No New Infrared Isolation Chapter Today

I’m taking a week off to help rebuild the buffer of chapters I once had. The whole thing vanished due to the business of December and January and while I’ve finally got time and energy to write again, it isn’t much and I’m not going to have a chapter done with enough time left to edit it myself, much less ask someone else to look at it. So I’m taking a week off. I’ll be working to get my buffer back in place and to figure out some kind of sustainable writing routines for these multi-thousand word writing projects. I don’t exactly double the writing I do for this blog (by wordcount, anyway) with each of these chapters, but only if you consider the average. I’ve defintely done that more times than I’d like to admit. It’s a lot of work to write, edit, review, and then edit again for each chapter, but this is the process I’ve got and there’s no way I’m posting anything as faulty and poorly edited as the chapters I originally wrote in 2017 and 2018… No, these will be done well, according to my current standards.

Anyway, if you need something to do, I suggest checking out the Poetry category or just browsing through old posts. I’ve written about so much over the last two and a half years that I’m sure there’s some hidden gem you’ve never read. Too bad wordpress doesn’t let you sort by things you’ve never read… Honestly, just type some keywords into the search bar and, as long as they’re specific enough, you’ll find something interesting to read. See you all next week for chapter 31!

Happy New Year!

I’m taking today off writing, so there’s no big blog post today (it is a holiday in the US, after all, and I’m trying to get better at resting when I need it). Instead, I’m just going to remind you that my Infrared Isolation series will start updating again on Saturday the 6th, that you should check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube for some fun videos of hilarious moments from a variety of media (including media that is VERY AWARE of him, often to a hilarious extent). That’s all I’ve got. Happy New Year and I hope you’re taking some time to start the year off in a way you find fulfilling!

Reflections In Post-Holiday Silence

After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both missing the noise and attention of the last few days but also relieved that there are far fewer humans wandering around in her view. Which is, in its own way, a little bit like how I feel. While I am much more relieved to have the silence than I am missing the noise and attention, I do miss it a little bit. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have people around all the time. Incredibly exhausting, but nice. Nice to say good night to people as they went off to their beds and nice to know there would be people around when I woke up. Sure, the only time to myself I got during that whole three day period was either bathroom trips or when I’d tuck myself away in my writing closet to continue hacking away at my various writing projects once everyone had either left for the night (my sister’s partner and her friend were both staying at a nearby hotel) or otherwise gone to sleep, but it was also nice to have people to talk to. I’m definitely ready for a weekend to myself, though, especially knowing I’ve got some pre-planned social activities to help prevent me from getting too lonely and melancholic (both of which are tabletop games).

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National Novel Writing Month 2023

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo as I’ll be calling it in the rest of the post) and I only just decided I was going to definitely participate yesterday (which, coincidentally, is the day I wrote this post). I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but not as long as I usually do. Normally, there’s little else on my mind as summer finally begins to fade into fall, but this past year (since it has actually been a year of this life stress and chaos now, despite my desperate attempts to avoid it) has driven most things beyond the immediate day and sometimes week I’m experiencing so far from my mind that I’m beginning to forget what it is like to live any other way. So when my friend asked if I was planning to do NaNoWriMo, it caught me off guard since I did not have an answer prepared and I almost dismissed the question as being hardly relevant right then, despite it being the twenty-first of October, because I’d forgotten how soon the beginning of November was. Still, it’s not like I had to do much to prepare. I’m fairly adept at coming up with writing projects and while I expect to struggle with finding the time I need to do my daily writing since my schedule is already so full, I expect I’ll be able to find enough to write about to fill any words left over should I finish the last twenty-ish chapters of Infrared Isolation before I hit the required fifty thousand words for the month. I mean, the first twenty chapters are over seventy-five thousand words, so I’m really not worried, even if I wind up being a few chapters short of forty-six.

