Pain in the Neck
As previously mentioned, I have a sebaceous cyst that has gone all manky on my neck. Last time this happened I was given a course of antibiotics, which cleared it up, only to have it go bad again a couple of weeks later. The second course of antibiotics failed to make an impression and then I spent the next month burning through all my savings to get to/from medical appointments.
This time round it appears I won’t have the gap of a couple of weeks between one lump and the next as the second lump formed as the gubbins was still leaking out of my neck from the first lump. I now have a second very painful lump on the back of my neck. I’m hoping that the antibiotics that I am still taking for the first lump will fix that too but I’m not that hopeful.
Bike
The bike is once again being repaired, I took it in yesterday the chain only fell off twice, both times when my gears were fairly high so I ended up cycling into Settle in a fairly low gear – so slowly. The route I had chosen was mostly downhill, so I got to the dubious point of almost needing to get off and push my bike downhill. Alastair the owner (I assume) of Three Peaks Cycles in Settle took one look at the wobbly chain ring and told me that the lock nut needs tightening – wouldn’t it have been nice if the people at r/BikeWrench on Reddit had told me that. I would have had to get a different crank puller to the one I already owned, but that would no doubt have been cheaper to do than getting the bike shop to do it for me. It’s now on my shopping list a long with whatever I need to actually tighten my locking ring.
Alastair did say that it might be something else, but they’d have a look and report back before the end of the day – they haven’t, so I will ring about that this morning. Hopefully I can afford to pay for the repair (Tredz will actually pay for it). I’m rather hoping that I can get them to fit my dropper too, but I’m waiting on being paid at the moment, which is due on the 6th, which is a Sunday so sooner than the 6th. But no actual date has been mentioned so I don’t know if that will be Friday or Saturday.
Writing
Wrote out a whole post about my health, it’s more of a general post and it still needs to be finished, cleaned up and edited, it’s been something I have planned on writing for a while. But as I have a habit of oversharing, I need to decide how much I actually want to post. Currently just a bulleted list of medical/health issues, I really want to talk about each thing in a proper sentence/paragraph structure. But it’s hard and there is stuff in there that I’m unsure as to whether or not I want to share – on the other hand, without the context from sharing it some of the other issues seem a little stupid.
I poked Hoodoo again but she’s still not willing to play the way I want, so I continued to refine my LitRPG a little bit. I realised that my setting was an almost copy of a series of LitRPG books I had read before (not story just setting) and I don’t want that to be a thing, so I need to change some of it quite a bit more. I think I have my own story and how the gamified elements work is different. But the actual System Apocalypse foundation where rather than a fully fantasy world, or a world within a game. You use the current real world with mana and a game overlay/GUI as your basic setting (then push the setting so that most of the old world has been forgotten). I am still planning to use that setting (like this other series), but I will differentiate mine more – it was already going to focus on it a little differently, and the origin of the System (the game system that creates quests and assigns stats, etc) was almost certainly going to different.
The issue is that the series I am talking about above, was a Trading/Collecting Card Game set within a future version of this world. And my book/series, was going to be a Trading/Collecting Power Gem Game set within a future version of this world. And I don’t want potential future readers of my story to read it and immediately think of the other series. Actually, using a System like system (or is that system like System?) shouldn’t be an issue as there are many LitRPG books that use it in various guises, so I don’t think I’d be stepping on any toes that way. TCG or CCG, again are fairly common types of stories within that genre, but I now have two points of similarity, would I have written a chunk of actual story and then found a third or fourth connection between the two?
So I did a little more prep work on the underlying system within the story to make it clear that this isn’t just copy with a different consumable/collectible. I also don’t use dragons, which are a fairly major component of the other series. I do have a story with dragons in it though – but I hope to finish or give up on one of my currently being worked on stories before I start working on that… 😉