I wasn’t really sure I was going to do New Year’s goals, but alas, I have some in the big areas of health, spiritual, writing, and finances.
I’m on my January week off for the year, and I haven’t really gotten going on my heaps of reading to do nor getting into writing, though I’ve things I do in fact want to scribble on. But due to it being my “recover from the brink of catastrophic failure to function” week, I’m not stressing over producing anything, and I’m kind of super chuffed that goals happened. I wasn’t planning to do them, but I got them set up as weekly things to track.
Hope everyone had some lovely holidays and a lovely new year to you!
Not making any blogging goals whatsoever, but am actually eagerly looking forward to this 2023. I’ve been slowly revamping my schedule to hopefully make getting in some solid base hours more doable (working so far) and spun up book-writing plans that feel more doable than anything ever (long story, maybe some other time). Additionally, a path forward on my health is finally well in my hands, which is probably exactly how I got enough brainspace and energy to start in on the other two.
So writing a book right now. Exercising (even if fresh air still needs to show up more, work-at-home doesn’t inspire me much to venture out into the cold) is happening, and we’ll just have to fit in the smaller rocks around the bigger ones.
Hope you all have a wonderful new year and all your goals are achievable!
Available when I’m in an up, not a down. So gonna keep posting but just not worry about skip days.
Health has been such that all my plans for the week largely melted away in the face of dealing with that. I’m going to try and get back on chapter 2 of Chosen for Power this weekend.
It’s very tempting to stretch myself too thin, and I’m trying not to. So no committing to other late treat work, and no committing to not doing that either.
It feels weird to do any part of life in light of a war, but I’m sending prayers and trying to push myself forward regardless.
Hugs and blessings to all who need some.
Yeah, so this year, I’m doing something new with the annual goals:
Me. I have plans.
Best wishes for yours!
Just tired, bone deep tired of everything, of everyone tearing the world apart and hurting people who don’t deserve to be hurt, of dogpiling and blaming, and in the middle of it all, of my body trying to give up altogether when that isn’t a person I’ve ever allowed myself to be.
It’s a lot just to keep going right now, and so I’m not talking about the nightmares going on in the world right now and don’t intend to start. I’m so grateful for everyone who’s stepped up to keep MFD going and beautiful because even signing up and committing to write one drabble is just too much. I love everyone and I see your posts and your emails and feel your pain and hold you in my heart and I stay silent.
I wish I were less silent. But right now, this is where I am. I love all of you and hope for all the things you need right now that I can’t give you. You’re in my heart.
Wrote:
Not what I was hoping but not half bad. I was hoping to get more down on WIP. I know where I’m heading with it, just haven’t had time/energy/headspace to get it down yet.
I’ve also finished getting a PDF file ready of What Lies Before, a collection of original short stories, which I will get into download access and possibly a gumroad before I try and figure out how to actually publish it properly, because that last sounds more tiring than it ought.
Still, that’s prepped, which is great.
I also pulled 5 pieces out of first access into freely available, so I’ll get there on posting links to those soon too.
On the health front, I went to a new doctor yesterday for insurance reasons to establish care, who is willing to keep my other doctor in the loop, which is awesome. And lo! There is hope for me yet. I have a structural issue apparently that’s preventing my getting enough oxygen or draining stuff the way I should, which technically I always kind of knew. From childhood, my breathing options were constrained, I just didn’t realize they meant I’m literally never getting enough oxygen, and I’ve always been so stuffed up, I can barely smell.
Shocker. These things have health consequences, so my doctor gave me a potential nonsurgical option to check out, which I will do as soon as we wrap up all this car and post-vacation business. Because quality of life! Not dragging around tired and depressed all the time! This would be good!
About that, CAR! I loved our beautiful, old faithful, 2005 sedan but it was… time to retire it. We got a new car on Friday, which has eaten a chunk into budget and time bank, but so worth it. A beautiful Hyundai Santa Fe Sport and I will eventually get used to how her responsiveness differs greatly from the sedan. Mostly, I will eventually stop turning on the windshield wipers when I’m trying to reverse because our gear shaft is now in between the seats instead of on the steering wheel. I drove like an amateur yesterday on my first time out in her. Oh well.
