Tag Archives: writing

Miscellany

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Going to try to write a little something each week, see how that goes. Hopefully it’ll help clear some clutter out of my head and I can focus on my fic or the thrilling conclusion of my Pugmire campaign.

Here’s a little thing that makes me happy these days:

The above pic is my Yeti coffee mug, adorned with some lovely vinyl stickers gifted by my east coast bestie. The other side of the mug has the sticker, “I’d rather be reading fanfic”. I love my morning coffee, but if I pour the coffee from my tiny carafe into the Yeti mug, it’s WAY too hot, even after I add my requisite too-much cream. And, because it’s a Yeti, it stays that hot so I don’t even get to sip it as it cools.

However, if I pour it into a regular mug first and add my cream and sweetner there, then pour it from the mug into the Yeti, it’s juuuuuust right. And stays just right. It makes my mornings just a little sweeter before I have to get my work day going.

Once the weather warms up, I’ll be switching to iced coffee again, but man, freshly ground hot coffee is amazing first thing in the morning. My Aunt got me a coffee grinder as a gift a few years ago and it’s just the best.

Here’s a little thing that frustrated me this weekend:

I had a work project to do this weekend for a couple hours of overtime, some easy data analysis that let me work my Excel magic without the constant interruption of messages and having to meet my outbound call volume that I have during the week. Knocked out most of it easy-peasy on Saturday, but some of the data came over wonky in the original format and I had to put that part aside. Enjoyed the rest of my Saturday and rolled into Sunday feeling good.

I had a craving for an old show and Maddie was nudging me for bed cuddles (it’s the only time she’ll curl up and sleep where I can pet her), so I got settled in and propped up in bed, fired up my show (Flashpoint) and picked up my knitting for the first time in a while. So there I am, knitting away, enjoying my Canadian peacekeepers with Maddie purring beside me…and I dropped a stitch.

I didn’t know how to fix it, so I couldn’t work on this project until I either find a good YouTube video for it or wait for my bestie to come fix it for me. I tried to do it myself and it’s been so long since I did any yarncrafting I know I made a mistake trying to tink (knit backwards to where the dropped stitch can be picked back up). I secured the errant stitch with a marker and shoved the whole thing back into my bag. Maddie picked up on my annoyance and hopped off the bed. That soured the mood even further and I headed back into the living room.

I wasn’t feeling creative enough to write or work on my Pugmire stuff. I didn’t feel like watching my show anymore and I had that aimless frustration without an outlet that routinely drives me nuts.

I remembered that last bit of data that I had put aside. Desperate to feel like I was good at something that day, I spent the next couple of hours auditing it line by line until I’d netted some more overtime and got the project finished.

I hated that it took work to take the frustration out of the day when I could have been doing something creative.

I have a five-day weekend coming up, my birthday staycation. I’m hoping that will kickstart my creative spark. I’ll be turning a year older. I have a scene or two to write to wrap up the most recent chapter of my fic. I have a few more epic sessions to plan for my Pugmire campaign. I have cats to play with and video games to enjoy.

That’ll be nice 🙂

Dipping my toe back into the blogosphere

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Whoof, what a difference nearly four years can make! Let’s catch up a little.

CATS:

The little monsters are four years/almost five years old now! They grew up so pretty:

It’s been a heck of a roller coaster with them. Have they settled down/cuddled up? Not really. They like to sit near me, but Maddie (fluffy) will only curl up next to me if I’m awake in bed (she does NOT sleep with me). Allie (tiny) will solicit attention, but she wants to PLAY more than cuddle. If I’m lying on the couch, though, she’ll curl up behind my knees, out of petting distance.

After a disastrous attempt to adopt a third cat who WAS a cuddlebug (he has been rehomed and is living his absolute best life away from my girls), I’ve learned to meet them at their level, and it makes the times they do choose to come close all the sweeter for it.

Also, after about a year of litter box issues with Maddie, some coaching from a very good cat-knowledgable friend, and a judicious use of gabapentin once medical issues were ruled out, Litter Robots have truly saved the day. We’re now on 6 weeks of no pee on the carpets and I couldn’t be more relieved.

