Reading Record 1

 I've decided to start using my blog to keep a record of what I read.  Not to review the books--though I'll probably make comments and leave notes--but just to keep track of them.

Why?

Well, because?  I guess?

See, I recently joined a book club on Discord.  (Uh...depending on your definition of "recently"...the meeting we just had this weekend was the third monthly meeting...)  I seem to recall that one of the reasons behind it was that the person organizing it wanted to ensure that they actually managed to read twelve books a year.  I've seen people in other Discord servers say that they had aimed for that number and failed.

My mind frankly boggled at the idea of reading so few books in the space of an entire year.  I am, in fact, fairly certain that I've read more than that already this year.  (Depending on how you define "a book," something I'll get into in a minute.) But I also find myself somewhat challenged in terms of perception of time.  I have trouble pinning down exactly when I read something.

In fact, that time perception issue is the larger part of why I decided to start writing things down.  See, I skipped the second month of the book club because it was a horror book and I am easily frightened.  Before this weekend's meeting, I was wondering if I would have people asking me if/what I read in that interim.  (No one asked, as it turned out.)  But as I tried to go over what books I had definitely read in the last two months...I wasn't sure which books I had read recently were before those two months and which were during it.

Thus, I thought a reading journal, as it were, was a good idea.  Nothing elaborate, of course, just a light aid to my inability to parse time properly.  Starting on January 1st would make more sense, but if I waited that long, I might forget all about it!

So, starting now.  At least it's a book I started reading on May 1st, so it's a clean monthly start...?  (Though I only read one chapter on May 1st, then realized I didn't remember what was going on, and the next day I spent a while rereading the last three or four chapters of the previous volume.)  I haven't had a lot of time for reading over the last few days, hence the absurdly slow reading speed on this book that I should have finished in two days, three max.

Anyway.

The book I finished reading today was The Legend of Exorcism, volume 5, by Fei Tian Ye Xiang.

Now, this of course brings up the question of "how do we define 'a book'?"  Because this is only volume five out of eight.  The eight volumes together comprise the full text of the novel.  That being said, this volume is a full 413 pages long (admittedly, in a moderately large font).  And Chinese Web novels are rather (in)famous for their great length, so...

I dunno.  Is it wrong to consider it a "book" I have read when it's only 1/8th of the full work?  Or is it right to do so, when it's fully as long as a regular novel?

Fortunately, this isn't something that requires a definite answer, since I'm not doing this for any reason but to bolster my weakening memory, but it's still sort of gnh that I don't know how I personally take this.

Anyway, I don't have much to say about the book itself (since the story is far from over!) except that I kinda feel like I peeked at the ending:  in between the previous volume and this one, I read (most of) a book on Chinese history that told me what was about to happen to the historical characters (of which there are many, including the emperor).  On the one hand, that told me before I resumed reading a certain amount of what was going to happen...on the other hand, the author expected his readers to have that knowledge going into the novel in the first place!  (Having knowledge of the history involved is why I opted not to read his non-fantasy, purely historical romance set during the early days of the Three Kingdoms period, because of what I know about the two leads (and how that guarantees a tragic ending to the novel) ...)  There was a special author's note at the start of the first volume (that was specifically added for the English translation) to give at least an indication that the empire was about to be thrust into turmoil, but it wasn't as fully detailed as what I read in the history book.  (Reading an historical account involving people whose names I'm used to seeing attached to fictional(ized) characters was pretty surreal, though!  🤣)

Anyway, that's about all I have to say, I guess.  I'm not sure what to start reading next.  I picked up a sapphic romance sequel (of sorts?) to Pride and Prejudice at the same time that I bought this, but maybe I ought to save it for June?  Ditto the new Eternal Library book, which has been waiting for me to read it for a while now...  (I suppose I could reread Pride and Prejudice, if I could pick which copy to read...)

Welp, I'll worry about all that later.

Right now, I need to make my lunch.  😅

IWSG Last Minute Post

    I normally pre-write these up to a week in advance, but for some reason I thought tomorrow was Wednesday?

🤷🏻‍♀️

Anyway.  Thankfully I can for once lean on the monthly question...

April 1 question - If you have a playlist (or could put one together) that either gets you in the groove to write or fits with one of your books, what is it? What type of music or what songs? 

Well, I sort of can lean on it.  I don't have any playlists that fit what I write (unless I'm working on a fanfic and listen to the soundtrack of whatever it's a fanfic of), but I do have a lot of playlists I listen to while I write.

They're pretty much all soundtracks, though.  Mostly video game soundtracks, with a few anime soundtracks as well.  Lately I've been listening to various Shin Megami Tensei (and spin-off) soundtracks, in part because I haven't put as much of my music collection on the computer I now use to write.  I ought to put more Final Fantasy soundtracks on there, since this is an anniversary year for the series.  (I do have to be careful about some game soundtracks, because sometimes listening to them makes me want to replay the game, and I don't have time to drop everything and play a 40-80 hour RPG just because the music puts a hanker in me.  😅)

The main thing is that since they're usually not vocals (and if there are vocals, they're typically not in a language I speak) they don't distract me from my writing.  (I remember one time, many years ago, since I was starting work on a book set in the '80s, I made a playlist of all my '80s music...and I spent more time singing along than writing.  😭  Not gonna make that mistake again!)

IWSG: March '26

    Another winner of a post title.  😅

I just can't title things, evidently.  Been struggling with that a lot lately, actually.

Anyway, I'm still in a phase that's heavier on editing than writing, sadly, which doesn't leave me with much to say...

...except at least to be able to crow that I have finally finished the rewrite of book four of my Greek mythology series!  Well, the heavy-duty rewrite of the 2014 draft, that is.  I've been working on the rewrite (more a restructuring, really) for almost a year at this point, so being done with it is exciting!

Except...

Except that as I was preparing for it, I had to reread the first three to take notes on various particulars and details...and I saw so much wrong with them.  So now I'm mired in trying to fix them.  About halfway through book one now.

I realize that's a potentially endless cycle of perpetual rewrites, but hopefully this time I'll actually be getting the first three books into a properly acceptable state.

Hopefully.

Or at least less cringe-inducing, anyway.

(Book one especially needed it, because for its interactive version, I used TWINE instead of Ren'py, which means that the text is smaller, and the way I messed around with various settings to increase the amount of the screen that held the text had somehow disabled the ability to go back...which is especially agonizing considering that in the interactive version of book one I had for some reason thought it would be a good idea to insert all these choices where you could see one scene or another but not both, even though the reader of the plain text version of course gets both.  (Spoiler:  it was not a good idea.  Not at all.)  So the updated interactive version is going to be in Ren'py same as the others, and it will have properly working rollback and absolutely no evil "you can only see one of the scenes ha ha ha!" choices.  Also the text should be bigger, which will hopefully make it easier to read.  And the glossary will be better.  Also the horrifically-bad, exceedingly-boring, unnecessary backstory-dump that took up four or five massive paragraphs at the start of the prologue is now gone, and good riddance to it!)

IWSG Feb '26

    So post titles are still not my thing.  😅

More relevantly, or not so relevantly maybe, I am still in a sort of "muddling through it" phase in my writing.  I alternate between being full of enthusiasm and being completely unsure how to continue or what to write.  Frustrating, but it just sort of moves along at its own pace, so I guess it's fine?  (Frustrating in a different sense is my ever-growing realization of how much I use "just" as a crutch word in my writing.  I try to notice as I'm writing and replace it with "only" or "merely" or "simply," but I fear that's treating the symptom rather than the disease...)

On the plus side, I did just yesterday finally get past a scene in my current massive rewrite project that had been blocking me for weeks.  So that's at least something?  (Better still, there's very little between where I am and the climactic showdown with the remarkably undeveloped villain of the week.  😅  So at least the end is in sight, I suppose?)

I feel like I don't ever have much to say that would even interest anyone, let alone potentially help them get through any of their own problems.  😰  But if I didn't have the IWSG posts to write, I might go six months or more without making any blog posts at all, so... 😰

IWSG: already 2026, huh?

    Soooo....Blogger still hates me and doesn't want to let me use pictures unless I either drag-and-drop in new pictures or copy-paste the html from old posts that used the pictures earlier.  Not actually relevant to this post, but I felt like complaining about it anyway.  (It's probably more Windows 11 than Blogger, really.  This is the worst operating system I have ever used.  I'd switch to Linux, but that might make my feeble game dev aspirations die a horrible death.  Also I'm not smart enough.)

    Anyway.

    I didn't achieve everything I wanted to as a writer last year, but pretty much the only concrete thing I failed to accomplish was to finish the rewrite of The Tablet of Destinies, book four of the adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne.  I'm still slowly plugging away at that (after being stalled for weeks at the rewrite of chapter five, I finally got that accomplished a few days ago, and even managed to get a rough outline of how I want to handle the rest of the changes!) so I'm hoping to finish the rewrite sometime this year.  Ooh, that reminds me, I should post a devlog to the itch.io version of book three to say how book four is coming along.

    Other than that...well, I didn't get to do much game dev work, either; I went into the year with a grandiose plan for a complex visual novel I wanted to write, but I quickly slammed into the brick wall of not having any idea who I wanted any of the side characters to actually be, so...that went nowhere.  I keep hitting that same wall in my other projects I've started working on, too.  Some side effect of having been a pantser for so many years, I guess.  Hopefully I'll figure out a way to get around that brick wall for future projects.  (Or even to revive one of the ones that have already crashed into that wall...)  I did at least manage to release one really polished visual novel wherein I didn't have that undefined characters problem, so that's something.  Obviously, I just need to focus my game dev on simpler ideas until I get the knack of it better.  Or something.

    As to things I did accomplish, I actually made a graphic of things I wanted to do at the end of last year.  Here's how that ended up working out for me:

    The VN mentioned in so many of those squares is the same one I mentioned above that crashed right into that brick wall headfirst.  😰  I'm not 100% sure I truly qualify as having achieved the "Actually play some Steam games" one or not.  I did get through a Steam playthrough of My Time at Portia, finally putting my Steamdeck through its paces, but other than that...kinda just mucked about with a few short things.  Not sure how fully any of that counts.  (Also not 100% sure those short things were in 2025 and not in 2024...)  Still, I decided to check it off anyway, because why not?

    So....yeah.  That's about all I have to say right now, because this new laptop is actually pretty hard to type on if I don't remember to adjust the lapdesk to a tilted setting first.  Um, also because I don't have much to say because my brain has been feeling pretty broken lately because the health issues that make it hard for me to sleep at night have gotten worse.

    But maybe I'll think of something later and edit this on my phone before it goes from scheduled to posted.

Looking back on the last few months

    So, things have been.

    Ahem.

    Yes, I know that's not proper grammar.  Or rather, it's very weird grammar.  (Technically, it's not totally wrong?  Things have indeed existed, which is basically what that means?  But's not phraseology that people would normally use.  Nor is the word "phraseology," but that's beside the point.  Actually, I'm not positive it's even a word, but this one character uses it in The Music Man, so...anyway.  Irrelevant.)

    My life has lately felt even weirder and more stagnant than ever.  Partially because I more than ever feel the need to hide in my house from the world, but it's definitely not just that.

    I had to buy a new computer because of the end of support for Windows 10.  And, as I believe I posted before, I absolutely HATE Windows 11.  To the extent that I've been putting off even turning on this computer so much so that one of my utility bills will be paid a day late and it took me a week to look at the results of the MRI I had done.  Also that this computer's battery emptied itself in the time between when I last turned it on and when I turned it on this morning.  (Though it also seems to have turned itself on at some point without my permission to download updates, which 100% should not be possible, but as soon as I plugged it back in and turned it on, it started installing updates.  I looked over all its settings as soon as it finally turned on (after it was done updating the stupid thing turned itself off again!) and didn't see anything authorizing it to turn on at random intervals to check for and download updates, but it apparently did so anyway.  (I think I'll put it on airplane mode before I turn it off, which will hopefully prevent it from doing that again.  Might not stop it from turning on and exhausting its battery, but it should prevent it from downloading anything when it's supposed to be off.))

    So, because of my new aversion to going online due to it requiring this overpriced hunk of junk (I didn't realize that the computer was named the Latin word for "conquered" because I was being targeted to be conquered by Microsoft!), I've been doing my writing on my old computer in airplane mode, because unsupported OS don't matter if the Internet can't touch ya! 🤣  (Ugh, those Windows 11 emojis are so ugly!  Why would they even make the emojis worse for the new OS?  Why would they even change them in the first place, for that matter!?)  Which means, of course, that getting any of what I've written onto the internet to, say, quote a passage in my blog, is suddenly somewhat tricky.  Unnecessarily tricky, in fact, considering that one of the changes to the way Blogger adds pictures to a post means that I can't add them on my phone anymore.  Also there's the fact that for some reason this computer has decided that I should not be allowed to access my own pictures on Blogger, nor even to upload new ones!  Thankfully, it turns out I can still add pictures by dragging and dropping (for the moment!) so I can still add pictures, but it's even more awkward than ever before.

    Anyway.

    What I've been writing lately has been (surprise, surprise!) another Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic.  Though I did at least get a little writing done on the rewrite of The Tablet of Destinies, but...ugh, it's such a mess.  It's actually really hard to rewrite it just because the current draft is such garbage.  It's much easier to just focus on writing pointless fanfic.

    I want to talk about this current fic now, blathering meaninglessly, as usual, but I think I'll put in a blocker line so the whole post won't go on the front page of the blog.

IWSG: Last (IWSG) post of 2025

    So, I've figured out how to add pictures to blog posts on my phone, as long as they're pictures I've used before.  😅

Uh.

More pertinently.

Once again, the suggested question for this month's post doesn't speak to me, so I'll be posting about something else instead...

But my writing life has been pretty stagnant lately, so I guess I'll write about that stagnancy?  (Wait, is that a word?)

I'm not totally sure what the problem is that's making it hard for me to write lately.  Lack of motivation, definitely lack of ideas (except for fanfic ideas), those are factors for sure, but are they the only factors?

I don't even know, nor am I sure how to figure it out.

It's making me feel like more of a failure than usual, though.

Without knowing quite what the problem is, it's hard to fix it.

In looking over my posts for the year, I realize I've been failing to get any significant progress made on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books for the entire year.  😭  I really need to get off my backside and get that rewrite finished.  If I can just power through into the climactic confrontation, it should be...um...possible?  I dunno.  I don't even know if anyone would care about it even being released.  I had one comment on one of the AO3 versions of the earlier books in the series that indicated someone had genuinely read it all the way through and liked it, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️