Hope you’re all doing well! Lots of love!
I could totally do goals! I could. I had a good 2019 for writing goals, bad on some fronts, but better than if I hadn’t had the goals.
2019’s Writing Goals:
2019’s Accomplishments: Well, to start off with, I haven’t properly run all the numbers, but I’ll take a stab at the poetry despite not having finished typing things up.
Boy, do I want to move that #3 needle, but that wasn’t a bad 3rd run at writing prose daily. Not what I wanted, but not bad.
So next year: I want to do all the things, to be honest. I want to finish writing books, compiling anthologies, finish those gift stories I never did because the guilt hangs over my head all the time, and I want to finish short stories too. I want to crosspost things to patreon and publish every week, so people have a reason to subscribe, and collect the month’s haul of writing into something publishable, and the truth is I haven’t compiled reasonable goals yet. I could keep up with the average 3 poems/day and that wouldn’t be hard, but I truly want to focus in on producing and making available fiction.
Ah, we’ll see what happens.
There’s such a thing as way too many pills. And I’m actually out of CBD and NS Calm and am not drinking enough of the right teas to make up for it.
I’ve got these exercises I’m supposed to do to help my sciatica, to build up my core and train my diaphragm, since apparently I use my core to breathe and am constantly making an unconscious decision whether effort or oxygen is more important, oooh yay, but I failed dramatically at doing any of them when I came down with a touch of strep. While I managed to stave off the worst of that, the low-level feeling ugh that goes with that has lingered since. And I haven’t gotten back to chiro in those three weeks, so I’m also frequently getting twinges of sciatica that get way too painful.
Aka, I have a few health-related ponies to climb back aboard. And some days I stare at the almost 20-pill monstrosity that is my lunch to-take and just think, please, pretty please, no more pills.
too many pills
not enough joy
thank you, I pray
that I’m still aliveI’m sure that my day
will improve if I praise
it’s better than pills
but for those too, give thanks
New stickers arrived! They’re so pretty. Except what’s with this custom stickers getting less and less space for letters. I don’t care for this new font. Ah well, still overall pretty and functional and I needed that.
Reading Clean Coder for work. My devs don’t do the whole tweak code every time, because yeah, code is already rigid and risky in the biggest areas of opportunity and the oldest code is affected by changes to new code. We keep breaking stuff when touching supposedly low scope stuff. So aspirational.
Listening to Dynasty by MIIA on repeat. I love this song, despite the everything lost vibe of it. Very evocative for fiction.
There are so many stories tumbling through my head all the time, all the lost, unforgotten, unfinished stories; all the new, bright and complicated new ones—I can’t write them all. It’s hard because I could write any. It freezes me up a lot. I owe so much fiction though everyone’s been nice enough to treat me as having gone bankrupt and expect nothing. I feel that. I feel the want to finish all these stories. They’re still there, this mighty shadow of the iceberg beneath stories written, “complete”. They aren’t all complete. So many need more. I’m going to expand “The Legendary”, but the truth is, most of Kingdoms and Thorn still demands the linchpin stories or more on any of the ficlets. And that’s the best developed of all my worlds.
I haven’t lost interest. I don’t lose interest when I write something short and move on. I’m so full up and I contain each bit as fast and tight as I can so I don’t lose it.
To say nothing of fanfic. Will I ever finish all these half-written pieces, some of which I love sooooo much? History says no. I don’t like that answer. I don’t know how to change it.
I’ve been watching so much anime, so much, an odd change of pace for me in a way, but seriously, it’s many flaws don’t bother me as much as the flaws in my old live action western tv/movie stomping grounds, and there’s this thing called arcs that are definitely used in western tv, but they’re kind of a lot clearer to me as I’m watching anime. I’m thinking I’m going to try writing down the arcs of all my different storyworlds and maybe I can get bigger pieces moving on a more regular basis. Which would require cutting back exchanges dramatically.
