November 10-12: Words, Words, Words. Also exercise, bubble tea, and Be That Way

 I have written Many Words. So many words.

I did the "wake up in the middle of the night and take a nap in late morning/early afternoon" thing again on both the12th and the 13th. It was worse on the 13th. I do not love waking up in the wee hours of the morning and struggling to sleep, but I am pretty fond of naps, so I guess it works okay. I didn't have trouble with being tired after napping.

But I skipped exercise on both days, which I'm sure helped with the not-feeling-tired part. I got some stretching in, though. If I do aerobics at home, I always stretch afterwards. But for no particular reason, I don't stretch if I walk for exercise. Maybe it's because I generally walk for an hour and only do aerobics for 10-15 minutes, so I feel like I still have plenty of time for stretching.

I am still listening to Small Angry Planet but you can tell it's not as engaging for me as The Murderbot Diaries because it's not convincing me I should go for a long walk so I can listen to it.

On the 12th, I used Spirit City's timer periodically throughout the day, until Coffee's stream started. During Coffee's stream, I did multiplayer and cranked out the words. I got to 7530 on 4thewords, though 570 of that were notes that I'd written in October and not yet put into 4thewords. 

Apart from writing, I ... petted the cat? And played Time Princess. And some Race for the Galaxy. A Race for the Galaxy game generally only takes 4-6 minutes, so it fits fine into a break when I'm doing 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off.

Oh, and one of my friends on Downtown, the Discord where I post Apothecaria, I realized that I'd never mentioned I'd published A Dragonling's Family. So I told the folks there.

On the 13th, I didn't run Spirit City and instead battled monsters in 4thewords and took breaks in between monsters. Or sometimes while fighting a monster, since I battled many monsters that were on long timers. 

4thewords monsters have base stats of "words" and "time". Broadly speaking, if monsters take more words to defeat, you have more time to fight them. There are some exceptions (I'm looking at you, Catte Latte). Your avatar gets modifiers from equipment to three stats: attack (which multiplies your words written), defense (increases the timer), and luck (affects loot drops). The fan base has generally agreed luck doesn't do much, and I rarely have a problem with time. So my character has All The Attack at +126. (I have also been playing this game since 2016 and have a streak for every day since I began.) +126 means that 1 word hits like 2.26 words. At that kind of multiplier, even the larger monsters are unintimidating. (Though the very largest monsters are still A Lot. There's a 15,000-word monster on a 100-hour timer. You need to defeat it once to advance on the main quest line. I have defeated it once.)

Fighting 4thewords monsters worked pretty well yesterday. I got to 6100 words on 4thewords.

Several people on Downtown told me they'd read or were reading A Dragonling's Family and enjoying it, which warms my writerly heart to no end. I seldom hear from readers on my published books. One of the nice things about serializing my Apothecaria journal is that I get a few cheerful comments on it every day or two, which is so much more feedback than I get on anything that's not a serial. Multiple orders of magnitude. Upbeat comments are <3 

On Tuesday, I made some notes for friends-to-lovers-to-enemies ideas. "And back to lovers" was technically optional to the ideas I wanted to get down. But, me being me, it's almost certain with anything I will actually write. I have published books that don't have a significant romance component, and I am not opposed to writing books that have no romance. It's not my preference, but if I had a good idea and for some reason it only works if there's no romance at all: eh, fine. But writing a story that's end on a grim, depressing note: nope. The first time I started writing a novel as an adult, Prophecy, I set out to give it a dark ending where almost all the protagonists were dead, with only one badly-disabled viewpoint character surviving. By the time I got to the ending, I revised it to make it less bleak because I just couldn't do it. And even so, the book is too bleak for me to bother publishing. Lesson learned: dark and bleak is Not For Me. 

Wednesday, I added some more notes to the new FtLtE idea, including one fantasy setting element that I think is sufficiently interesting that I'll play with it in some story at some point, if not in this one. 

I got Be That Way  to 49,600 and opted to stop because it was bedtime. I may be having a hard time staying asleep but I still want to go to bed on time. Going to sleep late usually doesn't impact when I wake up so it'll just make the "not enough sleep" issue worse.

Sleep went a little better on Wednesday night: fell asleep around midnight and woke around 6AM. I didn't get out of bed until 8AM but spent more time playing with my phone between 6 and 8AM than actually sleeping. 

In the morning, I wrote 570 words on Be That Way to break 50k on day 14. Whee! I think Be That Way is around 90% done now, so it's not gonna be a long book. I'll probably add some scenes earlier to flesh out some characters, but I doubt it'll get to more than 70k even after edits.

Telnar had suggested we chat on the phone at 11:30, while he was making a long drive. I made the short drive to the trail so I could walk along it while we talked. And also get a Thai bubble tea. The owner of my favorite bubble tea shop in the area (there's more than one now! sweet) is from Thailand and something about getting Thai tea from him amuses me. 

After walking and acquiring bubble tea, I went home, showered, made a sandwich for lunch, and futzed around playing Race for the Galaxy/reading Discord/playing Time Princess for a few hours. Maggie had asked folks for thoughts about isekai litRPG so there was a lot of chatter on that topic. I haven't read much litRPG and most of what I have read is manwha and also not isekai. IIRC I've read exactly one isekai litRPG. I have thoughts about it anyway. A Game to You, one of my unedited drafts, is more-or-less an isekai litRPG. You can't expect me not to write in a genre just because I'm not widely read in it. Fah. Researching genres is for successful writers, not me. 

(yes I absolutely should read more. especially in the genres I'm writing.)

