Marching Forward (Har Har)

March Books: 1/5 (The Murder at World’s End)

February is always such an interesting month. It’s short, but sometimes it feels long. Like, I got a lot done in February (and dealt with a lot of crap this year as well) this year. Most of my class (still working on that last section) got done, most of a book of writing exercises, enough books (February traditionally comes up short in that regard). I’d say that I was just as if not more productive than I typically am in a month.

Now we’re four days into March, and it feels like all my momentum got eaten. Funny how that works.

(Also I smashed my finger in a drawer this morning, which is unfortunate.)

Writing-wise, I do need to finish my class, and I also need to write the short stories I’m prepping for said class. I’ve started a new writing book, Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk. So far he offers writing advice but it doesn’t have the built in exercises Ursula Le Guin’s book did.

I think I mentioned this last week, but I’m also considering working on a kind of found footage sort of story using random paper people left at work. I’m an office administrator in my day job, and people feel like they can just donate notebooks or office supplies that they don’t want any more, often by just leaving them on my desk with a note.

(Generally I am pro-notebook, but sometimes they donate dozens at a time, or a lot of really strange supplies that no one is actually going to use.)

A few weeks ago I got a bag on my desk of small notebooks, index cards, and what I can only assume are cards meant to be used in a card catalog or rolodex. Functionally useless, from a work standpoint, but it feels wasteful to just recycle the lot of it, so since I don’t have book-based exercises anymore, I thought I might do a card a day for some sort of story.

The cards look like this:

A pile of index cards with a hole in the middle of the top.

and they’re about 3×5 inches. (This is maybe a third of them in the picture, so there is room for creativity.)

I’ve been watching some YouTube videos about found footage horror so I like the idea of doing something along those lines, like notes between people in some sort of circumstance of which I do not know as of yet. Or maybe I’ll just write bits of a story on it, a little bit each day, as a warm up.

And then I can tie them together, I don’t know.

(Seriously, what is the hole for? People who are more experienced with card catalogs/rolodexes, is this what you used for them? How old are these cards?)

That’s kind of on the backburner for now, until I figure out some other things, but I guess if a story idea comes to me we can get going on that.

That’s the plan, anyway. What are your plans for March?

Oh No, It’s Demo Time

February Books: 4/4 (The Murder of Mr. Wickham and Steering the Craft)

I don’t know if you remember last year, squider, but Steam apparently has a demo event at the end of February each year called Next Fest, where you can play demos of games coming out in the next twelve months.

Hundreds of demos, they claim! I picked out, uh, seven.

(Anything to avoid playing a real game, I guess.)

Of the demos I played last year (I downloaded six, but didn’t realize you had to play them during the week of the event, so only played five) I put three on my wishlist, and bought exactly none of them when they came out. So do with that what you will.

In order:

Cleaning Up!

A cleaning game, not unlike House Flipper, though more cartoon-y. The tutorial was so impossible I thought I’d have to chuck it for control issues, but the actual gameplay after the tutorial was fine. I played through the whole demo in about half an hour. I put it on my wishlist but I don’t know that I’d pay more than $10 for the full game.

Flock Around

Some sort of multiplayer bird watching game. I tried it on solo mode, as I didn’t feel up to dealing with random people, and to get a feel for the game itself without the distraction of other people. I don’t know if it’s a problem on my end or not, but whenever I went to look at the pictures of the birds it would say no bird had been found, and if I tried to get closer to the birds to get better pictures, they’d fly away. Mostly frustrating.

Nippets

A hidden object game. Cute graphics, but too out of the box for me, apparently. I could do about half the first level (maybe the only level in the demo) before I’d gotten well and truly stuck, and if there was a hint system, I couldn’t find it either. (ha.)

Thrifty Business

A cute little shop-owning game where you buy boxes of stuff from people and resell them in your thrift shop. Looks like there’s some re-occurring characters and stories based off of them, and the opportunity to build community around the store. Took me half an hour to get through the demo (I may have played a few extra days) and I put it on my wishlist.

Hozy

This, too, is a cleaning game ala House Flipper (closer to House Flipper, honestly) but the game ran so slow the controls were practically unusable. I tried for a bit then gave up. Don’t know why I picked out more cleaning games when I already have one.

