rowyn | Entries tagged with nyr 2020

Health & Fitness

Pretty much the same as last month. Exercised 20 times, technically, by way of counting things like “shoveling an inch of snow,” “doing laundry,” and “10 minutes of a beginner core workout” as exercise.

Writing

I remembered that I had an “alien peacelord” romance novel idea a while back, so I started developing that further. I have 7500 words of notes. It is not particularly going anywhere.

The Business of Writing

I finished the final read-through on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, and sent the last corrections to Alinsa.

Reading

Still chewing through India After Gandhi at a glacial pace. I did finish two Alexis Hall novels, which was surprising but nice.

One of the oddities of my life is that most of my friends assume I am a big reader, notwithstanding the fact that I have not been a big reader in over 30 years. I read voraciously as a child and a teenager, but that dropped off sharply after I got to college. I have had occasional bursts of reading since then, but I have not finished as much as ten books in the last two years. At this stage, I am not just “not a big reader”: I am not a reader at all.

I set a goal of finishing 12 books this year, which will more than double my current rate. We’ll see if it happens.

I have opened the Kindle app and read at least a few pages of something every day this year, so that’s kind of cool.

Art

Actually did some of this. Mostly from following along with “The Joy of Painting” videos, but also did a bunch of sketches for the theme weeks started by a Discord server I frequent. Themes so far have been hands, backgrounds (I just did more Joy of Painting videos), and eyes. The first eye I did was largely a paintover of the reference pic, but I still like it enough that I’m gonna drop it in here. It’s of Frost, from Frost and Desire.

Gaming

I realized on Thursday that I was gonna fail my “learn a new game each month” goal if I didn’t learn one that day. And then I realized I wasn’t accomplishing any of my other goals, so I blew that one off too.

February Goal Scorecard

Assist Lut: yep!
Proofread The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: did this
Look at goal list occasionally: Kind of but not much.

Stretch Goals:

Exercise 20 times this month: technically complete
Consumption tracking: yep
Make an art: made several arts, albeit nothing very original.
Practice art: did a lot of that
Figure out if there’s anything I want to write: kind of? I thought I wanted to write the Alien Peacelord thing but I don’t know if it’ll happen. Maybe I’ll look at one of my other incomplete outlines in March instead.
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: also technically complete
Maintain bullet journal: more or less, yeah
Watch stuff with Lut: I watched quite a bit of stuff with Lut, including binge-watching both seasons of “Harley Quinn and Ivy” over the course of a weekend.
Play games: yep did this
Read: oh hey I did this

March Goals:

I spent most of February depressed, and I am still depressed now, so I will stick with the “modest goals” thing.

Assist Lut
Look at goal list occasionally

Yes, that’s everything on the goal list. I don’t have any more low-hanging fruit that I’m comfortable listing as an actual “I will get this done” goal.

Stretch goals

Exercise 20 times this month
Consumption tracking
Make an art
Do a simpler cover for Lord
Practice art
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Complete Alien Peacelord outline
Dig up some of the other old outlines and see if I want to write any of them instead
Write some fiction
Re-read Demon’s Alliance so I can figure out what I want to change in edits
Re-read Angel’s Sigil so I can figure out what I want to change in edits
Make editing list for Demon’s Alliance
Make editing list for Angel’s Sigil
Start revisions on Demon’s Alliance
Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil
Maintain bullet journal
Watch stuff with Lut
Play games
Read

I decided to break down the ones that amount to “edit the two drafts you’ve got lying around” into smaller pieces in the hopes that I would be more tempted to do them because then I could cross them off.

I mentioned at the end of 2020 that I wanted to do one of those "art collage by month" things for the year, so I finally put that together.

Much of the "by month" part is fudged, because a lot of this was stuff like "I started this in November 2019 and finished it in July 2020 but I'm going to put it down for February 2020 because that was the month I mostly finished it and also I didn't do anything else in February 2020."

I have art for May and June 2020, but I didn't want to use them because the May pictures were bad and the June one is the still-unfinished cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. Also, it was harder to layout if I included those. The December picture is an icon I did many years ago (13?) for Lut. He wanted a mask added to it. ♥

February, March, and April are book covers for The Twilight Etherium, The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium, and Spark of Desire, respectively. September is a portrait of Raven from Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil. August is doodle of one of my characters from when I was 12. The "re-draw your characters from when you were a kid" meme doesn't work well for me, in part because I am still not that good at art and in part because I don't have any of my drawings from when I was kid. (My oldest work is from college and because I seldom practice, my style has not changed or improved much.) July is a doodle of Cherish from The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince, from when my fediverse friends were doing an alphabet-letter-a-day thing ("C is for Cherish", in this case.) I liked the way the crochet draped over her arm came out. January was "I should practice drawing more" and used a Pixabay photo for reference. October was inspired by an artist's landscape and I wanted to try something with a similar palette and a stylized look. November was "let's try that palette again but more of a landscape this time," and also used Pixabay for a reference.

I have done some drawing in January but it's all Yet More Work on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady cover. I should do a nice color doodle in the next week so I have something for a 2021 collage. >_>

Health & Fitness
Avg Calories Consumed per day: 1956
Avg Exercise per day: 121
Weight: 170.9

Consumption down a teensy bit, exercise up an even teensier bit, weight up a teensy bit. Nothing much to see here. I have been much more lackadaisical about calorie-tracking the last few months: I've done a lot more "eh, this meal felt like this many calories, just put that down" rather than keeping a true count. I am not concerned enough about this to actually measure things that are annoying to measure, but I think I'll try to at least measure things that fall into the "easy enough" category.

Writing

I did some of this! About 6600 words. Angel's Grace is now at 31,100. (I also chopped out about 500 words of stuff that I wrote during Nano but knew I would need to cut later.)

Writing was not a focus in December so I'm pleased that I made a little progress.

Equally important, I figured out the Angel's Grace timeline and my progress thus far through the outline. I have covered 35% (edit: this should've been 40%) of my original outline, but I added a bunch of stuff to the early part. I expect I have somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 words to go. 60-65,000 to go is possible but unlikely.

The Business of Writing

I finished final edits on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady! This went right down to the wire, with me completing it yesterday and sending it to Alinsa for layout. But it's done!

Now I just have to finish the cover. o_o;;;

The cover is way too ambitious. I've been working on it for months. I started taking parts out of the original file and blowing them up to work on them separately because I need a higher resolution for the cover as a whole than my little Surface can realistically handle. I will probably end up using my desktop to reassemble the pieces. The cover concept does make me laugh, though, so I'm not willing to give up on it. Although I thought of a much simpler cover concept that I could do if it doesn't sell well with the original idea.

Reading

I spent much of my "reading in bed before going to sleep" time proofreading The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady instead of reading someone else's book. Still, I managed 25 days of doing some reading, so not too bad.

Art/Other

Not a good art month, but I did put in some work on the cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, and I drew a mask on Lut's forum avatar at his request. (I did the original avatar for him 12 years ago and he still uses it. ♥ )

Gaming

Still playing "Dress Up! Time Princess." December's play experience was a little weird for me, because of the way that the game and its limited-time events intersect.

So you regen a certain amount of stamina per hour, up to a cap (generally several hours' worth). You can also get additional stamina in various ways. Some of the ways of getting additional stamina can be saved up. For one instance: you get daily gift boxes from your companions, and these might have materials, or gold, or stamina. The "season pass", which acts as a reward mechanism for doing dailies, also sometimes gives stamina in addition to other goodies. Like many players, I reached the final tier of the season a few weeks before the season ended, and the repeating final season reward included a nice chunk of stamina. Both boxes and season rewards can be stored to open/collect at a later date.

There were two reasons to hoard stamina: one is that Saturdays are "double drop" days, where you get twice as much of the encounter item rewards. The other is that the game had stamina events for Halloween & Thanksgiving, so everyone expected a Christmas stamina event.

