December 2021 in Review

[rowyn]

Health/Fitness

I stopped exercising regularly in November, and then stopped paying attention to what I eat a few days before Thanksgiving. I have not yet managed to get back to either one. I think I exercised like eight times in December, and pretty much only for the minimum amount of time I will count.

Writing

I added some scenes to Angel’s Grace, and barely wrote otherwise. Added another 500 words to Alien Peacelords, bringing it to 4100, but that was it.

On the evening of December 30th, I noticed that one of my official goals for December was “work on the Alien Peacelords outline and create a spreadsheet with a word count estimate for it.” Which I had not done. In fact, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing Alien Peacelords was that the outline needed adjustments and I didn’t want to do it. So on New Year’s Eve, during CoffeeQuills’ productivity stream, I beat the outline into better condition, then dumped it into a spreadsheet and estimated its length. The estimate came in at 130,700 words, which is longer than I expected, but not unreasonably so. I suspect the estimate may be high. Working on the outline made me want to write the book again. Some of the lines from the outline made me laugh out loud.

The Business of Writing

I finished initial edits on Demon’s Alliance and sent it to first readers. Since then, I’ve been working desultorily on edits for Angel’s Grace. On December 30th, I also noticed that I’d put down “40% complete on edits” as a goal for Angel’s Grace. Fortunately, I was already at 38.7%, so this was a much less unpleasant revelation. I did some more work on it after I finished the Alien Peacelords estimate. Then I split out one of the editing points I’d been working on and declared one part complete. It’s now at 41.7% complete.

Reading

I did finish a book in December, T. Kingfisher’s Clockwork Boys. I’ve been poking my way through the sequel, The Wonder Engine, but I am not enjoying it much so it’s been slow going.

Art

Still using Adorkastock's sketch app for figure-drawing practice. I switched to paper-and-pencil for this practice, because my tablet pen stopped working. To my surprise, I enjoy it more this way. Not quite enough to make it a regular habit yet, though.

In the last week of December, I remembered that “fix or replace tablet pen” was a December goal. It was an actual goal because I knew that (a) it would not take that long and (b) if I didn’t put a deadline on it I would put it off forever. I mean, I put it off for a month anyway.

I ordered more AAAA batteries online (AAAA batteries are hard to find in person), in case the AAAA rechargeable batteries I’d gotten before were duds. Replacing the battery again did not fix it. I did notice that the eraser on the pen worked but the tip didn’t. So I found a site of trouble-shooting tips and spent an hour walking through them. As I did so, I was struck anew by how much my tablet struggles to do even simple tasks, like “reboot”. Sometimes when it’s turned on or woken up, it will let me unlock it, but then the screen turns black and stays that way for 15 or 20 minutes before it finally comes alive again. I use the tablet primarily for art, and it’s barely adequate to the task of doing a print-resolution front cover. For full wrap covers, I have to do the front cover first and then flatten everything before expanding the canvas to full size and using a minimal number of layers for the rest of the cover.

I also realized that my tablet pen is specifically for the Surface: I don’t have any way to test to see if it’s the pen that’s broken or the tablet. The pen is the only bluetooth device I have for the tablet. Its bluetooth could be wonky, or there could be some firmware issue with it.

Anyway, the list of troubleshooting tips did not resolve the problem. I ordered a new tablet, the Surface Go 3. It’ll be delivered Jan 3. If the pen doesn’t work with it either, I’ll get a new pen too. Independent of the pen, I have wanted to replace the Surface for perhaps two years now. It’s time.

Social

In early December, I went to North Carolina to visit my parents. My brother and sister-in-law were supposed to visit at the same time. But my SIL got pneumonia and my brother had a reaction to the COVID-19 booster shot and was not up to flying even four days afterwards.

But I did get to see Kagetsume and Sophrani on both Saturday and Sunday, which was pretty great. For the first three weeks of December, I visited two local friends who hosted little weekly gatherings on Thursday night -- something like 3-8 people, all vaccinated.

On the fourth week, 12/23, my friends cancelled it because they were both feeling sick. On the following Sunday, the husband went to urgent care for a COVID-19 test and tested positive. On the 30th, he was hospitalized. His wife (more-or-less recovered at this point) got a COVID-19 test on the day he was hospitalized, and tested negative. It’s probable she also had COVID-19 but doesn’t have enough left to register on the non-PCR version of the test. As of this writing, he’s still in the hospital. :( And no visitors allowed, of course, given the contagion risk. Given the rate at which vaccinated people are contracting the omicron variant, and that Lut is immunocompromised, we’re going back into isolation.

