December 2020 in Review

[rowyn]

Health & Fitness
Avg Calories Consumed per day: 1956
Avg Exercise per day: 121
Weight: 170.9
Consumption down a teensy bit, exercise up an even teensier bit, weight up a teensy bit. Nothing much to see here. I have been much more lackadaisical about calorie-tracking the last few months: I've done a lot more "eh, this meal felt like this many calories, just put that down" rather than keeping a true count. I am not concerned enough about this to actually measure things that are annoying to measure, but I think I'll try to at least measure things that fall into the "easy enough" category.
Writing

I did some of this! About 6600 words. Angel's Grace is now at 31,100. (I also chopped out about 500 words of stuff that I wrote during Nano but knew I would need to cut later.)

Writing was not a focus in December so I'm pleased that I made a little progress.

Equally important, I figured out the Angel's Grace timeline and my progress thus far through the outline. I have covered 35% (edit: this should've been 40%) of my original outline, but I added a bunch of stuff to the early part. I expect I have somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 words to go. 60-65,000 to go is possible but unlikely.

The Business of Writing

I finished final edits on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady! This went right down to the wire, with me completing it yesterday and sending it to Alinsa for layout. But it's done!

Now I just have to finish the cover. o_o;;;

The cover is way too ambitious. I've been working on it for months. I started taking parts out of the original file and blowing them up to work on them separately because I need a higher resolution for the cover as a whole than my little Surface can realistically handle. I will probably end up using my desktop to reassemble the pieces. The cover concept does make me laugh, though, so I'm not willing to give up on it. Although I thought of a much simpler cover concept that I could do if it doesn't sell well with the original idea.

Reading

I spent much of my "reading in bed before going to sleep" time proofreading The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady instead of reading someone else's book. Still, I managed 25 days of doing some reading, so not too bad.

Art/Other

Not a good art month, but I did put in some work on the cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, and I drew a mask on Lut's forum avatar at his request. (I did the original avatar for him 12 years ago and he still uses it. ♥ )

Gaming

Still playing "Dress Up! Time Princess." December's play experience was a little weird for me, because of the way that the game and its limited-time events intersect.

So you regen a certain amount of stamina per hour, up to a cap (generally several hours' worth). You can also get additional stamina in various ways. Some of the ways of getting additional stamina can be saved up. For one instance: you get daily gift boxes from your companions, and these might have materials, or gold, or stamina. The "season pass", which acts as a reward mechanism for doing dailies, also sometimes gives stamina in addition to other goodies. Like many players, I reached the final tier of the season a few weeks before the season ended, and the repeating final season reward included a nice chunk of stamina. Both boxes and season rewards can be stored to open/collect at a later date.

There were two reasons to hoard stamina: one is that Saturdays are "double drop" days, where you get twice as much of the encounter item rewards. The other is that the game had stamina events for Halloween & Thanksgiving, so everyone expected a Christmas stamina event.

So starting on December 13, I saved all my season pass rewards and all my gift boxes.

But the thing about saving this stuff is that you're not just saving stamina: it comes bundled with gold and other items. By not opening it when I got it, I cut my total resources-per-day by more than half, I'd estimate. So for two weeks, I was constantly broke in-game, and struggling to finish anything. Then, on December 26 -- a Saturday when the Christmas stamina event was still running -- I opened everything, and did all the double-drop events with all my extra stamina, and suddenly I had So Much Everything. I tried to pace the next story I started a little bit, but I'm still 80% through it after a week. And I still have a big, albeit dwindling, stockpile of gold. I've been spending profligately on cat-breeding, trying to get a new variety of cat, with little success so far.

Neepery aside, still having a great time with the game.

I bought a new game for my desktop, "Calico." It's a cute game, with the premise of "you run a magical cat cafe". It's designed for console and the keyboard controls are clunky, though. I sat down and couldn't figure out how to stand up again, so I quit out and haven't gone back in. o_o;;; I may give it another try, but I am unlikely to buy a console controller to appease the PC games that think I should have one. The thing about console controllers is that I kind of hate everything about them: they feel awkward and uncomfortable and since I've never used them, nothing about them is remotely intuitive. "Press one of the four cryptically-labeled buttons to do [thing]." But there's an entire generation who grew up on console controllers so they're what they're used to and they love them, and therefore there's a corresponding generation of games I can't play. c_c

It's kind of weird, because the handful of games I've picked up for my smart phone have been fun and easy to play, but desktop games are really more miss than hit for me.

December Goal Scorecard

• Look into switching phone plans:

So at the start of the month, I opened a tab for Ting Mobile, a phone service provider that offered cheap, limited-data plans. I'd heard about them via a Youtube product placement ad from Legal Eagle, so I used that link. I checked their rates, verified that my phone and Lut's would both work with them, and then ... left the tab open. Until December 31. I checked a couple of other plans in the mean time and didn't see anything cheaper. Yesterday, I went "well, this is the LAST DAY to make that goal" and filled out the form to get SIM cards and start service with them. In theory, we will get the SIM cards on January 7, and if all goes well I will then cancel my service with T-Mobile.

I'm a little sad about this, because I like T-Mobile and have used them for 20+ years. But their rates are no longer competitive. My T-Mobile plan -- unlimited data for me, nothing for Lut who has a dumb phone --- has a base of $60 ($78 and change after taxes & fees). The Ting plan for both of us is $35 -- $25 for 5 gigs of data for me, $10 for Lut. All plans for both carriers have unlimited text & calling. Even the SIM cost -- Ting charged us $5 per SIM ($1 for the card and $4 for shipping) and the last time I had to replace a T-Mobile SIM it was $20. (Although, in fairness, I don't know that Ting will still charge $5 if I ever need a replacement.)

Anyway, we'll see how this goes. My T-Mobile phone reception has always been terrible, so if it's bad from Ting that won't be much of a change. :D

• Make final editing list for Lord: Done!
• Complete some editing points for Lord: Also done!
• Figure out time line for Angel's Grace: Done!
• Write more of Angel's Grace: done!
• Make an art: Technically done is the best kind of done?
• Stretch goal: Finish edits on Lord: aw yeah DONE.

So feeling good about December! Even if I fell down on the art one. Again. :D

Oh right I need to make January goals

January 2021 Goals

• Assist Lut
• Get to 2/3rds done with the Angel's Grace outline
• Cancel T-Mobile service when Ting SIMs arrive, assuming Ting SIMs work.
• Archive 2020 Bullet Journal spreadsheet & use fresh one for 2021.
• Look at goal list occasionally.

Stretch Goals:

• Exercise 20 times this month
• Track calories consumed a little more diligently. Like figure out how many calories is in the spaghetti sauce I keep making, and how many servings it makes.
• Make an art. Finishing part of the new book cover counts even if I don't finish the whole thing.
• Mention on social media that I have some published books people can buy
• Fling a few books at Bookbub for rejection
• Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
• Work on outline(s) for next potential book(s) to write after Angel's Grace
• Maintain bullet journal

Kinda missed having a whole pile of stretch goals, so figured I'd heap some back on.

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