Rowyn

Only on Dreamwidth Now

2022-03-09T14:08:13Z

A few years back, I moved my blog to Dreamwidth: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/ . For most of that time, Dreamwidth was able to crosspost to LiveJournal, so this feed continued to update. Sometime in January, it looks like LiveJournal blocked all third-party access to LiveJournal, ending the ability of Dreamwidth to crosspost here.

If you're still only on LiveJournal, I encourage you to get a Dreamwidth account. It's a lovely ad-free site, with owners who are committed to retaining ownership of it, and free accounts that are sustained by the accounts of those who choose to pay. Ie, what LJ was in its early years.

LiveJournal is a Russian-owned media company, and its servers are located Russia. I cannot recommend treating it as a secure long-term home for your posts or your community. :|

2021 Year in Review

2022-01-04T00:10:54Z

Let’s see what my goals were for 2021!

2021 Goal Scorecard

Continue caregiving for Lut: Sure did!

Grade: A+, with extra credit for dealing with ordering specialty medications again and again.

Publish two books: I did! I released The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady in June, and You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person in November.

I had to go back through my blog to find out what my first release of the year was. It feels so long ago. O_o

Grade: A

Finish drafting two books: Technically, I finished three drafts: Angel’s Grace, You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person, and A Game to You. Angel’s Grace was like three-quarters drafted when I started the year, but still, it counts.

Grade: A+

Continue to track food & exercise: This fell apart a few times, especially at the end of November and in December. But I tracked for a good 80-90% of the days in the year.

Grade: B+, you tried.

Post monthly updates: Every month!

Grade: A

Put month & year goal list in your bullet journal so you'll actually remember to look at it. Also, look at it: I did put the goals into my bullet journal spreadsheet, and I did look at them now and again. I didn’t quite make ‘every month’, much less ‘on a regular basis’, but it happened.

Grade: B+

Stretch Goals

Make an art every month. Part of an art counts if it's a complicated art:

...

So I was erratic about this one. I did more than the usual number of finished paintings in 2021, mostly from “Joy of Painting” videos. And I practiced more than usual; I started using Adorkastock’s sketch app for figure drawing practice during the Craft & Chat. On the other hand, I did nothing at all art-related in April, and I didn’t do anything but sketches in December, and I did some color work in November but hated it all.

I was gonna just say “no, I didn’t do this one” but I feel like I actually nailed the spirit of the goal. I worked on illustrations! I even did some intentional practice instead of just drawing or painting things and hoping I’d learn something from it!

So, no, I can’t do a nice “here’s one art piece from each month” collage, but whatever. I worked on this. It counts.

Grade: A for effort, you did good

Finish outlines for two books: Technically, I did four outlines: Level 99, A Game to You, and Alien Peacelords, plus I revamped The Twin Etheriums outline. I do not plan to write The Twin Etheriums based on the existing outline, but hey, it counts.

Grade: A+, you overachieved on a stretch goal, congrats.

Read 12 books:

*Non-Player Character by Victoria Corva *Spells, Snow, and Sky by CoffeeQuills *Micro Science Fiction by O Westin *The Fall of Lord Drayson *India After Gandhi *Shadeslinger *Looking for Group *Boyfriend Material *Definitely Maybe Yours *Coracle by MCA Hogarth *Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher

So eleven titles, one of which is a novella and another is a collection of microfics. This gets an honorable mention because I did read more than I did in 2019 & 2020, though.

Grade: C, whatever, it was a stretch goal anyway.

Write 50 blog posts: I posted forty-nine blog entries, but I wrote a few that I never posted, so I score this one on a technicality.

Grade: A

For next year, mostly reusing last year’s goals.

Goals for 2022

Continue caregiving for Lut
Publish two books
Finish drafting two books
Finish outlining two books
Track food & exercise, on most days
Post monthly updates.
Put month & year goal list in my bullet journal so I'll remember to look at it. Also, look at it.

Stretch Goals

Practice illustration on some kind of regular basis.
Paint
Read at least a few pages of a book I didn’t write, on most days
Keep track of how many books I finish or DNF
Exercise 15+ times per month
Use bullet journal to track what I’ve done, on most days
Promote my books a little
Write 50 blog posts

I’m using “most days” because I found that if I’m supposed to do something “daily” then the first day I break the streak makes me way more likely to stop doing it entirely. Aiming for something like “300 out of 365 days”. More is better, less is acceptable.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2022/01/03/2021inreview.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

December 2021 in Review

2022-01-01T17:27:06Z

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

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2022/01/01/december2021.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Steam Library

2021-12-27T02:30:22Z

My Steam library is relatively small by gamer standards, especially given the twelve years that I’ve had it. But it still has sixty-three games in it: way more than I can keep track of in my head. Anke asked me about how I managed to amass this many, and now I want to categorize them.

Games I got for Multiplayer and Actually Played: 29

ARK: Survival Evolved; ARK: Survival of the Fittest: Lut and I played this during its open beta. I think we stopped before the actual release, which I think is the second title. You could tame and ride dinosaurs in it. That was pretty much the selling point. (Lut points out there was also a lot of building and farming, which is 100% true and also not the reason I got this specific game).

Ascension; Cthulhu Realms; Splendor; Star Realms: Computer adaptations of card-based board games. I got these to play with Terrycloth. The Steam version of Splendor doesn’t let you do online multiplayer in the same game with AI players, which is annoying.

Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition; Blood Bowl: Dark Elves Edition; Catan; D&D Lords of Waterdeep; Small World; Ticket To Ride: Computer adaptations of board games. Played them with Terrycloth.

Card Hunter: Card-based RPG sort of thing, a lot like playing very old-school D&D without a GM. Got it to play with Terrycloth, played it a few times.

Dungeon Defenders; Dungeon Defenders II: Tower defense games. Lut, Terry and I all used to play the first one together, extensively. Lut burned out on it by the time the new version came out. Terry and I played it a little but not much.

Dungeonland: Dungeon stomp. Terry, Lut and I played this together, a few times.

FireFall: This wasn’t an actual Steam game; I must have added it to Steam for some reason, or downloaded a Steam copy after we’d stopped playing it. Anyway, I played a fair amount of this and Steam only says I played it for 30 minutes. Lut and I used to play it together, it was an FPS with MMO elements.

Gauntlet: Dungeon stomp.Terry, Alinsa and I played this together, a few times.

Left 4 Dead: One of Lut’s favorite-ever FPS for team-based PvP. Zombies & survivors game. I played it once with him but my FPS days were already well in the past.

Magic the Gathering (five different versions): These were MtG games where you played a flat fee to buy the game and then unlocked decks and cards to customize the deck with. Much more limited than standard MtG. Terry and I used to play them.

Magicka: Dungeon stomp with weird combo powers. I played it for a while with Terry, Alinsa, Lut, and Octantis, but I never really got the hang of it.

Sanctum; Sanctum 2: Lut, Terry and I all used to play the first one together, extensively. Lut burned out on it by the time the new version came out. Terry and I played it a little but not much. Yes, I had the exact same game experience with this as with Dungeon Defenders, and no, I don’t know why.

SolForge: A card-based game like MtG, but it’s online only and the gameplay would not adapt to physical cards. Lut, Terry and I all used to play this.

Tricky Tower: A tetris-y style game I play with Terrycloth.

Games I got for multiplayer and launched once: 6

Armello: A board game I bought to play with Terrycloth. I installed it and it tried to take me through a tutorial of some kind. I didn’t want to wade through it while Terry was around, so I exited out and never opened it again.

Forced: not sure. I played it for 48 minutes, and Alinsa and Terry also have copies, so I’m guessing it was a dungeon-stomp-style game that we played together for a bit and then I noped out.

Guns of Icarus: FPS where you play the crew on a flying ship. Terry, Alinsa, Lut and I played this briefly. I recall not liking the controls/gameplay much, which was a shame because the premise was pretty great.

Hammerwatch: I played this with once or twice in 2014 and have no memory of it, but I’m pretty confident I played it with Terry. I’m putting it in the “opened once” category even though Steam says I played for 2.8 hours, because it is too forgettable.

Talisman: Digital Edition; Talisman: Prologue: I don’t know why I have two Talisman versions. One was bad enough. I remember loving Talisman in the late 80s/early 90s, and wow, those were Dark Times for gaming. DARK TIMES. “Back in my day, we played Talisman and we LIKED IT. No, I can’t tell you why, I have no idea.” Terry and I played the first title for 38 minutes, but it felt like so much longer.

Games I got for single-player and actually played: 9

Boyfriend Dungeon: dating sim + dungeon stomp

Divide by Sheep: A puzzle game Lyn recommended. Played it for a bit. Simultaneously cute and gory.

Dream Daddy: Dating sim. Played one of the routes but never went back to do any of the others.

Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business!: dating sim + ‘business’ sim. Whole game was very tongue-in-cheek and silly.

Puzzle Pirates: Dark Seas: Technically, this is a multiplayer game, but I hardly ever played the Steam version multiplayer. (Lut introduced me to the game in the pre-Steam era and we did play together back then). On Steam, I played so much distilling puzzle. SO MUCH.

Regency Solitaire: Rounds of solitaire games interspersed with a story. Entertaining.

Sid Meier’s Civilization V: I love Civ-style games, but they’re so addictive that I don’t often buy/play new ones for fear of losing months to them. Technically, this has a multiplayer mode and Terry and I did play it together on several occasions, but the vast majority of my play was solo.

Sunless Sea: I bought this because I loved Fallen London. I did not love Sunless Sea. It wanted to be a roguelike. I tried.

The Wolf Among Us: Interactive fiction game. Fun! Started Lut and I on reading the Fables graphic novels. I played it while Lut watched; it’s one of those games that’s fun to watch.

Games I got for single-player and launched once: 3

Calico: You run a cat cafe shop and acquire pets. Vicorva played this on their stream once, and it looked fun and was cheap. I played it once for twenty minutes, then sat down in-game and couldn’t figure out how to stand up again. Exited out, never played again.

Coffee Talk Demo: You run a coffee shop with supernatural patrons. I played the demo briefly but never bought the game.

Monster Prom: Dating sim. Played it for 15 minutes once, discovered it didn’t have a save, never played again. (It suggested game lengths of 30 or 60 minutes, so I guess the theory was that you would finish it in one sitting).

Games I never played at all: 14

AER Memories of Old: This is some kind of exploring/flying game that I heard of somewhere and thought sounded fun. I had it on my wishlist for a few years and eventually bought it on sale.

Card City Nights; Magnifico; Wakfu; Warlock - Master of the Arcane Demo; Windward; Ziggurat: No idea.

Hatoful Boyfriend: pigeon dating sim.

Monaco: Heist game. I think I got it to play with Terry and then never did.

Ninja Pizza Girl: Platformer. Backed it in Kickstarter.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Computer adaptation of a board game. Got it to play with Terrycloth but never did.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: I think Terry had an extra code for this from a Humble Bundle and gave it to me.

SteamWorld Heist: I guess I got this to play with Terry? Never played, don’t know what it is.

Tabletop Simulator: This was either a freebie or cheap. I think Terry and I were going to try using it but never did.

Games I literally just bought yesterday: 2

Spiritfarer; Kind Words: I heard about these games a year or more ago and put them on my wishlist. I bought them today because of the Steam sale. Will I play them? WHO KNOWS.

