Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

  • Getting back into it

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it

    The return to normalcy has been slower than expected. Life does not stop throwing punches just because you’re already having a bad time, it seems. Still, the brain is getting back to normal and I am getting back to distracting myself with projects again. As much as less than half an hour a day on projects cam do that, but I take what I can get these days and I am damn happy about it.

    I have already decided, however, that I won’t be increasing my time to work on projects next month. Between the medication stuff and everything else, I just wasn’t able to actually use my increased time in March anyway. If I don’t use it, then I don’t know if I can handle it, much less if I can handle an increase. That’s just the way things go sometimes!

    The Trilogy

    The more I write this book, the more I realize I have a very definite pattern to how the pacing of these books go. Book 1 feels like a stand alone, book 2 feels like a whole different thing where all of the world building happens, and then book 3 is the fallout from the chaos after the twist at the end of book 2. This is the third trilogy I’ve written and the second one that has followed this pattern. It is very much a second book slump, but narratively it works out better this way so I’m not entirely mad about it. It is weird how different the first book in the trilogies turn out, but maybe I can just claim it’s a style thing?

    White Noise Game

    I had a moment of nostalgia remembering old escape room games. I’ve made one or two in my day back when Flash was a thing (and in Figma as part of my day job) and started thinking about puzzles. Then looking into what engines supported making escape room games. And then realizing I had notes for a backstory that I never got into for White Noise. It could be a lot of fun, provided I figure out how to draw well enough to create all the art assets, by which I mean the human faces and bodies.

    I really have to start drawing more if I keep picking up these game projects.

    Audiobooks

    The number of times things crashed because I tried to export and import files was honestly frustrating. I didn’t get any actual stuff done, despite how much time I ended up spending on just getting the files in place. For something that’s going to turn out to be under 3 hours 1At least from what I’m looking at so far this process is taking a damn long time.

    Because Pretty

    I started getting a whole lot of errors from the sites, which I ignored because that started a couple weeks ago. Turned out that there were a few things going wrong, so Because Pretty should be working again now. While I was at it and because I was having a good day for being upright, I did manage to finally price a few of the new products that I haven’t gotten around to listing yet. We’ll see when I feel like writing product descriptions, taking photos, and the rest of what I need to do to list these!

  • Working through the stress

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it

    This has been a couple of weeks. Cat had her appointment with the specialist which… last time we were there she stopped breathing during what I thought was a routine procedure and ended up in the ICU so I have been stressed as a result. She is doing fine, though, which somehow did not make that stress lighten up even remotely. Turns out the new medication that’s doing great things for my energy is causing a whole lot of mental health issues. 1Did anyone warn me? Nope! Gotta remember to look up side effects of all my meds on my own just in case. The fun of chronic illness, folks!

    Follow that up with starting taxes and learning that being so disabled that I cannot hold down a job means I now owe more in taxes and this has been a very unfortunate couple of weeks for me.

    Hopefully life lightens up. Until then, I at least tried to distract myself with projects.

    Audiobooks

    This is turning out to be more of a pain than expected to work on. I’ve been moving more and more to working on the Linux side of my computer 2Thanks to all the Microslop and the sheer number of updates that have been breaking Windows in general lately where I just haven’t gotten things set up yet. Adding to that, it’s also a struggle to get some of the files moved between the different parts of the computer and there’s some things that I can’t install on this side of things and I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to get my workflow duplicated.

    Which, honestly, kind of fine? I still managed to finally finish the first pass edit of Syndicate after months, so now it’s just all the manual stuff that takes forever. Yay…

    The Trilogy

    While some people use bad moments in their lives to write great things, I am not one of those people. The writing happened, but it definitely slowed down while I dealt with life. It’s also a little slower in general because it turns out that, even though I am back in the part of the story where I can keep some stuff, I need to heavily restructure this part of the book still. I’m still setting up a bunch of foundational stuff for this new world, but at least things are happening alongside it so hopefully that makes sure the pacing doesn’t suffer and the audience isn’t too confused by the way this world works.

  • One thing finished!

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it

    I am happy to announce that I made it through February without any major crashes, or even minor ones, as a result of working on projects! This means that I can increase my time on projects every day from 20 minutes to 25 for the month of March. I still can’t really handle more than 15 minutes at a time, so it will be split up into a 10 minute block and a 15 minute block, but I am super excited because the split has worked out pretty well. I am more often than not getting a chance to work on two things a day, which is pretty great for me. I don’t have to choose!

    The Trilogy

    This has been going slower than usual, but that makes sense. I’m still in the brand new part of the book where I am actually trying to do the world building. There’s been a lot of doubling back and rewriting things I just wrote, which is not something I usually do but feels right for this one.

    Chronic Fatigue Activity Tracker

    I finished this! To be fair, I did create this spreadsheet a couple years ago and have been refining it as I used it over the last couple years. I thought there was a lot more to do, but ultimately I realized I didn’t use a lot of it and stripped it down to just the bits I used. Most of my time was spent on writing a guide for it.

