July 2023 in Review

Health/Fitness

I kept much better track of what I was eating in July than I have been. Lut got a scale a while back, and I discovered that weighing food was much easier than using measuring cups. I also bought an ice cream maker, which was arguably not the best way to get me to cut back on "eating junk food when I'm not hungry". Oops.

I managed my exercise goal just barely, and only by counting the random stretching I do while watching my cat eat. (Lyric is always leading me to her food bowl so that she has company while she eats.) Still, I did more aerobic exercise than I'd expected. I thought I'd blown this goal completely.

Writing

Writing motivation remains close to zero. I wrote more Apothecaria: 11,800 words, up to 57,300. I wrote 500 words of The Jewel-Strewn Night at some point in July, up to 48,700.

I started poking at notes for a new idea, this one being "I will write my own solo RPG and that way when I play it, I can publish the results to retailers instead of it being fanfic." I have no idea if any part of this will work: either the "write my own solo RPG" part or the "have more fun playing my own solo RPG than I do writing a normal book" part or the "making a coherent book out of the play-through" part. I feel like my Apothecaria play-through will end up being reasonably coherent, but since it's not done yet, it's hard to say. I also made some choices that I might not have, in the interests of making the story longer because I didn't want to wrap it up before the end of the first season. I mean, the game is kind of designed around the idea that you will spend a year or two experiencing everything in the setting, and I'm more like "let's ignore the main plot and just do my own thing but make every week take like 10,000 words to write out." (I am trying to let some time pass in the game without cramming a million words into each day. This has always been a struggle for me.)

The Business of Writing

Weirdly, I did some of this. Alien Peacelords is at 58% complete now, up 18% from last month. The remaining 42% is mostly hard, complicated things that I don't want to do. I keep looking through the list for something I'm willing to work on, and then going "meh" and doing something else.

Oh, and I did a little bit of promoting my work. I put everything on 75% for the Smashwords sale in July and mentioned it a few times on Fediverse, including making some posts to talk about various books. This was not wildly successful, but it did result in my first-ever month where I made more money on non-Amazon sites than Amazon.

Fediverse is the only social media site I've used where my "buy my books" threads get more attention than anything else I do on the site. XD

(This remains "because my Amazon sales have all but flatlined" rather than because I'm selling a lot of books elsewhere. Still. Cool data point!)

Art

Did some more Apothecaria illustrations: up to 133, so 30 total. Not quite one per day. I did a bunch one weekend and had the buffer briefly up to 10, but it's dropped back to 4 now. I keep thinking "ooh, I want to draw [thing]" and then going "but I have all these Apothecaria entries to illustrate" so I do the latter. This is not a good habit, either. I should let go of the daily Apothecaria entries so that I'll have time to draw other things. Like to work on the Alien Peacelords cover.

Social

Visited my local friends a few times. Amazingly, Lut actually came with me once, last week. That was a nice change of pace. ♥ No visit this weekend or next, though: my friends will be in New Jersey.

Gaming

Lut and I started playing Kill Team, which is kind of a Warhammer 40,000 variant using the same miniatures but different rules (with some overlap). Lut is ridiculously excited to play Kill Team, to the point of "doesn't want to do anything else." It's great to play a game with him, but Kill Team is a really long game, like 2+ hours per game and that's with one of us conceding in the last turn (of four) because the outcome by then is clear. My favorite games are (a) short and (b) not combat-based soooooo this game is an uphill sell for me.

Also, I'm still salty about Games Workshop trademarking "Space Marines" and then trying to enforce that trademark as if space marines didn't predate their game by like fifty years. -_- But Lut has loved both the game and the setting since before I met him and has tons of miniatures for it that he got in the 90s.