So my general impression that, for the last decades plus, I mostly get games for multiplayer is born out: I have 35 definite “I got this for multiplayer” and 4 probable, vs 18 “I got this for single-player,” and 6 “I have no idea.” Since 2007 or so, Terry and I have played games together for a few hours Mon-Thurs, most nights. So I get a lot of gaming in that way.

I also have a much better track record of trying games if they’re multiplayer: 29 that I played for 2+ hours, 6 that I at least launched, and 4 to 10 that I never tried. Whereas single-player is 9/3/6-10.

I am also pleased that the majority of my Steam games are ones that I’ve played, too. Maybe someday I will launch the other games on the list! At least the ones that I have some recollection of why I got them. Ziggurat may be out of luck forever, whatever it is.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/12/26/steamlibrary.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Call for First Readers: Demon’s Alliance!

2021-12-20T14:01:26Z

Who wants a demon for an ally?
Throughout recorded history, the Anesh Archipelago has been plagued by demons: beings of pure evil, without conscience, irredeemable. That was the unquestioned truth -- until the angels granted a demon hunter's sigil to a demon: Bright. But when Guild White accepted Bright as a hunter-in-training, that didn't settle the question.
Instead, it opens a rift that sets hunter against hunter. At the center of the conflict is not just Bright, but those closest to it. Sunrise, who never wanted to be a hunter but has come to appreciate the demon she tamed. Raven, the seeker who identified Bright's sigil and whom some blame for its acceptance at Guild White. And Mercy, Raven's teammate, who must choose between turning her back on her friends, or on everything she knows about demons.
The division leads to violence, spreading far beyond the halls of Guild White, threatening to destroy the guild system itself. That outcome would benefit no one: not Bright, nor its allies, nor the demon hunters who oppose it --
-- no one, that is, except for every other demon in Anesh.

I have finally finished initial edits on Demon’s Alliance, which means I need first readers for it! Demon’s Alliance is the third book in the Demon’s Series. It does not stand alone. There should be enough context in Demon’s Alliance to remind readers of the events of the first two books, so you need not have read them recently. But I cannot recommend reading this book if you haven’t read the first two.

If you’re interested in being a first reader, please leave your email address in a comment, or DM me on Twitter/Mastodon, or email me at my gmail account, ladyrowyn! The document will be available as a Google Doc. Comments are screened.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/12/20/firstreaders.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Blockchain?

2021-12-09T18:22:29Z

I have opinions about a number of blockchain-based things:

Bitcoin: Irredeemably awful. Built on a massively inefficient standard that, by the nature of Bitcoin, cannot be improved. Wastes enormous amounts of energy, is not even good at making transactions. Please let it die already.
Cryptocurrency in general: Useful mainly to criminals. Pumped up in value by speculation and money launderers. A bubble waiting to burst.
NFTs: oh sweet heavens why. Just. Why. A pump-and-dump scheme inflated by money laundering. Pretends that it represents “digital ownership” of a piece of art or other digital good (often used without license from the creator), actually represents nothing. Terrible.

But the concept of blockchain -- a distributed ledger designed to prove that transactions took place without requiring a centralized system -- I do not have a strong opinion on.

The concept of distributed ledgers, as opposed to centralized systems, has some obvious advantages. A centralized system is easier to hack and to deceive. A centralized system is more vulnerable to failure. Distributed systems are more robust. I like decentralization as a concept; it’s one of the reasons I prefer Mastodon to Twitter.

I don’t know if the inefficiencies that make cryptocurrencies waste such massive amounts of electricity are inherent to blockchain. I do know that Bitcoin is far, far worse in terms of how much power it requires to execute a transaction than later cryptocurrencies. I’m not aware of any cryptocurrency being as energy-efficient as a typical bank transaction.

I tried to find out if there’s something about blockchain that makes it necessarily energy-intensive, but it’s hard to know what to trust in the sea of information from sources I’ve never heard of before. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be, and that most of the power consumption from cryptocurrencies is due to crypto mining and that kind of "mining" is not required for blockchain applications that don't use cryptocurrency. But I’m not positive.

My instinct when I hear that a company intends to use blockchain for some purpose is to cringe. Announcements like this are made by PR people who don’t understand what blockchain is, to reporters who also don’t understand what blockchain is, to be read by consumers who -- like everyone else -- don’t understand what blockchain is. There may be real engineers behind the project who have a good reason to use it, or it might be that upper management heard that blockchain is trendy and they feel compelled to jump on the bandwagon. Who knows?

I’m also always a bit intrigued when some company says they want to use blockchain for a product that is not cryptocurrency or NFT. Because there are some cool things about distributed systems and I want to hear about people using them for something actually useful for a change. -_-

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/12/09/blockchain.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Coracle, by MCA Hogarth

2021-12-08T18:36:03Z

A middle-grade fantasy novel, Coracle is a delight to read. I love so many things about it. The premise is that a fallen angel, the Adversary, broke the world in the distant past. At that time, the Savior and her Companions prevented the world from being destroyed and stitched some parts of it back together. In the modern era, islands of land float in the Breath, which can be traversed by vessels, and some of which are connected by bridges. The main character, Marda, chooses to attend the Abbey, a school for Outremers, where youths of age 14-18 or so are trained to emulate the Savior’s Companions and take on different roles in small bands that patrol the broken world. The Outremers’ mission is to mend the world and to stop monsters, if necessary. Over the course of schooling, every Outremer gets either a patron saint or an angel, who will offer guidance to them, and a Godsib: a companion animal/mythical creature.

Religion is prominent throughout. Becoming an Outremer is a spiritual vocation (although the book takes pains to show that characters don’t feel like they’re compelled to do it, or that they’re even necessarily sure it’s what they’re supposed to do with their lives). The characters pray for guidance and attend services and seek to serve one another, God, and the world as a whole.

The narrative showcases a world of fantasy, with wonders to admire and linger upon. One of my favorite parts is that the conflicts of the setting are small-scale and character-appropriate. It’s about kids dealing with kid problems: making decisions about their future, making friends, hanging on to their friends, figuring out where they fit in: all the very real problems of life. I have such a hard time writing this sort of story myself -- my plots all too often spiral into catastrophes and world-saving. But I adore science fiction/fantasy slice-of-life, and Coracle is a wonderful example of it. It’s relaxing and refreshing, with plenty of meaty issues and problems to intrigue and engage the reader. It’s the first book in the series, but ends on a solid note -- no cliffhangers -- at the end of Marda’s first year. Easily a 9, and I very much look forward to the rest of the series.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/12/08/coracle.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

November 2021 in Review

2021-12-01T23:00:50Z

Health/Fitness

I cooked for Thanksgiving this year, for the first time since 2016. Lut and I used to cook tons of food together every Christmas, for just the two of us, but he hasn't been up to cooking since his diagnosis in 2017. I decided to do much of the cooking on my own this year, because none of the catering options have been satisfying. We went minimalist on some things -- I got a pre-cooked turkey -- and skipped some of our less-beloved usuals. But we still had leftovers for several days.

Anyway, I stopped tracking food because it was too annoying to figure out how much I was eating. I stopped making an effort to exercise in November, too. I nonetheless exercised ten times, which kind of surprises me. My habit of 'exercise after work as long as I don't have other plans' remains strong even without much driving force behind it. Twice a week isn't much, but it's better than nothing.

Writing

I won NaNoWriMo!

I finished the draft of A Game to You and immediately trunked it because oh man it's the messiest draft. I put more work into outlining and worldbuilding A Game to You than any previous book, and it still wasn't close to enough work. I don't know whether I want to expand it so that the huge cast has room to breathe and be distinguishable, or if I want to cut out half the characters. One way or another, It needs Way Too Much editing. It needs so much editing that I'm willing to edit Angel's Grace now because it looks easy by contrast. o.o;;;

But! I finished it! After writing 50,021 new words. Total draft is around 121,000.

I started writing Alien Peacelords but only got to 3646 words on it. A Game to You ran longer than I expected, although not by that much.

The Business of Writing

I released You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person! kermitflail

I even made an effort to keep talking about it after release instead of putting up a release post and letting it flounder along on its own. n.n

Reading

This is on the list of things I stopped doing because Nanowrimo. I will return to it in December!

Art

Courtesy of the online Saturday Craft & Chat meet-up, this wasn't one of the things I stopped doing in because Nanowrimo. I didn't finish any pictures I liked this month, but I did a bunch of practice sketches using Adorkastock's sketch app. My Surface's tablet pen stopped working mysteriously two weeks ago. I'd hoped the battery was dead, but replacing the battery did not revive it. I am not sure what other trouble-shooting steps are available, but I should probably do something before I give up and replace it. Cheap tablet pens are not good for drawing, sadly, so it'll be spendy to get a new one.

Social

I attended Contra KC 2021! I had gotten my booster shot on the Wednesday before the con started, and I was still kind of worn out during the con. So I didn't spend as much time as I usually do at the convention, but I did stay late on Saturday evening for the room parties, and saw a lot of old con-friends I've not seen since 2019. It was good. ♥

Gaming

I learned a new game with terrycloth, Deus. We only played it once. It was promising, though. I expect we’ll play it again sometime.

November Goal Score Card

Assist Lut: Done!
WIN NANOWRIMO: Yes I did this thing. \o/

Stretch Goals Scorecard:

November did not have stretch goals, because Nanowrimo + day job + caregiving is enough.

November Goals

Assist Lut
Visit parents (I have tickets for this trip on Friday!)
Give Xmas gifts
Work on the Alien Peacelords outline and create a spreadsheet with word count estimate for it.
Get Angel’s Grace to 40% complete on edits (it’s at 14.75% now)
Fix or replace tablet pen

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
Exercise 17 times this month
Consumption tracking
Make an art
Work on cover art for Demon’s Alliance and/or Angel’s Grace
Practice art
Post six blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance
Finish revisions on Angel’s Grace
Maintain bullet journal
Learn a new game
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before

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New Release! You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person

2021-11-28T17:22:13Z

I have a new book out! kermitflail

You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99, But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person

Three Gamers, Two Ex-Lovers, One Comedy of Errors

When Griffin met a gorgeous young woman in a Guardians t-shirt, he shouldn't've led her to believe he was an expert at the Guardians MMO -- which he hasn't played in years. Now he's desperate to make up for lost time and level up before Kalisha returns from her vacation and expects to play it with him.

After Rachel stumbled into a group in Guardians with her ex, she should've told him who she was. But it's wonderful to game with Griffin again, especially since the two of them found the perfect sorcereress to complete their tank-healer pair. How can she tell him now, and ruin the trio’s synergy?

When Kalisha decided to play Guardians on her vacation, she didn't want her friends to tease her about it. But using an unknown alt to group with her housemate wasn't the most ethical plan. Especially not given that Kalisha already has a crush on her. Rachel is bound to find out someday, and it's growing more awkward the longer Kalisha waits.

Meanwhile, the three players grow closer as their characters level together ...

Author Commentary

A Discord conversation about litRPG themes inspired this book. We were discussing what drives characters, and one of my friends, Tuftears, said, “You thought you wanted to be level 99, but really you wanted to be a better person.”

Me: “That’d make a good light novel total.”

Tuftears: “You should write it.” =^_^=

Me: “All right, but you all have to help me brainstorm.”

I assembled various ideas from the server* into most of an outline. But it was early in the pandemic, and the story began with two people who had traveled for a vacation. It’s common for contemporary fiction to ignore current events, including global pandemics, aiming for a ‘timeless’ feel. But I could not convince myself to set it in 2019, or in a fictional pandemic-free world.

