rowyn | Entries tagged with nyr 2023

Health/Fitness

My exercise habit is BACK. I exercised 28 out of 31 days in December. \o/

Granted that my standards of what counts as "exercise" have become very low, this is not as impressive as it sounds. But it does mean that on every one of those 28 days, I made a concerted effort to move around in some fashion more than I would have otherwise, even if it was just for a 10-minute aerobics video or to clean the kitchen or whatever. It's much better than I was doing in August through October. It's probably better than I've done since I quit Pokemon GO! in 2020, tbh.

I still wasn't paying attention to my eating habits, and I need to get back to that, if only to make them more in line with my appetite and less in line with my stress levels.

Writing

I worked on notes for a few different books: a sequel to A Game to You (this was ridiculous because I'm not even ready to edit that book, never mind writing a sequel. But I did it anyway), a new Etherium romance, and another romance in the same setting as A Dragonling's Family. I'm leaning towards the last as my actual next WIP, but we'll see what wins out. I like the last option because it's not only a romance, but a romance between people who aren't rich or powerful, and whose problems are on a personal rather than national or global level. I often write stories about Important and Influential People who need to tackle some major crisis affecting millions. This is a great trope but I have a deep and abiding love for small stories and I don't write enough of them.

The Business of Writing

I published Alien Peacelords! Good job, me. This involved finishing the last editing pass and then final read-through, as well as all the miscellaneous tasks of publication. It took me until Christmas Day to finally wrap it up. But I did it! \o/

Art

I finished the art for the Alien Peacelords cover again. The original blond figure on the cover looked off to me and I figured it would always bother me if I didn't get him at least better. So I removed the original figure and redrew him from scratch and probably no one else who saw both versions even noticed the difference. But I'm happier, and frankly that's what counts.

Besides that, I illustrated 34 Apothecaria entries, through entry 285.

Social

Hm.

I may have forgotten to social at all in December.

I called my parents a few times -- four, I think. Not quite the "weekly" I was aiming for, but not terrible.

Gaming

Lut and I played Kill Team once or twice each week (usually once). The last two weekends, we've played at home instead of playing at the gaming store. With the incidence of various contagious diseases rising over the holidays, we figured we'd stay home for a few weeks until the surges pass.

On a related note, the oncology center called to reschedule an appointment for Lut last week because his oncologist had covid. Again. :/ (This oncology center stuck with their mask mandate longer than any other provider we've seen, too -- they didn't drop it until this summer.)

Goal Scorecard for Prior Month

Help Lut: Done!
Keep in touch with parents: We'll call it done, if not as well as I'd like.
Track exercise: Done! For bonus points, I actually did exercise this month so there was a lot to track!
Pay bills: Done! Though I gotta remember to get some money out of my non-retirement investment account so that I can pay January's bills.
Check goal list occasionally: Done!
Complete an outline for a new book: Nope! Worked on a few different options, didn't finish any of them.
Finish penultimate read-through on Alien Peacelords: Done!
Layout the cover art for Alien Peacelords: Done!
Layout Alien Peacelords for publication: Done!
Finish final read-through on Alien Peacelords: Done!
Publish Alien Peacelords: Done!

Stretch goals:

Illustrate 30+ Apothecaria entries: Sure did!
Post an Apothecaria entry every day: Ayup!
Generally other productive things from the Bored? list:
- "exercised 28 out of 31 days" falls under this heading. I did other stuff that's on the list, but mostly gaming/reading/entertainment type things. I think all the other productive stuff was covered elsewhere. OH WAIT. Blogging! How could I forget blogging?
- For the nth time I decided I'd post more random blog entries and then, for whatever reason, this time actually did post more random blog entries. I made seven posts in December, six of them in the last five days of the year. One was the usual month-in-review and one was a release post for Alien Peacelords. But the other five were pretty random; the kind of things I used to post back in my early, early days of online journaling, and that I haven't posted regularly in many, many years. Anyway, that was cool. I don't know if I'll keep that up, but I might. I like having a record of my life.
- This was my last month before semi-retirement: I am now only working seven hours a week. I've only been working thirteen hours a week for the last four months, so this is only a drop by six hours. But it feels huge and I want to note it in the review.
- Man I just remembered something else that went in here and I instantly forgot it, brain why. Oh yeah! I collected most of my Apothecaria pages into an epub: Cassie, Witch of High Rannoc: Spring . Doesn't cover the most recent entries, which will go into the "Summer" version. The ebook is ginormous because it's all images, but it means I can read it on my phone at night. I am happy.
- Ooh and BUDGET! For the first time in ages (possibly ever?), I made a projected budget of how much I plan to spend and on what. I've never done this because my spending has always been "spend whatever you have to and save the rest". And I am a compulsive saver so I've never overspent. But moving into semi-retirement meant that I wanted to make sure that the way I've been spending matched the amount of income I'd have available to spend. It does, although it meant guesstimating the present value of the social security payments I won't be getting for 10+ years. It also means assuming Social Security and Medicare will still be there when I'm old enough to collect them. This is probable although not certain. My wage earnings have always been pretty solidly "lower middle class", which is one of the least likely segments to be targeted by American politics for cuts. If anyone's still getting social security, it'll be the people who had low-but-consistent incomes during their working years and who do not have high taxable incomes as retirees. But it wouldn't shock me if Congress decided to raise the retirement age for Medicare & Social Security. Oh, and my budget is also dependent on Obamacare, which is also not certain to stick around. The Obamacare healthcare subsidy actually covers all of my monthly premiums for 2024, to my surprise. Anyway, there's plenty of place I could cut spending if I had to, so my confidence is in the 95%+ range.

Goals for Next Month

Hmm.

Help Lut
Keep in touch with parents
Track exercise & consumption
Pay bills
Check goal list occasionally
Complete the 2023-in-review post and set goals for 2024.
Complete an outline for a new book
Flesh out editing list for A Dragonling's Family
Get 25% (combined) through editing one or more drafts.

I expect I will be editing A Dragonling's Family next because it's the path of least resistance (I have three other completed drafts but they all have Major Issues to address in edits and I'm extremely meh about doing so). But I'm leaving myself open to the idea that I'd rather edit something else. If I get 10% done on one book and 15% on another, that's fine too.

Stretch goals:

Illustrate 30+ Apothecaria entries
Post an Apothecaria page every day.
Keep up the blogging habit. "Every week" qualifies for this but "almost daily" is fine.
Compare actual spending to budget for December and see how that's working out.
Get 50% (combined) through edits.
Make an Illustration Retrospective for 2023.
Work on the cover for A Dragonling's Family
Any other productive stuff.

Health/Fitness
Ate more when I wasn’t hungry this month. Exercised a tiny bit more, too. Managed 19 days of at least minimal aerobics plus 1 day where I just stretched.

Writing
The Jewel-Strewn Night is at 60% complete now. Draft is up to 48,200, up 15,400 from last month. Draft remains on track to be 80,000 words.

I wrote some Apothecaria, but not very much. It’s at 37,100, up about 6,200. Because I spend so much more time illustrating than writing, the written journal is still waaaaay ahead of the illustrated journal. I’ve got around 26 more entries to illustrate before I run out (if I don’t write more). I expect I will write more before that happens.

The Business of Writing
My first readers finished reading Alien Peacelords, yay! I went through all of the comments and made my final editing list. It is very long. I have started it but haven’t gotten very far. It’s about 5%

Commentary that amused me:

Me, in the “questions for first readers” section at the end of the book: ‘I feel like there’s too much sex at the end of the book, what do you think, should I cut out some of the sex?’

First readers: ‘Really there needs to be more sex at the end of the book.’

Well. Okay then.

Art
I illustrated many Apothecaria entries this month. So many. Twenty-nine entries, looks like? I’ve continued to post one every day, but I haven’t necessarily drawn one every day. Sometimes I draw two or there and sometimes I draw zero.

Oh, and I completely forgot until I looked at my bullet journal for the month: I did the “Portrait Challenge”, which meant I watched a bunch of Paintable tutorial videos and completed a portrait following them.

