February in Progress

Early in the month, I decided to get to work editing Alien Peacelords. This went much better than I expected, and by the 6th, I'd gotten to 23% and made my editing goal for the month. I went back to writing A Dragonling's Family after that, and on Friday the 19th, I finished the first draft. With the exception of the exercise goal and the bullet-journal goal (which I will finish, it just takes more than 19 days to do a daily activity 20+ times), I have completed all of my February goals already.

!

It's been a while since I last finished my goals this early in the month. Usually when I do, it's because I lowballed the goals by a lot. I don't really feel like I lowballed my February goals by that much, though. A little, maybe? Anyway, this means I get to work on stretch goals!

I have finished two stretch goals already, too:

• Practice art, including bonus stretch goal of practicing for 15 total hours
  
• Complete a picture that's not just a redraw of a reference

My "completed pictures" are fanart of a pngtuber friend in two of the games they've been playing recently. It counts okay.

I've been working on some of the other stretch goals: more editing of Alien Peacelords, outlining another book, deciding what I'll write next.

The book I've been working on outlining is The Way You Play, the sequel to A Game to You. Yes, the book I don't want to edit because it's too complicated.

The sequel is more complicated.

A Game to You ends on a satisfying note and does not require a sequel. I will not be writing The Way You Play next. Although I did make some actual progress on outlining it. To my surprise. I wrote tons of notes for it, some of which are coherent.

Part of why I've been writing copious notes is that 4thewords.com introduced "co-op" as a new battle mode. Coffee Quills, the writing/productivity streamer I watch, has been running battle rooms and I've been signing up for them since day one. Multiplayer mode has been pretty buggy from day one: it doesn't always tell you when a battle starts, or when it finishes, or count it for your quests, or let you turn in your quests when they're complete. One especially fun bug had a quest first not count my battles, then it counted the battles but wouldn't let me turn the quest in even though it now showed complete, and then it rolled back the count so that it didn't show complete anymore. Whee!

Despite this, co-op is fun when you're in a good room, and Coffee's rooms have all been good -- players are friendly, communication on when we will start the next battle is clear, and most players are writing at a good speed. I don't know how well co-op will work out long-term, because getting all of those things together in a pickup group is much tougher. Also, I might get bored of it. But for now, it has renewed my interest in playing 4thewords, to the point that I am writing this entry in 4tw in an effort to defeat one of the main quest monsters so that I can clear up a quest slot. My quest log is getting jammed with quests that I can't turn in because they're either bugged or incomplete. Mostly incomplete: 4tw has been releasing several new quests every day since they released the new mode, and most of the new quests stack and/or everyone wants to fight the new quest monster so HERE WE ARE, I need to take the new quests and I have no free quest slots. o_o;;;

Some of the quests in my log are dailies that I can just dump because I can't use the rewards from them anyway but I keep taking them because they stack with my regular activities. I'm like a magpie collecting keys because SHINY KEY

throws on top of the pile of 200 other shiny keys that do not unlock any available object

(checks It's actually closer to 300 keys that I have no use for now and will never have a use for. But I still do the get-another-key quests because there's no cost to completing them as long as you have free quest slots.)

Anyway, the thing I like about the co-op battles is that I feel like MY TEAM IS DEPENDING ON ME so I am required to actually write while I said I would be writing.

I don't necessarily have to write useful words, so I have done some "spam out words about how hard it is to keep up with my team/defeat this particular monster". But I don't have the patience to do very much of that sort of thing. If I'm not at least working out ideas on the screen or otherwise writing something I will care about later, there's not enough point to keep at it. On the first day of co-op mode, co-op mode did not take your attack stat into account and I found the word counts/timer combination too brutal to have stuck with it: the only way I could reach the word count in time was by stream-of-consciousness rambling. But on the second day, the devs adjusted it to reflect the attack stat. I have my attack stat pretty much maxed so this halved my required word count. Much more manageable. This means I can write things I actually care about without feeling like I'm letting down my team by not writing my share and/or enough to defeat the monster. (I don't mind being one of the slowest writers in the battle room if we beat the monster very early and I totally could have written my share if the battle had run for the full time available. But I don't want to be the reason we lose, or the reason it comes down to the wire and we almost lose.)

I think once I run out of co-op quests to complete, I may lose my enthusiasm for co-op mode? But we'll see. I'm wondering if co-op mode will get me to write faster in general, which would be cool given my general tortoise-like tendencies. I get books written by tenacity, not speed.

Anyway, one of my stretch goals is "blog posts", so I will post this. Maybe I will make it to four this month! Anything's possible.