rowyn

Health/Fitness
I used my exercise bike in during the first week of the month, because I was doing some writing for Nanowrimo while on it. In subsequent weeks, I've been doing stretches in the living room instead. I have a hard time going down into my dark, dank, miserable basement to exercise, and even when it's warm enough, it's too dark after work to ride my bike outside at this time of year.

I did dance exercises in the living room on Friday night, so I may go back to doing that, though.

I no longer walk to work. I did for a little while, but there've been at least two times where I'd walked or biked to work and Lut had a health emergency in the middle of the day, so I don't want to chance it any more.

Writing
I won Nanowrimo!

I started Demon's Sigil for Nano, and it was at 53,000 words at the end of the month. I won it early, on 11/26, despite doing very little writing during the three days I was at the convention across the street in mid-November. So it turns out I can still write quickly when I put my mind to it.

I have not been much motivated to continue the manuscript since I won Nano, though. My plan is to take it easy in December and only write 14,000 words or so. I have to do the cover art for The Sun Etherium, for one thing.

I feel guilty not writing faster. Or working harder. I also feel worn out and don't want to work any more. So, you know, that's a thing.

The Business of Writing
I released a new book! It feels so long ago. Silver Scales is now a thing people can buy!

Scales sold well on launch day. Afterwards, its sales graph per day has turned into a weird little sine wave, something like: 0 1 3 5 4 1 0, repeat. So far, it's selling better than The Moon Etherium did, but not as well as A Rational Arrangement or even Further Arrangements. The sequel will be out in January, so that should perk up sales a bit.

The Sun Etherium will be out later this month. Alinsa finished the initial build on Saturday, so I've started proofreading it. I also started work on the cover on Sunday, and then finished it on Monday. It helped that I'd already figured out what I wanted it to look like and assembled all my references beforehand. I was pleasantly surprised by how it came out; much more mellow about it than I was about The Moon Etherium's cover.

Art/Other
I did some fan art for Poison Kiss, and a promo image for Scales. (Not the cover! The beautiful cover image for Scales was painted by the talented Ilse Gort.) The Sun Etherium cover doesn't count for November.

I did a lot of adulting, too. Adulting. So much.

Gaming
I miss the PollRPG but I'm not sure I miss it enough to do it again. In part because running a serial that I can't build a buffer for is not well-suited towards my mentality, and in part because I suspect most of the people who were following it have forgotten by now and will not be interested enough to pick it up again.

Socializing
I went to the convention! I saw people and talked to people and got socialized-out for like a month.

Happiness
Uh.

Yeah, not so much. I'm glad I won Nano, and I'm glad I can still write 2000+ words in a day. That was a good thing to be reminded of. But Lut has cancer and I have to be a grown-up and inside I am just screaming and flailing and tantruming like a toddler. Sometimes not just on the inside.

One grace note of this whole situation: Lut and I have remained understanding towards each other. Our frustrations are all directed outwards. (Lut has been astonishingly good-tempered overall. I am the only one tantruming.) So that's one nice thing.

Goals for coming month
* Illustrate The Sun Etherium cover
* Look for an artist for Demon's Lure. I might do the art myself, I haven't firmly decided. I have an idea of what I want it to look like if I do it myself; it wouldn't be either the flat-shape look I've done for my other books or one of my attempts at realistic. I don't know if it'd work at all. Anyway, I should probably try to hire someone because it's a good investment in the long run. It's just that I have horrible cash flow issues right now and I would like publishing to make them better and not worse.
* Talk to my father and/or Telnar for advice about my horrible cash flow issues.
* Write 14,000 words of Demon's Sigil.

That seems like enough.

Health/Fitness
LUT IS HOME.

This fact continues to be a source of profound relief to both of us.

He is running out of home visits from health aides, so his speech therapist and occupational therapist has signed off. He is going to continue to get physical therapy, I think.

I'm back to biking to work most days, and biking afterwards. This is closer to three days a week of exercise than the six days I'd been doing before Lut was hospitalized. My weight is holding steady at around 180, so at least it's not going up.