Birdwatching Notebook

Apparently I was into birds when I picked the demos as well. This one was cute, and it doesn’t take up much of your screen, so I suppose it may be meant to be one of those idle-ish games that sits onscreen while you do other things. I enjoyed it while I was testing it out, but don’t see much appeal long term.

The Last Gas Station

You have bought or inherited a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Most of the game is store management–buying stock/gas, helping customers, cleaning up the store, but there’s definitely a horror element to it as well, and some sort of mystery about the gas station. Took me two and a half hours to get through the demo. I put it on my wishlist. Probably the one I’m most likely to buy. You know how much I like horror adjacent games, and it has a cute pixelated art style as well.

So that’s the demos sorted. I suppose I should play a real game with a storyline (and an end!) here soon.

Happy weekend, squiders!

Making Progress (But Slowly)

February Books: 2/4 (Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom)

(I read Crooked Kingdom in three days. Been a while since I’ve plowed through a 500 page fantasy novel.)

Sorry for the Saturday post, squiders. But I’m sick of talking about things that are problems, so let’s ignore all that, shall we.

Writing

I’ve made good progress in the last week. The new microphone works great, and I’ve done all the theory videos, one of the workshop videos, and the intro and outro videos. Did run into an issue on Thursday where the videos were not recording sound for no apparent reason (everything was plugged in, power was on, settings were correct) but the recording software seems to have gotten over itself, thank goodness.

Only video left is the outlining workshop. I’ll do the outlining as part of that video, but I’m debating how much prep work to do first. Typically I brainstorm before I outline, and it may be easier/less obnoxious if I do that part not on video. But fingers crossed that I will figure out my plan forward and record on Monday, and then it’s on to the editing.

Where, fingers crossed, I shall not discover a ton of sound issues like I did that one time.

I’ve also done several exercises out of my Steering the Craft book, and am now nearing the end.

And someone gave me a bunch of tiny notebooks at work that they no longer wanted, so I’m toying with the idea of writing a single tiny notebook page of a story each day.

I’ve actually done something writing related every day this month except February 13 (though I did blog that day, so maybe that counts).

Reading

I finished up Six of Crows (which I know everyone else read ages ago) and went immediately into its sequel, Crooked Kingdom, which I read in three days, as I mentioned above. I don’t tend to go directly from one giant fantasy book into the next any more, so that’s noteworthy (but it is a duology, so really one long story anyway). I enjoyed both.

Other than that, I’m through Volume 15 in the Promised Neverland manga I’ve been reading (Volume 16 has yet to show up, so I may hunt it down on ebook, because of course Volume 17 has shown up). There’s 20 volumes total, so I’m about done with that. This, too, was published a while ago, but I guess it’s good to finally work through some things on my TBR list.

AND I’m also reading The Murder of Mr. Wickham, which, as you can guess from the title, is a mystery based on Jane Austen’s books. It’s got characters from every book (I never read one of them…Mansfield Park, maybe?) which is proving to be Too Many characters, and I’m having a hard time keeping people straight. Which is bad, because everyone gets a viewpoint. We’ve finally gotten to the murder now, though, so I’m hoping things improve.

AND also When All the Men Wore Hats, which is by Susan Cheever on the stories of her father, John Cheever. Have I ever read anything by John Cheever? I don’t think so. So one could ask why I picked this book up, and I don’t rightly know, except it had a write-up in the BookPage (a free magazine my library gives out about upcoming and new books) that caught my interest. And it’s good to read outside one’s normal genres from time to time. Broadens the mind and so forth.

Art

I have done a few pages in my trip sketchbook, but have run into a potential issue that is going to become a problem quite quickly. Normally I take notes when I go on trips. I know myself, and I know, like many things in my life, I tend to binge working on scrapbooks or sketchbooks or what have you, so taking notes allows me to remind myself what we did when I get around to actually working on things.

