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It was my birthday yesterday! I had a lovely day- spent some time at the ocean, had dinner with my parents, and then played video games with my friend until she went to bed. Nice and chill. The existential dread of being in (or at the very least, quite close to) my late twenties while still being directionless is looming but that's a problem for, like, next week.
This last year has been pretty good! Here's some stuff that I did since last April.
I am extremely unemployed and all my friends moved away, so I have a lot of free time. While I know that I get stressed out of my mind when I don't spend what other people consider to be an unreasonable amount of time sitting around and doing nothing of note, there is in fact a limit to how long I can do that without going nuts. So, since August, I've been making an effort to go to the beach at least once a week. It's a ten minute drive to the better views, so it's a nice easy thing that I can do to see sunlight. Depending on what time I end up going, I either settle on a bench to get some writing done or I watch the sun go down. It's honestly done wonders for me. I'm not always the most consistent, but I've gotten into enough of a habit that it's stuck so far. I do wish I'd started doing this earlier, though; I've lived in this town for eight years now and literally only just thought of it. Whenever I end up moving I'm going to have to find something like this to keep up.
I've also been getting a lot of writing done! Being in writing spaces is new to me and it's really so astounding how much easier it is to work consistently when other people are around me doing the same thing and cheering each other on. This last calendar year I've written more than 20k in prose alone, which is huge for me!! I am so slow and a perfectionist to the point of detriment, and I still knocked out twice the word count of my previous most productive year. :)
I worked on a long-term project for about six? months and got that done in February, and then wanted to get something shorter out before my birthday. Last week I was stressed about it because it really wasn't coming together, and then one day at like four am I just sat down and it all fell into place and it was done an entire week early. If you have the ability to schedule/predict your pacing in a project in even a remotely accurate way, I am so impressed. Someday I will learn that skill too but for now it evades me.
I'm not a big fan of my writing. I am well aware of bad habits and all sorts of things that are too whiny to talk about here lmao. It's been a long effort to get over it and keep writing anyway, because how am I going to get better if I don't practice? Along with that, I try not to focus too much on engagement numbers. But this dungeon meshi fic that I just put out is on track to being my most popular fic yet, which is crazy. It is nice to get positive interaction and people being enthusiastic, which I haven't really been getting with bnha. Like, it feels like the effort that I've been putting into improving is paying off, you know? I still don't think the fic is, like, my best work ever, but it's clearly doing something for people so I can be nicer to myself about it. Also, I'm excited because it's about women and in my experience fandom tends not to care about women. Thank you fellow lesbians and other wlw of the dungeon meshi fandom for the encouragement.
I traveled more than I ever have before, which is still objectively not that much, and I've learned that that's my absolute upper limit of how much I can travel in a year. It was all fun though! I also quit my 40 hour a year job making me even more extremely unemployed. And I took all the steps to graduate college but I've already talked about that :)
Next up: employment :/ On a more fun note, I'm also starting guitar lessons on Tuesday! I got a few lessons as a gift so by god I am going to get as much out of those cumulative four hours as one possibly can. I'm excited to hopefully do a lot more with music in the next year; I will learn to use the DAW I bought like five years ago, and I'm going to figure out how midi works because I was so wrong about it last time I tried.
One of my old housemates showed me this app called Vampr, which is kinda like a dating app but for matching with musicians around you for gigs or starting a band or whatever. Much like how I use dating apps nowadays I set up a profile with barebones info and mostly left it, but the other day somebody reached out because their band's singer moved away. I'm going to meet up with them next week and jam a little bit. My gut feeling tells me that it's probably not going to go anywhere- they play a lot of radio pop which I think my voice is not at all suited for, unfortunately, and they also are all college students and I don't really want to hang out with 18-22 year olds on a regular basis. But I think it will be good practice just to see a little of what the scene is like, and I've never jammed with anybody before! So I'm cautiously excited. and have so many songs that I've never heard before to learn, but that's half of what my degree was anyway so nbd
If I do this again next year hopefully there will be more (positive) significant things to look back on. also hopefully I won't start writing it at four in the morning bc good god
This last year has been pretty good! Here's some stuff that I did since last April.
