You want it darker?

I finally tested negative for COVID on Sunday night and was able to go back to jiu jitsu the past few days, so I'm feeling much more myself again. I took it at 75% energy level just in case, but I don't seem to have any lingering effects in terms of fatigue or brain fog thankfully. Not that my stamina has ever been especially amazing, but I am more or less back to baseline. The gym will be closed for Thanksgiving weekend, so I will only have three days to train this week anyway. And I haven't heard about anybody else there having COVID recently, so that's probably not where I picked it up. Still probably going to avoid the evening classes whenever possible going forward and stick to morning classes where the mats are freshly cleaned, there are usually fewer than 10 people, and the gym isn't a fucking hotbox of sweat from probably 50 adults and 100 kids who have been there over the course of the day. Also, I finally got to see my mom in person for the first time in months, and she keeps telling me how toned I look since the last time she saw me, so that's good motivation to keep at it.

In writing news, I have been gripped by the sudden drive to do a full rewrite of my very first fanfic - one that will probably also end up being a vast expansion of the story. I'm not sure where the urge came from because the fandom it's in is both pretty dead and not exactly a hub of seriousness in terms of both the original content and the transformative work that largely came out of it, but I think what happened is mostly just that I became caught up in my own web of headcanons and storytelling back in the day, and now I'm still just riffing with that. There's probably real potential for a lot of what I'm doing at this point to be reworked into an original story, so I'm just gonna roll with it and see where it goes. The timing seems fitting as well because I am coming up on 10 years since I wrote the original (published January 2015). At the time, I was several years younger than the characters I was writing, and now I am several years older. My perspective is very different, and my writing has matured a lot (it's also taken a sharp turn away from the maudlin and into the...well, grotesque, I suppose). Fanfiction has always been my main vehicle for writing prose, and that story was one of my first forays into longer-form creative writing, so it will be cool to have a side-by-side of how my writing has changed over a decade. Especially if I can take something novella-length that is very character-focused and spin it out into something novel-length with a whole, like, plot. I'm really shit at writing plot, so I think trying to write something that piggybacks off an existing story but still has its own full arc could be a valuable exercise for me to eventually segue into writing more robust original stories.