I started writing Level 99 as vaccines first became available, and I grounded the book in a specific period. It opens in May 2021, as it became possible for any adult in the USA to get vaccinated. When it looked as if the pandemic was almost over, before the Delta variant brought a new surge of cases.

But this isn’t a book about the pandemic. It’s about three gamers living online, and finding a love there that carries them into the real world. This is the first contemporary romance I’ve written, but as a polyamorous gamer, the story is intimately familiar to me.

It’s a short, sweet, cheerful novel, about the joy of gaming with good people, the uncertainties of falling in love online, and the mistakes humans make in their efforts to find both companionship and love. I had a great time writing it. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.

*To my regret, I did not write down the names of everyone who volunteered suggestions at the time, and the server has since gone down.

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On Series Branding and Subgenres

2021-11-05T19:40:42Z

I should be working on my NaNoWriMo project, but I'm still flattened from the booster shot I got on Thursday evening. So I thought I would write about my thoughts on a different topic.

One of my Twitter friends, DanniRook (Twitter handle), did a thread on writing yesterday. One point they made was that the Anita Blake series changed over time from "urban fantasy mystery with some romance" to "erotica with some paranormal fantasy." They added that they considered this a marketing mistake on Hamilton's part. Readers felt betrayed by the genre switch. Danni argued that it would've been better to start a new series then to change the subgenre of an existing series.

Lut and I both read the early Anita Blake books. We both dropped the series after several books, due to the subgenre change. So you'd think I'd agree with this idea.

But it turns out that I don't.

First, while there are undoubtedly many Anita Blake readers who dropped the series because of the subgenre switch, the Anita Blake series continues to be massively successful. 28 books in, the latest installment has a 4.7 star rating on Amazon, with over 5400 people rating it. Saying "this was a marketing mistake" given its long-running popularity strains credulity. If it were truly a marketing mistake, the series should have foundered.

Second, while many readers point to book eight as "when the series jumped subgenres": in retrospect, I believe this was Hamilton's intention from the start. She wanted Anita Blake's character arc to go from "ruthless monster killer" to "monster lover who sexes up all the monsters." Book eight was the point at which you could no longer ignore this evolution, but there were many, many intimations about the character arc before that. It's not an arc I enjoyed or would have chosen, but that doesn't make it inherently worse.

Third, starting a new series is a huge risk. Readers fall in love with specific characters and want to read more about that character. Yes, Hamilton could've escaped the reader backlash by writing a separate paranormal erotica series instead of turning Anita Blake into paranormal erotica. But it is by no means a given that a non-Anita-Blake erotica series would have met with more success. Hamilton has, in fact, written other series; to my knowledge, none of them are as successful as Anita Blake.

But perhaps the most important point is that there is no guarantee that "sticking with the formula" will lead to continued sales for a series.

If you've got a series with a single main character, and you don't have that series evolve in genre and tone, you can also easily lose readers.

Many -- perhaps most -- readers fall in love with characters: not subgenres, not tropes, not settings. Characters. They want to read about their beloved characters growing and changing over time. If a series delivers a consistent experience in terms of tone/tropes/subgenre/character, will that guarantee that readers will stick with it? Absolutely not. Yes, readers are more likely to get angry if a series changes in a way they don't like than if it stays the same. But when it stays the same, they're just as likely to drop it. "I loved the first few books, but after a while it got repetitive."

Writing a successful series is difficult. And the things that one reader sees as essential to the heart of the series are not the same as what another reader sees as essential. You may think that the subgenre is central and if it changes, the series is ruined. But another reader might be delighted by the shift in subgenre. I love the way Lois McMaster Bujold changed subgenres over the course of the Vorkosigan series, for example. I enjoyed the early milsf novels, but would I have read every Vorkosigan book if they'd all been milsf? Maybe, but probably not. The Honor Harrington series delivered a consistent experience, at least from my perspective, and I quit reading those after six books or so.

Of course I'm not saying "authors have to change the series subgenre as they write to keep it fresh." My point is that regardless of what the author changes or doesn't change in a series, a certain portion of their existing readers are likely to dislike it and quit reading. If the author is lucky, a different set of readers will be drawn to it, probably for the same reason that some people left.

As a writer, I wouldn't change what I consider to be the key qualities of one of my series. But I'm aware that what I think is a key quality won't match what every reader thinks is key. I don't like where Hamilton took the Anita Blake books. But this is a matter of taste on my part, not an indicator of some fundamental rule of branding or marketing.

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October 2021 in Review

2021-11-01T18:20:33Z

Health/Fitness

Managed exercise 20 times this month, mostly the bare minimum. But I haven’t quit! \o/

Writing

As of October month-end, A Game to You was at 71,815 words: added 14,400 words to it and took it from 50% done to 63% done. I estimate another 30k-45k to finish the draft.

I strongly suspect this will be another draft like the drafts for book 3 & 4 of Demon's Series, where I sit on it for several months or a year because it’s too much work to edit. But it’ll get done eventually. Unlike Fellwater, which is not only too much work to edit but also super embarrassing to imagine other people reading it. ^_^

I also sorted out a timeline for the Alien Peacelords book. I want to play with it some more and see if I can tighten it up. But it’s good enough that I can at least start writing the new book when I finish A Game to You, so that’s nice.

The Business of Writing

I picked off some of the low-hanging fruit for Angel's Grace, and edits on that are now at 14.75% complete according to my estimate. Progress! About as much progress as I made on A Game to You, even.

Reading

I finished Definitely, Maybe, Yours even though I didn’t like it. I think next year I will give myself reading credit for the % read instead of just for finishing books, so that I can give myself credit for the books I DNF. “Finish what you start” is useful for something like “writing a book”, where I know I will share and enjoy the finished product much more than the WIP. But finishing reading books is not more important than the act of reading by itself. I don’t know that I benefit much more from finishing one book than I do from reading half of two different books.

After that I started a nonfiction essay collection, and then DNF’d it in favor of an upbeat middle-grade fantasy. I am pretty sure I will finish the MG fantasy and be happy about it, so that’s nice.

Art

So I did a surprising amount of art in October? I painted along with three Joy of Painting videos, did a grayscale sketch of one of A Game to You’s protagonists in male form, and painted another sketch of the same character in female form. The portraits were done during the weekly Craft-and-Chat sessions with my fediverse friends.

October Goal Score Card

Assist Lut: Done!
Look at goal list at least once per week.: Er. Whoops? There were at least a few times when I was sitting at my computer and had the specific intention of looking at my goal list, and then somehow did not. O_o I didn’t even update the list on my bullet journal spreadsheet until the month was almost over.
Look at to-do list at least once per week. Make an effort to do the tasks that linger on it. I don’t think I managed this once a week, either, but I have cleared off all the current tasks on it? So not as much fail as the goal list one.
Write some of A Game to You: done!
Work on edits for Demon's Alliance and/or _Angel's Grace: done!

Stretch Goals Scorecard:

Work on notes/outline for a different book: Finished the timeline for Alien Peacelords!
Exercise 20 times this month: Yes!
Consumption tracking: More-or-less, yup
Make an art: made several, whoa, weird
Practice art: did some of that, too
Post five blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: Posted five exactly!
Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil: It has begun!
Maintain bullet journal: Did reasonably well at this one
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: done

November Goals

Assist Lut
WIN NANOWRIMO: This will probably be finishing A Game to You and starting Alien Peacelords, but I’m okay with whatever gets me 50k of new fiction.

Stretch Goals: You know, winning Nanowrimo is enough. Not putting anything else down for November, even as a stretch goal.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/11/01/octoberinreview.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

In Writing

2021-10-31T16:34:40Z

I read a mesmerizing in-depth breakdown of a recent court case that's attracted some attention from newspapers and a great deal of discourse on Twitter. It was written by a blogger who'd read through the court filings. That writer has since pulled down her tweets on the subject as well as the blog posts; perhaps a sign that the time to discuss this particular subject is over. I will not attempt to recap it here.

But the process of discovery in that court case meant that large volumes of written conversations -- email exchanges, Slack server logs, and so forth -- had been entered into the public record. One of the things that struck me, in reading direct quotes from these exchanges, was how awful these people sounded. In their own words -- not just pull quotes of a sentence or two, but sections of several hundred words -- they came across as cruel, vindictive, petty, two-faced, and self-centered.

It made me think about my own private chats with friends, in email or direct messages, or on Discord servers or in Steam chat. If the logs of those were put into the public record, how often would my own words indict me as petty or vicious? I am more careful with my public blog posts and tweets, but even those have venom in them on occasion. I daresay it is unlikely that anyone will ever have cause to comb through the detritus of my digital life in search of dirt to uncover. Even in this case, the person who came across the worst was the one who had initiated the lawsuit and in so doing triggered discovery. They had brought it upon themselves. (Although their friends, who also sounded terrible, got dragged down as a result of that decision, too.)

Still, it’s a reminder that it would be nice to live in such a way that there would be no dirt to find. I am definitely not that person. There are things I've written in private that I would be embarrassed for the world to see.

But it's something I think about. How would I feel if someone other than my intended audience saw the things I put in writing? If I’m discussing a third party, how would the subject of that conversation feel? You never know what might be forwarded by mistake, or glimpsed over a shoulder, or passed along by rumor.

It’d be nice if it was all loving and kind, wouldn’t it? And hopefully not intolerably sweet. n_n

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The Things You Want

2021-10-27T23:02:54Z

I was talking to my partner about how Nanowrimo is popular because many people -- perhaps even most readers -- dream of writing a book. And Nanowrimo’s roots are in “stop saying you will write that book ‘someday’ and do it. Do it right now.”

Many people who start Nanowrimo do not write 50,000 words in November, and many of them never finish their draft. If they do finish the draft, they don’t revise it. If they do revise it, they don’t publish it. It’s a path with a lot of failure points.

One of those failure points is realizing that this is a lot of work and maybe you like the dream of writing a book a lot better than actually writing a book. Maybe you give up on that image of yourself as an author. Maybe you decide: this is not something I want, after all.

That last one made me reflect on my own path. I did eventually turn into the sort of person who writes, edits, and publishes books. Pretty often, by most standards. But I did give up some big parts of my self-image along the way.

I loved reading from an early age. I came from a family of avid readers, and I loved science fiction, fantasy, and romance when I was growing up. I got a bachelor's and then a master’s degree in English Literature.

Throughout my education, I had an image of myself as a person who enjoyed books of all kinds. Maybe I liked fantasy/science fiction/romance best, but I liked classics, too. When I was in middle school, I read the Iliad and the Odyssey for fun. (My mother reminded me of this recently, because it boggled her at the time. From my perspective, they were fantasy. Why wouldn’t I read them?)

As a teen, I wrote a fair bit of fiction. After I started college, my fiction writing trailed off. I wrote a few short stories for college assignments, and did some work on a novel or two, but for 13-14 years, I wrote little fiction on my own time, apart from text-based roleplay.

In 2001, I decided to make a serious effort at writing a book again. I had two ideas from my twenties, one science fiction and one fantasy, and I decided to write one of those two. While neither concept was literary fiction, they were heavily influenced by what my education said was Serious Literature. They were pretentious, dramatic stories exploring big ideas, with a lot of tragedy and suffering, and protagonists who died at the end.

At the time, I thought “I only have these two ideas that are worthy of becoming a book.”

