What're You Doing Here?

Hey, what are you doing here??

Why reading a new comic, because it's Saturday!

It's also the start of a new chapter... a chapter that right now will probably take us to the end of 2021 and to a meeting I've been building towards for a while.

You may notice this art looks different than the last chapter, and different than the chapter before it, and so on.

Well... I thought since Catherine was going to a dark place it should be a little more darker than usual. Yes, Natsumi also passed through here on her way to see Helena, but she knows the way, she expects the monsters, and she's not put off by any of it. But, Catherine... it'll be a little more of a journey.

The Last 28 Days

...Have been great.

I quit my previous job and took more than a few weeks before I start on my next job. I won't say too much about this new job on this site -- same as the previous position, but it'll be in game programming and I'm looking forward to it. I'm a little apprehensive because it's new (after all), but I start on Monday, so that'll be exciting.

But... I spent a lot of time over these past for weeks working on building new daily habits that I hope to keep going. Mainly my morning meditation and writing.

Two months ago I began to keep monthly goals. That is on the first of the month I would conjure up some things I'd like to accomplish before the month's out and then loosely focus my time in that month to make it happen.

Not everything gets done. In fact, when I started some of my goals were vague. They were wishlist items, but without any decent way to measure success against the goal I couldn't say if it was done or not. I've gotten a bit wiser in how I write my goals so that I know how when something is done.

With that said some of the things I've done over the past 28 days:

• Continued reading Maria-sama ga Miteru. I've focused entirely on reading and learning kanji, vocabulary, and grammar through the context of reading that light novel. I marked only three new pages to learn because the idea is to read them and re-read them over again to pick up the words. This way of reading seems to be working to some degree and I'll keep at it.
• Writing. I really want to get The Mechanical Bird a third book. I've started and stopped over the past few years, but now I want to make a habit to write every morning. Getting the book done is a long term goal, the path to getting it done is a daily habit. The idea is to sit down and write each day for 25 minutes. I know I can put down at least 700-800 words. How many words does the whole story need? I don't know, but if I sit down and type every day eventually I'll have all the words I need.
• The Mechanical Bird Website. I did this over my time off: I built a website for my novel series which you can find at www.mechanicalbirdtales.com.
• This Mortal Coil Gatsby Starter Project. To help me build that new site I also created a template of the codebase I use for This Mortal Coil's very own webcomic site. If you're curious about it, you can find it on github. Also you can read a retrospective I wrote about why I switched from Wordpress to Gatsby here.
• The Lolita Fashion Coloring Book. I did a few coloring book illustrations over the break. It'll be slow going, but it'll get there if I keep at it.
• Publishing a new comic for TMC is always a new weekly goal and I've continued to do that.

And I think that's the general theme of things. A little at a time over a period of time and these projects will come to fruition. I'll learn enough Japanese to read other books. More pages of this webcomic will be done. More coloring book pages drawn. More text put down on paper. I don't expect to be able to touch every project each and every day, but a little at a time, over time will eventually get some results. It's work and patience.

So that's all from me this week. I hope you're having a great weekend, see you next week!