rowyn

 Health/Fitness

The weight-loss program I've been using since January, RealAppeal, has switched platforms. I have seen a lot of "we're switching systems" over the course of my life, and I don't think I've ever seen one that was quite so perplexing and, well, terrible, as this one.

 

RealAppeal is shutting the old website down in mid-December, which they announced a couple of months ago. RealAppeal is not converting over the data. There's no support for individuals to export their own data, either. If you want your own data, you have the option of ... going through day by day and copying it out my hand? That's about it.

 

If you want to move to the new website, you can, assuming your insurance provider is willing to pay for an entire year of it, because RealAppeal is starting all classes over from the beginning.  

 

While they're winding down the old program, they're randomly consolidating classes on the old site, so you had the option of sticking it out on the old site while they rescheduled your classes over and over again, with new coaches, over a period of a few months, with the each consolidated class being at some random point +/- 10 weeks of wherever your original class was.

 

Basically, it's not a conversion from one platform to another. It's "we're blowing up the old platform and you can maybe start over from scratch on the new one?"

 

Also, my coach was given a new job in a different department and is no longer in coaching and has no way of contacting former students. So that was annoying too, but can't really be blamed on the non-conversion process.

 

The new website, in addition to not offering a way to export data (just like the old system), also doesn't have any kind of summary or reporting function.  The old website would at least summarize your last seven days of tracking, and you could scroll back through weekly reports to kind of eyeball things badly.  The new one only lets your see one day at a time. Ever. It also doesn't have as large a database of foods as the old site. The only advantage that it has in tracking is that you can sync it with a number of other tracking apps, pretty much all of which are going to be a lot better. Although your coach can't see what you enter no matter what, so the point to the RA site knowing whether you're tracking or not is unclear.

 

Oh, and I forgot the most astonishingly terrible decision on the new website: it insists on two-factor authentication for every session, and times you out after 15 minutes of inactivity. So if you're going to use the website to track, you have to submit your user name and  password, then on a new screen click "send" in order for it to send you a text, and then check your phone for the text and enter the authentication number in a badly-designed entry form, and NOW you can log the glass of milk you drank.  Be prepared to do all that again at lunch time!

 

There is no bypass or "remember this computer" or "keep me logged in for two weeks".  It's every single time you want to use the site.

 

The app at least lets you stay logged in for 30 days at a time but OY.

 

Anyway, as should be evident from my critique of the new website, I decided to sign up for another year. I am not sure how long I will stick it out on the new site, since the only thing I'm using it for now is the classes.  Maybe the classes will work from my phone and I can walk while they're going on again? The old app had stopped displaying video or sound for the classes after the first couple of months, so I've had to do them from home.

 

I looked around at tracking apps and was meh about all of them. Everything I saw offered "free" and "subscription" models, and I kind of wanted to be able to pay like $10 and own my own data and I didn't see anything where this was an option. Also, the tracking apps all emphasized features I don't care about or find actively obnoxious and counterproductive, like "this will nag you if you go over your calorie goal" or "gives you coaching advice". All I want is something that will add up my calories and tell me how much I've been eating/burning per day this month.

 

So I gave up and started using a Google spreadsheet to track. -_- This is also freeware, but at least Google makes it easy for me to export my own data. I could use Excel -- I own a non-subscription version of Excel, from the days before Everything Is a Subscription Service Now -- but then I couldn't update it from my phone. Also, I would be more tempted to use Access and build a database for it, and this way lies madness.

 

I thought the spreadsheet would be annoying because I'd always have to look up foods to find out how many calories they are and type in food names and such.  But I've been using the spreadsheet for about two weeks, and it's not been an issue. I usually check calories before I eat anyway, so it's not as if I was waiting until I logged food to find out.

 

I do kind of miss the old site's nutritional analysis, but it's not as if knowing that I never eat enough protein has induced me to eat more protein at any point in the last 10 months, so it probably wasn't going to in the future, either.  

 

According to the spreadsheet, my calorie consumption for November is ~ 1900, and exercise burned around ~290. I think this about the same as October, but I haven't tried copying out all my October data by hand in order to compare it.  I was eating much more than usual for my six-day vacation to visit Terry, and probably somewhat more during the three days of the convention. But I actualy continued to track while visiting Terry so I even have data for that, which is nice.

 

I fell out of the habit of both stretching and push-ups this month. Gonna see if I can get back to it next month.

 

My weight was pegged at 170.6 for several days before I went to Seattle -- seriously, it was weird, every time I stepped on the scale it'd be exactly the same weight, down to the tenth of a pound.  When I got back on 11/25, it was 174.4.  It plummeted to 169.9 by 11/30, and then went back to 170.6 as of 12/1.  Maybe travel cause me to retain a lot more water? Weight is weird, y'all.

 

Anyway, my average for the last 5 days is 171.3, so I'm gonna pretend that counts as "actual weight." That puts me down 13 pounds for the year, and down about 2 pounds over the last two months. So, pretty much exactly where I planned to be. Sweet.

