I have to say: I don’t feel as though my life is much different from where I stood a month ago, but now that I think about it, a good deal has happened. For one, the school semester started. It may seem like old news to me, given that it started four weeks ago, but my semester is still something I haven’t even brought up yet. At least, not in depth. So let’s dive right in.

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

No blog changes this month. For once, I’m (almost) 100% satisfied with my posting schedule. (That’s not to say that I expect it to remain like this forever. It shifts with my school/work schedule, and this one functions well for what I’ve got going on.) The one thing though is that the Wednesday whatever has just become more Me posts due to my uneventful life — particularly the lack of D&D lately. I don’t like talking about myself twice a week because I don’t really have anything valuable to say, but it is what it is.

The first Lisa Stenton story is out. It was about five hundred words shorter than I anticipated, but honestly my 6k word estimate turned out to be pretty spot on. I’ve gotten literally no feedback on it whatsoever, though (apart from two grammar mistakes), so that’s a thing. I’m not ecstatic about how it turned out, but I think I did a pretty good job overall. Expect another one on the last Friday of February! As a side note, I’m really enjoying the flash fiction Fridays I’ve been doing. Plus, narrating stories is fun, and even if nobody listens to them, I’m enjoying the process. I won’t narrate Lisa Stenton, though. Not for a while yet, if ever.

In other news, Spear Gate is growing harder and harder to write. It sucks, because I told myself I would finish the first draft of a novel, damn it. It’s been years since I’ve actually written an ending. But it’s just not fun anymore. And I don’t know what’s wrong. I have had an inkling of an idea, though… What if I write this book like Lord of the Rings, or other books. That is to say… separate it by “Book I” and “Book II” even though they really are one book. No plans to speak of yet, but it is an idea.

Video game news: I hit Diamond League in Heroes of the Storm. Go me! (For reference it’s one of the highest tiers of skill in the game. It goes Bronze-Silver-Gold-Platinum-Diamond-Master). I’ve been playing it a lot lately because it honestly just feels great to know you’re good at something and just relax while you do it. I’ve also been playing some Monster Hunter World. More on that later (next Tuesday, probably), but I like it. Only thing is I don’t really understand what I’m doing. I just make new armor and kill new monsters. No strategy, forward thinking, or learning going on at all. Doesn’t help that you learn the game by reading paragraphs and paragraphs of tutorial.

I’ve been reading Fahrenheit 451. Very. Slowly. As in, a month later I’m 30 pages in. I’ve just had a hard time reading at all, lately. I wanted to read a chapter of whatever a day, but I pretty much knew ahead of time it wouldn’t last. I’m about a fourth of the way through Return of the King, but it’s laid unopen near my bed for about a month now. Why are all the good habits so easy to break?

Okay: school. I’m on campus for basically 12 hours straight on Mondays and Wednesdays. First class starts at 10, last class ends at 9:15. (I had an 8:30am class, too, but it was cancelled.) And on Wednesdays, my only breaks are two half hours. So needless to say I’m exhausted. I’m also pretty busy on Tuesdays, so the beginning of the week just takes a huge toll. On the plus side, I’m generally free to work on writing, schoolwork, and whatever on the weekends, so it isn’t all bad. I like all my classes. I’m mostly taking classes all indirectly related to theatre (Costuming, playwriting, voice acting, etc), so it’s not as high stress a workload as last semester. High on involvement and participation, yes. But not stressful.

Lastly, I want to talk about the Writing Excuses scholarship. This is sort of related to writing plans, but doesn’t really have anything to do with the big projects I’m working on. My first personal essay was terrible, and I’m still working on a second. I want to put more focus on things I’ve already written the next few weeks, edit them, and just punch up the storytelling in general because I want to submit as strong an application as I can. This means I have to find my three best works and edit them a ton. Only problem is, I don’t know what my best works are anymore.

Soon I plan on individually asking people who’ve read a good amount of my stuff what their favorite stories of mine are. Problem is, a lot of their opinions would be outdated because basically nobody has read any of my 2017-2018 shorts. So we’ll see. But if I were to submit the application right now, I’d personally choose “The Girl, the Owl, and the Creek”, “Orn’s Legacy”, and an epic fantasy poem I wrote. I still don’t know if the submissions have to be prose, which is frustrating. Either way, I know all three of those stories need work, but I think they’re strong contenders.