I’m working through a cruise we took in November of 2024 (ahhhhhhhhhhh why do I do this to myself) and I just…stopped taking notes on Friday. (The cruise went through Sunday.) Now, I know why, the kids got norovirus and spent all of Friday throwing up all over the cabin, but it does mean I don’t know what the spouse and I did that day, or what any of us did on Saturday (our port got cancelled so we toodled around the ship). Sunday, well, we got off the ship and then I got sick at the airport and had the most miserable flight of my life. Yay.

Video Games

I’ve played some video games this month, but I’ve not done any of the real games I’m supposed to be playing.

If you recall, I have 60-some games in my library that I’m supposed to be playing through and either beating, or at least categorizing them for later.

This month I’ve played: House Flipper, which is a game where you go into people’s houses to clean, decorate, repair, etc. them, whatever they want. Also you can buy houses and fix them up and them sell them to other people. I’m pretty sure you cannot beat this game, that there are always more houses to clean. It is relaxing though, just painting or vacuuming or what have you. I played this earlier in the month to deal with the Stresses Related to Stupid Drama.

The Perfect Tower II, which is a tower defense game Steam just put in my library one day. I liked it a lot the first time I played it, but was less enamored of it this time around. I may give it a few more chances and then chuck it into a category.

Among Us and Goose Goose Duck, which you’ve probably at least heard about unless you’ve been living under a rock. If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know that I was big into Among Us during the pandemic, even competing in and placing in tournaments. Goose Goose Duck is essentially the same game as Among Us. It’s free and I’ve had it in my library for years, but had never gotten around to it til a few weeks ago.

All four of these games are in my “Fun!” category already, which means they’re games I go back to periodically as the mood takes me. None of them count toward my goal.

So that’s me this week, squiders! Hope your week is going well, and that you’re taking care of yourself.

More Drama But On We Blindly Stumble

February books: 0/4 (Doing great. Have read four volumes of manga, though.)

(Sarcasm!)

The drama thing continues to take up all my mental and emotional energy, which is so, so dumb. The worst of it is that it took something that I was excited and confident about and has made it so I’m second-guessing everything. Sigh.

My friends and I in the Spork Room (my earliest online writing group) are doing a Baby Step challenge this month (and next). We’ve done one from time to time, but basically the idea is that you do just a little bit, every day, instead of setting a grand and perhaps unattainable goal. We set 100 words or 10 minutes of writing-related activities.

Thus far it’s actually been going fairly well, in that I’ve done something every day of the month. Main project wise, I tried to record the theory portion of my SkillShare class, which is just a PowerPoint with me talking over it. I tried this over two days, first using PowerPoint’s built-in recorder (which is actually not great, you can’t go backwards to re-record something if you mess up) and then with ScreenPal, which is what Screencast-o-matic is called now. I tried both with both of my current microphones, but all the recordings sounded distant, like I was shouting down a tunnel. My spouse says it’s an EQ problem but I can’t figure out a way to modify that, so I bought a new microphone to see if a better microphone might help the issue. That just arrived today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a chance to get it a test to see if it fixes the problem.

It is interesting, though, because I didn’t notice anything weird with the sound when I did the video tests last week.

On the days I haven’t been fighting with my microphones or doing video tests, I’ve mostly been working through Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s prose practice as opposed to structure or anything like that, but it’s been good and I’ve appreciated the exercises. Sometimes it is good to look at the details rather than the big picture. Thus far the hardest exercise has been one where I had to write without using any adverbs or adjectives, and also one where no sentences could be longer than five words. Her goal is to make you focus on rhythm and flow, and how each word is working toward the tone and feel of your piece. It’s a good reminder.

Currently I’m working through some POV exercises. She has a narrator-observer POV which is not one I’ve seen before but which is actually super fun to write.

Today I sent out some queries because why not. I haven’t sent any out, really, since November, so it’s something that needs to be added back into the monthly routine. At the end of the month we’ll be at a year a querying. Not sure what the next steps are there, exactly, but hope springs eternal. At least for now.

So it is nice to do just a little bit each day, and built up some consistency, but I do wish I wasn’t having to spend some much time on drama, and I do wish the filming was going a bit faster (fingers crossed for the new microphone). The kids are off school til Tuesday, so not sure I can film while they’re around, though I can at least test the new mic.

Have anything you’re working on, bit by bit, squiders?

Why is There Always Drama (and January Thoughts)

January Books: 5/4 (Weird Parenting Wins)

No February books as of yet.

Sorry I missed my second update last week, squiders. There’s been ~*~drama~*~ with my volunteer commitments, which is always so dumb. We’re all adults, why can’t we act like it? Anyway, I was livid for like 48 hours straight and I didn’t get anything unrelated to that accomplished.

Anyway, that’s awaiting mediation and we’re moving on as best we can.

I’m tracking my goals a little differently this year. I made a spreadsheet. In theory I am noting days when I do each of my normal goals (writing, reading, art, video games, and a fifth column for word count when applicable) but in practice I’m remembering the tracker every few days and so January is a little piecemeal.

According to said tracker, I did 5 writing days, 11 reading days, 2 art days, 12 video game days, and wrote 572 words. I suspect the writing and reading are underreported, but oh well.

I did get through the theory portion of my SkillShare class, which often takes the longest (aside from video editing), and do two exercises in the Ursula Le Guin craft book I’m slowly working through.

So now we’re up to the filming portion of the class. I spent yesterday looking at my options for doing screen share with my face in the corner, since it’s been a while and my webcam no longer supports that functionality, and today I tried them all out, which, I’m not going to lie, was pretty fun. I basically talk to myself and it’s all a bit silly. Maybe I’ll make a blooper reel at some point.

But, basically, my requirements were:

Free
Easy to use
Supports the dual inputs I need for the workshop portions of the class

I came up with four options and made a short video with each (and also, in some cases, played with the editing and exportation options).

Zoom

The idea is that you go into a meeting by yourself and record the meeting. There were some pros to this; Zoom has built-in background blurring and light controls, and you can easily move between your face and screen sharing.

However, I found the video quality of the recording to be quite poor. Easily the worst of everything I tried. So I doubt I’ll use this.

Canva

Canva records screen recordings with talking heads if you download the Desktop app (which I thought I had at some point, but apparently if I did it got eaten one of the times I’ve had to reset the laptop). The image quality is nice, sound levels are good. No blurring of the background that I can see.

You can’t do just screen recording or just video of yourself, as far as I can tell. The editing suite is fairly intuitive, and it’s easy to add in text and other effects, but unfortunately without paying for a subscription I can’t control the resolution the video is exported at, which makes the whole thing kind of grainy.

ClipChamp

I’d never heard of this, but apparently it’s the built-in Microsoft video recorder/editor in Windows 11. I’m pretty sure I used its predecessor for editing before. The video quality is good, and it supports screen/face, just face, and just screen. It too is fairly intuitive on the editing (or at least, is close to what I’m used to) and also supports text and other effects.

It runs a little slow, though, and the videos it makes are huge. Plus the default is to upload everything into OneDrive which isn’t where I necessarily want a gazillion gigabytes of raw video, but I think I can make it work.

Honestly, I’ll probably go with this.

OBS

I’ve had OBS for a while, as it ties in to Twitch and every now and then I do ponder streaming video games. But one would need free time for new hobbies, and we barely have time for the ones we already have.

ANYway, I’ve had issues with sound levels with OBS. When I tried streaming some games last year, the audio for the game ended up being way louder than my commentary, to the point where you couldn’t even hear it in some cases, and I’m not sure how to fix it. It’s potentially easy, but it feels very overwhelming because I don’t understand the menus.

OBS also supports just screen or just face or both, and as an added bonus you can select where your face goes over the screen and how big it is. Video quality is good.

Audio is still so, so quiet. Part of me says that it’s fixable, and maybe I should poke at it and figure it out.

The other part says that ClipChamp basically does everything I want and just use that instead of making things harder for myself.

Wednesday

I started this entry yesterday and then had to go do productive and responsible things, so today I’ve poked around a bit on just screen recording options. Traditionally I’ve used Screencast-o-matic, which has worked well but does put a watermark on the screen. But it does allow me to select a portion of the screen to record, which is useful, because typically I teach from PowerPoint in Presenter mode.

I tried ClipChamp here and discovered that if I put it in Presenter mode and share my screen, it will just do the presentation, but it puts the presentation controls on the screen, and doesn’t have an option (that I’ve found, anyway) to remove the cursor. Perhaps if I recorded the video it could be removed after the fact. Who knows? Not me!

Canva doesn’t seem to do just the screen without a talking head.

Apparently you can also record directly in PowerPoint, which may be the easiest thing to try. And if it doesn’t work, well, Screencast-o-matic still exists.

But I think I’ve done all the research and playing around that I need to, so the next step is to start filming. That’s for next week, I think.

I’ll let you know how things go!

Hope you’re doing things that bring you joy, squiders. See you soon!

Always Pondering

January books: 4/4 (Love’s a Witch)

You know how long I’ve had this blog, squider? 15 and a half years. That’s an insane amount of time to do anything, really. This blog is older than my children. Ha!

Like any longer running project, it’s gone through cycles. I definitely spent a long while writing more authoritative posts–here’s how you do this, here’s what this means, here’s a long write-up about some aspect of writing. (My character archetype posts are still some of the most popular posts I’ve done to this day.) I spent some time doing a lot of Landsquid related things–drawings, short stories, guest posts from other writers. I’ve shared story aspects and vulnerabilities, good times and bad, write ups about conventions and conferences, written parts of my nonfiction books here first.

There’s always an aspect of “is this working” that runs in the background when I post. Do people like when I share stories? Do they appreciate when I share my hardships or successes? ARE YOU ENTERTAINED and whanot.

I haven’t shared a lot of work, traditionally, aside from the Landsquid things, because of a couple of reasons: 1) I’m not always brave enough to put something out for other people to see, especially if it hasn’t been edited and beta’ed, and 2) the idea of writing stories for the blog sometimes feels…unfocused. Like, it’s taking away from other projects that I should be focusing on.

But I do revisit the idea from time to time. Would people like stories? Or would it be like shouting out into the void?

I feel like the blog has been a bit of a downer lately. Yes, the world sucks and terrible things are happening everyday, and it is hard to create in such an environment, and I’m not in a place in my life where I can create as easily or as much as I have done in other times, but when even I am sick of my own moping, that’s saying something.

So maybe it is time to try something new.

Nothing’s clear yet, but the wheels are turning. Maybe we take the best of the morning pages for the week and add a little sketch to go along with them. Maybe we do a prompt challenge once a month.

We shall ponder. But let me know what you think, squiders, if you have opinions. Has there been cycles here at the blog you’ve liked better than other ones?

See you later this week! Maybe with answers!

Creative Vibes

January Books: 3/4 (Five Golden Wings)

Hi ho, squiders, you’ll be happy to know I haven’t touched video games since my post last Thursday, which follows established trends and is not surprising in the least.

I wish I could say I was getting other things done, but aside from a bit of painting and some work on my class, most of my time is still being spent on Scouting work, so I may need to think about my expectations on myself until we’re past this point of the process.

Last week I finished reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. It’s one of the writing books I inherited from my mother and was published in 1986. It consists of a series of short chapters talking about different aspects of writing, but unlike many of the writing books I’ve picked up recently, it was about the feeling of writing. The vibes. The act of being creative and being open to the world around you.

It felt, to be honest, like a breath of fresh air.

Someone in one of my writing groups recently expressed how writing to publish changed their whole outlook on writing, and how she wished in many ways she could go back to that earlier creative work, where the creative part was the point. Writing without worrying if it was any good, if the plot made any sense, if it was marketable.

And she’s 100% right. I feel like many writers–and creative people in general–go through a process. They start creating as children or young adults for the love of the craft, for the fun of it. But people reach a point where they feel like they should do something with it, and everything changes. And as far as I can tell, you can’t really go back to before you knew about story structure and rising arcs. Some innocence has been lost.

And many people give up on their creativity altogether.

Something to think about. Is there a way to reclaim more of that freedom that I used to have? Some way to find joy in the art of writing without wondering if it’s any good? I’d like to restart the morning pages and see if that helps, though thus far I haven’t managed to get them back into my routine. Hopefully by the end of the month.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just write the most inane, self-fulfilling story I can manage, but I do worry that I wouldn’t be able to manage it anymore, that my brain will tell me I’m wasting time I could be spending on more “serious” projects, or that I’ll try to self-correct in the middle.

