rowyn

Health and Fitness

I exercised 23 times this month, most of that while watching “Pursuit of Jade” for ~60 minutes. I did so well on exercise that I slacked off a bit at the end of the month, only exercising 4 times out of the last 8 days. 

Dailies

I wanted to focus on Moving A Thing To Completion this month, and picked A Game to You as the current path of least resistance. So for most of the month, I’d edit for as long as I was willing to do anything creative, rather than switching to a different activity for the sake of the checkbox. So I had 25 days with some editing.

Near the end of the month, I started making low-effort comics, so I checked off drawing for those. Plus I did one or two other things with drawing, so that got me to 10.

Working on an outline or a rough draft was the heaviest lift (although I wrote several new scenes for A Game to You, but counted that under editing). Only 5 days of these, and one was counting the low-effort comics for it. The low-effort comics are so low-effort that I’m not sure they should even count for drawing some days. :D 

Writing

A tiny bit of progress on A Dragon’s Secret, to 61,600, so 900 words. 

June 24 is “Make a Terrible Comic Day”, so I made a comic for that day using Zhenshay and Moon, the characters I was brainstorming about last month. Afterwards, I wanted an excuse to make more low-effort comics and stumbled on a blog post for a “gentle comics habit”. I did not succeed at following the actual method the blog poster used, but I did start making one comparatively low-effort comic per day. I ended up counting this comic as writing for one day in June. I didn’t count it as “writing” every day I did it because there isn’t a whole lot of actual text to the process. 

Business of Writing

The bulk of my creative time went to editing A Game to You, which is now up to 66% complete (from 45% last month). Another two months and I might actually finish the second draft.

Art

Apart from the low-effort comics, I drew an Olive fanart and finished the Gongsun Yin fanart. I also drew a page of cartoon void kitties because Anke posted the most adorable tutorial ever and I had to follow it INSTANTLY. Please admire the tutorial https://mastodon.art/@Anke/116744624947961187 and then go forth and make your own void kitties.

Reading

I finished season 1 of Chocolate Snow and read some assorted manwha throughout June, as I usually do. Then on the last day of the month I dropped everything to dive headlong into reading the Heaven Official’s Blessing novels, which are even now still eating my brain. 

Social

Continuing to go to Wyndsong on Fridays and visit Envoy once a week for additional video-watching.

June Goal Scorecard

• Provide care for Dad: Done!
• Actually take Dad to the ultrasound appointment on June 11 instead of spacing out about it a second time: Done!
• Do June withdrawal from brokerage and pay June bills: Done!
• Pay quarterly estimated taxes by June 15: Done!
• Complete one(1) creative stretch goal: I completed two ha take that stretch goals

June Stretch Goals

• Got A Game to You past 60% edited
• Checked off 40 boxes for creative activities on the habit tracker
• Exercised 23 times
• Kept the habit tracker updated
• Read some fiction, including most of a novel, and updated my Storygraph

July Goals

The June approach of "Extremely Modest Goals" seems to have worked out, so I'll stick with it. I got about as much done in June as I did in May, but I didn’t feel as stressed about it. Good enough.

• Provide care for Dad
• Enjoy Eliyahu’s visit (they’re coming from July 11 to August 9
• Take Dad to July 17 audiologist appointment
• Make acupuncture appointment for Dad
• Do July withdrawal from brokerage and pay July bills
• Complete one creative stretch goal

July Stretch Goals

• Figure out middle and denouement for Kingslayer
• Refine editing list for The Jewel-Strewn Night
• Get A Game to You to 81% edited
• Write 10,000 words of A Dragon's Secret
• Check off 40 boxes on the bullet journal for writing/editing/drawing
• Make 20+ low-effort comics
• Any of my other usual stretch goals

Health and Fitness

Eliyahu made sure I was conscientious about exercise this month: 23 times. Amusingly, despite Eliyahu insisting that we walk almost every day, Eliyahu is not good at all about exercise when they're at home. It's only while they're visiting me and I'm available to walk with them every day that they're diligent about it.

Diet was again a smidge better than usual; Eliyahu and I made seafood potatoes a few times while they were here. 

Dailies

Was pretty good at tracking these, though not particularly good at doing them. I drew 6 times, wrote 9 times, and edited 13 times. Reading picked up slightly, to 23 times.

