Today I learned that sometimes, dogs that are supposed to be put down for hurting people get rehomed instead. Great. Now I'm gonna be even more terrified of dogs than I already was. How the fuck is this even legal? If a dog hurts someone bad enough to get a euthanasia order, THAT DOG NEEDS. TO. BE. KILLED!!! No exceptions!

...I finally felt both good enough and bored enough earlier today that I started planning out one of the important chapters of book 7, with the intention to write. I think I knew the writing part was doomed for the day, given it's a "dueling tournament" chapter(s), and those always take a fuckton of work for me to prepare for since I have to come up with at least a handful of names for the other school's team members (for Singles, Doubles, Melee, and now also Triples), decide how far I want the Fae Springs players to get in each category, fill out the W and L brackets to match, and other miscellaneous planning. So all of that work tends to be exhausting even on good days, and usually takes a few days to finish even then. So I shouldn't have been surprised to get only as far as coming up with a list of things that need to be in the chapter, which this time includes a lot of callbacks to events in book 6, meaning I had to re-read part of one of the relevant chapters because I keep forgetting to write down truly minor character names in the character notes.

Anyway, so I lost energy after finishing the simplest part of that process earlier, the literal first step for this chapter, because I'm still ill. But it's a good sign that I was able to do even that much. I might need to include more in the chapter, but I got the biggest parts written down. And AFAIK I did not forget anything; anything that gets added later will be something I think of later.

Fun fact: Whenever there's no need for me to decide a name for a player in one of these tournaments, I like to come up with funny names for them instead of all of them being "(X school student) (#)" (or more likely "FS1 v SM2")¹ or whatever. Some examples: Barney vs Betty, Fred vs Wilma, Tom vs Jerry, Donald vs Mickey, Wednesday vs Pugsley, Shaggy vs Fred, or Tweedle Dee vs Tweedle Dum. It works because I color code the backgrounds of the name tag thingies by school anyway. (Fae Springs is always green.) If I need to give one of those joke names a proper name later, I can just delete the joke name(s) and put in the proper one(s) instead.

~ ~ ~

1 = FS1 stands for Fae Springs (team), player #1. SM here stands for Shawnee Mountains, since that's the school the chapter in question is playing next. The last tournament was against Loess Hills School in Iowa. (Loess is pronounced Lush.)

Fun fact: Loess Hills School of Magic is in the middle of the first featured all-witch city/town in the series, which is named Vanishing Valley, Iowa. The town, which is about the same size that Shenandoah, Iowa was when my family lived there, is located inside a hollow hill, and was inspired by supposedly true stories on Reddit about towns that don't exist on any maps and which the people who stumbled into them can't locate again later even when they know the area very, very well. And having lived half my life in the Midwest and knowing how horrible it is there for anyone outside the norm at all, I figured most Midwest witches would either live in big cities like Chicago, or inside hidden towns like Vanishing Valley, Iowa.

So at some point, I don't remember when, I forgot to mention I had gotten stuffed up and blowing my nose so much that I've had to pick up massive amounts of toilet paper (because I haven't bought facial tissues in years) from various surfaces. The stuffed-upness comes and goes. I've been awake for like 20 minutes now and not coughing as much. Barely needed to blow my nose so far. Nostils both mostly open now. Head hurts, but I've taken something for that. Last couple sleeps have been a lot easier, even though I keep ending up drenched in sweat.

No idea how long these improvements will last. But I feel like I am getting better in general, slowly but surely. It's the "slowly" part that's annoying. The thing I always hated the most about colds is their tendency to last a week or more.

I'm thinking of going to do laundry later today because of the sweat problem. I uh... can't find my spare bedding, except for the one sheet that's been on my recliner for months. On my recliner, being used. So it's not clean either. If I had more energy, maybe I could make a better search, but I don't.

Doing a bit better, still sick. Throat is almost normal. Not quite as achy. Nose now runs occasionally, and having sneezes occasionally that make me cough and struggle to breathe. Able to stay awake a lot longer.

Main issue is, I have basically no appetite and even less energy than usual, so I'm forgetting to eat until it makes me nauseous, and it now comes with having to fight the strong urge to vomit. (IE, standing over the toilet swallowing my own spit again and again to keep myself from puking, which is very unpleasant, especially as I prefer to pretend saliva doesn't exist because it's grosser than piss or snot to me.) Exacerbated by the fact that when I do remember to eat, it's like... a slice of bologna or some noodles or a cookie. Or a banana. I could probably eat tacos, and I have the hamburger for it, but no energy to cook. My biggest meals have been Chef Boyardee.

