December 2022 in Review

Health/Fitness

Tracking was still more theory than practice this month. Exercise remains spotty, but I managed 15 times. I ate much more junk food than usual because I baked at least three batches of cookies for the house during December. Normally I bake cookies to ship out and then have no interest in baking again.

I still have a bunch of unused cream cheese so I expect there will be more sugar cookies to come in January. :9

Lut had two separate endoscopies in December, in addition to his usual oncology appointment, so there was a lot of medical in this month. He’s doing all right, though.

Writing

I did a little work on A Dragonling’s Family, which is now up to 68,150 words from 57,150 at the end of November. It’s at 65% complete.

I made some more notes for The Twin-Souled Empress, although the outline still hasn’t gelled for it. I am not sure it will be my next WIP after A Dragonling’s Family, but I still have a lot of writing left on A Dragonling’s Family before I have to decide.

I signed up for https://bringback.blog/, which has a “blog at least three times in January” commitment. Since I do my December-in-review and year-in-review posts in January anyway, and I plan to do some kind of art retrospective, I figured this would be an easy goal to hit.

Also, I did more blogging in December than any other month. This was 100% due to 4thewords giving an endurance monster quest during the NaNoWriMo event. The connection requires some explanation.

In 4thewords, “endurance monsters” are monsters that need to be defeated via consistent effort over the course of the timer, rather than by hitting a certain word count. You have to keep typing or you lose. You get a bonus based on how quickly you write.

I kind of hate them.

I find it almost impossible to write fiction under these conditions. It should be possible, because I don’t have to write that fast or for that long. But the “you will be penalized if you stop typing for even a moment in order to consider how to compose the narrative” really works counter to the way I write fiction. The only thing it works well for is stream-of-consciousness. It doesn’t even work well for essays, or recaps like this one. But I can use it for “talk about my day” blog posts.

I wrote five posts this way. Of them, two are private because they’re boring and full of me whining about fighting endurance monsters. Two are friends-locked because they’re not things I want being scraped by bots. One is actually public!

Anyway, I don’t plan to fight more endurance monsters in 4thewords, but I might write more “rambling about my day” posts. I used to write those all the time for OpenDiary and I kind of miss having that sort of record of my life.

The Business of Writing

The bulk of my creative energies in December went to this. I finished final edits on Angel’s Grace and did the ebook/print layout in Atticus. The only details remaining are the cover layout (Alinsa expects to finish this today) and the final read-through on the e-book, which is 30% complete. I expect to publish it this week and have it out in stores next week.

Art

I had thought I would get back to art in December, but I didn’t. I finished the wrap cover for Angel’s Grace, which I am pleased with. I finished CuratorPrompts18 and started 19. I did a Solstice Hedgehog for one of the SillyCuratorPrompts. And that was it. More than the “totally ignored this section” of the early part of the year, but nothing like the regular practice of May through October.

Social

My friend Telnar came to visit for one weekend. We went to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which was fascinating even though I am wholly indifferent to sports. We also went for a few walks, including getting lost on a nature trail. One of my shoes got pulled off in mud (I retrieved it successfully) and then we decided to try climbing a slope instead of retracing our steps back through the mud, when it was obvious we’d lost the trail. Climbing the slope reminded me of Callie and Justin trying to go straight up a cliff in the bowracing scene of A Rational Arrangement. It was obviously not nearly so challenging in absolute terms, but in terms of our actual skill level at climbing/hiking, it was not much more sensible. But we did make it! And we were even right about the actual trail being at the top of the slope. All’s well that ends well.

Reading

I’m still lagging behind on MCA Hogarth’s Haley and Nana series, a delightful set of LitRPG stories. I finished the second and third in December and am almost done with the fourth. These have all been wonderful, charming and thoughtful and a joy to read.

I struggle a lot with reading fiction and these are just perfect for me: they’re short, but long enough and satisfying, so I still feel as if I read a full book. They’re light-hearted and center around forging social connections and building things. Kind of the reading equivalent of a city-builder game. So good. I dislike preorders but I have preordered every one of these ebooks.

I’m hoping to finish the fifth before the sixth is published on Amazon, so that I can read it in the pre-publication Google Doc that Maggie puts up for patrons.

Goal Scorecard for December

• Help Lut. Done!
• Update my website to reflect that Demon’s Alliance is published and Angel’s Grace is coming soon: I did this! Yesterday. Still technically in December, good enough.
• Finish the cover for Angel's Grace and get it to Alinsa for layout: Done!
• Finalize the blurb for Angel's Grace: Done!
• Get final edits to Angel's Grace at least 75% complete: Done!

Stretch goals:

• Complete edits on Angel's Grace: Done!
• Write more of A Dragonling's Family: Done!
• Maintain bullet journal: Ehh. I didn’t entirely not maintain it? But I have 5 days that I can’t reconstruct and most of the days that are there were reconstructed several days after the fact. This is like a C- for December.

January Goals:

• Help Lut
• Exercise 13 times (aerobic)
• At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes
• Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days
• Look at goal list & schedule occasionally
• Set up 2023 bullet journal spreadsheet
• Publish Angel’s Grace
• Visit Terrycloth (I have tickets for this already!)
• Write more of A Dragonling’s Family and reach 80% complete

Stretch goals:

• Consumption tracking
• Maintain bullet journal for entire month
• Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice)
• Exercise 20+ times
• Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference
• Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
• Learn a new game
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before
• Refine editing list for A Game to You.
• Work on edits for A Game to You.
• Make editing list for Alien Peacelords
• Get some use out of Color and Light by James Gurney
• Finish A Dragonling’s Family
• Outline a new book