iPhone Detox
With only a couple exceptions, my phone has been sitting on a shelf in my office for the past week, and I’m pretty happy about it.
Compared to the many hours of screen time I’d been racking up previously, I’m barely using my phone now. I’d like to see how long I can keep this up.
Background Previously, I noticed how doomscrolling news and social media coincided with my mood spiraling downward.
March 2023 in writing
In March, I realized I had been overly ambitious trying to outline all 3 books before drafting. I found myself struggling with Books 2 and 3 because my grasp of Book 1 wasn’t yet solid enough.
Rock bottom I had two problematic arcs that just weren’t working.
The Last of Us Podcast reminded me about characters needing to hit rock bottom before the climax. Not just some hardship; rock fucking bottom.
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.