Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

Category: General

  • Progress, at last!

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    One of the better things about summer is that the nice weather tends to help ease symptoms. I’ve been doing my best to have my one adventure a week 1Still all I can handle, but there’s actual stuff to do now! and catch up on the chores that I’ve been taking a lot of short cuts with.

    Which means I finally swept the floors and vacuumed one rug. Still, progress!

    The Trilogy

    Speaking of progress, the second pass of book 2 is done! I think the structure is finally solid, but it’s definitely going to need another pass to make sure all the information is in the right place and the prose is good.

    While I am really happy about it, I can’t help but remember how this used to take me a matter of weeks to do. It’s weird taking so long, but I try to remember that this is not actually as slow a pace as it feels like. It’s just slow compared to what I used to be able to do.

    Audiobooks

    You know, if I just kept up doing just one audio file every 2 weeks, I could have been done one book by now. At this rate, maybe I’ll get the first book done by the end of the year. But hey, another chapter edited and finished is another chapter edited and finished!

    Fantasy RPG

    So, I haven’t actually done any work on this. RPG Maker still doesn’t work on my computer, so nothing’s really getting built until I can be upright long enough to use the desktop.

    What I have been doing is I’m slowly creating some templates in Notion so I can make notes and keep track of asset creation. Luckily, I’ve already more or less made my standard templates for this kind of stuff, so it’s just digitizing it and adding a little extra for video game specific elements like attacks. With any luck, I will be able to use this for that other game.

  • The tangents are back!

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    Just when I thought the sun meant going out and enjoying myself, the heat got a bit too harsh for me to be going out quite as much as I want. It means I don’t have to deal with those feelings just yet, but I’m hoping that the blazing heat either dies down or I get used to it so it isn’t stopping me quite so much. If nothing else, I am still getting my once a week outing to check out the world and being much less housebound, one way or another.

    I also recently got scouted for a medical thing. Yay for being medically interesting! It resulted in my furthest adventure out from my house in years 1On my own and not in a car, anyway and I survived! Crashed very hard as a result, but I was downtown for the first time in years, so I’m hopeful that the weather isn’t going to stop me for too long.

    The Trilogy

    I am so close to getting back into the bit of the book that exists. As much fun as writing new stuff has been, it’s also slow and I am excited to get back to some of the fun bits of the plot that I wrote the first time around. It’s also a lot faster to work with story that I just have to make sound better rather than write from scratch, so my productivity will feel a lot greater, even if I’m pretty sure I’ll be working on it at about the same pace.

    As a side note, I do miss when I could write fast. This is the longest it’s ever taken to write a trilogy. I feel like it’s going to take me longer to finish this than it did to finish all of The Looking Glass Saga.

    Worksheet Tangents

    I had a thing happen with one of my medications. Yay for being medically interesting, right? It gave me an idea for something that people can use to keep track of how their new medications are improving their symptoms or causing side effects. And then I remembered I can’t get Affinity working on Linux, so it’s currently trapped in back of an envelope limbo for now.

    Photo of a mockup for a worksheet that tracks medications and symptoms over a month.

    Fantasy RPG

    It’s been ages, but I finally opened Notion up again so that I can start making notes on this project as I come up with ideas for it. Mostly because the day I had an idea for the game, I didn’t have a notebook and ended up starting a slide deck of all things to make these notes. I had a notebook for this project, but I cannot find it so naturally I have to complicate matters.

    I also had a sprint of trying to get the program working on my computer again but, again, Linux. I like this OS, but dammit. I’m going to have to run a virtual machine, aren’t I?

  • Might as well be summer

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    I’m calling it, it’s summer. I know technically I should wait for the solstice, but if I’m having to use the aircon, then I think it’s worth making the call here. My health should start to even out with the good weather and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to enjoy more of the local events that the city puts on over the summer. I know the craft fairs have expanded to the outdoors and the farmers markets are in full swing, so I’ll have plenty of chances to enjoy the weather.

    I also got myself a rollator so I can go out more! Still having some feelings about being so visibly disabled, but hopefully I will get over it and be able to enjoy the nice weather.

    The Trilogy

    I’m finding it hard to do much else besides the books these days, and for good reason! I’m getting close to finishing the rewrite of book 2 of the trilogy! It’s nice to have so much of the world building done, though I am going to miss all my fade to black chapter endings.

    I am going to need at least one more pass on this before anyone sees it, but I’m still excited to have this pass almost done.

    Audiobooks

    I had a good upright day, so another chapter of book 2 has been recorded! Meanwhile, I’m working on editing chapter 7 of book 1. At some point, this audiobook will finally be out of my hands and I am excited for that day.

  • The unexpected

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    Alas, I spent another week crashed and so not a lot has been done. On the bright side, I learned what some of the different tax forms are called, so not a total loss. I do wish I was spending that time on something less stressful, but there’s no going back now. I’ve just been trying to ease myself back into things and not think too hard about the possibility that I did something wrong and this will be just the excuse insurance needs to kick me off.

    I may have spent too long working with US healthcare. One insurance call and form has me very stressed.

    On the bright side, I think they finished repairs to the roof. I may not have mentioned it last time, but I have been living directly under a construction zone and let me tell you! The sound of banging, power tools, and the walls shaking due to what’s happening directly above you for weeks does not do great things for your mental health!

