Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter Chapter 9

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Harry has nightmares, unsurprisingly. The first dream is of Lea, bleeding him in a crystal cave. He's restrained with thorn manacles, although they are not named or really described here, and would not be readily identifiable except on a reread, since they aren't formally introduced for another two books. She comes to him, and kisses him, and the cold pleasure of the fairy magic in her lips is described as "almost like a drug". I mentioned, when we were talking about Fool Moon, that Harry has a certain vulnerability to anything that relieves or reduces the physical and emotional discomfort which he otherwise constantly experiences, and this moment feels like both reinforcement of that and important setup for what's coming later, with the vampire venom. She tells him he's almost ready, and we proceed directly to what he's almost ready for, the final moments of Harry's confrontation with Justin, as he watches his former teacher burn to death, and the point at which he finally looks away. We don't know where the dream would have taken him after that, because he's woken up by someone pounding on his door. 

Harry, displaying well-earned paranoia and a healthy sense of self-preservation, retrieves his new, very large gun from the kitchen drawer, and points it at the door. Susan backs up, to clear his line of fire, which, see? See?! If a slobbering monster or a deadly assassin is at the door, she knows what to do, and does it unprompted. Harry informs whoever's knocking that they won't be able to break down the door, but it turns out it's Michael, not a monster or an assassin. Something tried to get into the church last night, after Harry sent Lydia there, and he'd like him to come take a look around, see if they can figure out what happened. 

Susan retreats into the bedroom to finish sleeping, and to avoid letting Michael see her wearing nothing but a blanket. Harry tells her to stay covered up, so she doesn't get sick, adding an unexpected note of domesticity to the scene. Michael comes in while Harry gets some caffeine and food into his system, and nonjudgementally surveys the wreckage of the living room. He asks if he should lecture Harry on sex before marriage, but he's more cognizant that he ought to disapprove than actually disapproving. He wants Harry to have good things, wants him to have safety and warmth and comfort and pleasure, and while he'd rather add stability, respectability, and compliance with God's will to that list as well, he recognizes that they're less of a priority. Harry takes a second to look in on his girlfriend, and his cat, before they head out. He also gears up with the shield bracelet and the force ring, although we are not yet told the functions of either, just what they look like, both of which are newly introduced as of this book. 

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We get a description of St. Mary's, in all is slightly overdone glory, and of Harry's discomfort with churches, which is here presented exclusively as a question of Christianity's unfortunate history with magic users, and not Harry feeling like he's done anything in particular to make God upset with him. The cars outside have been smashed up pretty good, and show signs of having been mauled about by something with claws. The rosebushes by the delivery entrance are in similar condition, but there's no blood, and no footprints, meaning that whatever did this didn't have a real, physical body. Michael asks if it was a ghost, and Harry says he hopes not, because a ghost that can exert that kind of physical force would be way too powerful to deal with. 

They go inside and talk to father Forthill, who apparently once blessed a 5 gallon drum of holy water for Harry. Almost the first thing he says is that he looks forward to the day Harry gives his life to God. Is this foreshadowing? And if so, "give his life" in the sense of devote? Or in the sense of sacrifice? If it is foreshadowing, I don't think it's come to pass yet, so file under "things to keep an eye on". He describes how Lydia arrived last night, in pretty bad shape, and he got her some clean clothes and food, but then she had a seizure, which Harry thinks might have been Cassandra's Tears, and Forthill thinks might have been drug withdrawal. (He says "narcotics", but opioid withdrawal doesn't cause seizures in adults, withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines does), and about ten minutes later, the spirit showed up. Forthill tried to compel it with his priest powers, and it did not like that, started tearing things up. Lydia wanted to go out to it, so it wouldn't hurt Forthill, but he wouldn't let her, and they hung out for a while while he read to her from the gospel of Matthew (I don't know the Gospels well enough to speak to the significance of the selection without something more specific), and eventually she fell asleep, but then he went to check the doors and windows and she sneaked out the back. The wording is sort of important here, from a dropping hints perspective, Forthill said that she "went to sleep", not that she seemed to, or anything along those lines. On a first read, a normal person will assume that she either wasn't really asleep, or woke up after Forthill left, but it's important that neither thing is said, because neither thing happened. It's not exactly foreshadowing for the possession thing, but it's going out of its way to avoid misdirection. 