I am extremely unemployed and all my friends moved away, so I have a lot of free time. While I know that I get stressed out of my mind when I don't spend what other people consider to be an unreasonable amount of time sitting around and doing nothing of note, there is in fact a limit to how long I can do that without going nuts. So, since August, I've been making an effort to go to the beach at least once a week. It's a ten minute drive to the better views, so it's a nice easy thing that I can do to see sunlight. Depending on what time I end up going, I either settle on a bench to get some writing done or I watch the sun go down. It's honestly done wonders for me. I'm not always the most consistent, but I've gotten into enough of a habit that it's stuck so far. I do wish I'd started doing this earlier, though; I've lived in this town for eight years now and literally only just thought of it. Whenever I end up moving I'm going to have to find something like this to keep up.
I've also been getting a lot of writing done! Being in writing spaces is new to me and it's really so astounding how much easier it is to work consistently when other people are around me doing the same thing and cheering each other on. This last calendar year I've written more than 20k in prose alone, which is huge for me!! I am so slow and a perfectionist to the point of detriment, and I still knocked out twice the word count of my previous most productive year. :)
I worked on a long-term project for about six? months and got that done in February, and then wanted to get something shorter out before my birthday. Last week I was stressed about it because it really wasn't coming together, and then one day at like four am I just sat down and it all fell into place and it was done an entire week early. If you have the ability to schedule/predict your pacing in a project in even a remotely accurate way, I am so impressed. Someday I will learn that skill too but for now it evades me.
I'm not a big fan of my writing. I am well aware of bad habits and all sorts of things that are too whiny to talk about here lmao. It's been a long effort to get over it and keep writing anyway, because how am I going to get better if I don't practice? Along with that, I try not to focus too much on engagement numbers. But this dungeon meshi fic that I just put out is on track to being my most popular fic yet, which is crazy. It is nice to get positive interaction and people being enthusiastic, which I haven't really been getting with bnha. Like, it feels like the effort that I've been putting into improving is paying off, you know? I still don't think the fic is, like, my best work ever, but it's clearly doing something for people so I can be nicer to myself about it. Also, I'm excited because it's about women and in my experience fandom tends not to care about women. Thank you fellow lesbians and other wlw of the dungeon meshi fandom for the encouragement.
I traveled more than I ever have before, which is still objectively not that much, and I've learned that that's my absolute upper limit of how much I can travel in a year. It was all fun though! I also quit my 40 hour a year job making me even more extremely unemployed. And I took all the steps to graduate college but I've already talked about that :)
Next up: employment :/ On a more fun note, I'm also starting guitar lessons on Tuesday! I got a few lessons as a gift so by god I am going to get as much out of those cumulative four hours as one possibly can. I'm excited to hopefully do a lot more with music in the next year; I will learn to use the DAW I bought like five years ago, and I'm going to figure out how midi works because I was so wrong about it last time I tried.
One of my old housemates showed me this app called Vampr, which is kinda like a dating app but for matching with musicians around you for gigs or starting a band or whatever. Much like how I use dating apps nowadays I set up a profile with barebones info and mostly left it, but the other day somebody reached out because their band's singer moved away. I'm going to meet up with them next week and jam a little bit. My gut feeling tells me that it's probably not going to go anywhere- they play a lot of radio pop which I think my voice is not at all suited for, unfortunately, and they also are all college students and I don't really want to hang out with 18-22 year olds on a regular basis. But I think it will be good practice just to see a little of what the scene is like, and I've never jammed with anybody before! So I'm cautiously excited. and have so many songs that I've never heard before to learn, but that's half of what my degree was anyway so nbd
If I do this again next year hopefully there will be more (positive) significant things to look back on. also hopefully I won't start writing it at four in the morning bc good god