So starting on December 13, I saved all my season pass rewards and all my gift boxes.

But the thing about saving this stuff is that you're not just saving stamina: it comes bundled with gold and other items. By not opening it when I got it, I cut my total resources-per-day by more than half, I'd estimate. So for two weeks, I was constantly broke in-game, and struggling to finish anything. Then, on December 26 -- a Saturday when the Christmas stamina event was still running -- I opened everything, and did all the double-drop events with all my extra stamina, and suddenly I had So Much Everything. I tried to pace the next story I started a little bit, but I'm still 80% through it after a week. And I still have a big, albeit dwindling, stockpile of gold. I've been spending profligately on cat-breeding, trying to get a new variety of cat, with little success so far.

Neepery aside, still having a great time with the game.

I bought a new game for my desktop, "Calico." It's a cute game, with the premise of "you run a magical cat cafe". It's designed for console and the keyboard controls are clunky, though. I sat down and couldn't figure out how to stand up again, so I quit out and haven't gone back in. o_o;;; I may give it another try, but I am unlikely to buy a console controller to appease the PC games that think I should have one. The thing about console controllers is that I kind of hate everything about them: they feel awkward and uncomfortable and since I've never used them, nothing about them is remotely intuitive. "Press one of the four cryptically-labeled buttons to do [thing]." But there's an entire generation who grew up on console controllers so they're what they're used to and they love them, and therefore there's a corresponding generation of games I can't play. c_c

It's kind of weird, because the handful of games I've picked up for my smart phone have been fun and easy to play, but desktop games are really more miss than hit for me.

December Goal Scorecard

Look into switching phone plans:

So at the start of the month, I opened a tab for Ting Mobile, a phone service provider that offered cheap, limited-data plans. I'd heard about them via a Youtube product placement ad from Legal Eagle, so I used that link. I checked their rates, verified that my phone and Lut's would both work with them, and then ... left the tab open. Until December 31. I checked a couple of other plans in the mean time and didn't see anything cheaper. Yesterday, I went "well, this is the LAST DAY to make that goal" and filled out the form to get SIM cards and start service with them. In theory, we will get the SIM cards on January 7, and if all goes well I will then cancel my service with T-Mobile.

I'm a little sad about this, because I like T-Mobile and have used them for 20+ years. But their rates are no longer competitive. My T-Mobile plan -- unlimited data for me, nothing for Lut who has a dumb phone --- has a base of $60 ($78 and change after taxes & fees). The Ting plan for both of us is $35 -- $25 for 5 gigs of data for me, $10 for Lut. All plans for both carriers have unlimited text & calling. Even the SIM cost -- Ting charged us $5 per SIM ($1 for the card and $4 for shipping) and the last time I had to replace a T-Mobile SIM it was $20. (Although, in fairness, I don't know that Ting will still charge $5 if I ever need a replacement.)

Anyway, we'll see how this goes. My T-Mobile phone reception has always been terrible, so if it's bad from Ting that won't be much of a change. :D

Make final editing list for Lord: Done!
Complete some editing points for Lord: Also done!
Figure out time line for Angel's Grace: Done!
Write more of Angel's Grace: done!
Make an art: Technically done is the best kind of done?
Stretch goal: Finish edits on Lord: aw yeah DONE.

So feeling good about December! Even if I fell down on the art one. Again. :D

Oh right I need to make January goals

January 2021 Goals

Assist Lut
Get to 2/3rds done with the Angel's Grace outline
Cancel T-Mobile service when Ting SIMs arrive, assuming Ting SIMs work.
Archive 2020 Bullet Journal spreadsheet & use fresh one for 2021.
Look at goal list occasionally.

Stretch Goals:

Exercise 20 times this month
Track calories consumed a little more diligently. Like figure out how many calories is in the spaghetti sauce I keep making, and how many servings it makes.
Make an art. Finishing part of the new book cover counts even if I don't finish the whole thing.
Mention on social media that I have some published books people can buy
Fling a few books at Bookbub for rejection
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Work on outline(s) for next potential book(s) to write after Angel's Grace
Maintain bullet journal

Kinda missed having a whole pile of stretch goals, so figured I'd heap some back on.

Health/Fitness
Avg calories eaten per day: 1,894*
Avg exercise per day: 194
Weight: 171.3
So the asterisk is for this reason: I have been eating the same meal for breakfast almost every day for the last year or two: cream of wheat mixed with nutella. I'd been estimating the calories in it because measuring nutella is annoying, and realized this month that my nutella consumption per meal was much higher than I'd accounted for. And my count for the calories in the milk had been wrong, too. The whole meal was 180 calories more than I was recording, which over the course of a year is a lot of error. Anyway, last month's adjusted calorie count is 1976 rather than the 1793 I put down.

In light of my revelation about the number of calories in my breakfast, I cut the portion size in half. This didn't save that many calories because I started snacking a little more, but it was still an improvement. Regardless: calories are down, exercise slightly up (which amazes me, because I felt as if I was never exercising anymore in October -- I went outside so rarely because it was cold and gloomy and sometimes snowy, and I am so little interested in Pokemon Go that I no longer even open it most days. But somehow I still managed to get some exercise on most days.) And weight is about the same. I am content.

Writing

I finished the outline for Angel's Grace and am happy with it, yay! That was important for my Nanowrimo goals.

After wrapping up the outline on October 9th, I returned to writing Demon's Alliance and got in another 15,600 words on it. Book is two-thirds done now.

I made notes for a couple of new ideas that I haven't started yet: one is an Alien Peace Lord Romance that I'd been threatening to do. There is a romance subgenre featuring Alien Warlords, and the premise is essentially the same as for the Scottish Laird and werewolf (and the old racist "Jungle Fever" one that I thankfully do not see these days) romance subgenres: you have a sexy alpha male who's all growly and untamed, and a woman who loves him and maybe tames him or maybe gets topped by him, very likely both for one definition of "topping" and "taming" or another.

Anyway, I am not very interested in the basic "sexy, wild, dangerous dude who always needs to be in charge" concept; the trope retains its sexist and racist roots. But I am amused by the idea of doing an "alien peace lord" as a variant on this concept, and making him a civilized member of a functional, sophisticated, high-tech society. I thought up a hook for it one night and wrote it down. I don't have a full outline for it yet, but it's something I might get to eventually. Or not, because honestly my "I'm tired of this Very Popular trope and would like to do something completely different" is 99% Just Me and a few of my friends, so the market for this is probably tiny.

Of course, I thought the market for my most successful book would also be tiny, so what do I know. Nothing. I am bad at marketing, y'all, gonna just write whatever I feel like and you can buy it or not, it's cool.

The other idea was inspired by the new dress-up game I started playing this month, and the working title is "The Twin-Souled Empress", about a young empress with various personal problems and oh also the empire is falling apart and she is not doing anything to prevent that. She turns to religion for help and gets possessed by a saint. It does not get less complicated from there. This would be a fantasy polyamorous romance with a lot of politics to it, a little like The Princess, Her Dragon and Their Prince but without any problems that can be conveniently solved by sufficient application of violence. Lots of thorny political problems that will be very challenging to solve at all, and an aura of impending doom. I am looking forward to this one.

The Business of Writing

I did some editing of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. I started an editing list, and completed two points on it. I still have nine to go. If I'd thought this all the way through, I would have finished editing in October instead of working on both editing and writing, since I'm unlikely to do much other than Nanowrimo in November. On the other hand, this Nano is going to have far more free time than I usually do -- no con in the middle, and no vacations either, just one staycation to kick off the month. So I might be able to do both? But probably not.

Art

I finished the portrait of Raven! It's nice. I should post it to Flickr so I can link it.

I did a little more work on the cover for Lord, and I also did some more random doodling. One of them is a semi-abstract tree that I rather like. I am trying to figure out if I can do something with the same kind of approach that would make for a good cover, or at least the backdrop for the cover, on some future book. Or existing book: I'd like to do new covers for the Etherium books in a different style, because I don't feel like the existing covers are good at drawing readers. Especially for The Moon Etherium, which is bad because The Moon Etherium is the first book in the series and therefore most needs a good cover.

