The End of 2023 is Nigh!

Late night, come home / Work sucks, I know

Hello, it's almost the end of 2023, and I've made as much progress over two years in Moonless than what any other serial author could have pulled off in 6 months (is that a grammatically correct sentence?). Not that you should measure yourself by the standards of others. but do it anyways, self image is a joke.

Good life news, though. After pulling off my 3rd 4.0 semester, getting 100% on finals for some of the most difficult prereqs for my degree, I'm finally entering Nursing school. Yes, I need to brag about it to somebody because do you know how hard it is to take A&P and magically be able to blindly put your hand in a dead body and know yes, this is the ileocecal valve, even though the last person displaced it to where the descending colon should be, due to the sharp angle and the squish it makes.

All that's left is the oral interview. I imagine it'll go down just as well as Andy Dwyer's police interview from Parks and Rec.

Any future progress plans for Moonless? I've got exactly 5,605 words in Moonless that need editing. Once I got some more flesh for 2 or 3 parts, I'm hoping to get all of what I got posted to Reddit before end of January. I may be slow, but I'm not giving up, I swear!

A shot of my messy workspace

to prove I am certainly not lying

Reading Updates: For the holidays, the people in my life accurately guessed I like books. As I'm trying to finish Tolkein's LOTR series yet again, my sister gifted me with On Writing and Worldbuilding: Volume III by Timothy Hicks. Doens't help I got Heart Stopper 1-3, The Vampire Lestat and The Emotional Thesaurus in the mail. A nice break from reading textbooks and angry work emails, I guess.

School Sucks p2

 I want to write a story called The Last Vampires on Earth, about a pair of vampires in a post-apocalyptic climate crises, after all non-infected humans have disappeared, thus condemning the remainder of vampire society to starve out and die. It'll have political undertones. Climate change undertones. Resource exploitation undertones. Undertone undertones. Will it be good? Probably not. But I think I'll name the characters Todd and Sarah, after my Totodile and Cyndequil in Pokemon Go.

Idle dreams for an idle future where I have free times on my hands, though.

After two months of a dead sprint through 3 classes and 40+ hour workweeks, I found time to squeeze out Part 29 of Moonless. After rereading previous sections of Moonless because I, uh, forgot a lot of things over multiple hiatuses (we talk about unreliable narrators, but what about unreliable authors?), I accidentally uncovered a plethora of inconsistencies.

Like character names being dropped then disappearing, or having new names, or names with new spellings... It's hard not to go backwards over details instead of forward. I know what you're thinking--have you thought of making a list of characters?

Yes!

But have you done it?

Sort of! Kind of. Well, I have now.

By my count, Moonless currently has 30 named, reoccurring characters. I've finally gotten around to posting a total Reoccurring Characters list. You can see it on the Serial Table of Contents page.

There are some characters with whited-out names, or parts of their names; this is to help protect some plot twists for those trying to avoid spoilers. And makes me feel like a cool secret keeper. Yes, you can highlight the white-out to reveal names.

sunburnt

 For the record, not only did I remember to bring sunblock floating, I actually wore it this time. And reapplied it! Just not... on my neck and face. It's okay. We're all gonna get cancer and die anyways unless a climate catastrophe or the sun exploding gets us first.

Part 26 of Moonless is up. I know it's been long gaps between updates (which sucks because I have the work planned out up to the final scene), so I'll try to get 27 up either tomorrow or midweek as a bonus. Just gotta warm up my grammar bones and haul up some rough spots. Summer classes end in two weeks; the reprieve might help get my gears running again. At a minimum, it'll be time to actually sleep. 

In my reading adventures, I decided to finally trial Audible. Tried to listen to Journey to the West, and accidentally ended up with the short kiddie version that spoiled the longer work for me :\ Starting to think Audible isn't worth the price since it just gives you one credit a month (which is like, the cost of a book), then access to a bunch of free books I don't want to read.

Good thing for trials, right?

Anyways, read list for this update is short. All I got done is, again, that kiddie short version of Journey to the West. But! Been knocking out Sailor Moon, the OG series. It's fucking great.

Crystal sucks, though. Don't watch it if you've never seen the series, or else you'll miss out on a sassy Mars, sassy Tuxedo Mask, and some Mercury goggle action. Mysterious buildups in the original that take like, 20 episodes to reveal, Crystal just expositions in like five minutes >:(