Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

  • 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!

    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.

  • Whoops, so much for weekly

    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!

    I was planning to keep with the weekly updates, really! With the lack of my main computer, I was on a temporary computer that has a keyboard that I absolutely hate. There’s keys that just don’t work properly, some things are just in the wrong place, and the feeling of it all is just too sticky. Surprise, I really struggle on keyboards that I dislike using and, given that I’m mostly relegated to bed when I’m trying to do anything 1If I’m typing, I’m lying down. If I’m doing most things, I’m lying down. I can’t really get an external keyboard plus laptop like this. Add to that the fact that this backup laptop will absolutely give me a concussion if I try to prop it up in the same way as my lighter laptop and I just didn’t actually get much done.

    Well, it was the laptop and the medication adjustment. I was encouraged to try increasing the dosage on one of my meds and I spent a week convinced that my cat was dying. One vet visit later and it turns out she is totally fine, but at that dosage the medication gives me severe anxiety. So probably for the best that I wasn’t online as much.

    Website updates

    I’m still not sure what to really do with the Project pages, but I started adding a little more information to them. It’s not much, just current status. The fact that I can’t heavily structure these pages the way I want still annoys me, but that might be for the best given how different all of these projects ultimately are. So if you want more information, there’s at least something more there. Let me know if there’s more you’d like to see on there!

    The Trilogy

    Got a whole one chapter done on this keyboard. It was frustrating because it was also a chapter that should have been really fun given the changes, but in the same way as a pencil that keeps breaking is going to make drawing a pain, a bad keyboard is going to make writing an absolutely horrible experience. But now that I’m back on my old computer I might actually be able to write some more! Hopefully.

    Audiobooks

    It’s been a while, but I finally recorded a new chapter! If you want to call them chapters. Tales from the Twisted Eden Sector is the anthology series, so technically everything is a short story and this was a twenty page short. It took a couple days and you can definitely hear my voice change over the days. Hopefully I can still use it and if not, well, hopefully I can record it in less than three days next time. I’m just going to go ahead and blame my reading struggles on the health issues so no one can make fun of my for some of these bloopers, okay? Cool.

  • Weekly update: Oh right, the hard part

    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!

    I made a few very specific choices this week that ended up being less than ideal for my health. It was worth it, but it also means that I wasn’t able to do nearly as much this week as I was last week. That and my computer breaking 1Thank you Dell and your notoriously shitty hinges means that I just didn’t get to do nearly as much this week. Still, I didn’t crash as a result of working on this, so I’m still on track!

    The Trilogy

    So. I forgot just how much work book 2 needed. This is the part where I need to do some structural changes and also change the names of half of the cast. It takes place in a fantasy world with a fantasy language and the first pass had a bunch of stand in names so I could get to writing instead of figuring out which sounds the new language had and which sounds it didn’t. So much stuff about the world and how things worked changed from when I started writing this to now, so I’ve got to go a lot more slowly through this section of the story.

    It’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that I will start getting distracted so I can rework things in the back of my head. Actively sitting down and figuring things out doesn’t work as well for me as picking up another project and letting the ideas stew.

    Audiobooks

    This is a bit of a cheat, but I’m loosening the definition of “worked on” for this week to make myself feel better. I’ve been using Descript to help me with the editing of the recordings I’ve made so far and they are not only making it worse with every update, it’s also been trying to hard to shove AI into the software that I don’t trust that they aren’t going to start training on my voice if I keep using it. This means I’ve been looking at how to get that art of what I liked about the software–The ability to edit audio via the transcript–into Audacity, which I use to do the rest of my editing.

    I think I’ve found something that could work, but unfortunately with the computer currently in need of repairs, it might take a bit to actually try it out.

    Because Pretty stuff

    I’ve been thinking about those trinkets that I made and trying to figure out how to adjust them so that they weren’t just cute things to put on a shelf. I may like them that way, but I do not want all of these to stay in my house. I found a keychain to throw one of these on, but something about glass on a keychain just feels like an awful idea.

    Apparently purse trinkets are a thing, though? I haven’t had a purse in a while, so I’ve been pretty out of the loop on that. Someone else is going to have to tell me if that’s a thing I should consider.

  • Weekly update: Let’s see how long I keep this up!

    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!

    The Trilogy

    The first book of the trilogy is mostly rewritten! I have been working on this for months, which you’d think would mean it was longer. It is currently under 30K and definitely needs one more pass so that there’s some actual description. It is going to be a pretty short installment regardless, which makes sense. It is intended more as set up for the rest of the trilogy and plays out a bit like a horror movie before they encounter the killer. Will I do this pass before I start working on the next book? Absolutely not. We’ll be diving into the next book next week!

    Unless I get distracted. Which, well, we’ll see what happens.

    Created some place to track the projects

    I wanted to have some kind of public record of all the things I have managed to accomplish this year, so I made the Projects page. It took more time than I’d like to admit, honestly. I may have started my career as a WordPress developer, but that was over 20 years ago and it’s a lot less straightforward to do things that used to be pretty simple. Well, simple if you just went into the source code to make some adjustments. I really do hate the amount you have to rely on plugins, but at least it works? Maybe not as well as I’d like, but I might poke at it again later.

    Let myself get paranoid about income again

    For those who aren’t aware, I am unable to hold down a day job. The Long Covid means that I am limited in the amount of good hours in a day, and many days that number is a fraction. However, I am also posting about how much stuff I’m getting done in a week as part of this series which, well, someone may see this and decide that I am, in fact, able to get a job and will lose my benefits.

    So I decided to reopen my Patreon just in case. For right now it’s just going to be a bunch of cross posting these updates there, but if if there’s ever something that I want to release early it will probably be released there. Maybe. I don’t think I ever had anyone sign up for it so we’ll see.

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