January 2023 in Review

Health/Fitness

So terrycloth has cancer too. I have known for a while but haven’t said anything about it because (a) Terry actually has a social media presence while Lut’s never posted anywhere but GamersWithJobs, and (b) I used to wonder after the fact whether I should’ve posted so much about Lut. But Terry told me it was all right to tell people and it is increasingly weird to talk about my life without at least mentioning this.

Terry’s prognosis is not as bad as Bard’s but much worse than Lut’s. So that sucks. Not that there are any non-sucky kinds of cancer to have. Terry was in the hospital for one day while I was visiting him in January. He was discharged but ended up back in the hospital again about a week later. He is still there now. I don’t know when he’ll be discharged. Hospitals are still terrible. Not being able to visit him while he's in the hospital: also terrible. x.x

I did a surprisingly good job of getting regular exercise in January: twenty-three times. I even wedged in some exercise while visiting Terry, when he was busy with something else.

I made no meaningful effort to track food while I was traveling. I had a lot of bubble teas and piroshkis and other delicious food from small vendors who did not provide nutritional information.

But since returning home, I have gotten back to tracking. I’ve been working on “only eat when hungry”, too because over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of “eat because it’s delicious even though I’m not hungry.” It’s improved.

I am trying to take care of myself, and not despair.

Writing

I’ve gotten A Dragonling’s Family to 85% complete and up to 85,700 words, from 68,150 and 65% complete at the end of December. It’s coming along well and I should be able to finish it easily in February.

I’ll need to think about what I’m drafting next soon. Oh no.

I did a few extra blog posts in January: my year-in-review, an illustration retrospective for 2022 (which was fun to do because I did so much painting in 2022), a post about Machine Learning, and the release post for Angel’s Grace.

The Business of Writing

I released Angel’s Grace!

flails

It’s nice to have those books finally done.

I poked at editing Alien Peacelords but made no serious effort to begin. Still need to make a list for it.

Art

I did three sets of CuratorPrompts, an art-nouveau-style image of Bright, and one random quick painting. I also made a bunch of signature-doodad images to use as signatures on my illustrations. So that I will stop forgetting to sign my work. This has actually worked so far! The last two images I’ve posted both had a signature dooded on them.

Social

I visited Terry for a week in January, and we got out one day to see Steve and Jeff for brunch at their house, which was lovely.

Gaming

Terry wasn’t up for most activities while I was there, but he was still good with gaming. So we played a lot of pass-and-play iPad games because it didn’t require as much energy as sitting at a table moving pieces on a physical board game. Lots of Suburbia, Brief History of the World, and Splendor, and a few games of Eclipse. We’d both played Eclipse before as a board game, but neither one of us remembered how to play. I ended up watching a 23-minute video on how to play while Terry played the tutorial. It did not really come back to us. We played the first game with AI opponents and they annihilated us. It was sad. We played two or three more games with no AI while we tried to figure it out. It's a 4X game, and I didn't enjoy the way the combat against other players worked (I generally do not like combat against other players in 4X games. Too much snowball effect, where the loser's position just keeps getting worse but the game hasn't ended yet. Anyway, I'm counting this as "learned a new game" because if I have to watch an entire video to figure out how to play a game again, it might as well be a new game.

Reading

I did some reading in January! I set up a bookwyrm.social account: https://bookwyrm.social/user/Rowyn. Bookwyrm.social strikes me as very Not Ready For Prime Time: updates posted to it often took a while to show up even on my own profile. And Bookwyrm did not play well with my Mastodon account: one time I had a review I posted to Bookwyrm take actual weeks before it appeared in my Mastodon feed. Also, my Bookwyrm account isn’t set to require approval for follows, and doesn’t tell me when users have followed or tried to follow me. But on my Mastodon account I would periodically discover that my follow request to my Bookwyrm account was shown as “pending” rather than “followed”. Since the main reason I picked Bookwyrm was “I thought it would be nice to have a book-tracking app that played well with another of my social media accounts”, I’m not sure I’ll stick with bookwyrm. I might try Storygraph, another book-tracking app I’ve heard mentioned more.

It was very satisfying to mark things as read and post little quick reviews and comments about what I was reading, though. I read several novellas and other shorts. I finished MCA Hogarth’s Haley and Nana series, which continued to delight me through the final installment. ♥

I also read all the Veo Corva’s Tombtown shorts: Familiar and Flame, Tinker and Terror, and Making Friends, which were all fun. Familiar and Flame was my favorite -- I loved seeing Ree from the perspective of Usther. ♥

After that was The Governess Affair by Courtney Milan, which had an unusually good sex scene -- sex scenes often bore me now but this one was revealing about the personalities of the characters, as well as less formulaic than most.

The last book I finished was Blasted Research, by Coffee Quills: post-apocalyptic adventure with a polyam NB/M romance. Fun romp, and the male love interest was sweet and endearing.

Only Blasted Research was book-length, so this was more like reading, idk, maybe two books rather than seven. But it was nice to have it counted as seven. :D I have foundered on the next thing I started and I should really just try something else, but I’m not sure what and my kindle remains an unnavigable mess of possibilities. Maybe I'll try the Murderbot novellas; I have epubs of those so I can put them on my Google Play Books app.

Goal Scorecard for January

• Help Lut: Done!
• Exercise 13 times (aerobic): Overachieved!
• At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minute: also achieved!
• Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: every day, in fact
• Look at goal list & schedule occasionally: I got A Dragonling’s Family to 80% by like the 25th, so I actually checked my goal list a few extra times to see if there were any stretch goals I wanted to go for.
• Set up 2023 bullet journal spreadsheet: Done!
• Publish Angel’s Grace: Done!
• Visit Terrycloth: Done!
• Write more of A Dragonling’s Family and reach 80% complete: Done!

Stretch goals

• Consumption tracking: This was extremely phoned-in for much of the month, but I’m gonna count it anyway.
• Maintain bullet journal for entire month: Done!
• Practice art: I did not make it to 15 hours -- about 10 -- but I did get some practice in
• Exercise 20+ times: yissssss
• Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference: Yup
• Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review. I actually made this one, albeit by counting things like “my usual annual review” and “the release post for Angel’s Grace. Whatever, still did it.
• Learn a new game: Re-learned Eclipse, which I am totally counting
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: Done! Only one of the stories I read was book-length ( Blasted Research), but I would’ve given myself this one anyway.

I did not make all of my stretch goals for January (some of them were ambitious) but I did unusually well.

February Goals

• Help Lut
• Keep in touch with Terry
• 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
• Finish A Dragonling’s Family
• Make editing list for Alien Peacelords
• Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 20% 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 story I haven’t read before
• Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 50% complete
• Refine editing list for A Game to You.
• Work on edits for A Game to You.
• Get some use out of Color and Light by James Gurney
• Decide what book to write next
• Make an outline for a new book
• Work on cover for Alien Peacelords

That looks like plenty.