Hi everyone!
This quarter has reached its half-point, so it’s time for another one of my Currently on my art posts. I have little to tell this time, so this’ll be a short one.
Honestly, October was the roughest month I’ve had ever since I had COVID last year. A combination of stress from the stop-go of the part-time work (and the associated strain of having switched teams and projects for it, getting used to which has added to the mental strain) and the stress from the more tedious parts of gathering data for my master’s thesis and managing to make a crisis with my thesis from a potential need for a lot of additional work with the data gathering, as well as a poor work-life balance wound up pushing me to close to burning out. I ended up taking about a month’s break from my thesis, which in turn pushed my deadline to the end of the following semester, as there is no longer any chance I’ll be able to finish the data gathering, let alone anything else, before the end of the year.
It’s mid-November now and I’ve finally started to properly regain my grip on things after hurtling from one day to another with little control over, well, anything. Making more reasonable plans for how I’m going to tackle the behemoth of work with my thesis has helped since it has made it a less formidable-looking opponent. I’ve started to draft routines to get used to so chores won’t be put on hold until the last moment anymore, although that’s very much a work in progress. So, despite the rough patch I wound up hitting (and falling face-first into), things are already starting to look up. My stint as a part-timer has been a learning experience in retaining work-life balance and taking care of myself.
My projects – particularly The Fate’s Way, which has run into a writer’s block – have been suffering quite a lot too. Navigator’s Glove is getting somewhere, though, fortunately. The end of the first editing round is finally within sights in the horizon. If I’m lucky, I’ll get it finished before the end of the year, and I’ll get to start the reworking phase before 2024 starts. I’m looking forward to it and everything I get to add to the story – as well as mangling the canon and seeing how big of a mess I’ll make of things, haha!
That’s all I have to say this time around. Let’s see how things are going with my projects, as per my project widget:
- The Fate’s Way: Chapter 83 is in writing. I still need to redraw the regular Alyssa and also Alyssa’s friends and family and the other important people, like Matti, someday. I need to revise chapters.
- Off-DA projects: Nothing notable here. My master’s thesis progresses slowly again after an unplanned hiatus; I’m almost 50% done with gathering data.
- Lyokostar: The second part of story 7 is still waiting for alphareading, but that’s a thing for once its indefinite hiatus ends. This story is in need of massive reworking, so it’s going to take a long time to finish when I do find the time and energy to resume it. References need to be done.
- A Wandering Aura: On indefinite hiatus.
- Navigator’s Glove: What is currently known as the epilogue is being fleshed out drastically before splitting it into multiple chapters and then editing them. Once editing is done, I’ll be reworking to add a considerably big plot bunny into the fic and lots of smaller plot bunnies in the form of the background characters I’ve been researching for my master’s thesis. I’ve written 23253 words during Q4 so far.
- Gaming: Habitica and Pokémon Masters EX keep on going. I’ve also played the remaster of Persona 5 Royal for my master’s thesis a bit and I played through Persona Q2, managing to finish it yesterday.
- Other stuff: I haven’t started working on the FFM 2023 collection yet. I have been reading fanfics mostly. I still haven’t gotten started with IDW’s Transformers comics and at this point I might just postpone them to tackle some other stuff I want to read since the ones that I’m missing are no longer available digitally as far as I can see.
- Personal life: Not much, mainly just work and master’s thesis stuff. Not really anything else, in part thanks to getting too close to burning out.
That’s all for this post. Thanks for reading and take care!
WindySilver 