Aria's Hollow

So I've been rather absent here of late! I've been a bit scattered and exhausted for a while now, but I still want to try and keep up on here at least periodically. SO! What I've been up to:

- Playing Guild Wars 2! I vaguely recall the first game from childhood, so when my friends wanted to try out the sequel, I was interested. I of course had to make my first character a Necromancer, and came up with a very short Sylvari woman named Visthira. She has joined the Durmand Priory and specializes in blood magic and soul reaping, with a side of death magic. I'm still annoyed that the game gave the player character a canon personality/voice, as it kind of discourages roleplaying, but even so I try to see Vis as herself - if nothing else, I'm happy with the vibes I'm getting from her! I would be happier if the light armor would let me have pants though, or a longer, more robe like skirt. Perhaps once I can do more with Outfits the problem will be solved lol. She is also a jeweler and tailor! But because I took so long to get to crafting, it has been hard to progress in it much. xD The areas with the right level of crafting material is FAR too low for my character level (and none of these salvage items are giving me JUTE SCRAPS), and I usually prioritize character leveling and plot following. But eventually I want to go back and catch up with my trades!

- Role-playing Masks! And spending far too much time writing supplementary material for my player character, who I almost never get to actually play since I've been DM-ing for a long time. I wrote (and even partially revised!) nearly 10,000 words for her backstory, and now I don't know what to do with myself since my hyperfixation is not useful xD

- Taking some Gale courses on writing screenplays, writing for magazines, and getting into online writing markets! These have been rather low-stress compared to past courses, and the screenwriting class in particular has given some of the most useful plotting advice I've seen a class give so far.

- I'm low-key participating in the Ace Readathon over on Twitter! I recently started reading Every Heart a Doorway, which has been interesting so far. If I finish it in time I'm going to read Beneath the Citadel next, so we'll see how it goes!

- Working on my story outline for the project I hope to post on Tapas. This is the second draft of the outline, since I want it to be as polished as possible before I start drafting (since Tapas is serialized). It has been very difficult to focus on because I want to do prose writing more. xD But I'll keep trying!

So April's camp nano has come and gone! It was a good month for writing for me, at least as far as consistency goes; I wrote every single day and made my word count goal. Focus-wise, it was all over the place, though, and I definitely kept jumping around from project to project to keep the writing energy going. I did make some progress on my main project, which is good, and I did some fun character shorts for my aro shoujo project. I also counted any blogging writing I did, since I put a fair amount of time and thought into that. Now that nano is over, though, I should probably focus on my main project and take the time to do the slow work of structuring/figuring out my revised plot. Nevertheless, I had a good time doing this nano! I will probably go again in July unless I'm feeling really busy with my other activities, but either way I for sure will be doing November nano like always.