Look I’m applying for grad school right now, things are getting lost in the shuffle. That’s really the main life update tbh, I’m applying for grad school, it’s all I’m thinking about, I’m tedious about it if you’re my friend right now I’m sure. One of the schools is Princeton, it’s a lot of work but also less work than you think? At least, if your undergrad program was fucking great and had your senior project just literally be a grad school portfolio + a job portfolio. God, the program I went to was so good.

I haven’t had a lot of time for writing because of that and don’t expect that to change until the applications are done in another few weeks. I asked my mentor (ig I’m the kind of person who has mentors now) how he got into Princeton and he said he wrote them a 47-page letter/research paper explaining how they were doing everything wrong and he was going to fix it actually. So the bar is pretty high as it turns out. (For the record I’m not expecting to get into Princeton, but I do need to get funded for at least ONE of these programs so!)

The time I have had to write has been focused pretty exclusively on KS; it’s got my focus right now. Thanks very much to the people that have left me tips; you would not believe how much they help me have more time to write in the months I get them. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the tip jar page to know how you can make your tip go even further.

Stay warm as the weather is turning cold, everyone! I know my arthritis is already acting up; I feel like we’re in for a cold one this year. (I am not particularly good at weather predictions.)

Quinn cornered the last living duergar in a room, where he had been trying unsuccessfully to escape out of a boarded up window. Promising to spare his life should he answer some questions, Quinn eeked out some truths from the frantic duergar: namely that the duergar were assigned here with the orders to steal valuables, particularly anything they could get their hands on made from chardalyn, an easily-enchantable black, ice-like substance found only in Icewind Dale. The duergar also claimed to have nothing to do with the ill Speaker, or the missing sun. Quinn, having learned what he wanted, killed the duergar.

Meanwhile, Taz used her herbalism kit to nurse Bladebeak back to consciousness; Bergen removed some fingers from the duergar to use their bones for scrimshanding; and Ena formally introduced the group to her doll, Footsteps, which seems to double as an arcane focus of sorts. Taz insists she saw the doll move its head and blink. The group has also noticed that Ena does not (blink), but an unblinking girl carrying a doll and summoning swarms of insects is ultimately not that high on their list of concerns. (She seems nice.)

After Bladebeak was back on her feat and any potential fires were snuffed out from the run-down inn, the group climbed back up the hill, all the way to the castle. They were at first brusquely turned away, as the Speaker was ill, but after explaining what they found in the inn, the guard brought a tiefling named Fel Suparra to speak with them. Convinced by their tale, she brought them inside to meet the Senechal, Kaldroth.

The Senechal thanked them enthusiastically in the Speaker’s stead, and invited them to stay the night in one of the guard towers, even having the servants provide a warm bath and laundering their outer layers, which had gotten gruesomely bloody and somewhat torn during the fight. The party agreed to stay, and in so doing, met a few of the servants, including a teenaged tiefling looking to be about Ena‘s age, Mere, who seemed nervous and a bit scared of Kadroth. Ena, rushing out after her bath (and nearly freezing in the process) to the kennel where she’d heard barking, also met Alassar Sulmander, a young human boy of perhaps eight, who claims to have come to Icewind Dale on a boat.

Alassar takes care of the dogs as well as doing various menial chores suited to a young child. He and Ena bonded over some dried fish rations, and he informed her of many things, including

• Kadroth can do magic, and in particular does magic with his fireplace sometimes, often when he’s alone in his office.
• Kadroth has a cat, Touche.
• There is a scary, mean old dwarf lady upstairs who’ll throw fish at you.
• There’s a trapdoor in one of the guard towers that leads to a dangerous place under the castle.

He’s agreed to take Ena there the next night they stay in the castle in return for more rations.

Quinn, the following morning, traded a large wheel of cheese he’d found on the duergar for some gossip and good favor with the chef and Senechal Kadroth. The Senechal saw them off warmly, and assured them that they’d always have warm beds and hot meals in Caer-Dineval.