Reading
I finished reading terrycloth’s “Summoning Ocellus” (he posted it to FiMFiction when I was partway through reading the .docx version; I finished reading the .docx for Maximum Commentage). I’m basically current on Alien Tastes (do need to read Sunday’s entry still). I started a published book but we’ll see if I actually finish it.

Goal Scorecard for Prior Month

Help Lut: Done!
Keep in touch with Terrycloth: Done!
Exercise 13 times (aerobic): Done!
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes: Done!
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: Done!
Make final editing list for Alien Peacelords: Done!
Start final edits on Alien Peacelords: Done!
Complete 60% of The Jewel-Strewn Night: Done!

Stretch goals:

Consumption tracking: I did this one, with somewhat more accuracy than usual, even.
Maintain bullet journal for entire month: Done
Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice): Between Apothecaria entries and the portrait, got in around 32 hours of practice this month.
Finish reading a story I haven’t read before: Done!
Play Apothecaria: Done!
Illustrate Apothecaria entries: Done!

Goals for Next Month

My June goals are:

Care for Lut
Keep in touch with Terrycloth
Keep in touch with parents

aaaand that's it.

For the last week and a half, I've been planning to have no creative goals for June. I'm not even gonna set non-creative goals like "exercise." No stretch goals either. Instead, I will make a list of 'things I might like to do and/or have done'. The difference between this and a goal list is that a goal list is a plan, and this is a reference list to check when I'm bored so I can see if anything on it sounds like fun. I'm even going to include items that are purely "this might be fun" and where I don't remotely care if I ever do them or not.

Bored? Maybe Try One of These

Play (Terra Nil, Wandering Village, Boyfriend Dungeon, RftG. Apothecaria, 4thewords)
Read (webcomics, Hoopla, books, webfiction, Dreamwidth, Discord, fediverse)
Watch (The Dragon Prince, MCU, youtube subs, ??)
Draw (Apothecaria, A Game to You, Alien Peacelords, A Dragonling's Family, Demon's Lure, fan art, sketching practice)
Write (Apothecaria, blog post, email, chat, social media, The Jewel-Strewn Night, something new)
Edit (A Game to You, Alien Peacelords, A Dragonling's Family, Fellwater)
Exercise (walk, pace, stretch, lift weights, do aerobics video)
Track (activities, food, exercise)

Lists in parentheses are not exhaustive. I could probably even dredge up something else to edit if I thought hard about it.

Health/Fitness

Back to eating when I’m not hungry, oops. I was still recovering from illness for the first week of March, so exercise was not great either. But I did manage 15 times of minimal aerobics plus 7 times of just stretching.

Writing

I finished the outline for The Jewel-Strewn Night, the unnamed SFF story I mentioned last month, and started writing it. It’s at 20% complete and was coming along well right up until I started playing Apothecaria. I should work on it tonight during CoffeeQuills. c_c

The Business of Writing

Editing on the first draft of Alien Peacelords is 88% complete! My goal was 80%, so this is pretty good. I finished most of the editing points, started on the final read-through before first readers, and am 85% through with that. I came up with a few more things I forgot to add to the editing list, and I decided I was underestimating the effort required for final read-through. I do the read-through using ProWritingAid now, which means I catch more little details, but it also takes longer. So I’ve added more points to the editing list and revised the estimate for the read-through, and I’m still 88% done. Woohoo! I will finish this in April.

Art

So, uh, apparently I did a lot of art during March?

Ten character portraits for friends
Two Veo cartoons for their Kickstarter for The Beautiful Decay (check it out!)
Six illustrated journal entries for Apothecaria
Sketch & flat colors for the cover for A Game to You
A little more work on the Alien Peacelords cover.

I have this logged as 23 hours, which feels like it must be an under count because that’s a lot of color pictures. Granted, my current art style is “work quickly and don’t stress too much because it’s more satisfying to finish something kind of slapdash in an hour than to lavish ten hours on it and not be much happier with the result.”

checks through bullet journal

Okay, yes, looks like I didn’t log the time I spent on three of the character portraits or either of the covers. This should be more like 28 hours, I’d guess.

