April is here, and let me say I am ecstatic to see what this month brings. Lots of big updates for games I play, and a lot of big things happening with school, as well. A lot of things will be very different by the end of the month, and I’m really optimistic as to what’s coming. As usual, the order of things I’m going to talk about with my life: blog changes, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, and other things.

As far as my blog goes, I don’t actually have any big changes planned (for once). I’m going to stop numbering the blog posts that end in ‘5’, because it’s getting tedious at this point, and I haven’t needed to feel validated through numbers in quite some time, so from now on the only posts I’ll number are by 10’s. (Maybe sometime in the distant future I’ll jump to 25’s, but at that point I’d probably just stop numbering the posts entirely.)

My writing plans are in a lot of flux right now. I’ve got a lot of current things I’m working on, and I’ve been pressing pause to start new things without actually finishing anything. I’m still only halfway through Windcaller, and only wrote the first half of the fourth Lisa Stenton piece “Answers”. I had the idea of Cyntheras’ story a while back and didn’t want to hold off on it for too long, so I figured I’d get it off my chest now. Her story may actually end up being the eighth novelette in the anthology Rise of the Riftguard, but that depends entirely on how the rest of the novelettes go leading up to that point.

I plan on finishing “Answers” next week, and especially since the first half didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, it’s already turned out to be more work than I’d have liked it to be. I plan on pitching it to my writer’s group this week to see what they think of the first half before I finish up with it. And as far as Windcaller goes, I need to make some adjustments to the latest part before I can continue working on it, but I plan on finishing Delanden’s story this month as well! Maybe I can move on to that Spark story I’ve been talking about once I’ve finished all of this!

My video games of choice have been fluctuating a lot recently. I’ve been playing a lot of Heroes of the Storm lately, and I’ve sort of embraced it as my go-to these past several weeks. I’ve also started playing a bit of League of Legends, too, but at this point I don’t like it nearly as much as the Heroes, primarily because there’s so many more moving parts that I can’t hold on to. What’s more, Heroes is getting a huge update later this month, and it’s changing the entire interface of the game in such a way that I can’t wait to get my hands on it! And also Hearthstone‘s latest expansion: Journey to Un’Goro, is releasing mid-April! Lots of cool stuff I’m excited for. I’ve also been playing Minecraft more lately, and my current project is to build the starting city of my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It’s coming along nicely, I’d say, but the more work I put into it, the larger of a project it’s getting to be. And here I thought it would take me a week tops.

While I’m working on that, I’ve been catching up on the Writing Excuses podcast! I never got caught up with it back when I was giving it a lot of attention (in August I think?), and I’m currently on season 9, which spans 2014 (each season is one year). Since each season is a total of over 17 hours long, hoping to be caught up by May is a long shot for how much free time I have.

My spring semester is still going pretty well. I love my astronomy class because of how much cool stuff I’ve been learning from it. I did a post on Fraunhofer lines several weeks ago, and it’s just one example of huge scientific concepts I had zero knowledge of until I took this class. Especially since Nacre Then has a lot of astronomical phenomena going on, and another universe I’m working on has a lot of weird space stuff happening, this is easily one of the coolest classes I’ve taken period. (It just sucks that the class meets for four hours at a time. I don’t get how people I know can just take three of those sorts of classes in one semester. My brain would be fried!)

And while I’m talking about school– I applied for a bunch of different scholarships this year. The year prior I won the first scholarship I’ve ever tried, so technically I’ve won 100% of the scholarships I’ve applied for. This year I’ve sent applications for about seven-ish, one of them being the 2017 Writing Excuses Retreat. I don’t expect to win any of them (least of all that one), but winning a small $200 scholarship would be pretty neat, at least, and it cost me (almost) nothing to try. I’ll know before the end of the month if I did win any.

Last but not least, I’m going to start trying to publicize myself a bit more. Specifically, I made an official Reddit account and have been trying to learn the community’s ways as I lurk the Writing Prompts subReddit. I figure if I can write cool stories there and submit good writing prompts, I can get my name known in that community and maybe even start building a following. It hasn’t gone well so far. I try to submit a writing prompt every day, but nobody has ever submitted any story based on one of my prompts, and some of my good ideas were even downvoted a few times! I can’t take this to heart, I know. I just don’t know the community or what they like yet. We’ll see what happens.

So, that’s everything that’s new with me. I hope to bring even better news next month, so we’ll see what tomorrow brings!