A Fine Mess

I’ve been writing so much! I can see that I’ve improved dramatically over time which I’m very chuffed about.

It started out as a very ambitious game of Apothecaria—which is still running, though I’ve put the writing part of it down a bit. It got TOO ambitious and I need to let it cool off before I get stuck back in.

In the last in-game month: Ivy’s odd acquaintance with the mildly terrifying Druid she keeps bumping into in the forest seems to have somehow turned into a situationship, to the horror of her familiar Nutkin. She lost her first patient. She’s been charged with the sacred duty of guiding lost souls back to the Land Beyond by the time the Autumn closes with Bogle’s Night (not a lot of time!). There’s a vampire preying on the young people of High Rannock and she’s got to find and stake him in his weird freakish heart before his games kill someone. Oh, also she saw her Fetch, and she can’t get an appointment with her solicitor in her home town to make her will without her mother finding out she’s in town, which is almost worse than seeing the omen of her imminent death, frankly.

It’s all very dramatic. And told through the POV of a squirrel, so also difficult.

Then I picked up an ancient fanfiction that I started when I was, like… 15? Messed about with it a bit but it was for a fandom that shall not be named so the fun wore off. Sigh. If you’ve been in a fandom and had to reckon with discovering that the author is even more… unsavoury… than you thought. Well. You know how it is.

I’m also playing (with various levels of seriousness) in no particular order:

• For Small Creatures Such As We (resource management and journalling, in space! Also there’s a hex map!)
• Tangled Blessings (a solo or duet game, journalling in a magic university with a built in mechanic for rivalry and possibly romance <3 while you try not to die from all the eldritch horror going on.)
• 5’ Into Space (not too far into this one yet, but the story mechanics are interesting. It feels kind of like writing an episode of a sci show?)
• The Prize (solo writing prompts exploring the inherent misogyny in ‘save the kingdom, get the girl!’ You play as the Hero’s fellow adventurer until you are demoted to ‘Queen’.)
• Ironsworn (a very popular rpg system that I’m only just getting into.)
• Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop (more resource management, kind of, and little stories about animals who own bookshops and stuff.)

I’m looking forward to picking up, at some point (I want to get a few of the above closed off first, I think):

• Ashes (a ‘Souls-like’ solo rpg)
• Drakonym (the solo version of a very interesting looking ttrpg which involves bonding with DRAGONS, hell yeah!)
• Brambletrek (adorable looking explore/adventure something something with little animal people)
• Wandering Bookshop
• Gossamer Frontier (a campaign of, as described by the author, a mass-effect like story. I’m a BioWare fan.)
• A lot of small indie games I got in various charity Itch.io bundles.

I have a few original ideas that I’m letting marinate because they’re not ripe yet. I write romance, though, so they’ll be kissing books D:

Moving round ups to Monday when I'm usually more able to actually do them. It's not the last day of the week (in my calendar, at least) so it bothers me because it feels like I should be looking FORWARD on a Monday not BACKWARDS but. I will get over it.

I know it's Tuesday. Shh.

Last week I was annoyed that my cough that I thought I got rid of is back! I think it's possiby not anything to do with covid but is in fact my allergies so we've kicked all out non-organic food again and I'm working on lowering my histamine levels to rebild my histamine tolerance after it's been wipes by having covid again. Very annoyed, it took me about a year and a half to fix that last time. I know what I'm doing this time at least so perhaps it'll go quicker.

In the meantime I've been knitting my log cabins squares while I wait for more yarn  for other blankets.


I haven't done maths for this project yet because I'm not sure how many squares I'll actuall ymake overall. Our bed is bigger than it was when I started it, but we were originally planning to keep it in the living room so it may not need to increase in size to match. We'll see!

I might rip back the last section of the one on the far right, I'm not keen on the beige/brown/grey and it's not in keeping with the colours of the squares I've made so far. I'll wai tuntil the point where I'm decided which leftover balls to mix n match together to make more squares so I can determine if it will be echoed elsewhere or not. I feel like a few of Kureyon colourways have sneaky sections of beige so it might be fine.

These work up very fast, if I hadn't had other things going on earlier this year I could easily have finished the blanket by doing one every few days. I Was intending to have it done by my next anniv ersary but I moved the date back a year to the milestone anniversary when I picked up a load of other more urgent blanket projects but I might not need to tbh.

I also started a playthrough of Apothecaria! I need to tinker with the style I started writing it in before I'm happy I think but Im enjoying myself. I signed up to the author;'s patreon and got most of the DLC for the first £3ish payment which is so much value for money it feels like stealing! It's recommended to keep a physicl journal for it where you write in it like it's your character's actual journal and make sketches of things they encounter etc etc which sounds amazing but I am not sure I;m ready for that level fo committment yet. I'm writing on Scrivener and once I get into the swing of it I may start writing some of it up in a journal and doing some artwork later. I actually started writing in 3rd person POV because that's what I always used to write in but it is contributing to the entries being SO LONG so I might stop that and do it the other way instead after all.

I've been looking the journals shared by other players in the author's discord and they are so wonderfully creative, it's really such a joy to look through them all. I've been feeling incredibly down this year overall for various reasons so it's nice to feel such untainted pleasure from something so whimsical and fun.

I'm using my Frodor Pavlov tarot deck to play it with and I'm thrilled to have an excuse to use that more regularly and also want it to inform the general vibe of my playthrough so I'll be keeping an eye on that as I play.

I'm hoping, perhaps optimistically, that I can do enough crafting in a week that I will have interesthing things to share for future me when I look back at what the heck I even got up to.

This week I mostly knit on my next Hue Shift blanket.

 
I also attended a cider and sausage festival :O and a virtual geogame in my local city, and a picnic, on consequetive days! And now I'm absolutely knackered.