Michelle Taylor

Health and Fitness

Despite Eliyahu having left, I was still pretty good about exercise: 21 times. That I enjoy watching "Pursuit of Jade" while exercising definitely helped on this front.

I wasn't as good about cooking or diet in general during May -- I only made seafood potatoes twice. I also relapsed on eating junk food in place of meals again. At least Envoy and I found a place that serves tasty sushi near his house. Sushi is not ideal, but it's better for me than most of the restaurant foods I order.

Dailies

I was good about both tracking and doing these, because I feared it was the only creative goal I was capable of accomplishing. I edited 24 times, wrote 18, and drew 21 times. Reading picked up, to 27 times.

Writing

I started a file for a new idea. The file's title is Violence Is Not the Punchline, because it's a comic idea and I noticed that when I write comics, I often use violence. Even though I don't think much of violence in fiction. I doubt I would use this as an actual title. Especially since I gave the feline character one of Lyric's bad habits: biting people when she's done being petted.

I also don't think I have the patience for illustrating a comic so I doubt this will get off the ground. I drew two of the characters and then stalled on visual concepts for anyone else. But I made 1700 words of notes and a bunch of fun ideas accreted to it. The original concept was "harem manga set in a stereotypical fantasy world, except it's me so the harem is gonna turn out like a polycule mess of disaster bisexuals instead." 

I may write a story with some of the ideas at some point, idk.

I spent more energy on Kingslayer, which has crawled up to 14,800 words of notes. I am still grappling with the middle of the story, which is less like a middle more like "a few dozen different abortive middles and endings". I clearly can't write all the middles/endings in detail so I need to figure out what gets summarized and what gets expanded and why.

I wrote a bit of A Dragon's Secret because on one or two days that was easier than working on anything else: 1000 words total, up to 60,700.

Business of Writing

I spent quite a lot of time editing A Game to You, which is not well-reflected in the stats because there is so much editing to do on that book. It's up to 45% complete, from 30%.

Art

I actually had a pretty good time with art this month? I finished a landscape by turning it into fan art (adding tiny figures of Olive and Dahlia to it) and now I'm pretty happy with it. 

I drew two pictures of Zhenshay and a bunch of sketches of Moon (both from the comic idea) . After I gave up on that, I did some random hand and horse sketches, then some "Pursuit of Jade" fan art, painting portraits of Xie Zheng and Gongsun Yin. 

So I have four colored pictures for May, which is unusual, and I like looking at all of them, which is also unusual. I shared art a little more this month so it wasn't just Maria for everything. Some things, though. I never pronounced the Gongsun Yin portrait Actually Finished; I still have to look at it again and see if want to do anything else with it.

Oh! And I totally forgot until I got to my goal list: I worked on the cover for The Jewel-Strewn Night. It's like 90% done art-wise, and I still have to do the layout, but this is far enough for the cover of a book I haven't even started final edits on. 

Reading

I finished reading Omega Heroine Wants Her Alpha Villainess, a lesbian omegaverse (but with no shapeshifters) romance manwha. I have never read an omegaverse story before! So I don't know how typical it is of the genre. This story had an unusual structure: at about 2/3rds through it looked like everything had resolved but there was still a third of the story left and I'm like "what's gonna go wrong?" The setback and then ultimate resolution were also atypical. I enjoyed the story overall. I don't read too much queer manwha because they're marketed as "boys' love" and "girls' love" and those terms alone make my skin crawl. I enjoyed this one, though.

Married His Brother and Now He's Obsessed had also finished. I'd read most of it several months ago, and finally read the last 10-20 episodes. The ending felt odd and rushed, but I liked the story overall. The first half of it is very gentle, with many things just going smoothly for the main characters and not much real drama. It does get to some actual peril eventually, though.

Both of those were manwha on Tapas. I also started a new Webtoon, Chocolate Snow. I thought it was already complete when I started it, but I checked just now and it's on hiatus; it says "season 1 finale" for the last episode posted, and I probably misread that as series finale. It's tagged "slow-burn romance". The characters wake up in bed together in the first episode, so I don't think "slow-burn" means the same thing to this creator that it does to me. It's a "Webtoon Original"; I'm not positive, but I feel like it's manga/manwha-influenced but originally written in English. I can't tell whether it's supposed to be in Korea or Japan or some other place. The main character (Daejoon) and his friend have Korean names, while the main love interest and the MC's ex-crush have Japanese names. Daejoon refers to his lover as "Aoi-san" and his ex-crush as "Sensei". So ... maybe he's a Korean man attending college in Japan? I cannot tell. 

Also, -san seems an awfully formal way to refer to a lover but idk, I am not that familiar with Japanese conventions.

