Greetings, welcome back, hello again, and good to see you. Today marks the return of the Daily Dose, as well as, of course, the beginning of the new year. Pretty fortunate that it starts on a Monday, eh? It really compliments my posting schedule. As you can imagine, lots of things are going to change. My intent for this new year is set with one major goal: to have a more presentable output of writing for people to read and enjoy. This blog’s original purpose was to force me to write at least 500 words a day, and I can safely say it’s more than achieved that. Unrelated stress aside, the blog has proven invaluable. I think it’s time to shift my focus. So, here’s what I’ve been doing over the break, and what my plans are for the next several months.

As always, here’s the Monthly Update Topic Order™: blog, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, and other things.

First and foremost, I’m changing my posting schedule (again) to line up with my current school semester. I scheduled school very poorly last semester, which was the primary reason for the hiatus—just getting through each day was exhausting. So, while I’ll talk about school in a bit, the idea is that the more fun, entertaining posts will be closer to the weekend, because Mondays and Wednesdays are now extremely busy for me. I want to publish more fiction to read while also writing stuff like Reviews and Life. Those posts are more for me, as nobody is coming on this site to see what I thought of the new hot movie. So I’m moving posts around to accommodate that system. Mon-Wed are for me, Friday and Sunday are for also me you. Here’s the new schedule:

Sun — Spear Gate
Mon — Me
Tues — Review
Wed — Whatever
Fri — Fiction

(Notice I made most of the titles alliterative so its easy to discern which topic is on what day.) D&D has been demoted from its weekly standing because, while I do love it and play it as often as I can, it really isn’t that large a facet of my life. It’s the same thing that happened with improv. I love it, I just don’t have a “weekly” amount of discussion for it. That said, expect stories from sessions (which may be somewhat common) to pop up on Wednesdays, not Fridays.

My writing plans are pretty straight forward. Spear Gate is still my main project, and I’m determined to see it “to the end”, wherever that may be. It still isn’t that long—a product of only producing 600ish words a week—but I need to get out of the habit I’ve gotten into lately of giving up on projects before I even finish them. It isn’t good for me. I’ve got some good characters, good worldbuilding, and especially some good plot twists lined up. I just have to earn them, which means Spear Gate is still probably the only thing that will post on a Sunday for several months yet to come. I will say, however, that I’m working on some secret stuff on the side. So along with the fact that Friday’s posts will be fiction based on various universes (often unrelated flash pieces, probably), Spear Gate won’t be the only project I’m looking at.

As far as video games go, my life has been pretty consistent lately. I’ve been playing almost exclusively Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, depending on how much energy I have, but I also recently played through Battle Chasers: Nightwar, which was pretty neat. Expect a review on that pretty soon. My main focus right now is HotS, but I’ve completely stopped playing Destiny 2 because it’s just the biggest letdown of the year as far as games go for me. Maybe I’ll fill the FPS void by getting back into Overwatch soon? (My brother also got me a sweet gaming keyboard and mouse for Christmas. The LED kind that you can program to do whatever you want. So I’ve been playing with that a lot recently setting it up to light different colors depending on the game I’m playing. It’s pretty neat.)

The last several weeks of the year has been characterized by my frantically trying to get caught up in some podcasts and books I’ve been working on. I’ve achieved that for some—I’m all caught up with Critical Role and Writing Excuses in preparation of the new year—but now I was primarily listening to Oathbringer, which is just a monster of a book, until yesterday. Now I’m also actively listening to Voice Acting Mastery, but I just started that one. As far as physically reading goes, I just finished Wildcat, which I believe is the debut novel of an author that lives in the UK: J.P. Harker. Expect a review on that soon, too!

So, school. Last semester was pretty awful for me. I noticed that every semester I tend to have one high maintenance class. One that requires a majority of my focus while the others are pretty much in the sidelines. In Fall of 2017, I had three high maintenance classes, and they were back to back, with no break. That’s not to say that they were exceptionally difficult, mind you, just that I couldn’t sit back and relax in any of them. One of them I hated my teacher, another was a theater class (so most of the semester we were performing in that time slot), and the last class had very difficult concepts to grasp. (These also weren’t my only classes.) So, yeah, it was hard to hold on to all of that.

This semester should be different. While I am taking just as many classes, they’re all on the same two days, and I know I’ll like most of my teachers. At this point I’m mostly taking electives for the two degrees I’m working on, so it should be a mostly easy ride. Just don’t try to talk to me on Monday or Wednesday because I’ll be exhausted.

So, here’s to a new year. It’s bound to be better than last year’s travesty because 2018 isn’t a prime number.