February was a really busy month for me at 9-to-5 work and at least semi-productive on the writing front, but I have good news to report: my significant other – henceforth known as ProfessorTheHun or PROTH, for short – has landed a permanent position at our local university. Huzzah! This means we'll be staying up here in the frigid expanse of the Upper Midwest for the foreseeable future, which, aside from the punishing 5-6 month winters, has been a nice place to live. A little bit of job security goes a long way, so we're in house-hunting mode now and hope to be settling down more officially in the coming months.
Other than that, I'm still chipping away at the RW story and unrelated side projects in parallel. It's fun to see the first signs of convergence between hobbyist passion project and tangible output, but I also don't want to delude myself here: I still have a ton of work ahead of me, and I need to be mindful of how – to borrow a phrase from game development – extended pre-production can only do so much, and a failure to recognize the point of diminishing returns can be the death of an otherwise solid project. Left unchecked, I suspect the self-sustaining Fun House of my imagination would lead to perpetual worldbuilding, and my hunger for (re)reading non-fiction works on the craft itself could just as easily lead to a never-ending state of "preparing to write" rather than actually Actually Getting Shit Done™ in any consistent sense. But I digress. Orbital HQ, out.
