January 10-12: More decluttering, final Apothecaria entry

 January 10

I woke at 7:40AM, did not want to get up, and checked Fediverse to see if Vicorva would be streaming. Stream was cancelled, yay, I could back to sleep.

But instead of going back to sleep, I started to play Time Princess, "just to do a few quick time-sensitive things". Eliyahu got up at 7:45AM and went out to shovel snow. Another inch of snow had fallen during the night, so they had to clear the walk again, too, but that part was quick.

Around 8AM, I gave up on the idea that I might go back to sleep and got up.

At 9AM, I went out to take the shovel from Eliyahu so they could do morning prayers. They'd gotten most of the driveway done, so I just widened the top a bit further and then cleaned off the car. 

Once the car was cleaned off, I went inside at 9:30AM to get ready to go out, and found Eliyahu had just finished showering and was still drying off. I sat at my computer for a bit while I waited for them to finish in the bathroom, so I could use it before I left. Around 10AM, I set out on Challah Quest. 

I listened to a podcast on the way there and most of the way back: Left, Right, and Center. I started following this podcast six or seven years ago, but I may drop it this year just because USA politics are so dreary now. The value of the generic "stay informed" is extremely unclear to me. The show got to the topic of trans atheletes in schools and I turned it off. I do not know why there is a national conversation over whether maybe 100 American trans girls should be allowed to play sports. Why are you this threatened by a tiny number of young women. Why do you care which kid is playing a sport you don't follow in a state you don't live in. Please just leave them alone. (Sometimes people care about trans boys in sports too but that seems so much rarer.) 

Anyway, I got challah and bagels and returned to the house around 11AM. For the next two hours, I did very little. I ate two bagels and a brownie, played a lot of Race for the Galaxy. Oh, and groceries arrived, so we got those put away. Around 1PM, I decided to take a nap since I wasn't doing anything else useful.

I woke around 3PM, dragged out of bed, and poked at my computer for a bit. A little before 4PM, I had Eliyahu keep me company while I made spaghetti sauce. I finished making food around 4:30PM and ate while playing RftG like usual. At 5PM, Coffee Quills started their stream and I wrote in my journal for the first part of it. 

For the rest of the evening, I wrote some of The Secret Dragon, and finally finished the last Apothecaria illustration. 

January 11

Woke around 8AM, played Time Princess for a bit, and dragged myself out of bed around 8:30AM instead of sensibly trying to sleep in further. Made breakfast, played Race for the Galaxy, ate a brownie, played some more Race for the Galaxy. Eventually dragged myself away from RftG and started writing up my 2025 goals. 

A little after noon, Eliyahu finished prayers and came in to play with Lut's computer (now the guest computer, since I don't use it.)  I'd thought to go through more of the living room credenza, but decided since Eliyahu was already in the den, I might as well decluter in the den instead. I have two drawer units next to my loveseat that are mostly full of cruft. I emptied the top two drawers and threw away much of the contents, then cleaned the drawers and put the drawer organizers into the dishwasher for a more thorough scrubbing. I moved most of the stuff I didn't throw out to the top of the credenza for staging. I want to organize things in a way that makes sense and so I'll be able to find it again, instead of stuffing them back into the same lack-of-order. 

I am not sure it makes sense to organize things when I plan to move soon anyway. But some level of organization will survive even the move; things stored together tend to get boxed together even when you're hiring movers. 

After I finished the second drawer, I asked Eliyahu if they wanted to play Flamecraft. I'd been carefully leaving the top of Lut's desk pretty clear so there'd be place to play. Eliyahu was up for that, so we played a game. This one was pretty quick by our standards: under two hours.

After the game, Eliyahu did afternoon prayers and I made myself late lunch/early dinner. I was cold after dinner, unusually, and so fixed a hot chocolate using the last of the premade chocolate bombs I'd bought in November. Storebought hot chocolate bombs are not as good as homemade but homemade are so much work. I used two little ones in a single cup of hot milk and that worked all right. 

Now it's time for Coffee Quills' stream but all I really want to do is declutter some more. o_o;;;

I'll try writing a bit of The Secret Dragon until the next break instead, and declutter after break if I still feel more like doing that than writing/drawing/editing.

~

Ended up just writing The Secret Dragon and doing a little reading after stream.

