WIP Week

I discovered that I have a *ton* of things that I planned to try and do this "weekend," and I'm kind of dreading it!

The biggest one is needing to get some maintenance on the truck. Our lead instructor's neighbor has volunteered to take a look (I hope he volunteered; I asked my coworker if he thought his neighbor would be willing and he told me yes, ha.) There's a pretty major coolant leak somewhere, and the washer fluid does not work at all. I'm *hoping* the coolant leak is something that's easy to figure out and not wildly expensive to fix. The washer fluid shouldn't be too big a deal - either a fuse is burned out, or the motor in the pump died - but having no washer fluid is pretty crap heading into winter. Buuuut, lead instructor also thinks we should take a bigger look for any other major maintenance things that the truck needs, since it's hit over 200k miles, and I know he's right, but I *just so deeply dread* anything car-related. I'd love for it to not be a big deal, but every time, I'm petrified that what I hope is a tiny thing is actually a MAJOR thing.

I hope that's really the only truly major thing on the list. Some of the rest is fun stuff, or at least not *not* fun stuff, like getting holiday cards sent out, hopefully getting stuff in the kitchen neatened up enough to put up our tiny trees... I want to try and get caught up on some reading, since I'm behind where I'd hoped to be... I have other chore type stuff to do. I am a bit worried that if the car stuff is worse than planned, it'll derail me from being able to do anything else, heh.

Final month of 2025! Somehow!

As I've said basically every month, 2025 has not been a good year for me in terms of writing. I surpassed my official goal of writing 75000 words, but relatively little of that has been fiction writing. More of it has been on things like book reviews, which I do consider to be writing, but certainly aren't the creative writing that I'd hoped to do. Over the last couple of months I've at least made some progress on some projects (and to be fair, I got at least a bit of one worked on earlier in the year as well), but definitely nothing even sort of moving toward completion. At this point, about the best hope I have is to try and set myself up for better success in 2026.

My goals for November were:
- Continue my outline for my current WIP
- Start outlining a fic project

And well... I did continue the WIP outline, but am in the middle of the process, not even close to done. I definitely didn't get to the fic project at all.

I will say that at least I feel pretty good for the moment about the outlining. It really has helped me sort out a few things, especially in terms of character motivation that I thought I had nailed down, and then I discovered some interesting aspects that hadn't occurred to me until I was working on the outlining steps. I'm side-eying it a little, because while the outlining process said that would happen, I didn't quite believe it, and now it feels like witchcraft, haha.

So my goals for December are... try again to do what I meant to in November.
- Finish outlining the current WIP
- Perhaps start outlining the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic

Tentative goals for into 2026:
- Finish outlining the WFM fic
- Outline the second original WIP
- Revise the intro for the first original WIP
- Write the first draft of the first original WIP
- Revise the intro of the WFM fic
- Write the first draft of part one of the WFM fic

I created a sort of "master plan" for how to possibly move between projects, with the hope of having different things at different stages of completion, so that I could also switch between different types of work. I'm right now at step five, and the above takes me to step eleven... of about fifty that I'd outlined, haha. At least I've got enough to keep me going for quite a while.

I'm still considering what my real "goals" will be for next year. It really might just come down to "keep moving along the list of steps," but I haven't yet decided if there's a particular place along that list that I want to reach or not. I'd hoped this year to get something completed and shared (if possible), but didn't get there. Do I want to try and get something completed next year, or just bounce between more projects? Trying to decide, ha.

I do hope that 2026 will be a better year for writing, whatever "better" looks like. To be honest, even if I keep up the extremely slow (but at least not nothing) pace of the last few months I'll be happier.

It snowed!

This year has been bizarrely light on snow for our area. The weather stayed warm well into November, and our first snow only came last Saturday, as barely a dusting. I'm not complaining - I've joked that I find snow acceptable between Thanksgiving and New Year's only - but as usual ~we need the moisture~. I don't think I ever expected our snow to *actually* hold off until after Thanksgiving, and it's true that I also don't want things to be on fire all next year. (That can and does coexist with the fact that I would be happy to literally never see another snowflake.)

But at least if it is going to snow, this particular storm was very aesthetic!

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Yesterday, Alex and I went over to my mom's house for a while to help her sort through some old stuff of hers. A while back, she expressed to me the desire to try and sell off a lot of the "stuff" she has accumulated. I think a combination of her mom passing away, and then trying to help her sister with her hoarded house in preparation for moving, and her own 70th birthday, made her really want to make sure that she doesn't wind up with a lot of junk. A lot of what she has isn't really junk: she has antique tools of her grandfather's, some china, some other genuinely antique things. But she'd rather get rid of it now - and maybe get some money for it - rather than leave it to be dealt with after she's gone.

We did look at a lot of the tools, so many of which are really cool! It's amazing how well some of them were made. Nicely carved hardwood handles, a few with carved decoration, things like that. A few it makes me sad to think of getting rid of, because they are such an example of "they don't make 'em like they used to!" but I also understand my mom's desire to part with things that she doesn't actually use.

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Bella and Jaspurr had an accidental face-to-face meeting. I went to the bathroom, and came back to Jaspurr hiding under a chair, and Bella sniffing him. Alex and my mom thought he was upstairs and that Bella was just sniffing around more generally, or they would have intervened. While Jaspurr wasn't loving it, the meeting actually went really well! He didn't hiss or swipe at her, and she was just happily interested. She was easy to call away (though then wanted to go back) and was just mildly excited. He did growl at her the second time she returned, and she left him alone. They later also had a quick meeting in my mom's room, while he was up on a table and Bella was on the floor.

Jaspurr didn't love Bella being there, and ended up spending the whole night in my mom's room after, but it really did go about as well as I could have hoped! We've never gotten to truly test Bella around cats (beyond seeing them at more of a distance), and Jaspurr hasn't gotten to interact with other animals since being with my mom and Taylor. I'm actually quite pleased.

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I had a dentist appointment this morning, and since my dentist is only about five minutes from my mom's house, in light of the forecast snow overnight, I spent the night at my mom's.


The birds were happy to have the feeders today in the snow. A towhee and several house finches!

These couple pictures are a little blurry, but of my favorite random bird at my mom's:


This little girl on the right does not have snow on her head - she has a white patch on the top of her head! She's also not a white-crowned sparrow or anything like that, she's just a house finch with a leucistic patch.


You can see more of the patch here, though it blends in a bit with the snow. She's been coming to my mom's feeders for about three years now, she thinks. I'm always happy to see her. :)

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My dentist appointment went well! I'd been dreading it a little bit, because I had to have *such* extensive dental work done back around 2020-2021. A decade+ of no dental care, and many years of really precarious living situations, plus probably some general mental health garbage really took their toll.

I missed my last cleaning over the summer because of my grandmother's memorial, and so it'd been closer to a year than six months, and while I hadn't noticed any issues, I was very afraid it'd be worse than expected.

It wasn't! No cavities, which always feels like a big win, haha.

The weird hole in my jaw (where I had an extra baby tooth removed when I was young) has not gotten any worse. It's always exciting when every dentist and hygienist that sees my x-rays has an instinctive, horrified gasp. They assumed this was a crisis that would require bone and tissue grafts... and somehow, it's all very stable. The teeth around the gap aren't unstable or in pain, the jaw itself is not deteriorating. This was my five-year x-ray appointment, and my hygienist was delighted when she said that it looks the same as it did five years ago. "Science would disagree with me, but it really does look like it's just... not causing problems." I love that science can't explain my jaw.

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Jaspurr, having returned to the main floor this morning, ha. So regal.