Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 24

Photo by Tigran Hambardzumyan on Unsplash

Harry is thoroughly freaked out that his magic didn't work, and more frightened by that than he is by the active three-way battle with which he is currently sharing a room. He's concerned, not unjustifiably, that he somehow seriously damaged his ability to use magic, with the way he overextended himself under the influence of the stimulant potion. This is a threat not only to his livelihood and immediate safety but to his identity. Being a wizard isn't about being good at magic, it's about what you do with it, how you choose to exercise that power, but without his powerful magic, there would be no choice to make, and he wouldn't be a wizard anymore. Interestingly, he doesn't express the worry that he does in Dead Beat, that one or more failed spells could erode his belief in his ability to cast, creating a cyclical loss of power. Of course, in Dead Beat, the initial problem is a phobia, not magical burnout, and that may make a difference. 

Marcone and Henricks manage to get into a truck and smash their way out of the building with it, all the white shooting at the Streetwolves and the Feds, who are in any case far more interested in fighting each other than in anything Marcone is doing. Denton is still in human form, giving directions to Benn and Wilson, but Harry catches sight of his wolf belt. 

There's a scrabbling sound, something trying to dig under the wall, and when a pay comes through, Harry, who is having an intense kind of day, smashes it with the wrench, until he puts his head near the hole to make threats, giving Tera the opportunity to tell him to knock it off and let the Alphas rescue him. He lets the get back to digging, but a minute later he hears fighting on the other side of the hole, and Tera doesn't answer when he asks what's going on. But this point, Denton has killed Lana the lycanthrope, the one who was chanting "kill him" when Harry first encountered the Streetwolves. I don't think the similarity between "Lana" and "Lara" is a coincidence here. The former, with her predatory instincts and facility in calling up the aggressive energy of the pack, very much feels like an abortive initial attempt at the latter, and thank goodness Butcher waited four books after this one to try and write Lara for real. Fool Moon has some deeply troubling things to say about female sexuality, even if it's already doing noticeably better than Storm Front. Tera and Susan, both "good guys" (and interestingly, both women of color - I am not sure what to make of this aspect of it, if anything), enjoy being the recipients of sexual desire, and are willing to use their bodies to get what they want. And that's apparently fine. But Lana and Benn aren't content to be objects of desire - they want openly and intensely. And the narrative condemns them as villains for it, and then kills them. 

On the subject of which, as the battle hits a lull, Benn starts pressuring Denton to shift, trying to leverage a combination of sexual desire, bloodlust, and addition to make him do it. He's holding out pretty well, until Parker comes shambling back out of the shadows. Such a direct threat is apparently his breaking point. He and Benn both shift, and then they, along with Wilson, kill parker in just the worst way. They eat him. It's bad. 

Harry absolutely does not want to be around any more of this, and starts widening the hole from his side until he can squeeze through. Outside, he finds three Alphas and a naked Tera surrounding wolf-form Harris, with two other alphas injured on the ground. This is the first time we see the attack pattern that the Alphas use at least through Small Favor, where they flank their opponent and attack one at a time, without committing themselves, forcing their prey to turn around and around dodging and trying to hit any one of them without leaving themself open to a more serious attack from behind by one of the others. 

Tera tells Harry to run, to get away while he an and help MacFinn, letting her and the Alphas cover his retreat. Harry responds that she and her pack should also leave, since the other hexenwulf feds are on the way, but Tera's not going anywhere while two of the kids are down. It would mean abandoning them, which she would never countenance. Harry, for his part, isn't willing to let anyone else get hurt on his behalf tonight. He is absolutely out of fucks to give, and hits Harris with the wrench. Once. Harris takes it out of his hands pretty easily, leaving Our Hero unarmed and virtually powerless against a giant wolf monster. Again. 

It's been an extra intense couple of weeks with my freelance gigs, or this would have gone up days ago. It's got a couple more non-reread posts brewing, but the next post, in hopefully a bit less than a week, will almost certainly be Fool Moon Chapter 15. Stay tuned, and remember to be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