Forthill makes it clear that he intends to tell the police that vandals smashed the cars and tore up the rosebushes, and asks Harry and Michael to maintain "discretion" about the situation. Harry gives him a little bit of a hard time about it because, y'know, lying is sort of unpriestlike, and Forthill responds that letting word get around would spread fear and potentially give whatever this thing is more power. 

Once they're back outside, Harry says he's gonna talk to a "psychic" who's reasonably clued in about the spirit world, and ask Bob to hit up his contacts as well. Michael doesn't approve of either, and asks if there isn't a spell Harry could cast instead. Harry does his best to explain that no, there isn't a "what kind of being did this" spell, and Michael reluctantly concedes that the point and says he'll follow up with his contacts to see if they can find Lydia. 

So we're gonna finally meet Mort in the next chapter. That should be fun to talk about. I'm sorry this post has taken so long, also - really was hoping to be more on top of things this year Next post ought to be in a week or so. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read all the things! 

2022-2023 Eeveeyear Goals

 So I'm gonna go ahead and call this year a qualified success. I fell short of nearly all my goals, and the one that I didn't, well, that was a whole thing. I accomplished unprecedentedly little on every non-new goal except fiction writing, in both absolute and percentagewise terms. If you look at the screenshots of the spreadsheet, at the bottom of the review section, you'll see goals, new and longstanding, on which I actually accomplished less than 50%. And of course, this was the year I added a bunch of things, and the first year I had working time tracking, but I spent a solid chunk of it without a laptop, and we need to talk about all of that. So let's go through these one at a time, and discuss what exactly went down. 

Reading
Yeah, 57 was not a dazzling accomplishment. That's barely more than a book a week, and only 54% of the target. One of the things that happened there is the damn game manuals. They would take a longer time to read than their often intimidating page counts suggest, even if I didn't tend to pause in my reading to discuss them with my partner, whose conversation doesn't exactly run to the concise. (To be clear, the problem here is not the length at which he goes on - I could just like, not say "Hey, what do you think about this" every few pages). Between the small text size and the density of information, it takes me three or four times as long to find my place again after an interruption, self-imposed or otherwise, as it does with a novel. And that adds up remarkably. Also I had a really heavy workload first semester last year, and much of that included reading nonfiction that was nearly as dense as the game manuals. 

Blog Posts Read
This was one of our new ones, and it went a lot worse than my very tidy, just-enough-to-make-this-goal-higher-next-year 245 (67.12%) makes it look. For most of the year, I was struggling to not have this fall off the map completely. I was consistently one of the things I was most behind on. The problem, and this is exactly as irritatingly cyclical as it sounds, is that I don't read enough blog posts. Oh, and I guess that two of the bloggers I follow had fairly major life crises that affected their posting, but I don't like to cast blame on external circumstances. See, when the next thing I need to do is read a blog post, I go through my RSS feed until I find one, and then I read it. My RSS feed is a mix of blog posts, news, webcomics, and YouTube videos. I don't look at every article from Publishers Weekly, and at this point I'm mostly just scrolling past Dresden Codak (this is a reflection of my current ability to engage with information-dense webcomics, not the quality of Dresden Codak), but I read or watch almost everything else, and the problem is, right now, I'm often hitting two YouTube videos, some of them as much as 15 minutes long, between each blog post. That's not conducive to smooth progress, especially since the range of circumstances under which I can watch a video is more limited than the set of circumstances under which I can read a blog post, so a lot of the time, I'm multitasking, as I do, on a boring phone call or something, and I'll scroll past six PW headlines that have no bearing on my particular corner of the industry, reach a video, and then not be able to proceed. The way to get that to happen less, obviously, is to subscribe to more blogs, but to do that, I need to get through the backlog of one, which I don't do until I'm caught up on my RSS feed, and I can't do that if I'm staring at a YouTube video I can't actually watch. I don't have great solutions on this one, but upping my goals on both YouTube and blog posts read, and upping the target on YouTube more should help with actually getting through the damn RSS feed, and any time that's done I can read through backlogs, and eventually get a better blog/video balance on the feed. 