Losing track of time more than usual because I just don't have the energy to care about the time, which makes many of the above issues worse. Been doing nothing but watching YouTube videos, though I did also watch half an episode of "Dimension 20: Cloudward Ho!"

I honestly would rather have burning diarrhea that smells like a dead skunk fermenting in piss for twelve days in Arizona than this cold. At least I can function mostly normally with diarrhea.

While out coming back from the grocery store where I had gotten a new light bulb, I spontaneously remembered something I used to do waaaay back in high school: writing these first-person perspective stories taking place in a setting called "the Eternal Prairie." This was a realm that was basically an infinite plane best described as "flat Earth, but infinite" except that like, the ground was equivalent to the floor of that universe -- dig deep enough down and you literally cannot go any further because you've hit the absolute floor of the universe. Similarly, the sky was like the ceiling: if you flew high up enough, eventually you would hit that ceiling and be unable to go any further. But in all other directions, that realm was infinite, and that whole infinite plane had various terrain and biomes on it, including plate tectonics. The name "the Eternal Prairie" was technically a misnomer, as prairie was just the first biome I explored in that realm. And it wasn't even the one I went to most of the time; usually I would pick a forested or slightly wooded biome, mainly to swim in streams and lakes and stuff.

I word it that way because these stories were basically self-insert demi-fiction. IE, I was writing them as though they were accurate accounts of real trips to that realm, which functionally was just an excuse for me to escape mentally to a world with no people, where I could run around naked and safely swim and do whatever else I wanted to do. And I do mean safely; one of the things I remember about the setting was that it was impossible to be hurt or drown or die while there. Animals there were always benevolent as long as you try to didn't hurt them first. Mostly, though, the animals kept their distance. Also, I could shape-shift.

Some details I have forgotten. I know there was a day/night cycle there, but given it's an infinite plane, there's nowhere for a sun to go, so I don't recall how that worked. I may have even handwaved it away. I'm pretty sure I wrote dozens of these stories, but I only have one remaining story in my possession, which I put in my book of shadows at some point. I skimmed it a bit ago, and was reminded that the alora fruit and cylinder fruit that eventually ended up in Traipah first appeared in the Eternal Prairie stories.

I think there may have also been connections between the Eternal Prairie stuff and my Vah'zyahl stuff, long before they were called the Vah'zyahl. The Vah'zyahl are another series of stories I tell myself to this day, starting back in high school, involving being part of a post-human collective with disposable/swappable 'meat puppet' bodies. IE, blank cloned (mostly biological) cyborg bodies that are super hard to kill because they have Deadpool-level healing due to nanites in their system; their tech gives them all kinds of amazing powers, too. There are hive minds among the Vah'zyahl, always by choice and only offered to of-age adults, but mostly they just use their nanites to body-swap into any form they want to (robots, aliens, other genders, etc) and to have what is essentially a form of always-on (unless they choose to disconnect) Internet in their heads, though the Vah'zyahl Omni-net is beyond massive; the modern world's entire data storage and processing of all its computers ever made (including smart phones and tablets) would fit into half a gram of Vah'zyahl nanites, and the Vah'zyahl equivalent to a very small server farm is a Matryoshka Brain that measures both storage and processing space in yottabytes (10^24 bytes) and xenottabytes (10^27 bytes), if not larger.

Anyway, one of the big things about the Vah'zyahl is, they are avid explorers of both the universe and the multiverse, using technology-based portals (and I'm fairly sure I usually 'got to' the Eternal Prairie using Vah'zyahl tech). Their tech is basically They even show up a bit in my Ravenstone series, name-dropped on occasion, and there's a few side characters who are part of the Vah'zyahl culture, first introduced in book six, and showing up again in book 7. The Vah'zyahl also ultimately have their roots in Traipah. In fact, their name -- Vah'zyahl -- is a deliberate misspelling of the Traipahgnanog words/phrase 'vahzii ahl,' which means 'many one.' Which when properly interpreted in context means "the many are one" / "many=one." Also it's a pun on the similarity between the TPNN word "ahl" and the English word "all."

The main reason I'm talking about all this is, I'm sort of tempted to go back to writing "Eternal Prairie" stories, because my life is very boring and I could use an escape. Still debating whether to write them the same way I did before, or to change things up and make a proper shareable story about it, with someone else from our world finding the place instead, an escape from their horrible job and stressful life under capitalism. Probably the first one, TBH. I could really use a setting and story type that let me write solely for my own pleasure, without it having to be any good. Also, if I wrote it as proper fiction, I would have to write that character's shitty life, even if just for a few pages to start with, and I would rather not.