I really gotta start doing art posts on Dreamwidth because mastodon.art is not a good archive.

Social

Not very much here. Saw my local friends twice, which was nice.

Terry is still at the adult family care center, with no clear end in sight for when he’ll be fit enough to be discharged. :( He has all his electronics with him, at least. He’s been playing mostly single-player action games to keep himself engaged, and catching up on some shows he never got around to watching. We talk via Steam or Discord chat for a bit on most evenings.

Gaming

Terry and I learned a new game on boardgamearena.com, It’s a Wonderful World. I liked it pretty well, but we haven’t been playing together much and haven’t tried it again yet.

anke mentioned Apothecaria on Fediverse, describing it in a poll option as “whimsy village witch solo RPG”. I commented that it sounded so delightful that I wanted to play it now, and Anke pointed out that it was in an itch.io bundle. (Bundle has since expired, alas, but it’s worth full price. And there are community copies available if you can’t afford it.)

I love it. I went through the basics of the rules in a day or two, and have played it every day since. I’d always thought that “solo journaling game” would feel like “writing a book, except it’s all fanfic so I can’t publish it.” But it reminds me more of playing a PBEM and I kind of don’t care that I can’t publish it. I am surprised by how much it reminds me of PBEM, given that there’s no “here’s a bunch of replies from other people to keep the story going” aspect to it. But there are mechanical rewards for the things my character does -- she gets money/reputation/reagents -- so there’s some definite game aspects that I enjoy.

I should cross-post the Apothecaria entries here, too. I’ve illustrated eight fancy journal pages and written ... a lot more. So many more. That I haven’t gotten around to illustrating yet and making fancy. :D

The fancy illustrated journal entries are a thing I’ve always wanted to do, but I’ve never been able to keep one up for either writing about my own life, or a fiction project. The game provides a good mix of structure and creativity, making it more fun for me to keep it up.

I should cross-post the Apothecaria entries here, too.

Reading

...I actually have a thing I want to read and enjoy reading, but it’s on a website instead of an e-reader app so I keep forgetting about it when I think of reading at night. Mph. I have not been reading.

March Goals Scorecard

Help Lut: done!
Keep in touch with Terry: done!
Exercise 13 times (aerobic): done
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes: done
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: done
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally: done
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 80% complete: done!
Finish outline for new WIP: done!
Give new WIP a working title that I’m willing to share with other people: done!

March stretch goals completed:

Consumption tracking: A bit sloppily as usual, but done
Maintain bullet journal for entire month: I fell apart on this in the last week, but I basically reconstructed it so I’m gonna count it anyway.
Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice): TOTAL VICTORY. So much arting.
Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference: I didn’t love any of this month’s work but “complete a painting you love” is not the goal. I did this one.
Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: I actually did this! Amazing.
Learn a new game: I learned TWO new games WHAT
Start writing next WIP: 20% done already!
Get some use out of Color and Light by James Gurney: I’m gonna give this one an honorable mention because I did actually look at it while working on one of the paintings I did in March. Not a lot of use! But a little.

April Goals

Help Lut
Keep in touch with Terry
Exercise 13 times (aerobic)
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally
Complete edits on Alien Peacelords and send to first readers
Get The Jewel-Strewn Night to 40% complete
File taxes (I already did this one, this morning, but I still want to give myself credit for it. It was an important goal!)