 

Writing

I won Nanowrimo, writing 20,800 words of Spark of Desire to finish that book (at 91,300), and 29,200 words of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady (bringing it to 44,000). I stayed up a little late on 11/29 to finish winning Nano, and then spent Saturday writing no fiction whatsoever. My word counts per day were all over the place:

 

11/1/2019 : 4,559

11/2/2019 : 4,204

11/3/2019 : 4,753

11/4/2019 : 1,965

11/5/2019 : 1,208

11/6/2019 : 1,705

11/7/2019 : 400

11/8/2019 : 2,044

11/9/2019 : 1,121

11/10/2019 : 274

11/11/2019 : 1,584

11/12/2019 : 858

11/13/2019 : 2,675

11/14/2019 : 531

11/15/2019 : 3,463

11/16/2019 : 2,628

11/17/2019 : 4,714

11/18/2019 : 749

11/19/2019 : 277

11/20/2019 : 2,438

11/21/2019 : 130

11/22/2019 : 157

11/23/2019 : 0

11/24/2019 : 400

11/25/2019 : 1,839

11/26/2019 : 0

11/27/2019 : 514

11/28/2019 : 2,047

11/29/2019 : 2,796

11/30/2019 : 0

 

That 4,753 on the 3rd represents a new single-day high.

 

Also, I wrote over 36,000 of those 50,000 words -- more than 70% -- on just 11 days. Writing was much, much easier on days where I had no other plans. On the days when I was working, or visiting Terry, or spending time at the con, or taking Lut to an appointment, I often didn't break 1000. Actually traveling on a plane, however, is fine for writing. It's 3+ hours sitting with no Internet access and no excuse not to write. :D

 

The new NaNoWriMo site manages to be even less likable than the old one by having no mechanism by which to edit your word count per day. For even more amusement: the only reason I use the NaNoWriMo site at all is because 4thewords.com has offered a discount code to NaNo winners for the past three years.  This year, however, there was a glitch in their NaNo sponsorship and so there's no 4thewords discount code for winners.  (Yes, NaNoWriMo charges prize sponsors for the honor of offering prizes, in case you're wondering why most of the "prizes" are pretty terrible.) 4thewords offered a 25% discount on their own site to everyone instead.  (2020wrimo, if you're interested. My referral code is LBQFV83845 if you're signing up for a new account and want some referral goodies.)

 

Every year, I go to the NaNoWriMo site and think "maybe this is the year that I will actually use any of the networking features that they keep trying to get me to use". And every year, I go "NOPE." Maybe next year will be the year I finally skip using the site entirely. <_< At the least, I'm gonna check with 4thewords before I sign up to see if they're sponsoring a prize.

 

The Business of Writing

I did NaNoWriMo in November. No business stuff got done.

 

Art/Other

See above.

 

Socializing

I low-key attended the convention across the street, by which I mean "I spent 12-15 hours total at it, over the course of three days." And on the Thursday before it started, I spent the evening with friends who'd driven in for the con.  And I spent 4.5 days with Terry.  This time around, we just spent the time together instead of seeing other people. We did get out of the apartment each day for food and exercise, and I made him spend two hours on Sunday playing Pokemon GO with me and doing the Team Rocket event. Team Rocket continues to entertain me. The weather was nice on the 30th, so I spent almost 3 hours wandering around on the Plaza fighting Team Rocket grunts and a couple of leaders. 

 

Happiness

NaNoWriMo was both good and stressful. I enjoyed focusing on writing and letting everything else slide for a while, Writing 13,500 words in the first three days of November was particularly fun. Trying to get enough ahead so that I wouldn't have to stress about the remainder while I was in Seattle was challenging, though. If I do NaNoWriMo again, I should avoid scheduling a trip during it. Attending the con is a lot of distraction by itself.

 

Oh, and I have a funny story about planning to do NaNoWriMo. I looked at my plans for November, and made up a schedule based on the days I'd be busy. And wrote a post called "NaNoWhyMo" because the schedule looked so brutal. 

 

Then, instead of posting that, I decided I would either do NaNoWriMo and be excited about it, or I wouldn't do it. If all I could think going into the month was "UGH NO", then I should just skip it. With this resolved, I realized that I was excited about writing as much as possible in the first three days -- days when I had no work or other plans. I figured that was good enough; I could be excited about starting the month and figure out the rest from there.

 

And that decision more-or-less worked and carried me through. 

 

Goals for coming month

~ Help Lut

~ Catch up on most if not all of those to-do list items that have been accumulating while I did NaNoWriMo.

~ Get back into the regular habits that I let slide because of NaNoWriMo (cleaning, stretching, etc.)

~ Make a list for the next round of edits on The Twilight Etherium and maybe start final edits

~ Revamp the outline on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady  and write some more of it.

 

That looks like plenty. I would like to either finish the next round of edits on The Twilight Etherium or finish the draft on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady , but doing either one is unduly ambitious at this stage. My estimate is at least another 46,000 words before the draft is done, and I am ambivalent about what to do with The Twilight Etherium next.

 

Also, I have found the outline for Lord  to be too vague; it's not nearly as useful as the outline for Spark was. And it occurs to me that I can fix this, and that there's no reason not to. So I'll do that.

Health/Fitness
I started doing kneeling push-ups and stretching a few times a week. I am trying to work myself up to 50 kneeling push-ups, and then I'll switch to regular push-ups and do fewer of those. On the one hand "I'll just do a 20-25 push-ups" seems unlikely to impact my strength by much, and on the other, it's easy to convince myself to do it: "It only takes like 3 minutes, just get it over with."

