Category: General

Health, wellness, and ink, oh man

Hope ZaneGeneral

(scroll down if you just want to see the earliest publication schedule for 2024)

I’m trying to give myself more credit, especially when it feels like I’ve accomplished nothing for long stretches of time, and then I look back and it turns out I actually have been doing and working on a whole lot. That feels like my life right now. I got back on asthma medication for the first time since I was 17, and lo and behold, a lot of the fatigue issues that I thought were just an intrinsic part of me lifted, and I was suddenly very excited to try and do every single physical activity possible. I went wild with that for about a month or so, to some hilarious (and sometimes injurious) results.

The shortest possible TL;DR of that entire state of affairs is that I’m now back in physical therapy for my knees and just had an occupational therapy appointment for my hands. Since I was in my early 20s, I’ve had issues with my joints. Current best guess is hypermobility, so I’m very tentatively and very carefully trying to strengthen my body enough that it can do the things I want it to do. It takes time, but I think I’m more patient now than I have been ever before.

I’ve also been studying Korean, which takes up my entire brain for days at a time. Learning languages seems like a good way to learn more about yourself—what your brain likes, what you love about the entire endeavor of words and collecting them. Writing my Korean notes out by hand in pencil has been very satisfying. I think my handwriting is getting a bit better, too.

Ask me how much time I’ve spent with the word 행복 stuck in my head.

I got a covid shot yesterday and have spent the majority of today feeling achy and sick but overall pretty satisfied about my body’s fomenting immunity and the whole doing my civic duty thing. I’ve been trying to take good care of myself lately. I’ll get my flu shot in a couple weeks and do the achy sickness thing all over again.

I did A Project and hilariously started fighting with my printer for like three hours yesterday as the delirium set in.


All of these new things have been taking up space that used to be solely inhabited by my writing. I didn’t write very much at all for a month or so, but I’m finding my way back to my former pace. It takes more willpower than it used to, but I don’t love it any less.

And a writing update

I wrote out a tentative publication schedule for 2024 that I’ll share once I have a few more things nailed down. I’d like to publish the fourth Fragile Tender book on Valentine’s Day, February 2024. I’d also like to do a big Kickstarter with fun merch for The Witchblood Heir series in the summer, and I have a new standalone book for the spring and something special for the fall. I hope you’re excited. I plan to work really hard in 2024, maybe harder than I ever have before. The prospects are really exciting to me, and I hope you’ll enjoy the results.

Back from the dead

Hope ZaneGeneral

And a bit sick, so this blog is probably going to be short. I’ve been so busy lately. I started taking qi gong classes, which I’ve been loving a lot. I went STRAIGHT off the fucking deep end for the entirety of October. I got really, really into Kpop. Stray Kids, specifically.

Stray Kids, the rabbit that led me down the rabbit hole

There is a truly terrifying amount of content in Kpop land. I’m enjoying it a lot. I also started learning Korean, which is a real “don’t look at me, let’s not acknowledge how far I’ve gotten down this rabbit hole” kind of vibe. 재밌어요!

I’ve been working on a new story and also had to pull back for a second to kind of take inventory of all my WIPs. I hit a real wall with writing this month, partially because of some life changes that have been going on, partially because I’d adopted a kind of workflow that really didn’t work for me.

We’re working it out, working out the kinks.

Anyway, maybe that’s all for now. I’ll probably elaborate on some of this… later.

For now, I’ve been continuing to serialize stuff on Wattpad, including the new story. Time will tell if this is a mistake or not. Sometimes it feels like it is, sometimes it feels like it isn’t. For better or worse, I’m currently too sick to agonize about it.

I’m going to go… be sick and try not to do things that are too labor-intensive. Maybe I’ll finally watch the survival show that made Stray Kids. I keep putting it off because Felix is my bias, and I don’t know if I can handle seeing him be sad.

New Patreon tiers and an ~extra~

Hope ZaneGeneral

I got my brain back from the war! Kind of! I’m working on un-neglecting my Patreon page, and I renamed all of my support tiers some incredibly goofy shit.

Heh. I like it, though.

(Why is the first tier so expensive? Because Patreon eats things in fees, but you can actually pledge any amount you want.)

I started writing a kind of alternative high school AU about Nice, basically because I started wondering what would have happened if Nice had met someone more like himself in high school. Would he have been any better off? Worse?

I’m only planning to write a short story. I posted the first part on Patreon today. I think I might sync it here as well (still as a patron-only post) just because I don’t like the idea of all my stuff being only on a website that I don’t control.

Here’s a little snippet of the AU for fun. I like Willow so far.

“Good?” Willow asks. “You look good like that.”

“Mm,” Nice says. Maybe it’s an answer to one thing or the other. “Take a picture, then.”

Willow takes his phone out of his pocket and snaps a picture of his new friend. He leans over and steals a taste of Nice’s candy, fastening his mouth to it and sucking some of the lemon-flavored sweetness from the gooey part of its softening surface.

Before Nice can complain that Willow took some of his candy, Willow preemptively reaches into his bag and stuffs a couple of gumdrops into his mouth. In the time it takes him to chew them and swallow, Willow has already pulled back.

He licks his lips while Nice coughs at the sugar crystals he’d accidentally inhaled.