Handwritten Pages
Honestly, depending on how this year goes, I may drop this goal. Normally, handwritten pages reflects both fiction writing and blog posts, and goals have been set with that in mind, but last December my life got taken over by a fanfiction. This was good, in a lot of ways, including or my fiction word count, but I write fanfiction on my phone, not in a notebook, so the contribution of my unparalleled-since-grad-school fiction word count to my page count has been very low. That's also why I didn't end up playing around with writing sprints like I said I would. The only thing that page count as a goal is doing for me as it stands is making sure my blog posts aren't under-length, and it's not really scaled for that. I was consistently further behind on pages written than on blog posts, and feel free to tell me if you disagree, but I don't think my posts have been too short. Because of the way averages work, even multiplied by 1.25, my goal is lower this year, and who knows. Maybe I'll finish Ghani before Wheel of Time season 2 starts and I'll squeeze in some work on my original fiction. We'll see. 

Fiction Word Count
I may only have completed 56.3% of this, but holy shit you guys, I wrote more than 28k, and in so doing exceeded last year by about 12k. A lot of this is down to the fic - overriding compulsion will, as it turns out, do a lot for your productivity. I played around with timed sprints in Octover and November, but mostly I wrote a short fic, and the first four chapters of what's looking to be a sex chapter sequel, of which I hope to complete the last two before the beginning of Wheel of Time season 2 in...sometime in November? I don't have a lot to say here - I did much better than I expected on a hugely ambitious goal, and the reasons are not complex, nor were they really within my control. There might be something in how much of this writing I did on my phone, rather than by hand, and depending on how this year goes, I might see about doing less drafting in my notebook and maybe even trying out drafting on the computer again. 

Nonfiction Word Count
I knew my initial goal here was arbitrary, but I didn't think it was set that low. Holy fuck. I have no idea how typical this year was, but if I'm usually writing almost 100k of nonfiction every year, that would certainly go some way towards explaining how little time I usually seem to have for fiction. We'll find out, I guess. As always, the new year's target is 150% of what I accomplished the previous year, without reference to the original goal. which in this case mean 147636 words. I suppose you can look forward to some long blog posts this year. 

Game Writing Word Count
This may was set a skosh low, as it turns out, relative to my other game development targets, although that may just be because TCCSS is in such an early stage of development, and it takes a lot more words to explain a basic mechanic than it does to explain a longsword. I feel pretty good about what I accomplished here, and I didn't have to go very far out of my way about it. 

Rereads
I did a lot of writing this year, and much of it on my phone (are you sensing a theme here?). That means less time playing phone games, and by extension fewer natural opportunities to listen to audiobooks. I've added two new goals about making things with my hands, and a few others that should be audiobook compatible, so I hope to do a little better this year. 

Blog Posts
Yeah, I didn't have a computer for a lot of this year, was a lot of this. Also the reread posts require a certain amount of mental space, a certain amount of flow, and with both of my housemates at home full time, that's harder to achieve than it might once have been. Pretty sure I was also having pen issues for a while there. We'll see what increased effort and working tech can accomplish in this area. 

Fanfic Chapters
Sort of the opposite problem from nonfiction. My starting goal was way the hell too high, even with nearly all my writing being fanfiction, 24 chapters was straight up never going to happen. I halved my goal, when I have never reduced one mid-year before this, and I still didn't manage it. The new goal should create some incentive to not just work on the one Wheel of Time fic, while still being like, physically possible. 

Pages Read
This is another one that was a real struggle. The last two years, I scaled it off the number of books I'm supposed to read, at an estimated 375 pages per book. I guess the books I read are shorter than I think they are, because this has never worked how it was supposed to. This year, it's set to 125% of my average from previous years, and we'll see if that doesn't work a little better. Also until about halfway through this year, I wasn't counting scientific papers I had to read for work towards pages read, which was silly of me, so they'll be counted going forward

Pages of Game Manuals Read
Agh. I'm just, I'm really slow at this. I already talked about why in the section on books read. I'm going to try tome little things to improve my speed on this, mostly having to do with text size and reading on the computer rather than my phone, but the only reason my final result was so high is that for the most part, game manuals are long, so I get this done in very large chunks, especially relative to the low target. 

