Like I'm sure many of you, I've been pretty disheartened by
the news lately and the direction my country is going.
I wish I had something helpful to say but, honestly, my
anxiety is pretty bad right now and all that's really
helping is focusing on hobbies and doing what good I can
when I can. So I've been making lots of earrings again
and I even started re-reading what I have of "The Prodigal"
in preparation for returning to work on that. And then
one night I couldn't sleep well because I'd seen something
about how if you have favorite media, try to get physical
copies in case there are extended internet
disruptions. And then I thought about all the bad
winds we've been getting around here and how those could
lead to prolonged power outages. So the media I wanted
physical copies of most of all was... the Dyeland/Asteriana
stories. This is something that's been a major part of
my life since I was fifteen/sixteen and the idea of not
having access to any of it for an unknown prolonged period
made me really sad. And unlike so many of the current
issues, there was something I could do to definitively make
that a non-issue... so I started prepping 20+ years of
stories for printing. Is that the most important
thing? Obviously not! But it's the thing I
latched onto as something I could absolutely fix. So
here I am... printing dozens of stories myself and others
have written over the years. And because that was so
time-consuming, I didn't work on anything else for the
newsletter so... enjoy my prepping and printing musings, I
guess!
Please take good care of yourselves and those around you.
God bless,
Jenni
Realizations While Attempting
to Print All Canonical Dyeland/Asteriana Stories
1. I was pretty fond of writing in script format early
on. Why?!?! It's not very enjoyable to read, at
least for me personally. I am not Shakespeare... and
even he is better seen than read.
2. As I scroll to check for obnoxious spacing issues, I
see character names and am like "Nadia?! Who the heck is
that?!" RIP to the Dyeland characters who
disappeared. A lot were because their authors left but a
fair amount are people I apparently just forgot about!
3. I'm going to need to make a donation to a forestry
charity or something. To be fair, I'm using recycled
paper and an Ecotank printer but still...
4. Once I eliminate the non-canonical stories, I
actually get to stories I feel pretty decent about pretty
quickly. I thought most of the early stuff was
garbage. "Nor Iron Bars" is within the first 20 stories
and I still like that one.
5. Things actually got back to "normal" a lot more
quickly after John Dye's passing than I realized. I
remember writing an initial reaction story and the annual
Valentine's story as a tribute. But then I thought I
kinda flailed for a bit there. But it actually looks
like fairly normal output in the months that followed. I
haven't re-read any of those stories lately so who knows what
condition they're in but I guess maybe it's a lesson in how
our self-perception can be really off.
6. How was I managing ridiculously long Valentine's
stories? That's only a month and a half after
Christmas... which sometimes had its own very long
story. What was my secret?! Like just as one
example "The Past, the Present, the Future" from Christmas
2009 and "When You are Real" from Valentine's 2010 are 160
pages just on their own... single spaced, narrow margins, 12
point Candara, letter-sized paper. How?!
7. "The Carpenter" is 1,110 pages long...
8. It makes me sad whenever I'm skimming through and see
a Harry Potter reference. Such a
disappointment...
9. It amuses me how the first document I printed
contains all canonical stories from the Story
Index through line 50 but then later files are just
lines, like, 163 and 164 because the stories got so lengthy.
10. Not gonna lie, there's a small part of me that is
like "Wow... Think of what all you could have done with
the time you spent writing." Like I totally feel that
the time spent on "The Carpenter" was worth it. But then
I look at some of the Valentine's stories that I'm sure I
spent hours on and I barely remember them and who knows if
anyone read them. Oh well.
11. Copilot is super annoying. No, I don't want
help writing something I wrote 15 years ago! Thankfully,
figured out how to disable the stupid thing. At one
point I hit it just cause I thought maybe it could help with a
weird spacing issue only to have it freeze. AI, folks...
12. I really wish I'd added a column to the Story Index
saying when a story was written. I'm sure I could
backtrack using the Updates page but that's too much work for
right now. Oh well.
13. Yeah... So I've been an administrative
assistant for almost twenty years and literally just now
learned how to create a Word doc template because of this
project. Professional development via JABB!
14. This whole time I've been thinking the Story Index
is an accurate count of how many stories have been written but
it's actually not because the Valentine's Vignettes all share
a line whether there are one, two, or three stories. So
it's actually low-balling the count. Wow.
15. Would it be mean to, assuming I die of old age, as I
feel that nearing, bury these in my backyard just so someone
years from now can have the joy of finding TBAA/Beauty and
the Beast/pseudo-Our Flag Means Death/etc.
fanfic? Imagine getting all excited, thinking you found
a trove of valuable old papers, and it's just dozens of
stories about an angel of death.
16. Part of this song has intermittently been stuck in
my head this whole time: https://youtu.be/vYbdQAeO0vo?si=fRRBy1vEKm9bGyZ4
Maybe my time would be better spent writing about democracy
but, hey, at least I'm highly unlikely to ever have a Reynolds
Pamphlet.
I mean, to be fair when my central character is an angel of
death maybe it makes sense that I write like I'm running out
of time. Kinda hard not to think about mortality... not
in a dysfunctional way. Just kinda a given cause of the
content, I guess.
And, hey, the song gave me a break from "Pink Pony Club" for a
while. Uh oh...
17. As of right now, all canonical stories (plus "Spirit
of the Forest" since it's kind of ambiguous) equal to 9,742
pages. WOW.
18. Eventually, I'll subtract the pages that other
people wrote from the count cause I wanna know how close I am
personally to 10k pages. Cause I definitely want to hit
that milestone since I've gotta be close-ish. Good to
have goals!
19. It's wild when I see a story and am like "I don't
remember this. Someone else must have written it."
But, no, I wrote it. Can't remember them all, I guess.
20. So I've actually only printed about 2,000 pages
cause this is clearly bigger than a weekend project. But
at least I got all the files prepped! And that 2,000
pages is still from the original ink bottle. So that's
pretty impressive.
21. One day when I'm really bored, I should try to see
how many times the name "Andrew" appears in those pages.
22. Anyway, this kept me from mentally spiraling for a
bit there so that's good at least!
23. Just gonna keep reminding myself that God is with us
and God loves us.
24. Also, I will be instituting a policy in which I
print stories as I finish them. Cause I'm not doing this
again!
25. And... I need to send this cause I think my computer
is protesting its over-use.
This newsletter is dedicated to John Dye
for inspiring 9,742 pages of content... and that's canonical
stories only. I can only imagine how huge the page
count would be if I included all the newsletters. So
good on him for being inspiring!
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this page are from Touched by an Angel and
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