I am on zero sleep, I have managed to plough through some big chunks of work, and I hit target before 3pm. All in all, that is testament to how I can do just about anything on any day if I put my mind to it, and I’m realistic about my limits. Of course, it’s my health limits that have me in this state in the first place, but here’s hoping it’s me overthinking it and I can look back and laugh at myself later when it turns out the diagnosis was wrong. There’s still a good chance it is, and no I’m not going to say what it is for except to say it’s not the big C or the little c; I’d hope you’d recognise I wouldn’t be this wound up about covid in either case. And it is almost certainly not fatal.

Yeah I am not ok. I thought I’d go back to work and on the Tuesday I’d get blindsided by something and fall back into struggling again. Turns out I was a day off and it was Wednesday I needed to keep an eye on. Then again, this whole month has been wretched. Actually no imma say it: 2022 is wretched. The only difference to 2020 and 2021 is that 90% of the problems are my own doing and even choice in the majority of cases. This however, this was not. And it goes without saying, Project4 just potentially got a lot harder overnight. It was already close to impossible, so, yeesh…

One day when I can stop speaking about this in code, y’all imaginary folk are gonna realise just how messed up this first quarter of the year was for me. For now though, back to work, and back to trying to figure all this out…

You spend your whole life wondering why things are the way they are, and then in one hour long appointment, you get the answer. Not the full answer, that has to come in time but, let’s just say it’s not a good outcome of that is the answer. Been a rough day. Being cryptic to not be an attention hog, even if admittedly the whole point of this blog is I can say what I want because no one reads it. Ah well. It’s been, a long year.

It’s not my best work, but HOF is done. That first draft needs a heck of a lot of work, but I can finally put it in a drawer, and move on. I don’t know if New Horizon will prove any better first time around, but I gotta hope. Today was, harder than I expected, but at least I got through it, this book, and now I can try and bring this trilogy in for a landing.

Yeah I am never writing a trilogy back to back ever again…

My time off seems to have worked. Of course I do need to make sure I get an early night so that I can climb back into my old routine, but with any luck I can revive my old-old routine and leave the house a bit earlier. Here’s hoping at least. I also believe I should finish HOF tomorrow, as I’ve written about half the epilogue. It’s such a disjointed mess, but at the same time it’s pretty standard for my first drafts to be eclectic messes. The interesting test will be if when I come back in a year’s time, it’s a salvageable mess. Right now, I don’t care. ‘What will be will be’ is the order of my life right now.

I’m doing ok. I avoided getting ill, even if I was A LOT more burned out than I realised. I think if I’d powered through to April 9th, I would have become very ill, and I would not have wanted that one bit. That’s not least because it’s my sister’s wedding that day, and I would like to be presentable and functional for that. I’m going to try and relax for a bit as I need to leave for my volunteering in an hour. Things are, slotting back into place. I just hope things stay stable.

Ok at least I wrote earlier today, but I ended up writing absolute tripe for the ending of HOF, and I still have to do the epilogue. I just wanna shove this in a drawer and forget about it for a long, long time. And that’s, ok. I powered through it, and while I do want to make it good, the Horizon Trilogy can always come out much later than the rest of it, and I would still be happy. So yeah, I have as long as I want to get this right, and even if I never do, I can try other things to work around it. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Back to Minecraft.

I am almost back to feeling myself again, and it’s all thanks to just taking things slow. I’m ok, and I’m confident I’ll be back on my feet by Tuesday. HOF is going well, and it’s almost done. I’m going to take things easy tomorrow, but I do need to get back in order on Monday. Well, back to Minecraft.

Well, my routine is a bit borked. Oops. But this darn book is so close to done I can sell it, and it smell of shi-

On the plus side, two days of just chilling seems to have done me some good. And that intense next Project4 step on Monday is delayed, so I have a pure 5-day stretch. So imma keep making the most of that. Getting back into Minecraft, which is, kinda why my routine is borked. Almost as if I get hyperfixated on this game.

Well I took today to try and rest up, and I ended up writing my latest target in ages. Oops. I’m ok with that, as I don’t exactly have to be up early any time. I’m just, I dunno worried I guess about target slipping again. But I’m feeling more chill about HOF now. I guess it’s because I get to put it down soon, and I always had a clearer view of the ending of this story. That might even be part of the problem with the story, that I tried to railroad for a certain ending too much. I think the bigger problem is I kept leaving loose threads where I went ‘hey let’s hint at this’, and then I’d get to the payoff and be ‘eh’ about the idea by then.

This is what rewrites are for.

I’m just about limping on today. Not literally, I don’t need a repeat of that, but I do need to go home for a short while and recharge, hence my five days of leave I have coming up at 5pm. My queue is, about as empty as I was gonna get it, which is to say nothing urgent, but still not quite as empty as I’d like. In a way that’s no bad thing: it shows I have a steady flow of useful tasks I perform for the college, and that I have a decent handle on things that the queue isn’t longer. But I am limping mentally, because by god, Project4 has left me a burned out wreck. And it’s barely even getting started. Heck if this succeeds, it’s not like in a few months this’ll all be wrapped up. If it fails it kinda will be, but success means years of toil ahead. Kinda makes you wonder why I’m even doing the damn project. Well, you’re not wondering, because you got sick of me being cryptic about what Project4 is months ago, and you are also in fact, imaginary. Sorry to break the latter to you if it is news.

I have found my groove with the ending of HOF. The last chapter and a half are looking pretty smooth sailing plot wise, which I guess goes to show I have the bookends of the, well book, sorted. It’s the mushy bits in the middle that are messy. Pages aren’t supposed to be mushy so, erm, that bodes ill. I guess if it was a romance story? To be fair every book I write is a romance story, it’s just rare that it’s cut and dry as one. What can I say I find the relations between people fascinating and it’s my comfort food, sue me. Actually don’t, the cost of living crisis and Project4 combine to mean I am very much broke for the next yes-years.

I couldn’t bring myself to write on my break today, so I worked late in the office and chipped it off bit by bit while answering some emails. I don’t mind working late so much, especially as it’s only half working if I’m writing outside of my break, but I still feel rough. Project4 took a step today. Whether that’s a step forwards or backwards is too hard to nail down at this point, and I won’t know for sure until Monday, or even then I imagine. And in either case, it’s only one part of the Rube Goldberg machine I’ve spent the better part of two and a half months now assembling in the real world rather than a theoretical one. It’s still a long way from a certain thing, but I can I hope make this into a positive. Again, sorry for being so cryptic; you’ll understand when the time comes.

HOF is, nearly done. That’s the best I can say about it at this point. I’m hoping when I reread it in a year I find it’s nowehere near as bad as I remember it being, but I doubt that somehow. TUS on the other hand, while it’s not going to have daily updates like I once hoped, is still marching forwards quite well. I need to sort a link to my ScribbleHub from here at some point, even if that is close to pointless. Still, I like you, my dear imaginary reader, to feel you can follow my progress, even if on a macro layer of my life I have no idea where the road ahead is going. Just gotta keep hoping I guess.