November 2023 in Review

Health/Fitness

Bribing myself with my own money remained unexpectedly effective throughout November. I didn't keep formal track, and I know I missed 3 or 4 days around the convention, plus one Saturday towards the end of the month. (The day went something like "scramble to get out the door in the morning because Lut wants to get to the gaming store when it opens; play Kill Team; go out for lunch; nap when we get home; get online to watch CoffeeQuills & write at 5PM; realize at 8PM that I didn't exercise and decide to skip it.") But I am pretty sure I exercised the other 25-ish days. Mostly just 10 or 15 minute aerobics videos, but it's still good to get back in the habit.

Still eating when I'm not hungry because food is delicious. Oh well.

Writing

I won NaNoWriMo! Somewhat to my surprise, on day one of November, I went right back to working on The Jewel-Strewn Night and continued until I finished the draft. The total draft is 80,118 words, of which I wrote 31,093 in November. After finishing The Jewel-Strewn Night, I didn't have any other stories with a complete outline that I'm eager to work on. I wrote more of my Apothecaria story instead: another 19,372 words in November (it's at 118,953 total so far) .

I'd feel more productive if I were working on something I could sell instead of what amounts to fanfic. But I am invested in my Apothecaria fanfic so I'm happy to be writing it and looking forward to eventually bringing it to a conclusion. I do not know how long it will take to bring it to a conclusion; it probably depends on whether I get tired of writing to the prompts and decide to just focus on the romance arcs that have taken over the role of Main Plot. I am not in any rush yet.

My writing pattern during this NaNoWriMo was weird. My usual NaNo pattern is "write as much as I can in the first few days of NaNoWriMo, then start writing a little less each day, with some days off for cons, but generally staying far ahead of par as I move along a downwards ramp and coast to victory." I did the usual "start strong" thing: by the end of the 4th, I was at 17,769: my strongest 4-day performance ever. In fact, my 2-day and 3-day performances were also my best-ever. Nov. 2, 2023 was the first time I've ever written more on the second day of NaNoWriMo than on the first. I was doing great. I continued to do well through the 6th, and then I ground to almost a standstill for the next 10 days. In that time, I had seven days at 0, one day at 97, one day at 721, and just one day that was above par, at 1804.

Some of that was expected: I'd figured I would write little to nothing during the convention from the 10th-12th. And both before and after the con, I was building back up my buffer of illustrated Apothecaria so that I wouldn't miss any posts. 

But even so: I burned through my entire lead on NaNo and was below par by the 16th. I remained below par every day until the end of the 29th, when I made a final big push to win. I have since written like two sentences of Apothecaria. Which is weird because I’m in the middle of a really good scene and I want to see what happens next in it. o_o

Anyway, I'm proud of myself for getting to 50k with Actual Words and also keeping my one-Apothecaria-per-day streak going.

The Business of Writing

I continued the penultimate read-through of Alien Peacelords, finishing another two chapters. Not much progress, but given how much writing I was doing, I am pleased to have done this much.

Art

Despite devoting most of my time to writing, I continued to post a new Apothecaria page every day. My streak remains unbroken! I did 27 illustrations during November (I had a few entries as buffer going into the month.) Didn't do any other art to speak of during the month. At some point, I should draw something other than book covers and Apothecaria again. Some point before I finish illustrating my entire Apothecaria run, I hope.

Social

I went to the local convention! I had a room this year and stayed through the whole con for a change: arriving before opening ceremonies and leaving after closing ceremonies. I didn't go to the Dead Dog gathering post-con, though. Had a good time overall and didn't spend much time hiding in my room and playing with my electronics.

Gaming

I forgot to mention this in my October-in-review post, but somehow I have ended up in charge of my society in the mobile game I play, Time Princess.

That sort of thing usually means "the society is dying and you have inherited control because you've been there longer than the other 4 people left." But no, the society is in really good shape: maximum membership, and pretty much everyone plays every day and meets the society's requirements. My main task is to make sure we keep an eye on things so that it stays that way.

The societal management tools in Time Princess are pretty terrible, with no good way to track the main thing that we care about. We take screenshots daily and periodically I diligently go through and update a spreadsheet based on the screenshots. The amount of data entry makes my reporting heart wither. This data is already in a computer! Why can't I just export it from that computer without having to hand-enter it argggggh. Anyway, I should do something that's less time-intensive than hand-entering all this data but bleh. I don't love my other options.

Goal Scorecard for Prior Month

• Pay your bills: Done!
• Provide care for Lut: Done!
• Check in on parents at least once a week: Fell down on this. I talked to my mother four times in November, but it was like "twice early on in the month and near the end." I have some excuse -- my parents' landline stopped working on the 15th, so we were reaching out via my father's poker buddies and email to try to keep in touch. My mother was able to figure out phone calls on her new smartphone and can call back now if she misses a call, though, which was how I ended up talking to her twice near the end. I need to call her tomorrow, though, it's been almost a week now.
• Attend con because I'm the guest of honor: Done!
• Get to 50,000 words or word-equivalents: Overachieved! If I count each illustration as the equivalent of 800 words, my Apothecaria illustrations plus writing would put me at around 71,000 words-and-equivalent.

Stretch goals:

I didn't list any stretch goals but shout-out for this anyway:

• Kept the Apothecaria streak going aw yeah.

Goals for Next Month

• Help Lut
• Keep in touch with parents
• Track exercise 
• Pay bills
• Check goal list occasionally
• Complete an outline for a new book
• Finish penultimate read-through on Alien Peacelords
• Layout the cover art for Alien Peacelords
• Layout Alien Peacelords for publication
• Finish final read-through on Alien Peacelords
• Publish Alien Peacelords

Those last six are the remaining goals for 2023. I think they're still reasonably achievable? Writing an outline in a month is pretty easy, and so is finishing two read-throughs and using Atticus for layout. The cover art for Alien Peacelords is done already so I just have to put the text on it. All of them in a month seems a little optimistic somehow. Perhaps because it's in several different parts and most of them have to be done in order.

The most depressing part of this is that I set my publishing goal for two books again, as I did last year. Last year I only published one book because I couldn't quite get Angel's Grace published in 2023. In the 10 months since I published Angel's Grace, I have not managed to get even one other book ready for publication. Meanwhile I have four unedited drafts of books now. It's like I'm getting worse at editing instead of better. -_-

Anyway. I am making somewhat ambitious list of goals because it'd be nice to accomplish all of my year goals for 2023. We'll see if I actually do.

Stretch goals:

• Illustrate 30+ Apothecaria entries.
• Post an Apothecaria entry every day.
• Generally other productive things from the Bored? list

I refuse to make "keep up with my game journal" an official goal even though, let's be real, it's far and away the most likely thing for me to accomplish this month.