I started buying steamer bags of frozen vegetables with sauce. I am finally conceding that I won't go to the trouble to do any food prep on veggies. So it's worth it to buy expensive but conveniently packaged ones that are gooped up to tastiness than to not eat veggies at all. I bring the steamer bags to work and eat the whole bag as a snack. 12 ounces of broccolli with cheese still has fewer calories than a 1.5 oz chocolate bar.

So far, I've had three, so it's kind of working? There's been a lot of free junk food at work recently, and I haven't been resisting it, so. I'll see how it goes when there's less temptation from free cake and donuts.

Writing
5500 words on Demon's Lure*, I think? And a few thousand words of new scenes for book 2 of the Scales duology and The Sun Etherium.

* This is a new WIP title for Demon Hunter. It's not that "Demon Hunter" was a bad title, per se, but there are like fifty urban fantasies/paranormal romances already under that name, and mine isn't even an urban fantasy. Demon's Lure is also the title of a paranormal romance, but only one, so that's an improvement. I might change this name again, though.

The Business of Writing
Silver Scales is done! And also officially titled Silver Scales. It is in Alinsa's hands for layout now. We're planning to release it by the end of the month.  \o/

Book 2 is basically done. I finished my final editing pass on it, but I've decided on a couple of other minor edits to do. Since Alinsa is busy with Scales anyway, I am not in a huge rush to pronounce it officially done. I haven't settled on a title for it, but I am presently leaning towards Gold Coils.

I finished the last of my planned edits on The Sun Etherium and am doing a final read-through now. Then it'll go to first readers and there will be more edits. \o/ Who wants to be a first reader on the second Etherium novel? Note: the story is a standalone fantasy romance. You can read it even if you didn't read The Moon Etherium. (Although it comes after TME and accordingly has spoilers for it.)

I feel super productive, lemme tell you. Also, it was really nice to edit a book that only needed a few scenes expanded and a handful of tweaks instead of forty sweeping changes. Like maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this writing thing and it won't take me an entire year to get my next draft ready for release.

The new Surface helps a lot with editing, which I hadn't anticipated. This is because I can read on it in tablet mode in bed, and it's powerful enough to use Google docs normally. So I do proofreading in bed and make notes for any longer changes I want. (Virtual keyboard is still terrible for actual writing.)

Art/Other
I did some new incidental art for Scales & Book 2, for seven little silhouettes in total. I need to refine them a little more, but hey. New art!

I am not otherwise using the Surface much for drawing, alas. I should do more, if only to justify the $100 stylus for it. (I tried using a cheap pressure-sensitive stylus and ... nope. Just nope. It was unpleasant to hold and to use.)

Gaming
I fell back into Puzzle Pirates. Oops. On the bright side, I didn't feel like playing it this morning and wrote a post for Flight Rising instead, so there's some hope that it won't suck me in completely.

Also, a lot of the time I spend on PP now is time I used to spend on Twitter or webbrowsing. It's not really displacing editing or writing, it's just changing what I do to avoid those.

Happiness
I've been a little glum the last week or so, with the combined sense of "I am spending too much time goofing off" and "I am stressed out from not enough free time." Despite having a lot more free time because I don't have to commute twice daily to the hospital. I think I am subconciously expecting things to be "normal" and thus frustrated that I'm not getting as much done as I did when things actually were normal.

Goals for coming month
* Finish editing The Sun Etherium and send it to first readers.
* Finish editing Gold Coils
* Read some books. That somebody other than me wrote.

I'm also gonna try to do a few thousand words of Demon's Lure, but I feel like my reading has fallen off a cliff this year and that it is probably more important to me professionally to Do Some Reading than it is to crank out more words. And the only way this is happening is if I actually put it down as a more important goal than writing. For one month, anyway.

Especially since I will probably want to do Nanowrimo next month, so November will not be a great time for more reading. :)

Health/Fitness
I stopped exercising in July. The time I used to use exercising, I now spend commuting to the hospital twice a day. There's a really stupid quote that goes something like 'if you don't make time for exercise you will find yourself one day making time to be sick'. I find myself thinking instead "since I used to make time for exercise it's much easier to find time for sickness by giving it up". -_-

I'd rather be exercising, to be honest.

