April End-of-Month Update

It's a new month! I still haven't forgotten my NYR! I didn't even give myself a deadline beyond 'sometime in the next month' for doing these, so I'm still on track!

Health/Fitness
April was not a good month for health. I am still (still!) recovering from whatever horrible plague I caught three weeks ago. I am 95% healthy, but I feel a little rundown and I'm still coughing and sneezing now and again.

Predictably, this means I didn't get much exercise in April. I actually have done a fair amount of biking the last two weeks anyway, but more like 7-8 miles per ride instead of 10-11. And I've skipped several days.

I need to change my diet and lose or at least stop gaining weight this month. I'm over 50 lbs up from my lowest adult weight at this point. More importantly, I don't want to buy new clothes. Surely losing some weight will be easier. Right? Right.

Writing
I wrote three book reviews, eight other LJ entries, and quite a bit of Flight Rising fanfic -- I'd guess 7,500 words or so. Mostly since I caught the plague. The plague is good for lightweight writing? Maybe.

Note to self: in the May wrap up, I want to be able to put down that I wrote some original fiction.

The Business of Writing

alinsa is mostly done typesetting A Rational Arrangement. I divided it into post-length installments for serializing. In theory, I am starting the serial next Monday! I am not at all nervous about this.*

Alinsa is also hosting a webpage for me, so it can have its own URL, and she's putting together a Wordpress for it. She's also trying to set it up to auto-update, which will be awesome if it works. Although honestly, if I just don't have to manually re-italicize everything for posting, I'll be happy.

* This is a total lie. I have no idea why I am nervous about this, though.

Art/Other
I did 18 pictures based on prompts from Twitter; not as many this month as last month, but closer to it than I expected. I also finished coloring two coloring book pages. I did use up an entire 6x6" sketchbook, and started a new one.

But mostly, I've been crafting headers for the installments of A Rational Arrangement. I did 15 of them in April! For installments 1-13, 15, and 17.

haikujaguar told me at one point, "The headers are great! Please don't do 134** of them", which kind of sums up how I feel about them. I enjoy doing them, and I am surprisingly pleased with how they look, and doing 119 more is daunting and would be crazy time-consuming. I spent probably 3-4 hours on number 12. It is my new favorite. It's people at a dinner table. There are a lot of scenes where people are eating in this story: I am pretty sure I will be using a large chunk of this one again later on. Probably multiple times.

** Technically, she said 133, because I originally thought RA had 133 parts. I'd missed counting one. Oops.

Gaming
The Elect PBEM is still going!

I never did write up that character in Champions for Bradley's PBEM. *sigh* I may have to admit that I don't have time even to be a PC in a game.

Socializing
Corwyn took me to Tabletop Day three weeks ago. I caught the plague there. I have not done anything social and offline since then. Though I was flying to LA when I started writing this! But that'll count for May's activities.

I have been using Twitter more for actual socializing and less for random web-browsing this month, though. I've made some friends who're also friends with other people I know and it's starting to feel more like a community. By which I mean not only "I'm interacting more with new friends", but also that I feel more connected with ones that I've known for years. This makes me happy. ♥

Happiness
That thing I mentioned in the March wrap-up, about "there's not enough time for everything I want to do"? Even more intense now. In good news, I have been spending more time doing things I care about, instead of mindless webbrowsing or staring into space.

But where I said under socializing "this makes me happy": I mean that literally. Plague or no plague, April was a good month for me. I'm happy.