I have written the first draft of 2.5 books!

The first one was the 1/2 which just got a little messy and I didn’t enjoy it. It was my first major writing project and I just didn’t organize it well enough. I also grew out of the idea quickly and decided to stop and not waste more time.

My second book I managed to finish at 70k I believe (it’s been a while). Similarly I grew out of the idea by the end and it would have needed major revisions to push through editing.

My third and most recent one I really love, the first draft is complete and I am slowly editing it. Though editing seems to be my weakness it seems because it’s taking far longer than it should. This one I would love to actually clean up and eventually publish but yeah, going to take a while to get there!

I use Scrivener to write in and I highly recommend it! (you can usually find some discount codes for it as well). I like to use it to quickly draft the storyline and then expand each scene as I go. It also has some handy features for organizing research notes and pictures. It’s packed with so many features so it’s a pretty popular writing app among writers in general.

Fancy! This looks like it came from one of those collector edition sites for books! Definitely a pretty piece to put on the shelf.

100+ is very impressive! It sounds like you essentially finish a book every 3-4 days to get those numbers. How you keep that up consistently? I feel like I can do that for a month or two and then tend to need a break before picking up more.

I just went through a loss myself. My boy was 17 and I had him since he was a kitten and honestly it still hurts many months later. There is no easy fix. I still start crying at random times if I happen to see his favourite toy or a picture of him. You just need to let it run its course I think and slowly it gets better, just be there for your partner and offer support and hugs.

It’s on sale right now on switch (which is where I played the first as well) but not on steam.

I played through Far: Lone Sails and really enjoyed the light puzzle and management of the machine. It was super atmospheric and I really loved the game overall. It was a perfect casual game that really absorbed me into it. Going to play the sequel as well soon.

I do Halloween reads all year! I also just really like horror in general so I tend to pick them up a lot. There are a lot of different subgenres of horror as well so it’s hard to recommend stuff without knowing your specific preferences, but here are some that I’ve read recently and liked.

If you want creepy occult you can try:

• Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Mister Magic by Kiersten White

If you want creepy atmospheric:

• The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling
• The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher

If you want messed up horror:

• Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

If you want classic horror:

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I haven’t played Outer Wilds but from what I know of it it should be similar. The Forgotten City is based on real world history though which was pretty interesting and it’s much more compact than what I’ve heard of Outer Wilds. It look me maybe ~7h to finish it fully, but can definitely be done faster too.

I played through The Forgotten City and really liked it! It’s a time looping puzzle game where you have to unravel the mystery of a strange city before every day it collapses into ruin. It really sucked me into the story and I could forgive a bit of the jankiness in the actual gameplay. The characters were all interesting and were very interconnected which made the whole thing feel quite alive. I didn’t love the ending (there are technically multiple but I managed to get the canon one on my play through), it was okay but a little out of nowhere, everything before that was good.

Take a look at Dredge! It’s a creepy horror-ish game where you play as a fishing boat. There are some creepy elements at night but it’s fairly causal overall. I really loved the atmosphere and light story elements as well as the fun fishing games that is the majority of the gameplay.

Yeah I am not a fan either. I did find that if you filter out YA in general that gets rid of a huge portion of these romance masquerading as fantasy novels. It seems to be super prevalent there. But now YA is bleeding into adult fantasy as well and for that I end up having to read reviews to see if anyone specifically mentioned it.