January 12

I posted the last Apothecaria entry. I'm free! \o/

I did more decluttering on Sunday. I emptied all the remaining drawers on my side of office with the exception of the tax paperwork drawer. Throwing away tax paperwork is not generally advised so I'm just keeping that. I moved one drawer into the living room, because it was a stacking drawer and didn't fit well under the drawers it'd been resting on. I moved all the music CDs into sleeves in a binders, stacked a handful of data CDs on a spindle, and threw away all the jewel cases. I haven't used any of these things in 10+ years, but once you get rid of the jewel cases, they don't take up much space and it's nice to have backups. In an ideal world, I would back up this stuff to some even smaller medium but ripping that many CDs would take quite a while. I also threw away all the ancient software (most of it was 20+ years old. The copy of Windows 7 was the most recent item. It's been a long time since we bought anything on CD.)

Lut and I had bought a few dozen movies/shows on DVDs, and most of these I will either donate or pitch, though. If I decided to stop using a music subscription, I might listen to the music I bought on CD again. But I almost never watch movies a second time. I'm not gonna dig out a DVD to watch something even if it's not available on streaming. I haven't reached the shelves full of DVDs or Lut's music yet, though. There are a few DVDs I might keep out of love or nostalgia, even though the odds I will ever use them are almost nil.

I restocked the drawers near me with a handful of things that I actually use, and put about half of the remaining things I hadn't thrown out in the drawer I moved to the living room. The top of the credenza is stacked with miscellaneous small items that I want to keep but haven't decided how to organize. 

After I finished with that, I showered and looked at my daily habits list. Coffee Quills had taken the day off because it's a holiday in Japan (where they live). So no stream to watch. I opened Be That Way and collected notes into an editing list so that I could check of "edit". Then I fought a few monsters in 4thewords while writing The Secret Dragon, so I could check off "write" and "4tw". I read a little of Timecrossed Engineer and checked off "read". I thought about drawing something so I could get "draw" checked, but didn't. 

I keep thinking of loading the last Apothecaria entries -- 221 of them, IIRC -- into Atticus, but not actually doing it.

The Time Princess society event "Fantasy Promise" started after at 11PM, so I stayed up fiddling with Time Princess and the event. My society is very keen on Fantasy Promise, and I'd dragged my alt into it to replace a long-time member at the last minute, because she hadn't logged in for the last 5 days and wasn't communicating outside the game, either. :( Hope she's okay.

Went to sleep a little late, but not ridiculously so.

 

2025 Goals

 I have been unusually reluctant to settle on my goals for 2025. 

Part of it is that I want to make more granular goals than usual, and I want to do a bingo card for them because I heard that as a suggestion for goals and it sounds like fun.  But I can make a normal new year goal list and then break it down into a bingo card later. I don't need to wait until I've figured out everything before I can get started.

Goals 2025:

• Move to North Carolina
• Assist parents
• Collect the rest of my Apothecaria journal into epub(s)
• Independent of my Apothecaria journal, complete six writing/publishing stages
• Complete monthly updates
• Be gentle with myself

Stretch Goals 2025

• Keep up with the habit tracker most days
• Keep up with the art habit now that Apothecaria's complete (Doesn't have to be as often as "drawing most days". Producing one finished art a month, doing curator prompts. Anything that shows that I'm not forgetting to do drawing/painting for months at a time).
• Make a goals bingo card and see how that goes. I can add or restructure my goals any way I want for this. 
• Exercise 15+ times per month
• Play through a short journaling game
• Try some more journaling games
• Figure out how to measure personal improvement at art (every year this is a stretch goal because I still don't know how to tell)
• Read at least a few pages of fiction (or a nonfiction book) I didn’t write, on most days
• Redraw an old picture that I'd put considerable effort into at the time
• Promote my books a little
• Write 50 blog posts and maybe also post them?

Details

The Move

The critical reason I'm moving to North Carolina is to provide care for my parents. But moving to North Carolina makes sense even beyond that. Despite living in Missouri for twenty-eight years, I've never really "built a life" around the community here. I am unlikely  to build one in NC, either. My life is online and at my computer, and this is what I enjoy. But I already have friends in the area where my parents live, and given that I always make a point of seeing them when I visit my parents, it's likely that I'll see them at least once or twice a month if I live in the area, too. That's more often than I'm likely to get out in my current area. 