Writing

Still making notes for Kingslayer, still haven't finished the outline. Notes file is around 10,000 words, so up another 2750. I don't think I even opened the file for A Dragon's Secret.

Business of Writing

Made some progress editing A Game to You. It's now at 30% done, up from 23% last month. Also, it's gotten much easier to convince myself to do editing at all, so that's useful.

Art

I finished the backlit Olive and only showed it to Maria because eh, whatever, she and I are the only people who care.

I didn't have any new fan art ideas so I worked on a landscape after that for the sake of drawing something. It's mostly finished but not very interesting.

Reading

After forgetting "Mistaken as the Monster Duke's Wife" existed for a few months because I hadn't subscribed to it (it's a Tapas webcomic), I hunted it down again and discovered that it had wrapped up. So I finished reading that. That was nice; a short one for a change, at 68 episodes. A few others had started new seasons and I read those: "The Falcon Princess" (which is into the denouement now), "The Little Saint and the Grand Duke of the North", and "I Shall Master This Family". I tried a few new ones. "I'm a Homebody but I Transmigrated into a Dark Captivity Novel" is cute, but it's only in the first season so there's not much there and I've only read 14 episodes so far.

Oh, and "Seducing the Monster Duke" (there are a lot of monster dukes and dukes of the north in romantasy manwha, it's a whole thing) finished. The second half was weaker than the first half, but this is a strong story with lovable main characters and a distinctive female lead who is often clever and assertive, and yet at times has what I can only describe as Big Orange Cat Energy. It works; she's clueless about certain things but not everything. The male lead is sweet and a green flag; I recommend this one.

"Just Kill Me Now" also concluded; this one is wild, just a very strange time-looping plot with both the male and female protagonists going back in time to repeat parts of the story, often together and both of them remembering. The initial premise is that the female protagonist just wants to die, so she keeps killing herself and looping back to before she killed herself, so it's not very effective. But it means that her perspective is pretty unusual for a protagonist.

"Isekai Maid" posted five episodes of recap, then put up one new episode in mid-April, and hasn't posted anything since. Alas. Waiting to see if we get some consistent new posting before I put in the energy to read the recap. Maybe too many of her readers are planning the same thing and low reader numbers dispirited the author for posting more. o_o;;;; It's so tough being the author and writer for a webcomic, don't blame her a bit.

Social

Eliyahu was here for all of April, and M visited for the last weekend of the month, just before Eliyahu left. Eliyahu and I also saw Envoy, Kage and Sophrani on every Friday but the last one, and went out to visit Envoy three additional times to watch Frieren. I even continued this pattern by seeing Envoy last Wednesday to watch a different anime.

So I was Very Social in April.

April Goal Scorecard

• Provide care for Dad: Done! 
• Enjoy Eliyahu's visit: Done! <3
• Do April withdraw from brokerage and pay April bills: Done! yes I still need this to remind me to pay bills. Even though I only have two bills now.
• Pay 1st quarter 2026 taxes: Done. I haven't had them refunded yet so hopefully this time they were applied to 2026 and not 2025. 
• Complete one creative stretch goal: I finished 7%+ of A Game to You. Good enough!

April Stretch Goals

• Track what I read: I updated my StoryGraph with the manwha I finished, even
• Do some art: I did not do A Lot, but I am still on track for being able to do a 2026 art summary, so good enough.
• Exercise 15+ times: still doing the thing!
• Visit friends: So much of this. So much. At least relative to my baseline :D

May Goals

• Provide care for Dad
• Schedule COVID-19 booster for Dad
• Do May withdraw from brokerage and pay May bills
• Either contact an artist or start work myself on the cover for The Jewel-Strewn Night
• Complete one creative stretch goal (can combine effort if I'm productive but scattershot) 

May Stretch Goals

• Figure out middle and denouement for Kingslayer
• Refine editing list for The Jewel-Strewn Night
• Get A Game to You to 50% edited
• Write 15,000 words of A Dragon's Secret
• Check off 60 boxes on the bullet journal for writing/editing/drawing
• Any of my other usual stretch goals

~

My stretch goals for this month are ambitious compared to what I've been actually doing for the last year+. But I need to get a move on if I'm to finish my (fairly modest) goal of "complete 5 writing/publishing stages". I have completed zero in the first 4 months of this year, so that's not going great. I kinda need to finish, like, one every seven  weeks for the rest of the year. If I can finish final edits on Jewel and get a cover for it, the layout stage is quick, so that'd be three. But I still need to do two other stages, like finishing the first draft of A Dragon's Secret or the Kingslayer outline or initial edits to A Game to You. I could do covers for unfinished or unedited draft if necessary. though. I have kind of a start on A Game to You's cover, but I don't think I'll be able to finish it to my satisfaction. Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

