January 3: Technically

An anonymous commenter on my year-in-review post noted that "an artbook is also a book". My Apothecaria journal is fanfic, so I can't sell it, and I think of my writing/publication goals as "origfic I can sell."  However, my 2023 goal doesn't say "books I published to a retailer who will sell them." It just says "books published." And I did collect all of the Spring entries into a single epub, which I then published (by putting a link to it from a Dreamwidth post) on December 28. So technically I published three books in 2023. \o/

Unfortunately, it's the "outline two books" part that I flubbed in 2023, not the publication part, and I never outlined my Apothecaria journal. Much of the joy of Apothecaria comes from not having to outline it: you just randomly draw some prompts and go. I did script some of the events independently of the prompts (everything about the protection against/dispelling of mind magic was unprompted, as was the entire arc with Umbral going to South Pindon and getting captured/hurt and the adventurers rescuing them. The "disintegration" ailment isn't an official Apothecaria ailment, either. Both the potion to treat it and the clarity potions are much, much harder than anything Cassie could draw at her level from the prompts.)  But by no means did I outline the story.

You could technically argue that "writing a book" counts as outlining it: it's just an extremely detailed  outline. But back in school when my teachers  wanted me to turn in an outline before I wrote the paper, they would absolutely not accept the paper in lieu of an outline. No matter how many times I asked. (I didn't get the hang of outlines until well past my post-grad years, tbh.)  Anyway, I'm not gonna take "I wrote a book-length fanfic" as "technically the same as outlining a book", especially when the intent behind the goal was origfic and not fanfic.

I spent much of yesterday writing my month- and year-in-review posts. I did start those on Jan 1, but just enough to say "I did some of this". I did a little bit of all my planned Jan 1 activities, in fact. Not very much of anything, just to make a start.

Anyway, I finished the posts yesterday and made my official goals and ugh I have to actually make an outline this month. I had to do that last month too! This doesn't seem fair. I mean, I didn't do it last month, but I was supposed to, isn't that enough? 

I guess not.

I might work on editing A Dragonling's Family today instead of the outline idk. I could just make more notes for the outline. Surely once I get 20 or 30k of notes it'll eventually turn into an outline, right?

...

It's possible I still haven't got the hang of outlines, come to think of it. Didn't I make a post about how to outline a book? Maybe I should check my notes.

<-comes back four hours later

Well that was a digression.

I haven't made significant progress on any of the writing or editing that I'm supposed to do this month, but hey, still go lots of month left, just gonna finish writing about my day here. And yesterday.

In addition to the review posts yesterday, I took Lut to a doctor's appointment and afterwards we got to-go from one of our regular restaurants, mostly so I could use a coupon before it expired. I also finished up the Apothecaria drawing I'd started on the first.

I spent a good chunk of today reading and re-reading nice things people had said recently about my writing. (Odds are that if you've ever said anything nice about my writing, I have read it several times because my brain just loves that stuff.) And also responding to folks. So that was nice. An HVAC guy also came by to inspect the furnace for problems. (I have a maintenance contract with a heating/AC/plumbing service where they give me a discount and also come out to inspect each respective service once a year. I doubt this genuinely saves me any money because it's not like these places have standard prices that you can compare. But they do a good job with keeping everything working so that I don't have outages. Good enough.) He came up to ask me if any of the vents were closed because the static pressure was slightly too high. I had just had this same service do $$$$ work to fix the "static pressure too high" issue after the AC inspection last year. Anyway, he opened all the closed vents in the basement and the closed vent in the bathroom and that resolved the issue. I am sad because I don't want more heat going to the basement (which we don't use it) or the bathroom (which is overheated by the oxygen machine) but eh. Better than the furnace aging faster. It's already 20 years old so I am pleased that it passed inspection and is still chugging happily along.

Also, Coffee Quills is back from a six-day vacation from Twitch, so I've been doing multiplayer battles in 4thewords with them to celebrate. Mostly we've been doing battles on Easy with copy-paste enabled, so I've been working on illustrating Apothecaria entries. (I count illustrating as about 1000 words per hour of illustrating). I've finished one and a half so far today. This is on the slow side, but I'm drawing Umbral and I always take more pains on those entries because I love drawing Umbral and so does my protagonist (the conceit being that Cassie is the one who illustrates her own journal.) Anyway, someone asked Coffee to increase the difficulty, so I am forced to write. But I had this entry to finish anyway, so no big deal.

I didn't exercise yesterday, which was a little ominous. But Michael called today, and we had a long chat so I spent an hour and a half pacing, and even at just pacing, that's a noticeable amount of exercise. I ate too much today, which I can tell because it's been like 3 hours since I ate anything and I still feel too full. But I am paying attention! Paying attention usually results in a behavioral change eventually.

And that's about it. Guess I'll post this and then figure out something else to write for the rest of this battle.