Stretch goals:

Consumption tracking
Maintain bullet journal for entire month
Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice)
Exercise 20+ times
Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference
Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Learn a new game
Finish reading a story I haven’t read before
Refine editing list for A Game to You.
Work on edits for A Game to You. Make editing list for A Dragonling’s Family Work on edits for A Dragonling’s Family
Get some use out of Color and Light by James Gurney
Play Apothecaria
Post more fancy journal pages for Apothecaria

Health/Fitness

I was sick for the last week of February, with a sore throat that started on Feb 20 (a Monday) . It turned into a full-blown sore throat and fatigue on Tuesday and I took Tuesday off. On Wednesday, the sore throat was almost-but-not-quite gone, and I felt significantly better. On Thursday morning, I got up at 7AM and thought "I'm fine, I can do my day job today" and then by 8:30AM I was "I need to go back to bed." So I took the Thursday off too. Friday, still too fatigued to really go out and do things. By Saturday I was like 90-95% healthy, and I have been stuck there since. I can't seem to make it all the way to "yes I am genuinely fine". Today, I decided to drink some Diet Coke: one of my bellwethers of health is "do I feel like my throat needs clear hot liquids". All I have been drinking for the last nine days is a low-calorie spiced apple cider mix that I order online because it's not reliably stocked in stores.

My throat remains a little meh: not sore but a bit grumpy. My body is not exactly fatigued but still low-energy. It's a work in progress.

I did some stretching while I was sick but I only exercised twice in the last nine days of February. So I made my exercise goal of "13+ times plus 7+ times stretching on the remaining days, but only exactly that: the bare minimum. I also did the bare minimum amount of exercise in each session -- mostly pacing the house while on the phone, or doing the 10-minute core body workout. It was not a good month for exercise, but I haven't stopped exercising, so kudos for that.

Also got my eating habits more under control: doing better at eating when hungry and and not out of boredom or habit or because sugar cookies are extremely delicious. Under the circumstances, I am content with how the month went.

Writing

I finished writing A Dragonling's Family, huzzah! That was one of my February goals and I completed it halfway through the month, on February 17.

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, 4thewords started doing co-op battles on February 14. I find the co-op battles fun and motivational. Co-op battles do not involve working on the same file and you don’t see what other people in the battle are writing (which would be distracting from writing your own stuff anyway.) It just means you’re all battling the same monster. The battle ends when either the co-op group collectively contributes enough words to reach the monster’s total word count (which is [monster base word count] * [number of players in co-op battle] * [difficulty multiplier]) or the timer runs out.

I’ve spent many co-op battles brainstorming ideas and making notes for my next WIP. I worked on notes for the next book in The Demon’s Series and for the sequel to A Game to You, but those are for the long-term: I don’t want to draft either of those yet.

Instead, I started work on an unnamed science fiction polyamorous romance in a new setting, because I am allergic to success or something. I’ve got about 12,500 words of disorganized notes so far. Outline is incomplete but coming along well.

The Business of Writing

I created an editing list for Alien Peacelords and completed 50% of the editing! That went much better than I had anticipated.

Art

I did quite a bit of art in February:

Curator Prompts 135
Various pencil sketches for the Alien Peacelords cover
Nine color tests of two different sketches for the Alien Peacelords cover
Color sketches for two cats and one person
A color image of Veo’s avatar in Outer Wilds
Four color cartoons of Veo’s avatar in Roadwarden
Flat colors for the Alien Peacelords cover once I finally settled on a sketch and a color scheme.

I have this all added up to 24 hours and 40 minutes, which seems about right. Lot of drawing and painting. Most of it was for specific purposes rather than practice. Not sure how I feel about that.

Social

I did not get out much in February. Saw my local friends twice, including for their birthday party. That was about it.

Terrycloth was discharged from the hospital in early February, which is better than being in the hospital. He is in an “adult family care center”, which sounds similar to the rehab center Lut was in. He is not healthy enough to go home -- he can’t reliably do things like “transition from sitting down to standing” on his own. He’s doing physical therapy with the goal of improving this, but it’s not clear how it will go. :/ I have been calling him every day but I don’t necessarily reach him -- sometimes his phone goes directly to voicemail. He has his desktop computer and his tablet with him now, so sometimes I can reach him on Discord or Steam, but sometimes that doesn’t work, either. I wanted to get tickets to visit him again, even if it’s just visiting during visiting hours at the care center. But he’s discouraged me every time I bring it up so I haven’t yet.

We have gotten to play games in the evening a few times, like we used to do every weeknight, including yesterday and the day before. So that was lovely. ♥

Reading

I have bounced off a few different things and became dispirited and gave up. I should try again this month.