2021-2022 Eeveeyear Goals

Between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 Eeveeyears (an approximation of the academic year, starting on October 1st), I doubled the number of things I was tracking, adding rereads, blog posts, and pages read to the previous year's books read, word count, and handwritten pages. The formermost was based on the fact that while rereading is easier for me than reading new books, it isn't actually less important to my writing process or general well-being, just differently important, so it made more sense to track rereading separately, rather than either disregarding it entirely (which disincentives doing it at all), or combining rereads with new reads, which is functionally a disincentive to reading new books. The other two were added to more fully capture both what I was doing (reading books, some of them long, and writing blog posts), and what I wanted to be doing (the above, without feeling like it wasn't a good use of my time, which it did when blog posts only counted towards handwritten pages and longer books took more time than shorter ones without contributing more to any of the accomplishments I was tracking). This... worked pretty well. While I once again didn't reach any of my goals, I did more in each of the original three categories in absolute terms (9 more books, 1338 more words, 23 more handwritten pages), and I feel like the additional categories did what I wanted them to do. I made time for rereading, and I got almost twice as many blog posts done in 20-21 as I did in 19-20. Including pages read helped me feel less like I was wasting time when I read longer books, but not as much as I'd hoped. It doesn't compensate effectively for the fact that very long books are often things like tabletop game manuals or textbooks - dense, concentration-intensive books that I can't get through quickly or multitask at all. 

In relative terms, I actually did worse on two of the metrics that applied both years. 213 pages out of 286 is only 74.6%, compared to the previous year's 191 out of 250, which is 76.4%. Similarly, 16,060 words is a smaller percentage of 22,096 than 14,722 is of 20,000, 72.7% compared to 73.6%. Only in my reading goal did I manage relative improvement as well as absolute. 87 books out of 111, 78.4%, compared to the previous year's 73/100. These first two are not a huge surprise, as the goals for the past year were set deliberately high - I can less readily account for how well I did with the reading, although some part of it might be attributable to having a couch to sit on, readier access to my book boxes, and half as many talkative housemates. 

I didn't end up with as much useful information about time spent as I would have liked, since the 10 and a half months during which I did not have a device capable of running my time tracking app overlapped with both years. While I will not commit such incomplete data to paper, I will say that the amount by which I fell short of my writing time goal in 2020-2021, compared with the amounts by which I fell short of my word count, page count, and blog goals is not adequately accounted for by a single month's missed time tracking. My writing goals, and in particular my fiction writing goal, were set far too low for the good of either my creative development or my professional aspirations. It is for this reason that, in defiance of any reasonable expectations that the previous two years' evidence might support, I am setting my 2021-2022 fiction writing goal to 50,000 words. 

Having once established that I am not writing enough, this may come as something of a surprise, but I am also lowering my blog post goal, from 75 to 60. Please don't worry. If I get anywhere near reaching that goal, you'll still get at least as many posts as you did this past year. The fact is that the need to produce blog posts was routinely a sticking point in my task rotation, owing partly to their being so many steps involved, and partly to the fact that everything except the Dresden Files reread is like, hard. One of my non-quantifiable goals for this year is to figure out the combination of lowered barriers and particularized goal-setting which will allow me to consistently produce advice columns, craft posts, book reviews, and Wheel of Time reread posts, without exhausting myself or losing days of productivity struggling with a single post. At any rate the draft by hand, then it up on the laptop routine will necessarily be disrupted a little, because I don't currently have a working laptop. We're looking at some combination of typing things up on a library computer, and typing things up on my phone and using the library to format and add photos. 

My 2020-2021 goals for pages written, words written, and books read were set at 150% of what I accomplished in 2019-2020. For this year, for the two goals that are entering their third year, and that I did not just abruptly and drastically increase, I averaged the previous two years' results and multiplied that by 125%, producing goals lower than last year's, but higher than I have so far actually managed to accomplish. This may still be too high, I don't know. Next year, I shall be able to play around with rates of increase, and then we'll see what's what. (I am well aware that my annual goals can't just keep going up forever, perpetual growth is a capitalist myth, but I have good reason to believe that I could be accomplishing considerably more than I am, and I don't know where the limit on that actually is. This is partly my way of feeling it out). The goal for pages read us once again based on the goal for books read, although using a more realistic 375 pages per book, rather than last year's 350. 

So now I think it's time to talk about the profusion of additional progress bars over there on your right. I've added a shitton of new goals. A few are to better capture additional angles of work I was already tracking, like fanfic chapters and words of nonfiction. I was already writing fan fiction, and counting it towards my fiction word count, but I hope that this additional metric will better allow me both to maintain regular updates and to balance it with my original fiction. Similarly, I was already writing nonfiction, in the form of blog posts and freelance assignments, which were tracked to some extent by blog posts and handwritten pages, but I hope by tracking the actual number of nonfiction words to get a better sense of how much of my writing-specific time and energy these activities consume, and to assess whether there's any validity to my anxiety that my blog posts are too short. The goal of 15,000 words is somewhat arbitrary - this is more about seeing where I end up than getting anywhere in particular, but it provides a decent basis for comparison. 