I finished the draft and revision of one of those books, a fantasy epic with a working title of Prophecy. I never did a second revision of Prophecy based on reader feedback (I can’t remember now if I ever got any critical feedback on Prophecy, for that matter, although Greywolf read it as I wrote it and did a lot of cheerleading for me.) I never attempted to publish it.

I hated writing Prophecy. While there were parts of the book that I enjoyed reading, I’ve never read Prophecy for pleasure. I’m not sure I’ve even opened its files since I finished the second draft.

Over the next several years, I wrote other stories in fits and starts. I started A Rational Arrangement on a whim, and finished the draft in less than a year -- more than twice as fast as either of my previous drafts.

And over time, I realized that I do not like Serious Literature. I don’t like grim stories, I’m lukewarm about big ideas, and I am almost never in the mood for tragedy.

I do have a genuine and unstrained love of some classics. I love watching Shakespeare’s comedies, and reading Jane Austen’s books. I love Jane Eyre. But one thing these and almost everything I enjoy in a story have in common is that they’re not serious.

I am an extremely fussy reader. It’s hard for me to read a book by someone else and enjoy it. I pick books apart, questioning the choices the author made on plot or pacing or climax. But despite my weirdly exacting standards, I don’t actually like the things that most people look for in Great Books. My culture says that Great Literature is most often serious, dramatic, and tragic. Even awards that are exclusively for stories considered unserious by the mainstream -- sf&f and romance -- privilege grim and serious over light-hearted romps. “Award-winning” is a predictor that I won’t enjoy a story, not that I will.

It took me most of my life to realize that there really aren’t awards for the kind of stuff I love best. That when light-hearted, upbeat books win awards, it’s in spite of being light-hearted and upbeat, not because of it. To finally stop telling myself “this is supposed to be great so I have to like it.”

No, I don’t. I don’t mind that other people love grim and serious and dramatic, but I have come to terms with myself. When I enjoy a book like that, it’s despite being grim and serious and dramatic, not because of it.

I love fluffy and upbeat. I don’t want to spend months immersed in crafting a story full of sorrow and heartache.

Young Me wanted to write Great Literature, and didn’t think anything else was worth the effort. Old Me just wants to write cheerful stories with happy endings. They’re not Great Literature, and that’s fine. They're exactly what I want.

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MG:SB Expansion: The British Are Coming

2021-10-22T13:40:47Z

As promised, the expansion for Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business was released last week. Rather than being a free DLC, it was added directly to the original game. If you already owned the game, you just had to update. If you buy the game now, it includes the expansion.

I enjoyed playing the original game, and love playing the expansion. It expanded everything: new mini-games for the lunch dates, new outfits for your executives (so many new outfits), new features for the main game, and tons of new story content. That includes a third and final story arc to the game, which wraps up with a spectacular and satisfying conclusion.

Tone

The tone is consistent with the original game, still full of over-the-top absurdities, interspersed with the occasional genuinely affecting moments.

The (entirely optional) smut peddler now sells, in addition to the original pin-ups, erotic vignettes that pair together two of the twelve executives from the original game. Each vignette ends with a sexually-explicit illustration. This adds some actual erotica/porn to the game, although as before you can 100% skip it and miss nothing about the main story or the dates. But if you were like “why is there basically no sex in a game about Sexy Business?”: now there is.

Pronouns

Unless I missed it, the original game never referred to my character with pronouns, only by my chosen title. The expansion referred to my character as “they” at a few points. I’m guessing everyone gets “they”, although I don’t know. (My avatar has an hourglass figure, a beard, and chose “sir” as their title, so they do have a gender-ambiguous presentation.) I kind of felt like it was the gender-unknown they rather than the nonbinary they, which particularly amused me when used by the people who’d known my character the longest. ‘Yes, yes, we’ve known sir forever, but we couldn’t presume to know something as private as their gender.’

Gameplay

The new third act adds two of the major players from the first two acts as executives for your company. You can increase affection with them as you do with any other executive. But while you unlock story arcs with the other executives by increasing their affection, you unlock story arcs with the two new characters by progressing through the business campaign. The story arcs of the two new characters also are not romantic and do not have “establish romantic bond” as an option at the conclusion.

So they’re not love interests in the same way the original twelve are. But the story arcs are great and they further the main story.

The business campaign has a lot of new complexity in the third arc. If you've unlocked all three, the game now lets you pick which one you want to play when you start a new game, and ranks them in order of difficulty. So if you wanted to progress in the dating arcs without dealing with additional complexity in the business campaign, or if you want to practice on easy mode for longer, you’ve got that option. The new "lunch date" games are good -- they add more variety to the lunch dates and shore up what had been a weak spot in the game.

There are “lose” conditions in the game -- failure to make timely loan payments, or failure to beat a timed boss in time. I’ve lost to timed bosses twice, and doing so meant I had to restart the fight from the beginning, with a new timer. I’ve never failed to repay a loan on time, so I don’t know what happens if you do that.

I enjoyed the added complexity in the business campaign. It has new stuff that makes your company more powerful, and also new problems that mean you will need the extra power. It’s a lot more to manage, but I beat the third arc on my first playthrough of it (with 37 whole seconds to spare!) So it was challenging, but not too challenging to be fun.

SPECIAL NOTE:

One of the new complexities is “teamwork”, where two executives get better if they work together in pairs. When you raise teamwork between two characters to 6, you unlock a vignette between the characters. CHECK FOR THESE BEFORE YOU FINISH THE CAMPAIGN. Like all the other content, they’re replayable at any time ... but only if you watched them during the campaign where you earned them. I earned a lot of ones but missed the notification of “vignette available”. When I finished the campaign and went to look at them, I realized the game had only recorded the ones I’d already watched. Oops. (Teamwork resets at the end of the campaign, which the game had warned me about.)

I think there are 182 of these? Because there’s a vignette for every character pair and there are 14 characters? There’s a lot of these.

I’m gonna play the game some more to unlock more of the vignettes, but I don’t think I’ll be unlocking all 182.

[Edit: 132. Only applies to the original 12 executives, not the two added in the expansion.]

Main Storyline

The main storyline now has an EPIC conclusion. Very happy with the ending.

Overall, extremely pleased with the new material. I spent about 15.5 hours completing the third arc, and then started a new company because I wanted to play more and also so I could unlock more vignettes. The gameplay changes greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the non-story parts of the game. Definitely recommended!

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Definitely, Maybe, Yours by Lissa Reed

2021-10-14T01:21:07Z

This is the M/M romance I started back in July. It is not one of those books that took me three months to read despite my enjoying it. I think I picked it up as a Bookbub deal.

Spoilery review, because I can't really explain why I disliked this book so much without spoilers. Tl;dr: BOOK IS NOT RECOMMENDED.

Early in the book, Craig meets Alex at Craig’s usual bar in Seattle. Alex is drunk and just broke up with his boyfriend. Craig’s general impression of Alex is ‘a hot mess but maybe I can help him.’ Craig himself appeared to be aware that you should not take in people like stray puppies, so I thought “hopefully this will not be about Character A Saving Character B.”

Craig takes Alex home for a one night stand. This immediately turns into a relationship where they see each other often, but they do not talk about being in a relationship or romance or anything. They are pretty cute together. Some other side characters are thrown in for flavor, some of whom have known Alex for a long time and give the perspective that he used to be a jerk but he’s doing well with Craig. Alex also ghosted all of his existing friends and family while he was with previous jerk ex, and now reconciles with said friends/family.

At around the halfway mark, Craig and Alex start to grapple with the idea that they’re in love with each other and this is probably a real relationship (after, y’know, months of recurring dates and regular sex.)

Then Alex & Craig run into his jerk ex, who is now married. Alex dumps Craig, runs away, and ghosts everyone in his life. Again. For weeks.

It was at this point that I lost all sympathy for Alex. I no longer wanted Craig and Alex to have a happy ending. I wanted Craig to find a partner who could treat him with the barest minimum of decency. Fine, dude, you’ve got self-esteem issues and trauma and whatever, but your mental health problems do not excuse you for treating all the people around you like complete garbage.

I hate-read my way to the end. Near the end, I got to watch Alex’s purported best friend lecture Craig for not trying hard enough to reach out to Alex. Alex, who has not answered email, texts, phone calls, or his door for weeks. CRAIG is somehow at fault in this. ‘Why are you not an actual stalker, Craig?!? Why have you not broken into your ex’s house???’

...

I should’ve DNF’d it.

At the end, Craig and Alex get back together. My only feelings were “Craig deserves so much better than this absolute toaster.” I found the idea that these two were going to live happily-ever-after laughable. Alex’s entire approach to life is ‘ghost everyone whenever you’ve got a problem’ and there’s nothing to indicate that he won’t continue to treat people like disposable objects that only exist for his convenience. Dude needs professional help, not a partner he will treat like a doormat. x_x

Anyway. First part was competent and entertaining, and the only reason I stuck with it, hoping the author would find a way to rescue it. Last half was “I would throw this across the room if it was a paperback; I hate this and everything about it.” Author did not find a way to rescue the ending, but did manage to make it worse with "You should be a stalker!" friend. If you are OK with romance protagonists ghosting their loved ones, I expect you'd be fine with this book. It super did not work for me. -_-

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Non-Player Character, by Victoria Corva

2021-10-08T17:40:44Z

Non-Player Character* is a charming, low-stakes, gamelit portal fantasy.

Back when V ran the Kickstarter for this book, I read the first three sample chapters and instantly wanted to read the rest.

It's rare for me to be hooked on a book from the start anymore, but Non-Player Character resonated with me. The main character and narrator, Tar, is autistic with an anxiety disorder, non-binary, fat, asexual, self-deprecating, snarky, and 100% delightful. They are drained by their day job, hide in their room playing video games, and are exhausted by social events. SO RELATABLE.

While Tar does resort to self-deprecation, it's humorous and gentle, rather than harsh or cruel. Tar is often frustrated by their difficulties in interacting with the world, but for the most part this is presented as "ugh SO DIFFICULT" rather than "this is why I suck and/or the world sucks." It's not about judging things as Right or Wrong, it's about coping.

Tar's friends likewise represent a mix of identies and intersectionality: nonbinary, trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, aromantic, autistic, ADHD, disabled, Black, White, probably more that I'm forgetting. And it all flows naturally: of course these queer, neurodiverse people will be drawn to and befriend other queer, neurodiverse people. They're all gamer nerds, too, even the one who feigns disdain for gamer nerds.

There are a lot of fun little touches. One of the characters, Pauline, has chronic pain and uses a motorized wheelchair on Earth. Pauline's wheelchair doesn't come with them to the fantasy world, so she searches for a new mobility aid. She ends up with a hexclimber, a six-legged one-person vehicle that can negotiate every kind of terrain. It's pretty great.

And I enjoyed that the narrative centered on coping mechanisms and accommodation, rather than cures. (This is not to say that there's something wrong with stories about people seeking and receiving cures; they're just a lot more common.)

The first several chapters of Non-Player Character take place on Earth, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this part of the novel. The scene of Tar doing their day job as a guide at a tiny museum was especially funny. But the entire book is great: lots of heart and humor, full of wonder and magic. Highly recommended!

Also available at other stores, see Corva's page for the list.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/10/08/nonplayercharacter.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

September 2021 in Review

2021-10-01T17:52:39Z

Health/Fitness

I scraped my way to my "exercise 20 times" goal in September, putting in my 20th session on the last day of the month. \o/ Records indicate that I did better at not eating when I wasn't hungry, so that's good too. Average exercise per session was lower, because I really did the minimum allowed for several of my sessions.

