October in Review

A post by the_gneech reminded me that I'd written my monthly update but not posted it. Oops.

 Health/Fitness

The bad news on the fitness front is that my exercise habit remained thoroughly broken for most of October. The good news is that I exercised every day for the last five days of October. I did this in the goofiest way possible: bribing myself with my own money. Specifically, I told myself I could spend a small amount of money ($4 or less) on my mobile dress-up game for each day that I exercise. And then I overspent that amount one day and put myself "in debt", so that I have to exercise for two days where I don't buy anything. 

Spending money on a mobile game is a lot like lighting it on fire. It's gone and you have nothing meaningful to show for it except for a sense of "I spent HOW MUCH on this silly game?" I've played this game for three years now and have spent hundreds of dollars on it already. Would I pay hundreds of dollars to have my current account? Absolutely not. This is the general argument that keeps me from being comfortable spending willy-nilly on the game. (You can easily spend thousands each year on this game and STILL not 100% every event.)

But I can afford to throw away a few dollars each day. There are many ordinary daily expenses that I happen not to have (I don't commute to work, I don't buy fancy coffees, I don't have a gym membership): all similarly ephemeral expenses. 

So I am exactly at the balance point where I can convince myself it's okay to make spending a little money an exercise incentive, and where I won't just go "eh, I didn't exercise, but I'm gonna give myself the reward anyway because I want it." (The latter would likely be the result if I told myself, eg, I couldn't play the game at all unless I exercised that day.)

Moral: any game can be an exercise incentive game if you have the right attitude towards it. c_c

While this has been an effective short-term fix, I don't know if it'll be a long-term solution. Most days, I don't particularly want to spend money on the game; Time Princess just happens to be running one of rare the events where I do. I am not sure if I will be like "well, I can bank some credit towards the next event I care about" or if I'll stop exercising. We'll see? Once I get back in the habit it may be easier to keep going than it has been to get started again.

I still have to work on my eating habits (only eating when I'm hungry), but I feel like exercise is much more important. The science behind "some exercise is better for you than being totally sedentary " is less ambivalent than the question of what foods are good for you or how weight impacts health.

Writing

I haven't much wanted to write this month, not even Apothecaria. It's at 98,100 words, up 6,600 from the end of September. It's not that I want to drop the project so much as that there keeps being something else I want to do more. I have around 13 entries written and not illustrated, so I've been illustrating the backlog instead of writing new entries.

Abandoning The Jewel-Strewn Night is much more likely, but I haven't made the decision to do that yet.

The Business of Writing

I've been editing Alien Peacelords. Technically, it's 93% complete now, up from 74%. I'm now halfway through the penultimate read-through: the one that comes before layout. After layout is the final read-through. It's still possible I'll decide to make some more changes beyond minor word rearrangement before I move on to the layout, but it's looking unlikely.

Art

I did more Apothecaria illustrations! I have 4 in the buffer at the moment and have posted 31. It looks like I illustrated 29 in October.

I also finished the art for the Alien Peacelords cover! Still need to layout the text for it. But progress!

Gaming

Lut and I continue to play Kill Team. I dug up the old Harlequin models he has, and Lut pronounced them unfit for the current Void Dancer units and wants to buy new ones. I think this is silly, but it makes him happy so whatever. We've bought one so far, a Shadow Seer. I started painting it on Sunday. I still have so much terrain to paint, but I really wanted to paint the Void Dancers myself. The models are pretty but I don't like the official color schemes so I'm making my own variant.

Reading

I've been reading an e-ARC of The Old Goat and the Alien, a new standalone sf novel by Veo Corva. It is absolutely delightful so I'm savoring it (and leaving a gajillion comments on it for Veo to enjoy reading in turn). The Kickstarter for it is running now -- go back it, the book is well worth it.

I ended up finishing Jay's Gay Agenda, by Jason June. This is the book I was talking about DNFing at the end of September. It's basically a YA gay rom-com. Rom-com is not really an official subgenre in fiction, so it gets lumped into "romance". It's a much better romantic comedy than it is a romance. I enjoyed it reasonably well and a few things about the eventual resolution surprised me in a good way. I give it 7, mostly because it doesn't match my tastes rather than for anything it does particularly wrong.

Goodhart's Law

One of my Fediverse mutuals linked to this post on Goodhart's law. Goodhart's Law being "any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a useful measure." The post itself is kind of rambling, and the only part that interested me was the section on how to avoid doing this to yourself. Ie: "How do you keep yourself from setting a target that doesn't represent what you really want to accomplish?"

As someone who sets goals every month, and talks about word count and percentage complete and suchlike, it did give me pause. Am I sure I'm setting the goals I want to accomplish?

And then I remembered that I've been doing this for many years and my goals system has been constantly evolving as I tailor it towards what I want to accomplish. "Tailoring it to what I want to accomplish" is why I started measuring progress by "percentage complete" instead of "words written". It's why I do the editing lists and give myself credit for each point completed, instead of endlessly cycling through the entire book the way I did with A Rational Arrangement. It's why "Provide care for Lut" always has a spot on the goal list even though I don't need a reminder to do it.