My reading time goal has been reduced from 1200 hours to 1000, because I asked around and most of the working writers I know are reading and writing at about a 1:1 ratio, not a 6:5 ratio.

All but one of the other goals are related to things I was already doing, want to do more of, and feel are worthwhile, but that I didn't feel like I could justify spending the time when they didn't contribute anything to the damn spreadsheet. These can be divided into three categories: tabletop roleplaying games, video games, and non-book media consumption. 

My partner is a tabletop game game designer, and I'm… not, but I like tabletop gaming, and spending most of ones free waking hours with someone who does them professionally makes that more salient than it otherwise might be. There's also a tabletop RPG system I've been wanting to write for like, a decade now. And I finally last year found a system that should allow me to run a campaign based on my Actual Favorite Book Series, so I'm trying to get that set up. And there's another, much more involved campaign that I've been trying to get fully prepped for years now. I have five metrics for this one: words written (on my own system, or campaign and setting notes or homebrew for either of the campaigns), hours spent (counting all time spent playing or developing, and half the time spent reading), pages read (of game manuals or similar), elements designed, and macroelements/subsystems designed. An element would be like, one feat in D&D, or one dot of a Contract in Changeling the Lost, while a macroelement might be the whole Contract, or a feat tree, but might also be like, all the combat rules. Finalizing all the feats or spells in the game would also constitute a macroelement, even if it contained feat trees that had already been counted. Having a separate count for pages of game manuals read is the big thing I'm adding to try and make the time it takes to actually cover-to-cover a game manual worthwhile. Pages of game manuals read also count towards pages read, and the books themselves will be included in the general count. 

"Video games" here mostly means my efforts to catch up on the Pokemon games (I got through most of Moon when it came out, but otherwise haven't completed a Pokemon game since Platinum), finishing Breath of the Wild, and completing my attempt at a 100% run of Majora's Mask. If I am able to obtain a Switch, PS4, or PS5 this year, my horizons on this front will broaden considerably. I have only two metrics here: time, which should be self-explanatory, and orbs, which is a shorthand for small-but-significant units of progress as appropriate to the game. Catching a Pokemon is an orb (in the regular games, not in Let's Go), and so is beating a gym leader. Beating a shrine in Breath of the Wild, getting a mask in Majora's Mask, or beating a dungeon in any Zelda game would all count. Beating an Elite Four member for the first time, or on a rematch when their team has changed, would count, but if I white out and have to start over, re-beating the ones I already got past would not. In Jak and Daxter, power cells would count, but precursor orbs, despite the name, would not, because they are too numerous and often obtained more than one at a time. Mobile games do not count for time or orbs. 

In the past two years, I've had a hard time keeping up with my RSS feed, much less catching up on and incorporating new blogs and YouTube channels. Part of that is just, y'know, have you seen the past two years? But part of it is that incentive thing again. Reading blog posts counts towards my reading time, but that's it. YouTube doesn't count at all, so from the perspective of my metric-obsessed little brain, it's wasted time. And the same for movies and TV shows, both of which are kind of important for my mental health and creative process. 

The last goal here is walking, which is measured in kilometers because I'm using Pokemon Go to track it. This is kinda like the nonfiction word count. I walk a lot, like several hours every day except during the very hottest and coldest parts of the year, and I do a lot of hard-to-track word, like planning and talking out my ideas, while walking, so distance walked is functioning as a sort of proxy for time spent doing the parts of my work that don't otherwise produce a measurable result. 

So here is the full list of my goals for the coming year:

• Books Read - 105 (includes non-rereads over 12.5k in any medium)

• Pages Read - 39,375 (includes audiobooks, does not include rereads)

• Rereads - 80

• Reading Time - 1000 Hours

• Handwritten Pages - 253

• Words of Fiction - 50,000

• Words of Nonfiction - 15,000

• Fanfiction Chapters - 25

• Blog Posts - 60

• Writing Time - 1000 Hours

• Tabletop Game Subsystems - 20

• Tabletop Game Elements - 200

• Tabletop Game Words Written - 8000

• Tabletop Game Pages Read - 2000

• Tabletop Game Time - 300 Hours

• Orbs - 300

• Video Game Time - 200 Hours

• Blog Posts Read - 365

• YouTube Videos Watched - 365

• TV Episodes Watched - 200 (does not include rewatching)

• Movies Watched - 24

• Walking - 2500 km