Having learned from the Senechal that Torg’s left town for Easthaven three days prior, the party set off for the town at once. When they arrived, they saw a merry bonfire, around which the townsfolk were gathering. From the twitching and smell, as well as general outline, it quickly became clear that this was no celebratory bonfire, but a human being burnt at the stake. Horrified, they quickly learned that it was a wizard, Dzann, who had been captured and put to the death for his part in the murder of several adventurers he’d hired, that had previously helped the people of Ten-Towns. Quinn was quite familiar with the adventurers, and was troubled to learn of their deaths, but upon hearing the Sheriff’s animosity towards the magic-user, shielded Ena from view by hiding her behind the much larger Taz.

The Sheriff acquired after the group’s origins, and upon recognizing Quinn and Taz by reputation, pleaded with them to scout the coastline of Lac Dinneshere for four missing fishermen. The party agreed, and asked after Torg’s, learning that the merchants were still in town, but planning to leave tomorrow morning. The party hastened to where Torg’s had set up, and found the merchants milling about and starting to close up for the day. Quinn learned from Torgga that she’d obtained a magical accordion for him–from the wizard executed that very day, in fact, and offered it for the steep price of 500gp. Meanwhile, Ena approached the suspiciously lightly dressed Sephek Kaltro, and learned that the reason for his lack of winter gear was that he had been blessed by Auril for being born on Midwinter, and simply didn’t feel the cold. This fact had lead him to leave the Sword Coast, where he grew up, behind, and come to Icewind Dale to take full advantage of his blessing.

Having not gained enough to go off from the merchants, the party decided to simply head off to the inn where they heard Torg’s was staying, The White Lady Inn. Upon entry, Quinn was once again forced to lay eyes on their “””bard,””” a halfling named Rinaldo, whose admiration for Quinn‘s skills is not at all reciprocated. He appeared to be planning some sort of seance to summon the spirit of the White Lady, a ghost on Lac Dinneshire for which the inn is named.

KS has a majority of my focus right now, just because I’ve been working and traveling a lot so there’s not a lot of time to write. It’s mostly getting written on my laptop in my car between uber rides. After I hit the end of this arc, I’ll have to switch into outlining mode so it’ll go on long hiatus again. Especially since I have actually decided to change a bit of the outline (this is insanity to no one but me, who has resisted changing the outline against any and all outside forces up til now). It’s just to improve the pacing, though.

It doesn’t take a genius to notice that KS’s pacing is slow as hell, and one of the things that was really throwing a wrench in the works for me in working on the upcoming outlines was trying to fill out the time. I still don’t want to break the stream of consciousness storytelling, so there won’t be any time skips, but I’m working on moving through the days a bit faster if there’s really not much to linger on. As for the outline changes, I’ve actually changed one particular big serious event, which had a ripple effect that basically made an entire arc I had irrelevant, so the stuff from that got squished in with another one… I think the pacing will be much better this way, especially when you consider that I’m updating like twice a year instead of twice a month now.

So long story short, I’m DMing a campaign of (a kind of heavily modified) Rime of the Frostmaiden. Those of you who know me know that I play, but it’s actually been years since I DMed anything. I’ve never actually DMed a full game on Roll20 before; I was an in-person player for the majority of my life. It’s an adjustment! I bought the module and there’s all these buttons and halfway through combat I just gave up and went back to rolling the dice myself lmao.

But anyway, I thought it would be fun to do simple, informal write-ups of my players journey through the Icewind Dale. Just to have a sort of written record, and also for anyone else who might enjoy it! So, without further ado,

Welcome to Icewind Dale!

This campaign is set in the frozen tundra of Icewind Dale, a bit over a year since Auril the Frostmaiden plunged the area into eternal winter. Every night, she casts a spell that fills the sky with an aurora but dooms the sun to never rise on Icewind Dale, their only reprise being the murky 3-4 hour twilight that winter normally affords them right at midday.

