Oh my goodness, is it really Monday again already? I know I’ve said this a million times before, but I really do have no idea where last week went. I feel like very little in particular actually happened, and yet it was just gone in a flash.
Mind you, when I say that I feel like very little happened, that’s not to say that I didn’t get anything done. That is to say, there’s definitely plenty that I should have gotten done and didn’t, but other stuff got done. Some of that stuff was, like…housework and whatnot, but hey…that crap has to get done too, right? Right.
Side note before I get into the meat of the post: I just wanted to mention that it’s snowing. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, honestly, but it kinda is because we’ve had a weirdly mild and lacking-in-precipitation winter so far. I mention this because, remember last week when I complained that I was cold and couldn’t seem to get the chill in my bones to go the hell away? Well that has pretty much persisted since last week’s post. It turns out that having a really mild start to the winter makes it feel that much more miserable when the world finally does get cold.
Okay, whining out of the way! Let’s do this thing!
Health
Phew! Okay, a few things of note this week.
First of all, I did do several days in a row worth of P90 videos, so yay for me. However, in direct opposition to this…I got really really bored with the P90 vidoes. Now, I’m sure things will bounce around in my head as the weeks go by and I have different things going on and whatnot, but yeah, just at the moment doing those same two P90 videos back and forth is striking me as incredibly boring, which is not very conducive to keeping a habit going. So, to shake things up a bit, I started playing “Just Dance 2021” (which Adrianna got for Christmas). I’ll probably intersperse the actual exercise vids with the dancing to shake things up a bit, but we’ll see how it goes. What’s really important right now for me is to just keep moving and burning calories. Lord knows I’ve got a lot of them to burn.
And speaking of calories, we had a bit of a hiccup over the weekend. I did fairly well concerning food throughout the week, though I started to slip a bit at the end of the week, and then Saturday came, and oh boy… Long story short, it was a friend’s birthday, and we had a small Covid-restrictions-appropriate party for her, and there was a lot of liquor, and a lot of food, and just…just arseloads of calories, you guys. Just off the top of my head we had a chocolate cheesecake, chips, crackers with cheese and pepperoni, peanut butter balls, trail mix, and Swedish Fish, and that’s not considering the calorie content of all the stuff we drank. Soooo…yeah. I ended up gaining some weight back that night. lol Most of it is probably water weight, because that happens every time I drink, but even so I intend to be as good as possible for the rest of the month to try to reverse some of that damage.
To those ends, and because Jason is starting to feel like a pathetic blob as well, we’re both going to try to stick to an intermittent fasting schedule for a while and see if it helps us. Honestly, neither of us ever really eat breakfast, and we both tend to just guzzle water and coffee until late afternoon, so it shouldn’t be all that difficult to pull off, as long as we restrain ourselves from snacking at night.
Creativity
Firstly, I would like to revisit the topic of my new graphics tablet and the fact that I am absolutely fucking loving it. I’m not really getting the hang of coloring stuff, and I’m not entirely sure that I ever will, but even just the sketches I’ve been doing…SO much better than 90% of the shit I do organically in a sketchbook. Being able to have a ‘model’ layer to sketch over top of makes getting poses right so much easier. It has honestly made drawing so much more fun for me than it’s been in ages.
Of course, you can probably guess that I’ve been doing a ton of Good Omens fanart, and I am totally not sorry at all for that, but I’ve also been doing some more original stuff and that’s been great as well. The picture below, for instance, is a scene from “The Other World: Book One”, and after completing it I started to seriously consider eventually republishing the books with occasional illustrations. I think it would be fun and add a touch of something extra to the books. That will definitely be a ‘way down the line’ kind of thing though.
In terms of writing, I had another weird week. Productive, but a bit off. For several months I had a pretty decent laser focus going with whatever I was working on at the time, but now I’m starting to fiddle off into multiple directions at once again. Part of that is obviously because I’m trying to put work into “The Other World” instead of just lending all of my attention to fan fiction, but part of it also seems to be a refusal of my brain to be able to handle one idea at a time. I’ve been all over the place, writing bits and pieces of scenes for all different projects, while also trying desperately to force myself to focus on the projects that are more time sensitive, and I can’t seem to manage to keep myself moving forward in the right direction. I keep jumping from chapter to chapter, everything all out of order. My brain is like a bloody word blender.
