March in Writing

This was a rough month. As pretty much everyone knows, COVID-19 is throwing wrenches into everyone's plans. Between the anxiety of a pandemic, having children at home, and the regular disruptions to my schedules, writing has been difficult. Oh well, I'm going to adapt like everything else.

I'm still maintained my weekly chapter posting. I managed to get a six week buffer though it's down to two weeks at this point due to distractions of various natures (the big one is below). March covered consecutive weeks 245 through 249 of my weekly chapter goal so I'm excited that I'm halfway done through the 200s.

  • Allegro 11-15: I'm really enjoying this part of the story. It is the early days of Linsan on her own, mainly about those first days of being on her own and the frustrations of trying to find the murderers and thieves.

On the short story side, I had three at the end of the month:

  • Illusions of the Dead was a inspired by Victoria Corva. This is another of the stories about the dead of the world, but not undead. In this case, it is about an illusionist giving someone closer.
  • Confessions Among Friends is a short story about two old men who find out they were on opposite sides of the same war.
  • Brilliant Luck is the sequel to a flash fiction I wrote a while ago, Brilliant Manifestation. Told from the point of view of a father (Jacom) who's son had gotten light powers (one of the rarer forms of magic in my world), it is just another view of a parent seeing how their child changes after going away for a year. (Something that I'll probably go through myself, not sure).

Last year, I did a poem a day for National Poetry Month. As much as I'd like to do that, I'm thinking it is too much load at this point. Likewise, I have given up trying to write a money post this year. I'm also going to skip writing processes post, but maybe only for a month or two.

On the other hand, I did hit a lovely distraction. About a week ago, my Gitlab stopped deploying. I have no clue what changed and I spent two days trying to figure it out without any success. This was based on a static site generator I had written (Cobblestone) but I decided to try switching over Fedran's (no other site has a problem) to Gatsby.

The last time I tried Gatsby, it was a disaster. It took seven hours to generate the website after three days of trying. This time, however, it has been going much faster and I've been rather happy with the results. I'm about 19% done with the conversion, but I'm aiming for having a limited version of the site on https://fedran.com/ by the end of Sunday.

It doesn't hurt that I understand CSS Grid and Flexbox a lot better, so a lot of the hoops I had jumped through are much easier. However, I have years of custom code behind this website so it will take a while to produce a good looking and useful site.

In April, my goals are:

  • Continue Allegro and get a few more weeks buffer going.
  • Three short stories.
  • Get the 80% point on the Fedran website conversion.

As usual, let me know if you like any stories or want to see new topics or themes. I'm deeply thankful for my subscribers through Patreon and other places. Your help has been wonderful in encouraging me.

Thank you.

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