Posted by bzedan on Nov 16, 2025
Image description: A photo of a tall stand of paddle cactus, backlit by the sun, which glares through the gaps and highlights the spines. End ID.
I finished the next newsletter and got that queued and have begun (lightly) the one for January. I would so like to get a bit ahead, just one or two months would be nice. Part of me wants to go and count up the words in all the newsletters and all the blog posts and all the short stories I've written this year, so I can have a probably impressive number to be like: LOOK I do things! I do them! But I've well learned that metric-watching, from steps to likes, is a waterslide to hell for me, so.
Although I didn't get as much writing-writing done this week as I'd like (newsletter is "writing", story is "writing-writing"), I did get a head start on some holiday gifts (that you lot will also reap the benefit of). I sent out things in January but the process starts now. Year-end vibe stuff in general happening as I got a goodly amount of file management done as well, hooray.
I do think I've written a fair bit this year, though, across it all. The Buttondown interface I paste my markdown into is always like "oh lordy your newsletter is [some number] of words, wow! you should add a call to action for folks to subscribe." to which, of course, I tell it to fuckoff as I'm not interrupting my flow of essay to pop a "put your email here!" box. You're reading this update for free on a subscription site because at some point this year I decided that the challenge of clicking a link was enough currency of support to read these little updates. My priorities just don't include a CTA to subscribe, free or not (though, I will point out, you lot who do subscribe pay my gas bill, thank you forever).
Oh right, I also had a nice bit of blogpost about the embroidery work I used to do.
Speaking of blogs, if you remember the monster brainstorm sheet I shared a bit back--I finally sat down this week and wrote a proper list of beasties out based on the results from that playthrough. A fresh flavour of torture I've found is that I really want to draw these damn things to get my head around them.
However: they will never be seen, just described because of the whole "it's for a book" thing. I need to be sketching via words, as drawing something (then subsequently going down rabbit holes to learn the difference between antennules and antennae) is 100% writing procrastination. Which is fine!
I can tell this is the World Building Disease, where one begins spending more and more time crafting the world than writing the story it is ostensibly for (which again: is fine, it's fun to world build for the lark of it!). It hasn't caught me yet, honestly, so it shan't now. Even though it tempts me with drawing wretched little creatures...
Thank you, as always, for your support!
Crossposted to Patreon.