Adventures du jour! (Feb 17, 2023)

Gamer dude…A privilege to chew meat…end of a fear-based economy.

Adventures du jour!

I have one ear back! Still feverish. I skipped walking yesterday but went today.

Good day yesterday despite starting out so whiny. Gaming online with a friend again. A lot of low-level quests to start building good practice on playing well together and testing boundaries on when it is, and is not, fun to bite off more than we can chew.

A guild-member hopped on the guild chat channel we were on and immediately tried to cool gamer-dad us and give us All the Things. I had to laugh; he seems the kind of person who means well but min/maxes in their sleep and doesn’t understand any other reason to play. Here’s me, just there to play games and hang out with my friend…and trying not to giggle too much. The fact that we weren’t kitted out to perfection was a bridge too far for this other guy, though. My friend tried to explain that we were just having fun and that, under certain circumstances, being even LESS overpowered might also be fun, but no. I thanked the dude for the stuff, but I suspect he’ll be back around to make sure We Have Kitted Out Properly Next Time. >.>

But if we Kitted Out Properly, we Wouldn’t Get Ganked in Amusing Fashions for Being Such Dumbasses. And, you know. There should be consequences for throwing yourself off cliffs and picking flowers without supervision.

Ah, we’re all children underneath.

I’m pretty sure the guy was trying to assure me, the new guildmember, that their guild was solid and supportive, plleeeeeaaase be friends even if you’re not the kind of friend that I need to have my back on the next big group operation.

Which I am not. I’m the one putting mental pins in plans to toss my character under a train to see if that’ll kill her or not while trading jokes about whether mindless or mindful killing is more Zen.

I need to get a headset before next week, though. It completely slipped my mind last time.

Also yesterday: crossed 100K on the Book 3 material for the WIP, which makes the total wordcount just shy of 300K. Almost done with B3? Still don’t know what I’m doing in the next scene, although I vaguely know what needs to happen in the rest of this “book,” which means it probably won’t go like that. Everything continues to feel off, like, at THIS moment I’m supposed to be doing X and instead I’m doing Y.

But then I get stuff like this:

Costas’s ugly old face, a leaking leather sack full of something heavy and gummy, wrinkled up even further along one side. “How could I not see such boys and say to myself, ‘Someday, Costas, you old fuck, they are going to ask you a favor, and if that’s what it takes you’re going to throw away everything you have and just say yes.’” Before Dan could protest, he raised a hand like an industrial glove. “At my age, it is a privilege to chew meat, let alone have a heart that still sees good in the world. You owe us nothing. But I have earned the privilege of asking you to be the sons I never had, yes? Yes. I asked Skevi if I could say this, and she didn’t even call me a fat old fool. So you must know how serious we are about all of this.”

And I go, yeah okay, Y it is.

I’m patiently/impatiently awaiting cover art to redo for Swindlers and the light edits on the other book, Your Souffle Must Die. Rebuilding website stuff, prepping taxes, studying class. I’m not terribly flustered about any of this today, as I usually would be.

Finishing the friend project was a Big Stinking Deal on some level. I am no longer operating on a fear-based internal economy. It’s weird. Everything that I’ve let slide is such a mess. But I’m not worried about it. I’m not even worried about whether I’ll be able to finish the WIP. I will. I have no idea how I will. I don’t need to plan it out. I don’t need to be “better at Z than I am now” in order to do it. I am not overwhelmed. Some stuff will fail, that’s all.

I’m still ME; I still broke down sobbing the other day over something minor. But I think it was relief that I’d fucked up a bunch of stuff and (shockingly) it wasn’t the end of the world or anything. I still had a couple of minutes of “how can I call myself a writer? I’m not even a real writer” but then I started laughing at myself and it was done. “I suck” feels like an old habit and not a current, ongoing guilty secret I need to continuously confess, or risk constantly feeling like I’m a liar.

Still a long way to go. But I have hopes that I might not have to do it while slogging uphill both ways in the snow.

Me trying to convince Midjourney to make an actually BAD pen and ink self-portrait of me. (No photos of me were included; this is just a text-based prompt.) MJ was being a sweetheart and drew me a bunch of really good ones instead.

Actual photo of me (feeling ooky with ear infections) included for reference.

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