Health and Fitness

I exercised 21 times in February! Pretty good for a short month. I'd thought maybe I'd done more cooking than usual? I've been making potatoes with broccoli, cheese and imitation crab every now and then since Eliyahu left in January. But it looks like I mostly did that during January and only once during February. I might have missed a time or two of cooking, though, since I wasn't as scrupulous about keeping my journal current as I have generally been for the last year and a half.

Dailies

I was not bad at keeping track of these! I have records for every day in February. I checked off editing 21 times, writing 19 times, drawing 17, and exercise 21. I was also pretty good about reading a little every day (usually manwha) -- 26 times on that.

Writing

I made more notes on Kingslayer, including starting to reorganize them to get rid of some cruft and make bits easier to find. The file is up to 4400 words, so 1100 words since January. I feel like I made more progress than this, but this is probably because I thought about it more than I wrote things down. Oops.

A Dragon's Secret is up to 59,000, so 4300 words for February. Perceptible progress, woo!

Business of Writing

My first readers were done with The Jewel-Strewn Night. Going through the comments and moving action items to the editing list took much longer than usual, but it was my only creative goal for February, so I made sure to finish it. 

Art

I finished the non-Olive-art, or at least pronounced it as done as I was gonna get it. It was based on a photo on Sandra Tayler's Discord server, so I shared it there and nowhere else. I remain weirdly more interested in painting than in showing anyone what I've painted.

After that, I went back to painting Olive, this time in a modern business suit. Her boymode in Time Princess is suit-inspired, with a neckcloth and a long coat. Even though it's much more interesting than a modern business suit, I kinda wanted to draw her in one anyway. So I did! I didn't finish it in February, though I got very close to done. To the point where most viewers will not be able to tell the difference between the version as of Feb 28 and the final version after several hours of additional work.

Reading

I started reading Tears on a Withered Flower, which probably won't finish for a few more years, alas. I didn't get to the end of the available episodes because I ran out of coins and figured I'd just let Webtoons bill me for another month of subscription in mid-March, as the most dollar-efficient method. When there aren't many episodes left on an unfinished story, I sometimes lose enthusiasm to catch up, because I know the last episode is unlikely to be satisfying. Not always, though; there's several series that I stay current on using Tapas.

I also started another unfinished series, What a Bountiful Harvest, Demon Lord! by BK_Moon, the same author who wrote The Greatest Estate Developer. Time Princess released the rest of The Coming Calamities, and I read a bit of it, but didn't get very far. I'm still enjoying it, just not patient enough to read it.

Social

I saw Kage, Sophrani, and Envoy every Friday in February, so that's on track! M also came down for a weekend, though he was mostly down to take care of financial things for Dad and related to Mom's passing. I was not very social during his visit, though we did go for long walks together with Rosie each day of it.

February Goal Scorecard

• Provide care for Dad: Done!
• Pay February bills & do withdrawal from brokerage: Also done!
• Look at comments for The Jewel-Strewn Night and make an editing list: Took me until the last day of the month to finish, so way more challenging than I expected. But I finished it! And haven't wanted to look at it since, so that part is not great, but oh well.
• Write 2000 words of A Dragon's Secret: I wrote over 4000 words! Woo, overachieved on extremely lowballed goal.

Stretch Goals Scorecard

• Edit A Game to You: I made some progress on this. I even started assigning difficulty values to the various points on the outline, so at some point I may even be able to estimate how much progress I've made. I think probably less than 10%, but mostly because edits on this book are so much more extensive than I usually deal with.
• Work on outline/notes for Kingslayer: I didn't write a lot of words, but I felt like I made progress on it, so sure, let's count it.
• Exercise 15+ times: 21! Aw yeah.
• Do some art: Finished the crypt piece and started a new fan art

March Goals

It's almost halfway through March and I have done very little creativity-wise, so I do not think this month is gonna be very productive at this point. 