Gift exchanges keep me writing fiction when little else does, but they take a particular production schedule mindset which interferes with the way I write longer fiction. I only write in a focused drilled down way on one piece of longer fiction at a time, and right now I have the working novel I started so long ago to relearn how to write long and a book my family can read (they would not approve of my SFF / “what terrible things I have done” backstory proclivities) and a major exchange fic. I like writing longer works for exchanges. It has helped me relearn how to write long(er) despite my lack of finishing working title: canaf. Even so. There are a lot of original pieces I want done more than the exchange ones that aren’t going to happen if I don’t curtail my love of exchange fandom quite a bit.
I don’t like that answer either. But I really cannot change it.
Most interesting to me is my inability to fully prioritize publishing any of this stuff right now, though I have Patreoned up (for original fiction, fanfic will ever remain free) to at least attempt to maximize my efforts. Because publishing takes a lot of effort. I’ve been cleaning up the typesetting, adding optional hyphens and tweaking kerning as necessary, on a collection for several weeks now. And my efforts tend to go to creating. It’s more important to me to create than to package something to sell. My budget disagrees, the hours I’m capable of working to increase said budget disagrees, but my health comes first and if I stop creating, publishing hardly matters.
So I wasn’t expecting to start talking about all this stuff, but yeah, thoughts there. And bandwidth. Bandwidth is the thing I really want more of—that confluence of time, opportunity, energy, and memory. I’m grateful for what I have. I’m trying to be a good steward of it. Maybe I’m not there yet.
I’m not too fond of that answer, but at least that, I might be able to change.
I actually emailed people! Been a while since I’ve been out there at all with anything other than an exchange due fic. True, writing has happened, and I’m still throwing things in the Notebook Archive, both original and fannish, and hoping to get back up on the poetry train like a good girl.
I have been writing poems, which is kind of great. I’m well on track to beat my goal of 1K poems this year, which is exciting, though now I want to slow down and write a long one or two again as well. Narrative poetry has fallen off my plate, but it’d be fun.
Work has been crazy. I was sick with a touch of strep then working through my recovery while still being sick and exhausted, so suffice to say, been swamped and lurking and barely getting through my days before crashing. But par for the course. I’ll live and I’m grateful that I can feel that way at this point. Maybe it means my ability to manage my chronic health issues better and my feelings about them is getting better. (Don’t tell my doctors I’ve skipped every single exercise or special thing I’m supposed to do while dealing with strep/recovery. At least I’ve been taking the ghastly number of pills I’m supposed to.)
That said, I am also enjoying writing again and trying to write something family-safe for the family, though I’ve been still ploughing through exchanges, so that’s slow going. Only so many writing hours in a week. Alas! I’m the master of overextending.
Been watching anime when I’m mentally out of it or physically not up to stuff, or on the weekends because I got hooked on a few.
So thoughts.
Starting with, why anime? In short, because I really, really love superhumans and living weapons and overpowered characters and my favorite settings sticking around with my favorite characters in it with domestic fluffy moments and established relationships with history that see on-screen development.
Aka, MCU broke all kinds of trust with me and I am bitter and all my attempts to try the Marvel shows (Marvel was my home, my fandom, and it’s all broken and I am bitter) only led to hating them and noping out partway through. Anime delivers on these things without utterly destroying everything I love about a canon. It builds on them and also superhumans who aren’t always playing vigilante as the core and almost sole conceit. Yay.
Violet Evergarden — Made for me. I always knew that even by osmosis, because living weapon learning to human is my trope. Well, that and soulmates, but seriously, they’d have to botch this bad for me to not like it. I loved it. I binged the anime in less than 2 days and loved it.
Afterward, I went looking for the LN translation because she didn’t get any reconciliation with the Major and I was hopeful, and discovered that LN lovers pretty much hated the anime. So I’ll read the LN when the bad taste gets out of my mouth and carry on loving both if possible.
It’s also super pretty, I don’t care what anyone says. I could get fannish about this but I don’t know if I’d feel confident about writing a lot of the characters, especially considering I haven’t read any LNs yet. Eh, might not fic this one too hard unless some flist joins me in my pain.