Our heroes,

• Taz Krakhorn, half-orc druid, is a farmer from Icewind Dale who has had it up to here with this conflabbin’ endless dark! She left her chickens in her neighbors’ care and headed out with just her axe beak, Bladebeak, to find Auril and give her a stern talking to about this eternal winter nonsense.
• Quinn Quarrel, half-elf bard, has been a Ten-Towns mainstay ever since he moved to the area several years ago… just in time for the damn place to freeze over! Business, which involves a mix of performing at taverns and collecting rumors, has slowed to a frozen river’s crawl, and his pockets are getting awful light.
• Bergen L. Troublesome, shield dwarf barbarian, is an old and well-traveled sherpa and mountain man. There are few, perhaps none, in the Ten-Towns who can match his survival skills out there in the thin air of the Spine of the World. He’s also gone a little bit off-his-rocker, having disappeared several years ago and suddenly reappeared spouting stories of duegar who want to steal the sun, secret messages tapped by the drippings of icicles, and elaborate theories about the nature of the extraplanar hive mind represented by the supposedly-harmless chwinga.
• Ena, human sorcerer, is a young woman who found herself recently in dire straights. Her merchant family was heading to Icewind Dale with much-needed carts of supplies, only to get lost in a blizzard coming through the Spine of the World. Ena was found by friendly trappers, alone and wandering across the tundra towards the Ten Trail, most of the way to frozen and already on the verge of losing several extremities to frostbite. Only the skilled healing and personal care of the folks at Bryn Shander kept her from losing a hand, a foot, or at least a few fingers.

These four would-be adventurers have decided to team up, for reasons of their own ranging from “increased survival odds” to “I really need money and my main marketable skill is eldritch blast” to “this fool will definitely die within MINUTES if I don’t babysit.”

The party elected to go to that most classic of adventuring locales, the tavern. Specifically The Northlook, a tavern run by a retired adventurer and, while rowdy, considered the best place in the Ten-Towns for new adventurers to find work. There, everyone was abuzz with rumors of the spate of murders across the Ten-Towns, with the most recent one being here in Bryn Shander a mere three days ago. Quinn also heard rumor that the Speaker of Caer-Dineval had taken sick and hadn’t even been to Speaker meetings.

While still in the tavern, the party was approached by a lone dwarf, Hlin Trollbane, who had some professional work history with Bergen. She informed them that she’d been researching the murders, and cast her suspicion on one Sephek Kaltro, bodyguard for the shady Torg’s merchant caravan. She claimed that the caravan had been in each town on the very night the murders took place, and furthermore, Sephek could walk in the bitter, deadly cold without so much as a scarf. She believes him to be an agent of Auril, doing her dirty work and killing those who had cheated their way out of each town’s “human sacrifice lottery,” where the person who will be next sacrificed in an attempt to appease Auril is selected.

The party took the case, and headed to pick up some supplies, having decided to leave straight away in an attempt to catch up to Torg’s, which last Hlin had heard, was headed to Caer-Dineval. Ena decided to bow out briefly to let Speaker Duvessa Shane know she was leaving town. Speaker Duvessa had been very kind to Ena since she arrived, going so far as to offer the young girl a home (a shack, really, but still) on the edge of town if she wished to stay and become an official citizen of Bryn Shander.

Unfortunately, Ena is not very good at sharing information, and what she wound up communicating was essentially “I, a sixteen year old girl, have found some nice adult strangers to go on an adventure with, byeeeee.” The concerned Speaker, failing to talk Ena out of leaving, asked if she could meet these kind strangers, and set off with Ena to meet the party on their way to the stables to fetch Bladebeak.

The Speaker expressed her concerns, which were very much not allayed by Taz’s wholehearted declaration that the team was off to find Auril (not knowing where she was) on “whatever mountain was closest” and “give her a stern talking-to.” Bergen pointing out that if Ena didn’t leave with them, she intended to find another group or just leave on her own, also didn’t do much to calm the Speaker down. However, she did eventually suggest that she introduce them to a researcher in town who had a nice, beginning-adventurer-friendly quest.

The Speaker made introductions to Dannika Graysteel, a scholar researching chwinga, who offered the party a lantern of elemental tracking and 25gp if they could bring her a live chwinga specimen to study. The group agreed readily enough and took the lantern with them on their axe-beak-sled-ride journey along the Eastway to Caer-Dineval.

Their journey was uneventful, but with no sign of chwinga from the lantern, and the party made it to Caer-Dineval hours before Auril‘s aurora was set to light up the sky. They headed to the tavern to find news of Torg’s, but were disappointed to learn that the merchant caravan had tried selling overpriced alcohol in the town two days earlier to little luck, and headed out already. They enjoyed a hearty bowl of chowder, wincing at their ever-lightening wallets, and were convinced to head to the Caer as the only inn in town had shut down a year prior.

