Some updates from me

I feel like I haven't been active enough for my base. While I'm grateful for your patience, it's frustrating to me to drip-feed you all how my work is going and what it is I'm doing on my day-to-day, so here's a quick update on myself, my projects, and what I've been up to lately.

The first is my current main focus, Tall Lyric. My work has been a bit slower lately - I don't want to be nice to myself and just admit that I've been lazy at worst and distracted at best. But it's coming along, and I'm hoping to have it finished before the end of the year: the only things left to do are two sex scenes (one and a half, really), followed by some cleanup, and then porting some of Small Lyric's content with logistic changes for Tall Lyric (namely, talk scenes, pregnancy content, and the scene where you can make Lyric herm). Overall, it's actually not far from completion and I'll hopefully have something to show for the Year of the Dragon before it's over.

However, I've intentionally halved my already-slower workflow on Tall Lyric so that I can focus a bit on Winter Lorelei. While she's admittedly a lower-priority project, particularly since I'm doing it for free, I also want her done ideally before Christmas, and I really dropped the ball on her. I started her in August specifically so I could have a buffer of time to get her done, and now, here I am, crunching myself to do her. All that said, hopefully, she doesn't need much more work either, much like Tall Lyric: her "nice" branch only needs about one sex scene more, and then the entirety of her "naughty" path could go a bit faster depending on how much attention I want to sacrifice to the PC.

Some updates on my personal life: I was diagnosed for ADHD, but the doctor I spoke with said I was inconclusive. I was hoping to have something to help me get my sleep under control and to help me focus on my work, but, well, I spent about three hundred dollars to have a doctor tell me that she didn't know, so I just have to knuckle down better than I have been. Now that they days are shorter, I'm pretty sure I have seasonal depression - I have a lot of symptoms, particularly poor sleep, that I have every year around this time, that make things a bit harder.

A more immediate health issue that I've been having, though, is constant knuckle pain. You may have seen me post about it on Twitter and Bluesky. While it's not so intense that I just want to lie down for the day, it's debilitating enough that I legitimately have trouble getting more than a thousand words down a day. I went to my doctor for arthritis concerns, but she told me to come back when it was truly painful, like, every-day-is-hell painful, so I just have to put up with it. Thankfully, my dad recommended me some balm that helps a lot for hours at a time. I just hope it's not, you know, kicking the can down the road and hiding a problem that's going to be exacerbated later.

Like I said, though, I don't want to be kind to myself. My work is slow and it's my own fault. I appreciate anyone and everyone saying that everyone needs rest, that it's alright to slow down, but this is my livelihood, and I don't make a whole lot of money to begin with - I literally cannot afford to be as slow as I have been, and it's wholly selfish of me to take as much time as I have.

One of my new year's resolutions is to try and keep track of how much work I do in a year, partly to judge myself on my habits and try to keep them moving, and partly for my own curiosity. I wonder how many words I write in a year.

I haven't forgotten about Equivalent Exchange. Every week, I tell myself, "this will be the week I get back to it." But it's a passion project, and while it's a major breadwinner on my patreon, if I sit down to work on something, it needs to be something that'll put food on my plate this week, not next month. That, and I've written myself into a... well, not a 'corner', exactly, but not something I'm looking forward to. I bit off a whole lot more than my mouth was ready to chew, and my mouth chewed through Berwyn.

I think that's about everything. Again, thank you all for putting up with my slow updates and your unending patience. You're all donating your hard-earned money to help me pursue something I want to pursue (creative writing, specifically), and you all deserve more routine updates and expediency than I've been able to give you. I promise to try and be better with my routines and my updates - but words are only words, and the word 'try' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'll do my best to make 2025 better for you and your money's worth.