November in Review

[rowyn]

Health/Fitness
It's too dark after work for me to go for bike rides, which torpedoes my enthusiasm for exercise. Still, I managed to exercise 15 times this month, mostly on my exercise bike in the basement. Could be worse.

I ate lots of unhealthy food, though. Mmm, Thanksgiving.

Writing
I wrote probably five thousand words in November, in the process of editing "His Angel" and "Inconceivable. New scenes and expanded scenes.

The Business of Writing
I finished initial edits on "His Angel" and "Inconceivable", sent them to beta readers. Then made more changes to both in response to initial comments, and sent them to a new batch of beta readers. I should proofread them some more, but they're basically done.

I am pretty happy with the third novella, "A Regular Hero", but am holding onto it to make some final adjustments. I have promised myself I will look for beta readers for it by the end of next week, though.

Art/Other
I did a mere 13 headers in November: I finally stopped feeling more like drawing than editing, and devoted most of the month to the latter instead.

I did eight other drawings, mostly from Twitter prompts.

Gaming
My November goal, in lieu of Nanowrimo, was "spend 60 hours on art/editing/exercise". My reward for making this goal was that on Monday, I officially resurrected the 2012 +terrible butterflies+ game. Amazingly, all my players who'd lasted until it fizzled had previously expressed interest in bringing it back. I offered to resurrect the 2014-2015 "Elect" game first, but two of the players from that were uninterested to lukewarm, so butterflies it is.

I spent Monday-Wednesday re-reading the archives, and was astonished by how engaging I found it. I'd thought I'd get bored (it's probably over 500,000 words!) but nope. The more I read, the more I wanted to read! I'm not even going to regret spending the time to read it if the re-launch fizzles, because I had a blast going through it and it was worth the time for its own sake.

Anyway, I'm excited to start playing that again. We haven't done much IC yet, as everyone is getting back up to speed first.

Socializing
I went to Contraception the first weekend of November, and to Seattle for the second weekend. (Much too short a trip! I didn't see anyone but Terry because I was only there for two days.)

So real live socialization happened this month! \o/ It already feels like forever ago, but I'm still grateful for my weekends at home, resting.

Happiness
It was a good month. I felt productive and generally not stressed, although the back-to-back weekends away from home were a bit much. I am happy.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the re-launch of Terrible Butterflies! Sorry to be less than totally enthusiastic about Elect; it was interesting but I think it ran into the problems of people being AFK/forgetting to respond/not responding to All and I think that may be the nature of PBEM RPG, one needs a campaign that's resistant to such. Maybe a campaign told through people sending letters so there are natural excuses for less-than-immediate responses?

You're always welcome to use Sinai for logging RPs or ask me to set up a MUCK for you with the appropriate holodeck/logging tools if you want. :)

[rowyn]

Oh, it's fine. PBEM is not for everyone. I assume Terry is even less enthusiastic than you are, given that he didn't respond at all. :)

Weirdly, the "reply all" problem that we had so much trouble with is

I've lost interest in synchronous RP (eg: in person/on MUCK/via Skype/etc. Any set up where all the participants get together on a regular schedule for the purpose of spending X hours roleplaying.) I wind up with severe performance anxiety and always spend a day or two dreading the game, regardless of whether or not I enjoy the game session itself. I might still join the occasional one-shot tabletop game, but I really don't want to go through that cycle of stress again. Maybe that will change someday, but it's been 3 years since my last synchronous game and I still have zero desire to do it again, so ...not looking good. :/

PBEM has lots of problems of its own, and I've never had a PBEM reach a satisfying conclusion. (At least Elect stopped with all the PCs in relative safety; you made it through Act One, so to speak.) But I don't find it nearly as stressful to run or play, and that makes all the difference to me.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I can totally understand that, but despite the dread of setting up the game (for the Avatars 2.0 campaign I ran, I did a lot of preparing maps for upcoming play with MapTool) it still rocked pretty hard in actual play, since everyone's there and present and you can get a lot of bantering on the side. I guess it's a matter of preferences though! Different things (groups of players, play styles, themes, game systems) work for different people.

As for Terry, who knows, maybe he's just AFK, or it fell through his mailbox or something!

[rowyn]

Oh, the sentence that got cut off: emails from the butterflies Google Group automatically reply to the group. The sender's not even listed on the email. Instead of doing that freakishly annoying thing where it replies to the sender, like the Elect list does. Apparently there's a setting somewhere that I forgot about and that has an awful default? That would've been good to know a year and a half ago. :/