Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

Tag: fantasy rpg

  • Oops, new hobbies

    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!
    17. Oops, new hobbies

    I have been influenced. I already had a pretty bad fountain pen habit, but somehow the algorithms didn’t know about it until very recently. Seeing all of the pretty pens and inks, not to mention the notebooks 1Which, honestly, less tempting. Pretty notebooks have been a problem for me since high school and these practical but plain ones just don’t do anything to me. have got me back into journalling. I already had my brain dump one and one for when I actually finished a project, but pulled out one of my notebooks that have been collecting dust to start a journal just daily creativity journalling.

    Will I spend all my time journalling instead of doing actual projects? MAYBE! But my health is better during the summer and the books is small, so this might just be a thing I do for a short amount of time and drop when the weather gets bad.

    The Trilogy

    I really should rename this to Scions, since that is the name of the trilogy. I’ve been using the name for a while now and it was the name I used for it when I thought about making it a single long volume, but I just never got around to it. I’ll add it to the list of to dos for the next block of time, I guess, but heads up that the title will probably change and some links might break as a result.

    Audiobooks

    No actual progress has been made on the current project. Whoops. I managed to record a new chapter on the next book instead and got the files into the program I use for the first pass of editing. It only gives me an hour worth of audio a month and I had files from last month I hadn’t loaded in, so unfortunately the next book is also going to take a damn long time because my ability to read is pretty bad. Still, at least I’m not going to be procrastinating by trying to record more this month? That’s probably a good thing.

    Fantasy RPG

    I really need to just accept that I can’t work on actually building this right now. Which should be fine! I don’t have anywhere near enough of the story together to even think about building this, but I saw that the Steam sale had RPG Maker available and I was very tempted to purchase a version that would actually work on my OS. I did not give in, but I did spend far too much time staring at it.

    White Noise Game

    It’s been a while since I have looked at these books. I have my notes for what happened in this prequel story, but I did need to go back into the books eventually to see what actually made it into the final books about what happened. Luckily most of it is in just the first book and contained mostly in one chapter, so I needed to pull this information eventually. I should really check Dead Air again before I start putting together a final story line, but maybe next block.

    I also need a better title for this. Something like Tinnitus but better.

  • 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!
    17. Oops, new hobbies

    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!
    17. Oops, new hobbies

    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?

  • 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
    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!
    17. Oops, new hobbies

    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.

  • 2026 projects

    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!
    17. Oops, new hobbies

    Despite this being the year of the done list rather than the to do list 1I need to make sure I’m not accidentally pressuring myself into being more productive than I can handle I do still have some general ideas of things that I want to work on this year. I wasn’t sure last time if I wanted to make that list of projects, but the more I thought about it the more I realized I wanted to keep a record of what I did manage to accomplish.

    I’m going to try and keep this as an index and report back on what I managed to get done. Fifteen minutes a day isn’t much, but hopefully it adds up!

    1. The trilogy
    2. The prequel interactive novel to the trilogy
    3. A fantasy RPG
    4. Converting the existing books into more formats (eg. Audiobooks, collected editions, etc.)
    5. Some Twisted Eden resources
    6. Digital art
    7. Jewelry and trinkets

    I may not touch some of these, I may add more to the list, we will see! Currently I’m hoping that I will do better about posting and keeping a record of how much I’ve done on these, but time will tell how well I manage that. Wish me luck!