Lut is a little better physically and somewhat worse mentally than he was when I took him to the ER on June 30. He is still at the hospital, and in a regular ward instead of the PCU, where he was all last week. So that's an improvement. If he continues to improve, the hospital will try to place him in a skilled nursing facility again. I don't know when or if they'll succeed at that.

Writing
I wrote, I dunno, a thousand words of Demon Hunter in July. It's not really on my priority list any more but sometimes I do it anyway. I kept my #4thewords streak by using up my stockpile of stempos (in-game items that allow you to skip days) because I forgot or didn't have time to write on several days. I also wrote a lot of stuff about Lut and health care that I'm not going to share.

The Business of Writing
I cut about 9,500 words out of the first half of Scales. I am pretty much done cutting words out of the first half, although having cut that much stuff I really need to read it again to look for editing artifacts. But at this point I'm comfortable saying "I just want to fix things that are actual errors", I think. For the first half.

I am still looking at trimming the second half, and also making some more changes based on feedback. Work on it hasn't ground to a halt despite health crisis, but I'm not dumping any deadlines on myself at this point.

Socializing
I haven't socialized much outside of the hospital, but I have seen Corwyn a couple of times and we did hang out for an hour or two after I took him to test drive the Corolla. Also, I went out for a couple of meals with Lut's family when they visited, and I talked to them. So less hermit-like than usual, really.

Goals from Last Month
I had "help Lut get better" down, which in retrospect was unduly optimistic. I visit him at the hospital before and after work during the week (this is why I got a car) and I spend several hours each weekend day with him. I still go home to sleep, because I have a cat and also the one time I tried to sleep at the hospital was traumatic. I am trying to help him. I don't know what I can do that actually would help, though.

I looked into buying a car, and actually bought one on 8/3 so good job there.

Card benefits services sent me a document saying they'd settled the claim and that Enterprise had acknowledged it was settled, so I think that's finally over. Four months and many emails later. Meh.

Goals for coming month
Get adoracar registered and real license plates put on her.
Visit Lut in hospital or wherever else he goes, until he can come home.
Upload The Moon Etherium print edition (this is basically done, but I found another typo to ask Alinsa to fix. Bleah, typos)

Everything else is extra.

Health/Fitness
I caught another lingering cold, this one mostly a cough that won't quite go away. I never felt horrible on this one, just run down. This is good, because I only have enough PTO to cover my vacation in the third week of June.

The Fitness Challenge at work wrapped up in May, thank goodness. I can go back to my usual workout schedule instead of the weird deformed one I've been using to try to minmax the challenge. The challenge does not correlate very well with any actual minmaxing of health, so this was mostly not a net positive. The closest it did to good was getting me to exercise on some days when I would have skipped it. But I also did less exercise on many days than I would normally, because extra time didn't "count".

I did some kind of exercise for 23 out of 31 days in May, so not far off normal. I hope to get back to doing one long bike ride on the weekends while the weather remains good. I think I've only had one ride over 12 miles since March, and I am feeling out of shape.

I've been eating more mandarin oranges and cottage cheese and less pastries and candy. This has not impacted my health or weight as far as I can tell.

Writing
I wrote a bunch of Poll RPG installments, and some new scenes for Birthright. That's about it. I have been more focused on editing.

Poll RPG: 13,500 words (the total of both files is at 26,250 now).

The Business of Writing
I finished my first editing pass on Birthright. I now have 7 items left to fix on Scales, and 18 left on Birthright. They are pretty much all hard changes that I don't have a clear idea on how to implement. Still. Getting there.

Art/Other
I worked on a picture of Smoke and Corydalis for several days, and lost interest before finishing it. That was all the art I felt like doing this month.

Socializing
I went to see Terrycloth in Seattle! Alinsa came to visit too, and the three of us hung out a lot. Alinsa and I went to see the Sabaton concert on the last day of my trip. We were going to drag Terry along, but opted not to in the end. This was the right call, as Terry is even less keen on standing than I am. Concerts are a LOT of standing. I actually sat down on the floor through most of the set for the second band, Leaves Eyes. Also, the venua did not have A/C and it was packed with people and about 90 inside. Sweltering. And you don't dare drink much because then you have to fight your way to the bathroom and then try to fight your way back to your spot.