I did less walking this month, down to 63 minutes per day from 76. I also spent more time cleaning, which I count as exercise in the RealAppeal tracker (as "light cleaning", which is about 2/3rds of the calories-burned-per-minute of "walking"), but didn't log in Google Fit, which is where I get my month-end report.

In addition, I took the last five days of September off from both exercise and food-tracking, because I was visiting family and didn't want to bother with either.

I'm up a pound for the month, which does not feel surprising under the circumstances, or worrisome. My long-term plan is to lose a pound a month, and weight fluctuates enough that a pound one way or another doesn't mean much. If I'm still flat or trending upwards at the end of November, I'll lower my calorie target then.

It is amusing to be losing weight slowly, because standard weight-loss strategies all revolve around weekly progress and I'm like "I don't expect to make progress in a week, and don't really expect to make progress in a month. Maybe in three months we'll know if it's still working or not."

Still down 11 pounds for the year. Still willing to track and stay under 2000 calories daily. Good enough.

Writing
I wrote around 1500 words of Spark of Desire. I was seriously not in the mood to write fiction last month.

I made a few notes for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, and the untitled next book in The Demon's Series.

The Business of Writing
However, I did finish initial edits on The Twilight Etherium. \o/

I will need to do more edits. Not looking forward to that.

Art/Other
I have been using to-do lists, and one of the items on my to-do list has been "sketching." It has been surprisingly hard to actually do this one. I usually think of sketching as an easy if not useful thing to get myself to do. But apparently it's not.

When I did get myself to sketch -- I think a total of three times last month -- it was mostly gesture drawings, using gesture-drawing web apps. I do not enjoy gesture drawing. But I would like to someday learn how to sketch without spending several hours on every drawing, so. It's probably good for me.

I should probably watch some tutorials or do other things in an effort to learn and improve instead of struggling randomly.

Also, I really need to do the thing where I do the timed gesture drawings as a warm-up and then let myself draw something for a while, instead of feeling completely exhausted after 15 minutes of quick sketches and quitting.

Socializing
I went to visit my family! I flew out to my parents' home last Thursday, while my brother and his wife flew down to meet us, and we spent a long weekend together. I also spent much of Saturday with Kage, Sophrani, and Envoy, who all live in the area.

It was a laidback weekend of conversation, eating good food, and watching videos and some tennis with my mom. (She loves watching tennis, and I like watching it with her).

Happiness
Fine, I think? Maybe I will start mood-tracking again.

Scorecard for prior month
~ Help Lut & general adulting: I will mark this as done, even though there is one adulting task that I continue to procrastinate on.
~ Use to-do lists: This is working pretty well. I use a combination of lists and "what I actually did". Each week has a section of "things that are scheduled for a specific day" like work and appointments, "one-off tasks I need to do" like "coordinate plans for upcoming trip with friends" or "write month-in-review post", and a section of recurring things that I do multiple times per week, like push ups and stretching. I cross things off as they get done, and put a ~ beside the things I do multiple times to indicate how much is done. If I don't get a thing done, it rolls over to the next week. It's been useful.
My current week has too many one-off tasks, though. I will probably need to figure out a way to abandon tasks rather than rolling them over to new weeks indefinitely.
~ Score 20 writing/editing points: finished editing The Twilight Etherium, so got this done.
~ Do not beat self up for any productivity lapses: I wish I'd remembered this was on the list. n_n I did a reasonable enough job of not beating myself up, though.

Goals for coming month
~ Help Lut & general adulting
~ Keep up with the weekly to-dos
~ Finish 25% of a new book (working on final edits for The Twilight Etherium can count in place of some of this.)

That looks like enough. I gotta get back to writing eventually; it's been a while.

Health/Fitness I didn't walk 50km in a week in July, so not quite as much exercise this month as June, but more than May or April: 65 minutes per day.

The last couple of weeks, I've made an effort to walk faster while I'm out walking. I don't have a good way of measuring this, although it looks like my steps-per-minute-of-walking is going up. This is not a great measure because my "minutes" only includes the time I spend walking for a few minutes or more, and "steps" includes any time I walk around with my phone. The data for "how far I walked but only when I was going for a walk" exists but not in a convenient form for summarizing.

Still down around 10 pounds for the year. Eating habits have not changed much; still tracking and taking some care not to overeat.

Writing
I wrote a thing! "Insecurity", an 8000-word story for The Reclamation Project, a shared-world furry anthology that John "the Gneech" Robey is editing for FurPlanet.

Back in the 80s, I started reading the first shared-world anthology, Thieves' World, with its first book. Shared-world anthologies were pretty popular for a while and I read a bunch of them; I remember Liavek with particular fondness, and Wild Cards, which George R. R. Martin wrote stories in and edited for decades (still going!), long before he hit the mainstream with Game of Thrones. I always thought this style of story-telling was great fun and I am excited to have written a story for one. Eeee! *^_^* FurPlanet plans to release the anthology at the end of this year, and I will keep y'all posted.

The Business of Writing
I published The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince! It was a successful launch! Woo!