It's a topic that I'm always revisiting anyway, isn't it? That's why I make goals every month instead of setting them all for the year, or having all the same goals each month. But it feels like a useful thing to revisit.

I'm pretty good with the way my goals and what I measure mesh up with what I want to do. There are some places where I have competing desires and I don't know if the best one is winning. Like Apothecaria competes with other writing projects and I don't know that I want it to win. I don't know that I want it to lose, either. The illustrations I do for Apothecaria are useful art practice in one sense, and in another sense I take shortcuts on them to make them faster and easier to do, which makes them less valuable as practice. And of course a chunk of the time I spend on Apothecaria illustrations is stuff like "moving words around to fit the picture better", which has very little to do with drawing practice.

But on the whole, I'm okay with it. I like looking back at my 200-odd illustrated Apothecaria entries and know that I finally did the illustrated journal I've always wanted to do.

Goal Scorecard for Prior Month

I forgot that I set goals for October, so I didn't look at them again until the end of the month. Oops.

• Pay your bills. Yes you have to pay them all every month: I paid my bills! Even before I saw that I'd put it on the goal list so I wouldn't forget.
• Provide care for Lut: Did this one too! 
• Check in on parents at least once a week: Fell down on this one; called around every two weeks instead (three times total).
• Look at "Bored?" list occasionally. Especially when bored: I did this occasionally, although I am more often afflicted by analysis paralysis than boredom. Maybe I should add a randomizer in for when I'm struggling to decide. Although I think it's less "struggling to decide" than "I decide I ought to do [X] but I kind of don't want to so instead I browse social media or play Race for the Galaxy." Maybe what I really need is an interrupt on those activities.  "Have you been playing RftG for an hour? Maybe you should do something else, possibly including 'play a different game', just to get out of the rut."

 

Stretch goals

Didn't have any of these but I'll touch on the highlights of Other Stuff:

• Halfway through penultimate read-through of Alien Peacelords
• Posted Apothecaria every day and  have a buffer of 4 illustrated entries
• Wrote 6600 words of Apothecaria
• Finished art for Alien Peacelords cover
• Painted Yet More Terrain and started painting shadow seer.

Goals for Next Month

It's November, and that means 4thewords.com is doing its usual big November event. The event started on October 31 and I already like it: it's a fun "school of magic" theme but with the sense of adults rather than kids taking classes, which is neat. And there are cut-scenes when you complete various quests, which add to the sense of place and character. Very happy with it so far.

Which means that I will want to write during the event, or at least "do activities that I am happy to convert into word-equivalent and give myself credit for it."

So, possibilities:

• Finish The Jewel-Strewn Night
• Work on the outline for a new orig-fic book, since I don't have anything planned after Jewel
• Write more Apothecaria
• Finish the read-through on Alien Peacelords and give myself editing credit for it (at the usual rates)
• Edit a different book, like A Dragonling's Family or A Game to You
• Illustrate Apothecaria and give myself drawing credit for it  "800 words per hour spent illustrating", or 800 words per illustration if I'm not sure how long it took.
• Give myself drawing credit for other forms of art (like the cover for Dragonling or Game)

This is more-or-less in descending order of "things I think it's reasonable to count." The first one is in the spirit of my usual NaNoWriMo writing: it's an original fiction novel. It's more than half-written already and unlikely to take the full 50,000 words to finish, though.

I know many 4thewords users (including myself) who give themselves "editing credit" and add it to their word count using one metric or another. Editing is part and parcel of writing: you don't finish novels without editing. Counting editing as "words" is not traditional for the NaNoWriMo brand, but I don't care at all about NaNoWriMo as a brand, or a website, or a corporate entity. I like being part of a big social media event where people talk about writing and are goal-oriented. I like doing the November 4thewords events. As for NaNoWriMo as brand/site/entity? Somewhere between "meh" and "active distaste." When I first heard about it, I thought it was just a hashtag, a thing people talked about and not an organization. I still feel like it's better as an idea than an organization.

Anyway, I've already started giving myself illustration credit on 4thewords, because 4thewords is my productivity gamefication site and illustrations are a Thing I Want to Have Done so in that respect, it makes sense to incentivize them via the game.

That said, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea and I'm less comfortable adding it to my word count totals when I do my usual November word-count chatter.

Ideally, I'd like to do my usual 50,000 words via writing on first drafts of an original fiction novel, as I've done for every November since 2016*. So that'll be my primary goal. Finish The Jewel-Strewn Night and work on whatever my next draft will be.

*It is not a coincidence that my NaNoWriMo winning streak began when I started using 4thewords. I first won Nano in 2007 but I didn't enjoy it enough to try it again until I saw the 4thewords event for it.

 

But I am giving myself formal permission to do anything and everything on the list above, and I'll count the month as a success if  I make 50,000 via any combination of creative endeavors.

I also have to:

• Pay your bills. Yes you have to pay them all every month
• Provide care for Lut
• Check in on parents at least once a week
• Attend KC Contra because I'm the guest of honor