I know there are new and effective treatments recently approved: pills that you can take at home, if you get a prescription within a few days of showing symptoms. So kinda hoping that production of that and also tests will be ramped up. And between vaccinations, easily-available tests, and a good treatment option, perhaps in a few more months it will be a more manageable risk for us. But right now, I’m concerned that even with vaccines & booster, Lut is at a high risk of hospitalization (if not death) if he gets sick.

In online socialization news, still doing the weekly Craft & Chats -- even on Christmas and New Year’s Day, because some of us didn’t have any other plans. I’m writing this during today’s chat, as my craft du jour.

Lut,
terrycloth and I also tried out Teleparty. It’s a browser extension that does watch parties with friends on various video streaming sites, syncing up the video for participants and putting up a sidebar where you can text-chat. We watched the first episode of the new live-action Cowboy Bebop that way. Tech worked pretty well and it was nice to do something with all three of us again.

Gaming

Technically I did play a new game in December: Kitten Match. It’s a match-3 game -- I’m guessing similar to Candy Crush, though I’ve never played Candy Crush -- with a metagame of “renovating houses while acquiring an ever-increasing number of adorable cats.”

I love repetitive puzzle games like this one, and Kitten Match hasn’t done the “become impossible to play without paying” thing so far (I’m like 800+ levels in so I’m guessing it won’t). Sadly, its account-creation system is Facebook-exclusive, so I won’t make an account and am just playing a local copy on my phone. But the upside to that is that I’m not gonna spend any money on a game that won’t let me make an account without handing my life over to Jeff Zuckerberg. Anyway, the real purpose of this category was to learn new games to play with other people, so no successes on that front.

December Goal Score Card

• Assist Lut: Done!
• Visit parents (I have tickets for this trip on Friday!): Done!
• Give Xmas gifts: I gave out some of them when I visited NC, and shipped the rest on December 10.
• Work on the Alien Peacelords outline and create a spreadsheet with word count estimate for it: Just barely done!
• Get Angel’s Grace to 40% complete on edits (it’s at 14.75% now): Also done!
• Fix or replace tablet pen: Technically not done yet, but I’m giving myself credit for it anyway because the hard parts are complete.

December Stretch Goal Scorecard:

• Practice art
  
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before
  

I was not good at the stretch goals this month but so it goes.

January goals

• Write a year-in-review post
• Figure out annual goals for 2022
• Break up the remaining editing points for Angel’s Grace into smaller steps: Everything left on the editing list (and there is a lot left on the editing list) is too intimidating. I need to make steps like “decide where this thing goes” and then have “add this thing” be a specific step.
• Get Angel’s Grace to 65% edited.
• Exercise 13 times: this gets to be an Actual Goal because exercising at all has become a real challenge in the last two months, and I want to get back to it. 13 times means “every work day”, which are the days I’m most likely to exercise.
• Set up new Surface so I can use it for art: yes this needs to be an actual goal or I will put it off forever.
• Look at goal list occasionally
• Make entries in bullet journal for at least 20 days: I like having the bullet journal but I haven’t been using it for the last two months. Hoping that a goal that isn’t “every day” will encourage me to update it when I think about it. Instead of thinking “oh, there’s no point, I haven’t used it in two days and can’t remember that far back so no reason to start now.”

Stretch Goals:

• Read through A Game to You.
  
• Make an editing list for A Game to You.
  
• Work on notes/outline for a different book
  
• Write more of Alien Peacelords
• Get some use out of the art book I bought in November (Color and Light by James Gurney; I want to have a working tablet & pen so I can learn stuff and then practice it.)
• Exercise 20 times this month
  
• Consumption tracking
  
• Make an art
  
• Work on cover art for Demon’s Alliance and/or Angel’s Grace
  
• Practice art (bonus stretch goal: total of 15 hours of practice)
  
• Post four blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
  
• Finish revisions on Angel’s Grace
  
• Maintain bullet journal for entire month
  
• Learn a new game
  
• Finish reading a book I haven’t read before
  

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