It was, in fact, my most successful launch since A Rational Arrangement, surpassing the launch month for Further Arrangements by a few dozen sales. I am still a long way from publishing another book as successful as ARA was, granted, but I am pleased. Ooh, and in other good news: the new release had a perceptible "halo" effect on the rest of my catalog: every other title also sold a few more copies in July than in June. The effect really was spread across the whole catalog, too. ARA was the biggest beneficiary, but readers who wanted to try something else after reading Princess just went all over the place.

I also revised "Insecurity" and sent it off to the Gneech.

I did a little bit of editing work on The Twilight Etherium and Eclipse's novelette, which now has a title: "A Mortal Prince in Fey Lands". Eclipse's novelette now has an editing list just like I do for books. It has seven points on it.

Oh! And I solidified the outline for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. It stars Raindrop, one of the supporting cast members from The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince. It is ridiculous and inspired by Northanger Abbey in the sense of "gentle send-up of Gothic romances". Raindrop is the antithesis of a Gothic romance heroine. It amuses me greatly. I think y'all will love it.

Art/Other
I drew a fan art portrait at the start of July:


I started another portrait but wasn't happy with how it was coming out and just stopped drawing for the rest of the month.

Gaming

Pokemon Go added a new mechanic: Team Rocket "takes over" pokestops on occasion for 30 minutes at a time. While they're there, you can battle their three-Pokemon teams of "shadow Pokemon". If you win the battle, you have the opportunity to capture a shadow Pokemon, which you can then purify.

It took me a while to figure out how to defeat Team Rocket. In raids, you really want a team of pokemon that the raid boss is vulnerable to. With Team Rocket, raw CP seems to be the most important factor. I buffed up a team of three Slakoth to 4250-4400 CP, figured out how to get their charged attacks up to "Excellent" reliably, and they can now take out pretty much any Team Rocket combo they've gone up against.

It's not clear if there's much real advantage to purified Pokemon over regular ones. They can get a charged attack that's only available to purified Pokemon, and they're cheaper to evolve and level than standard ones. But none of that necessarily makes them any better in combat, and most of the shadow Pokemon are pretty wimpy in their regular forms. But hunting for Team Rocket pokestops has made playing Pokemon Go actually interesting to me again, at least for a little while. I went to the Plaza on Wednesday evening for an EX Raid, and wandered around for an extra hour getting some exercise in and taking out Team Rocket. I figure on doing the Team Rocket hunt again either tomorrow or Sunday. Saturday is Community Day, so I expect I'll do that on Saturday rather than fighting Team Rocket.

Happiness
I did manage to be happier in July than in June. So that was good.

Goals for coming month

* Help Lut and generally adult
* Just edit "A Mortal Prince" already. I have been waffling about what to do with this novelette for several months. I am going to stop waffling and Do a Thing.
* Send "A Mortal Prince" to first readers. Then if I did the wrong thing, they can tell me. My plan for "A Mortal Prince" is to make it a freebie anyway. It is really a tie-in story: it fills in the background for Eclipse, the titular prince in The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince.
* Do some fiction writing too
* Do not angst about productivity otherwise.

Health/Fitness
I exported my data from Google Fit in an effort to crunch it. According to Google Fit, my daily activity has been between 69 and 58 minutes a month for the seven months that I've been using the app. May was actually the low, at 58 minutes, but 58 minutes a day still strikes me as plenty.

It turns out that Google has a calories-used estimator that's supposed to include your base metabolic rate, which is kind of cool. Google thinks I have been burning an average of 1837 calories per day for the last seven months, with a monthly high of 1893 in March and a low of 1796 in February. My average for May was 1837. I suspect this number is higher than the "minutes of exercise" would suggest because Google factors in things like step-counting that happen outside of formal exercise. I did start making a point of using the downstairs bathroom at work, and keeping my drinks in the downstairs fridge, so that I'd have a reason to get up and walk around a little more when at work.

I suspect Google is undercounting my calorie usage rate. I track calories consumed in RealAppeal, and that has generally averaged a little under 1800 calories per day for the last four-five months. (RealAppeal doesn't have an export function, so this is an estimate based on eyeballing their weekly summaries.) By Google's metrics, I should've lost maybe 2-3 pounds during a period where I've lost 9. RealAppeal thinks my metabolic rate before exercise is higher than Google thinks it is including exercise.

Based on the rate at which I've been losing weight, I'd guess my actual average usage is around 2000.

Anyway, numbers are fun. Exercise is going fine. Eating food that isn't mostly sugar remains a work in progress, but I am doing better than usual.

Writing
I wrote 20,600 words of Spark of Desire in May. I am a third of the way through my outline now. My initial estimate of the draft's length at the this point was 33,500 words, and the actual length is 33,600, so the by-bullet-point estimates remain spookily accurate. I was running long for a while, but then got to a collection of three points and realized I'd already covered most of them. So right on track again.
Writing is a bit of a slog; it's been especially difficult to motivate myself to write on the days where I work or take Lut to appointments. But I am over my goal for the month, so good enough.

I also started work on an outline for a standalone sequel in the setting of The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince. The idea is for a mock-Gothic novel and omigosh, it's adorable. I am absolutely writing it if Princess does well. I might write it even if Princess doesn't, we'll see. Outline still needs significant work first. I do like the idea of having multiple outlines that are already completed for future books; makes the transition between projects easier and gives me more options.

