I suppose I didn't have a ton to say after my last post... Honestly things have been the same for a while here, but not necessarily in a bad way. Glasgow winter is still rough, so damp and dark and cold, but I'm hanging in there.

February was actually kind of a packed month for me, surprisingly. Since mid-December I have been consistently working on revising the novel draft I produced during NaNoWriMo, and am about 75% of the way through that first pass. So far it's been a really exciting and interesting process that's gotten me even more invested in thinking about the characters and working out the themes I want to touch on... I'm kind of obsessed! So anything else (including writing update blog posts) I've been slacking on.

But aside from that there were also some other writing things I had to finish this month for non-novel purposes. I ran the annual crit writing jam I've done for the past six years now (woah!), UNDO! Jam, and as you can see we got a lot of interesting entries, even though people in general seem to be (understandably) really tired out right now.

I've also been revising and writing some short sci fi fiction, both to submit to some magazines and share with a leftist sci fi writing group I joined. I haven't had any luck with the magazines so far, which is disappointing because I thought some were a particularly good fit, but it also makes me wonder if that's really a productive venue to share my work. I've been enjoying reading stuff people just casually post online, like this story by Splendidland or this one by Marina Kittaka, so I may set up an additional zonelet to do that eventually. Or maybe going to the group discussion this weekend will give me some additional ideas. I have a longer story I've been thinking of distributing as a zine, and GZF applications are up...

I also finished a catalog essay(!) for an exhibition publication that should come out sometime this year. I always feel really excited and like I can let loose a bit when I'm writing about games for a contemporary art perspective, whereas I find responding to the assumptions of academic game studies really grating and stultifying. The piece will still go through a few rounds of editing but I'm excited to see the feedback I get on it! Even though I feel excited now it did seem like a larger scale opportunity than I'm generally used to and I was kind of nervous about it, so put off putting any of the ideas I was thinking over down. So it was sort of hanging over me all this month but I finally got it done.

Finally, in terms of personal life I had a nice Valentines Day with my partner. It's kind of one of the things we celebrate as an anniversary, since we never really had a specific moment of "starting dating," "getting engaged" or even "getting married" so far, lol. But Valentines Day 2017 was when we worked up the guts to move from emailing to text chatting, which quickly became regularly meeting up in person, and the rest-- Well anyways, we got a big, hearty takeout meal from a local Greek restaurant and watched an appropriately trashy and insane romcom (My Life in Ruins, great).

We're also looking at new flats, and have made our first application for one, so, fingers crossed! And I guess the last thing I want to wrap up before the end of the month is reading over the first three chapters of my novel draft again and sending it off to some manuscript competitions that are currently open.

Other things that happened since my last post, in brief

See ya!