I feel like I should get another exercise game, because I did so much more regular exercise when I was playing Pokemon GO. I could just go back to Pokemon GO. But the thing I did not love about Pokemon GO is that it strongly favored playing the game in densely-populated areas that had more pokestops. When I was playing the most, I did a ton of driving to get to area with more pokestops than my neighborhood. I don't want to go back to spending time and money driving around just to play my exercise-incentive game. (This also lets out playing games that use the same model as Pokemon GO, like Ingress.) But I am not motivated to look at new exercise games. I remember the last time I posted about this, I even got some recommendations that I never looked into.

Writing

After putting "get A Game to You to 50% complete" down as an actual goal (not even a stretch goal), I decided what I wanted to do in September was edit Demon's Alliance.

Thank you, brain.

I spent most of my September staycation working on Demon's Alliance, but I did some writing on A Game to You because I hate failing at goals. I wrote 3500 words to get to 49.4% on Wednesday 9/29, and then got to 49.9% yesterday. My next bullet point would've taken me to 51.25%. Thursday was very tiring and I did not want to put in another 3k day, so I broke the next point into two parts and wrote the first of them. Good enough.

A Game to You is now at 57,123 words. I estimate there's another 45-60k left to write. Nanowrimo starts in 31 days. Regardless of how much or little I write in October, it's likely that I'll need to start a new book at some point in November in order to write 50k of fiction for Nano. I should maybe prioritize 'finish an outline for something new' this month.

The Business of Writing

I finally got to work on edits for Demon's Alliance in September. This is not what I'd planned to do in September, but since I've been procrastinating on revising this draft since January, I'll take it. I have two items left on my editing/revision list. I'm contemplating working on revisions to Angel's Grace now, rather than finishing up Demon's Alliance. That way, if I decide I want to add something to Demon's Alliance, I can do it before my final read-through instead of afterwards.

Reading

Victoria Corva released Non-Player Character to KS backers in September, and I tossed aside the M/M romance I'd been slogging through to devour the new release. I read it slowly, partly to savor it and partly because I wanted to litter it with cheerful comments. I need to write a review for it, but the short version is: DELIGHTFUL, highly recommended.

Then I finished it a few days ago and haven't wanted to pick up anything else, so reading streak is once again broken. XD

Art

Maggie gave me a little hardbound book of blank pages for my birthday, and for five or six days I did a sketch or three a day in it. So way more than my usual amount of sketching for September.

During the craft-and-chats for September, I worked on pictures of Rose Thorn, one of the protagonists in A Game to You. My attempts to draw her in color were dismal failures, so I left the last one as a messy sketch. I like the last sketch version. I keep thinking "maybe I should try coloring it. Maybe this time will be different." Anyway, didn't do anything like a finished piece, but I did a lot of drawing so good enough.

Gaming

I forgot to lean a new game in September. I'm pretty sure I forgot? Maybe I learned something at the beginning of the month, but I don't think so. Oops. checks to see when she started playing Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business: yeah, that was at the end of August.

September Goal Score Card

Assist Lut: Still doing that thing! He had some swelling in his feet and ankles, so after a week or so, he got a prescription for a diuretic pill to help the swelling go down. The swelling went away but he broke out in mysterious little bumps that are kind of like acne and kind of not. He's been picking at the bumps so now they're all scabby and look terrible. I think they're healing now, though.
Get A Game to You to 50% complete: Technically complete is still complete. \o/
Look at goal list occassionally: I did do this, which is why I remembered I'd put A Game to You on it. But I didn't do it often enough to remember the gaming stretch goal existed. Oops.

Stretch Goals Scorecard:

Practice art: an unusual amount of this one! Just random drawing, not focused on learning anything in particular.
Exercise 20 times this month: Done! Barely!
Consumption tracking: More-or-less kept this up
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: Also done! I should check to see how far off I am from my 50-entries-for-the-year goal. Let's see: 33, not including this one. It's been 39 weeks, so I've written not quite as many in the year-to-date as I was aiming for. Still, I'll only need to do 16 more after this one to hit my goal. Just a little more than one per week. Pretty doable.
Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance: I did not finish this one, but I got quite far along on it, so I want to pat myself on the back for it anyway. Not technically complete.
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: aww yiss and it was a great book, too.

Notably, I failed dismally at my usual "maintain bullet journal" goal. Early in September, I fell behind on it. Since I've started keeping a bullet journal, I've often fallen behind. In the past, I've always reconstructed what I could and continued. But this time, I just didn't care enough to resume.

A few days ago, I picked it back up again. The bullet journal is helpful for reminding me to do a lot of recurring tasks, like maintenance on the house and Lut's bi-pap, and cleaning on a semi-regular basis. So I plan to get back to it in October.

October Goals:

Assist Lut
Look at goal list at least once per week.
Look at to-do list at least once per week. Make an effort to do the tasks that linger on it.
Write some of A Game to You
Work on edits for Demon's Alliance and/or _Angel's Grace

I did not enjoy having goals with ambition in September, so ambition is going back into the stretch goals where it belongs.

Stretch Goals:

Make the character voices more distinctive in A Game to You
Work on A Game to You.
Work on notes/outline for a different book
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
Post five blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance
Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil
Maintain bullet journal
Learn a new game
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/10/01/septemberreview.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business!

2021-09-12T19:25:24Z

After I finished Boyfriend Dungeon, I still wanted to play more of it. This prompted me to dig up my Steam code for Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! I’d backed MG:SB! at about the same time as Boyfriend Dungeon. MG:SB! had fulfilled a year and a half earlier, and it turned out I’d added my code to Steam already. Now I installed it!

Tone

Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! and Boyfriend Dungeon are similar in some respects: they’re both dating sims with another game type added as the mechanic for advancing to the next romance installment, and neither of them are striving for a realistic/gritty/serious tone. But Boyfriend Dungeon is much more serious than MG:SB. MG:SB! is a goofy lampoon of Victorian England, wealth, wealthy people, gentility, capitalism, business, and imperialism. It is not a serious critique of these things; it is not serious in any respect. It is an absurd fantasy romp.

The game premise is:

You are a wealthy business owner in Victorian England, capably assisted by your servants, Business Maid and Battle Butler. Your company is stolen by your rival. In order to regain it, you must create a new business, forge alliances and relationships with wealthy business owners who will become executives in your new company, and grow your business until you can defeat your rival in Business Combat.

The relationships you forge don’t have to be sexual, but as one might guess from the name, the game offers that option and generally leads you in that direction.

So this concept is full of stuff ranging from “problematic” to “ZOMG NO.” From the “you are doing WHAT with your executive staff” to “business in Victorian England was a dystopian nightmare” to “wait you are sexually harassing your servants too” to the entire loyal-servant-to-rich-person trope. If it were played straight, it would be hard not to find it appalling.

But nothing about it is remotely serious. It’s a goofy fantasy, and it has no pretensions that any of this would be OK in any form of reality. It’s not saying “wouldn’t it be great it ...?” It’s much closer to “wouldn’t it be ridiculous if ...?”

I laughed a lot while playing this game. It’s not great for romance or erotica, but I did find its over-the-top absurdism very entertaining.

Diversity

You get to design your own avatar and also, amusingly, the avatar of Your Rival, one of the game’s antagonists. The character designer lets you pick from six body types, three feminine and three masculine, with builds of slender/average/plump. You don’t pick a gender and all of the character options are available regardless of body type. So you can pick, for example, “thin feminine body in a suit with a beard”. You do pick one of three titles: “sir,” “ma’am,” or “boss.” The game never genders you regardless of the title or body you pick: it refers to you in the second-person or by your chosen title. There’s a reasonable array of skin colors and hair types and suchlike to pick from. You can redesign your own avatar or your rival’s at any time, no cost.

The game has 6 male and 6 female romanceable characters; there are no nonbinary characters in the cast. The romanceable characters are all protagonist-sexual (and frankly, no one knows what your gender is anyway). Two of them are POC (with wavy dark hair and brown skin) and the rest are white. There is very little mention of ethnicity or race for any of the cast.

The body types for most of the cast are “conventionally attractive”, although they cover a range within that -- slender, curvy, wiry, muscular. Likewise, they’re all young. The only one who’s fat/old is Sinterklaas, a white man with a white beard and hair. (His canon age is 42. I am So Old, folks.) Yes, he’s basically Santa Claus. When I first saw him, I thought: “... don’t think I want to date Santa but okay.”

By the end of the second date with him, I was like “nope, changed my mind, I am so here for the Santa romance line.” Unexpectedly endearing.

Gameplay

There are three basic elements to the game:

Dating: After you hire an executive, you can raise your affection with them to unlock “dates”. (Many of the early “dates” are not particularly date-like). There are five different dates, plus initial meetings, with each of twelve different executives. During the dates, you make frequent choices about how to respond. The choices have some short-term effect on how the date goes, but no long-term consequences for the relationship, or impact on the next date. You can also replay dates you already unlocked at any time, and explore different options on them, which is a great touch.
Business: This is a kind of leveling/worker placement game. You assign executives to various tasks. Some of those tasks require skill, and you can assign executives to train those skills up at a cost of money. Your overall goal is to pay back your loans (which gives you stuff) and conquer districts (which also give you stuff) and eventually defeat your rival (which lets you “win” and then repeat the cycle).
Lunch dates: You can take your executives on “lunch dates” to increase affection with them, which involves a variety of simple minigames. The minigames are randomly chosen and the weakest part of the game for me. They are quick and most of them are luck-based.

I was much better at the business game in MG:SB! than I was at the dungeon stomp in BD, to the surprise of no one who knows my game preferences. Despite this, I found the business game too grindy. This is mostly because Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! has a lot more romantic interests than BD (12 versus 7) and partly because it takes longer to advance in ranks. Unlike BD, where you get a big bonus to finishing the other romance lines after you finished one, there’s no change to the rate at which you increase affection in MG:SB!

I should note that I am enormously tempted to play more of MG:SB! even though I finished all the romances and completed what there is of the main storyline. So the business game may be grindy, but it’s still fun too.

Main Storyline

The main storyline -- how your business is stolen, how you get it back, why you need to repeat this cycle -- was absolutely wild for the first two iterations of the cycle. At the end of the third cycle, a brief cutscene implies that when you max all the romances, there will be another significant installment in the main story.

Alas, there isn’t. I do not regret maxing out all the romances, but I was disappointed that the end of that cycle was just another brief scene that didn’t resolve any of the outstanding questions from previous scenes.

I don’t regret maxing out all the romances, but I wanted to warn other players that you should only do this if you want to see the romance lines. The third cycle and the final cycle have a few little bits of main story, but there’s no elaborate main story installments like the first and second cycle had.

DLC

The Kickstarter for Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business unlocked some stretch goals that were not included in the original game. The developer has been working on a DLC that will include that and other additional content. That DLC, “The British Is Coming”, isn’t out yet, but the studio’s twitter account says it’ll be out in October. It’s announced as a free DLC (and will be included with the Kickstarter at a minimum), so I’ll definitely dust off the game and play it again then. Assuming I don’t go through another round of it sooner. >_>

Censor Modes

The standard version has three different censor modes, which really only apply to the gallery pictures and the eventual “nude” versions of the characters you can unlock. But the standard game’s “uncensored” version is still censored. There’s a free DLC called “Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! Uncensored” which actually removes the censor bars.

None of the game content is what I’d call “porn”. Some of the gallery pictures are suggestive, but for the most part it amounts to “there’s some nude art of the dateable characters if you want to make a point of looking at that.”

