rowyn

Health/Fitness

I cooked for Thanksgiving this year, for the first time since 2016. Lut and I used to cook tons of food together every Christmas, for just the two of us, but he hasn't been up to cooking since his diagnosis in 2017. I decided to do much of the cooking on my own this year, because none of the catering options have been satisfying. We went minimalist on some things -- I got a pre-cooked turkey -- and skipped some of our less-beloved usuals. But we still had leftovers for several days.

Anyway, I stopped tracking food because it was too annoying to figure out how much I was eating. I stopped making an effort to exercise in November, too. I nonetheless exercised ten times, which kind of surprises me. My habit of 'exercise after work as long as I don't have other plans' remains strong even without much driving force behind it. Twice a week isn't much, but it's better than nothing.

Writing

I won NaNoWriMo!

I finished the draft of A Game to You and immediately trunked it because oh man it's the messiest draft. I put more work into outlining and worldbuilding A Game to You than any previous book, and it still wasn't close to enough work. I don't know whether I want to expand it so that the huge cast has room to breathe and be distinguishable, or if I want to cut out half the characters. One way or another, It needs Way Too Much editing. It needs so much editing that I'm willing to edit Angel's Grace now because it looks easy by contrast. o.o;;;

But! I finished it! After writing 50,021 new words. Total draft is around 121,000.

I started writing Alien Peacelords but only got to 3646 words on it. A Game to You ran longer than I expected, although not by that much.

The Business of Writing

I released You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person! kermitflail

I even made an effort to keep talking about it after release instead of putting up a release post and letting it flounder along on its own. n.n

Reading

This is on the list of things I stopped doing because Nanowrimo. I will return to it in December!

Art

Courtesy of the online Saturday Craft & Chat meet-up, this wasn't one of the things I stopped doing in because Nanowrimo. I didn't finish any pictures I liked this month, but I did a bunch of practice sketches using Adorkastock's sketch app. My Surface's tablet pen stopped working mysteriously two weeks ago. I'd hoped the battery was dead, but replacing the battery did not revive it. I am not sure what other trouble-shooting steps are available, but I should probably do something before I give up and replace it. Cheap tablet pens are not good for drawing, sadly, so it'll be spendy to get a new one.

Social

I attended Contra KC 2021! I had gotten my booster shot on the Wednesday before the con started, and I was still kind of worn out during the con. So I didn't spend as much time as I usually do at the convention, but I did stay late on Saturday evening for the room parties, and saw a lot of old con-friends I've not seen since 2019. It was good. ♥

Gaming

I learned a new game with terrycloth, Deus. We only played it once. It was promising, though. I expect we’ll play it again sometime.

November Goal Score Card

• Assist Lut: Done!
  
• WIN NANOWRIMO: Yes I did this thing. \o/
  

Stretch Goals Scorecard:

November did not have stretch goals, because Nanowrimo + day job + caregiving is enough.

November Goals

• Assist Lut
• Visit parents (I have tickets for this trip on Friday!)
• Give Xmas gifts
• Work on the Alien Peacelords outline and create a spreadsheet with word count estimate for it.
• Get Angel’s Grace to 40% complete on edits (it’s at 14.75% now)
• Fix or replace tablet pen

Stretch Goals:

• Read through A Game to You.
  
• Make an editing list for A Game to You.
  
• Work on notes/outline for a different book
  
• Exercise 17 times this month
  
• Consumption tracking
  
• Make an art
  
• Work on cover art for Demon’s Alliance and/or Angel’s Grace
  
• Practice art
  
• Post six blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
  
• Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance
  
• Finish revisions on Angel’s Grace
  
• Maintain bullet journal
  
• Learn a new game
  
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before
  

Health/Fitness

I scraped my way to my "exercise 20 times" goal in September, putting in my 20th session on the last day of the month. \o/ Records indicate that I did better at not eating when I wasn't hungry, so that's good too. Average exercise per session was lower, because I really did the minimum allowed for several of my sessions.

I feel like I should get another exercise game, because I did so much more regular exercise when I was playing Pokemon GO. I could just go back to Pokemon GO. But the thing I did not love about Pokemon GO is that it strongly favored playing the game in densely-populated areas that had more pokestops. When I was playing the most, I did a ton of driving to get to area with more pokestops than my neighborhood. I don't want to go back to spending time and money driving around just to play my exercise-incentive game. (This also lets out playing games that use the same model as Pokemon GO, like Ingress.) But I am not motivated to look at new exercise games. I remember the last time I posted about this, I even got some recommendations that I never looked into.