The Business of Writing
I finished proofreading The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince, and sent corrections to Alinsa. I also completed the front and back matter for the book and sent those. Alinsa made the corrections, and added the new stuff. I have checked the new copy over and sent back a much smaller round of corrections today. So it's getting closer! There are still a bunch of fiddly layout things left for Alinsa to do, however.

I poked at edits for the Eclipse novelette, which needs a title beyond "Eclipse novelette". I did not really get anywhere on editing it.

Art/Other
Put a smidge more work into the Frost/Thistle picture I started ages ago, but not much.

Gaming
For various reasons/excuses, Lut and I did not go to the game store for gaming night again until last Thursday. But we did finally make it out again! We met a man named Rick and played WarhammerQuest with him. It's a co-op game a little like Thunderstone, or like using cards to generate the dungeon for a D&D game. The rules were not well-written, but we had a good time.

I remain cheerfully addicted to Love Nikki.

I started playing Pokemon Go more again, from a combination of "improving weather" plus "in-game events that I wanted to do" plus "I exchanged trainer codes with a new handful of online acquaintances so now I have motivation to get gifts again."

Happiness
Been feeling pretty good. Still so glad that I only work 20 hours a week now.

Report Card for May Goals
* Proofread The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince: Done!
* Complete front/back matter for same: Also done!
* Write 15,000 words of fiction or make a dent on initial edits for the Eclipse novelette and The Twilight Etherium: I did the "write fiction" part of this and overachieved. Have not made a dent in edits.

Goals for coming month
* Keep up with general adulting and helping Lut
* Visit Terry! (I am going to be in the Seattle area from June 21-24, if anyone wants to meet up.)
* Do anything else necessary on my end to get Princess ready for publication.
* Write 15,000 words of fiction.
* Start editing the Eclipse novelette.

That looks like enough

Health/Fitness
I should download my Google Fit data and look at it but meh. I forgot to add a few workouts into it until just now, which means they won't be in the export. I'll do that later. I was pretty good about doing some form of activity on almost every day this month. Mostly walking. Walking is low-effort. Not just low physical effort, but low mental effort. I don't have to psych myself up to doing it, I can just go "well, I'm already wearing clothes, I might as well go for a walk."

RealAppeal sent me a blender in March. It's this adorable 24 ounce tumbler with the blender blades in the top of the vessel instead of on the bottom. I bet all blenders do that now, it's a good design choice. Anyway, I dug up some smoothie recipes online and bought some fruits and vegetables, mostly frozen, to put into smoothies. And then I actually made some. The only one I like so far is blueberry/banana/spinach. I cut up a little of a yellow bell pepper to add in and that worked all right. It mostly tastes like banana and yogurt rather than spinach or pepper, which is all to the good. The biggest downside of the recipe is that it uses a whole banana and the resulting smoothie is ginormous and effectively a meal, so I have to pick a meal to replace with it. At some point, I need to try sticking half of it in the fridge and drinking the rest of it the next day. Anyway, this is a good strategy for sneaking some Actual Fruits and Vegetables into my other produce-free diet. The nice thing about smoothies is that I can use frozen stuff for it and it doesn't matter because I was going to drink it cold anyway.

I'm down to 178 pounds now, so since I started RealAppeal about 10-11 weeks ago, I've lost six pounds. The RealAppeal thing is no trouble to maintain and I plan to stick with it. This has been an interesting contrast with my last attempt at tracking diet & exercise, in 2014. In 2014, I lasted through about 10-11 weeks of tracking app before I found it too annoying to keep doing. During that time, I lost a total of two pounds.

The most fascinating thing about this to me is that in 2014, I was eating significantly less than I am now. It's one of the reasons I gave up; it took willpower to stick with it and I ran out of willpower.

The differences that I think matter:

~ I am not trying to lose weight. So if I weigh in at the end of a week and I've gained two pounds, I don't go "WHY AM I EVEN BOTHERING???" I go "meh. Didn't care anyway."
~ I refused to let the program set a calorie goal for me. Like the fitness app I used in 2014, the RealAppeal diet program thinks my calorie goal should be between 1200 and 1550 calories. To which I say NOPE. I tried that goal in 2014 and I hated it and burned out after less than three months. I set my calorie goal in RA at 2000.
~ The RealAppeal tracking app is much easier to use than the last one I tried. It has a huge database of existing foods, including most items from chain restaurants. I can start to type and then pick from the list of matches. It remembers the things I've eaten before and offers those matches first. I can add new recipes to the database. I can use the app on my phone or open it in a web browser. I have done daily quests for games that were more inconvenient than this. It's not a hassle.
~ RealAppeal has coaches: actual human beings. I liked my coach, Cass, immediately. Having an Actual Human Coach that I can email or talk to is of both practical and psychological value. I scheduled a one-on-one with my coach (you can do this! As often as you like! Because fortunately not everyone wants to) to talk to her about sneaking veggies into my diet (yeah, I'm basically a toddler, I have to trick myself into eating them.) This was not just so I could get suggestions (which she provided, and some of them were helpful) but to give me MOTIVATION. I told myself three weeks in a row that I would find a way to eat more veggies THIS WEEK FOR SURE but it wasn't until I had to talk to an actual person about it that I persuaded myself to DO IT. I am sure the coaches are the most expensive part of the program, and I don't know that they're the most effective. But they are certainly add considerable value. And the fact that I know how expensive this is makes me value it more, I think, than I would if I treated it as if it had no cost. Even though I have no out-of-pocket costs for the program.
~ The coach and the class doesn't push the nutritional guide. The class is structured around the idea of gradual improvement and giving you a few new things to consider each week. Cass emphasizes the importance of tracking much more than the idea of avoiding specific unhealthy foods or eating healthy ones.

