Milestones for the Remainder of 2026
The Year of Ranges
As November encroaches upon us, I experience the same feelings that a runner must as they turn the final bend to the finish line. The stretch feels endlessly long, and yet the gap will close faster than the next inhale. I find this time of year to be the perfect season for reflecting on the year thus far so that I can finish it as strong as I am able.
One of the biggest differences this year compared to previous ones is how I've approached the blog. The first year I wrote on Fridays, the next Wednesdays. This year I intended to continue the trend of the latter while falling more into the former. At first, I chided myself for missing my "deadlines". After all, if I didn't post consistently on Wednesday, wouldn't that frustrate my readers? Professionals should make and stick to their deadlines. Consistency shows discipline toward the craft, and someone who can't make good on promises to stick to their own schedule can't be trusted to finish the projects they start, right?
For some, maybe it's true that if they don't adhere to those strict schedules, they won't maintain consistency. For others, the lack of wiggle room can be pretty damning and create more problems than it helps. Discipline isn't necessarily about meeting deadlines so much as it is seeing the task through to completion, which is the philosophy I've been trying to follow.
2026 overall has been the year of "ranges" for me. I have a range of days in which I complete my blog now. Wednesday is for brainstorming and writing, the Thursdays I work are a continuation of Wednesday, and I aim to package and publish by the end of Friday. This evolution happened organically as I've written meatier posts and fewer "accountability updates." Whether that trend continues into 2027, I don't know yet, but I foresee finishing out the year in the same fashion.
For my Built With Science workouts, I've lowered each of my exercises to 1 working set pushed as close to failure as I can manage without risk of injury, giving myself permission to add sets when I'm feeling good and am wanting to push myself harder, usually to a max of 3-4. For that 1-set minimum, I ignore the ranges suggested by the app and instead push to complete one more rep than last time. If I'm able to land between 15-30 reps, I'll up the weight. For isolation moves like Bulgarian Split Squats, I'm more inclined to up the weight on the lower end of that range because I'd rather do fewer of them at a higher load than more of them at a lower.
For my walking, I've endeavored to hit at least 8k steps most days as a bare minimum while pushing to 10k as often as I'm able. As a matter of fact, reflecting on it, the shift in my view toward walking from, "I must walk 10k steps a day or I have failed," to, "Eh, 8k steps is fine; 10k steps is great," may very well have inspired the whole process of landing within groups of ranges and being happy with those outcomes, because that happened right near the beginning of the year. Huh.
The Final Weeks of 2026
So, what do those observations mean for the final 10-ish weeks of 2026?
Honestly, not much other than I'll continue the aforementioned trends at a steady pace while trying to puzzle ways of incorporating the idea elsewhere. In some ways, the blog and physical activity have become the support pillars to my routine while I consider my other milestones. Even if these other goals fall apart, I can count on blogging, BWS, and walking to keep the wheel spinning.
Cael's Journals
The blog creates an interesting wrinkle, however, because it went from a 1-day task to a multi-day task. If 2-3 days a week are dedicated to brainstorming and writing the blog, another day or 2 dedicated each week to transcribing campaign sessions, and 2 days are non-work days, that's ~6 out of 7 days accounted for, leaving one full day available to work on another project, such as catching up on Cael's journals. Because I'm not working toward it every day, the process of switching gears and warming up and rereading material to know where Cael's head is and then writing can stall any meaningful progress.
Which is why I've made a bargain with my partner! Currently, we are playing through a downtime phase in-game. Important events are still happening, but the pace has fallen back into more of a slice-of-life form of stakes than the world-ending events of epic fantasy. Since we're close to the end of that downtime arc, however, I requested that if we 1) reach that bookend or 2) December hits, we take a short break so I can allot transcribing days toward writing instead. A couple years ago I spent all of December catching up on Cael's journals, and there were more then than there are now, so I believe I can do it again, given a loosening of the reigns. Once I'm caught up, I should be able to stay caught up.
Reading
This epiphany feels obvious in hindsight, but most activities that require a significant amount of effort are best performed once you've warmed up. You don't work out without warming up, otherwise you risk injury. Vocalists and instrumentalists warm up with scales and arpeggios before they practice repertoire. Artists warm up with drawing exercises to loosen their wrists and wake up both their literal and creative muscles.
Warming up the mind and body benefits the actual execution of the craft even though it requires you to sacrifice a little bit more time beforehand. Without the warmup, you might injure yourself or, in the case of writing for me, you might not be able to pull your focus together well enough to actually complete the writing you want that day.
I, however, dislike warming up with random writing exercises, because they lie outside my sphere of attention. So, I've turned to reading as a tangential warm-up exercise, and it works well for me. I've experimented with this in years past and always let it fall by the wayside because I tend to eventually get too absorbed in the reading and not enough into the writing, but if I strike a balance, reading before I write elevates my prose and my ability to focus. Rereading relevant transcripts helps me get into character, but the physical act of reading the chapter of a novel such as "Shogun" before I ever touch story material helps my focus snap together in a way that rereading transcripts doesn't.