Writing

After putting "get A Game to You to 50% complete" down as an actual goal (not even a stretch goal), I decided what I wanted to do in September was edit Demon's Alliance.

Thank you, brain.

I spent most of my September staycation working on Demon's Alliance, but I did some writing on A Game to You because I hate failing at goals. I wrote 3500 words to get to 49.4% on Wednesday 9/29, and then got to 49.9% yesterday. My next bullet point would've taken me to 51.25%. Thursday was very tiring and I did not want to put in another 3k day, so I broke the next point into two parts and wrote the first of them. Good enough.

A Game to You is now at 57,123 words. I estimate there's another 45-60k left to write. Nanowrimo starts in 31 days. Regardless of how much or little I write in October, it's likely that I'll need to start a new book at some point in November in order to write 50k of fiction for Nano. I should maybe prioritize 'finish an outline for something new' this month.

The Business of Writing

I finally got to work on edits for Demon's Alliance in September. This is not what I'd planned to do in September, but since I've been procrastinating on revising this draft since January, I'll take it. I have two items left on my editing/revision list. I'm contemplating working on revisions to Angel's Grace now, rather than finishing up Demon's Alliance. That way, if I decide I want to add something to Demon's Alliance, I can do it before my final read-through instead of afterwards.

Reading

Victoria Corva released Non-Player Character to KS backers in September, and I tossed aside the M/M romance I'd been slogging through to devour the new release. I read it slowly, partly to savor it and partly because I wanted to litter it with cheerful comments. I need to write a review for it, but the short version is: DELIGHTFUL, highly recommended.

Then I finished it a few days ago and haven't wanted to pick up anything else, so reading streak is once again broken. XD

Art

Maggie gave me a little hardbound book of blank pages for my birthday, and for five or six days I did a sketch or three a day in it. So way more than my usual amount of sketching for September.

During the craft-and-chats for September, I worked on pictures of Rose Thorn, one of the protagonists in A Game to You. My attempts to draw her in color were dismal failures, so I left the last one as a messy sketch. I like the last sketch version. I keep thinking "maybe I should try coloring it. Maybe this time will be different." Anyway, didn't do anything like a finished piece, but I did a lot of drawing so good enough.

Gaming

I forgot to lean a new game in September. I'm pretty sure I forgot? Maybe I learned something at the beginning of the month, but I don't think so. Oops. checks to see when she started playing Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business: yeah, that was at the end of August.

September Goal Score Card

• Assist Lut: Still doing that thing! He had some swelling in his feet and ankles, so after a week or so, he got a prescription for a diuretic pill to help the swelling go down. The swelling went away but he broke out in mysterious little bumps that are kind of like acne and kind of not. He's been picking at the bumps so now they're all scabby and look terrible. I think they're healing now, though.
  
• Get A Game to You to 50% complete: Technically complete is still complete. \o/
  
• Look at goal list occassionally: I did do this, which is why I remembered I'd put A Game to You on it. But I didn't do it often enough to remember the gaming stretch goal existed. Oops.
  

Stretch Goals Scorecard:

• Practice art: an unusual amount of this one! Just random drawing, not focused on learning anything in particular.
  
• Exercise 20 times this month: Done! Barely!
  
• Consumption tracking: More-or-less kept this up
  
• Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: Also done! I should check to see how far off I am from my 50-entries-for-the-year goal. Let's see: 33, not including this one. It's been 39 weeks, so I've written not quite as many in the year-to-date as I was aiming for. Still, I'll only need to do 16 more after this one to hit my goal. Just a little more than one per week. Pretty doable.
  
• Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance: I did not finish this one, but I got quite far along on it, so I want to pat myself on the back for it anyway. Not technically complete.
  
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: aww yiss and it was a great book, too.

Notably, I failed dismally at my usual "maintain bullet journal" goal. Early in September, I fell behind on it. Since I've started keeping a bullet journal, I've often fallen behind. In the past, I've always reconstructed what I could and continued. But this time, I just didn't care enough to resume.

A few days ago, I picked it back up again. The bullet journal is helpful for reminding me to do a lot of recurring tasks, like maintenance on the house and Lut's bi-pap, and cleaning on a semi-regular basis. So I plan to get back to it in October.

October Goals:

• Assist Lut
  
• Look at goal list at least once per week.
  
• Look at to-do list at least once per week. Make an effort to do the tasks that linger on it.
  