• Do not go into hermit-mode while siblings visit for Dad's birthday
• Provide care for Dad
• Pay February bills & do withdrawal from brokerage
• Finish assigning values to A Game to You editing points. Break down the points that feel too complicated to tackle so they're more manageable.
• Do a perceptible amount of work on something else. 2000 words on A Dragon's Secret or notes on Kingslayer or edit Jewel or make progress on A Game to You. Whatever. Enough that I can feel like "yeah I can finish this within a few years."

March Stretch Goals

• Organize Jewel's editing list. Assign difficulty values to editing points.
• Write 5000 words of A Dragon's Secret
• Create a rough outline for Kingslayer (beginning, middle, end)
• Make 5% of progress on A Game to You after settling all the values for the list
• Any of my other usual stretch goals

It struck me while I was writing this that I do not yet have a public entry mentioning my mother's passing. I have written about her extensively in daily access-locked entries but not much has been in the public monthly reviews. Mom's health continued to decline through December. She passed away early in the morning of January 5. I don't know what else to say, but I wanted something to be in a public-facing entry for the friends who don't have a Dreamwidth account.

Goals 2025

Move to North Carolina: I have done this! I may even have completed all the bureaucracy associated with moving. I'm not sure if I had to de-register my car with Missouri.

Assist parents: I did this thing too.

Collect the rest of my Apothecaria Journal into epubs: I made two more epubs out of my Apothecaria journal. You can download the epubs:  here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PZBpM45Ot8QiTKG3e7OU701dbV8m5T-_?usp=sharing . I didn't edit this project because it's way too annoying to edit individual jpgs for each page. While I was writing the journal, I wrote two scenes between Umbral and Magnus that aren't part of the journal and aren't illustrated. Those weren't posted with the serial, but they're included in the epubs. 

Independent of my Apothecaria journal, complete six writing/publishing stages: 

I completed 5 stages:

For A Wolf-Shifter's Pack: finished initial edits, final edits, cover creation, and layout/publishing

For The Jewel-Strewn Night: finished initial edits.

I worked on some other things. I made some progress on drafting A Dragon's Secret, did a very small amount of initial edits on A Game to You, and made meaningful progress on outlining a new book. None of this is complete. None of it is even halfway done. 

I wrote a total of 45,963 words of fiction in all of 2025. The last year where I wrote less fiction than this was 2014. From 2016 through 2024, I wrote more fiction in November than I wrote in all of last year.

Last year sucked hard for writing, is what I'm saying. It sucked for every stage of the publishing process, for that matter. I set my goals low because I knew 2025 would be bad, and I still didn't meet those goals.

I am not disappointed in myself, but I am disappointed with RL. I thought we'd talked, RL. I thought you were gonna be better than this. Maybe not a lot better than this, but a little. You gotta make an effort here, RL. 

Complete monthly updates

I've been slower about doing these in 2025, I think because the hyper-detailed posts about my life make me feel like the month-in-review is unnecessary. Like 'do I read the book, do I really need the Cliff Notes for it too?' But the review posts give a nice summary view that's hard to pick out from all the everyday details. I am glad that I've kept doing them. Despite how often I felt like "I got nothing done this month either" was the takeaway. 

Also, looking back at the summary reminds me that while my mother's declining health was far and away the worst part of 2025, it wasn't the only difficult part. I had the gallbladder attack in January and the surgery in March and the move in April, too. 

Be gentle with myself

Yeah, I think I'm doing all right on this one. Like yes, I am frustrated that I didn't write or edit more in 2025. But I'm not frustrated with me. It's not 'oh, I should've tried harder.' There was a lot going on. I'm not beating myself up over it. I'm not beating myself up over the things I failed to do in RL, either. It is what it is.

Stretch Goals 2025

Keep up with the art habit now that Apothecaria's complete

I spent far less time drawing in 2025 than I did when I was illustrating daily (fictional) journal entries. But I spent enough time on art that I completed an art summary by month image: https://photos.app.goo.gl/iztciamHArjYBtVV7 . I did an absurd amount of fan art for Olive, my favorite Time Princess character, and I have no regrets. Doing more fan art of her this month. It's all good.

Exercise 15+ times per month

I did not succeed at this every month, but I'm giving this an honorable mention because, under the circumstances, I did freaking awesome at exercise. I exercise 14 times in January (because gall bladder attack), counted minimum effort in February (because gall bladder sapping all energy), counted moving prep in lieu of exercise in April, and exercised 8 times in May (because COVID and Mom's broken leg). For the other 8 months, I exercised more than 15 times. I may well have averaged over 15 times per month even if I count February and April as total losses. Given everything that went on this year, that I didn't give up on physical activity entirely is a triumph. 