The weaving of these 2 activities, reading and writing, shows promise, because I want to finish "Shogun" before the end of the year as well. I'm just shy of the halfway mark, so I should have plenty of time if I keep to the discipline of reading a chapter as part of my warmup routine.
Other Areas
While the above tasks are milestones I actually want to complete, I have ideas for other areas where I want to sprinkle in flakes of progress, however small they might be.
Summaries
Session summaries are one of those tasks that has been niggling me for years, and it'll continue to niggle me until it's done, because even if I declare, "I give up!" I know I won't actually mean it. Claude's help in creating these Skies Over Aefala summaries should expedite the process significantly once I get the ball truly rolling on it, but Cael's journals take precedence. Still, with well over 150 sessions, this task grows ever more daunting and heavier the longer I procrastinate on it.
Ultralearning
Oh, the project ideas. All the project ideas. How to settle on one? Possibilities continue to percolate in the background, gliding between what could I feasibly commit to vs what takes highest priority vs what piques my interest most, and more. Instead of deciding on a project here and now, I want to spend the rest of this year researching the skills and knowledge that align with my interests so that come New Year's, I'll be able to make a more informed decision. This kind of research I can do while my partner takes his turn on "Dead Cells" or during those moments where I know I won't have ample enough time to sink into one of my other tasks. In general, however, these are the areas where I want to improve or learn more about:
Improv
Communication (speech, conversation, and otherwise)
Writing techniques, leaning more toward the grammatical, the flow and structure
Vocabulary (it's so interesting how there's not a lot of advice at a surface glance for how to improve your vocabulary in your native language, though I suspect there's a lot of overlap with the process for foreign language learning)
Music Composition, specifically improving my harmonic/voice-leading skills
Art, from drawing dynamic poses to how gravity affects cloth to lighting and color theory
Learning more about the Central Nervous System and what factors and intensities rejuvenate/deplete the energy reserves; this is a way for me to learn about my own habits, strengths, and weaknesses and how to accommodate what my mind and body need
What skills I would need to learn to develop Fear No More and what to pursue first from that list
Japanese, primarily reading and writing, to a lesser degree listening, and at the bottom of that speaking; I want to take the N3, then the N2, and maybe the N1 someday
A deeper understanding of nutrition so I don't have to look up information like, "Foods to help me through the afternoon slump."
Philosophy
Psychology
...and more
What drives me nuts about this list is that I can see the connections between the different areas and how learning more about psychology or philosophy could inform character motivations or how to write a moving speech, for example. Each category contains layers upon layers upon layers of skills and knowledge that compound even across other fields, which makes it difficult to narrow the scope down to one focus, even if temporarily.
Cheers to the Rest of 2026
Everything I'm doing now is working to clear the bottleneck so I can pursue my other interests, which I inevitably hope to use to further bolster my storytelling skills. It's tempting sometimes to sacrifice my physical wellbeing to further along my intellectual pursuits; I would have made the swap without hesitating a beat back in college, but because physical fitness takes up such a small slice of my pie of interests, I protect what habits I have formed with greater ferocity than a lioness over her cub.
With a little bit of luck, I'll be able to close out 2026 fully caught up on my writing, get the gears turning for churning out Skies Over Aefala summaries, and start absorbing other skills to help me shape this story I want to tell.
Summary of Notable Accomplishments (10.7 - 10.20):
Transcribing. So much transcribing. Sessions 148, 149, and 150
Wrote the journal for the 21st of Nudon; just need to reread and edit
Also wrote a letter from Cael to another NPC
Read a lot of "Shogun"
BWS workouts
Had to regress a little after vacation because I was a loaf when I could be and have no regrets about it
Walking/jogging
The usual repeat tasks like meal planning for the next day, filling in my planners, bookkeeping, etc...
Lots of "Dead Cells"
What I appreciate about rogue-like video games is how well they can teach the idea of perseverance in the face of difficulty. I spent all of vacation trying to get to and beat the Giant on 4 Boss Cells and failed repeatedly. For reference, you start the game at 0 Boss Cells, and then each time you beat the game you can increase the difficult from Normal (0 BC) → Hard (1 BC) → Very Hard (2 BC) → Expert (3 BC) → Nightmare (4 BC, where I've been playing) → Hell (5 BC)
I only ever made it to him twice during vacation because the Cavern, the biome prior to his fight, would obliterate me. Well, a couple nights ago I made it to him a 3rd time with my best chances of defeating him thus far and died, and last night I made it to him again and finally defeated him to get the 5th Boss Cell. Yes, you can ease some of the difficulty by enabling certain gameplay options, and doing so is valid. I almost did, if only to save on the time I spent playing, but persevering as I had made me appreciate the victory that much more.
I beat him on run 177, by the way, which is a little skewed because both my partner and I have been playing on the same file.
Real Talk:
What are you hoping to accomplish before the year's end and, looking back to the rest of 2026 as data, how realistic are those goals?
Ooo, with NaNoWriMo coming up in November, I wonder if I can push to finish the journals in November instead of December. I wouldn't want to postpone the sessions necessarily, and I wouldn't be aiming for 50k words because I know better than to burn myself out like that, but I wonder.... Hmmm.... I'll need to take some time myself to consider whether or not I want to go that route.
This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Mura
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