• Write some of A Game to You
  
• Work on edits for Demon's Alliance and/or _Angel's Grace
  

I did not enjoy having goals with ambition in September, so ambition is going back into the stretch goals where it belongs.

Stretch Goals:

• Make the character voices more distinctive in A Game to You
  
• Work on A Game to You.
  
• Work on notes/outline for a different book
  
• Exercise 20 times this month
  
• Consumption tracking
  
• Make an art
  
• Work on cover art for Demon’s Alliance and/or Angel’s Grace
  
• Practice art
  
• Post five blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
  
• Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance
  
• Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil
  
• Maintain bullet journal
  
• Learn a new game
  
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before
  

Health & Fitness

Staying the course: exercise about every other day, eating about the same.

Lut finished radiation in May, and has switched to taking pills at home -- Revlimid and Ninlaro -- as of Monday, instead of getting treatment at the clinic. But because Revlimid and Ninlaro are hard on the patient’s immune system, we’re going to the clinic for blood tests every Wednesday for the next eight weeks. This week is our only week off from the clinic in a long time.

Writing

I finished You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person in May, writing ~13,000 words.

I made a few more notes for A Game to You, but haven’t made a lot of progress on it. So much world-building to do. o_o

The Business of Writing

Instead of writing, I launched into editing Level 99, and managed to finish initial edits on it. It is now off to first readers! \o/

Fun fact: Level 99 takes place right now, like the end of one arc is June 3, 2021. Contemporary novels almost never reference specific dates, and from a marketing perspective this was a foolish move. But it’s sort of fun to tie the book so solidly to a particular moment in time. Especially a point in time that is nothing like the years that will come after it, or the years that came before.

I semi-organized the list of things I highlighted last month in my re-read of Demon’s Lure and Angel’s Sigil, but still no progress on actual edits for those books.

And Alinsa finished layout for the ebook of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady at the end of the month. I uploaded the books in May but they didn’t finish percolating to retail sites until June, so the launch was in June. Yay, new book in the wild!

I have also already updated my website with both the new release and the new WIP, for bonus business points.

Reading

I finished India After Gandhi! After just nine months! Wow, that was a long time. I started reading a novella, which is short so I’ll probably finish it in June.

Art

I worked on the cover for Level 99 on the last day of May, so I have something to show for art, yay.

Gaming

I thought that Terry and I tried a new game neither of us liked in May, but I don’t see anything new in BGA since Schrodinger’s Cats, so I guess not.

I tried a new strategy for editing, which is gaming-adjacent so I’ll describe it here. My normal editing strategy is “make a list of planned changes, rank how hard they are from 1-10, and then wander through the list doing those things.”

This time, I decided to add a ‘word count equivalent’ for each item, which ranged from 100 words for the easiest to 3800 for the hardest. And then I let myself count that many words as 'written' in 4thewords. I felt like I was, on the one hand, overestimating the difficulty in many cases and therefore giving myself too much credit. And on the other hand, I finished initial edits on the book in less than a month, so I feel like this was a Motivational Win. I will do it with my next editing pass, too, and see how it goes.

May Goal Scorecard

• Assist Lut: Done!
• Look at goal list occasionally: Done! Regularly, even.
• Finish first draft of Level 99: Done!
• Make editing list for Level 99: Done!
• Start revisions on Level 99: and done!

Stretch goals

• Work on notes/outlines A Game to You: technically I did this
• Exercise 20 times this month: This month’s total was 16.
• Consumption tracking: done
• Work on cover art for Level 99: Did this, in the “work on” sense, although it’s not complete.
• Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.: I did two non-review entries, so yes, although I think my target is 3-4 extra per month.
• Finish revisions on Level 99: Aw yisss done
• Start revisions on Demon’s Alliance : I did a little bit more work towards this, but no.
• Maintain bullet journal: done
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: I did this! Wooo!

Also, this is worth noting -- I’ve finished one of my 2021 goals goals already: completed drafts for two books. This should not be a surprise since I finished the draft for Angel’s Grace in January, and yet somehow it is.

