もっと遊んでたいの

Still in the hospital.

Rough night.

Basically, the issue is trying to get my guts to function again. They pretty much quit after the trauma of the infection and the surgery. So I have to be able to digest and pass things through the system without throwing up before I can leave.

There's been some progress, so I'm hopeful.

This is a disgusting process, lol. I still recommend avoiding this altogether!

I am so sick.

I suspect food poisoning, but I don't know what the culprit was. Alex is fine, but we did eat slightly different things.

Got sandwiches from a place near work, but when we got home discovered they weren't no mayo. I can't eat mayo - I hate it, and I hate that I hate it to the point I can't even put up with it on something - so I left it for Alex for another meal. I scavenged a couple bits of the sandwich filling to put on my own roll of bread. That was fairly small, so I also heated up some leftover rice.

About two hours later, I felt like I wanted to die. It's now about 25 hours later, and I still feel like I want to die.

The roll was the last of a package we'd just eaten from a day or two before. The rice was only leftover from Tuesday. The sandwich bits wouldn't explain why Alex is fine.

Yesterday mostly felt like pressure and bloating, but very painful. I only slept about an hour, maybe, and that pretty broken up. I was just too uncomfortable to really drop off.

I had to go to work - no real choice - because it was a new person's first day of training, and the first of a class series... Then an instructor called out sick, and it was pretty much just a really rough day. It felt like it took forever.

I haven't been able to eat anything - the thought of trying to swallow anything makes me gag. I haven't actually thrown up, but I kind of almost wish I would, in case it would make me feel better. I've sipped at about 3/4 of a bottled smoothie over the course of the day. I am SO THIRSTY, but even liquids make me queasier.

Now it's less pressure and more just pain. It's a steady maybe 5/10, like I cannot ignore it, but it's not too horrible. Then it spikes to an 8/10 as it feels like every internal bit just cramps at once. Not my actual abdominal muscles, but everything inside.

It's awful. I hate it. I can't get comfortable. I keep getting chills and then hot flashes, and every hair on my body hurts.

I also can't take tomorrow off - another class, I'm solo.

I want to maybe take a hot bath, see if that helps things relax any, but I also just want to try and get any sleep possible. I'm exhausted, and dehydrated, and I can't fix either one effectively right now!

I rate this a zero out of ten stars. I do not recommend it.

In what wound up feeling very fitting for the week, Cthulu rising up to devour the world; by my friends the Atomic Pixies.

This was not a great week. The murder of Renee Good was horrifying, and more horrifying was a lot of the reaction to it. (And yes, I'm aware she is far from the first person murdered by ICE.) The anger and frustration and sense of despair overshadowed and felt far more important than anything else happening for the week. Work was mediocre. Writing was nonexistent. Reading was okay, but short of what I wanted.

Goals for the week:

• I did patch the seat of the truck
• I finished reading Manhunt
• I read Through Gates of Garnet and Gold
• I started reading Ninth House
• I did not post my January (or broader 2026) writing goals
• I sorted out my what-needs-doing for plant care, but didn't start on doing it
• I did not work on my WIP outline
• We paid rent
• I did post my reading goals for the year

Tracked habits:

• Work - 5/7
• Household Maintenance - 4/7
• Physical Activity - 1/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
• Non-fiction Writing - 1/7 - over 1000 words
• Meta Work - 6/7
• Personal Writing - 6/7
• Other Creative Things - 0/7
• Reading - 7/7 - I finished Manhunt, read Through Gates of Garnet and Gold, started Ninth House; I started my ebook side-read, Our Bloody Pearl; Alex and I read some of The Sun Dog
• Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday we watched the Ravens game, which was pretty crushing, then news and then reviews; Monday we finished Stranger Things which was... fine, then reviews; Tuesday we watched news coverage; Wednesday we watched some news, then some storm chasing, then some reviews; Thursday watched news coverage and then reviews; Friday watched news; Saturday watched paranormal stuff, then news, then later reviews.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 6/7

Total words written: 2245 of non-fiction, setting reading goals

I definitely feel like I’m struggling a little bit to figure out what I’m hoping to get out of 2026 in terms of writing.

I’m not very satisfied with what 2025 looked like. I didn’t finish anything, and I didn’t even get much done in terms of planning for future projects. I worked on one WIP for a while, before deciding there was so much I felt needed fixing/reworking that it wasn’t worth continuing as it was. I did have one burst of hyperfocused enthusiasm midway through the year that led to me really wanting to make a plan, and push through, and Do The Thing (and especially to put energy into some original works)… but the burst didn’t last, and I didn’t manage to capitalize on it as fully as I wish I would have. Toward the later part of the year there was at least some progress on planning a different WIP, but it was slow-going, and still isn’t done.

2024 wasn’t much better. I struggled badly until I finally finished an editing project for a friend (which I fear WAS too little too late; she responded with one additional chapter fairly quickly, which I was able to do a much better turnaround on, but then she pretty well ghosted me on the project after, which I still feel terrible about.) After that, I finally managed to finish some lingering fics of my own… but after completing those, I struggled to find anything else that grabbed my attention. I spent months kind of half-heartedly prodding at plot bunnies, but never really settling on anything to focus on, which persisted into 2025.

2022 - 2023 were better writing years for me, but that feels sadder and sadder the farther away from them I get, haha.

---

I did set myself a goal (via getyourwordsout and inkingitout) of 75000 words again for this year. I surpassed that goal last year, though it was primarily on non-fiction writing. While I still plan to count my non-fiction writing (book reviews, other effort-ful writing), I am hoping that more of my total words will be fiction again.

My other tentative goal, set as part of my 2026 intentions, is to finish something. That doesn’t mean it has to be shareable (I’m still iffy about sharing any original works), but I’d like something to feel finished.

Trying to set some more specific goals… that’s where I’m floundering. In part, I think I’m having a hard time determining what a realistic schedule looks like for me. I am trying to up my reading goals, and want to try and be a bit more participatory in communities and things here. I’ve said all of that before, but all the intentions in the world haven’t overcome the fact that my hours in the day are limited! Deciding that somehow I am going to be social and participatory every day AND write 1000 words every day AND read at least 150+ pages every day… just leads to me struggling to do any of it.

I haven’t written anything yet this year (in terms of fiction). I need to get reoriented in the outlining I was doing, and resume that. Again, time and energy are a struggle. I’m frustrated that it feels SO SLOW… while also knowing that it only is slow because I’m being slow! If I was putting more time into it and making it a priority, then it’d go a lot faster… but if I prioritized that, I’d never keep up on posts here, never get through the comments I want to, and probably would have to slow down how much I’m reading as well. I also don’t want to give up time I spend with Alex in the evenings, even when we’re just watching stuff together or reading or whatnot.

(For a while last year I tried to sort of “schedule” different priorities for different days, like “I will spend time on DW three days a week, and focus just on writing two days a week…” but it didn’t really work as intended. I guess it worked as long as literally nothing else ever came up, haha. Too often, something would derail a particular day, and then I’d feel incapable of catching up, and stressed as I tried to decide between sacrificing the next day to “make it up” or just letting the derailed thing remain undone.)

So… if I’m not going to have writing be a top priority - not that I don’t want to prioritize it at all, just sort of admitting that it’s a middle priority, not a top three - then I need to figure out what a realistic goal looks like.

For now… my goal for the month is to get back into outlining that particular WIP, and perhaps even finishing that outline!