Boku No Hero Academia — Did I mention I really, really hated the art for this and thought I would never even try it? I hated the art through two and a half episodes but the characters hooked me and now it’s fine, I’ve adjusted. I tried this because gecko. I stayed for all my faves. I like what Midoriya does to the narrative, but he is not one of my faves at all. My favorites are Tsu and Ochako and Shouto and Katsuki and a leetle bit of Momo and Toshinori when he’s deflated and a leetle bit of Aizawa. But I like most of them and I really like the learning elements and the quirk training is fantastic and Katsuki’s breakdown was kind of wonderful and every single thing about Shouto protecting his mom and Ochako just deserves all the love but her and Tsu both don’t give me nearly as much fanficcable space where there’s iceberg material to go play with.
So… Crossovers maybe? I don’t know. I want something meaty and BNHA keeps its meat on the big three and their emotional growth and issues and that’s part of why I’m a serious multishipper and here it’s almost all passive shipping. I like reading quality stuff for some of the big ships or the obvious ships but I don’t actually actively ship anything. It’s weird. I’d like to.
That said, I’ve started writing some in it for exchanges mostly and don’t know that I’ll get any ideas that aren’t prompted, but it’s a thing.
Lord El Melloi II Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace note — So I really enjoyed the first LN and adored Flat and his relationship with Waver Velvet from Fate/strange fake, but this anime is like the best little fantasy mystery series and I have stars in my eyes over the characters, the details, the credits, and I’m loving it utterly. This from someone who has an extremely low tolerance for gore. This series should absolutely not be my cup of tea and somehow it absolutely is.
Gray is a sibyl, so her village (and family) wrote a Servant face/body over her but weren’t able to displace her spirit yet with the Servant, so she’s still her own person saved by Waver, who hates that face as much as she does. I really like the complexity of their relationship and how understated the identity issues are there. Also, her girl day with Reines was adorable and it was nice to see Reines’ nicer side.
Reines is an adorable little sadist and I love her way too much. Mages are an interesting bunch for sure.
Flat and Waver (and now Svin) remain some of my favorite characters ever. Flat Escardos is just a cinnamon roll with a great heart and cheerful disregard for important rules and I love him utterly.
I’d ask somebody to save me, but I don’t want to be saved. I want other people to fall in love with this show so I can squee with them and write fic and all that.
Fate/Grand Order — I watched the movie in time for the preview first episode of Babylonia to come out and that first episode was just like a very long preview with some scenes in it. If you don’t know a lot about the story, including some spoilers, it really sucks as an episode. That said, I’m interested in seeing what they do with it. Hopefully something good.
Dr. Stone — Oddly charming. I don’t think I’ll get fannish about it, but I’ll keep watching and enjoying it. I tried it entirely on a whim and was surprised I ended up liking it after a bit. Senku is fun after a bit, Tsukasa is irritating but not present enough to be a problem yet, and the villagers are mostly delightful. The science stuff is really fun, so I’m sticking with it.
Yuuri on Ice — I’m 2 and a half episodes in and going slowly. Because I don’t care about Victor or Yuuri yet and I ought to. I like Yuri, but we’ll see if it gets better or he’s worth it.
Fruits Basket (2019) — OMG, I’m in love! And I have a new favorite grumpy redhead! And I love Uo-chan sooooo much. And Hana and her family. And Tohru. And so many of the Sohmas being Sohmas. And Kisa trailing after her big sister. And there’s just so much good backstory whump and hugs! and not nearly enough of them doing stuff with their animal totems like in the first episode or two, so great loss there, but soooooo much good stuff, I’m hooked anyway.
I spoiled myself on endgame ships and am less sure I still ship everything I started off shipping, but I do have a little fondness for Arisa/Kyo, Kyo/Yuki/Tohru, besides Kyo/Tohru. Ah well, we’ll see how that pans out.
And here I shall stop going on and on for a bit. How’s everyone doing? What are you getting into?
It hides the place to enter an SA form for an HSA, which costs a several hundred dollars fee until you find it.
It hides the real home page until you’ve filed this years taxes, making it impossible to reach my 2017 taxes, which I completed but didn’t hit the file button due to lack of funds to pay for it.
It puts my account under review for violation of terms of service because the only reason it would not show the real home page is me keeping multiple accounts. Because that makes sense.