Try some more journaling games

I started "Reincarnated as the Unlovable Villainess", and while I only wrote up three of the thirty days it's meant to run, I had fun with those days. 

Write 50 blog posts

The vast majority of my posts were access-locked this year, so it's not obvious to people who don't use Dreamwidth, but I wildly overachieved on this. I posted a detailed account of almost every day in 2025. It's wild. I didn't post each day -- I'd often post a batch of days at once -- but I have 160+ entries total. Not the kind of "essays on a particular topic of interest" that I think of for a blog, but whatever. I wrote a ton of nonfiction here. My diary entries probably come to 500,000 words; more than I've ever written before. It's become a habit I don't want to quit.

Goals for 2026

Modest goals seems like the plan for 2026, too. 

• Provide care for Dad
• Assuming Dad's health does not precipitously decline or some other new disaster: complete five writing/publishing stages
• Complete monthly updates
• Read 2 books 
• Be gentle

Stretch Goals 2026

• Keep up with the habit tracker most days
• Do some art every month so I can make an art summary at the end of the year
• Exercise 15+ times per month
• Try some more journaling games. Maybe a short one.
• Finish the "Villainess" journaling game.
• Redraw an old picture that I'd put considerable effort into at the time
• Promote my books a little
• Write 50+ blog posts
• Track reading
• [Open space, feel free to add stretch goals as desired]

Details

Caregiving

Dad is pretty self-sufficient in many ways, and most things he really needs help with (laundry, showering, general cleaning) his aide or the housekeeping service takes care of. Pretty sure I spend less time caregiving for Dad than I did for Lut in last few years of Lut's life. But it would not be realistic for Dad to live alone. He needs someone who can remember things for him, as well as someone who can make appointments for him and suchlike. 

Writing/Publishing Stages

The stages are:

• Outlining
• Drafting
• Initial Edit
• Final Edit
• Cover Creation
• Layout/publishing

So five of these might look like:

• The Jewel-Strewn Night: final edits, cover creation, layout/publishing
• A Dragon's Secret: Finish drafting
• Finish a new outline

It doesn't have to be these exact ones. It can be any five stages. I can finish drafting a different book, or editing A Game to You, or complete five different outlines. Whatever it takes. Also, cover creation counts as a stage whether I do it myself or hire someone to do it. Hiring someone is also work. Different work, but nonetheless work.

I finished five stages in 2025. 

Five stages is not enough to take a book from beginning to published. From 2016 through 2024, I did more than this every year. Generally a lot more than this. I've averaged two books a year since I started publishing in 2015. In most respects, I have far less going on in 2026 than I did in my most productive years. In 2018, when I published three books, I was working 32 hours a week and providing care for Lut, who'd already been diagnosed with cancer. In 2026, I'm retired, and while I'm still caregiving, I am caregiving-while-wealthy -- which is doing it on easy mode -- and my father is arguably healthier than Lut was. 

But 2026 Me is traumatized by nine years of caregiving and watching four loved ones grow sicker and eventually die. And wondering when my 88-year-old father will take a sudden turn for the worse. And that's not even mentioning the worsening state of national and global politics. There's no sense in making a comparison.

Right now, five stages feels pretty ambitious. Finish drafting a book? In this life? Idk man. Still. I want it on the goal list.

Reading

I saw a post from someone who was like "I set my reading goal at 2 books one year and I read like 13 and the next year I set it at 3 books because let's not get overly ambitious about this." Y'know, I can probably manage two books in a year. Maybe I'll even finish the webserial for Housekeeper of the Dungeon finally. (I kinda forgot it existed until I looked at StoryGraph recently and saw it on my Current Reads list). Let's not get overly ambitious on this one.

Track Reading

I've been using StoryGraph to track what I've finished; it's a little clunky but not to bad. It's hard to use for first-reading things, because I'm reluctant to enter an unpublished book that the author plans to publish later, but for most other cases, it's fine. I noticed it has a "Paused" status, so I may start using that with all my Tapas manwha that I can't finish reading because the rest is not yet written/illustrated/published/translated (I seldom know the exact source of the bottleneck.) I'm not holding myself to that, because I've started so many manwha on Tapas.