Skip to main content

May Round-Up

It's been pretty quiet around here lately, but I'm still trucking away. Not as much writing is getting done as I would like, but at least there's something.

Words written YTD: 28,300 on two projects (Paranormal Investigations & a short story set in the PII universe)

Things accomplished in fiction: Not too much in the main Paranormal Investigations books. In the short story, Dr. Lobo encounters a patient who is behaving quite erratically, and is trying desperately to get some kind of referral for a specialist. This isn't what he signed up for.

Writer-ly things accomplished: The original plan for the short story was to submit it to "People of Col(u)r Destroy Fantasy!", but the further I get, the less fantastic it is and the more it veers toward horror. My work tends to do that sometimes - not sure what that says about me...

New books read: In the Labryinth of Drakes (Lady Trent Memoirs #4, which remains fantastic); The Elite (The Selection #2, which I was surprised to make it through this time - it was better and less meebling than I thought it would be); Rat Queens #16 (to which I say GIVE ME THE NEXT ISSUE); Unbound and Revisionary (Magic Ex Libris #3-4, and the end of the series - it was a little too clean an ending for me, but still did some amazing things with the consequences of secret magic going public).

Old books re-read: The Selection (needed to re-read #1 before getting into #2); Maskerade (such love for this one!); Something Rotten (Thursday Next #4); The
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (speaking of comfort reading, this is probably my all-time favorite).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wanna Hear Me Talk?

I mentioned in my last post, but now I'm doing the official promotional thing. I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations at the Flights of Foundry  convention next weekend! Specifically, I'll be doing a game demo for Rolling Realms  on Saturday, September 28 at 1pm Pacific. On Sunday, September 29 at 3pm Pacific, I'll be doing a panel presentation on copyright and public domain basics; finally, also on Sunday, September 29 at 5pm, I'll be on a panel sharing my handwork (specifically my crochet, cross stitch, and blackwork) with a few other fantastic people. This is my first time doing this kind of presentation, and so I'm a wee bit nervous. Still, I'm super excited, and the fact that it's all online means that I'll at least be in my home, and the cats may or may not make an appearance on camera. So! If you're interested in what's looking to be a fabulous online convention (that's FREE!), come join us next weekend!

Calm Your Mind with Needle and Thread

 I was fortunate enough to be able to host a workshop at GeekGirlCon last weekend, which went extremely well. My friend Erin was in town for the convention and was kind enough to co-host the workshop with me, which worked wonderfully because she was able to answer some questions that I didn't know how to answer, and also keep us on time (she's a professor, so she's experienced with dealing with classrooms full of people). I thought it would be a good idea, for my own benefit if nothing else, to document the first part of the workshop, which was a talk about embroidery and mental health. I've made the PowerPoint and list of resources available on a separate page of this blog ( here ). I don't know about you, but the last few years have not been especially kind to my mental or emotional health. I discovered early on in the pandemic that going back to something I learned when I was a child, cross stitch, was something that could help ease my anxiety and give me somethi...

Hope is a Four-Letter Word

I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals  by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this: "Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope  for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or ...