February Scorecard

Help Lut: done!
Keep in touch with Terry: done
Exercise 13 times (aerobic): done
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes: done
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: done
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally: done (I actually did this a lot because I was checking stretch goals for ideas to do once I finished with the regular goals)
Finish A Dragonling’s Family: done!
Make an editing list for Alien Peacelords: done!
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 20% complete: done!

Stretch goals:

Consumption tracking: Done, but badly (I phoned it in for the entire time I was sick, for instance)
Maintain bullet journal for entire month: Done
Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice): overachieved!
Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference: also overachieved
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 50% complete: done!
Decide what book to write next: done
Make an outline for a new book: Not complete but I made good progress on it so Imma make a note of it.

March Goals

Help Lut
Keep in touch with Terry
Exercise 13 times (aerobic)
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 80% complete
Finish outline for new WIP
Give new WIP a working title that I’m willing to share with other people

Stretch goals:

Consumption tracking
Maintain bullet journal for entire month
Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice)
Exercise 20+ times
Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference
Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Learn a new game
Finish reading a story I haven’t read before
Complete edits on Alien Peacelords.
Refine editing list for A Game to You.
Work on edits for A Game to You.
Get some use out of Color and Light by James Gurney
Start writing next WIP

Health/Fitness

So terrycloth has cancer too. I have known for a while but haven’t said anything about it because (a) Terry actually has a social media presence while Lut’s never posted anywhere but GamersWithJobs, and (b) I used to wonder after the fact whether I should’ve posted so much about Lut. But Terry told me it was all right to tell people and it is increasingly weird to talk about my life without at least mentioning this.

Terry’s prognosis is not as bad as Bard’s but much worse than Lut’s. So that sucks. Not that there are any non-sucky kinds of cancer to have. Terry was in the hospital for one day while I was visiting him in January. He was discharged but ended up back in the hospital again about a week later. He is still there now. I don’t know when he’ll be discharged. Hospitals are still terrible. Not being able to visit him while he's in the hospital: also terrible. x.x

I did a surprisingly good job of getting regular exercise in January: twenty-three times. I even wedged in some exercise while visiting Terry, when he was busy with something else.

I made no meaningful effort to track food while I was traveling. I had a lot of bubble teas and piroshkis and other delicious food from small vendors who did not provide nutritional information.

But since returning home, I have gotten back to tracking. I’ve been working on “only eat when hungry”, too because over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of “eat because it’s delicious even though I’m not hungry.” It’s improved.

I am trying to take care of myself, and not despair.

Writing

I’ve gotten A Dragonling’s Family to 85% complete and up to 85,700 words, from 68,150 and 65% complete at the end of December. It’s coming along well and I should be able to finish it easily in February.

I’ll need to think about what I’m drafting next soon. Oh no.

I did a few extra blog posts in January: my year-in-review, an illustration retrospective for 2022 (which was fun to do because I did so much painting in 2022), a post about Machine Learning, and the release post for Angel’s Grace.

The Business of Writing

I released Angel’s Grace!

flails

It’s nice to have those books finally done.

I poked at editing Alien Peacelords but made no serious effort to begin. Still need to make a list for it.

Art

I did three sets of CuratorPrompts, an art-nouveau-style image of Bright, and one random quick painting. I also made a bunch of signature-doodad images to use as signatures on my illustrations. So that I will stop forgetting to sign my work. This has actually worked so far! The last two images I’ve posted both had a signature dooded on them.

Social

I visited Terry for a week in January, and we got out one day to see Steve and Jeff for brunch at their house, which was lovely.

