January 2025 in Review

[rowyn]

 Health & Fitness

As the "when gallbladders attack" part of the header on the last entry might suggest, it was not a good month for health or fitness. Except in the "well I didn't overeat because I had no interest in eating" sense. I don't feel like that really counts.

I did pretty well on exercise for the first half of the month, and gave myself credit for the effort of decluttering two times after gallbladder attack. For a total of 14 times in January. Which I guess is pretty good for a month where I was too ill to exercise for 11 days.

I am probably not actually 100% yet, but I felt well enough to drive out to the trail for a walk on February 1 & 2, and pretty sure the queasiness during it on the 1st was more from my period than residual gallbladder stuff (though it's hard to tell.) The walk on the 2nd was fine and I even got bubble-less tea afterwards. (The bubble tea place was out of boba. I chatted with the proprietor to get a not-high-in-fat version of my usual Thai milk tea, too.) So doing all right.

Writing

Continued to write The Secret Dragon, albeit slowly because of gallbladder attack. It's up to 14,765 words: 7528 new words in January. I also added a bit more to the Apothecaria journal before illustrating and posting the final entries.

The Business of Writing

I made the editing list for Be That Way. It is unprecedentedly short at just nine items, five of them so easy that I already finished them. The other four are trickier, but I should be able to finish edits this month.

I also experimented with Bookbub ads towards the end of January: discounting Demon's Lure to 99 cents and running ads for it. This was a money-losing venture, as I assumed it would be going in, but it was fun to try something different in the marketing arena. I made a long thread on Fediverse where I live-posted about the experience over the course of six days. . Before my next adventure in paid advertising, I'll submit for a featured deal, which is unlikely to be a money-losing venture but also I won't get one. I submitted one in January after I'd already started the experiment and they turned it down, of course. 

Also, I should get the backmatter updated on whatever book I advertise next, because I have never bothered to update any of them. o_o;;;;

Art

I finished posting my Apothecaria journal in January. It feels like this was an age ago already, as if I finished it last year instead of this.

My art output cratered after I completed the last entry. (The last entry was ridiculously intricate, granted.)  I finished one drawing of Caliper (the goblin from Be That Way) and mostly-finished one of Caliper with Taeyna (the wolf-shifter). 

It's been nice not posting images daily to Fediverse. 

Reading

Mostly been first-reading Tuftears' Timecrossed Engineer: Back to School. I started The Spell Shop at some point, maybe during the last plane trip in December? I'll probably go back to that after I finish Timecrossed Engineer.

I started and finished a manwha, The Return of the 8th-Class Mage. It's the first action fantasy manwha I've finished, and was remarkably similar to the romance fantasy manwha I've been reading. The main distinction is that the romance plotline was less prominent and the action plotline more prominent. I read one comment on it, made near the end, where the reader complained that the main character had never been in any real danger and that the audience always knew he outclassed his opposition and would defeat them in due course. And my thought was: Yes, exactly, that's what I enjoyed about it. A lifetime of stories of rising stakes and increasing tension has left me rather delighted to read a low-tension story where hardly anything goes wrong for the MC and almost every conflict is soon resolved in his favor. 

Social

Eliyahu returned to Canada in mid-January. They have to stay in Canada until June at least. I can't imagine it will be feasible to invite them to stay with me for a month when I'm living with my parents, but maybe we'll work something out.

Another long-distance friend had mentioned visiting in January, but I didn't contact them immediately after Eliyahu left and then I was horribly sick for the rest of the month. I should get in touch with him. I am tentatively planning to go to a convention on the other side of the state in three weeks, and I'll probably see him there if not sooner, at least.

I did not make plans to visit my parents, because Gallbladder Attack. I don't intend to make plans for air travel until I talk to a specialist about the gallbladder thing.

Gaming

I didn't start playing a romance soloRPG, but I downloaded one that looked promising. I read partway through the rules but didn't finish. Part of me wants to play another soloRPG and another part is like "wow that was so much work for something that's not really mine." Playing Apothecaria was fun in a way that writing without prompts is not, but still. So much work.

Tuftears is running a game with two friends using a soloRPG as the base, and I admit this is something I'd like to try, too. GMing an Apothecaria game would pretty fun, for instance.

Goal Scorecard

• Write some of The Secret Dragon: done!
• Read through Be That Way: done!
• Make an editing list for Be That Way: done!
• Finish illustrating and posting my Apothecaria journal: done!
• Make plans for next trip to parents: nope, putting this off until I know what's going with my health issues
• Call parents a few times: three times, good enough

January Stretch Goals:

• Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed: I actually did this for a change!
• Track what I read: I didn't start using Storygraph but hey, I updated the "reading" section of this entry, good enough.
• Pay for car insurance, pay quarterly taxes, and file and pay for business license & annual tax return: these weren't on the list but they really should've been regular goals, because they're not optional. Also, they're done now, woo.
• Make progress on clearing out stuff I no longer want: I've been nibbling away at this. I'm making a point of filling my trash cart completely on each trash day. The city does free pickup for one full trash cart, which holds around 4 full trash bags. When it's just me, I don't even generate half a full trash bag from ordinary use. So the rest can be filled with things I don't want and doubt I could donate. I have so much more to go through, but I'm making progress. I really need to contact places about donations, though.

February Goals

• Finish initial edits for Be That Way
• Contact primary care physician if I haven't heard from specialist by 2/7
• Contact at least one (1) place about donations. Of anything.
• Finish reading Timecrossed Engineer
• Call parents a few times

February Stretch Goals

• Write some of The Secret Dragon
• Play a romance soloRPG
• Work on cover art or book illustrations
• Exercise 20+ times
• Track consumption
• Track what I read (maybe try Storygraph finally?)
• Make progress on clearing out stuff I no longer want
• Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
• Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
• Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote
• Pick an old picture to redraw

Comments

[tuftears]

Ironsworn: Starforged supports both solo and cooperative play, evidently, but the rules mostly make mention of cooperation now and then, and there are moves like 'Aid an Ally' which say 'See "Secure an Advantage"' ... if you're interested, there's a download of the first chunk of the rules: https://tomkinpress.com/collections/free-downloads

The cooperative play has been happening on good ol' Sinai but I don't see any reason it couldn't happen in Discord or in email. Or even in a Google Doc, with shared editing access to the same document.

One thing I'd do, if you want to make a cooperative solo-based RPG campaign you can put somewhere, would be to significantly edit the background setting, so for example, instead of the default 'oops, all humans' setting for Starforged, I tweaked it to have multiple species. Humanity escaped from the Milky Way with a number of 'adapted' and 'beastkin' species, genetically modified from the baseline humans, and the galaxy they've reached is occupied by weird aliens, generated by rolling on creature tables. You could probably have some fun with a worldbook of your own, borrowing from your existing books!

I definitely appreciate your comments on Timecrossed Engineer. ^.^ You're almost at the end! Whoo!

Hope you are recovering well from gall bladder attack!

[rowyn]

Yeah, if I did another online RP, I'd probably just use Google Docs. I've done a few RPs in it and it makes reading the story-so-far much more pleasant than email or Discord. The holodecks are pretty nice, but still more labor-intensive for editing/archiving than a Google Doc.

[tuftears]

*nods wisely* Do you ask people to attribute their text so that it's clear who added a particular paragraph? And how do you handle the dice rolling, if any?