Things that do not make difference:

~ The instructional videos. Every week, there's a thirty-minute class, of which 10-20 minutes is instructional video. They do their best with these, but I find them tedious and mostly uninformative. The rest of the class is discussion between the coach and students, and that part is more engaging. I don't mind the class; I exercise through it and I don't generally do anything very interesting while I'm exercising, so it's no worse than usual.
~ The nutritional guide. RealAppeal has astonishingly inconsistent messaging. Its app tells me that my baseline calories used (assuming no exercise) is 1935. To lose ten pounds in a year, you only need to eat, I don't know, 70 calories fewer than you burn per day. Given that I usually get some exercise in a day, 2000 calories is a perfectly reasonable target for me. But despite this, the nutrition guide programs top out at 1800 and those are supposed to be for large active men. So it's like the app was set up with the idea of "we want you to do this for the rest of your life so you can make your goals ones you can easily maintain" and the nutrition guide is "we think you will quit unless you see instant results so here's some super-stringent requirements that will require all of your willpower." The RealAppeal nutrition guide also wants me to pick one of its meal plans and eat only its recipes and I'm like ARE YOU KIDDING ME. I am not going to prepare 21 new and unfamiliar meals in a single week. Why would you even think that was reasonable. It's so far out there that I haven't even tried to incorporate anything from it into my diet. I don't even use its smoothie recipes because I wanted recipes with veggies and it doesn't have any.
~ The commitment contract: they want you to sign a contract every week that says you will stick with your chosen plan from the nutritional guide. NOPETOPUS ON OUTTA HERE.
~ I want to re-emphasize that point about the nutritional guide, because the last time I tried a diet plan of 1800 calories or less I DIDN'T LOSE WEIGHT. So not only is it a sacrifice, but it's a sacrifice that doesn't even work.

The failure of the nutritional guide to offer any guidance on "ways to gradually improve your diet" is probably my biggest disappointment in the plan. But I am taking a mix-and-match approach and just ignoring anything that doesn't work for me, so it's in the category of "missed opportunity" rather than something that's actively making the service less useful. Overall, I am pleased with the experience.

Writing
I worked on outlines for two new books in March:
The Twin Etheriums: set two hundred years before The Moon Etherium, this novel is a polyamorous romance between three fey who seek the key to immortality: an asexual/alloromantic trans man from the Sun Etherium, a demigirl barbarian, and a cis woman from the Moon Etherium. The outline for this book is complete and in pretty good shape.
Untitled sequel to Frost and Desire: a four-person polyamorous romance. From a marketing perspective, this is a mistake (Frost is my worst-selling series.) I don't particularly want to write this and consider it vaporware. On the other hand, I do want to read it. So it might happen. I have about 2/3rds of an outline for it, so it'll need more work before I can start.

>The Business of Writing
I also outlined the most significant changes I want to make to the final version of Princess. I wrote another eight thousand words or so to add to the novel.

Art/Other
I started work on an illustration of Frost and Thistle, but it's unfinished.

Gaming
I had some drama on Flight Rising. In an effort to make the recap less tedious, the following is not actual quotes. It's pretty similar to the events, though.

Flight Rising moderators: "We deleted a bunch of the bios in your lair for obscenity and we are giving you a warning for having posted obscenity."
Me: "But ... there wasn't anything explicit or pornographic or obscene in any of the bios you deleted. Can you give me copies of the material you deleted?"
FR Mods: "No, we don't keep copies. Or have site backups, apparently. But that stuff was all porn."
Me: "Then how do you know it was obscene?"
FR mods: "Because we deleted it!"
Me: "... so ... do you mean that you consider saying 'some dragons enjoy consensual BDSM activities' to be obscene, even if there is no depiction of sex, sexual activity, or BDSM scenes?"
FR Mods: "Yes."
Me: "The actual site lore is that dragons are sapient beings. Lairs buy and sell them. On an auction house. To breed."
FR Mods: "Yes, well, slavery and forced breeding is fine, obviously, but dragons who enjoy the role of a slave? Having discussions about consent? HOW DARE."
Me: "This bio you deleted was about the rescue of a lost dragon. What was obscene about it?"
FR Mods: "That one is fine."
Me: "... then why did you delete it?"
FR Mods: "Because."

I am vaguely annoyed about their decision that "saying consensual BDSM exists is obscene", given the site lore. But I would have shrugged it off if they hadn't been completely ham-handed and arbitrary in their enforcement of it. This wasn't material on the front page of their site; these were bios buried in my lair. You had to dig to find them. The mods could've told me "Please remove any bios that reference BDSM within X days or we will delete them" and I would have deleted the actual material they cared about and not, like, random bios of the dragons sitting next to them.