Anyway, I've gotten like 25 episodes into "Chocolate Snow" and there's been only the barest hint of a conflict. It's pretty much just the male leads being super-cute together. I'll read an episode and think "I've never seen a comic better exemplify the 'I just want to draw boys kissing' mood." So many loving shots of facial expressions while they're making love, too. The male leads are drawn with proportions that make a superhero look understated -- beefier than I like tbh -- but the art is good and I enjoy the close-ups. And I appreciate leisurely stories about people being happy together.

One thing that really struck me: the first episode depicts Daejoon getting drunk and going home with Aoi, who is sober. I feared that it was going to use the "drunk sex" trope, which would be D:

But no: some time passes, Daejoon says that he's sober now, and they make out a bit. Then Daejoon wakes up in bed naked with Aoi and is like 'what did I do?' (Spoiler: nothing, Daejoon vomited and passed out so Aoi undressed both of them to clean up before going to sleep). I'm like "oh good, that seems fairly reasonable."

Then I got to the comments. The creator had put up an apology and a note that the comic had been revised in response to feedback. The earliest comments -- clearly before revision -- were all angry and on the lines of "why are you romanticizing rape?!?"

And I find it so touching that instead of being angry or demoralized or doubling-down, the creator put in the work to revise their comic in response to feedback instead. The comments from later in the comic are all positive and cheerful, too. It's sweet. It's got some weaknesses in the writing, but I'm enjoying it.

Still reading a handful of manwha that update once a week and aren't finished. I read all the free/wait-until-free episodes of Homebody but (a) it's a new series and probably won't be finished for years and (b) I was iffy about it. Oh: I also read all the free epsiodes of The Runaway Extra and the Obsessive Duke; the male lead in that one is a red flag so I haven't gone any farther with it. 

I'd unlocked a bunch of episodes of Arelyn Is Sick and Tired a month ago and forgotten about it; I finally read those. There's a handful that I hadn't unlocked yet and I have not since bothered to unlock. This has the "MC isekai'd into a child's body" trope. I get suckered into many of these because I enjoy the child-parental figure relationship in them, but the transition to "romance as an adult" is very often a dud. In this one, the male lead has already been introduced and I already don't like the ML/FL relationship. The FL's guardian, Mehen, is a delight but I don't think I'm gonna stick with this story just for him. Maybe.

Social

I've continued to be pretty social in May, going out on both Wednesday and Friday to see friends, plus a bonus trip on a Sunday for Envoy's birthday. It's more of a routine and less special-occasion stuff this month.

May Goal Scorecard

• Provide care for Dad: done!
• Schedule COVID-19 booster for Dad: done! Bonus, I even took him for it.
• Do May withdrawal from brokerage and pay May bills: done!
• Either contact an artist or start work myself on the cover for The Jewel-Strewn Night: I did this so early in the month that I forgot about it until I looked at the goal list, but yes, I did it
• Complete one creative stretch goal (can combine effort if I'm productive but scattershot): Yes, just barely.

• Check off 60 boxes on the bullet journal for writing/editing/drawing: made it to 63!
• Get A Game to You to 50% edited: I only got to 45% but I'm giving myself an honorable mention for coming close
• Exercise 15+ times: 21!
• Visit friends: getting out quite a lot for me, really
• Do some art: I think May even qualifies as A Lot of art.
• Track what I read: I've even updated my StoryGraph! Technically that happened on June 1, but hey, if I can still reconstruct it, good enough.

June Goals

May's goals were (a) very modest and (b) exhausting. I don't know why it's so hard for me to get back to creative pursuits, but: OOF. I finally got to 60 bullet points on May 28th and I just collapsed for the last three days of the month. I caught up on my journal and that was about it. I'd let my journaling slide for most of the month and then caught up in big bursts with whatever I could remember. Writing less exhaustively about each day was a good call overall, but on the other hand: I like having the record of what I did each day, and I don't want to stop entirely.

Anyway. I think the "goal is flexible" was a good plan, but my goals need to be Even Less ambitious, which is disheartening (these were not ambitious goals! I did more than this while working full time AND caring for Lut). But I don't want to feel drained dry by the end of June. So:

• Provide care for Dad
• Actually take Dad to the ultrasound appointment on June 11 instead of spacing out about it a second time
• Do June withdrawal from brokerage and pay June bills
• Pay quarterly estimated taxes by June 15
• Complete one(1) creative stretch goal

June Stretch Goals

• Figure out middle and denouement for Kingslayer
• Refine editing list for The Jewel-Strewn Night
• Get A Game to You to 60% edited
• Write 10,000 words of A Dragon's Secret
• Check off 40 boxes on the bullet journal for writing/editing/drawing
• Any of my other usual stretch goals

I am hoping that sufficiently low goals will trigger my joy in exceeding them, so I'll finish them early and forge on instead of falling over at the finish line. We'll see if this works any better than May did.