I've been doing stuff.

I've been slowly getting my resume and cover letter updated. I've mostly been playing videogames and walking around town. I haven't done much in the way of writing stories and I definitely haven't been working on any PPC related stuff either.

Now that I've read some posts, I should get to writing some drafts for PPC stuff.

~Ozzielot

Working. Just celebrated Midsummer with friends, it was pleasant. Managed to be in the countryside without a single mosquito bite, which is rare! They usually flock to me. And also there were cats there. Cats are nice.

Am about 8000 words into an interlude that will heavily feature Psychonauts-related elements, am pretty excited about that even if I'm not even close to approaching an ending. It's trucking along though! It's just got a lot of notes that go "AND THEN MORE OF THIS TYPE OF CONVERSATION HAPPENED BUT WHATEVER ON WITH THE STORY WHO CARES" which I will obviously have to, uh, fix. The number of hours I have spent on this interlude is frankly insane.

I remain present on the Board. Just imagine me peering in through the door occasionally to see what's going on.

/Ekwy, waving

I've been traveling a lot in the past few months, but I finally arrived home a few days ago. I'd like to work on both personal and PPC related writing projects, but I haven't been able to find the motivation as of late. For now I'm just focusing on recovering from my long trip, reading, listening to Night Vale, educating myself about the internet, and gaming. I have plans to learn 3d modeling and printing soon, so I might have more to do with my time in the future. Oh, and I finally finished the PPC original series.

As far as the PPC goes, absolutely nothing. I think it's partly post-NaNo burnout, which gets worse every time; but even replying to this thread has taken days to work up the energy. I don't know.

I haven't done nothing with my time, though. I've been very slowly working on a translated Middle-earth musical that I started over on the Barrow-Downs back during lockdown; we're only about three songs from the end, but everything just keeps slowing down. And recently Kaitlyn and I have been playing around with board-game design: we have two which are broadly complete apart from coming up with understandable rules, one of which should be suitable for print-and-play (or indeed scratch-in-the-earth-with-a-stick-and-play).

I also did some family tree research earlier in the year, which. Folks. Do not dig too deeply into family tree mysteries unless you are in a very stable state of mind, because every single person in them dies. I ended up writing two of the most depressing biographical pieces I've ever seen and inflicting them on my parents, because frankly they're descended from these people and they should suffer too.

(Which backfired massively, because my mother forwarded it to my, um... half-second cousin once removed, who asked her to ask me to look into her husband's grandmother, who it turns out may or may not have died of the freaking Spanish Influenza.)

And the usual menagerie of writings-for-the-drawer that makes up my general background state, but which I don't think we really mention. I have loads of little stories that I just turn out and bounce to Kaitlyn for our entertainment, because ultimately, I'm a writer; that's what I do.

hS

just video games and stuff really, trying to come up with ideas of a short fiction story (non PPC) and my goal is to finish it before school consumes me in the fall

im also working on an rpg maker game, i’ve found that i enjoy making little rpg games rather than write, as i feel like it’s more engaging and enjoyable when it’s intractable! at least for me, i feel like i can get a story better across that way

A mix of things.

Non-PPC-wise, I've been slowly working on an original fiction story that's now percolated to the point where I'm really happy with what I've written and also now all the main characters make sense to me (two got overhauled) and I finally have pretty full knowledge of the plot! I've gotten to play with a bunch of fictional cultural stuff, and character relationships, and it's been slow going but I'm very glad that this is what's come out of taking my dad's advice to stick with an idea without judging it (guess what difficulty I was having with writing a couple years ago >.>). I've only shown it to a very few people, and only one has seen it in full--and she's really into it, which is just the best feeling!

I've also been learning Mandarin more actively (via Duolingo, cdramas, dictionary, and so on), and it's been really fun. I recently got to the point where I added some of the relevant keyboards to my phone, and have been playing around with that a little bit! It's only been a few days, though.