This may be my last concert at a venue without seats, is what I'm saying. Fortunately, ProgPower is in a big theatre with stadium seating, so it's quite comfortable.

In any case, Sabaton was great. <3

Seeing Terry and Alinsa was also great. <3

Happiness
I spent a lot of May in a kind of low-grade glum mood. Not miserable, just thinking "I want to cry" a lot. I didn't even actually cry. Just glum.

Anyway, the "I want to cry" song is much better than the "I suck and everything I do is awful" or "I want to kill myself" songs, so. There's that. It would be nice to be more upbeat, though.

I write this down as a marker, so I don't forget and exaggerate my past as better or worse than it was. Moving on.

Goals for coming month
* Finish editing Scales and Birthright. I'd like to finish Scales (again) first, because once I finish it this time, I can kick it to beta readers. Because this will be the last round of edits that will impact it.
* Do something about covers for the two books. Where by "do something" I mean "find a cover artist". Who is not me. A professional.
* I also still have to deal with the rental car and credit card insurance people. Sigh. There was actually a thing the credit card insurance people asked me for that I could even get them (credit card statement showing the rental), but I didn't until last night because I had to look up when the accident happened again. I couldn't remember any more. I could have just sent every credit card statement. "It's on one of these four! Have fun."

Anyway, I finally did this (and even found the right statement) yesterday evening. Chrome would open the statement but not save it to file, for no apparent reason. I had to print it to PDF, which was semi-illegible also for no apparent reason. It was basically still readable, so I sent it. Hopefully that will be that.

Card Benefit Services has sent me letters for stuff that only the rental people can provide, too. I forward those on. I don't know if the rental people have provided any of it. They don't write me back. -_- But the claim form only had "other" for things to upload and they haven't asked for anything else but the statement lately, so. Maybe?

Health/Fitness
Work started a "fitness challenge" in March. I looked at the parameters when they announced it, and realized that my current levels of exercise scored 3-4 points, 5 days a week. "Sure," I said. "I will participate. Maybe I will even exercise on the weekend for bonus points." The fitness challenge, annoyingly, has a per-day cap of 3. I don't mind that there's a cap, but a per-week cap would be way less obnoxious.

In the first twelve days of March, I took two weekend days off and could count 30 of a max 36. (I scored well over 36, but can't count points over 3 in a single day.) We're on teams of like 4 to 6 people, and they tallied up the teams. My team was in second place, with a per-person average of 16 (for the full 12 days). The 1st place team had an average of 16.5.

... If I'd scored 6 more points, we would have been in first.

Anyway, clearly (a) everyone else in this challenge has a very different idea of "reasonable amount of exercise" from mine, and (b) I can't take another day off.

So I maxed out my points for the rest of March. The challenge runs through May 31, so I dunno if I'll keep this up for two more months. Six days a week is okay, but every single day is excessive. Even for me.

I still eat too much, so no change in weight. \o_

Writing
Mostly been writing Demon's Hunter. Also a lot of generic rambling, and a very little bit of Fellwater. I kinda feel like I should finish Fellwater, because there's only a handful of scenes left. But it's such a ridiculous thing that I'm not even motivated to edit it.

I've also been doing a lot of "I am just rambling to myself about my day", when I feel like playing 4thewords.com but don't want to work at it writing anything very coherent. Much of it is the sort of thing I used to post on LJ and Opendiary, way back when. Some of it is very boring (me talking about 4thewords, for example), but it does make me wonder if I should post more chit-chat stuff to my LJ again.

Demon's Hunter: 34,200 (total book is now 37,400).
Fellwater: 1,100 (total book is now 89,900)
Other stuff (LJ posts, 4thewords counting deleted words, forum posts, etc.): 27,000

My 4thewords count for the year through 3/31 is 178,000.

The Business of Writing
In March, I finished 30 out of 27 items on my to-edit list for Scales, and had 2 items left at the end of month. I am bad at math. Also, the list kept growing. This doesn't include some items that I decided to change without adding them to the list.