I’ve never had more than one account with them, and if I hadn’t put in so much work on last year’s taxes, the tears would not be worth trying to get access to that work. But I did. Literally the only thing left to do was hit file.
Weekends used to be when I got everything done I didn’t have time for during the workweek. So often now, I have to just stop and rest. I’ve got the ideas for how to write out stories right now, but not the right headspace to write them.
There’s so many things I want to do, including put together those story or poetry collections and I know just how to do it too, but the energy’s just not there. It’s frustrating and yet, I feel like that lesson I learned in childhood that just accepting and choosing to rest is still important. If you’re stressed and guilty while resting, you don’t come out refreshed on the other side of it. If you actually stop and break and accept it, you feel better afterward.
A hard lesson sometimes, to stop and rest.
That said, I was gifted with a 2-day pass to crunchyroll for the purpose of watching the first episode of the Fifteen adaptation and I loved it. Sooooooo much. I love little bundle of fierceness Chuuya, his belief he’s going to keep growing (awww, nope, you’re done, kid), and his protectiveness of the Sheep. Also, his distaste for the Port Mafia specifically because they bathed Yokohama in blood and violence under the previous boss, which puts into perspective some of his later protectiveness of the city. He just really is a protective personality in general, I think, and chooses to use his gleeful love of destruction against targets he feels merit it and are harming people or places he cares about. Interesting. To me anyway.
I love how he rejects the label of king so strongly and how he absolutely loved going up against Hirotsu, and he kicked Dazai in the face! And picked up on the suicidal thing instantly at the first warning sign and they’re absolutely delightful bickering!
Ugh, I’m just so happy right now.
I thought about rewatching Dead Apple while I have the opportunity but instead braved the first episode of Yuri on Ice because every red flag for a potential favorite character is waving in Yuri Plisetsky’s direction, so here’s hoping I make it through the incredible amounts of secondhand embarrassment the first few episodes of an anime always seem to have. (Why? Can’t any of them just skip that part? :headdesk: )
Tomorrow, I have to do taxes and sort out how bad did I screw over my finances when I bought essentials on payday, so I can send off bill money. And I even forgot to buy some things, soooo that’s gonna be interesting. I don’t recommend living paycheck to paycheck. This is where getting on publishing a few hundred poems would be a good thing. Get right on that.
I still have that list of 8 people I intended to properly write after my negligent, hi y’all, I can barely function phase. Hopefully tomorrow?
Well, here’s hoping you’re all having a lovely weekend!
Sometimes I write things. Lots of things. And don’t get them posted anywhere right away. I have a little WordPress site that’s password protected where I’ve been dumping inventory, original and fanfic both but not poetry because apparently, I’ll never get the hang of crossposting that. It’s behind. Not sure if I want to go ahead and unlock it or not because it’s anything but complete and it reveals every sock I ever had.
I’ve got a little wiki where I log stuff as I write. The poems go on one page with the actual title and body of the poem and no stats or data beyond date written and their chronological order (aka, this is where I post them for my own self but without metadata except as implied), and the fiction of all kinds gets logged in stats and linked form but no content, which is making it a lot easier to figure out where all my stuff is and isn’t without getting bogged down in crossposting. I have a lot of stuff and going back more than ten years of didn’t log it right.
Progress.
In other words, I’ve written this week and no one can read what I’ve written this week because I’m behind on getting stuff out to the world. It’s kind of frustrating. Let alone the stuff I’m supposed to publish. I’m sooooo behind on doing that kind of thing. But my sister got me a graphics program again, so there’s that.
I have a list of people I’ve carried four, five weeks now that I want to actually sit down and write and connect with because I’ve been heads down, keep head above water, crash at the first sign of duties done lately. This extends as far as I’ve seen friends’ posts and prayed for them but didn’t comment. Oops. I love you all really. This too shall pass.
That said, lots of work work today on the day job. And also, huge shoutout to Erin Condren and their life planners, more importantly the stickers. I’ve been trying to use lists, planners, and every organizational thing under the sun to keep taking all my stuff even when I’m so sick I forget and to DO all my stuff even when I start forgetting. It’s never worked. Until the stickers.
I’m a fan.
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