Okay, so I lied about my hiatus being done. I took on a project that took up a good chunk of my time and sanity. I also had a huge allergic reaction to my birth control and it took a bit for my body to completely readjust after that mess. Also, summer equals health issues for me. I hate summer. I'm so happy that it is September. Cooler weather is on the way. Fall! Aaaaaand I may or may not have invested several hours into No Man's Sky-- which I will go on a spoiler-filled rant about in a sec.
So what have I been up to lately?
Projects: Abby 3 is here! I will link everything to its proper place in a bit. But it looks so great. The art is, as always, amazing. I love the story. This one is “The Rescue One” meaning it features a puppy that was adopted. The adopted dog is, of course, my Patches boy. I can't think of a better tribute to him than to immortalize him in my books. I do miss him.
Next up is Deep Waters 2. Deep Waters is my baby. We are behind, but I think it looks great. We had a fair few submissions, so it is longer than the first one. That is okay. I have another story published in there. At first, I was going to put “An Open Letter to a Douche Bag” in there, but, even after edits, I'm not sure how I felt about it, so I pulled it. I think it was too angry and too personal. So, to fill the space, I wrote a continuation of “The Temple” which is the first piece of anything under my nom de plume. I think it came out very nice.
I have also been working on a new children's book called, “The Wish Book”. It is a cute little thing for little little kids. I'm not the author. This was my first experience taking on a project where I had to work with an author I didn't know. It was a great learning lesson for me. The book is beautiful and ready to go. We are just waiting on proofs. Preorders are already up and going.
I am currently editing book three of the Guardian Circle series. So yeah, slightly busy.
Upcoming Projects: I'm working with Wendy Story, who created a coloring book for us, on a planner/journal thing. We are both pretty excited about that. She is a good friend and very talented.
I'm going to be starting work on Abby 4 very soon. All that in addition to editing projects.
Health Issues: My thyroid is out of whack. Dunno why. Also, my body doesn't like to process Vitamin D—you know, one of the important vitamins. I have to take 5,000mu a day. The lack of D (giggle, giggle) has caused all sorts of crazy things to go wrong with my body. From a lack of energy to fibromyalgia-like pain in my feet and legs. But on the bright side, I am still active more than I have been in a long time. Husband and I climb a mountain two weeks ago. I wouldn't have been able to do it a year ago. I haven't lost much weight, but I have lost a hell of a lot of inches in places. I'm down two pants sizes and down a shirt size. I'm eating better. Drinking less soda and more water. I drink a ton of water. I'm working really hard to break my soda addiction. Now that it is cooling down, I can go outside more without feeling like an elephant is sitting on my chest while I try to breathe out of a straw. Yes. That is really what asthma feels like. Slowly, but surely, we are getting there.
I am about to talk about No Man's Sky. It is going to be spoiler filled. So I have decided to make the following rant with white text color. You have to highlight it to read it. Okay?
Start here –--> I was really excited about No Man's Sky. I watched game play videos and read everything about it. I have always loved space and space exploration. Star Trek is one of my loves in life and I have always wanted to be one of those people who gets to step foot on a new planet and explore it. The fact that you could discover new things and name them was of particular interest to me. When it came out, husband and I bought it for the PS4. He played it a while since I had work that needed to get done. But after about two weeks, I noticed he went back to playing Witcher 3 and he hasn't picked NMS since. So I started to play. I loved it. At first. I explored new places. Learned words in Vykeen, Gek, and Kovax. I upgraded my ship, exosuit, and multi-tool. I had constant fights with the Sentinels over those Albumen eggs which eventually caused me to tunnel from my ship, that was on a landing platform at an outpost, into the mountain so I could collect all the eggs and sell them for tons of money. That took longer than I care to acknowledge. I progressed down the path of Atlas and collected Atlas Stones. Things were going well until I hit the tenth Atlas stop. I didn't have enough journey milestones to get the tenth stone. It was frustrating. I made it to the end—the last Atlas stop with only 9 stones. So I just walked away since I couldn't birth a new star like it said I could if I had ten stones. I had no option. I could only walk away. I can buy a stone on the Galactic Market for like 3 mil, but I still couldn't go back and change my mind and birth the star. That was it. I was done. Now I am only able to travel to the center or free explore. I just sat there and thought, “that wasn't very fair”. I went online and did some more research. When you “birth” a star, nothing really happens. The Atlas just tells you that a new star is born for another player to enter. Okaaaaay.....That's it? Really? Even those who have journeyed to the center of the galaxy say that once you get there, you are tossed in a new galaxy with no good ship and all your stuff is basically factory reset and you have to do it all over again. Seriously? That's it? With the hype the creators were giving us and all these promises of a unique experience, it is rather anticlimactic. I mean, I had issues more than just this one as well.
1. The inventory management. Why can't the 10 Altas Stones stack? Or the power canisters for the hyperdrive? Why do I have to move hell and high water when I'm trying to raise money from mining, or trying to build tech because these stupid things won't stack?
2. No variety. The thing I was looking forward to the most is planet exploration. Yes, you have planets that are cold, hot, toxic, etc, but the flora looks the same. The monoliths, the outposts, the plants, animals, all of it looks the same.
3. Why can I name everything except my ship?
4. What happened to all the ideas we were promised?
I think the game was over-hyped and in the rush to release the company made promises it couldn't keep. This game has so much potential and I still like it. It is a very zen game and still playable, but I'm quickly losing interest. Maybe they will release DLC or better updates. Who knows? ←End highlight.
So there you have it. A decent blog post for once. I'm going to try to actually keep this thing updated. Well, as best as I can. No promises.
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