There's light somewhere

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.

My goals for this month are fairly straight forward since June was a crazy busy month for me:

( Writing Goals )

( Reading Goals )

( Art Goals )

I haven't been able to write as much as I want this last half month. :( The first ten days was a bit biting my nails related to my work life, but that's more or less worked out for now. The rest of the time not consumed by that, there just been something happening most days-- 'tis the season that is June as everyone is either graduating, marrying, or moving. I've managed to at least keep this weekend open so I can at least try to not have my time full.

Video game wise: I caved and bought Balatro, and it's a new favorite rouge-like and time killer. I was at least smart and only got it on the switch. If I I followed my friend's bad suggestion and get it on my phone, there's no way I'd be able to actually function lmao

Reading wise: I picked up a few books from a thrift shop to spoil myself, and one of them that I picked up was The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. It's a very fun and weird book that plays fast and loose with magical realism. One moment we have man mysteriously falling ill from a curse (but turns out he was drugged with extra strong laudnum) and the next, an emperor dreams a girl to life so hard, she's becomes real. While most of the main characters are men so far, Rushdie goes out of his way to give us some POV characters from women--namely the emperor's wives being frustrated that the "perfect dream woman" is just pieces of them patched together, the perfect dream woman having her own thoughts and wants, and--the most surprising given this book was from 2008--a sex worker being apologetically a sex worker. Even the narrator more or less spells out "sex work is real work and shouldn't be looked down on." I just think that's neat! I'm about a hundred pages into it, but have yet to officially meet the titular enchantress, though I have thoughts.

Other things I've picked up are a couple of second hand D&D books, namely the Descent into Avernus and a source book for the Sword Coast. I've poked my nose into Descent, and boy, my brain is having some fun with a lot of what-ifs, especially with how BG3 is suggests it goes. 

Writing has been hard as of the last few days. Either work has worn me out or I have something planned. Writing club has turned into less of a writing circle and into more of a critique circle, which...I'm having mixed feelings on. I love reading other people's stuff, but it just feels like it's only critique and from one person. It is encouraging others to share stuff, though, which is neat! I don't have anything I feel is ready for critique, so I'm just going to continue holding off.

Meanwhile, I've gotten back into contact with an old friend of mine. I haven't really talked with her since I was in high school, so it's pretty exciting to catch up after over a decade! Depending on how far out she is, maybe I'll see about making an excuse to make a trip to visit.

Been a bit sick the last few days, so I've been just doing nothing besides video games and thinking about writing. I had a bit more energy today, so I took a crack at some editing. Unfortunately, it seems grammar checks native to writing programs have gone the way of the dodo, and I've reluctantly started using the trail run on Grammarly. I know it's decent, but I'm frustrated I gotta sign up for it. I would kill to just have a plug-in for Scrivener that I just pay for once, attach and never think of again.

I could just pay for Word again, but I despise the recent renditions of it and it's a subscription model. I wrote with Word 2003 for a decade, and that is the platonic ideal of what I want a word processor program to look like. Scrivener hits the right beats for me, but makes it so much easier to not have a billion documents open at once. Best sum of money I've put down on a program.

I've done a bit of poking around for a grammar checker for the Windows version of Scrivener, and I did find ProWritingAid, but it comes with a whole bunch of doodads and whistles. It touts being a virtual beta reader, but I'm a Luddite that deeply prefers having a living, breathing beta reader.