rowyn

Health/Fitness

I was sick for the last week of February, with a sore throat that started on Feb 20 (a Monday) . It turned into a full-blown sore throat and fatigue on Tuesday and I took Tuesday off. On Wednesday, the sore throat was almost-but-not-quite gone, and I felt significantly better. On Thursday morning, I got up at 7AM and thought "I'm fine, I can do my day job today" and then by 8:30AM I was "I need to go back to bed." So I took the Thursday off too. Friday, still too fatigued to really go out and do things. By Saturday I was like 90-95% healthy, and I have been stuck there since. I can't seem to make it all the way to "yes I am genuinely fine". Today, I decided to drink some Diet Coke: one of my bellwethers of health is "do I feel like my throat needs clear hot liquids". All I have been drinking for the last nine days is a low-calorie spiced apple cider mix that I order online because it's not reliably stocked in stores.

My throat remains a little meh: not sore but a bit grumpy. My body is not exactly fatigued but still low-energy. It's a work in progress.

I did some stretching while I was sick but I only exercised twice in the last nine days of February. So I made my exercise goal of "13+ times plus 7+ times stretching on the remaining days, but only exactly that: the bare minimum. I also did the bare minimum amount of exercise in each session -- mostly pacing the house while on the phone, or doing the 10-minute core body workout. It was not a good month for exercise, but I haven't stopped exercising, so kudos for that.

Also got my eating habits more under control: doing better at eating when hungry and and not out of boredom or habit or because sugar cookies are extremely delicious. Under the circumstances, I am content with how the month went.

Writing

I finished writing A Dragonling's Family, huzzah! That was one of my February goals and I completed it halfway through the month, on February 17.

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, 4thewords started doing co-op battles on February 14. I find the co-op battles fun and motivational. Co-op battles do not involve working on the same file and you don’t see what other people in the battle are writing (which would be distracting from writing your own stuff anyway.) It just means you’re all battling the same monster. The battle ends when either the co-op group collectively contributes enough words to reach the monster’s total word count (which is [monster base word count] * [number of players in co-op battle] * [difficulty multiplier]) or the timer runs out.

I’ve spent many co-op battles brainstorming ideas and making notes for my next WIP. I worked on notes for the next book in The Demon’s Series and for the sequel to A Game to You, but those are for the long-term: I don’t want to draft either of those yet.

Instead, I started work on an unnamed science fiction polyamorous romance in a new setting, because I am allergic to success or something. I’ve got about 12,500 words of disorganized notes so far. Outline is incomplete but coming along well.

The Business of Writing

I created an editing list for Alien Peacelords and completed 50% of the editing! That went much better than I had anticipated.

Art

I did quite a bit of art in February:

Curator Prompts 135
Various pencil sketches for the Alien Peacelords cover
Nine color tests of two different sketches for the Alien Peacelords cover
Color sketches for two cats and one person
A color image of Veo’s avatar in Outer Wilds
Four color cartoons of Veo’s avatar in Roadwarden
Flat colors for the Alien Peacelords cover once I finally settled on a sketch and a color scheme.

I have this all added up to 24 hours and 40 minutes, which seems about right. Lot of drawing and painting. Most of it was for specific purposes rather than practice. Not sure how I feel about that.

Social

I did not get out much in February. Saw my local friends twice, including for their birthday party. That was about it.

Terrycloth was discharged from the hospital in early February, which is better than being in the hospital. He is in an “adult family care center”, which sounds similar to the rehab center Lut was in. He is not healthy enough to go home -- he can’t reliably do things like “transition from sitting down to standing” on his own. He’s doing physical therapy with the goal of improving this, but it’s not clear how it will go. :/ I have been calling him every day but I don’t necessarily reach him -- sometimes his phone goes directly to voicemail. He has his desktop computer and his tablet with him now, so sometimes I can reach him on Discord or Steam, but sometimes that doesn’t work, either. I wanted to get tickets to visit him again, even if it’s just visiting during visiting hours at the care center. But he’s discouraged me every time I bring it up so I haven’t yet.

We have gotten to play games in the evening a few times, like we used to do every weeknight, including yesterday and the day before. So that was lovely. ♥

Reading

I have bounced off a few different things and became dispirited and gave up. I should try again this month.

February Scorecard

Help Lut: done!
Keep in touch with Terry: done
Exercise 13 times (aerobic): done
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes: done
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: done
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally: done (I actually did this a lot because I was checking stretch goals for ideas to do once I finished with the regular goals)
Finish A Dragonling’s Family: done!
Make an editing list for Alien Peacelords: done!
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 20% complete: done!

Stretch goals:

Consumption tracking: Done, but badly (I phoned it in for the entire time I was sick, for instance)
Maintain bullet journal for entire month: Done
Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice): overachieved!
Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference: also overachieved
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 50% complete: done!
Decide what book to write next: done
Make an outline for a new book: Not complete but I made good progress on it so Imma make a note of it.

March 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
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 80% complete
Finish outline for new WIP
Give new WIP a working title that I’m willing to share with other people

Stretch goals: