So.
March was horrible.
Not even midway through the month, I started experiencing heart palpitations. (I'm not quite 48, btw, so this is not normal.)
After a few days of suffering anxiety over this, it slowly dawned on me that this was likely being caused by the stress of working on my script for the game jam. I stopped working on it for a few days and the symptoms got better.
Of course, when I resumed working on it, they sure enough started up again. 😫 I had started the month hoping to write the entire visual novel's script in the first month of the jam and then get the programming done in the second month.
Because of this heart thing, I'm not even quite to the point I had decided would be a good stopping point for a demo version. 😭 Fortunately, there's another place that a demo can stop, but... 😖
It just really annoys me that my own body sabotaged me like this.
Honestly, if I hadn't spent ~$65 on various art assets for the game, and two artists hadn't generously donated their time to make character sprites, I'd just cancel the thing and say "well, this just means no more game jams!"
Admittedly, I've still taken a "no more game jams" policy, but...I can't just cancel the game now. I'm just not sure how I'll ever finish it. 😩 (I can, at least, find someone else to do the programming, but the rest of the writing...that's harder to deal with. Though at least that part won't have a time limit.)
I am going to spend so much time writing fanfiction to de-stress after this. (Which sounds crazy, writing to de-stress from writing, but...🤷🏻♀️)
I think what most irks me about this is that I put off working on one of my novels to do this game jam, after rushing to try and get its next draft and release prep done first. That may have added to the stress, actually... 😰
Ugh.
My life is just a wreck.
That's the short version. Even my hobbies are bad for me.
(On the other hand, this forced me to finally get a new primary care physician, so small win?)