Gaming

Terry wasn’t up for most activities while I was there, but he was still good with gaming. So we played a lot of pass-and-play iPad games because it didn’t require as much energy as sitting at a table moving pieces on a physical board game. Lots of Suburbia, Brief History of the World, and Splendor, and a few games of Eclipse. We’d both played Eclipse before as a board game, but neither one of us remembered how to play. I ended up watching a 23-minute video on how to play while Terry played the tutorial. It did not really come back to us. We played the first game with AI opponents and they annihilated us. It was sad. We played two or three more games with no AI while we tried to figure it out. It's a 4X game, and I didn't enjoy the way the combat against other players worked (I generally do not like combat against other players in 4X games. Too much snowball effect, where the loser's position just keeps getting worse but the game hasn't ended yet. Anyway, I'm counting this as "learned a new game" because if I have to watch an entire video to figure out how to play a game again, it might as well be a new game.

Reading

I did some reading in January! I set up a bookwyrm.social account: https://bookwyrm.social/user/Rowyn. Bookwyrm.social strikes me as very Not Ready For Prime Time: updates posted to it often took a while to show up even on my own profile. And Bookwyrm did not play well with my Mastodon account: one time I had a review I posted to Bookwyrm take actual weeks before it appeared in my Mastodon feed. Also, my Bookwyrm account isn’t set to require approval for follows, and doesn’t tell me when users have followed or tried to follow me. But on my Mastodon account I would periodically discover that my follow request to my Bookwyrm account was shown as “pending” rather than “followed”. Since the main reason I picked Bookwyrm was “I thought it would be nice to have a book-tracking app that played well with another of my social media accounts”, I’m not sure I’ll stick with bookwyrm. I might try Storygraph, another book-tracking app I’ve heard mentioned more.

It was very satisfying to mark things as read and post little quick reviews and comments about what I was reading, though. I read several novellas and other shorts. I finished MCA Hogarth’s Haley and Nana series, which continued to delight me through the final installment. ♥

I also read all the Veo Corva’s Tombtown shorts: Familiar and Flame, Tinker and Terror, and Making Friends, which were all fun. Familiar and Flame was my favorite -- I loved seeing Ree from the perspective of Usther. ♥

After that was The Governess Affair by Courtney Milan, which had an unusually good sex scene -- sex scenes often bore me now but this one was revealing about the personalities of the characters, as well as less formulaic than most.

The last book I finished was Blasted Research, by Coffee Quills: post-apocalyptic adventure with a polyam NB/M romance. Fun romp, and the male love interest was sweet and endearing.

Only Blasted Research was book-length, so this was more like reading, idk, maybe two books rather than seven. But it was nice to have it counted as seven. :D I have foundered on the next thing I started and I should really just try something else, but I’m not sure what and my kindle remains an unnavigable mess of possibilities. Maybe I'll try the Murderbot novellas; I have epubs of those so I can put them on my Google Play Books app.

Goal Scorecard for January

Help Lut: Done!
Exercise 13 times (aerobic): Overachieved!
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minute: also achieved!
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: every day, in fact
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally: I got A Dragonling’s Family to 80% by like the 25th, so I actually checked my goal list a few extra times to see if there were any stretch goals I wanted to go for.
Set up 2023 bullet journal spreadsheet: Done!
Publish Angel’s Grace: Done!
Visit Terrycloth: Done!
Write more of A Dragonling’s Family and reach 80% complete: Done!

Stretch goals

Consumption tracking: This was extremely phoned-in for much of the month, but I’m gonna count it anyway.
Maintain bullet journal for entire month: Done!
Practice art: I did not make it to 15 hours -- about 10 -- but I did get some practice in
Exercise 20+ times: yissssss
Complete a painting that isn’t just a copy of a single CC 0 reference: Yup
Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review. I actually made this one, albeit by counting things like “my usual annual review” and “the release post for Angel’s Grace. Whatever, still did it.
Learn a new game: Re-learned Eclipse, which I am totally counting
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: Done! Only one of the stories I read was book-length ( Blasted Research), but I would’ve given myself this one anyway.

I did not make all of my stretch goals for January (some of them were ambitious) but I did unusually well.

February Goals

Help Lut
Keep in touch with Terry
Exercise 13 times (aerobic)
At least 7 more times of “exercise” that can be just stretching for five minutes
Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days
Look at goal list & schedule occasionally
Finish A Dragonling’s Family
Make editing list for Alien Peacelords
Get edits on Alien Peacelords to 20% complete