    And despite the last post, I do still want to talk about it more. Specifically, I want to talk about how it works so people can better customize it. I don’t know if people even want to use it, but you know. Just in case.

  • I made an activity tracker

    In case you missed it somehow, I’ve had long covid since 2022. Among the many health issues this caused was chronic fatigue that came with something called post exertional malaise, or PEM. PEM was the absolute worst because it meant that my symptoms existed on a delay. I wasn’t sure when I had gone over my limit because I simply couldn’t feel it right away. I usually couldn’t feel it at all until I had pushed myself into a crash. And you know what? That crash wouldn’t hit for several hours at least, which meant I would keep doing stuff to make things worse.

    Needless to say, there’s a reason I’ve spent the last several years either bed or housebound.

    Knowing that I didn’t have a good way to feel when I was going overboard, 1And knowing that I don’t have good impulse control to stop myself when it was too much I ended up figuring out a way to externalize things. Back when I first got into my first Long Covid Clinic, a nurse send me a handout of activities with point values assigned to them and told me to only spend 20 points a day. This handout formed the base of the spreadsheet that I have used to get myself to a place where I am now stable.

    I’ve spent some time over the years refining the formulae and figuring out how to make it work best for me. And now I’ve cleaned it up a bit so that it can now also be used by anyone else who needs something to help them figure out how to manage their activity when dealing with chronic fatigue, myalgic encephalomyelitis, or long covid.

    Get the spreadsheet

    How long have you been using this?

    Around 2 and a half years.

    How did you use it?

    At the start of the day I used it to determine how many points I had to spend for the day, then I planned my day based on how many points I had. This didn’t always work as things would come up 2Thank you, random long phone calls with insurance, fire alarms, and family who still don’t really get the whole chronic fatigue thing but it definitely helped keep me in my energy envelope.

    Did this activity tracker cure you?

    No. I am now stable, which is a lot different from being cured. What it did was ensure that I did not push myself into a crash and, when I did, I kept my activity low enough during recovery so that I was not back in bed due to feeling better and increasing activity when I still needed rest.

    Are you still using it?

    Not at the moment. Thanks to using it, I’ve managed to rest myself into increasing the threshold to hit PEM enough that I am able to stay within my energy limits. Unfortunately, I’ve also developed a few other health complications that also ensure I don’t hit the threshold.

    Are you charging for this?

    Absolutely not. I’ve been in this community for long enough to see how many people are out of work as a result of this illness and I will not be adding to the financial stress by charging for a tool which may not work for everyone. If you want to give me money, I have a Kofi link and plenty of other things like books available that you can purchase from me.

    Are you asking for anything in exchange for this?

    Nope! Not even an email address. This is not the top of a sales funnel. I have no course or coaching services to offer you. I am just a person who still has long covid and would like to help out other people.

    Can I offer this to others?

    Provided you are not charging for it or putting it behind a paywall and give me credit, go for it! If you’re part of a clinic dealing with a patient population that could find this useful, please do send it out.

  • New month, more time!

    1. Fabricating productivity for the new year
    2. 2026 projects
    3. Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!
    4. Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part
    5. Whoops, so much for weekly
    6. New month, more time!
    7. One thing finished!
    8. Working through the stress
    9. Getting back into it

    Because I made it through January without crashing 1As a result of working on the fun stuff, anyway I get an extra five minutes a day to work on things! Up from 15 minutes to 20! I am, unfortunately, not able to do that consecutively yet, so I’m doing two chunks of 10 minutes a day.

    Also I guess we’re down to every two weeks? Whoops.

    The trilogy

    You know what I didn’t do the first pass on this? Explain literally anything about how this world worked or established anything other than what directly applied to what was happening in the story at the time. So now I’m adding four new chapters that are mostly being used to set up the world and give some more foundational characterizations for these people.

    Which, well, lets hope that the pacing isn’t too much of an issue. I’m trying to make sure there’s still stuff happening, but also I’ve been reading more lately and I’m realizing how little I allow myself to go on tangents compared to some other authors. I really need to let myself have some fun tangents more often.

    Fantasy RPG

    I have made notes for a puzzle/level. I’m still not sure what engine I’m building this in or a lot of the details about the story or a lot of stuff really, but I do now have notes for a scenario where a party gets trapped in a school and has to escape. Technically I could use this in a couple places, but for right now it’s sitting in the Fantasy RPG idea.

    The spreadsheet

    In case you weren’t aware, I’ve had Long Covid for a while now. Since 2022, in fact! One of the things that comes with that for me was chronic fatigue, which has been very hard to manage. For the past couple years I’ve been living my life off of a spreadsheet and I’ve finally started working on a version of it that other people can use. It’s not done yet and it needs some adjustments 2I hard coded so many things, you guys. SO MANY. but I’m hoping that it won’t take too long to get it ready.

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