I had some realizations that have made my gameplay more enjoyable:

• The new patch has a "auto-walk" key that toggles whether or not you're moving forward. This makes traversing large distances more palatable.
• I finally was willing to cheat a little bit so that I could actually have fun. I boosted my character's endurance & speed by about twenty each. And since I'm still early on and having cash flow problems, I gave myself about 2000 gold (in the console, which is accessed by the ~ key: player->additem "gold_100" 2000). I also boosted my health by about twenty points. Now my character doesn't die every few minutes :).
• The journal makes it very difficult to keep track of quests. So I decided to stop worrying about it. If I get a quest, and forget about it, that's OK. The thing about keeping track of quests is that it means you're trying to find and finish everything in the game. But this game is so so so big that that's tremendously difficult. Instead, you can just kind of nose around and see what happens -- concentrate on your one or two big goals, and maybe take up quests of opportunity where you can. It's OK.

Now if only I can find a light spell and a magic ring of mana regeneration :).  11:29:03 AM  (comments [])