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February 2023 in writing
I largely spent the first half of February continuing to garden my Obsidian project, and the second half delving into outlining books 1 and 2 of the trilogy.
I’m readjusting my time estimates: ideally I finish the scene weave of all 3 books by the end of March or early April, and I can switch to drafting.
Stats My Obsidian project now looks like:
Manuscript markdown files: 11 Manuscript words: 5875 Total markdown files: 314 Total words: 103785 I wrote a python script that discards symbol-only words (like # or ## from markdown headers or - from markdown lists) from the wordcount.
Archer
A number of weeks ago, Archer hurt his leg while walking on ice. We took him to the vet, who didn’t find anything concerning… maybe a soft tissue injury that would clear up on its own. But it got worse, and he was limping along on three legs, holding his left hind leg up to avoid putting any weight on it.
A couple weeks ago (Valentine’s Day?) we took him back to the vet for some more thorough tests.
New Macbook
My new M2 Macbook Air arrived yesterday!
I’ve pretty much settled in… I’ve gotten a lot of practice at setting up new working environments through the various computer adventures I’ve had over the past few months. Super comfy already, probably due to all the MacOS muscle memory over the past decade-and-a-half.
The Apple Silicon processor is a win in almost all ways. I can even set up a less-performant Intel VM via UTM if I want.
January 2023 in writing
In January I focused on outlining, using my Github activity to track daily progress.
Obsidian vault My wiki is now over 95k words, across 205 markdown files and 47 characters at various stages of development, accumulated over the past ~8 calendar years. (Most of those years I was not focused on writing, and I’ve trashed more ideas than I’ve kept.)
I’ve migrated it all to Obsidian. I’m hoping the Obsidian backlinks will help me keep track of characters, side plots, clues, and ideas: if I follow this arc does it make sense?
reading again
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx
One metric for how stressed I am, generally from work, is what I’m able to read, understand, enjoy. When I’m reading complex novels I’m generally at a very low (for me) level of stress.