Anyway, I have not been much involved with Flight Rising for the last couple of years, and this kerfluffle killed what interest remained. I decided to take an indefinite hiatus from the site. Maybe someday I will want to go back, although it seems unlikely.

After this, a couple of people suggested trying PonyIsland.net.

On the plus side, I love the art for the ponies. There's like 15 different breeds and I like almost all of them.

However, there isn't a whole lot of game to the site. You get enough in-game currency to buy a few ponies. After that, you go to the site now and then, click around a bit to take care of the ponies and do the things that cost money but will eventually make, hopefully, more money. Then you leave the site and do something else until your next window in which to click around a bit opens. After you make more money, you can buy more ponies and dress them up. And use them to make more money. That's pretty much the whole site. Probably the worst thing about it is that your ponies eventually die if you don't take care of them, so taking a few months off would mean your herd would be dead when you got back.

Despite my ambivalence about the gameplay or lack thereof, I bought a year's subscription and have dutifully been building up my herd and trying to make enough money that I can eventually dress them up. They are pretty cute. We'll see if I find this worth it long-term. I do not expect to get involved in the community on PonyIsland, because by the sound of it their moderation system is even more ham-handed and arbitrary than FR's.

One of the things that had kept me coming back to FR for so long was the monthly writers' chat Maggie and I hosted on their forums. I decided to make a writers' chat community on Dreamwidth to see if I could lure some of the FR folks away from the site. And also in case any of my writer friends off-site were interested. It's not a feedback group: it's just a chat group for talking to other writers about writer stuff. Check it out if you're interested: https://dragonwriters.dreamwidth.org/

Happiness
I felt pretty beat up at the end of February, and honestly, March was worse. (Not because of the FR kerfluffle. Or cancer. Stuff I don't want to talk about.) But I got some stuff done that I wanted to do, so that's good. It'll be all right.

But I do want to take a moment here to thank Past Rowyn for her rabid determination to save money for an early retirement. She could've gotten a car fifteen years earlier, or a bigger house, or traveled more lavishly, or eaten restaurant food for lunch every workday instead of bringing food from home, or spent her money on any number of other things that she wanted at the time. But she saved it all instead, so that Present Rowyn wouldn't have to worry as much about money as Past Rowyn did. Thank you, past me. That was kind of you, and I appreciate it.

Goals for coming month
~ Finish the final version of The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince and send it to Alinsa for layout.
~ Stretch goal: start work on my next draft
~ Other stretch goal: start edits on the Etherium novelette that I inadvertently wrote while drafting Princess, or on editing The Twilight Etherium

I do want to get The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince wrapped up this month, and that may take all month but seems pretty doable. I feel pretty flexible about what I do apart from that.

Health/Fitness

I spent all of February sick. With the same cough. That doesn't stop. x_x It was only really bad for the first week. I still have it, a little bit, but it's just "I cough a few times a day" now, so it's not waking me up at night anymore and I feel basically healthy. Still. Actually healthy would be nice.

I've been walking less because it's miserable outside and also sick, but I'm still averaging 3,045,647 Google-Fit-increments per day. I don't understand how those translate to anything else. I used to think those were microseconds (it's labelled "duration (ms)" so that'd make sense?) But I know the total duration of "other" is way less than the number of minutes I entered so really, I got nothin'.

Ooh wait, I updated my numbers in the Google Fit app just before I downloaded it from my desktop. Maybe the app didn't sync before the download.

*attempts to force a sync*

No luck. But I think Google's just not adding in the numbers I entered today to the archive I'm grabbing today, because I added a new activity and it's not showing up at all.

The problem is that I've been tracking exercise in RealAppeal, which I can't export from, and also Google Fit, which I can export from but it's weird.

Anyway, my Google Fit numbers are:

November: 69 minutes per day
December: 64
January: 64
February: 51

February is probably undercounted due to syncing issues. I can see if it goes up retroactively when I grab numbers again at the end of March. But I also did exercise less in February. Because sick. For the whole month.

I am still doing RealAppeal. It hasn't altered my eating or exercise habits much. I eat slightly less and I exercise slightly more. I am kind of frustrated because the change I wanted to make was "eat more healthy foods" and that's not happening. On the other hand, eating slightly less and exercising slightly more is a good thing, so there's that. My weight as of today is 179, so I lost another pound, woo.

Writing
I made some notes for The Twin Etheriums, the prequel story for the Etherium setting that I want to write. It is not close to an actual outline yet.

The Business of Writing
I chopped out a novelette's worth of words from The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince. There was a big chunk of backstory for one character that just doesn't fit in this book. I also added another 8000 words of Other Stuff in, so overall length hasn't changed much. I sent it to first readers last Sunday. I plan on starting final edits for it in April.

Art/Other
Oh hey I did a picture!

Gaming
I made level 39 in Pokemon GO, as anticipated, and am all of 10% of the way to level 40. I will stop posting level updates now.

Flight Rising added a "Hibernal Den", which gives you storage space for dragons you're not using but can't bear to part with. They have a bunch of quests for it. I've been playing a lot more Flight Rising lately.

Happiness
I have been grimly depressed for the past week or so.