That said, I did still manage to write quite a bit throughout the week, so I guess that’s a positive, right? Pacemaker.press wanted me to write 10,178 words for the week, and I ended it out with 12,061 words, with only 1963 of those being non-fiction, and about a third of the fictional words being toward “The Other World”. Considering how mushy my brain has been all week, I consider that to be a pretty wicked win.
Productivity
Uhhh…okay, so….*cough*
First of all, I’ll just go ahead and say that I basically fell apart when it came to social media and self-promo last week. I’m not even sure exactly what happened…I just looked back at myself on Sunday night and realized that I’d posted practically nothing on any of my accounts for several days in a row. Obviously I’m going to try to turn that around in the coming week, but damn…it never fails to amaze me how much time and effort it actually takes to deal with several social media accounts at once. It’s no wonder so many people end up with burn-out and have to take ‘internet vacations’ for their mental health.
Looking at a more broad range of productivity-related topics… I, uh…I had absolutely nothing to do with the editing and uploading of our most recent video. Oh wait. That’s not a positive thing either, is it? *cough*
To be fair, after the video was up I started work on getting our website back up and running (it had been suspended because I was late on the yearly invoice, because the credit card they had on file was the old one). That said, I can’t really give myself too much credit for that, because after getting everything up and running again I basically just…poked around with different themes for a few hours…and eventually stopped because I couldn’t figure out how to get our ads to work with the different themes…and got frustrated and sulked about it for a few hours afterwards.
Hey, I’m not a web-design person, okay? Gimmi a break.
So yeah, from a ‘productivity’ standpoint, I actually kinda feel like things went off the rails. I mean…I did a bunch of house stuff that needed doing, so there is that, and I did a few other real-life-related errands that you guys frankly don’t need to know about…but when it comes to the YouTube channel, and the social stuff, and the self-promo, and all that kinda stuff…yeah, I just…blah.
Moving on before I put my head through a wall…
If you’re interested at all in the numbers, both Twitter accounts and the Author Instagram account went up three followers each, while the YouTube Instagram, for whatever bloody reason, went down five.
Down-Time
And then there was the down-time, which, honestly, you can probably mostly summarize by the birthday party I mentioned earlier. I mean, really. That one thing basically wrote off my entire weekend, especially considering how I felt like epic shit the day after. Ugh. Booze and huge quantities of sugar…
But seriously, I suppose I do have a few things to mention in this category.
As far as reading goes, I’m actually a bit annoyed to say that I didn’t even touch “Godsgrave” last week, because I didn’t find a whole lot of time for reading at all. When I did read (which was mostly during moments such as stirring the gravy I made with yesterday’s supper) it was little bits and pieces of fan fics that I’m currently subscribed to. To be fair, though, those fan fics have been fucking amazing…just saying.
Gaming has been pretty straight-forward and unremarkable as well. I played “Jedi: Fallen Order” a few more times, though not generally for an extended period, so I’ve still got roughly a third of the game or so to go. I could probably beat it pretty quickly if I just chose a day and sat the hell down and did it, but I’ve had so many little things going on all at the same time lately that I haven’t really wanted to give up that much time at once for a game. Aside from that, the only game I’ve been playing is the aforementioned “Just Dance 2021”, for the workout purpose.
Side note, though: the other day we downloaded the demo for Resident Evil 8, and Jason played it. It didn’t really show much about what the gameplay is going to be like, since it was a one-off without any ability to fight back against monsters, but it definitely showcased how beautiful and ridiculously creepy it has the ability to be. If that dead body had shifted one more time, I thought one of us would have had a heart attack.
And then there’s movies and television, of which there haven’t been a great deal lately because we’ve been mostly watching the hockey games as they come up. We have been watching “Community” again, and have gotten more into it as we’ve gone. We just watched the paintball episode the other day and I thought I was going to die laughing. Aside from that, we haven’t really been watching much of anything, although I watched a couple of episodes of Supernatural, since I haven’t watched the 14th or 15th seasons yet. I figure that now that it’s over I should probably catch up, right? It’s probably going to be the kind of thing I mostly watch when I’m, like…folding laundry and whatnot though, since Jason has no interest in it anymore.
So that was my week, in a nutshell. I can’t believe that we’re almost through January already… Things seem to be going decently, overall, but I’m still wary, given it was 2020 only a few weeks ago, and that stain cannot possibly be cleaned away so easily. Fingers crossed, everyone, and let’s all stay vigilant. ❤
Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤
Tracey Tobin 