However, before heading up to the Caer, the party took a detour town to the abandoned Dinev’s Rest; Taz wanted some fresh rats as a treat for Bladebeak’s hard work pulling their sled and thought she might be able to find some sheltering from the cold there. Finding it boarded up and locked, the party merely tore off the boards and unlocked the door…. to the outhouse, before finding the actual front door and repeating.

As the party spread out to look for signs of rats, Bergen felt something strange… a sensation like he was being watched. He loudly declared it to be the bastard invisible duegar here to steal the sun, and began casing the joint hunting for them… only to have a goddamn invisible duegar pop out and attack! Well, damn, it’s gonna be a lot harder to discount him now!

The party had pitched level one combat with a crowd of six duegar, helped by the cramped quarters that kept most of them from growing in size, as they were fighting in a narrow hallway. With some help from Bladebeak, who busted through the front door–taking some wall with her in the process–the team managed to best the duegar, although it nearly cost them Bladebeak‘s life (and Ena‘s, at one point).

Quinn managed to corner one of the duegar alone in a room as it was trying to flee, and closed the door behind them, hiding the two from the rest of the party, who are preoccupied with the direly injured Bladebeak. What could our bard have planned for this duegar?!

We’ll find out what our adventurers have planned in our next session!

The tl;dr is that I managed to get hired for a job I was qualified for, got bait-n-switched (no literally I signed for one job and I showed up and they were like actually you’ll be doing 100% different job, and it turns out in America they can do that and it’s legal????? they can literally be like ‘this job is for tech support’ and then you show up and they make you a janitor and you have little to no legal recourse??? what is this country) into a job I wasn’t qualified but still killed it at (great performance reviews, clients and coworkers loved me), only to find out they’d done it to fill the slot temporarily while they were still looking for more qualified individuals, and upon finding one, they fired me! Then the more qualified person quit in under three weeks because it turns out qualified medical professionals don’t want a $16/hr job that also involves kitchen work you didn’t tell them about in the interview. I only know this because I’m still good friends with several of my now-ex-coworkers, which frankly is turning out to be more valuable than the job, although I did really enjoy caring for the elderly and helping people get food stamps and stuff.

Now I’m doing gig delivery for a bit because I have a long vacation planned with my dad at the end of September and like hell I was going to interview for a bunch of new positions only for them to tell me I couldn’t take dad on his dream vacation he’s been talking about wanting to do for actual decades, fuck that. A month of ubereats it is!

Okay so actual news! KS is finishing up its catch-up run here finally, feels like I was doing that forever. I’m still editing the last 2-3 chapters at time of writing, but I’m pretty sure by the time this goes up in a few days it’ll be 100% edited. I’ll have a special surprise sometime after that, but I’m not entirely sure when it’ll be done since I don’t have as much time for writing these days, obviously. I’m trying to figure out a way to write in between ubereats deliveries but it turns out it’s really actually very hard to use your laptop in a car. If anyone has any pointers or experience with this, I’d love some suggestions. Popping into a starbucks was my plan but it turns out it’s kind of a pain to do that for 5-15 minute intervals between jobs and then have to pack back up.

Work on the tip jar is slowly ongoing, but I’m kind of stumped at the visual level. I’d like to have some kind of visual for the tip jar filling up, but I’m really not sure how best to make it. My best guess at the moment is to buy a twitch stream element off etsy or something and jerry-rig that, but I think I’d have to fill it manually which is what I was hoping to avoid. At that point I might just try to make something in paint.net or canva. Again, if anyone has any ideas (or feels like drawing a tip jar at different levels of filled), please let me know!

Speaking of streaming, I’ve been doing that a little and I’d like to do it more, although it does run into the aforementioned lack of time. These days I often feel like if I have down time, I should be spending it cooking, cleaning, writing… You know how it is, it’s not even that #capitalism grindset so much as it is a lot of responsibilities and not enough time. Plus the best streaming times overlap pretty much 100% with the best times to be delivering food lmao.