Maintenance

My house is mostly painted! Work continues sporadically. I think he needs a taller/better ladder to reach some of the areas that are not yet painted, and the trim still needs to be done. It's slow progress, but pretty much all the old peeling spots now have new paint over them, so I'm not worried about it.

Christian Brothers Roofing did finally manage to cash my check, too. :D It cleared on October 6, I think.

Reading

Amazon's app tells me I missed one day this month, so "read at least a little of something new, almost every day" goal was accomplished. And I even finished a book!

In addition to finishing The Duke Who Didn't, I've read another 83 pages of India After Ghandi, which I will finish in another six months at this pace. c_c But I will probably pick another work of fiction to try. I have some Bujold novellas that I haven't read yet, for instance.

Gaming

Maggie, who got me hooked on Love Nikki a year and a half ago, got a new phone and her Love Nikki account password did not transfer over to it (unlike almost every other app). Love Nikki support responded with "that sounds like a 'you' problem." As far as we can tell, Love Nikki has no account recovery system whatsoever: lose your password (or get banned by Facebook, if your account is tied to Facebook), that's it, you're locked out forever.

I have not yet been locked out of Love Nikki, but this still substantially lowered my interest in playing Love Nikki, especially since I can't even remember setting a password for it, much less what that password is.

I have followed Maggie to a new, similar game: Dress Up! Time Princess, which I absolutely adore. Time Princess has some issues, which mostly boil down to "we have no clue how to monetize our product and are flailing around wildly in an effort to figure this out." So they do things like "oh no, it's too easy to progress in our game, people are leaving because they finished all the content. MAKE IT WAY HARDER!" and then "oh no, people are leaving because it's TOO HARD to progress in our game, what do we do??" They have far fewer clothing items than Love Nikki, and the purchasable clothing is rare and for the most part absurdly expensive. They had a single suit that was $400. Some people bought it. I can't imagine.

After a few days, I bought the $15 two-month "season pass", on the grounds that I love the game far more than Love Nikki and $7.50 a month is a perfectly reasonable entertainment value. Today, I spent another $5 because their wild flailing meant they put out a package that was obviously meant to be priced at $40 for $5, and I failed my resist roll.

In any case, I love the stories in this game (as evidenced by being inspired by one of them!) and I wish the devs success. And will not be spending $400 for a pixel outfit. Y I K E S.

Goal Scorecard for October: Assist Lut: Done! Did have a little more medical stuff this month. He had to go for a skeletal survey to see if his bones have gotten any weaker since the last one. Also had an annual check-up with the neurologist who manages the bi-pap for his sleep apnea. In one of those rare good moments of the pandemic, we were able to do that appointment by Zoom, so we didn't need to haul ourselves out of the house at 7:30 in the morning to get there. And the pre-check-up list of medications went much better with me doing it at home, because I could go into the kitchen and look at the bottles. I used to have all the names and doses in a list, but a few things have changed and the list is out of date now.
Finish Outline for Angel's Grace: Aw yiss I did it!
Reading Streak: I did that too!

Stretch Goal Scorecard for October

Oh wow I totally forgot I'd made this long list of stretch goals. Dear self, your list of things you want to do will probably be more useful if you glance at it now and again. Let's see how I did anyway!

Think about what to write after Angel's Grace: Hey, I did that one! Cool!
Make an editing list for Lord: Did that one too!
Sketch/draw once a week: I will give myself an honorable mention here. I missed one week, but I did finish a picture and I did some other drawing, so good work, me.
Finish the portrait of Raven: I did that too!
Keep up on reading Dreamwidth: I'm a few days back, but I haven't missed any posts because I fell more than two weeks back, so I'm counting this as successful.
Start keeping a to-do list: Eh, technical success? I've been making one and glancing at it now and again. I do not reliably do everything that's on it.

So the ones I didn't make at all are:

Finish editing The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
Post a few times to Dreamwidth
Finish the cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady

This strikes me as a pretty good stretch goal completion rate, given my "I'll just lard on more stretch goals, why not?" attitude last month.

Goals for November
~ Assist Lut
~ Win Nanowrimo by writing 50,000 words: This will probably be "finish Demon's Alliance and start Angel's Grace" but if I hare off on a different book mid-month, that's fine. I am well past the point where I have anything to prove to anyone about focus and/or writing speed. n_n

Stretch Goals

None. Winning Nano is enough goal for any month. If I happen to do some other things, I can add them in as bonus accomplishments when I do my November write-up.

Health/Fitness
Avg calories eaten per day: 1,793
Avg exercise per day: 176
Weight: 171.6

So: eating is up, exercise is down, and weight is up.

My addiction to Pokemon GO has been effectively killed by the pandemic. I still go out for walks and I still do aerobics sometimes, but the 2+ hour walks at the Plaza while I cheerfully played with my phone are never coming back. Unless I manage to hook myself on a new exercise game.

I started eating more vegetables in September, at least. Lut has been ordering premade salads from Wal-Mart for years now, and I finally decided to do likewise. I consider premade salads ridiculously decadent, but they are extremely convenient and get me to eat spinach. For two weeks, I'd been buying salad ingredients and assembling salads from them, but this was enough less convenient that there was a good chance I would quit eating them entirely. I hardly ever have takeout; spending an extra $10 a week to have someone else make salads for me is not unduly extravagant.

Anyway, I don't know. I might be at the point where I care enough to change something, since the last six months have been trending slowly upwards; I'm up four pounds since my low in March/April.

Writing

I worked on Demon's Alliance a lot this month. I finished making notes and working on the outline on September 2, and started writing the book on September 4. Book is at 32,500 words so far, and just shy of 50% complete. Like the other Demon's Series books, I expect it to be on the short side.

I did not finish writing the outline for book 4, which I'm gonna give the working title of Angel's Grace so that I can stop calling "book 4." I did make more notes for it, though. I still want to finish the Angel's Grace outline before I finish writing Demon’s Alliance; it’s another case where I’m setting stuff up in the current book that will pay off in the next one.

I started a new writing game, SoulScribes, which is in closed alpha but one of my friends made big puppy eyes at a dev and got me an account. It’s been encouraging me to write more, so that’s nice. I still play 4thewords, too, of course, because the only thing better than a writing incentive game is TWO writing incentive games.

The Business of Writing

Alinsa finished initial layout on Spark of Desire, and I've done the final proofread pass and sent corrections to her. So that should be done soon.

My first readers are done with The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. I haven't opened it since late August, or looked at comments, or considered what I'm going to change. I should do that.

Art

I finished Spark of Desire's wrap cover, so that it would be ready to go when Alinsa was done with the book layout.

I also tried to draw Raven, one of the protagonists in Demon's Alliance, a few times. The third try is coming out pretty well; I hope to finish it up. It was nice working on a picture for fun instead of as a potential book cover.

Maintenance

Diane's company (her husband, to be specific) is to start painting today!

I am giving Diane even more slack than usual because she has cancer and just had surgery for a compression fracture a couple of weeks ago. Also, the paint had to be ordered and only just arrived. Josh (the husband) has done some work already on prep -- scraping off the old paint where it was peeling, taking down the decorative shutters, power-washing the house, probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It proceeds apace; I am content.

The saga of Paying For New Gutters continues!

In early September, I got a phone call:

Caller: "Hi, I'm with Christian Bros. Roofing -- "
Me: . o O(Aha! They will ask about picking up a check!)
Caller: " -- and we wanted to check in and make sure you are happy with your new gutters."
Me: "I am happy with them! I have not yet paid for them, though, because I was expecting an invoice or someone to collect a check like with the roof. Would you like to be paid? I would like to pay you!"
Caller: "... uh, I'm not with billing, I only do customer satisfaction. But I will let them know!" Several days later, they emailed an invoice to my real-name account with an 'Oops, sorry we forgot to bill you' apology. I never remember to check my real-name email, so I didn't notice until I got the physical copy in the mail on September 20. I immediately went to online banking and sent them a check, which online banking said would be delivered on September 29.