So, while I will let myself off the hook for moving if something happens and it no longer makes sense for me to provide care for my parents, moving is a good idea. I don't plan to keep my house in Missouri because I don't plan to return here, regardless of what happens with my parents.

Writing/Publishing Stages

These are:

• Outlining
• Drafting
• Initial Edit
• Final Edit
• Cover Creation
• Layout/publishing

They are not all equal. The stage that takes the most time Actually Doing the Thing is generally drafting, but drafting takes the least mental effort/willpower, other than cover creation. The part that takes the most time psyching myself up to do the thing is usually the initial edit, though the final edit is close competition and sometimes harder. Outlining gets harder every time I do it, but this is because I've been pushing much of the stuff I used to leave for Drafting into Outlining. Layout/publishing is so easy that I'm only giving it a stage because I deserve a cookie for getting that far.

This is my approximate timeline for each stage. Times are laughably imprecise.

• Outlining: 3 weeks
• Drafting: 12 weeks
• Initial edits: 9 weeks
• Final edits: 9 weeks
• Cover Creation: 3 weeks
• Layout/publishing: 2 days

But this timeline should not be interpreted as "it takes 36 weeks and 2 days for Rowyn to turn an idea into a published book." First, I don't work that way: I don't pick an idea and then work on it and only it until it's published. I give pretty much every book two rest periods of at least a month: between drafting and initial edits, and between initial edits and final edits. Many books get long rest periods here, and often I take breaks on books at other points, including in the middle of stages. Ask me how many incomplete outlines I have! I don't know, I'd have to dig around. At least three?

For my six completed stages in 2025, I expect something like:

• 4 stages on Be That Way: initial edits, final edits, cover creation, layout/publishing. Time: 21.5 weeks
• 1 stage on The Secret Dragon: drafting. Time: 11 weeks. (I got about a week done on it in December)
• 1 stage on new WIP: outlining. Time: 3 weeks.

I expect November will take me around halfway through drafting a new WIP, but I won't finish it this year.

My process generally involves some overlap -- I'm likely to make a cover at the same time that I'm drafting or editing a different book without changing the time estimate for either. I briefly entertained overbooking myself and setting the goal at 8 stages, which would be perfectly achievable in a year where I wasn't moving and wasn't caregiving for two elderly parents. I am moving and caregiving. Sure, let's build some slack into that schedule.

Also, this is not The Official Schedule To Which I Must Hew. I have to do 6 stages. It doesn't matter what 6 stages.

Turning my Apothecaria journal into ebooks is a separate goal because (a) I don't know whether I'll be able to get the last 221 entries into one book or if it'll have to be two -- the image files are BIG and Atticus struggles to combine 200+ of them into one epub -- and (b) I refuse to edit it on the grounds that I'm not making any money from them and also editing the entries is a nightmare because each page is laid out with its illustration in ArtRage, which is a paint program, not a layout program. So (c) the only stages for it are "cover creation", which I am skimping on because Not Getting Paid, and layout, which is the easiest stage. The Apothecaria journal would artificially inflate the number of stages I can do in a year. Especially if I split the last 221 entries into two epubs instead of one.

Habit Tracker

Spirit City has a weekly habit tracker, where you can enter habits and then check them off if you do them. I like this concept and made it into a spreadsheet so I could look at past weeks and not just the current one. My current habits are: Edit, Write, Draw, Exercise, Read,  4tw. "4tw" is just "did I maintain my 4thewords streak this day y/n". "Read" means "read at least a few pages of fiction written by someone other than me." The bar for checking a box is low and I like it that way. 

I started using this on January 4 and even with the bar being low, I haven't checked off "Edit" once yet. o_o;;; I need to start on that soon, because one January goal is "read through Be That Way and make an editing list." That doesn't require a lot of time spent editing, but it does mean some. 

Blog Posting

I have actually written posts for Dec 14 through Jan 11. Some days are more detailed than others; I stopped writing about my days for two or three weeks and then got back to it and wrote what I remembered of the missing days. But I never bothered to post any of it. I kind of do need to post it because Dreamwidth is how I organize that sort of information and if it's not here I won't be able to find it again. I should just backdate a bunch of entries to keep it from being one ginormous entry. It might exceed the post length maximum for DW at this point. Idk if DW has a post length maximum tho. If it doesn't, I could just post it as one ginormous private entry, which would have the dual virtues of "putting it where I can find it later" and "not spamming folks with 30 days' worth of back entries."