Meanwhile, a month later...

Well, there went March. It was a busy, happy month for me, just in ways that got in the way of blogging here. April should be a month of more activity here.

The biggest thing is improvement in my health. "Health" is a pretty tangled for me, with fixed and variable chronic health problems, acute crises driven by purely internal stuff (auto-immune reactions and like that), chronic and acute environmental complications, and on and on. Four years ago I fell into into a deep valley of not-so-hotness, kind of like a volcanic caldera. I am now climbing out the far end of it, with a virtuous cycle of reinforcements between exercise, diet, environmental hardships passing, and other stuff. I have more energy and physical ability to do (among others) housework backlogged for years, and getting that done opens up more opportunities to do new things I've been wanting to, and it just really is very satisfying.

(It's not all biscuits and gravy, of course. There are nasty down stretches and sundry complications. It's just that the overall trend is very clearly up.)

One of the best parts of the above is that I've been able to resume work on writing projects long stalled out. At the top of the list is a book on playing "outsider" heroes in the pulp '20s and 30s—women, people of color, political and other ideologues, etc. I had to shelve this two years back, and it hurt a lot, and I spent a lot of time wondering if I'd really ever be able to do it. Well, turns out I can. But to do that, I had a lot to do in March, building the infrastructure of schedules and review checkpoints, getting my suite of writing and data-keeping tools in order, assembling playtesters to evaluate advice and mechanics...well, a bunch.

The key point here is that I did get it done. :) Work's now underway within what's providing as sound a framework as I hoped for.

At the same time all of that was going on, several of my guildmates hit points of transition and reflection, and for several weeks there was a lot of uncertainty about who'd be doing what. It settled out happily for each of them, I think. Lots of them are now on what might be extended leave from WoW, with just a few of us remaining activity. I respect my friends' judgment a lot, and it seems to me like everyone's making good, sensible decisions likely to lead to their greater well-being, and that's a very happy thing to have reason to think about people you like. It just means that we won't, right now, being doing the "gang of us" team-ups for 5- and 10-person challenges the way we thought we would.

(Side note: I'm fascinated to see that there's a really big noticeable wave of leave-taking right now. Several big-name bloggers have gone on indefinite leave, and I hear from friends in more dedicated raiding guilds that they have a lot of players doing that too. The conventional wisdom blames it on the initial Lich King content being too easy for the relatively hard-core players, but I have the theory that most of it would be happening even if there were a bunch of harder challenges available right now. People can't assimilate changes indefinitely without it taking some toll. A recurring from those returning from hiatus is that they have a firmer sense of what's happening now in the game, what the possibilities before them now are, and what they want to try next. Sort of a mental palate clearing.)

I dithered around a while, and decided that, no, I don't want to take a WoW vacation myself. But neither was I getting very far as a semi-soloing tank—at the raiding level, which Spiderheart's at the lower edge of now, there don't need to be as many tanks as a fraction of a group's composition, and the folks I do pick-up and scheduled runs with already have a solid cohort of experienced tanks. So I've re-specced to give Spider a nice solid dps build, since dpsers (and healers) are more in demand to fill in raid gaps than tanks are.

Coming up in April, more regular posting, therefore, of my three usual kinds: reports on things accomplished (or at least bravely attempted), random tourism, and occasional essay pieces. I actually have added in WoW posting to my to-do app, because the nudging will do me good.

Looking forward to writing at you more this month!