Right now I’m writing about ~1000 words on days when I don’t work, which is slower than I’d like but it’s frankly a miracle I’m even getting that done. Maybe I should combine ’em and do streams where I just share the single line of writing as I write it (if I can figure out a way to do that lol) and it can be like a write-with-me stream like how I used to basically live in study-together streams during college.

A bunch of important stuff this month. So I’m using headers. Real break from tradition here.

Patreon WordPress Plugin = Borked

Most importantly, the connection between Patreon and the website has broken. This has happened to a bunch of people today, and the issue is likely either the wordpress plugin or, more likely, Patreon itself, which probably wordlessly pushed an update that broke it despite being the ones who run the fucking wordpress plugin. This is not unusual for them. I’d switch to subscribestar if anyone used it but here we are.

This is likely to be fixed soon, but in the meantime you will not have access to the paywalled stories. I’m very sorry about this. If it goes on for more than a few days, I’ll (temporarily) de-paywall the stories until it’s fixed. The only reason I’m not doing it now is that it’s likely it would take me longer to do it (I have to edit each chapter one at a time) than it will for them to fix the problem.

Ongoing Stories

Currently, I’m working on fanfiction primarily, both Keeping Secrets and other pieces (DC and ZZZ respectively). This is for two reasons, but the main one at the moment is that most of my work gets done at the office and I’m not Kitty-Unpretty bold enough to be writing smut on the clock. The mere thought makes me want to crumple into dust. So SFW fanfiction it is. The second one is just that my main stories really require me to use Scrivener and not just scribble into Notepad, btw.

Original stories that are getting updates once I get a better work/life balance (we’re getting there!) are first Demon Isles, since it’s got a half-finished chapter languishing, and then A Place Among the Stars, both of which have considerable sex scenes on the horizon, hence the fact they have to wait for the weekends.

Website Updates

I’ve finally started to put in some baseline work on the tip jar I really want to add. I don’t think it’ll see a lot of action, mind you, I just think it’s a fun and cool idea that encourages more interactivity from the people who frequent the website. How it’ll work is that you can give tips via Ko-fi and attach the title of any work. That tip will then go towards getting more of that story. It’s tips, but it’s also crowdfunding, lol.

In unrelated news, I’ve decided to hand off running of the actual business side of this business (are you guys shocked that it’s a business?) to my brother. This will let me focus just on my day job and also writing, ideally. This won’t change anything for you guys and you will likely never see any evidence of his existence.

Streams

I’m currently streaming on Twitch, Fridays around 5PM EST. Right now I’m playing Homicipher with Crow. I’m officially(?) a pngtuber now, lol. After Homicipher, I’m planning on streaming either Digimon Survive, Horizon Zero Dawn, Dredge, or Date Everything, all blind plays. I might also slip in some Long Dark or HSR/ZZZ for gab sessions. These streams don’t last very long and are generally short 2-3h sessions since that’s what I have time for and I’m just doing it for funsies. I’m not the most entertaining on my own with an empty audience, so I try to drag my friends into things as much as possible, so you might see Crow, my brother Con, or even my friend Kay.

Once again, thank y’all for sticking around, and I hope you’ve been enjoying the slow KS updates. They’re queued up to chapter 90 now! The end is just around the corner! In a few months…!

It’s part time but should pay enough to pay the bills, which leaves me with three days a week to do other stuff. Unexpectly, it’s social work. It’s kind of a weird story but I interviewed for a driver position and they wound up giving me an assistant social worker position instead due to my English major and experience with social benefits paperwork (due to… being on… social benefits…). It’s a bit exhausting but I like it because there’s a high amount of job satisfaction (helping old people feels good, no shocker there) and my boss is understanding of my situation and let me part time to accommodate that.

I’m going to be focusing pretty narrowly on KS until the edit is done, at least, since getting 3-4 chapters a week edited is a bit harder now that I’m out of the house 4 days a week. Just doing that doesn’t leave me with a great deal of free writing time atm. Past that, however, I’m planning on… well, I’m planning on following my creative whims. At the moment I feel like writing PaS the most, but we’ll see where I land when KS is done updating here.

