December 30: Music, Sleep Habits, Outlining a New Book

Lut and I didn't go to the gaming store today like usual. I figured I'd watch Jonathan Ong's Saturday music stream until it ended, and then we could play Kill Team. Ong lives in Australia, and time zones are such that even though he has one all-night (for him) stream and two all-day streams each week, I can never watch all of a stream. His Saturday stream starts around 5AM in my time zone and generally ends between 1-3PM. Normally I catch maybe an hour of it, after waking up and before going to the gaming store. (The streams during his daytime usually work somewhat better for my schedule -- I can catch 2-4 hours between start and bedtime).

Ong mostly streams live-learns, a streaming genre where patrons bid for slots and then give Ong a link to a song for him to learn live. After figuring out the score for the song, he performs his version of it. Today's stream had his audience gifting subscriptions and tipping to an extreme degree, such that the stream went for almost 12 hours, until after 5PM my time (it'd started a little late).

By that point, Lut was tired and not up to playing Kill Team. (Boo). So I will ask him tomorrow after Craft & Chat if he wants to play. Or maybe before Craft & Chat, in the unlikely event we both get up that early. My target bedtime is around 11:30 and my target get-up time is around 8AM, but lately it's more like midnight to 9AM* unless I have something scheduled that convinces me to get up earlier.

* Look my Pokemon like to sleep for 8.5 hours and who am I to deny them? Also I tend to be awake for a bit in the middle so I don't manage 8.5-9 hours of actual sleep anyway. Alas.

While watching the stream, I illustrated an Apothecaria entry. I got to draw Umbral again, which hasn't happened for a while. *checks timing* Yeah, it's been over a month since I last drew them. Despite it only being six days in the actual story. I am too long-winded. FILM AT ELEVEN.

I also worked on an old outline, trying to get it into shape to actually write. The original was a perfectly good two-person MF romance that I started to outline in 2012. It needed to be further fleshed-out and revised to fit into the Etherium setting (the outline predates the Etherium setting but I've long intended to fit it in to that setting and timeline). Instead of doing the sensible thing and fleshing out the parts that are underdeveloped and fixing the setting stuff, I decided it needed to be adapted into an MFF polyamorous romance and got completely sidetracked. Please tell my muse that not everything needs to be queer and polyamorous. 

Yeah never mind he's not gonna listen to you either. -_-

I have one day left to finish a second outline for 2023, and I think this one's just not gonna get done. I'll work on it some more tonight and tomorrow, though. Not stressing about it. 2023 was a terrible year for me personally (I miss you both, Bard, Terrycloth, so much) and it's amazing I completed all my other goals for it.

I might also switch which outline I'm working on, idk. The old outline I started poking at last night has a king as a romantic protagonist and a climax that centers on use-of-force. These are fine tropes that I've used a lot and I'm more inclined to make my next book involve neither. (A Dragonling's Family is one of my few books that revolves around middle-class protagonists and their personal problems. It's such a pleasure to work on stories like that. SF and fantasy both tend towards international problems where violence is a crucial plot element, and that's mostly what I've fed my brain over the decades so it's mostly what I get back. But I love small stories that are about the problems individuals have, too.)

Anyway, having two partial outlines and notes that both need more work is not as nice as having one complete outline that I could actually start drafting from. But in the long run, the work's all gonna get used. It's fine.

I might take the opportunity tonight to go to bed early, too. I can re-read Apothecaria in bed. I'd like to shift my sleeping hours earlier, and with CoffeeQuills on vacation I don't have my usual incentive to stay at my computer until at least 11PM.