PPC-wise...I've been slowly (okay, it's kind of on hold recently) pulling together all the various missions and interludes that I started over the years (and sometimes finished!) to be able to put them up and kind of...close that chapter. I have a framing device and everything; I just don't have much spare time and energy to put into it recently. But maybe I'll try harder to pick it back up. These are, primarily, stories I'm no longer interested in continuing; I just think it might be nice to share most of them as 'historical' stuff, instead of just leaving them on my hard drive/gdrive and that's that. I know at least a few people here would be happy to read these, even in incomplete form. We'll see how it goes.

I also have the next part of Like A Wink and A Smile (Jacques/Jenni series), which I've slowly been poking again; hoping to do more soon. That one's got a mix of editing, writing, and cutting down left to do; I'm excited to see how the ending goes, once it can be finished!

There's also...more Jacques! I'm sensing a bit of a pattern forming. Remember how he wound up with an orchestra's worth of AUs? Yeah, so in 2020, when I decided to just write anything that came to mind and entertained me, I started a little series about his AU selves slipping through into HQ, and so on. Some of it I don't think I'll be sharing, but some of it I definitely would like to. I just need...honestly, it's probably only a matter of a few hours each, for the most part, in terms of finishing them; these ones that I want to share are primarily stories I wrote in one go or over a few days or so, but then getting to the ending stalled into half an hour here, half an hour there (two hours there when a bunch of words spilled out...), or, in one case, I really wanted to add a couple bonus scenes, and that got into the majorly broken up writing sessions territory as well. It's not unpleasant to go in and write a few sentences at a time, but I would very much like to just sit down and write the endings already, especially since I have the inclination to and more or less know what they'll be. The problem is that I keep not getting there, for RL reasons (namely: I work full-time and also study and also have to deal with general housekeeping and all manner of similar stuff, all of which takes a lot of time and energy). Maybe I'll manage to shift that in the coming months, but I'm trying not to beat myself up about it. It'll happen when I figure out how to make it happen, as will every other writing goal I'd like to achieve faster, and in the meantime it's not like nothing's moving. A few things are, really, just very slowly for the most part. It'll happen.

So yeah, that's about it! We'll...see how it all goes. Wish me luck with improving that writing part of the work-school-housework-RL-writing-hobbies balance soon :)

~Z

Since I'm working as a pet-sitter, my schedule is constantly changing and it's not always easy to find a solid chunk of time when I can shut out the world and just write. TBH it's more to do with managing anxiety/energy than actual time, and I think I'm getting a bit better at it now that I've been doing this for almost a year(!) and feeling more secure that this is a job I can keep doing long-term at least until my knees/hips/back give out. ^_^

I have been enjoying collaborating with Lily Winterwood on the Heirs of Avalon world, mostly behind the scenes, though I do have a bit of Jenni/Jacques/Ryan's backstory about halfway done. That's been my active focus most recently.

Purely PPC-wise, I continue to poke at Subjugation off and on. Like Ix and My Immortal, the fact that it's a Legendary and people tend to have high expectations about it makes it a bit daunting, but I am close to the point where I actually have plans for what happens, and whenever I get there I hope it will come more easily!

There's also a Farscape mission starring Ilraen and Agent Taboo of the MPreg Division; various co-writes in various stages of completion (please poke me if it's been too long!); and some interlude-y things also in various stages of completion.

In non-writing projects. Phobos and I broke down and got into miniature-painting at Christmas, so I've also painted some Space Marines. We decided they're Soul Drinkers chapter, which are purple and gold and definitely not scions of the Alpha Legion. {= )

Oh, and I'm on Flight Rising doing pixel dragon breeding and things. If you like pixel dragons, come be my friend and also Calliope's!

~Neshomeh

The day job of being (as hS put it than one time) a Master Computerer continues to take time. Aside from that, I've been down various rabbit holes, including Balatro and Final Fantasy 14. And finishing the Southern Reach books. That and, for example, the game of Spell that Delta's been running on Discord these last few Fridays.