JOB:

On the work front, I was laid off unexpectedly this summer and today is my four month anniversary at my new job doing B2B collections. It’s decent for fully-remote work, and I’m finally starting to find my groove with it with the goal of hanging in for the required year until I’m allowed to look elsewhere in the company and find a better fit for my skillset. I’m not used to a lot of outbound work, but it’s a job instead of a gap in my resume, and I work with a decent team of people.

Work is work. Enough said. I’ve never had a career path, just a series of jobs.

GAMING (video):

I’m still playing and replaying the Horizon video games series (Zero Dawn, The Frozen Wilds, Forbidden West, Burning Shores) and love all of it. The next game likely won’t be hitting the stores until 2027, but I have more than enough to amuse me until then.

Other games include:

  • Ghost of Tsushima (I love Jin Sakai as much as I love Aloy)
  • God of War / God of War Ragnarok (I haven’t finished Ragnarok but love the story and characters)
  • Jedi: Fallen Order / Jedi: Survivor (Cal Kestis is my very favorite Jedi)
  • Rise of the Ronin (unfinished but LOTS of fun)
  • Epic Mickey: Rebrushed (amazing blast from the past!)
  • Star Wars Outlaws (still finding my way through this but I’m digging it)
  • Lego Horizon Adventures (absolutely precious)

GAMING (tabletop):

My Pugmire campaign is coming to its thrilling conclusion over the next two sessions! I’ve had so much fun bringing my group of Very Good Dogs and one Intrepid Cat through their adventures. They are poised to vanquish the Bad Dog who usurped the throne and restore peace and balance to the kingdom. I hope to make it exciting for my players and be a campaign to remember.

I’ve been looking at my various sourcebooks and wondering what to run after this campaign is done. I’ll have to talk to the gang about it, see what kind of game they’re looking to play and see if what I have will sufficiently cover those aspects.

As a player, I’ve been enjoying playing Ember, my Tabaxi Artificer, in a D&D campaign run by someone else in our gaming group. Here she is with her Steel Defender, Bruce (art by Pugcrumbs):

I finally get to play a furry character! It’s been so funny that, when I get a chance to be a player and get to indulge my little fantasies, I end up doing something different. I love bards. I’ve been DYING to play a bard, but when this game came up, I decided on the Artificer because it’s a spellcaster I’ve never tried before. When I get to design her Steel Defender, I have the chance to make a mechanical panther, or big dog, or dinosaur, or even mimic a machine from Horizon Zero Dawn, but I end up with a spider.

This happened in a Humblewood game where I got to play a Beastmaster Ranger. My character could have had a wolf at her side, but instead I picked a boar. Boaris was a faithful companion, but I’m not sure why my subconscious tweaked my choices for these two characters. I’m sure that’s a question for my eventual therapist.

WRITING:

I’m still writing fanfiction, and have several works in progress (WIPs) that I’ve been poking at and shaping over the years when I’ve felt the creative urge. Given the stormy political seas, that energy also has its ebbs and flows. I haven’t found a new fandom to write in, so I’m sticking with my H50 idiots, McDanno. I have plenty of AU ideas to keep them occupied. I’m also committing to finishing my one Sterek WIP, my dog show AU. If one of my favorite authors can finish her amazing fic 13 years later? I can take a few years to finish this one.

In response to a challenge from (of all people) my physical therapist to write some original fiction, I did that for NaNoWriMo one year, with a concept inspired by one of my existing fics. That’s yet another one of my WIPs that’s currently being polished from NaNo “words is words” chaos into a readable first draft.

Speaking of NaNo, after the awfulness revealed last year I’ve stopped participating, and our local writing group now does their challenge in October. It’s a shame seeing what I thought was an awesome organization have the seedy underbelly that was exposed in 2024. I’ll keep my t-shirt quilt made of all my NaNo shirts, and I have one poster in my home office, but I’ve tossed my posters that I hadn’t framed yet and took all my NaNo stickers off my computer. I’m still part of a great writing community and that gives me more inspiration and energy than all the NaNo swag.

And I think that’ll do for my first foray back into blogging! Stay tuned. I’ll try to update more with book/TV/movie reviews as I have the time and inspiration.

The Homestretch!

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As NaNo wraps up for the year…

This last quarter of the year has been a rough one.  I stressed through a lot of October about the election, needing an idea for NaNo, and health issues that I needed to address. Thankfully, towards the end of the month, I got an idea for NaNo (thanks, Londa!) and I finally saw a doctor and started addressing my health concerns.

