Category Archives: Checking In

Enforced chill, week 3 of 3

anime nerd corner, Checking In, games nerd corner

Almost to the end of Recuperation Times. Apart from a little cabin fever, it went quite well.

  • Assembled 3 small to medium Lego sets; I still have 3 Animal Crossing ones un-assembled
  • Did a jigsaw puzzle early on, which is a prime Calm Down my Frazzled Brain activity
  • Some crafting for Christmas presents, ahead of time for once
  • Watched 3 one-season (so far) anime series, mostly while walking on the treadmill: Villainess Level 99, Fairy Ranmaru, and Chainsaw Man. The latter I binged over two days, which is not something I normally do.
  • Writing: The rough/first draft of Therapist 8 (Ballad of the Bardbarian) is done, though it’s one of those drafts that feels like it’s going to need a lot of added chapters to feel complete. It’s currently sitting aside while my alpha reader reads it. Also working on the Non-Agna-and-Keifon-Healers-world project, The Strangers’ Crossroads, which I think is unstuck now, and has a fighting chance of existing before Healers 4 does.
  • Gaming: Played all of A Little to the Left, most(?) of Strange Horticulture (though the dour music and atmosphere is getting to me), and a metric ton of Palia. I started Palia a month or so ago knowing that I would have a lot of downtime this month, and it worked. There is some jank, especially on the Switch, but it has been an effective diversion. I’ve gone as far as connecting a keyboard to my Switch, but not as far as buying a fancy outfit yet. I probably will eventually, just to throw a little money at the devs for all the time I’ve spent on this game.

Back to work on Monday, and back to a new, hopefully more energetic normal. Feeling pretty good.

Update (good)

Checking In

Somewhat TMI, fair warning. Bodies are weird, and if you don’t listen to them and ignore early symptoms, sometimes they go full body-horror WTF on you.

Back at home and doing pretty well. Turns out general anaesthesia hits my brain like a truck, because it took me longer to come out of it than the surgery itself took. So that’s the lesson of the day.

[CW: Links are both to reproductive health articles] The procedure went well, and extracted the body part that was going rogue; it was even more rogue than we expected. But that’s resolved, and I’m very glad to be rid of it. And the near-absence of pain is almost eerie. I was in a little bit of pain most of the time, punctuated by much worse symptoms that came and went. It’s wild that eventually, once everything heals up, it might not hurt at all.

Now I just have to take time to heal and not pick up anything heavy for several weeks. Sounds like a plan.

It’s spring here. Hooray.

Checking In

Just a quick check-in.

  • It’s solidly spring here! Hooray! Planted a border of native plants and bought some herbs. It’s going to be a fairly low-ambition gardening year this year, though, because:
  • I finally have a date for a medium-seriousness surgical procedure that will end a health issue that has been plaguing me for about a year. Scary yet exciting stuff. I hope to keep writing and reading through recovery (which is short, 2-3 weeks if all goes well). But in the interest of my own mental health, I hope to keep my internet use to a minimum through that time. So if I drop off the radar next month, that’s why.
  • Speaking of reading: still making my way through that haul from the sale. Good times.
  • Speaking of the sale: I’ve committed to listing Therapist book 1 in the July sale. That’s quite a ways off, so more details once we get closer.
  • I’m not going to make any promises about what I’ll finish writing first, but I am continuing to write consistently. I’m stressing myself out thinking about when the next thing will be done, so let’s leave that aside for now.
  • Anime corner: Still continuing Delicious in Dungeon, Train to the End of the World, Tonari no Yokai-san, The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, and Laid-Back Camp, along with the Spice and Wolf reboot. The latter is going exactly on pace with the first adaptation so far, so I sincerely hope it gets additional seasons.
  • Game corner: Started the free-to-play MMO Palia, which is so far the only MMO I’ve ever played. It’s a complete pain to attempt to chat on the Switch and I don’t like keyboard controls, so I don’t know how long this will last. But it’s nice enough so far. In the early phases you don’t actually have to interact with other players, which is just my speed.

Back and forth, once again

Checking In

Honestly, this is not really a surprise at this point: I gain and lose motivation over time. I’ve gotten better at consistency in spite of it, but the underlying oomph still very much goes in waves.

It’s been a rough year in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts sort of way, though of course, that’s all relative to one’s frame of reference. We’re still alive and we have a home, but life is stressful right now. In particular, a long-running, background health concern turned into a foreground concern, as a body part I don’t actually need decided to riot / melt down / freak out. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, although it will take a string of tests running up to the procedure and some recuperation afterward. In the meantime, I’m tired, stressed, and holding on until the next round of tests. Because there is a chance it’s something even more scary than a rogue body part, and until I get that all-clear, I’m going to worry. It’s what I do. [edit from the future: I got the all-clear. Not Cancer(tm)! Woohoo!]