It's now October 2, and that check has shown as "pending" for the last three days. Dear company, please cash my check already, I am tired of looking at my account balance and having to remember why it is unexpectedly high.

In other maintenance news, my Surface no longer runs the Evernote client. I'm not sure why, but the Evernote client now takes a very long time to open and to sync, and even once it's done syncing, it's unusably laggy -- there's a long delay between when I hit a key and when Evernote acknowledges the keystroke.

This puts me in the weird position that I just ... don't use Evernote anymore. I used to write each chapter of a story in Evernote and paste it into Google Docs when I finished the chapter. Now I just write directly in Google Docs. I like Evernote's client UI better, but not enough better to use it when it won't autosync across all my devices.

So this morning I decided I might as well cancel my premium subscription (I don't have to migrate my data off Evernote first because the unpaid version still stores all existing data.) It turned out that my annual renewal was in two days. So that's gone.

It feels weird. I switched to Evernote premium in 2016. It's been part of my process for all but two of my published books.

But the biggest reason I needed Evernote -- so I could write on my phone -- hasn't been a factor since my old thumb-board phone became unusably slow and I had to switch to a new phone with a virtual keyboard in 2018. And it's 2020 now: I don't go anywhere and wouldn't use my phone to write regardless of the hardware available.

And if it turns out I miss Evernote at some point in the future -- I admit that it was nice that my prior process meant I always had my WIPs in two places -- I can re-subscribe. The unsubscribe function on Evernote was reasonably painless (it went glitchy at the end but turned out to have gone through), so kudos to Evernote for that. Companies that do not make me hate unsubscribing are WAY more likely to get me to re-subscribe. (As opposed to, say, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, neither of which I will ever subscribe to again.)

Part of why I am sad about unsubscribing to EverNote is that it's a good product and I liked supporting it.

And it just struck me that I've never paid for Google Docs but Google Docs does, in fact, have premium membership. Its premium membership benefit is "do you want EVEN MORE storage than the ridiculously excessive amount of storage we gave you for free?" so it's not as if this is a perk I will use. But I signed up for it just now anyway because I feel better being a customer than a product. :D

In related news, also renewed my subscription to Dreamwidth.

Reading

The Kindle app has a feature called "Reading Insights", which auto-tracks how many books you've finished in Kindle that year, and also how many weeks/days you've "read" in a row. I think it counts "reading" as "opened an ebook in the Kindle app", regardless of how much you read of it. Maybe you have to read a page or two, I don't know.

Anyway, I'd read a productivity blog post that suggested that if there's a thing you want to do that you find yourself not doing, start with the smallest possible unit of that thing and then give yourself credit for doing it. Eg, if you want to journal but don't, set a goal of "open journal every day" and mark it as accomplished after you open the journal. Give yourself a sticker or whatever.

I have struggled a lot with reading books over the last few years (I have only finished reading three books in all of 2020) so I decided to give this a try. I missed a couple of days, but for 28 days in September I did at least a little bit of reading-a-book. Mostly I've been reading India After Ghandi, a nonfiction history of India. It's a 900 page book and I am 200 pages into it, so I don't know if I will ever finish it via this method. But it's something.

Goal Scorecard for September

Assist Lut: September was happily a quiet month for medical stuff -- just the usually monthly immunotherapy and subscription refills. So this was easy and unrelated I love him.
Finish the cover for Spark of Desire: Done!

Stretch Goals for September

Start writing Demon's Alliance: Done!
Work on the outline for the fourth Demon's Series book: Did work on it, though not finished yet.
Work on art/sketch weekly: Still not a weekly thing, but I worked on art stuff in three of five weeks, so not too bad.

Goals for Next Month

Assist Lut
Finish outline for Angel's Grace (or some other new novel). I want to do NaNoWriMo next month. If I just work on Demon's Alliance in October, I'll either finish it or come close to finishing it, and either way I will need to start on Angel's Grace or have some other project ready-to-write in November. Granted, yes, I have won NaNoWriMo before with a book I didn't have outlined, but it adds unnecessary stress to the experience.
Generally maintain reading streak. This counts as long as I read, say, 25 days in October.

Stretch Goals

Think about what I want to write after Angel's Grace. Geez I picked new projects to work on TWICE this year already, am I really going to have to do this AGAIN? How does this keep happening. I didn't have to think about this at all in 2019, and I only did it ONCE in 2018.
Make final editing list for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
Complete final edits on The Lord, His Monster and Their Lady. I want these as two separate goals because that's more motivational than one.
Sketch/draw once per week, anything counts. I was a little tempted to do Stocktober (SenshiStock posts a reference photo on her DeviantArt every day in October for people to draw) or Pinktober (https://www.culturehustleusa.com/pages/pinktober), but not tempted enough to do it. I was looking at things yesterday and going "meh". Still, maybe I'll do a few sketches. I can use the practice.
Finish the portrait of Raven
Finish the cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
Post a few times to Dreamwidth
Keep up on reading Dreamwidth
Start keeping a to-do list: I stopped making a weekly to-do list ... uh ... a long time ago. Looks like the first week of April was the last one? My bullet journal used to have a section of weekly to-dos like "exercise 5x" and "write 5000 words". I still keep a bullet journal, but it only has my schedule and the things that I have done, instead of miscellaneous things I want to do. I feel like "things I want to do" might be nice to have again. We'll see.

I kept larding on the stretch goals this time because stretch goals are fun. I don't need to actually do them. I can put whatever I want in here! I'm free! Freeeeeeeee!

n_n

PS: I tried the Markdown version of the new Dreamwidth editor for this entry. I do not love the way it handles line breaks, which is "if you want a blank line between every carriage return, great, otherwise be prepared to use a lot of html code." But I am not formatting this entry a third time for Yet Another version. I think I got most of the wonky sections tamed. Eventually. -_-

Health/Fitness

Avg calories per day: 1745

Avg exercise per day: 183

Weight: 170.2

So everything is basically the same as July. Eh. Good enough.

I had not been outside to walk at all for the last week of August, despite the weather being pretty reasonable for walking during most of that week. I did aerobics videos a couple of times and spent like three hours cleaning instead.

Writing

I decided to write the next book in the Demon's Series. The new working title is Demon's Alliance, and I expect it to be the first of another two books that go together, the way Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil did. I've got the outline for Demon's Alliance nailed down pretty well, but I kind of want to finish the outline for book 4 before I start writing Demon's Alliance. We'll see if I actually do that or not. I have made a lot of notes so far, way more than I usually do before writing a book. This included re-reading Lure and Sigil and making tons of notes of names and places and other details from them, so that I have a handy reference whenever I need to look something up. Soon, I'll get to see how much this helps with writing, and with editing. I am hoping that thinking through the outline more will result in fewer incidents of "oh, I should change the entire climax now that I've finished writing it the first time." At the least, I'll have fewer "look up/make up a real name instead of this placeholder" notes.

The Business of Writing

Finished initial edits on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady and sent it to first readers, woo.

Alinsa finished initial layout on Spark of Desire, so I get to review that for typos, woo! I should see if anyone wants an ARC for the purpose of writing a review.

Art

I didn't finish the Spark cover, but I did more work on the Lord cover. It is now at the stage when I am disappointed that it didn't come out better but do not know how to make it better. *glowers at it*

I understand that it's very common for art to have an "ugly" stage before it's finished, but I kind of feel like my art reaches this stage when I finish it. While I'm still working on a piece I think "oh, this should be good when it's done!" And then I get to the end and think, "Wait, is that it? I thought it would be better."

Anyway, I'll put some work into it regardless and see if I can push it a little higher.