I finished one of the remaining items this morning, so it's done. The last point -- "actually try to make it shorter, this time for sure" -- is probably not happening in any meaningful way. "Make it shorter" is not something I do. -_- Also, of the three books I've released, the longest one is the one that still, almost two years later, sells the best. So the personal experience is not really speaking to the whole "people like their books concise". However, I will leave it out there as a thing to think about. I did actually cut some unnecessary-but-amusing stuff this morning. It is not clear to me how much of that kind of thing -- "this is just here for flavor" -- I should cut. Obviously some of it is integral to making the book not be boring.

Other
I paid off my mortgage this month! \o/ That was nice.

Socializing
Telnar visited last weekend! We did a lot of talking and some walking. Also went to the indoor waterpark near my house for a couple of hours, and I got him to download Ascension for his iPad so we could play it. The UI on the PC is basically identical to the iPad, but the PC is ten times more annoying because my desktop doesn't have a touchscreen and I can't hold it conveniently ten inches from my face. (The big problem with the PC UI is that the max resolution is like 600x800 or something. It is teeeeeeeny and I can't resize it.)

In other socialization news, I went to a retirement party last night, for a man I've been working with for 16 years. He was my boss, briefly, after my previous boss left in 2010 or something. Other than that time, we've never worked in the same department, but we always got along well. He and his wife were really surprised and touched that I made it to the party. It was 25 miles away! I did not ride my bike. I rented a car. A couple of people offered me rides, but I needed a car this weekend anyway so it worked out.

Anyway, it was only for a few hours and it was hard to talk because the room was loud (just from all the people talking!) But I saw many many former co-workers from before the last merger, and that was cool. Including several people who don't work at the bank any more! I am glad I went. And happy for my friend. And a little melancholy, thinking about other former co-workers I haven't seen in many years, and wondering if I ever will again. It's very hard for me to keep in contact with people unless I have some activity that keeps me engaged with them. :/

Happiness
I have some depression related to "not retired from Day Job yet and very tired of working 40 hours a week", and some bonus free-floating anxiety at the end of the month. I feel like I have forgotten to do some critical adulting task and by the time I remember it will be too late.

Still, it's been a good month overall and I'm pretty happy, but there are still hard parts.

Goals for coming month
So it's CampNano in April, and moreover 4thewords.com will be doing a CampNano event, so I know I'm going to be writing for it. I set my CampNano goal for "modest and easily achievable", which is to say 25,000 words.

...

Yes, that is modest and easily achieved. I wasn't really trying to write this month and went over 30,000. The biggest threat to my writing productivity is that the weather is getting nicer, though. I've been writing 800-1000 words just on the walk to and from work, and while I'm on my exercise bike.

I keep comparing my current writing pace to the rate at which I wrote The Moon Etherium and being disappointed. Then I have to remind myself I'm supposed to be editing and not writing.

Then I remember that I've been editing for four months and I'm maybe half-done, and it's all black despair from there. -_-

Anyway! I PERSIST.

So, goals:

• Write 25,000 words of new fiction
• Do some research for Birthright. Make world-building notes.
• Do some editing on Birthright
• Do my taxes, including the tax form Missouri wants my business to fill out even though I thought I already filled it out and I know I paid it so .... I don't know. I need to fill a thing out.
• Do what I can to make sure my credit card and the rental car company talk enough to get claim for damage settled.*

I would love to finish editing Birthright by the end of May, but I'm betting on end of June.

If I am doing really well at editing somehow, I don't care if the writing slides.

Last time I did research, I checked out books from the library. I plan to buy some e-books this time, to see if having more conveniently-sized books helps with the process. Also, the book selection in the local library system was disappointing. I don't know if the selection in e-book form will be better or worse, but I'll take a look.

