magistrate

Since my last post, I've spent a very stressful time trying unsuccessfully to launch a career change, discovered a number of new old new and exciting psychological landmines, gone through a number of bizarre interview processes involving all manner of new technologies, started a new job, been commended at a new job, entirely forgotten how to write, slowly rediscovered how to write, gotten hooked on both Inscryption and Crusader Kings 3, learned how to make some pretty bangin' meatballs, played my first board game in a long time (King of Tokyo!), acquired my first new card game in a long time (Muffin Time!), given actual people actual fanart of their actual characters (which was received far more appreciatively than its quality warranted), successfully climbed a bunch of walls (up to a 5.10C!), served on the admin team for a 6-month intensive workshop, dragged a hapless new friend into the wilds of 镇魂 / Guardian, accidentally started a dive into Buddhist philosophy, and started going through a number of trainings from The Consent Academy.

I still have not managed to drag anyone into playing Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes with me, but I have mostly memorized the NATO phonetic alphabet just in case. Also, I'm currently on a 3-game win streak for Blood on the Clocktower, which is pretty nice, because I think I racked up three wins total in 12-ish games last year before I got too overwhelmed with life to seek out additional social interaction.

I got a profoundly kind and moving comment on one of my scrappy, ridiculous unfinished braintics a while back, which nice because I had worked myself into a deep funk of the "I haven't put anything out in so long," and "why do I think anyone would be interested in the weird mishmash of stuff I scrape out of the bottom of my Id," and "all my stuff is so unfinished and might always be unfinished; where's the use in that?" varieties. Spontaneous validation that, no, sometimes some weird old unfinished idfic is just what someone out there needs... was a lovely little gift from the universe. Possibly I should make more of an effort to throw my ancient unfinished idfic out into the world. That follows, right? Sure. That follows.

As part of my re-training my brain to understand that words are things that we can, indeed, put together into sentences and paragraphs and chapters and narratives and the like, I'm taking a good run at finishing the currently-326,000-word RDR2 fanfic which was supposed to be 30K-40K long. My last update was in January of 2021. Fanfic readers are saints for putting up with this sort of nonsense.

I feel like it's the recurring theme of my life that I'll make a plan, whether a plan about a specific project or a plan for my next year or five years or for anything beyond a month, do considerable prep work, aim confidently for Point C, and arrive at Point थ. Point थ is frequently a perfectly fine point in its own right, but I do wish I knew the secret of the people who can actually accomplish what they set out to do, instead of just accumulating unrelated experiences like a drunken Katamari.

I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed bemused.

A while ago, I accidentally* started on a Detroit: Become Human reboot-style AU (which I cleverly titled Detroit: Reboot), which project I think only rionaleonhart actually knows anything about, and storyinmypocket and sholio may have heard me mention off and on. Anyway, it ballooned to ridiculous size in ways I don't fully understand, and then I got distracted by other things.

*I accidentally 2.9 MB of fanfiction... is this dangerous?

Primary among those other things was a Red Dead Redemption 2 fic which I thought I could knock out in 30-40k (HA... HA HA... Ha ha hah haaaaaaaugh... •sob•), which, as you may have guessed if you know me, I was not able to complete in 30-40k.

Anyway, I didn't notice this last night when I was finishing up my writing and heading for bed, but my unfinished RDR2 fic finally exceeded the length of my unfinished D:BH fic! I wasn't actually sure that would ever happen. Also: what the fuck.

(For the record, the "of 300,000" is not an actual aspirational goal. 300,000 words was a placeholder I put in because I like seeing the progress bar go up, and if you meet the goal, it just stays full and green and there's no visible progress. I figured that 300,000 was a nice, safe, high number that I would not actually ever reach. I am now figuring that I'm probably going to have to change it on one or both of these projects if I want to keep watching the bar move.)

Here's a brief list of things wot happened or wot I did during 2013:

( The council meeting was a great success. We made a lot of lists. We here in Vault City love making lists. )

All in all, it's been a scary, disorienting, demoralizing, and challenging year, which has seemed intent on putting me into walls but has still served up a few measures of grace. Looking back, I can see that a lot of cool things happened – it's just that the stuff that was bad was really bad, and often for months at a time. It could have been a lot worse. But I still count having survived it mostly sane and optimistic to be the major accomplishment of 2013, and I eagerly, eagerly await 2014. Which will be better. I will make it be.

Partially because of how low I've felt through much of the year, I feel like I'm getting a better handle on how to build (and rebuild) strong foundations and get myself moving, even if I'm still not an expert at applying all of that. But I'm learning, slowly but surely, to find my footing in bad places, and if I can just keep building on that, it'll lead me to better places in the end. It's a goal to live into.