Lately I have been pushing myself to write The Serious Fiction, because those readers have had to wait long enough, and there are more of them than for The Silly Fiction. But while it’s going (slowly), I don’t think I can spare the energy to pour into pushing myself. As long as something (anything) gets written, that might have to be good enough.

All of which is to say that I’ve started writing Therapist again, specifically the Bard College story featuring Greta, Henry, and Burleigh from book 3. Will it end up being finished as quickly as the others? Heck if I know. But it’s something. And I’m deciding that “something” is good enough.

Amazon has started a beta trial of AI-voiced audiobooks. First, fuck you, pay narrators; second, I care about my readership enough not to charge them for bullshit robot voices when you can use bullshit robot Read Aloud features for free. Third, fuck you, pay narrators. 🙂

The screening process has pointed out that some of the table of contents in my catalog are effed up, so I will use it to troubleshoot that. And then not take the greed-bait.

Therapist book 6 (Berry’s, Starting Over in Another World with My Level 99 Self-Doubt) is still in cover limbo. 🙂 Hey, the title designer is doing me a favor here.

Book 7 came back from the beta readers (thank you!!!), so it’s in the pipeline. After an evening hammering away at a thesaurus, the working title has morphed into The Salty Mageknight and the Sweet Dark Lord. For a minute it was The Spicy Courtship of the Salty Mageknight and the Sweet Dark Lord, but I don’t need agita from the type of reader who would take “spicy” literally. It’s not spicy even by TikTok standards.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Both are still coming. Eventually. Fate willing, so is Healers 4, someday. I will do my goddamn utmost, because this is what I love to do.

Numbers, year 9

Checking In, The Process

“Surely,” I thought, “it’s far too early to do a year-end wrap-up.” And maybe it is, but the last one was at this time last year. So here we are.

It’s been a while, so I’ll preface this with my usual philosophy/statement of scale. Namely: I’m aware that these are tiny numbers. I’m not embarrassed; don’t be embarrassed for me. I’ve come to accept and enjoy what I do. Some people had a nice enough time reading something I wrote. That’s pretty neat. Also, it’s not my main source of income (I still have a day job, much to the annoyance of some of my coworkers), so we’re not starving over this.

I think it’s useful to say awkward things out loud. To refuse to buy into shame. So I’m transparent about the fact that not everyone out here is a millionaire, and believe that those of us who aren’t still deserve to talk about our experiences.

That said, here are some little charts.

With numbers on them

“I’m gonna make it through this year if it kills me”

Checking In, games nerd corner

One week till a medical appointment that will take me out of this health-related limbo; two weeks till the end of the year. Oh yeah, and a holiday in there, which I keep trying to care about as much as other people do. I feel bad about that, I really do. Theoretically, I like a winter celebration. I love fireplaces/bonfires, baking, coziness, etc.; I think I just hate the stress related to gift-giving and gift-getting. Oh well. I do my best to keep my incorrect feelings to myself.

Anyway, the trend towards infographic-ing everything you do throughout the year is… sure something. It makes sense, in that apps want people to post about them on our increasingly bizarre social media landscape.

It’s been a weird one.

Numbers! Been a while.

Checking In, games nerd corner

When was the last post, October — well, my year hasn’t gotten any worse since August, so that’s nice. Still here, thankfully. Still working on Book 3 and trying not to stress about it. It’ll happen.

Otherwise, signed up for backloggd.com to keep track of my woeful video game backlog. It’s one of a few sites that function more or less like Goodreads for video games. Current backlog: 39, most of which are indie games from Steam or itch.io that I bought in bundles over the last couple of years. And so far I’ve found 213 games that I’ve played for any length of time at any point in my life. I started out on a console that isn’t even on the database, the Intellivision, which was basically the Betamax to the Atari 2600’s VHS. (Uh, that analogy is for old people too. It was a competitor that time forgot, in other words.) It would be amusing to include those games on the list too, but that’s okay.

Current TBR, by the way, is around 10. That’s one-zero. I spent most of 2021, when I had the focus to read at all, striving very hard to read down the TBR and quitting a few books that I just bounced off of. Still slowly poking through a year’s best sff anthology from I’m not even sure what ancient year.

So anyway, since it’s the end of the calendar year and I haven’t done this in an extremely long time, I thought I’d do a numbers post. Why not. I think it’s kind of interesting, because I’m going about this in a way that I don’t see often (or at all, ha), and therefore, you don’t hear about this scenario much.

Continue reading Numbers! Been a while. →