Home Maintenance

New gutters are installed and helmeted! (This was done in two different stages). They are not paid for yet because they haven't billed me. Not sure what's up with that. When they finished installing the roof, Daniel came the same day to get the check for the roof part.

For house-painting: Diane's quote was 20% lower than the other painter, so I went with her. House painting to start in the first or second week of September. My experience with Diane's company is "perpetually behind schedule but will reliably get the job done," so I expect this will be slow but it'll be finished eventually.

I've been thinking about making the basement less disgusting but this requires professional help at this point. Maybe after house painting is done and it and the gutters are paid for, I will call 1-800-GOT-JUNK to haul away the water-damaged furniture in the basement.

Goal Scorecard

Assist Lut: Yup! \o/

Schedule to have the house painted: Scheduling with Diane is more theoretical than practical, but I'm gonna call this done.

Stretch Goals

Finish initial edits on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady and send it to first readers: Done!

Figure out what my next writing project will be and start that: Did this!

Finish the cover for Spark of Desire: Nope, forgot this was on here.

Work on art/sketch weekly: Technically, I worked on art three weeks out of four, so this was closer than I thought. That work was spread across five days in two spurts, and all on the cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady.

Goals for Next Month:

Assist Lut

Finish the cover for Spark of Desire

Stretch Goals

Start writing Demon's Alliance

Work on the outline for the fourth Demon's Series book

Work on art/sketch weekly

Health/Fitness
Average Calories consumed per day: 1764
Average exercise per day, in calories: 201
Weight: 170.5

I ate a little less and exercised a little more than I did in June, and gained a pound.

*side-eyes statistics*

So that was not particularly heartening. Exercise remains overall down from my highs when I still enjoyed playing Pokemon GO. I have not exactly quit playing Pokemon GO, but I don't play it as much as I used to and it's no longer an effective incentive for exercise. The trouble with Pokemon GO is that it never rewarded "getting exercise" as much as it rewarded "go to high-traffic areas with a lot of man-made attractions" and this is a bad strategy in the era of COVID-19. Maybe I should try a different exercise game.

I have tried some aerobics videos since March, but even beginner aerobics is hardcore. I can get through a beginner 15-minute video but it's very unpleasant. "Very unpleasant" does not lead naturally to "so I will keep doing it." The exercises I stick with are more like "this varies between kind of nice, meh, and moderately bleh" rather than "I hate this and can't wait to stop."

"I hate this and can't wait to stop" may mean the exercise is more effective at promoting overall fitness but I don't know that it'd be worth it even if I could convince myself to keep doing it. OTOH, my history of exercise over the last ~15 years has been "switch to some new form of exercise every few months/years", so there's no saying it can't have a spot on the long list of "I did this for a while and then switched to something else."

Writing
Oh hey I finished drafting another book. \o/ Fellwater closed at 120,000 words, coming in a little under my latest projection for its length. So that was 19,000 words written in July.

*checks this against the total from her bullet journal* Ooh, that even matches!

The Business of Writing
The Twilight Etheriumis out! I am excited about this one. It's always nice to have a new book out, and this is another polyamorous fantasy romance and I don't know why I ever write anything else. Purr.

Also did more work on The Lord, His Monster and Their Lady, including about 2900 words of re-writing existing material, and a new scene that's around 1700 words. I also cleared some editing points from its list -- twelve, total. There are fourteen left, five of which deal with the revised climax.

And finished the final revisions of Spark of Desire and sent that to Alinsa for layout.

Art
I kind of forgot that I'd been trying to do some work on art every week. Oops.

I did sketches three days in a row, on an alphabet theme that some of my fediverse friends did for a little while. And I spent about an hour total working on the cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. I did not make meaningful amounts of progress in that hour. o_o;;;

Home Maintenance
Early in the month, Daniel from Christian Brothers Roofing came out to look at my roof and give me an estimate. He remembered the leak in my skylight from a couple of years ago.

"Yeah, it's back. There's a leak into the extension, let me show you where from the outside," I said to the roofer, as I walked with him around to the back of the house. "Oh ... and that's not caused by the roof at all. Do you do siding repairs?"

"We don't, but my best friend does! Let me send you his contact information."

The siding along the roof line between the extension and the house (the roof of the extension is a foot or so lower than the rest of the house) had rotted away where it was in contact with the roof.

I hired Christian Brothers Roofing to replace the roof, and StateLine Exteriors to replace the siding along the roof line and fix some other siding issues, mostly with the extension. The siding on my house is all asbestos shingles, which is not a problem until you need to fix them because they're hazardous to remove and you can't replace them with matching shingles. So this was a bit of an adventure but it did all get taken care of, and the roofing and siding companies coordinated the work so that they didn't have redundancy issues. It was expensive but remarkably painless otherwise. The roof was, in fact, removed and replaced in a single 12-hour day by a team of five roofers. The siding repairs were done by one man over the course of two and a half days, with a gap because of weather problems.

The gutters also desperately needed to be replaced so when Daniel asked if I wanted to I was like YES PLZ make them not be a disaster k thx. Next week, I am getting new helmeted gutters that are almost maintenance-free which is important because I have failed at not only cleaning my gutters myself but also at reliably hiring someone else to clean them.

My final big home-maintenance item is to have the exterior painted. I have a quote from a painter who was recommended by Kasey from Stateline, but I figured I should get a second quote from someone else just to have some kind of benchmark, and also my bank account needs a chance to recover. Today, I mentioned to Diane, who runs my lawn-care company, that I needed the bushes around the house cleared so it could be painted. Diane: "Have you hired anyone yet? We also do painting!" Me: "SURE GIVE ME A QUOTE."

So I may actually finally get the house painted. It's needed it for like two or three years now. Maybe longer. Two or three years is probably when I noticed it was getting tattered. Who knows how long it took me to notice.

Goal Scorecard
Helped Lut: according to my bullet journal, I did six different medical-related chores in July, from appointments with medical professionals, to scheduling appointments, to filling prescriptions. I think this is pretty average.
Replace/repair roof: This has actually been done! I have a new roof! It has a 50 year warranty! If I have to pay to replace it sometime after the warranty run out, I will feel extremely fortunate.

Stretch Goals
Published The Twilight Etherium! Not on the list, but I'm still excited about it.
Siding repair: Also not on the list, but it was an important accomplishment.
Finish rewrites on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: I still have a couple of bits left to rewrite, so I didn't finish this. I made significant progress, however. Also, I finished final edits on Spark of Desire, so I'm counting the combination as a win.
Write some of Fellwater: I finished it! That was unexpected and spiffy.
Work on art/sketch at least weekly: Forgot this was on here. I did some art but not every week.

I am giving myself an A+ for July even though I technically missed two stretch goals. I did a lot in July. It was a good month.

Goals for Next Month
Assist Lut.
Schedule to have the house painted.

Stretch Goals
Finish initial edits on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady and send it to first readers.
Figure out what my next writing project will be and start that.
Finish the cover for Spark of Desire.
Work on art/sketch weekly.

Health/Fitness
Average Calories consumed per day: 1801
Average exercise per day, in calories: 160
Weight: 169.4

This is 20 cal less in both consumption and exercise than in May. Weight is about the same. It is pretty clear that if I want to start losing weight again, I will need to exercise more and/or eat less. I do kind of want to start losing weight again. It's not clear that I want to do so badly enough to change any habits. But I'm going to continue to track because I am still down ~14 pounds from my all-time high at the start of 2019, and tracking will make it less likely that I regain that. Also, I am in the habit of tracking now and it only takes me a couple of minutes a day.

Writing
I wrote some stuff this month. Let's see if I can sort this out.

The Lord, His Monster and Their Lady: I finished writing this out based on the original outline, and it came in at 94,989 words, so that was about 5000 new words.