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Personal Warmth Thanks To Cozy Blankets And A Good Day

I spent the weekend relaxing. I did my chores, listened to podcasts, played more Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m currently hopping between a few alternate save files as the mood strikes me), and enjoying the chilly weather. I got to sleep underneath my comforter for the first time in more than five months, maybe six, and I feel like I slept super well both nights I got to sleep past sunrise. I had a few weird dreams both nights, none of which I remember at this point beyond a few vague impressions (well, now that I’m really digging into those impressions, I remember most of one of them), but I slept like a rock. Both mornings, when I woke up, I had to carefully stagger my way to the bathroom because my body was so dead to the world that I could barely keep myself upright until I’d had a chance to go back to bed and lay around for a while, waking up slowly as I luxuriated in the comfortable sensation of being beneath a big pile of blankets and not being so warm that I was sweating through them. I’ve always appreciate a good, weighty blanket pile, but my past couple years of plastic-covered windows and desperate attempts to keep my apartment warm enough that my pipes don’t freeze and my pet bird doesn’t die meant that I couldn’t do my usual thing of opening the windows in my bedroom at night in the winter and burrowing under as many blankets as I could comfortably fit on my bed.

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Infrared Isolation: Hiatus

I genuinely do not have it in me to do the work this project requires right now. I barely have it in me to keep regularly blog posts up and those actually get views. I’m sorry if this is the sole reason you’re here, but I need to stop trying to work on this project for a bit so I can focus on resting and recovering. I’ll, of course, keep trying to work on it in the meantime, but not having self-assigned deadlines that fly past will lessen the mental load of this process. Once I’ve gotten a few chapters done and no longer feel quite as emotionally exhausted and just ABSOLTELY knackered all the time, I’ll go back to posting them. I’ll even let you know ahead of time, so you can set your alarms.

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Taking a Birthday Break To Rest Up

This is the weekend after my birthday and, complex feelings about the day itself aside, I am absolutely going to use that as an excuse to rest. We’ve got a holiday in the US (Labor Day, which feels more and more important with every passing year) and I’m just taking some time off. I’m just going to have a quiet, guilt-free day of relaxation and video games on Monday, since I’ve got Baldur’s Gate 3 to finish and then Armored Core 6 or Sea of Stars to play. Plus all the other games I’ve started and left unfinished because something else came along (I’m looking at you, Cassette Beasts). And a new playthrough of Chained Echoes, inspired by the blog post that went up yesterday. I’ve got a lot of fun games to play, books to read, puzzles to do, and I’m just gonna set everything aside for now so I can just enjoy my three-day-weekend. It’ll be a couple months before I get another work holiday and it’s not like I’ve got much vacation time left after how much I was out in the first half of the year, so I’m doing what I can to maximize my relaxation right now.

There will be another Chapter of Infrared Isolation next week (I was almost finished writing the chapter when I wrote this post, so it should be done and edited and I’ll even be partway through the next chapter by the time this post goes up) and my normal blog posts will resume on the 5th of September. Have a great weekend!

I Ran Out of Time, So Have A Parody Called “If I Had 1,000,000 Hours”

I didn’t have time to write anything for today (Monday’s blog post will be a pretty good explanation as to why), so I made a quick little parody of The Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had A Million Dollars” (original lyrics and format provided by genuis.com). Feel free to hum it to yourself or just read my lyrics instead of the song’s while you listen to it. Or don’t. I’m not your boss. I’m just incredibly tired and decided I’d rather have something dumb in place than nothing. So please, enjoy this dumb parody I wrote of an incredibly basic song.

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One Week Of Rest Later. Sorta.

I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.

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Skipping Another Week

There’s no Infrared Isolation post today. While my rest is having a positive effect, it is not an instantaneous one, nor is it swift. It is a slow process that will hopefully bear fruit in coming weeks. The chapter for next week is already written and sent off to my editor, so it will be good to go for next week. Since I finished that early, I’ve even already started work on the next chapter (by which I mean I renamed the document, moved some things around, and reviewed the old chapter that is being rewritten into Chapter 25). If I manage to actually get more work done on it this weekend, between my various other activities, that will be even better. I don’t know if I’m quite that recovered, though. Just because writing during the week has gotten easier doesn’t mean that I’m quite ready to start spending time on the weekends working on writing projects. Especially this weekend, with my last two days of preparation for my new tabletop campaign and my on-going attempts to not mess up my sleep schedule all over again. I’m a bit more hopeful than I used to be, though. Now, recovery and a return to my old, non-exhausted way of living actually seems possible. Only time will tell, though.