Orbs
This went pretty well. I feel like I spent about as much time playing video games as I wanted to, although we'll get to that, and I made some real progress on my playthrough of Emeral Kaizo. 

Reading Time and Writing Time
This is the first year that I've actually been able to do the type of time tracking I've been trying to do since I started setting goals this way. I met about 2/3 of my reading and writing time goals, but somewhat more writing than reading. As it's important for a working writer to maintain a balance in these areas, though, so I averaged my progress, and set the new goal for both based on that, making the new targets 1066 hours each for reading and writing. 

Macro Elements
I hit 50% on this, but we're dropping it for the coming year. It doesn't make a lot of sense on a project that isn't yet very structured, and it's a disincentive to work on the "bigger" aspects of TCCSS, like the actual lists of symptoms, lifestyle restrictions, tricks, and superpowers. This might be more useful if I were focusing in the intensive homebrew involved in the San Francisco campaign, so that a completed macro-element would mean rewriting a subsystem, rather than creating one, but that's not where my head was at last year, and I don't expect it to be for the foreseeable. 

Game Elements
This one was work, and I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I wouldn't say it went badly. I was mostly poking at this because it was the things I was most behind on, not because I actually had an idea, but when I did have one, I often got three or four elements done at once, sometimes in less than an hour. Since I only hit 52% of the target, the new goal will be lower, nearer 150 than 200, which I thin better reflects the amount of time and energy I really have for it. 

Television
I wish I'd gotten a little more done here, but it went okay, and we finished watching Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, our lack of progress on which was one of the major reasons for introducing this goal in the first place. I was also watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9, but then they moved it from Netflix to Paramount Plus, for which I do note currently have a login. I started Legend of Korra instead, because that was next on my list. It's pretty bad. Watching TV is a little hard to multitask since it needs ears and at least 50% eyeballs, and either my whole phone or most of my computer. For this one, too, the new goal is a little lower this year. And I didn't end up skewing towards half-hours, so I don't have to add a time parameter.

Movies
This goal was set in the overoptimistic believe that it would become safer to go to move theaters, and therefore worthwhile to maintain an AMC A-List subscription, and without having checked the distance from my house to the nearest AMC. I don't watch a lot of movies at home. So I only managed about 45% of the goal, and have reduced it proportionately for this year. 

YouTube
I almost reached this goal, and probably could have done, if I hadn't spent the last two months scrambling to get my other goals over 50%. I took care of a big chunk of this early on by watching a lot of Overly Sarcastic, and maintained that lead through a combination of my RSS feed and videos I had to watch for work. For the same reasons, I'm already solidly ahead for this year, despite the new target being a bit over 500. 

Walking
I'm still not 100% sure what I'm doing with this one. I didn't reach my goal, which was based on the distance reward structure of Pokemon Go, but it was never the thing I was most behind on, and I did enough to raise the goal for the coming year. 

Tabletop Time
I probably did more of this than is reflected here - I didn't always remember to turn on the timer when I was actually playing, which accounted for much more of my progress here than time spent on design. I came very close to my goal without really trying, which is what we're hoping for with a time goal. 

Video Game Time
This one was much less effortless, partly because it's only tied to one activity, and partly because one catches more Pokemon in the early stages of a Pokemon game than later on, so that for much of the year I was actively working to stay caught up, or proportionately caught up, on time, and accumulating several orbs in the process. 

 

We have also gone and added no less than 16 new goals. Some of these are things I already was doing but want to do more of or track better, others are things I wasn't doing but intend to start. 

