contra KC. So I might just do those events rather than trying to get together with specific locals. We will see how ambitious and social I feel. I do want to catch the Halloween raid boss and I'm not sure I want to wait for Community Day to have a shot at it.

Ooh, and I got another EX Raid pass and caught a second Deoxys. Deoxys does not appear to be a useful Pokemon to have multiples of, but maybe it'll stop being Mythical at some point and I can trade one to my friends.

I won another raid against Mewtwo on Community Day, but did not catch it. Alas! So I'm probably not getting another Mewtwo. But I have two already and the non-EX-Raid Mewtwo doesn't have the l33t combat move so it doesn't seem to matter much.

Also on Community Day, I caught a lot of Beldums and then forgot to evolve any of them until I got home 56 minutes after the event ended. And I was like "but I have until an hour after so IT'S NOT TOO LATE!"

And then the app crashed.

><

I managed to get it working 59 minutes and 10 seconds after the event ended, and evolved one Beldum to Metang and then Metagross in time to get meteor swarm. But the second one I evolved was too late. Of course, "Metagross with Meteor Swarm" turns out to be super overpowered and it would be great to have, like, the FOUR of them that I could've had if I'd remembered sooner. 9_9 Well, at least I got one. This is better than I did with the Meganium evolution, where I forgot entirely.

One of the lessons from this is that I should look up before Community Day whether or not a Community-Day-only pokemon is going to be OP. (Yes, people who are not me know the game and moves and pokemon well enough that they can tell this stuff). Knowing that "yes, this will be a great pokemon with this move" will probably improve my chances of remembering to evolve them before it's too late.

Socializing

I went to see Terrycloth yessssssss. So many hearts. Also, my local friend Corwyn and his wife took Lut and me out to dinner, and I drove to Lawrence to see Jen. I feel like I am almost at a normal amount of socializing for an adult!

Okay not really, but I am a homebody and this much is fine.

Scorecard for last month
I did all of my September goals! Lut is getting palliative radiation for his back pain now, which is a quick treatment every morning for two weeks (with weekends off). He did two of the ten in October. His sixth one will be tomorrow.

I also finished edits on Frost and finished the draft of Princess.

The "decide what I'm writing" goal came out kind of squidgy, since my decision was to not decide. But you still have made a choice, as the Rush song points out, so I think that's good enough. At this stage, I have published 8 books, finished 9, and completed 11 drafts. I no longer feel like I need to commit to one project at a time in order to prove to myself that I can Finish Things. I have finished things. It's okay to work on projects in whatever order works best for me.

Goals for coming month

* Take care of Lut
* Write 50,000 words of something(s) for Nanowrimo. This will probably be The Twilight Etherium, because its outline is in the best shape. My other ideas are still amorphous. But I have decided that I am just going to count anything I write for Nano this year, because I'm tired and why not. So I can work on various outlines and notes some more, or I can dive into writing, or I can alternate books. Whatever sounds best at the time. Honestly, if it wasn't Nano, I would probably take the next couple of weeks off.

 I've read a few books without writing anything about them, so it's time for some quickie reviews.

 

The Corinthian, by Georgette Heyer: This one relies too much on coincidence and the romance is FAIL, but I nonetheless enjoyed it a fair bit. It's a fun romp sort of thing, with the female protagonist dragging the male protagonist into all kinds of scrapes, which he negotiates with aplomb. And he clearly needed someone to drag him out of his rut. It makes a charming buddy comedy.  As a romance, it's gross because the female protagonist acts like a kid and the male acts like a parental figure for the entire book. I am utterly unconvinced that these two will make a good married couple. SHUDDER. But, like most Heyer books, the reader can ignore the romance and just enjoy the ride, because romance is not a big part of the story. I'll give it a 7.

 

Arabella, by Georgette Heyer: This is the first Heyer book I just plain didn't like.  I dragged my way to the finish but lord, I detested the male protagonist. He is introduced in a way designed to make the female protagonist reader dislike him, and he doesn't noticeably change over the course of the book. Just yuck from beginning to end. The ridiculous schemes of the female protagonist didn't help the book any, but I minded her less. Most Heyer books are saved from lackluster protagonists by amusing side characters or other absurdities, but this one really didn't have any fun going on. MEH. It's like a 5.

 

The Flowers of Vashnoi, by Lois McMaster Bujold: A novella in the Vorkosigan universe, centered on Ekaterin. Like most of Bujold's writing, I enjoyed it. It's a story about the efforts of scientists to clean up the damage done during a long-past war, and the problems they run into in doing so. SFF that deals with healing and mending things is pretty much my jam. A solid 8.