Goals for coming month
So, depression has made it extremely difficult to get anything done, and -- BONUS -- trying makes me feel worse. YAY.

I am not sure that not-trying will help, but I sure don't feel in the mood for goal-setting. Here's my March goals for now:

* Care for Lut
* Do 2018 taxes
* Take stock on March 8 and see if I feel more like setting other goals or not.

Good enough. -_-

 Published

January: Golden Coils

June: Demon's Lure

August: Angel's Sigil

 

Edited

Demon's Lure: complete

Angel's Sigil: complete

Frost and Desire: complete

The Princess Her Dragon, and Their Prince: Started initial edits (very little done).

 

Written

Angel's Sigil: 8,000 (draft begun 2017, completed 2018)

Frost and Desire: 120,380

The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince: 134,928

The Twilight Etherium: 74,400 (draft incomplete)

 

That's 337,000 words. This is not quite my all-time high of 347,000 in 2016, but in 2016 I only edited one book and this year I edited three. Also, cancer. I am happy with my word count total.

 

Promotions

Purchased four international-only Bookbub ads, for Silver Scales, Demon's Lure, The Moon Etherium, and The Sun Etherium

 

Other Business-of-Writing items

I commissioned Anthony Avon to do the Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil covers. I've also commissioned a different artist to do the cover for The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince.

 

Art

4 finished

2 Flight Rising adopts

6 sketches

Composited one cover out of my existing art

 

Support Lut

He's still alive!  *\o/*  Actually doing pretty well at the moment, as he recovers from the cold and has not been pushed back down by cancer treatment yet. His oncologist will try tapering down on one of his drugs next month, which may help with his general brain fog.

 

General Adulting

I have done pretty well at this, with one exception -- I broke the front wall of my garage back in, like, October? And never got it fixed.  I made some very desultory attempts at it, and then it was winter and of course I can't hire someone in winter which gave me an excuse not to try.  I should really do something about this, though.

 

Also, the house needs painting and some general exterior repairs. Meh.

 

Points

In 2011, I started an activity log to track all of my creative efforts.  Then in 2012, I made a "unified productivity scoring" system kind of thing, that gave me points for writing/editing/completing fiction, and also for blog posts and for art. It was more than slightly ridiculous. For 2012, I scored 27,000 points.  For 2013 I set what I considered an extremely ambitious goal of 30,000. My actual 2013 score -- the year I began and finished the first draft of A Rational Arrangement -- was 45,780. My 2014 and 2015 levels of creative output were overall much lower. (In fairness to my past self, in 2014 and 2015 I was trying to sort out editing and self-publishing and this was extremely stressful for me at the time.)

 

I stopped using the activity log in the middle of 2014, because it had become much too cumbersome.  But for fun this year, I decided to try to calculate what my 2018 score would've been.

 

108,000.

 

That's not even counting a bunch of stuff that I would have scored points for if I was still using the log -- time spent (or words written) on blog posts and art would've counted as well, for instance.

 

Anyway, that amused me.

 

2018 Goal Recap:

I hit all of my stated goals:

 

* Support Lut through the cancer treatment process

* Continue general adulting as necessary.

* Publish Golden Coils

* Edit and publish the two Demon books.

* Post monthly updates on whatever I did.

 

I also reached my stretch goal:

* finish some other book and/or stories.

 

My ideal was "write and publish a fourth book and have two more books drafted."  I did not accomplish this. I drafted 2.5 books this year instead of the hoped-for three, and I didn't publish a fourth book.

 

I am vaguely dissatisfied about this, and also think that dissatisfaction here is ridiculous and unreasonable.  Yes, I could've spent December working instead of relaxing and maybe finished the draft of The Twilight Etherium. (Probably not; it would've taken another 50k month at a minimum and that still might not have been enough.)  

 

But I averaged over 900 words per day this year -- not just work-week days, every day! -- and I edited three books to completion and I got three books published and I hired contractors and at some point I just need to admit that this is Good Enough.  I'm not ready to be a four-books-a-year author yet.

 

Honestly, three books is quite a lot.

 

Also, they are all good books that I am proud of and enjoy re-reading, which is important too.

 

2019 Goals

* Support Lut through cancer treatment process

* Do something about the broken garage wall

* Publish three books

* Finish drafting three books

* Write a book in the 55,000-85,000 word range and which covers the entire original outline for the book.

* Post monthly updates

 

Technically, I've written one book under 85,000 words already, but this was accomplished by splitting Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil into two books. I am content with them as two books, but I have gotten some complaints about the break and I am just not a fan of this approach. It's part of why I don't want to split The Twilight Etherium.  The Twilight Etherium splits very well in one sense: there's one major plot arc that wraps up the first half, and the second half of the book has a new plot arc that resolves during it. But I want the Etherium books to all be in the same genre: standalone fantasy romances. If I split TTE in half, then it becomes a two-part romance instead of a standalone. From a marketing perspective, this is confusing.

 

Anyway, I feel as if I am much better at estimating book length than I was four years ago, and that figuring out in advance how long an outline will be and then MAKING IT SHORTER -- or doing a different outline -- is no longer beyond my skillset. Also, I don't want another year where I write 337,000 words but that's somehow only 2.5 books.