Weekly Update #121

Well, I definitely didn't get distracted by playing ARK all day.

Anyways, since I don't really have much to say this week, let me just complain about some hand pain I've been having lately. But first, let us start with a story.

You see, once upon a time, I used to work at a Dunkin Donuts / Baskin Robins combo store. Now, I absolutely fucking despised working the DD side of things. People need to stop wanting coffee at 6 in the morning. Seriously, who drinks coffee in the morning? Anyways, I fucking hated that part of the job. Fortunately, I became pretty close to one of the assistant managers and she was able to get me to work most shifts with her in the evening since that was when she was in charge. That meant I got to work on the Baskin Robins side of things. Now, I loved that part of the job. Nobody goes to get ice cream when they're grumpy like they do with coffee. All I had to do was deal with nice, happy customers, give them whatever ice cream they wanted, and everybody was happy and having fun. I ended up earning the title of King of Baskin since I knew that part of the job inside and out.

Also, on a somewhat related note - you know how fast food places will usually say something is broken like their milkshake machine, frosty machine, coolatta machine, or whatever? Well, 99.9999% of the time, that's pure bullshit and just means that it needs clean or is being cleaned or hasn't been put back together yet after being cleaned. I was often in charge of taking care of the coolatta machine. Had to strip down all the messy parts, wash them, and then carefully put them back together. There were like... 20 or so different parts I had to take apart and remember how to put back together? It was pretty fun. Also time-consuming. That's why we say they're broken. Though, I was always honest and said it was being cleaned.

Anyways, back to the main story. So, 4th of July, nearly a decade ago since it was my first ever job. The manager earlier in the day was an (insult of your choosing here) who always set the ice cream temperatures too low. So, when the fireworks were over and a bunch of kids and families wanted to come for ice cream, guess who had to scoop rock-fucking-hard ice cream for about 5 hours? This guy.

Ever since then, I've had pretty bad carpal tunnel or something in my right wrist. I can't really tightly pinch anything, doing stuff like holding a mixing spoon to mix some cookie dough or whatever is extremely painful, and so on. Fortunately, it only ever really applied to stuff like that. Well, I don't know if this is related to that, but it's recently begun affecting my writing. Even right now, I've had almost no pain all day, but I've been typing this for ten minutes and my wrist is starting to hurt. The pain has been getting worse lately, with yesterday being the worst it's ever been from writing, but it was tolerable. Annoying, but tolerable.

So, I bought a pretty nice compression glove. It just got here today, and... yeah, I just put it on. Pain is practically instantly gone. It's a bit difficulty to type with it on, but it's definitely doable.

Now, what I should probably do is go to the doctor's to get my wrist checked out to make sure that this won't get worse.

But guess who doesn't have health insurance?

This guy.

Hopefully this won't get any worse. For now, it's only having a very minor impact on my writing. I'll look into doing some wrist exercises or something that might help, too.

At least it doesn't hurt to rest my right hand on a mouse for gaming.

Time for memes 'nd things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlQbS5fW5sg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEfsYd-VdHg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSzyI93e_zY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-E7GHf20P8&feature=youtu.be

Weekly Worksheet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SHjZHkUolYejVuoXZyKHOJ3afuZeHSkw/view

24 hours, 18,889 words. Blegh. I still haven't gotten more editing done nor have I done much work on the new series. This writer's block is a bitch. 

The True Endgame

I wasn't expecting this lewd part to take so many chapters, but it is, and I'm not complaining. It's been a ton of fun to write. Though, I'm getting more and more excited for everything that's going to be coming after they're back in-game. 

Ero Dungeon Online

There's not much that I can say without spoiling things, but something I'm toying around with... is the idea of a lewd tournament arc. I have some ideas for how it might work, but I'm not sure if I'll actually go through with it quite yet. So, we'll see!

The Queen's Hound

Chapters be chapters, yo. TQH remains my hardest story to write right now. Good news is that I'm getting a bunch of ideas for it. I'm just struggling hardcore when it comes to actually writing it.

Lazy Dragon Queen

The cat queen will soon be conquered. I'm looking forward to a fun change of scenery afterwards which, to give some hints, will really be fitting with what the season will be when those chapters are coming out.

CORE

This latest chapter was interesting for me to write. I don't know, I've never really gone that in-depth with a specific material or anything before like I did with this one. I kind of liked going into that  detail with it. I'd like to do it some more.

Reading Report

I'll be honest, I didn't read as much as I was supposed to this week. I did, however, read, which is more than I can say for the rest of my life. Right now, I'm making my way through Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale. I'm an extremely slow reader, so reading has reminded me that some of you are insane for being able to read 5k-word chapters in a few minutes. I feel like it takes me twenty minutes at least just to read ten pages if I want to actually absorb what I'm reading and not just skim it. Anyways, as far as the story itself goes, I'm enjoying it so far. A few different lines have made me laugh out loud which is always good. More importantly, it's giving me a good idea for how to better describe scenes without completely writing them out. At the same time, it's kind of heavy on the telling rather than showing. Lots of telling what happened and what people talked about rather than actually showing it in any detail. However, because of that, it's able to have a pretty fast progression and focuses only on the stuff important to moving the plot forward.

Is it that useful to me as a writer? Eh, a little bit. Am I enjoying it as a reader? Absolutely.

In Closing

It's a new month, so thank you once again for your continued support! And thanks a ton for being patient with me lately. I know that people aren't really happy with me posting chapters so erratically and late now, but I promise that I'm still trying my best with these chapters. I just don't want to turn my writer's block into a burnout by forcing myself to try and stay on time as strictly as I was before.

Anyways, thank you once again, and I hope that you all have a wonderful week and month and year and life! Please look forward to the next chapters!