Some things I especially enjoy about litRPG are the progression fantasy: the idea of becoming powerful and that practice will predictably and steadily result in improvement. I've done tons of gaming so I enjoy seeing fiction employ the mechanics of gaming. The most popular RPG mechanics have, for decades, completely failed to capture the flavor of the stories they are based upon, something which has always vaguely annoyed me about most popular games. But these RPG mechanics were popular because they were fun in ways that mechanics more representative of sff media are not. Having fiction turn around and go "Fine, we're just gonna make a whole bunch of stories based on game mechanics, then" tickles me. Fiction is becoming increasingly meta, the way it helps to be familiar with a bunch of related media before in order to make sense of many subgenres. I also love seeing game mechanics subverted or used in creative ways in fiction. 

And one trope I like seeing in isekai is the "protagonist who knows how the story goes" (because they read about it or played the game it's based on, etc.) and therefore the protagonist can thwart plans and change the future. It's generally an easy way to make the protagonist seem clever. The same thing is the most fun part of time loop stories, too. 

At 4PM, I decided to write something even if I still couldn't face continuing Be That Way. I'd started this entry on Wednesday and went back to it then, while Lyric dozed contentedly on the footrest by my feet. Around 4:30, I got some junk on the blanket I use to cover my half of the loveseat and wrap over myself, and needed to put it in the laundry. Which meant that not only did I have to get up, but I had to get the blanket out from under Lyric and therefore disturb her too. The horror!

I put a fresh blanket on the seat after putting the dirty one in the wash, and wrapped myself up in it. To my surprise, Lyric returned and lay down across my chest to snuggle. She didn't want to be petted, as evidenced by (a) tail twitching, (b) breathing fast (c) glowering suspiciously at me. So I let her lie atop me without petting her, and played with my phone since I couldn't use my keyboard without Disturbing The Kitty.

After a bit, Lyric settled comfily enough for me to pet her occasionally, taking care not to overstimulate her. (Lyric is one of those cats who bites people if she's tired of being petted, instead of, say, not lying on top of them anymore.) She remained flopped atop me until about 6PM. At which point I hopped up to put the comforter in the dryer and a different comforter in the wash, while I was at it. I also let Lyric outside, since she'd had enough of inside for now. (I don't think she's gonna handle moving to my parents' retirement community well. They don't allow unleashed pets, not even cats. Sigh. Lyric likes to spend most of her time outside and having her on a leash and harness doesn't work well. I know. I tried.)

Then I went back to work on this entry. Now it's almost time for CoffeeQuills' stream. I need to wrap up my current 4thewords battle so I can join Coffee's multiplayer battle room. I'm at about 2400 words for today so far, which means I'll probably end the day at around 5400. I am still running behind on the 250k quest, and still not running far enough behind for me to give up on it, which is clearly the sensible thing to do. Getting to 250k in 44 days requires an average of 5,682 per day. It's been 27 days and I've been averaging 5,236. So close and yet so far. For the next 27 days (including today), I'd need to average almost 6000 words to finish the quest in time. And, as already noted, I'm unlikely to reach 6000 words today.

In happier word count news, I have, as earlier noted, exceeded 50,000 on the novel I started in November, and it's only the 14th. \o/ I will finish Be That Way easily this month. My total wordcount for everything for the last 17 days since I started the 44 day challenge is around 91,000; for drafting fiction, it's at 58,000. That doesn't include "notes made for fiction projects", and I wrote a good chunk of the Be That Way outline on the 30th, as well as notes for some other fiction projects. So I've been doing a good job of "stay focused on fiction and not blathering on in random blog posts for 5000 words per day." 

I want to write 100,000 words of fiction in November -- that's a more important goal to me than the 250k in 44 days silliness. I'm a little ahead on "100k in November", but I'm not sure I'll stay that way after finishing Be That Way. I managed to get the outline for Be That Way in good shape for writing just before November started, but I don't have anything else that's even close to that far along. I may start counting "working on notes/outline" as fiction writing for November. Or finishing Apothecaria. I don't have an outline for Apothecaria, either, but I have a pretty clear idea at this stage of what the last scenes I want to write are. Finishing Apothecaria is on my list of stretch goals for November and I need to write at least 11 more entries before the 44 day challenge ends, because I only have entries written through December 2, IIRC.

I know that I just said that I didn't want to spend my November writing time on long diary entries like one. But today, I felt like I really needed to finish this entry and talk about what I've been up to. With my days being so much "faceplant into writing" and "try to recoup enough energy to faceplant into writing some more," time has blurred together. I know what day it is because the clock in the lower right corner of my computer monitor tells me. But the days don't feel differentiated if I don't write about them.

I don't know why this is different from the last several weeks since I moved to full retirement. I haven't had a schedule beyond those of the Twitch streams I follow, and keeping to those has not been especially important. Maybe it's that writing fiction is different from spending the days in a less focused fashion. Maybe I feel as if I've plunged into different fictional worlds and it's hard to remember what I've done in the real world, because nothing I do in the real world feels very important.

At least I got out for a walk today. And spoke in person with someone, even if that was just a minute or two with the bubble tea proprietor. He's closing the shop on the 25th so he can go back to Thailand for a visit, and will reopen it in early January. I forget exactly which day in January; the 1st is the date stuck in my head, though that seems like an odd date to reopen. I suspect I will show up at the bubble tea shop at least once during the period and do a Surprised Pikachu face at seeing it isn't open. I am writing the dates down here to decrease the chances of that happening. There's another bubble tea place so I won't have to do entirely without, though. I don't like it quite as much, and it's farther away, and it's got less convenient parking. But  it'll do if I get desperate. 

This is enough nattering on about my day for now. Time to faceplant back into fiction.