Content Warning

I’ve covered most of the things that I might content-warn for under “tone”. But I do want to note that the second cycle of the business game features the antagonist mind-controlling people, including your avatar.

tl;dr

Fun, absurd and goofy, with some mild adult content that you can easily opt out of. I enjoyed the game. It took me about 32 hours to finish all the romances and the last playthrough of the business cycle. Do recommend.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/09/12/mgsb.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Specialty Medication: the Saga Strikes Back

2021-09-10T16:14:45Z

A week or so ago, we received an unexpected package in the mail. It was from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), welcoming Lut to the grant program.

Me: “Huh. Well, that’s nice, I can use it to pay his health insurance premiums if I can get sufficient proof of payment in a form I can submit to them. Maybe Accredo billed LLS and that’s how Accredo covered the copay? I never did find out who made the copay in August.”

The next day, LLS sent us a pharmacy card: “Present this to your pharmacy or specialty pharmacy and we’ll pay claims directly, so you don’t have to submit a reimbursement form.”

Me: “We’re at out-of-pocket cap now but that may be useful next year.”

Wednesday, we went to the oncologist. He is happy with how Lut is doing on the current dosages, and said he’d be sending in refills.

This morning, the phone rang.

Accredo bot: "We are calling with refill information!" confirms identity
Accredo bot: "Please hold while we connect you with a person."
Accredo hold message: "We are experiencing higher-than-usual call volumes"
Me: "YOU CALLED ME."
Me: "Why did you call me to put me through to a person when you DO NOT HAVE ANY PEOPLE."

Technically, this isn't worse than CVS Specialty Pharmacy, which often didn’t inform me that the refill had gone through at all. So I’d just have to remember to call them a few days after the clinic said they’d sent it, and hope for the best.

But I do feel like Accredo could wait to dispatch their bots to call me until they were at, like, normal call volumes. -_-

As it turned out, it only took a few minutes to connect me to a rep, Tammy.

Tammy with Accredo: "So there's $0 copay on the Revlimid."
Me: "Right."
Tammy : "And $7500 copay on the Ninlaro."
Me: "..."
Me: "ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME."
Tammy: "...no?"
Me: checks Cigna's website "Who do you show paid for the prescriptions we got last month?"
Tammy: "Cigna."
Me: "Cigna has forgotten this."
Tammy: "Ooh. Guess you need to call Cigna."
Me: dies
Tammy: “Do you want to schedule the Revlimid delivery, since there’s no copay on that?”
Me: “Yes pls.”

The Revlimid is the important one of the pair. We have a leftover dose of Ninlaro, so Lut can start it on time even if Ninlaro takes an extra week or two to receive (he’s supposed to start next Thursday).

Me: schedules Revlimid delivery
Me: sighs
Me: calls Cigna
Cigna: "We show the only order was on 9/8/2021."
Me: "We received a shipment of $21000 worth of medications 3 weeks ago. Accredo says you paid for it."
Cigna: "Oh, that was reversed out. We didn't pay for it."
Me: "... Accredo shipped it. Are you saying they sent us $21,000 in medication for free, out of the goodness of their heart?"
Cigna: "Yup! We didn't pay for it. Do you want me to call Accredo?"
Me: "... sure. why not."
Cigna: connects me with Katarina at Accredo, instantly hangs up because Cigna rep don’t care
Katarina with Accredo: "So this is about the delivery from August 16?"
Me: "Sounds right."
Katarina: "We show your insurer paid it in full."
Me: "Which insurer? We have two. Cigna and Medicaid."
Katarina: "Cigna."
Me: "Who paid the co-pay?"
Katarina: "There wasn't one. Cigna paid for both in full for $9k-ish"
Me: “None of this makes sense. Can you verify it?”
Katarina: puts me on hold a few times while she talks to various people and checks systems “Everything we have says Cigna paid it in full.”
Me: "Can you call Cigna and convince them that they paid for it? Because I can't. I don't have any proof that you billed them."
Katarina: doomed voice "I can try..."
Me: waits on hold
Katarina: waits on hold
Katarina, after several minutes on hold: "I'm sorry, I can't reach Cigna."
Me: "Well, it looks like no one paid the co-pay last month, and you did get Lut into the LLS grant program. So maybe just put me through to billing and I'll pay for it with the grant now?"
Katarina: "...sure."

Lyn with Accredo Billing: "I don't show a balance?"
Me: "... Really?"
Lyn: "Let me check some more."
Lyn: "Nope, no balance."
Me: "Did the Ninlaro and Revlimid both ship?"
Lyn: checks "Yes. I show Medicaid paid for it in full."
Me: "OKAY THEN."

A few minutes later:

Email from Accredo: “We scheduled a delivery for tomorrow! Check our website for details.”
Accredo website: “We’re shipping Revlimid on Saturday. Please call to schedule the Ninlaro delivery. Your account balance is $0.”
Me: “Welp.”

My guess at this point is that Lyn was wrong about Medicaid paying for anything, and wrong about Ninlaro having shipped. Instead, someone in refills has to press a button saying “we’re charging for the Ninlaro now.” And only after that step can they transfer me through to billing to pay it. And then billing has to transfer me back to refills to actually ship it. That feels like the Accredo Way.

But I have two weeks to get the Ninlaro refill and I’ve spent over an hour on the phone with these clowns already. I’ll wait until tomorrow to see whether we get 0, 1 or 2 prescriptions, and then call on Monday to sort it out if the number of prescriptions received is less than 2. -_-

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/663681.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Boyfriend Dungeon

2021-09-08T20:23:43Z

Many years ago, back in the 80s and 90s, much of my free time was spent on single-player computer games. They rivaled reading as my favorite pastime. As the web rose, I spent less time on them. Most of my game-playing switched to games I played with friends. Occasionally, I’d immerse myself in new iterations of Civilization, but my biggest solo gameplay activity in the last few years has been phone games: Pokemon GO!, Love Nikki and Time Princess. (These are all online-only games with a slight multiplayer component, but the vast majority of gameplay is solo.)

But I kept thinking “single-player games are fun!” To the degree that, when a KS for a neat computer game would come to my attention, I sometimes backed it. By July 2021, I had backed 4 different video games, 3 of which had delivered between 1 and 8 years previously, and none of which had I played, or even installed.

(I have a terrible record of making use of anything I back on Kickstarter, but that’s another entry.)

On August 10, the fourth game delivered: Boyfriend Dungeon. I was actually still looking forward to playing Boyfriend Dungeon. A few days later, I not only fetched the Steam key reserved for me, but I added it to my Steam account, installed the game, and then -- amazing! -- I started playing it.

Boyfriend Dungeon is a dating sim crossed with a dungeon stomp. You play as an individual who’s never dated before. You are visiting Verona Beach for the summer, where you sublet an apartment from your cousin. A dungeon has recently taken over the local mall, and it happens that a bunch of people can turn into weapons. The hot new thing is to meet up with a weapon and then go into the dungeon with said weapon and fight monsters.

The game just rolls with its wild premise. “Sometimes people turn into weapons and sometimes your mall turns out to be a dungeon full of old communications tech that’s trying to kill you, you know, these things happen.” No, I don’t know, and these things do not happen, but I’m glad to see that we’re sidestepping the tropes of “pretending none of this is going on” or “the government intervenes to cordon off the dungeon-mall and puts all the weapon-people into testing facilities” or whatever.

The game has six weapon-people (three male, one female, two nonbinary) and one weapon-cat (male). There’s some diversity in races/origins here: one African-American, one immigrant from India, one Korean man, and three white people. They are all slender and conventionally attractive. As you fight in the dungeon with one of the weapons, you gain affection with that weapon. Each rank of affection unlocks an encounter/date with that person (or cat). It also unlocks a new ability or a new ability choice (choices of ability are easily altered if you change your mind later).

You choose your pronouns and your appearance at the start of the game, and can change either one at any time. The sprites are androgynous, and you can choose to wear any clothing options available; the appearance of clothing is not affected by the pronouns you choose. I liked these touches and thought they worked pretty well.

All of the weapon-people are protagonist-sexual, as it should be in any dating sim. You can play through the encounters as either romantic or friendly. The same character can max affection with all 6 weapon-people, and play through each encounter as romantic, or none of the encounters as romantic, or just one of them. It doesn’t seem to impact the storylines one way or another.

After you max affection with one weapon, you get a 2x bonus to affection with all other weapons, so that does have the nice effect of reducing grindiness.

I maxed affection with all seven weapons and finished the main storyline. Note: finishing the main storyline ends the game! I recommend either finishing everything you want to do before you start the final storyline encounter (it will be obvious when this will happen) or making a copy of your save file first (the game supports this).

I picked the romantic options when dating the six weapon-people, and the romantic options all imply sexual content, although they’re fade-to-black about it. I found five of the routes pretty satisfying, and the sixth one a bewildering choice for a dating sim. I didn’t explore any of the “let’s be friends” choices with the weapon-people. My impression from the reactions of those who did is that the dates work best as romantic-allosexual. There are no romantic-asexual options, and the friendship options are portrayed as positive but not with the same depth as the romantic-allosexual.

The weapon-cat encounters are pretty much “make friends with a cat”. I found the weapon-cat storyline endearing although I’m not sure why the devs thought this was a good storyline to put in a dating sim. I mean, he’s a cat. He doesn’t talk, he does not interact as a being of human intelligence, and you’re not dating him. I’m not saying I wouldn’t play a “befriend seven different cats with different feline personalities, each of them getting their own distinct storyline” game because I 1000% would. But it was an odd choice when everything else is dating (basically) humans.

The game has a content warning for stalking; I’ll get into this more in the spoilers section below. I have some spoilery issues with the main storyline as well.

I am not much into dungeon-stomps and it took me a while to get the hang of this one well enough to get through it. I ended up repeating a lot of the early levels in the first dungeon several times because it’s what I could handle. Once I figured it out, I think I was somewhat overleveled for the later stuff, so it was pretty easy thereafter.

The final storyline fight was difficult enough that after I beat it once, I reloaded and tried to beat it with a different weapon, and then nope’d out after a few failures.

There is a setting to give you double health or something on those lines; I didn’t have a hard enough time to turn it on. (Though maybe using it would let me beat the boss again with a different weapon). I didn’t see any other difficulty settings.

So I found the combat content a bit grindy and a bit challenging, but it wasn’t much of an issue. And I liked the little break between storyline encounters that stomping around the dungeon provided.

Overall, I had a great time with the game. I appreciated that it was polyam-friendly (if only in harem-style), bisexual-friendly, and had nonbinary rep for both the protag and the love interests. I enjoyed the romances, and I liked the setting and the tone: offbeat and with a sense of humor, but serious enough that I could immerse myself in the world. The main storyline disappointed me in some ways, but not enough to impair my enjoyment of the game.

On to the spoilers! This includes some stuff that I enjoyed figuring out on my own and am glad was not spoiled for me. It also includes details about the content warnings and specifics on what disappointed me. So YMMV on wanting to read it.

I want to point out that I enjoyed this game enough that writing this review makes me want to play through it again. XD According to Steam, I spent 15 hours playing it. I expect someone reasonably good at the dungeon stomp could get through all the content in 10 hours or less.

A little space for people who came to this via direct link and didn't get the cut-tag.

The Antagonists

The main storyline starts by mentioning that some person or group has been kidnapping and damaging weapon-people. (Over the course of the dungeon stomp, you find and rescue all of the kidnapped/damaged weapon people. The damage is minor and everyone heals fine.)

