I reached the end of the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on. I knew I was close to it, but it caught me by surprise. I started this project with a few broad strokes, one of which was the ending, so I knew it was coming but I wasn’t entirely sure what form it would take. I started this project for National Novel Writing Month 2020, did about half of it in the first pass, fell off working on it for most of 2021, and then finished it yesterday. Well, I reached the end, anyway.
Continue readingMusing
The Modern Malaise of Mixed Emotions
It is a brand new month. Not a lot has changed since yesterday when I was upset about being in a tough financial spot (though I’ve crunched numbers so at least I know exactly how much wiggle room I have), but I did get my yearly Spotify stats today so now I’m wondering if I have a music/podcast addiction or if I’ve grown reliant on those forms of media to combat my constant solitude. I spent an average of 7.2 hours a day listening to Spotify, exactly 21% of which was a single podcast.
Continue readingThis Capitalist Hellscape
There are days where I consider getting an extra job. I have full-time work with the opportunity for overtime, but there’s not always work to do there and sometimes you just hit the point where you’ve been bashing your head against something for so long you can’t really do any more. A second job would have to be something mindless, something maybe physically taxing but not mentally taxing, since my current day-job takes pretty much all the mental energy I’ve got. Unfortunately, that would mean losing pretty much all of my writing time and energy.
Continue readingLooking To The Future
I took a weekend off. It was nice to get a chance to rest. Or at least sort of rest since it is me and I still did laundry, Dungeons and Dragons prep, and worked on story ideas in my head. I also spent time cleaning and doing home improvement/winterization projects. I experimented with insulating my windows with plastic, the first time I’ve had to do so since I have been lucky to have good windows and well-insulated apartments in the past, and learned a lot about the struggles inherent in this sort of shit. They look terrible and half of them need to be fixed or entirely replaced, but it’ll be easier going forward since I have some experience now.
Continue readingPost Holiday Reflections
Thanksgiving is over. It was fun to visit two of my siblings, horribly stressful to drive into the Chicagoland area since I haven’t drive anywhere more crowded than the central Wisconsin suburbs in about two years, and a delight to have two Thanksgivings in a row with mostly the same group of people so we can all say we’re building new traditions away from bad family situations. I’ve also finished most of my writing projects I’d assigned myself over my week of vacation, caught up on most of the media I missed, and managed to not fall further behind on anything else. Now, resting can begin.
Continue readingWisconsin Winter Preparations
I have lived many winters without ever needing to put plastic insulation over my windows. If this sentence makes no sense to you, well, congratulations on not living in shitty or old apartment or house in a frigid midwestern or generally northern US state. Or, you know, anywhere else in the world where the outside doesn’t get so cold in the winter that it can leech through every exterior surface of your dwelling to steal every drop of warmth you posses but also so warm in the summer that an unattended egg can cook in thirty minutes of sunlight or less.
Continue readingHoliday Reflections
I am at the beginning of a entire week (including two weekends) off of work. The first such week I’ve had since the winter holidays of 2020. I’ve taken the time off to work on some writing projects, rest, and grapple with the issues inherent with navigating the holiday season separate from a toxic family situation. Which, you know, is emotionally fraught enough on it’s own without throwing the holidays into the mix, which is an exponential increase rather than additive or even multiplicative. But I’ve planned some writing projects to keep me busy and engaged, some projects around the house to keep me moving and give me time outside my own head, and enough fun plans to keep me from feeling like I’m not using my time well.
Continue readingI Have Too Much Fun Stuff To Do
My relationship with media consumption has shifted over the last year and a half. It’s a mixture of living alone, trying to maintain healthy day-to-day habits, and the way that the pandemic has shifted a lot of content I used to consume into the streaming sphere. I had very little I used to follow as it came out, instead consuming it in bursts when I had time or wasn’t feeling well, or just needed a couch day. The pandemic changed how I rationed out my energy, my need for rest, and how I react to socializing, and that in turn changed how I consume media.
Continue readingWhat A Fucking Day
Somehow, I’ve managed to get almost everything done. It helps that one of the events I’m trying to catch up for is going to be late in the day tomorrow, so I should have enough time to get through it all. All of which only really applied until the rest of today happened. For a lot of reasons, the day I wrote this (November 19th, 2021) has been exhausting, draining, and just miserable. I don’t want to go into it all because it is either nothing surprising/unexpected or personal to the point that talking about it would take more writing and emotional effort than I have in me to give.
Continue readingOn Top Of The Waves
What a week. Started off kinda crappy with some on-going trouble falling asleep, which tends to cast a pall over everything else since, you know, being tired constantly sucks. But Monday started off strong with a Spotify Discover Weekly playlist that was nearly perfect. There were a few terrible misses, but it’s probably the best Discover Weekly I’ve had since before the summer. Just a bunch of absolute bops with a pile of songs to add to my upbeat and cheerful playlists, and it starts with a great sequence of eight songs before the first song I had to remove.
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