November 2024 in Review

[rowyn]

 Health & Fitness

I did well on exercise in November up until I finished listening to System Collapse, the last Murderbot story. Then I started Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and: meh. I have not been motivated to go out and exercise. Or exercise indoors. I've done it several times anyway, but I'm down to closer to 1-2 times per week instead of 6-7 times per week. It doesn't help that the weather has gotten colder. Yesterday it snowed. The roads are slushy today. I'm not sure they ever plowed, but there was some melt-off from direct sunlight. Eliyahu is here so maybe we will be motivated to walk despite cold and snow (today's high is right around freezing) but: meh.

Lyric was eating last night, but she's relapsed this morning and is back to putting her face in food and making the occassional eating motion without actually eating anything. :( So probably taking her back to the vet Monday or Tuesday. I will call tomorrow with an update and see what they recommend. "Eating but not well" is better than "not eating" and might be an indication that she's recovering slowly and just needs more time instead of more being-prodded-at.

She's eaten more dry cat food over the course of the day, but not a lot. I gave her a gabapentin this evening in anticipation of taking her to the vet tomorrow. She went outside for a bit afterwards, then came back in, climbed on top of me, and zonked out in my lap. This is not wholly unlike her; sometimes she does like to sprawl for an hour or so on top of me. But she's rarely this level of zonked out. Gabapentin makes her more mellow but doesn't knock her out, and she's pretty out of it now.

Writing

Oh yeah I did a lot of this. It was November.

I started and finished the first draft of Be That Way, which is 57,330 words.

I finished writing my Apothecaria journal, adding another 17,591 words.  The whole saga weighs in at 264,000.

After finishing Be That Way, I worked on notes and the outline for The Secret Dragon (new working title in place of Koysko and the Witch. I'm debating using The Dragon Duke as the title instead. or The Dragon's Secrets. Idk. Names are hard.) The outline is coming together but outline-progress feels so slow and frustrating compared to writing progress. Meh. 

I dictated 5000 words of a soloRPG-ish story, as a combination of play/notes/actual story. I started writing it out as an actual story and got 800 words in. I don't know if I'll finish the whole planned thing; it'd probably be novelette or novella-length.

Apart from fiction, I wrote seventeen blog posts: most of them just diary-style entries about my life, but a few about specific topics.

I used dictation to catch up on the "250k words in 44 days" goal. The "dictation word salad" file is up to 28,500 words and is mostly stuff I'm not gonna post or use anywhere. There is some "me talking through plot problems" in it that was relevant to The Secret Dragon or my Apothecaria journal.

On the "250k in 44 days" quest, I was at 194,071 at the end of November. 18,232 of those were from October, so 175,839 were November. About 75,000 were fiction, 28,500 were dictation spam, and the rest were notes, blog posts, deleted words, and other miscellanea. 

The Business of Writing

November was for writing, not business.

Art

While November was also for writing and not art, I only had illustrated Apothecaria entries going through Nov 15. So I illustrated 16 more entries during November, to take me through to Dec 1. 

Reading

I finished three audiobooks in November, all Murderbot: Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse. I started Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which has gone so slowly that it auto-returned while I wrote this entry. I'm 70% through, so I guess I'll check it out again to finish it? It's not that it's bad. It's fine. It has many good qualities, even. It's just not that engaging to me at this time.

I also finished a manwha, Observing Elena Evoy. It's not great at the romance part and did some things that annoyed me. But it also had aspects that I absolutely adored and that are incredibly rare in manwha. The female protagonist is clearly neurodiverse and an absolute delight. She has a cold, flat affect early in the story, but gradually warms and becomes more skilled and confident at socializing by the end of the story. Another aspect: the male protagonist is the main (but not only) viewpoint character -- the only manwha I've seen that made this choice. At one point, he's reflecting on the change in Elena and I was like "yeah, she really has changed, oh no, it's all because of the male protagonist UGH".  But no, the male protagonist's take is: she has worked so hard at this. Not "I helped her" or "she wanted to change because of me" or anything else, just: this was dificult for her and she decided she wanted to do it and she has done it AW YEAH SHE ROCKS. It was so endearing. 

One manwha I've mentioned before, The Flower That Swallowed the Sun, recently completed. I haven't finished it yet because I've got a big chunk of I Fell into a Reverse Harem Game entries to read and I've been putting off buying large numbers of episodes in a new story if I still have a bunch that I've already bought from another.

Goal Scorecard:

• Complete Outline for Be That Way: I thought I did this on October 31, but regardless, it's done.
• Write 50k of Be That Way: Done!
• Pay November bills: Done!
• Talk to parents occasionally: Only called twice and both times around Thanksgiving, but that's better than zero?

November Stretch Goals:

• Finished writing Be That Way
• Illustrated Apothecaria journal through end of November
• Finished writing Apothecaria journal
• On track to complete 250k goal by Dec 10 (I am a tiny bit ahead at this point and need ~5600 words per day instead of 5682.)

December Goals

Oh right I need some goals for this month too. Sigh.

• Finish an outline. (Probably The Secret Dragon but I'm not picky; it can be something else.)
• Pay December bills
• Call parents at least once before December trip
• Visit parents

December Stretch Goals 

• Play a romance soloRPG
• Start editing something
• Start writing something
• Work on cover art or book illustrations
• Illustrate Apothecaria through end of December
• Finish illustrating Apothecaria

 

Comments

[tuftears]

*purrs for writing goals* Once you get there, I might importune you to take a look at Timecrossed Engineer. ^.^

Yay for calling parents! And for finishing a whole book!

I wonder if some riff on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would work for your book title... But it might make people think it's wuxia which it wouldn't get, so maybe just 'The Hidden Dragon' or something?

[rowyn]

Yay for Timecrossed Engineer ready for first readers! purrs