May 2022 in Review

Health/Fitness

Tracking remains difficult and I phoned it in several times this month. I did exceed the minimum on exercise, yay, and hit 13 times. I even went outside for a walk once! Still pretty lightweight on total time commitment. Back in 2006, when I walked 0.9 miles to and from work five times a week, plus exercising 4-5 times, I got so much more exercise.

On the other hand, not crashing down to “no exercise” is important.

In fact, gonna take a break from writing this entry to exercise right now.

Writing

I added 34,900 words to Alien Peacelords: it’s at 96,645. Percentage complete is at 75%, up by 27%. Estimated word count to this stage of the outline is no longer “almost exact”, but still quite close: I’m about 1700 words under the estimate.

The Business of Writing

So I did work on the final editing list for Demon’s Alliance in May, which is a step up from April when I didn’t even look at it.

That is to say: I worked on it for a total of one hour, on the last day of the month.

But I did work on it!

...

sigh

Anyway, it’s not done. I made meaningful progress in that hour, at least.

I should explain what I mean by “final editing list” here. Ideally, I want my editing list to be specific about the changes I intend to make. It should function like an outline, so that I can look at the list and then go make the change and it does not require a lot of “figure out what happens now.” It’s akin to having a blueprint before you go to build a house.

At the moment, I technically have a “list”, but half of the list is “do these things” and the other half is “create a blueprint for these other things” and that second half is not cutting it.

Art

My big unexpected success in May was “art practice.”

The admin account for the mastodon.art server, Curator, posts a group of four CC 0/public domain images daily as #CuratorPrompts. Curator has also been encouraging artists to do two-minute or five-minute sketches as practice. Inspired by this, on May 12th I decided to do four 2-minute sketches. And not my usual “pencil-style sketch of a person”: full color sketches of entire photographs.

The resulting sketches were, of course, terrible.

But I enjoyed doing them, so I kept at it. I started doing the actual CuratorPrompts on May 13. After I noticed it took me longer to post the sketches than to do them, on May 20th I switched from “all 2-min sketches” to “two 2-minute, two 5-minute.” Then two days later, it became “two 2-minute, one 5-minute, and one long study.” The time on the long study in May varied, from as little as 16 minutes to as much as an hour.

The long studies I’ve done so far in June have been 90, 75 and 56 minutes, and I might have to rein it in. I like doing art, but I love having written. I do not want to spend more time painting than writing. Or, um, editing. o_o;;;

I might make a blog post later with some of my favorites from the sketches. But if you're curious, you can browse them here: https://wandering.shop/@Rowyn/media . I don’t post much other media.

Social

Still been getting out to visit my local friends on Thursdays. COVID-19 numbers have gotten kind of bleh in my area again. Still lower than it was from July 2021 through March 2022, but meh. If it keeps rising, I will return to full hermit-mode. A three-person gathering is not a high risk event, though.

Gaming

Started playing the Strange-Horticulture-inspired RPG! Having fun with it.

May Scorecard

• Pay April bills (today) and also May bills (at the end of the month): I paid April’s bills on 5/1 and May’s bills on 6/1 so technically: whoops. But it’s done now, good enough.
• Make final editing list for Demon's Alliance: it’s like, half-done? Fail.
• Write a few paragraphs on 20+ days, and/or log into Soul Scribes to fish and/or do the dailies: I did this, though! Mostly writing regularly, not so much using Soul Scribes.
• Exercise 13 times: 15 times! \o/
• Look at goal list occasionally: Yep, did this
• Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: Done!

Stretch Goals:

• Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice): For the first time, I not only made the “practice art” goal, but I made the BONUS stretch goal! I spent 16.7 hours on practice in May.
• Maintain bullet journal for entire month: Yes!
• Get Alien Peacelords to 75% complete: I really wanted to make this stretch goal if I was going to blow the editing goal again, so I’m happy to have reached this.

June Goals

So, after two consecutive months of failing at one of my main goals, I am a little disheartened and also unproductively stressed. In an effort to (a) make sure I do not fail at a main goal again, and (b) become less stressed, I will return to Very Easy Goals.

• Spend 2 hours on editing list/final edits for Demon's Alliance. This is more than I’ve done in the last two months combined, granted. But it doesn’t sound intimidating, at least.
• Exercise 13 times (aerobics) and at least 7 more times that can be just stretching for five minutes. Exercising reduces stress. Pls do not stop exercising because you feel stressed.
• Look at goal list occasionally
• Look at schedule occasionally so you stop forgetting to do things like pay bills until the next month
• Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days.
• Get Alien Peacelords to 82% (I’m picking this number because it gets me through to the next part I really want to be able to read. n_n)

Stretch Goals:

• Read through A Game to You.
• Make an editing list for A Game to You.
• Work on notes/outline for a different book
• Finish first draft of Alien Peacelords
• Create complete editing list for Demon’s Alliance
• Complete final edits on Demon’s Alliance
• Get some use out of Color and Light by James Gurney
• Consumption tracking
• Work on cover art for Angel’s Grace
• Create final editing list for Angel's Grace
• Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice)
• Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
• Maintain bullet journal for entire month
• Learn a new game
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before
• Exercise 20+ times