Our games thus far have gone like this (I played Aeldari in all games):

1) Played through a turn or two at home, could not make sense of some of the rules. Decided to go to the Warhammer store so the shopkeeper could help us.
2) Played through a game with no objectives at the store, just "try to kill the enemy team". Figured out most of the rules, more or less. Steve, who runs the store, is not a Kill Team player; he's kind of familiar with it and used to reading the Games Workshop rulebooks, though, so he nonetheless helped a fair bit. Match was Aeldari vs Genestealer, on a battlefield crowded with terrain (which favors the Genestealers). Game was not particularly decisive: we both lost several units. I am not confident that we were both playing the correct teams. I kind of think we each had an extra unit?
3) Played through a game with objectives at the store, Aeldari vs Genestealer. The Aeldari won the battle (scored the most victory points) while the Genestealers wiped out the Aeldari. (We didn't play out turn four because it was no longer possible for me to lose the battle, but I was probably going to lose most if not all of my remaining units.) I think we both had the correct teams and played by the actual rules in this game. I was very amused by the outcome because it was lore-appropriate for the Aeldari to focus on objectives regardless of danger, and the Genestealers to focus on murder.
4) Played through a game with objectives at home, Aeldari vs Space Marines. The Aeldari once again won and got wiped out. The Space Marine team accidentally had an extra unit (seven instead of six total) and also we didn't realize the Space Marines all get three actions per turn (almost everyone else just gets two). So it's not clear whether this team was at an advantage or a disadvantage vs a normal Space Marine team.
5) Played through a game with objectives at home, Aeldari vs Space Marines. This time we both had legal teams! We noticed a rule about objectives that we hadn't before, and then web-searched to try to figure out what it means. (Rule text is roughly 'you can spend an action to secure an objective that you control.' It's clear what securing an objective does, but the current rulebook does not, so far as we can tell, define how one has "control" over an objective. Per a 2019 Reddit post, a previous edition defined it as "your team has more units within 2 inches of the objective than the enemy team does" so we went with that.) Space Marines won this game and also wiped out the Aeldari. (We didn't play out turn 4 because it was no longer possible for Lut to lose the battle. I had one unit that Lut would not be able to kill that turn, but it was likely that most if not all of the other units would die.)

Reading

I did not do well at reading this month. Read a bit of an unpublished (and unfinished) fanfic by Terrycloth, but only a fraction of what was written, and I'm still behind on Tufty's Alien Tastes. Veo Corva's Kickstarter for The Beautiful Decay fulfilled, so I have my copy of that now, but I haven't started it.

Goal Scorecard

• Take care of Lut: Done!
• Keep in touch with Terrycloth: Did reasonably well at this, although he was in the hospital for several days and I am worse at keeping in touch when I have to call. It's so much easier when he's at the assisted living place where he can use his laptop and we can talk using Steam chat or Discord.
• Keep in touch with parents: I fell down on this. I have called them twice in the last two weeks and didn't reach them either time, just left a message. Need to try again tomorrow. Speaking of having a hard time keeping in touch when I need to use the phone. x.x
• Exercise/stretch (13 times aerobic, 7 more of whatever): just barely
• Pay attention to what I’m eating: Eh, did okay on this. Didn't change my habits any, but "changing habits" was not the goal, and it's good to know the baseline.
• Pay bills: I remembered to do this! Though I need to update an autopay that failed. It sent me a message "this failed and you need to wait 24 hours to try to fix it" so of course it's been four days now.

August Goals

I was okay with how much I got done in June with no official creative goals. I'm unhappy about how much I got done in July. The big difference is that in June I managed to get about a third of the remaining editing on my WIP done, and in July it was a sixth. At this rate, I'll finish a twelfth in August. x.x But I don't know if making creative goals will help.

Also, I'm annoyed by the length of my non-creative goal list. Like those first three are good but the others? Meh.

Anyway, gonna go back to a short list:

• Take care of Lut
• Keep in touch with Terrycloth
• Keep in touch with parents
• Actually look at "Bored?" list when I'm flicking back and forth between Discord and Fediverse and not engaged with anything and clearly I am bored and should do something I care about and/or enjoy instead.

Bored? Maybe Try One of These

• Play (Terra Nil, Wandering Village, Boyfriend Dungeon, RftG. Apothecaria, 4thewords)
• Read (webcomics, Hoopla, books, webfiction, Dreamwidth, Discord, fediverse)
• Watch (The Dragon Prince, MCU, The Witcher, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, ??)
• Draw (Apothecaria, A Game to You, Alien Peacelords, A Dragonling's Family, fan art, sketching practice)
• Write (Apothecaria, blog post, email, chat, social media, The Jewel-Strewn Night, the Hidden Etherium, something new)
• Edit (A Game to You, Alien Peacelords, A Dragonling's Family, Fellwater)
• Exercise (walk, pace, stretch, lift weights, do aerobics video)
• Track (bills, activities, food, exercise)