June Goals

• Assist Lut
• Look at goal list occasionally

Stretch goals

• Work on notes/outlines A Game to You
• Start writing A Game to You
• Work on notes/outline for a different book
• Exercise 20 times this month
• Consumption tracking
• Make an art
• Work on cover art for Demon’s Alliance and/or Angel’s Grace and/or Level 99
• Practice art
• Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
• Start revisions on Demon’s Alliance
• Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil
• Maintain bullet journal
• Learn a new game
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before

takes a moment to dance on 2020's grave

I made some goals for 2020! I wonder what they were?

looks them up

2020 Goal Scorecard:

• Continue caregiving for Lut: Done!
• Publish two books: Done!
• Publish The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium: Done!
• Finish drafting two books: OVERACHIEVED! I finished three. *Do enough maintenance on house to keep it from falling down around us: Done!
• Make one color picture every month: Ehhhh kinda.
• Continue to track food & exercise: I did a half-hearted job of this the last few months, but I'm gonna give this a "done" anyway. I'm not gonna say that some sloppiness a few missed weeks outweighs the 40+ weeks of fairly accurate data.
• Post monthly updates: Done!
• Check goal list when I post them: I did this ... some of the time? There's a reason I put "look at goals" on the January goal list. -_-

Stretch goals:

• Write a book in the 55,000-80,000 word range which covers the entire outline for the book: Done! Demon's Alliance was projected at 67,000 words, and came in at 74,800. GOOD WORK ME. I had absolutely forgotten that this was a stretch goal by the time I did it.

Some details!

Published

• The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium (novelette. Free with newsletter subscription!)
• The Twilight Etherium
• Spark of Desire

Edited

• The Twilight Etherium (first round of edits and part of final round was 2019, finished final round in 2020)
• Spark of Desire
• The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady

Drafted

• The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady (46,089)
• Fellwater (began 2016 and worked on in desultory fashion in 2017-2019. 28,800 new words in 2020)
• Demon's Alliance (74,842)

Incomplete Drafts:

• Angel's Grace (31,100)

Total word count for 2020 was about 180,800. This is about the same as last year's total and about half of 2018's total. 2020 was hard, I'm good with this.

Art

Despite my monthly updates on art being consistently "I fell down on this one", I actually did a number of drawings this year and spent a chunk of time on art.

January: Worth, forest fire drawing
February: incomplete crowd-sourced prompt sketch, cover for The Twilight Etherium
March: Spark of Desire cover
April: Moar Spark of Desire cover
May: Whispers Rain portrait, relative-sizes sketch for the Romance PBEM
June: The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady cover
July: Three alphabet sketches
August: Lord cover, couple of meh portraits.
September: Raven portrait
October: Abstract Etherium-inspired scenery things
November: Etherium-inspired landscape
December: Mask on Lut's avatar

So I actually will make a 2020 month-by-month picture like I wanted to, even if it is gonna have some repetition/mediocre pictures in it.

Home Maintenance:

Aw yeah I got it ALL DONE.

• Roof replaced
• Siding repaired
• Weather-damaged window frames repaired or replaced
• House painted

Work

In early March, as the pandemic started to look serious for the USA, I asked my boss to get me remote access. I went on staycation before the shutdowns began, and when my staycation ended, I started working from home. In October, I became an official only-works-from-home employee. I now have a dedicated work laptop with a docking station and a KVM switch (all bank-provided) so that I can use my own peripherals with it. (The bank would've given me peripherals instead of the switch, but I really don't have anywhere to put another set of monitors.)

Working from home is very nice. I'd always assumed that working from home is one of those things that sounds better in principle than it is in practice, but nope, I love it. I am especially looking forward to the part where I can wait for snow to melt instead of having to shovel out my car and/or walk to work in snow boots. My area gets a few snows every year, but we usually have enough days above freezing that the snow will melt off in a week or less. For example, it's snowing as I write this, but the Sunday and Monday highs are around 40 so it may be melted off by Wednesday. I might have to shovel snow a time or two in order to get groceries, but we'll see.

~

Given the Many Challenges of 2020, I feel pretty great about how much I got done. PRETTY GREAT. Lemme tell you.

So I guess I need some 2021 goals. Last year's goals were pretty good, let's just use most of those again.

Goals for 2021

• Continue caregiving for Lut
• Publish two books
• Finish drafting two books
• Continue to track food & exercise
• Post monthly updates.
• Put month & year goal list in your bullet journal so you'll actually remember to look at it. Also, look at it.

Stretch Goals

• Make an art every month. Part of an art counts if it's a complicated art.
• Finish outlines for two books
• Read 12 books
• Read a little every day (of a book you didn't write)
• Eat a little less and/or exercise a little more than you did in 2020
• Promote your books a little
• Write 50 blog posts

This looks like plenty.