After Q4 Week 3

This week, I got very enthusiastic about OSR (Old School [Dungeons and Dragons] Revival) roleplaying-related stuff. Some of that enthusiasm spilled over to my programming project, but the rest of it messed up my writing goals — I spent most of the weekend reading rulebooks and drawing maps instead.

The Mary-Sue project continues at the same slow pace of scoring: one and a half comics per week. It looks like I actually had 10 weeks to go last week, so I now have 9 weeks to score the remaining 14 comics.

Good luck and happy writing!

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Goals for 2016, and for ROW80 Round 1

For the last few months, I’ve been the only one in a job that previously had a three-person team. This has had a couple of consequences:

Firstly, I’ve had to think more seriously about becoming a better programmer, so I can keep up with what work needs of me.

Secondly, I’ve been finding reasons to stress out, and allowing this blog (and other bits of my life) to fall apart.

Goals for 2016

I’d like to do a few things differently this year:

• Make programming a proper part of my goals. ROW80 being a round of words, I’ve tended to exclude (and hence ignore) my programming projects.
• Communicate more with my fellow writers (and programmers). Living in a small town, it’s easy to neglect this.

I’ve also made a few commitments for the year already:

• Prepare for Pathfinder (roleplaying) starting again in February; it’s my turn to run this again. I’ve got some preparation done already, but it will need adjusting for where the game ended up.
• Participate in my family’s impromptu writing competition (write a love story). This might not produce a good story, but it’s a good chance to write as part of a group.

• Lastly, I’ve been considering taking a holiday in February or March, if the situation at work is stable enough to allow it.

  January/ROW80 Goals

  In light of all that, here are my ROW80 goals for January:
  (other ROW80 participants)

  • Finish writing up an adventure for the roleplaying group, by working on it for at least ten evenings. This will be my main focus this month.
  • Find some programming events I could go to. There are two organisations that run events within driving distance; I expect it will take an evening to research each.
  • Re-read Pride and Prejudice and start on a story for the writing challenge. I’d like to get 2,000 words done on this by February, which should take four or five evenings.
  • Get started on holiday plans, by spending a (weekend) day or so finding possible destinations.

  Programming is notably missing from this list. It’s possible a programming project will grow out of the roleplaying prep; if not, I’ll add it to my goals once I have some of the other things under control.

  I am also still looking for a house (indeed, I should be inspecting one this week), but I’m reluctant to make this a goal, since it depends so much on what is there to buy.

  Good luck and happy writing!

On reading Little Women

This week I read Part 1 (“Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy”) of Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott.

I mistakenly thought I’d read it before (it might have been the second part), so the seriousness and preachiness of the opening surprised me. Once I got past that, the book was quite engaging.

The moral points were actually a big part of that. A few of them felt very relevant to my situation, which I hadn’t expected. Others reminded me just how much has changed in the past 146 years.

Even those were interesting, though, especially the way Jo conforms to a culture she personally disagrees with.

I’m a bit ashamed that that surprised me, but it will definitely inform how I handle things in Conkers.

— Isikyus