* I rented a car last weekend too, and managed to damage it backing into a very low retaining wall at < 5 mph. I filed the claim with my credit card -- my special I-only-have-this-card-for-the-rental-insurance-waiver -- on the day of the accident. Thursday they emailed to ask me to send a bunch of documents from the rental car company. Why they didn't ask the rental place to send these documents is not clear. Today I talked to rental folks, but all the documentation I need is with their Damage Reduction Unit and they can't get me any of it. They expected the DRU to talk to me and/or the credit card. So I will wait a few more business days to see if anyone else gets in touch with me. If not, I will call the DRU and ask them for docs. It's a process. I have a lot of time to sort this out, so I am not very worried about it, but I also don't want to think "lots of time left!" and then find myself wondering in September whatever happened with the claim.

Health/Fitness
As usual, I am keeping up with exercise and not paying much attention to what I eat. I am doing a little better this week than the last several. I bought a bag of mandarin oranges a week ago and have almost finished it now, so I ate more fruit this month than usual. \o_

I got the mandarin oranges because one of my co-workers had bought a bag and gave me a few and they were SO GOOD. Sweet and not at all tart. Then the ones I got myself were much more orange-y and not nearly as delicious. Alas. But at least they're a convenient size.

Writing
According to 4thewords, I wrote 66,000 words in January. 4thewords counts words written and then deleted on the site, which means that if I cut-and-paste words to move them around, they get counted twice. It also does weird things like "count words a second time if you italicize them". So. Not the very best kind of tracker. But it's a site under active development, so some of the weirdness may well get fixed at some point. Moreover, since I used to never track the word count for my LJ posts and notes and other miscellanea, it's nice to have something that gives me a rough estimate of them. Anyway, my guess for the breakdown:

Fellwater: 27,700 (not a guess, I actually totaled this one)
Dragon bios: 3,500
Journal Entries: 15,000
Miscellaneous notes related to fiction and editing: 5,000
Forum posts & emails: 6,000
Deleted/repasted words and other 4thewords oddities: 8,800

For my convenience for the next update: Fellwater is at 80,800 words, plus 4900 words of notes, for 85,700 total in the project. I thought that this novel would be 100,000 words or so, but I've been ridiculously long-winded about it so now I'm not sure. I am kind of tempted to quit with this thing and work on something with a little more mainstream appeal and a lot less kinky sex. But I don't have anything I am eager to work on, so I am still poking away at it for now.

The Business of Writing
I edited 329 pages of The Warlock, the Hare and the Dragon, which was a little over my goal. \o/ On the other hand, my list of "things I should change but have skipped past instead" is getting longer. To the point where I need to make a real list of it and not just little scattered notes alongside the post-facto outline. (I didn't write an outline before writing WHD so I made one afterwards. I am not sure how helpful this really is but it makes me feel like I have a better handle on the work as a whole.)

Art/Other
I did a couple of headers, I think? Mostly I am re-using headers for TME at this point. I haven't really been drawing. If I want to do something mildly productive, I've been playing 4thewords instead.

Happiness
I had several bad days in January. It's hard to say how much of this is me and how much is the state of the nation. The latter is certainly depressing enough.

Goals for coming month

* Edit 180 pages of The Warlock, the Hare, and the Dragon
* Make a to-do list of everything I still want to change but haven't yet.

I am not going to finish edits in February. I had 11 days off in January and only 9 in February, and moreover I'm going to Conflation so only 6 days off in practice. I have 249 pages left. I really wanted to at least finish the current pass, but looking at the actual timeframe: bleh. I will make an effort to finish the current pass, but I'm not making it a goal because that's just setting myself up for failure. Also, the last 249 pages contain a lot of scenes that I want to make real changes to, not just rubber-stamp.

In related news: I keep thinking that (a) I want beta readers to be able to read both books together and (b) I need to do more research to revise the sequel. Realistically, it will take at least four months to revise the sequel. So unless something changes, that'd mean I don't get anything to beta readers until July. Which puts "starting the serial" out to August or September, and publication to October.

... or I can suddenly start researching and revising at like 10 times my current pace and not have this take an eternity. Or I could have some beta-readers read the unrevised sequel, I suppose. I kind of hate having people read something I know I'm going to change anyway, but the reason to have people read it in conjunction with the first book is mostly "do I need to change anything in Book 1 because of Book 2?" and revision will not affect that part substantially.

*sigh*

Well, we'll see how February goes.