Fellwater: I restarted work on the ridiculous BDSM erotica novel that I first began writing in ... 2016? *checks* Yup, 2016. I reworked the outline a bit, added in a frame story, and picked up the main story where I'd left off. It's at 101,000 words now, about 9,800 of which is new. My new outline says it needs about 23,000 words more. We'll see if I feel like finishing it this time. It's such an absurdly niche product that it doesn't seem worth the trouble of coaxing myself into working on it when I'm not in the mood.

Editing
Pretty much as soon as I finished The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, I decided that I wanted to re-do the climax, so I wrote a new outline for the new climax and started work on that. I've done 6900 words of new writing for the new climax, which is mostly complete now. At this point, I'm less in the "writing new scenes" stage and closer to the actual "editing" stage, where I have to massage the existing text into place and remove some bits that are no longer relevant and add some other bits to support the new climax.

Art
I started work on the cover art for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. My first thought when I began was "I will not remotely be able to pull this off so I'm just going to end up with a sketch that I will have to show a real artist as 'I want something like this, only good.'" I did that with the cover for Demon's Lure.

But the cover sketch came out as "this isn't bad", so I've been slowly working on refining it. I've got all the major elements down in grayscale, and am starting to do the background in color.

Tracking
Many years ago, I used to make "activity log" spreadsheets, with a date for each row and a column for every project that I was tracking. These spreadsheets were unwieldy: I had to do a lot of scrolling to see all the projects, and it was annoying to aggregate stats for, eg, different writing projects.

Halfway through 2014, I stopped using the spreadsheets entirely. For the next few years, I mostly tracked progress on a month-by-month basis, with word counts for books and general updates for other things.

About a year ago, I started keeping a folder in EverNote as a virtual bullet journal. Each week, I'd make a new note in the folder where I listed my work schedule, any appointments or scheduled maintenance, and any other goals I had for the week. Each day, I'd cross off the completed items and make some notes about whatever I'd done. It was useful in two ways: it made sure that I didn't forget about scheduled events, and it was cheering to look back on a week and see everything that I'd gotten done.

But a journal is pretty useless when it comes to metrics, and I missed having a spreadsheet where I could use functions to quickly calculate totals for any given period. I didn't want to go back to my old unwieldy activity log format, especially since all the things I wanted to be able to track would make it even clunkier.

But it struck me that I could make a less-clunky version by making a single "label" column with a pick list.

I ended up going with a five-column spreadsheet, and each activity on each day gets its own row.

The "details" column is "whatever I would have written in the bullet journal". This lets me have a free-form field. I've been using it to elaborate on tasks, but the most important use is psychological: it gives me a place to whinge about things that were unnecessarily complicated. ("Called Wal-Mart about paper prescription I'd dropped off, had to call Sarah Cannon Cancer Center to have them call Wal-Mart to tell them to fill prescription, so that Sarah Cannon could call me back that it was sorted and then Wal-Mart texted that they'd filled it so I could finally pick it up.") The "details" column also means that I don't need to make a category for everything that I feel like including in the bullet journal. I can just put in some text in the details field and move on. Yes, things without a category are things I can't do easy metrics on, but they're also things I didn't care about metrics for.

Since I generally log writing by words and exercise by minutes, I made separate columns for those. The "Y" is because a lot of things I don't care how long they took, just whether or not I got them done.

The activity/project distinction lets me track new writing separately from re-writing or editing on the same story, and in other areas I can use it to look up stuff like "when was the last time I mopped the kitchen floor?"

I've only been using it for a week, but so far I'm happy with it. I use a separate sheet in the same workbook to track calories, so that I only need to keep one document open for both. And there's a couple of columns off to the side for me to put in future events.

Moreover, it is no harder to update the new spreadsheet than it was to update the old journal. If anything, it's a little easier: I can start to enter the pick list items and then Google Sheets will pull up a match for me to select, instead of having to type the whole thing.

When I want to do metrics, I can use CountIfs or SumIfs functions to calculate totals for various categories/date ranges. Very simple.

The funniest thing about using it is that it feels like a "there's an app for that" concept, like I'm reinventing something that someone else has already done better. On the other hand, this is extremely simple to use and works on all of my devices. It doesn't have built-in reminder capability, but I have seldom bothered to set appointment reminders for the last three years and it's not been an issue. I am sure there are better products out there for most people, but for my particular idiosyncratic wish for "a way to have metrics on my schedule/to-do list", it works well.

Goals Scorecard for June

Did not cave to despair
Helped Lut
Finished The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
Sketched/worked on cover art at least once per week
Wrote some of Fellwater as tentative next project
I did do a little reading although I haven't finished a whole book. So, a very little reading, but technical success is the best success

I actually made all my goals and my stretch goals in June, so that was cool. Gonna stick with this whole "modest goals" thing.

Goals for Next Month

Help Lut
Try to get roof replaced/repaired: The skylight is leaking again, and it looks like the mysterious puddle in the extension, from way back when, is also the result of a leak that's gotten worse. The roof is 17 years old, I'm good with replacing it. I already contacted the roofer who patched the skylight problem* a few years ago and he's going to come tomorrow to look at it. Hopefully this will be doable.

* A few years ago, I called Christian Brothers Roofers about my leaking skylight, and they sent a man who climbed up onto my roof, caulked around the skylight, and told me he thought that it was a fluke due to the intensity of recent storms prying at the skylight, and caulk should take care of it. He gave me his card and left -- "No charge, let us know if it happens again." I have kept that card for years in anticipation of this day. He made a very good impression.

Stretch Goals:

Finish rewrites on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: I'm not planning to finish all initial edits in July, but I do want to finish the new climax and the parts that are connected to it.
Write some of Fellwater and/or switch to a different book to write
Work on art/sketch at least weekly

This Month WHY

( Pessimism, personal issues, global problems, etc. )

Health/Fitness

Calorie consumption was about the same as in April, and exercise even lower -- I'm down to less than half of my peaks in December and January. Motivation is close to zero. Somehow, I am still exercising after work. I don't know why that habit remains when all the other habits have been eradicated. I gained a pound and a half in May.

While I was out walking in May, a car slowed down near me and a couple of Pokemon GO players made friendly noises at me from within it, and I am clinging to this memory as a bulwark against the two randos who've screamed at me because I was walking around outside. But outside is still terrible and I don't want to go there anymore. I've been trying to do aerobics videos instead. They are brutal and I kind of hate them.

There's a pseudoscience weight-loss gimmick where you're supposed to only eat food during an 8-hour window each day, and fast for the other 16 hours of each day/night. I never tried it before because it'd mean eating 2-3 meals during work hours, but in May I realized that since I'm working from home, and only 7 hours, it'd be somewhat feasible. I started trying it on 5/20 and I don't really think this is having anything but mildly negative effects on me. Mostly it means that I don't eat when I'm hungry in the morning and then I eat a bunch when I'm not hungry in the afternoon, so that I won't be hungry in the evening. So just completely ignoring my body's signals about food. The whole thing feels like a terrible plan, to be honest. It's not clear whether or not it works for me as a weight-loss technique -- I'm down half a pound since I started it -- but I stopped it yesterday anyway. There are lots of ways to lose weight that do not require dysfunctional eating habits.

Writing

I wrote 16,300 words of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady this month, which is now up to 90,000 words and almost finished. Another 5000-7000 words to go, I think. This one is going to need more revising than Spark of Desire. It just occurred to me in the shower that I could completely re-do the climax in a way that might be more entertaining.

The Business of Writing

Alinsa finished the initial pass on The Twilight Etherium, and I am almost done with the final read-through. Cover layout is still pending, though. Might be done this month? I don't know.

Art/Other

I drew a portrait of Whispers Rain, one of The Twilight Etherium protagonists. I am not particularly happy with it, but hey, drew a thing.

Gaming

"World of Lightness" was on hiatus for a week or so due to personal issues, but is back on again. I haven't kept track of how many words I've written for it this month, though.