On a semi-related note, the friend who I sent my November story to (if you recall, I started a new story for November to write just to write, with mixed results) said it was super intriguing, and how mad she was that the story wasn’t done. That was nice to hear! So I’ve added the story into my project list for the year, to return to when it makes sense.

But yeah, I don’t know. It feels like I should be getting more done, that I’m letting my career slide, that forward progress must be made. But maybe I do need to spend more time with just creating to create.

I just wish I was as good at it as I used to be.

See you next week, squiders!

Actually, Let’s Talk About Those Video Games

January Books: 2/4 (Writing Down the Bones)

Since my post on Tuesday, I have:

Beaten A Building Full of Cats 2, which kept my save data the second time around.
Played the demo for Strange Antiquities. I played their first game, Strange Horticulture, a while ago, and Strange Antiquities seems to have a lot of the elements I liked about the first game with some new mechanics. I went to put in on my wishlist and discovered it was already there.
Started playing Mask of the Rose, which I Kickstarted who knows when, but only got about half an hour in.
Managed to rally enough of my old Among Us friends to play for two hours earlier today, which was excellent and reminded me of why I loved the game so much.

It’s a lot of video games, like I noted on Tuesday, and it’s continued to be a lot of video games. So I got to thinking…is this a sign of something? Stress? Avoidance?

I suspect our relationships with gaming, much like our relationship with food, is created when we’re children. My mother did not allow video games in our house, which she always said was because they rotted your brain, but looking back, I suspect it was actually a money thing. My cousins lived across the street and had a NES or SNES or whatever was out at the time, and she never seemed to mind when I went over to play games at their house. Additionally, computer games were always okay. Mostly we had access to teaching games (my favorite was Super Solvers Treasure Mountain, which taught you grammar and word definitions. I could not tell you how many elves I caught with those silly nets), though at my grandparents’ I also had access to arcade classics like Asteroid, Centipede, Tempest, and whatever that game with the rendered tanks was.

I got a GameBoy when I was 12. I’ve never owned any consoles myself. (My husband grew up playing consoles and has continued to buy new generations as they come out. We as a family own a Switch and a PS5.)

As such, while I do occasionally console game, I still, to this day, mostly computer game. (And a lot of the console games are more active games, like Just Dance, and Dance Dance Revolution before it.)

I’ve never been someone who plays, oh, half an hour of a game a day and then moves on to other things. I either spend a couple hours on them or don’t touch them at all.

Which brings me back to this week. Am I stressed? Am I avoiding something? Or is this just part of my normal binge/don’t touch for weeks or months pattern?

I think it is, perhaps a combo of one and three, with a side of “this is on my goals so technically I am getting things done” productive procrastination. My spouse is out of town on business, and I’m going to be honest, he helps a lot with my day to day executive functioning. Am I functional adult? Generally yes. But it’s much easier when he’s around.

And I’ve found in January, especially, I tend to go out the gates full steam ahead on a goal, and this year just happens to be gaming. I’m sure in a few days or a week I’ll wander off and not play anything until February.

What probably also helps is that because my video game goal exists to help me get through my backlog of Steam games, I tend to pick games each month that have been sitting around but that I don’t especially have an urge to play, but this month I bought games off my wishlist and then played them immediately.

So, yeah. Should I do other things? Maybe! But maybe it’s okay too. It’s not like other things aren’t getting done.

Anyway, happy Thursday, squiders. See you next week, when we shall see if my shenanigans have continued.

Mid-January Check-In

Little early, but hey, why not.

January books: Still 1/4

Reading

As we can tell from my usual count, it doesn’t sound like a lot is getting done. But I’m still working through that Weird Parenting Wins book (and I’m in a section about teenagers, and there’s a few things I might want to try) and I’m about a fourth of the way through Six of Crows, which has been on my TBR probably since it came out. I bought this copy five years ago (the receipt was still in the book) but better late than never.

I’m also slowly making my way through Writing Down the Bones, which I started at my writing retreat at the beginning of June. It’s not a terribly long book, but I find that I need to digest each section (which tend to run 2-4 pages).