I also keep picking up small writing projects, mostly Post-Self stuff (what can I say, the world surrounding the computer full of poetry skunks has hooks in my brain).

Health issues kicked me in the rear a while ago and really sucked dry my motivation to do much of anything since I'm mostly just laying in bed all day. I'm still slowly poking away at Final Fantasy XIV fanfics and the sequel to my book, and I keep thinking about finishing the My Immortal mission but always stall out because tackling the legendary is a bit intimidating, haha.

I'm still looking in on the Board from time to time. I do miss it here, but I just don't have much to say these days.

My partner has been capital letters Going Through It since January. Turns out he has an autoimmune condition that affects less than one in eleven thousand people in the UK, which was only discovered after spending nearly two months in a medically-induced coma. He also needs a wheelchair for the moment to help with his at-home convalescence. So in terms of writing, I haven't been able to really do all that much. The exception is getting back into the Parahumans series and writing a fic for that, which has somehow acquired over eleven thousand hits on AO3. They can't all be hateclicks, right? Right?

So yeah. It's been pretty goddamn rough here at Scapegrace Towers. But at least I don't have to worry about my life partner possibly dying at any moment. Which is nice. =]

. . . proofreading the second of (many) unpublished novels by our very own RosieAzrael! They said the next one conatins "puppies!"

I also started what I thought was a short story on my phone at lunch one day, which wound up taking multiple months to finish. And since I limit myself to two long reading sources at a time, that means I was doing screen-based reading only for quite a while there. But fortunately, I finished off the phone story while shaving Tuesday night, and I happily get to put a paper book back into rotation at last! Hooray!

—doctorlit, reading

Though lately I've been doing more prep work on the next story arcs rather than actual writing, also due to the fact that I'm in a bit of complicated phase of my life (Nothing to worry about thought!)

I've been doing a lot of cooking for my folks, and that has been going very well. I have grand plans of trying to make pho sometime this week. I'm done with school for the summer, so now I have time to sit around and read books and work on all my projects. I read A Game of Thrones by G. R. R. Martin for the first time this week and now I am debating whether to read the next one. I am very annoyed with the Lannisters, I wish Eddard hadn't been executed because he was a really decent guy, and I hope Arya doesn't get discovered. I could give you a whole rant on that. It was interesting and I liked it, but I will say that my first love will always be for Tolkien.

In other news, I got myself a mandolin and I've been figuring it out for a few weeks. I love it and I've been practicing a lot, but this is a bit of a problem because I have not been practicing my violin so much.

Purely PPC-wise, trying to finish up a standard 'old shame' mission abandoned/started in 2022, another CYOA co-write with Lin, and an Interlude concerning Makes-Things, gumiho, and childhood fears. And, if I can finish some of my other projects, a 'mission' bordering the worldbuilding angle, with jurisdiction issues and the impact of imagination and creativity as a threat to the multiverse, and also of short-lived universes and even fics crafted by dreams.

In non-PPC works, I'm been chipping away at some longer-form stories I've wanted to finish for half a year now. Struggling a bit with that old classic 'wow, old me wrote so much better' feeling, but trying to push through regardless. (It's probably just because my 'good writing' comes in spontaneous bursts impossible for me to plan out, so I get the feeling I can't write well when I basically do on accident.) I think I have... what, 50,000 words worth of original fiction by now? A decent amount considering my usual rates, haha. It's just healthcare golems and wizards being launched into space, low-stake stuff.

It’s taking a while. And it shall continue to take a while (namely another two months) because I’ll be at camp.

Specifically, my riff of Wild At Heart, a stereotypical Suefic on Wattpad with glimmers of potential. The last three segments are still scheduled and should be put by the end of June. Feel free to go back and comment on previous riffs!

--Ls

which of course I can't start on yet because Demonly Kings is still ongoing.