Early on, your cousin sets you up on your first date, with a swordsmith named Eric. Eric pretty quickly revealed himself to be a cretin. I was kind of “really? Dating this guy?” after the first date and then after he dissed my character’s cousin in text messaging afterwards, I went “Nope, hate him.”

By the time it’s confirmed that Eric is the kidnapper and that he’s been doing it to try to forge his own weapon-person that he can control, I’d pretty well guessed all this from the clues. It also turned out that he was stalking the MC, which did come as a surprise to me.

I was like “wait, what? He’s been stalking ME? We went on one date!” And then I went ... “oh yeah, that’s kind of how stalking works, isn’t it? Obsessive interest in someone who doesn’t return it at all.”

I found the stalking plotline creepy and well-done. The protagonist gets support from all their friends and it’s treated seriously, not as a joke.

At the end, you have to fight and destroy Katana, the weapon-person that Eric forged. Eric admits his wrongdoing, apologizes, and goes on to seek therapy. I found the “you have to destroy the weapon-person” part to be depressing and cruel. The weapon-person is made out of pieces of your friends/lovers, and they’re portrayed as at least somewhat sapient -- they can talk and understand speech. Killing them because Eric is a douchebag felt incredibly wrong. I realize that they were also murderous and stalking me, but the final fight is portrayed as “you set up a trap for Katana in order to kill them.” There is no possibility of reform for Katana, and the protagonists never try to envision such. I’d’ve felt better about it if, say, the trap had been intended to contain Katana but Katana escaped and you have to kill them to save yourself/your friends. Forcing me to treat Katana as a non-person in exactly the same way that the villain treated them as a non-person did not sit well with me at all.

I don’t mind that Eric goes off to therapy rather than to prison, but I would like to have seen Eric make restitution for his crimes. I mean, he kidnapped and injured five people and a cat, plus the stalking and the crafting of a Frankensteinien monster. Dude has some serious work to do and “go to therapy” is a good start but it doesn’t cover it.

Romance Options

The “romance turned weird” is the one with Sunder. Sunder is the face of Boyfriend Dungeon: an Indian man with wavy, shoulder-length hair and a trim beard and mustache. Over the course of his romance, you get warned off of him early on -- “he’s no good for you/he’s dangerous.” And then some clues that he’s a vampire, which had me going “what the heck” and then “well, this was already a paranormal fantasy with the people turning into weapons, so I guess vampires fit in?” And then on his last date, well after confirming that yup, he’s a vampire, he dumps you, no reason given.

I was one part “I didn’t want to date a vampire so okay” and one part “what was even the point of having this storyline in a dating sim? Why did you make the face of your game the vampire dude that dumps the MC?”

Isaac was easily my favorite dating plotline: he has the sweetest personality, a fantastic voice, and the most seductive demeanor. Sunder was the easiest weapon to fight with, for me, but I maxed Isaac first because he’s So Good.

Ending

No matter what you do, the game ends with you leaving Verona Beach to go home. And leave all your new friends and lovers behind. The general implication is that you’ll be back someday, or they’ll come join you, but there is no explicit “you stay with your lover(s) and live happily ever after”. This didn’t bother me too much -- I’ve been in a lot of long-distance relationships, and it’s not ideal but it can work fine and there’s no obstacle to your character coming back. But for some people, it broke the implicit “romance should promise an HEA/HFN” promise. Which Sunder’s plotline broke more explicitly.

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/09/08/boyfrienddungeon.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

August 2021 in Review

2021-09-02T00:35:59Z

Health/Fitness

I took another trip in August, this time to visit my sister and attend my nephew’s wedding. It was pretty great. I ate too much because wedding and attendant festivities, but not as much so as when I visit Seattle, because I mostly ate home-cooked foods. Also, my sister is conscientious about serving vegetables at every meal, and I am conscientious about eating vegetables if someone else goes to the trouble of making them for me. So in some ways, I ate better than I do at home.

On my first morning there, I asked my sister what she did for exercise, because she’s always been pretty active. She gave me a downcast look. “Oh, no, I want to get back to hot yoga but I haven’t. I don’t really get any exercise anymore.”

And after that, I went with her on her usual morning walk-with-the-dogs, which was about a mile. Then we visited her mother-in-law, and walked a few blocks to go get lunch, and a few blocks to get a snack, and a few blocks to go back to her MIL’s house. And then a few blocks to go to the farmer’s market in a park near MIL’s house, and then a block to go to the grocery store. Then we went home and took the dogs for another mile-long walk around the neighborhood.

Basically, my sister’s idea of “I don’t exercise at all” is the same as my idea of “sufficient exercise.” I counted every day of my visit as having exercised. XD So I did much better on that front than I had in July.

Writing

Continued writing A Game to You! I am at about 30% through the outline now, after writing another 18,000 words to bring the total to 39,000. Progress is not swift, but I’m making it.

The Business of Writing

Alinsa is still wrestling with formatting on You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99 But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person. Formatting for this book is rough because there’s a ton of in-game text and I want the in-game text to be visually distinct from the non-game text. It’s a lot. o_o

I did some more editing for Demon’s Alliance, which continues to feel forever away from being completed. Meh.

Reading

I forgot my phone when I went to visit my sister, and stopped reading for several days because of that. Also, the M/M contemporary romance that I started in July lost much of my interest around the 45% mark, but it wasn’t quite enough for me to toss it on the DNF pile. Than at about 60% through it went from ‘I guess it’s okay’ to ‘ugh I have lost all patience with this love interest now and I just want the good love interest to dump him.’ I haven’t decided if I’m gonna skim my way to the end or just DNF it after all. -_-

Art

My friends have continued to do the “Craft and Chat” on Saturdays, and I’ve been using it to draw or color. I haven’t done any sketches I particularly like, but it’s practice, yay.

Gaming

While I was visiting my sister, we played some expansions to Ticket to Ride that I hadn’t played before. She also taught me a new game, Oltre Mare, about Age of Sail merchant ships in the Mediterranean. It was weird and complicated but not bad, although I could totally see why Ticket to Ride variations were the game of choice in the household. Anyway, new game learned!

August Goal Scorecard

Assist Lut: Done!
Look at goal list occasionally: very occasionally. Being away from home for like 25% of August really through me out of my routine.
Write more of A Game to You: Wrote 14% more of the draft!

Stretch goals

Exercise 20 times this month: I did this one! Just barely!
Consumption tracking: Only kinda sorta, but I’m counting it anyway.
Make an art: Very technically.
Practice art: Did do this, tho
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: Mostly posted about the Cancer Medication Saga, but technically yes!
Learn a new game: Oltre Mare!

September Goals

Assist Lut
Look at goal list occasionally
Get to the 50% mark on A Game to You That last one is kind of ambitious, given how little progress I made in August and that I have avoided all ambitious goals this year. But what the heck. I will ambit!

September Stretch goals

Finish A Game to You.
Work on notes/outline for a different book
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
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance
Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil
Maintain bullet journal
Learn a new game
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before

This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/2021/09/01/augustreview2021.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The Saga Resolves (FOR NOW)

2021-08-20T04:21:29Z

Wednesday, August 17, early afternoon: Accredo calls.
Karen: “I’m calling from Accredo, patient advocacy.” collects standard identifying information. “We show that insurance is covering both prescriptions with $0 co-pay. We can schedule your order now.”
Me: . o O (I want to know what happened to get the amount owed back to $0, but I’m not even gonna ask because maybe she’ll poke the wrong thing and it will reset to $7900.) “Great! Just a moment, we were about to go into Red Lobster to get lunch.”
Karen: “Oh, would you like to call us back?”
Me: “Oh no. Absolutely not. Please. Let’s schedule the delivery.”
Me: spends 20 minutes on the phone scheduling the order because they are required to read you the multi-page list of potential side effects and what you should do, among other time-consuming elements
Me to Lut: “So delivery is scheduled for tomorrow. I will believe it is being delivered tomorrow when you are holding the bottle in your hand.”
Me: *calls Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, leaves message asking them to call tomorrow with whether or not he should start the meds right away.

Early evening: I fly to Oregon for my nephew’s wedding, and forget my phone.

Thursday, August 18, late morning: Lut ACTUALLY RECEIVES THE MEDICATIONS.
Me: !!!
Me: calls the clinic from my sister’s phone to find out when he should start taking it
Clinic: “Now. Yes. Today would be good.”
Me: calls Lut to relay message and also explain the complex dosage stuff because the Ninlaro is once a week and taken the same day as five tiny dexamethasone pills and Revlimid has a side effect of blood clots so he needs to start taking aspirin again once he starts taking Revlimid

And that resolves it ... for this month. x_x His next cycle will start in four weeks, so in about 3 weeks, we begin anew. It SHOULD go more smoothly next time, since one way or another the out-of-pocket for Accredo for this year is now met.

Though I might give up on private insurance and switch Lut to Medicaid-only, which may or may not create new issues. The main reason I will do it is if I’m able to discern that Medicaid will in fact pay for all of his care if they’re the only insurer. I’ve been reluctant to quit private insurance because I know not everyone takes Medicaid (his primary care physician doesn’t, for instance.) But I also feel like I’m making some things (like this whole fiasco) unnecessarily complicated by having two insurers. :|

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The Unending Saga of Specialty Medication Continues

2021-08-17T23:28:48Z

Saturday: No news.
Monday: No news.
Tuesday afternoon, Accredo calls.
Lacey: "This is Lacey from co-pay assistance. We want you to apply for a grant from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to cover the co-pay."
Me: "I thought Medicaid was covering that?"
Lacey: "Who told you that?"
Me: "Accredo. On Friday."
Lacey: "Well, I don't have any notes about that. Do you want to apply for the grant or not?"
Me: "Why can't he get the grant from Celgene?"
Lacey: "Because he has Medicaid, he's not eligible."
Me: "If Medicaid won't cover the copay, why does the grant specifically exclude Medicaid patients? This makes no sense."
Lacey: "I know nothing."
Me: applies for the same grant that turned Lut down when they applied for it in 2019, and that historically opened in November and ran out of money for new grants in December
Lacey: "So the status is 'pending' until the doctor confirms the diagnosis."
Me: "He had a grant from them in 2018. The diagnosis hasn't changed."
Lacey: "Oh. Well, maybe 48-72 business hours until we get a response?"

Two hours later, Sarah Cannon Cancer Center called.
Aisha: "So, our rep with Accredo said -- and, um, this didn't make sense to me so I'm not sure I followed it -- but he said that the insurer didn't have Revlimid and Ninlaro in their pharmacology so they have to add them first."
Me: "That is consistent with exactly nothing that any other person has said about this."
Aisha: "I KNOW RIGHT???"
Me: "I picked Cigna because the health insurance exchange said that they covered Revlimid and Ninlaro. Cigna sent us a pre-auth for Revlimid and Ninlaro on July 13. They know what Revlimid and Ninlaro are. Their website even showed the Ninlaro script. Is he talking about Medicaid not knowing what the drugs are?"
Aisha: "But how could Medicaid not know? I didn't ask, though. I'll send him an email to ask. I'm off tomorrow but I'll call on Thursday with whatever I find out. Did you hear anything from Accredo?"
Me: explains
Aisha: "Funding in since COVID has been weird, so the LLS might have more money in the grant fund than they used to? I guess we'll see."

Hope levels: none.