There’ll be a pause before I start bringing Curious over here, and I currently don’t plan on bringing Tiny Secrets or any of my other fanfic over. I probably will at some point, I just want to focus on producing new content instead of just bringing old stuff over once KS is finished being backed up.

If any of you have a particular story you’re most interested in seeing more updates for, let me know! I’m open to being influenced; I can’t fully follow my whims or I’d just being writing Hugo/Lycaon slash fiction right now.

My goals this month are a little up in the air; I heard back from a job with a potential offer and I’m waiting on them to confirm so I can go get a physical. If I get the job, I’ll mostly just be focusing on continuing to edit KS this month. If I don’t, I’ll keep filling out applications and work on more stuff in the background; I’m still working on the last part of the current Demon Isles storyline and I’ve been outlining some other stuff, mostly PaS and some Aeris. I’d like to start moving some of the Aeris stuff over here and get a more in-depth description page for it since the setting is quite sprawling. I want a character guide as well, since a lot of them get mentioned in each other’s stories, but it could be a looooong time before I have all the context written up novel-style and posted here.

If you’ve noticed me shifting into more reworking previous stuff for the website, that’s because it honestly takes less creative energy… or like, less creation energy if that makes sense? Thinking up new ideas, fleshing them out, and forming them into a coherent storyline is, for me, the most mentally exhausting part of writing. It’s why I tend to take long breaks to outline in advance; once I have the outline, it’s a lot easier for me to just speed along even if I’m not all there creatively.

Oh, speaking of things that destroyed my life and ability to work, I got a clean bill of health post-surgery. My kidneys are in good working order with nary a stone in sight. BTW, the stone was jammed in there so severely that the doctor had to blast it essentially into dust. There wasn’t even enough left to take a sample! Also, stents suck. Try not to need stents.

As always, thanks to y’all for sticking around with me through this. Getting a job will obviously mean my pace will continue to be slow, but it also makes this a ~passion project~ which I think is a happier general place to be. Takes a lot of the pressure off, at least, which in turn makes it easier to think of new ideas and such.

Actually, I have been getting a lot done behind the scenes, but mostly in terms of editing. I’m into the 50s, with KS chapters queued all the way into May. Actually just about to get to the Fenris chapter, atm. I’m hoping to get some work done on some other stories as the mood strikes me but for right now most of my work days have gone into editing KS. I really don’t know how you people read it this fast; this is taking me forever.

Hoping to get some more fun stuff done, like fanfiction no one asked for or smut that about 20 people asked for. It’s a lot of me wrestling with my own dopamine production and trying to figure out what sparks joy now that I’m medicated and joy can be sparked somewhat more easily. Turns out I kind of like to clean now? That’s taking some getting used to. And cooking. Did adderall turn anyone else into a housewife?

In life hunt news, I’m job hunting again. I’ve been doing contract work since the fall, but it’s really slowing down, and I’m just finding it really impossible to walk the extreme tightrope handed to me by the government when it comes to how much I can earn. The difference between ‘how much I need to earn to stay afloat’ and ‘how much I can earn before they cut off my insurance’ is quite literally $70/month, which means I’m completely incapable of having “good weeks” to counteract the bad ones. It just doesn’t work very well. Of course, the job hunt is going terribly and no one will even give me an interview, which is pretty bog standard, especially with all the massive lay-offs happening.

I’m doing more writing during this interim, kind of for lack of anything better to do as contract work has really dried up. This isn’t a move for me trying to make it a career or a good source of income again, it’s just something I do to keep myself sane! Hence why you guys got 15,000 words of DC fanfiction and not something more relevant. I will mention that I do have commission tiers at the $100 level if anyone is deeply invested in seeing something more relevant, but I know times are as hard for everyone else as they are for me. While I do intend to write more of the paywalled stuff, the focus on free content also feels apt since I know everyone’s hurting for $.

I can’t really say what to expect for March, because for all we know I could get hired next Tuesday and suddenly have no free time, but I guess if you see more updates, you’ll know why (and if you don’t, you’ll also know why). Stay alive out there! Stop doomscrolling! Read a book, or a manga, or watch some Dropout. Remind yourself there will for sure be a new Animal Crossing title with the Switch 2. Whatever it takes to keep on churning, my guys.