Goals for Next Month

Try not to dig even deeper into the pit of bottomless despair that is this timeline

Help Lut

Finish writing first draft of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady

Stretch Goals

Do some art/sketching at least once per week

Decide what next writing project will be? (I don't know what I'm going to write next! This is very exciting.)

Maybe work on writing the next thing?
Maybe do some reading?

April felt like a normal-length month and I'm not sure if that's because it actually was, or if that's because The March Epoch changed my baseline for "normal-length month"

Health/Fitness
In April, I returned to about February's level of eating & exercising: 1820 calories per day consumed, exercise of around 260 calories per day. This is actually the lowest level of exercise since I started tracking via spreadsheet in November. Motivation to go out, stay outside, or even to clean, were all very low.

Weight is about the same, at 168.

Under the circumstances, these numbers are amazing and I'm proud of myself for not spending all day motionless and eating cookies. A++ good job me.

Writing

I actually wrote! Almost every day! Often more than my three-sentence stretch goal! 12,000 words on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady this month, which is now up to 73,700. Normally, I would not be excited about 12,000 words, but this is more new writing than I have done in the three previous months combined so YAY PERCEPTIBLE PROGRESS.

Everyone I know has been going "well, there's no being productive in a pandemic", but this is the first month I've broken 10,000 words since last November, so I can hardly blame my slump on COVID-19.

The Business of Writing
I finished reading through Spark of Desire. I don't want to make many changes, but there are a few. I need to make a list of changes so I can do them, and then do penultimate read-through. But I'm not in a hurry to do this, since Alinsa is still working on layout for The Twilight Etherium.

Art/Other
Oops. I didn't do this at all. I think I poked a little bit at the Spark cover, but for the most part I would think once or twice on the weekend: "I guess I should do some drawing?" And then I didn't do any drawing.

Gaming
I started "World of Lightness", the romance-themed play-by-post RPG I mentioned early in April. I ended up with four players and it's been moving along. We've been playing the game in Google Docs, which was my preference and has worked pretty well. I wanted to do it in Google Docs because having each complete scene in a single doc makes for a nice, clean archive that's easy to search and it keeps the chronology straight, while still allowing players the option of continuing to write in early parts of the continuity. For example, if player A doesn't want to play out what their PC is doing in the afternoon and wants to skip to evening plans, and player B wants to keep writing out the afternoon, I don't have to tell either player to "wait" or "hurry up". I can just start writing the evening scene with A while I continue to write the afternoon scene with B, and it's easy to tell which is which because they're at different points in the doc, or in different docs. And B can be present in both scenes because this is a romance-themed game and nothing is going to happen in the afternoon that will dramatically impact the evening.

I've been using my portion of the writing for it to play 4thewords.com, so I have an approximate word count for just what I've written: 25,000 words.

Writing for a play-by-post game, for me, involves a lot more exploratory writing than writing a book. I need to write more, both because the players need to have enough information to make their characters act consistently in the story world (which is much more information than readers of a novel need or want), and also because we are figuring out What Happens Next as a team. It's a romance game, so the players need lots of opportunities to meet and interact with potential love interests so they can decide who they're interested in. And I spend a fair amount of time having NPCs respond to things that PCs say and do, purely for conversational purposes -- it's not about the plot, it's about being in an immersive, interactive setting where what the PCs do matters.

Running the game is great fun, and I'm glad I decided to do it. I have such a hard time with "but what do I SAY" that I don't chat much online these days, and World of Lightness gives me an excuse to write a bunch of stuff interacting with other people, and that is nice. Also, my players are all great. So much <3

I have cut back on other games; I stopped maxing out my Pokemon GO battles every day, for instance.

Goal Scorecard
Help Lut: done!
Maintained minimum functions: No starvation! Did not quit my day job! Goal achieved!
Stretch goals:
Weekly art: LOL nope.
Writing: Achieved!

Goals
Last month's worked out pretty well so let's just keep at that.
Help Lut
Maintain minimum functions
Stretch goals:
Do some art-like thing every week
Do some writing. Like three sentences a day. You can make this up by writing six sentences on some days as necessary.

Health/Fitness
Somehow, the March epoch has finally drawn to an end. What the heck, March. Why.

I am generally healthy, which is more than can be said for too many Americans at this point. (Seriously, March. You were terrible and you should be ashamed of yourself.)

Exercise was up and calorie consumption was down in March. I have not reached January and December's lofty heights for exercise, but I've been going out every day to walk. I've been trying to hit enough pokestops to send gifts to everyone on my friends list who is eligible for a gift. This is more challenging now that I'm walking around my neighborhood, which has few pokestops and even fewer people, instead of the Plaza, which has lots of pokestops and even more people. Though I expect at this point the Plaza is pretty deserted, to be fair. Still, I haven't been driving except for work, food, and medical care since KC shut down on March 24. Even in the week before that, I'd only been to the Plaza once, from 7AM to 10AM on a cold, rainy Sunday (when it was also deserted).

I've been eating less because a lot of my "eating when not hungry" comes from boredom eating at work and eating at restaurants. Also, pretty sure my appetite was depressed during my staycation. Anyway, working from home does not provoke nearly the "I am bored, let's have a snack to pass the time" response that being at the bank does. I find this amusing given how often articles on working from home cite the easy availability of the refrigerator as a drawback.

Anyway, my weight actually dropped in March, to 168. I am now down 16 pounds since I started losing weight in January 2019. So I'm on track with my "1 pound per month" goal.

Writing
Still writing a little bit a month on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. About 4000 words this month. It's up to 61,700.

The Business of Writing
I released a novelette! The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium is now available FREE if you subscribe to my newsletter, or you can buy it in stores for $2.99.

I did the cover layout for Mortal Prince in March.

I also finished the penultimate proofread of The Twilight Etherium and finalized the cover image, so Alinsa has that book now for layout.

Art/Other

I've been working on the cover art for Spark of Desire. It's mostly done at this point, but gonna fiddle with the background some more, and the text layout is a placeholder.

Gaming

I got tired of Civ V halfway through March, shortly after winning a game with every leader in the original game.

I've been doing the Pokemon GO Battle League instead. It is not very satisfying but eh.

Socializing

ha ha ha no.

I didn't go to visit my parents in March, either.

Goal Scorecard
Help Lut: Did this! Although I fell down on getting one of his prescriptions renewed in a timely fashion. It's not one of the important ones, though, and hopefully the pharmacy & doctor will get it taken care of soon.
Finish final proofread TTE: All done!
Work on final edits for Spark and/or write more of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: Technical completion remains best completion
Do something art-related every week: Managed this by working on book covers.

Goals
Help Lut
Maintain minimum functions
Stretch goals:
Do some art-like thing every week
Do some writing. Like three sentences a day. You can make this up by writing six sentences on some days as necessary.
That seems like more than enough, under the circumstances. There's a 4thewords event for CampNano and I kind of want to participate but I don't know about actually writing any significant amounts of literally anything. Even a blog post feels like A Lot these days.

Health/Fitness
On average, I ate a few more calories per day in February than I had in January (1830 vs 1811) , and I exercised significantly less )287 vs 435). The "exercise less" was intentional. As mentioned last month, I don't feel like the December/January levels were sustainable long-term, and I am all about "sustainable long-term".

My weight is basically unchanged. (Seriously, my average weight for the last month is almost identical to (a) my weight as of this morning and (b) my average weight for the last four months.) I should probably try eating a little less in March. Not a lot less, though. Maybe 1750-1800 per day. I am all about sustainability and not making changes that feel like a sacrifice.

Writing
I wrote a little more of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: 7,400 words. It's up to 57,700 now.

The Business of Writing
Most of my creative work this month was on The Twilight Etherium. At the end of the month, I finally figured out a better way to handle a scene that had been bugging me since I first wrote it. I also made various alterations and added scenes per suggestions from first readers. I am now happy with it!

I made enough changes that I need to do one last read-through of the latest version, but after that, it'll be ready for layout. Whew!

