A to Z Reflection

 

    Hmm.

    What to even say?

    I mean, a lot of the individual posts were things I had fun with, though I'm not sure how well I fulfilled my intention on the theme I chose for myself.  I mean, yeah, I wrote 27 posts about characters I have written about, one for each letter of the alphabet, but it ended up being more of a parade of "I enjoy this quote so much" and less of an actual discussion of the character or any facet of writing for them.  In that regard, I think the F and R posts were probably the most successful, because I actually did address more points than just "I enjoy this passage about this character."

    The fact that it mostly just swapped back and forth between my Greek mythology-inspired novels and my Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic was also not cool.  Unfortunately, I don't actually have that much else that fit the qualification of "available online or hopefully will be available online someday."  I guess if I'd tried harder--or been willing to accept smaller characters--I could have found characters from more diverse works to use.

    So, it's like...I finished the challenge but I also kind of feel like I failed somehow?

    More importantly, I was so fixated on it that I got very little else accomplished over the month of April, and was so exhausted by the process that I barely ended up visiting anyone else's blog--though I did at least visit a few!--so it sort of...defeated the purpose?  Even worse, I was getting stressed enough about it that I ended up triggering my heart palpitations, so that's excessively bad.

    Overall...

    Overall I think I can't even contemplate doing this again unless my heart condition ever becomes truly resolved, instead of merely "less intrusive," which is where it's been for the last...I dunno, six to eight months?  (Doesn't help that my doctor is no longer with the hospital (the reasons for her departure were not explained to me) and I have way too many social phobias to be able to easily call another one.  Plus all the tests indicated that there wasn't actually anything wrong with my heart, so it's like...wtf?)

    *sigh*

    This has not been much of a post.

    But I don't really feel like I have much else to say, either.

    (But that's why I won't be entering it into the Reflections bloghop.  No point in subjecting other people to the boredom...)

IWSG - Yikes!

 

    Normally, I pre-write these days in advance, but this month I've been so distracted by April A-to-Z that I totally forgot. 😰  So I'm gonna have to hasten out a post that will likely be even sloppier and more disjointed than usual.

    I've been in a bit of a muddle all month, but it got worse about...hmm...I want to say about a week and a half ago?  Somewhere around there.  Unlike on my computer, on the browser on my cell phone, I keep a whole bunch of tabs always open so I don't have to mess around with bookmarks and stuff.  And one day I opened the tab that is always aimed at the back-end of this blog so I could keep working on my April A-to-Z posts when it gave me this message that it couldn't load any of my data.  The posts, pages and even statistics all said that.  I wrote it off as a momentary glitch, and went about my business, but then it still said that four or five hours later.  Everything was still there--if I clicked the "view my blog" button, I could still see all my content--but I couldn't access anything, so I was afraid my blog had been frozen pending deletion, or at least pending an investigation into whether or not it needed to be deleted.

    So at that point I absolutely started panicking.  I tried using the help page to see if my blog was disabled, and came to the conclusion that my account was disabled (despite that I could log into my email just fine) and tried to start the appeal process, only since the account was not, in fact, disabled, obviously that didn't work.  After freaking out for a couple hours, I managed to download a full back-up copy of my blog....and then noticed a new help page indicating a way to get an indicator that a blog (rather than an account) was disabled and how to appeal that decision, so I went back to the back-end page...and everything was totally back to normal.

    I still have zero clue what happened.

    What I do know is that I figured that if my blog was going to be disabled, it would be because of the work of (fan) fiction I had posted on some pages, so I reverted them all to draft and across three days painstakingly copy-pasted the text from the blog (where it had received various minor edits in the year it had been up) to AO3.  (Where, ironically, it's gotten more kudos than it got views on the blog...)

    Anyway...my heart palpitations are definitely exacerbated by stress (at this point, I think it's safe to say they're not caused by it, though I still don't know what did start this condition) so that needless to say caused my heart to start misbehaving for a couple of days straight.  (And that was after I'd already had some issues because I was working too hard at the April A-to-Z process!)  So that was all kinds of not fun.

    Um.

    That's so not a writing thing, even though it's tangentially related.

    I didn't mean to go into so much detail.  (This is why I normally pre-write, so I have time to start over if I get derailed and run off on a tangent like this.)

    Anyway.

    I'm also very distracted because I'm in the final stages of getting The Martial Maenads, the third in my more-or-less YA series, ready for release.  I finished writing the glossary for the interactive version, but I'm using a different program for code entry now (because I learned the program I used to use has a habit of accidentally deleting your saved code!) and it was giving me all kinds of problems yesterday, triggering another heart palpitation, from frustration more than stress.  (Doesn't help that my computer is evidently too much of a potato for that program, and it chugs constantly when it's open...)  I should be able to finish getting the glossary into the code today, and then I just need to write a couple of post-novel mini-essays, maybe, or maybe I just need to write up that pre-novel essay on the alternate theogony that got introduced in book two?  Well, either way, that shouldn't take too long.  And then I only have to reread the novel twice--once in the Ren'py version and then once after posting the text online, since I find I can spot a lot of new errors by looking at it on my phone on AO3--and make any needed changed, then it can finally be released into the world that doesn't actually care in the slightest about it.

    I'm looking forward to finally getting that released, because I told myself "no more writing new things until after the release!" to force myself to stop goofing off by writing more fanfic instead of working on my actual release.  (Bad enough that I was putting so much into blogging over April that I barely touched it until the blog posts were all written...)  It's kind of weird how not writing can cause just as much stress as writing can.

    Aaaaaaand I feel like I have said nothing of any relevance to anyone, but I can't think of anything else to say. 😭  I'll try to get next month's post pre-written so it will be less of a gibbering mess.