The first three of these are a combination of two unrelated objectives. I've been wanting to get back to reading through SCP for years now, but the format resists inclusion in any of my existing categories. They can't be counted as blog posts, because the SCP wiki can't be added to an RSS feed, but without word counts readily available, they can't contribute to pages read, and since they're expository, they can't be included in the newly added short fiction category. So I have created a category for wiki pages read. This might be a little excessive for a single text, but I also need to start working on a worldbuilding wiki for my epic fantasy novel, so I also need to read a bunch of Wikipedia articles, to get my head around the shape, size, and language. The other two goals are for that project, planning the articles, figuring out the section headings and subheadings and how long they should be, and actually doing some of the writing of those articles. 

I need to do more cooking, and to expand my repertoire. For the most part, things that do not use the stove or oven don't count, unless they include mixing or cutting up ingredients (e.g. salad, ice cream), so making rice or a bagel is not sufficient, but pasta, or cookies from premade dough, do count. This may be too gameable - we'll see. My goal is to cook in the neighborhood of three times a week, and try new recipes 2-3 times a month. 

Adding a goal for watching television did not actually cause my to attend to my sewing, so I've added a goal for sewing time, and another for completed repairs. This should also go well with the new passive media consumption goals. I need to rewatch TV the same way I need to reread books, so that's on the spreadsheet now, and podcasts are too long to treat as blog posts, so they have been given their own category. 

I like playing trading card games, mostly the Pokemon TCGO, and I literally never have time for it. I'd also like to branch out into Master Duel (Yu-Gi-Oh! online TCG) and maybe MTG Online, and maybe get back to playing Elder Scrolls Legends. To that end, we've added goals for time on TCGOs (I could count this as video games, but I don't want the two activities competing with each other), matched, and new cards. This last has been set deliberately high, as an incentive to experiment with other games. 

I need, also, to learn how to use Unity. Or, it doesn't have to be Unity, but I have programs I need to make, and Unity should meet my needs in this area, so that's what we're going with. They also have what appears to be a pretty well-structured tutorial system, which counts progress in XP, Skills, and Missions. Of these, I have chosen Skills as the basis for the goal, because it was the one the size of which I could most readily get my head around. I have added a time goal as well, essential as a control variable since I have no real idea how long to expect anything to take. 

I don't read enough fanfiction, and I want to catch up on and then keep up with the short fiction Seanan McGuire posts on Patreon, so we've added a goal for short stories. Fics over 50k words were already being counted as books. The Seanan McGuire stories have clear page counts that can be kept track of, and fanfiction page counts will be estimated by word count, at 500 words to the page.

Duolingo is another thing I just haven't been getting to, so we've set a fairly conservative goal for that, and then I added webcomics as well, mostly because I want to catch up on Order of the Stick, but also so they won't be dead space on the RSS feed. 

A few of these goals, the new ones, have had their lead significant digits randomized, because last year there were a few too many times that different tasks were tied or progress, and I don't like that. So I've tried to reduce the number of common factors. 

So our ridiculous 38 item list of goals for the year is as follows:

• Books Read - 90
• Blog Posts Read - 381
• Rereads - 61
• Short Fiction - 55
• Pages Read - 30731
• Game Manual Pages Read - 2258 
• Reading Time - 1066 Hours
  
• Handwritten Pages - 219
  
• Fiction Word Count - 60,000
• Nonfiction Word Count - 147,636
• Blog Posts - 53
• Fanfiction Chapters - 11
• Writing Time - 1066 Hours
• Game Elements - 156
• Game Writing Word Count - 9818
• Tabletop Game Time - 423 Hours
• Television Episodes - 174
• Television Rewatch - 81
• Movies - 17
• YouTube Videos - 509
• Podcasts - 68
• Orbs - 314
• Video Game Time 231 Hours
  
• Wiki Pages Read - 298
• Wiki Words Written - 10,079
• Wiki Articles Planned - 16
• Foods Made - 150
• New Foods Made - 30
• Repairs - 26
• Sewing Time - 117 Hours
• TCGO Matches - 277
• New Cards - 10,950
• TCGO Time - 104 hours
• Unity Skills - 113
• Unity Time - 236
• Duolingo - 290
• Webcomics - 270

So yeah, that's what we're gonna be doing this year. Watch this space for updates to the reading list pages and the progress bars on your right. Next Dresden Files post will be in the next week. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!