Video Games

I’m not going to lie, I’ve been spending perhaps more than I should here. I bought three games at the beginning of the month at the winter sale, and I’ve since beat two of them, Tower Wizard and Digseum. Both had idling elements so they could run in the background while I did other things and check on them periodically (Tower Wizard more than Digseum, which needed more hands-on grinding), but I appreciated that neither went on forever like other idling games I’ve tried. Both games were under $3 and I definitely got my money’s worth.

The third game I bought was A Building Full of Cats 2. I’ve previously played A Building Full of Cats and A Castle Full of Cats and they’re all essentially hidden object games, where you have to find the cats in various locations. However, I’m having issues where it’s not saving my progress. It takes a long time to do each level so I’m pretty annoyed about that, especially since the end game stuff won’t unlock unless all the other parts are done, assuming it follows the same format as the other games.

Today I also re-downloaded Among Us, which I played copiously during the pandemic. (According to Steam, it’s been two years since I last played.) I spent a little bit of time today playing Hide and Seek mode, but my hope is to be able to get my pandemic Among Us friends together and play in the near future.

I also played a game called Lost But Found where you’re the lost and found at the airport, and you’ve got to correctly return a stream of items to people. I found this one frustrating, and generally I’m really good at these types of games, so I would not recommend. Some aspects of the game were not well explained (and I never did figure some of them out) and it was also a little buggy. Not worth it.

Art

I thought briefly about it.

Writing

My class is actually coming along pretty well. I outlined everything and am about halfway through creating the slides for the theory portion of the class. I find the slides typically are the most infuriating part of creating the classes, so it should be smooth(ish) sailing once that part is done. (I think it’s because while outlining the class is all well and good, when you actually start to create the class you find areas of repetition or missing information, and then you have to fix things as you go.)

I am slightly worried about filming the workshop portions. I bought a webcam in COVID times that would do multiple inputs, so you could screen share (and film it) and put yourself up in the corner, but somewhere along the line the company removed that functionality. I might be able to use the software I use to stream on Twitch to do more or less the same thing, but I was having issues with the volume last time I tried (the game audio was wildly louder than my commentary audio). Now, the writing screen shouldn’t have any audio of its own, but I think there is probably an issue with the microphone audio.

So that may or may not be an issue when we get to the filming portion.

I’d like to restart my morning pages, which I haven’t gotten around to yet, but all in all I’m not too worried about how things are going.

Do I need to stop playing so many video games? Yes. Will I? Maybe! See you later this week, squiders!

Goals and So Forth for 2026

January Books: 1/5 (Rose/House)

Now that we’ve got last year’s reading stats out of the way, we can talk about 2026 and goals and whatnot.

As you guys know if you were here over the last year, 2025 was rough, from a writing standpoint. Part of that was a bunch of life stuff and volunteer requirements (and I’m already running into some volunteer issues this year) so really I should give myself some grace, though that’s hard.

(Thus far, a week into 2026, I have finished a short story, gotten two query rejections, and did not get into the two mentorship programs I applied to in November. A mixed bag.)

I also have my normal yearly goals: reading 50 books (going to retry the 1 off my TBR and 1 I own requirements this year. I read a lot more of my own books than normal last year, and I hope I can continue that trend), working through my Steam games (though I bought 3 more last week…but I have started all three of those), and attempting some art periodically (still about a year behind on my sketch journal, which makes me think I should perhaps try something else as that’s not working how I wanted it to). I’d also like to start up archery. My family bought me supplies for my birthday two years ago and I haven’t even put the arrows together yet.

On the writing front, I talked briefly last week about how I was having difficulty finding cohesive writing goals for the year, and I can’t say I ever did. I’m going to focus on a single project at a time and let them take the time they need, and then move on to a new one based on the circumstances that exist at that time, rather than a prescribed list I’ve made at the beginning of the year. So we’ll see how that goes.

For my first project, I’m going to work on the interconnected short stories set in my Trilogy universe, which I believe I talked about briefly in October. As part of that, I’m going to make a SkillShare class based on how to write interconnected short stories, so hopefully effectively killing two birds with one stone (which is an awful metaphor, if you think about it).

So, wish me luck.

Have any interesting plans of your own for the new year, squiders?