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The Saga of Specialty Medications

2021-08-13T17:28:16Z

At the end of June, I had to switch health insurance providers because COBRA ran out on my existing insurance. I purchased new insurance for Lut, because ever since he got on Medicaid four years ago, I have feared he will require a treatment or a provider that won’t take Medicaid. (I am seriously questioning the wisdom of this choice.)

He started a course of Revlimid and Ninlaro on July 5, and I made sure to order the medication before the end of June because I didn’t want the first thing I did with a new insurer be “order $25,000 of specialty cancer meds.” I didn’t know if Medicaid would pay for the drugs or not (basically, no one knows the answer to these things until they actually try). And unlike clinical or hospital treatment, which you receive first and deal with paying for later, you can’t get medicines without paying up front.

But you can only order a month of these incredibly expensive drugs at a time. This is for good reason: Lut’s dosage was reduced this month, for example, so he can’t continue to take the old capsules (the capsules are not divisible, and they are sufficiently hazardous that, for example, pregnant medical professionals are not allowed to handle them.)

This meant that we had to get a new round of medications to start Lut on as of August 2.

A timeline of the saga!

July 13: Cigna sends us a pre-authorization letter for the Revlimid and Ninlaro prescriptions, to let us know they will be covered.
Friday, July 23-ish: Sarah Cannon Cancer Center sends the prescription to to CVS Specialty Pharmacy.
Wednesday, July 28: I call CVS Specialty Pharmacy and spend ~25 minutes scheduling delivery for Friday, 7/30. In the evening, I fly out to visit Terry. I give Lut his insurance cards in case he has an emergency (I usually carry them because I’m always with him when he sees a medical professional.)
Friday, July 30, 6PM Central: CVS Specialty Pharmacy calls to say that they do not take our new insurer, Cigna. Cigna has their own specialty pharmacy, Accredo. CVS Specialty Pharmacy does the best they can to transfer our info to Accredo.
I call Accredo. The first person at Accredo transfers me to a new person who works with specialty meds. (From here on, assume that any call to Accredo required talking to a minimum of two people unless otherwise specified). They eventually conclude that they know about Lut and have his Cigna information, but don’t have his Medicaid number. They know about the prescription from CVS, but they can’t fill it without the clinic sending it to them directly. (I suspect, but do not know, that this is a regulatory requirement.) The clinic is closed, and will not re-open until Monday. They ask when Lut is supposed to start taking it. “On Monday,” I tell them.
I don’t have Lut’s Medicaid info. I email him to ask him to call Accredo and give it to them.
Saturday, July 31, night: I check my email and discover Lut sent me the Medicaid number and asked me to call Accredo. Accredo is already closed.
Sunday, August 1: I call Accredo. They are not open on Sunday.
Monday, August 2: I call Accredo, and give his Medicaid number to them. The person taking the information is confused and upset that Medicaid only has a member ID, and not a slew of other numbers like private insurers.
I call the clinic and leave a message that they need to send the prescriptions to Accredo.
Tuesday, August 3: The clinic returns my call. They will send the prescription to Accredo tomorrow.
Wednesday, August 4: I get an email from Cigna that they have “new documents” for Lut. I check Lut’s account, and it shows the Ninlaro with a $7900 co-pay. The co-pay is exactly what I expected: the remaining out-of-pocket for the new insurance policy. I anticipate that either Medicaid or Celgene’s grant program will cover the co-pay.
I call Accredo. They have the prescription but Missouri state law requires that it be authorized by a physician, and the clinic put the nurse practitioner down as the prescriber instead. They ask when Lut is supposed to start taking it. “Two days ago,” I tell them.
I call the clinic and leave a message asking them to get Accredo additional information.
Thursday, August 5: The clinic calls me back to say they got Accredo the information they needed.
I call Accredo. Accredo says they have the information they need but they’re waiting on authorization from the insurer. I remind them that Lut also has Medicaid. Accredo: “He does? We don’t show that.” I give them the Medicaid number again. Accredo says it takes “a day or two” to get the prescription approved and filled, and they will call me when it’s ready for scheduling. They ask when Lut is supposed to start taking it. “4 days ago,” I tell them.
I take pictures of Lut’s insurance cards and store them in EverNote, so that I’ll have them on my phone for future reference.
Monday, August 9: I call Accredo and ask their automated system for a status update on the order. It is “processing.”
Wednesday, August 11, 10AM: I call Accredo and wait on hold to talk to a person about why this is still “processing”. After being shuttled through a few people, I reach a rep who tells me: “It takes 5-7 business days for a new prescription to go through. But I’ll mark it as ‘Urgent’ for you. When is he supposed to start taking it?” “9 days ago.”
I call the clinic to ask if they want to reschedule the 8/20 appointment that was supposed to be ‘after you finish the next course of Revlimid’ and will now be -- at best -- after a week of it. I leave a slightly hysterical message to this effect.
The clinic calls back to say that they’ve been monitoring the prescription and they had last called Accredo on Tuesday about it. Accredo had told them ‘we’ll mark it as urgent.’
Thursday, August 12, morning: A bot from Accredo calls me. “We’re calling to schedule your order. Wait, we can’t schedule your order. You need to talk to a person.” It puts me on hold for several minutes, then gives me a number and asks me if I want to call back or stay on hold. Me: “sure let's hold some more because lord knows if you'll have any clue why I'm calling or what I need if I call back. Since you haven’t told me why you called.”
I hold for several more minutes, and am put through to payment options.
Payment Options: “I have no idea who you are or why you are calling us.”
Me: gives them all the information about Lut and herself
Payment Options: “The system says we’re waiting for prior authorization.”
Me: “you know, the insurance co sent us prior authorization on July 13”
Payment: “Oh yeah, we show that for July 20. Let me put you through to an expert on Revlimid & Ninlaro.”
I hold.
Expert: “We're waiting on prior auth”
Me: “I really don’t think you are.”
Expert: pokes more
Expert: “Wait we have authorization. We can send you the drugs! But oh ... there's a $7900 copay”
Me: "So he has Medicaid”
Expert: “He does? We don't show that.”
Me: gives Medicaid info to Accredo for the third time
Expert: pokes system some more
Expert: “So Ninlaro shows no copay now, let me re-submit the claim on Revlimid ...”
Expert: “There's no copay on Revlimid either now?”
Me: “Yay? I wish I knew why.”
Expert: “yeah me too. I will put a note for Scheduling to call you to schedule delivery.”
Thursday Afternoon: The clinic calls me. “So I just got off the phone with Accredo and there’s a $7900 co-pay on the Revlimid.”
Me: “I wish this surprised me in any way.”
Me: “So he’s got Medicaid and also there’s a grant program for Revlimid so I’m not sure why they can’t charge the co-pay to one or the other of those.”
Clinic: “I’m gonna call our sales rep contact with Accredo, but he might be gone for the day. I’ll call you back tomorrow with whatever I find out.”
August 13, Friday, morning: Accredo bot calls: “We need to schedule a delivery. Oh wait, we can’t. Let me put you through a person.”
Me: “Is this just going to be yesterday morning all over again?”
Accredo bot: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Me: holds for a few minutes
Accredo rep: “I know who you were called regarding”
Me: “Woohoo!”
Accredo rep: gets standard confirming info from me “Okay, so we got your Medicaid verified. You don’t owe anything for the meds.”
Me: “Yay! Does that mean we can schedule delivery now?”
Accredo rep: “Yes! Let me put you through to scheduling.”
Me: holds for several minutes
Same Accredo rep: “... so it turns out no. They need to do a few more things before it’s ready for scheduling. This call was just to let you know the Medicaid was verified. Another bot will call you when it’s ready for scheduling.”

And that brings us to the present: still waiting. At least we’re back to “no money owed”, but at this point I will not believe that the process is over until I actually have a Revlimid bottle for the correct dosage in my hands.

Getting treatment for cancer is not as bad as having cancer, but it is A LOT. x_x

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July 2021 in Review

2021-08-07T18:03:58Z

Health/Fitness

I did all right until I went to visit Terrycloth in the Seattle area, and then I spent a week pretty much ignoring all my fitness goals and eating large quantities of delicious food when I wasn’t hungry.

So that was fun, but not sustainable. XD It was great to eat at all those restaurants that aren’t available in my area, though, and Terry likes a bunch of ethnic foods that Lut doesn’t care for, so it’s nice to get all of those when I see him.

Anyway, no regrets. But now that I am home, I have renewed my resolve against eating food when I’m not hungry. (This always seems like it should be easy, and somehow it isn’t.)

Writing

I started writing A Game to You! At long last! Official first day of writing (as opposed to outlining and all the other preliminary stuff) was July 16. I’m not sure how much I wrote in July proper, because I didn’t track the writing I did while travelling until I got home. I’m putting it down as 21,000 words for July and counting the rest for August -- about 16% of the way through the outline. I didn’t write a significant amount while I was actually visiting Terry, but I wrote 4000 or so words while on the plane to and from Seattle.

The Business of Writing

I wrapped up the last bits on You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99 But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person in July, and it is now in Alinsa’s hands for layout. \o/

Reading

I got back into the habit of reading books in July, though I skipped a few days while I was on vacation. I started a few books and DNF’d them, then finished an M/F regency romance. I’m now working on an M/M contemporary romance that I’ll probably finish.

Art

I did some of this in July! I finished the Shirt Cut Meme, featuring several little pictures of Frost. And I did some random sketching, plus some sketching for characters in A Game to You. Some of my friends have started doing a “Craft and Chat” on Saturdays, so we’ve been meeting up on Discord to use video chat and draw or crochet or work on maps or whatever

Gaming

I learned a new game while visiting Terry, before July ended! We went to visit his friend Tom while we were there, and played Tang Garden, a game about designing a garden for the emperor and his court during the Tang Dynasty. It’s a game with good production values: you get to put tiles and little gazebos and trees and stand-up tiles to represent mountains and waterfalls and things in the distance. We played two games. I’m not sure how much I like the mechanics of the game, but it’s fun to play in a purely aesthetic way.

I thought Terry had taught me a new game in August, too, but I can’t remember what it was now. Maybe I’m thinking of Le Havre, which we’d played before, but it had been long enough that neither of us remembered much about it. Except the starvation part. So many mouths to feed. o_o

July Goal Scorecard

Assist Lut: done!
Look at goal list occasionally: done!
Finish final edits for Level 99: done!
Write some new fiction: done!

Stretch goals

Work on notes/outlines for A Game to You: Yep, did some of that.
Start writing A Game to You: done! First draft about 17% complete.
Exercise 20 times this month: so close but no. I think 18 times? I kind of fell down on this towards the end of the month.
_Consumption tracking+: I skipped tracking while on vacation, but otherwise done
Make an art: Done! I finished the Shirt Cut Meme.
Practice art: Did this too, with some sketches.
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review: Only two posts, but it counts.
Maintain bullet journal: Didn’t track while I was on vacation, but otherwise done.
Learn a new game: done! Tang Garden.
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before: done! The Fall of Lord Drayson, by Rachel Anderson.

August Goals

Assist Lut
Look at goal list occasionally
Write more of A Game to You

Stretch goals

Get A Game to You to 50% complete.
Work on notes/outline for a different book
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
Post a few blog entries, apart from my usual month-in-review.
Finish revisions on Demon’s Alliance
Start revisions on Angel’s Sigil
Maintain bullet journal
Learn a new game
Finish reading a book I haven’t read before

Too many of my stretch goals are recurring goals. o_o;;

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