    The Trilogy

    As much as I want to publish this trilogy like the rest of the books, I am hesitating now. I keep getting reminders from my private health insurance and also from the Canadian government that if I dare to make too much money from a series that has taken me years to write, I could get kicked off of my insurance entirely. $7,400 annually to get investigated, $21,000 annually to be removed entirely. That doesn’t even cover housing, much less is that enough to live on. Not to mention if insurance isn’t covering my medication, my expenses go up. It would be catastrophic for me.

    On the other hand, I know what my traffic numbers are on this blog. I know my sales numbers of previous books. This is likely not going to be an issue.

    Audiobooks

    You know what a great test of noise cancelling headphones is? Roof construction! Stress meant that there hasn’t been as much writing, but I still wanted to get something done and getting the final edits done on another short was it. I know I can hear all the times my brain fuzzed out while I was recording, but I do wonder how much that is going to matter. I have heard a few audiobook samples now and I’m starting to think I’m being too hard on myself.

  • Summer is coming

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    It’s another new month and, while I had another month without major crashes, it was another month of not hitting those maximums per day. The fatigue has just been kicking my ass, which means I just cannot spend more than 25 minutes a day on fun stuff. Some of this definitely is related to having to spend more time on housework 1Some personal stuff has come up that necessitates this but ultimately it means I am maintaining what I’m currently doing. Just a little every day and hopefully I get to cross off something else at some point this year!

    But also I am kinda hoping that I can increase soon. My health tends to get better during summer, so wish me luck this month!

    Also, way less this block. Unfortunately for me, insurance really wanted to reassess whether or not I was still too disabled to work which meant my energy had to be spent on filling out paperwork for probably not a doctor 2Or even someone who doesn’t understand post exertional malaise, illnesses with variable good and bad days, etc. to look at and determine whether or not I can hold down a job. So I’ll see if documenting and celebrating what I spend 20 minutes a day on in this blog is a bad idea.

    The Trilogy

    I keep thinking I’m getting close with leaving the restructuring phase of this, but there’s so much world building. I am definitely going to need another pass on this to trim out some of the fat because I want to go into all the nuances of this world I created but is the audience going to care? Probably not. Then again, I may make my editor tell me what I need to cut out instead. Maybe.

    Because Pretty Stuff

    I finally published those listings! I really need to get better at editing the photos since they look hella dark but given the traffic to that site is mostly from China and the ability to purchase from the site is currently broken I am not in any rush to get that done.

  • Distractions happen

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    This two week period started out so well until the major distractions hit. Unfortunately, that did end up taking away some of the time I would have spent on projects, but it had to be done. And luckily I have already set up most of what I need, so it’s been pretty smooth making the changes. The unlisting has been done, and now I’m taking my sweet time setting up getting the books elsewhere while focusing back on the things that I want to be working on.

    The Trilogy

    Slow and steady! Emphasis on slow right about now, but that happens when you’re restructuring.

    Audiobooks

    Nothing edited, but I did manage to get another chapter recorded! It took 5 days, 10 minutes a day, and I really hope my voice doesn’t sound too different between each recording, but another chapter recorded!

    Because Pretty Stuff

    Before all of the Draft2Digital nonsense, I finally got some photos taken! The plan was to list some things, but hopefully that can happen next week.

  • Slow and steady

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    I’m doing my best to take things a day at a time. I’ve had a few odd spikes in motivation, but as is the case with chronic fatigue, I cannot act on it without pretty severe consequences. It does mean I’ve spent a lot of time working on things outside of projects, like baking or cleaning or generally crossing off to do list items relating to chores around the house that have been sitting there for ages. Using that extra motivation on things that I don’t lose track of time on, you know?

    The Trilogy

    These first drafts require a lot more work than I thought. Every time I think that I’m getting close to the parts where I got the story pretty close, I realize just how little is actually salvageable. Which, like, not terrible for me. I am having a lot of fun reworking the story and finding out I get to do some fun things with it. 1Like killing off that character instead of just leaving them around as a way to exposition dump! Honestly, much better impact on the narrative that way. It’s still fun, even if I’m a little frustrated with just how much longer it takes me now to write something.

    Also, decided to get the tablet out and figure out some stuff with the covers! I still don’t know what the titles of these books are, but I think I have a general idea of what I’m doing with the art for each of the covers will be. I am leaning toward a long title this time around, though, albeit with a different font.jrwi

    Audiobooks

    I got another one edited! Two of them, actually! The second one was a lot shorter so it felt almost like cheating, but it’s still another one! I am going to need to start signing up for all the services to distribute the audiobook at some point, and figure out what to charge, but it’s getting closer ever so slowly. Please tell me what services you use for audiobooks so I can get that done.

    Twisted Eden Stuff

    I have a journal full of journaling prompts. I had plans to create some guided journals for Twisted Eden, but I didn’t want to do that without actually trying the prompts out myself to see which ones I found value from, or without figuring out how to modify those prompts so that they were actually helpful. After around a year, I finally picked it back up again to continue journaling with it. Not because it’s awful journaling, but because if I only have 20 minutes a day to spend on fun stuff, I am going to spend it on creative works than self improvement stuff, but I had a rough writing day and needed a break.

    Because Pretty Stuff

    If there’s one thing I don’t like writing, it is product descriptions. When I finally get these products actually and fully listed, you will see just how much I do not want to write these descriptions. But that part is at least done, so there’s that.

  • 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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    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
    10. Slow and steady
    11. Distractions happen
    12. Summer is coming
    13. The unexpected
    14. Might as well be summer
    15. The tangents are back!
    16. Progress, at last!

    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.