I went into November fired up about my NaNo idea and started writing, keeping to par for the first week like a BOSS.

Then election night happened. My follow-up appointment with the doctor about my bloodwork was that night, I’d come down with a cold, and when they took my blood pressure the nurse was VERY concerned. I wrote about my adventures in medical panic that eventually landed me in the ER in another post that I haven’t posted yet, but I got on blood pressure meds after that and thankfully that’s been steady and the side effects have been minimal.

But my creativity stalled for a WEEK thanks to the election and my health concerns, and my word count suffered until I was almost 7K behind where I should be. I started writing again, but it was half-hearted; I was trying to push through so when I got to the overnight writing event that our local NaNo group hosts, I would be ready to close that gap to something manageable. I was getting there too!

And then came the diagnoses (yes, plural): Type 2 Diabetes. Hypothyroid (possible Hashimoto’s Disease). Hypertension, Vitamin D deficiency. All like a ton of bricks, and I went from being on no medications at all to taking five different drugs to manage these conditions, all of which could potentially have ALARMING side effects. More on this in another post.

So my health has been on my mind a LOT over the course of this month. That, plus the disaster that was our election took over my brain for a while and squashed my creativity, replacing it with this dull fear and despair of what will become of our country, which until now had made some real strides towards equality for everyone and not just white people. I did get some of my energy back to plug away at words here and there, but until the overnight event I just didn’t have it in me.  I’d lost track of my story and was having trouble finding my way back to it, but I managed to write almost six thousand words of pre-history and flashbacks and lots of sex and lasted until three a.m. before heading home and feeling more accomplished. I still wasn’t quite back on track, and I watched as my word count gap widened again over the next week and I just didn’t have the energy to do more than focus on my new diet and exercise plan. A couple hundred words here, a hundred words there, and it just hadn’t been happening. The gap widened from four thousand to six, then to eight.

And then yesterday, when I had all day to write and a goal of 6K words, by six o’clock that night I had 500 to show for it. The scenes just weren’t coming. Again the despair crept in. So many of my favorite celebrities died this year. This garbage fire of an election. All of my health diagnoses and new medication schedule. THIS YEAR NEEDS A HIGH POINT.

And I already ordered my “Winners” shirt.

I put out the call to my friends, all of whom know what I’m writing and most of whom know the fandom. All I need is a little nudge to get me going, and my peeps know just how to either ask the right questions or suggest the right scenarios, and BAM. 2K words before I finally went to bed.

So this is where I’m at. Health balanced for the moment.  Three days to go. Ten thousand words to write. At least three scenes in the queue and ready to go.

I can do this.

Alex O'Loughlin - crazyface

Look, Ma! I’m growing creatively!

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snoopy

So I’m at the Panera Friday Night Write-in (what I call Friday Night Writes), and I’ve been thinking about this blog post all day. Of course I have it in Scrivener, because words are words are words in NaNoWriMo 🙂

Every year I do this, I seem to learn something new about my creative process and growth. Once all of the stresses that had previously overtaken my creative energy were gone, I’ve really gotten in touch with my creativity and the way I approach my writing.

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NaNo idea: Acquired and Outlining!

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happy-steve

You guys, I am SO STOKED. Thanks so much to my friend Londa who plot-stormed with me and gave me that spark I needed to fan into a flame of inspiration. I’ve already set the story up in Scrivener and am working on an outline that expands with every person I tell about said idea.

It’s gonna be H50 fanfic, a shifter AU (because shifters are my JAM), and this is the first out of the other ideas I’ve thought about that I can see reaching 50K words. Here’s the basic premise:

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Winding up to NaNoWriMo – HALP!

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Okay, folks, it’s NaNoWriMo time! I could really use your input. I like the first two ideas, but I just can’t see how I can get 50K words out of them. My old chestnut, the TW/Sherlock crossover, has promise, and I can definitely get 50K words, but the characters’ voices are very faint in my head. I haven’t watched Torchwood in over a year and, while Captain Jack is truly unforgettable, I worry that too much time has passed for people to want to read it when I eventually post it.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall here’s the list so far.

One of the ideas is slightly NSFW but not overly so, just letting you know!

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