Art/Other
The other creative thing was working on the cover for The Twilight Etherium. It's mostly done: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERivzGoWkAEaA_W?format=jpg&name=large

I'm going to lighten up the dark brown in "A" and go with that version.

Gaming So much Civ V. I think I've averaged around twenty hours a week of it? I have been working my way through all the leaders in the original game. I only have two left. (Many of them I'd already won with in previous binges on the game.)

I'm also trying a game on "Epic" speed, which basically means "you can move units and explore faster because everything else is sooooo sloooooow." I've played most games on "Quick". I think Standard is really the optimum speed, though.

Socializing
I did an unusual amount of socializing, for me. I went to two birthday parties for friends, and Jenn was in the area twice in February so I got to visit her during both trips. ❤

March will also see me being social, because I'm going to North Carolina to visit my parents.

Goal Scorecard
Help Lut: yup!
Write more of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: technical completion is best completion
Do something art-related at least once a week: I did this too! Amazingly!

Goals for coming month
Help Lut
Finish final proofread on The Twilight Etherium
Work on final edits for Spark and/or write more of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
Do something art-related every week.

Health/Fitness

I ate fewer calories and exercised more in January than I did in either December or November! My weight is approximately the same! I don't care enough to change anything.

Calories and exercise levels had not changed a huge amount -- 100 fewer eaten and 20 more burned, basically. I might spend less time exercising less in February because by the end of January I felt like I was spending so much time walking and playing Pokemon GO that it was eating into my creative energy. I did not have creative energy in January.

Writing

Technically, I did some writing? About 1400 words. The Lord, His Monster and Their Lady is up to 50,300 words.

Whenever I go for a few days without writing any new fiction, I start to think "this is it. I am never going to write anything again." After my second straight month of writing less than five thousand words, the idea that I'm done with writing feels a lot more real. It's been hard even getting myself to ramble at random on 4thewords just to keep the streak there going. Most days, I didn't bother; I just went to the dashboard and clicked "repair streak" to extend it for the day instead. -_-

The Business of Writing

On the other hand, I did finish the second round of edits for The Twilight Etherium, so that's good. I wrapped it up on January 25, and then because I had zero interest in writing, I pulled out Spark of Desire and started editing it. As it's a self-indulgent novel, I have read Spark several times (well, at least my favorite parts) since I finished writing it, and it had far fewer structural issues that I wanted to correct than most of my books. My initial editing list for The Twilight Etherium had 43 points on it; Spark's had just 15.

Technically, I finished initial edits on Spark in February, not January, but I finished it on the morning of the first and it's done now.

Art

I actually did some drawing this month! Including finishing two color pictures. \o/ I should upload them to Flickr so that I can link them here. *does this*

Other

I tried finding another person to repair the missing siding. The site I went through told me to get materials myself, so I ran around to various home repair stores trying to figure out what I needed and who had it, and eventually acquired a replacement siding shingle and a block of wood to replace the rotted one that had been underneath it. The handyman was scheduled to come on the morning of January 15 and -- you'll never believe what happened!

HE SHOWED UP. On the right date and at the right time! And then! HE FIXED THE SIDING.

IT'S AMAZING.

I hired him to replace a rotting board along the outside of the house's extension, between the attic and the first floor. He fixed that too, so this is going great. He's going to come back to do some weather-protection measures on it. I will no doubt hire him for other stuff. I have so much broken house stuff.

Gaming

I started playing Civ V again a couple of weeks ago. (No, not Civ VI -- the previous version, from 2010.) I haven't sunk as much time into it as I thought -- a little under 2 hours a day. I think I am mostly playing Civ in lieu of browsing Twitter/Discord/Mastodon, rather than in lieu of actual creative stuff. On the one hand, I haven't been writing since I started playing Civ again. On the other, I finished editing two manuscripts since I started playing Civ, and I hadn't been writing for a month before I started playing again. It's probably not reasonable to blame my slump on Civ.

Happiness

There were several grimly depressed days. Lut has TMJ issues, which are not covered by insurance and are expensive, so money stress is back. I am out of cope. which means that any unexpected problem, no matter how trivial, makes me scream and rant with rage and despair.

I hate running out of cope.

Goal Scorecard

Helped Lut
Mopped! Twice, even.
Did something art-related once a week (I forgot that I made this a goal but I succeeded anyway)
Finished edits on The Twilight Etherium and sent to new set of readers
Wrote more of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. Technically.
Set calorie goal to 1850

Goals for coming month

Help Lut
Write more of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
Do something art-related once a week. Probably the cover for The Twilight Etherium, this month.

I should probably put a "reach X% complete" down for the writing one but this level of ambition exceeds me. It is what it is.

Published

January: Frost and Desire

July: The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince

December: "Insecurity" (novelette for The Reclamation Project )

Edited

The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince: complete

The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium: novelette, complete

The Twilight Etherium: completed first-round edits, needs a second round

"Insecurity": short story, complete

Written

The Twilight Etherium (draft started 2018, finish January 2019. Total length 102,900): 28,500. Draft complete, partially edited.

Spark of Desire: 91,200

The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: 48,900

"Insecurity": 8000 words

That's a total of 176,500 words, almost half of last year's total word count. Meh. On the upside, it's still 2.5 books completed.

Art

I did more sketching than usual this year, which is still "not much sketching". I also did a handful of nice fan art pieces and one ridiculous illustration of Frost in lingerie.

Support Lut

He's still alive! And doing reasonably well, although still too fatigued to do much activity on any given day.

General Adulting

On the home maintenance front, I continue to be a failure.

I got a quote on what it would cost to repair the garage and realized that having a garage is not worth that price to me. It's not even worth 25% of that price. Like, I might pay 25% of that just to not have a broken garage, but the truth is all the garage is to me is a place to store the bike I don't own anymore, and even if it were fixed I'm not sure I trust it enough to keep a bike there again. Even if I got another bike. Which I haven't really wanted to do. A lot of why I loved having a bike was because it's good transportation if you don't have a car. I have a car.

Home maintenance aside, I have done Excellent Adulting, including things like getting myself to the doctor for general wellness visit for the first time in many years, and twice-annual dental visits, and managing Lut's care and our insurance and renewing my driver's license and car registration and all that other adulty stuff.

2019 Goal Recap:

* Support Lut through cancer treatment process: Done!

* Do something about the broken garage wall: Nooope.

* Publish three books: Nope. Published two.

* Finish drafting three books: Nope. Finished two. Did finish a couple of short works, tho.

* Write a book in the 55,000-85,000 word range and which covers the entire original outline for the book: Nooooope. Spark was just 6,200 words over it, granted, but tbh I'd forgotten this one was on here until like October or something, and by then I didn't care.

* Post monthly updates: Done!

2020 Goals

~ Continue caregiving for Lut

~ Publish two books

~ Publish The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium

~ Finish drafting two books

~ Do enough maintenance on house to keep it from falling down around us

~ Make one color picture every month

~ Continue to track food & exercise

~ Post monthly updates. Check goal list when I post them.

Stretch goals:

~ Write a book in the 55,000-80,000 word range which covers the entire outline for the book

I failed on most of my 2019 goals and I don't feel like doing that again, so I'm just going to aim lower. Yes, I have published three books in a year in the past and I am sure I could publish three books in a year again. But I'm unconvinced that there's any real merit in pushing myself to do so. My revenue per year has been in the low 4 digits since I started publishing books, with 2015 remaining my best year for net income. Even if my net income from writing was ten times higher, my 20-hour-a-week job at the bank would still pay better. The likelihood that someday I will make enough money at writing for it to replace my day job is slim, and those odds are very little impacted by whether I write 2 books a year or 3.

So. It's enough if I only write 176,000 words in a year. Or if I only write 100,000, for that matter. It's plenty.

I put art back on the goal list because I got to do a "year in art" thing back in 2015 and I want to be able to do that again.