corvi | Network

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

When I come up ith n idea, I ususally brainstorm a bit about scenes and form a vague idea about the ending. I also like doing research for inspiration and details. Then I put my notes and vague scene list into a plain text document for further reference.

I'm a panster and write out of order, because somehow my brain lose interest if I try to outline. I usually only know wht the next scene should be. When I get stuck (often), I rewrite and add other scenes to try to fix it. I'm always looking for a more effective proccess and writing advice.

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

muccamukk

That was charming. I am charmed.

ysabetwordsmith posting in

followfriday

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today's theme is Leverage.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

canyonwalker

Replacing our USA travel map has been an odyssey. When I ordered the new one in early December I didn't think it would take just over 5 weeks until we hung the new one in its place. Though given the original had hung on our walls for going on 30 years what's an extra 37 days?

The delay happened first because getting the customized map printed and shipped took over a week. Then we delayed opening it as we were busy in the pre-holidays rush. Then we found the map was misprinted. Oh, no! The vendor courteously took full responsibility right away and printed and sent a new one, but again that process took over a week. It's only in the past week we've spent time moving our pin markers from the old map to the new one.

Moving 100s of pins from the old map to the new map (Jan 2026)

Moving 100s of pins from the old map to the new map (Jan 2026)

There were hundreds of pins in the map. We didn't count them precisely; that's just an estimate. Moving them was a laborious task. But it was a labor of love. Each time we removed a pin from the old map we noted the location it marked, recalled the time(s) we've been there, and inserted a new pin in the corresponding location on the new map.

Alas this labor of love was still labor. Moving all the pins made our hands achy, even with small pliers (you can see them at the bottom of the pic above) to help remove the old ones and press the new ones in. We worked on it across three sessions over the past week.

Our new pin map is complete! (Jan 2026)

But now it's done! And tonight we hung the new map on the wall in the place of the old one, in our upstairs landing.

What's custom, BTW? Aside from the frame we picked, which was one of about 8 choices the maker offered, we customized the message in the map legend.

We customized our pin map with a family motto in the legend (Jan 2026)

We customized our pin map with a family motto in the legend (Jan 2026)

It's our riff on the theme of the 1976 Billy Joel song You're My Home. Y'know, the one that goes:

🎵 Home can be the Pennsylvania Turnpike
Indiana's early morning dew
High up in the hills of California
Home is just another word for you. 🎵

We've been to all those places. And hundreds more.

sasha_feather

Gratitude / Self-reassurance / fighting against negativity bias!

1. The animals seem happy and content. I don't go to the barn every day and sometimes I feel bad about that, but I suspect I'm stressing over nothing, or channeling other stress into this area. The cat and dog make me laugh and are good companions. Again I stress sometimes with Sally the dog, but, it's probably easier to be crabby with her than with my family.

2. The house is reasonably clean, it's warm inside, the hot water is working, etc.

3. I have some friendly and wonderful neighbors.

4. My parents are doing well. My mom is so much better now that she's in the assisted living place rather than the nursing home. Just a huge relief.

5. I got to chat with two good friends today, Jesse and Emily, and it was a real mood lifter.

6. TV I'm enjoying: The Pitt, FallOut, Heated Rivalry.

7. On YouTube I watch the Handsome Podcast almost every single day. This is 3 queer comedians (Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, and Mae Martin) chatting and being silly.

8. I've been playing Terra Nil on my laptop and I can't rec it highly enough. I feel like it is meditative in the best way and really helps my brain chill out. The game play is very similar to Sim City, but instead of building a city you get to reclaim wasteland and turn it into wilderness. Very easy to learn, but challenging enough to keep me engaged. Click-only means it's easy to play in bed with my beloved Left-handed mouse, and doesn't bother my right shoulder. Sound design is relaxing, the graphics are pretty. Minimal reading makes it migraine compatible for me, and i can control the motion. It's not timed. Thank you to my friend eruthros for buying this game for me.

silveradept

We're over the halfway line at

snowflake_challenge, and this challenge wants us to introspect about how we turn things out.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

( Not exactly a process that has a lot of visible things )

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown - My New Philosophy

cahn

This book, via

selenak, was just very relevant to my interests and I adored it so much! It's one of those books that I didn't really want to end. It's a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of the Sybil, with nods towards making it Bronze-Age historically plausible.

Gull begins her life as the daughter of a slave in Pylos, and is apprenticed to the Pythia, the oracle of the Lady of the Dead, becoming Pythia herself when the current Pythia dies. After Troy (here called Wilusa) is sacked for the second time, the black ships of the Wilusan prince Aeneas and the remnants of his people land in Pylos to try to capture back some of their people who had been slaves (including Gull's mother, though by that time she has died). When they depart, Gull/Pythia goes with them as their Sybil on their sea adventures as the People search for a home...

I just really loved so many things about this, starting with that retellings of epic poems are always my jam. I loved Gull/Pythia and the way in which centering her and her experiences centers the lived experience of the women of Wilusa. I loved the way that Aeneas and the Wilusans are portrayed as refugees, because that's what they are. I loved that the gods, while they do appear on the edges, are mysterious beings that may be real and may be wholly belief; and that they aren't toddler-level petty and vindictive like in the Aeneid. I loved how Pythia and Xandros had that sort of fealty-love thing going with Aeneas, uh, not that this is a hardcore thing I love or anything.

Of course I was very curious about how Dido would be portrayed, even without knowing (as Graham says in her afterword) that Carthage didn't... actually... exist during this time period, so that Aeneas & Dido would have to at the very least be revamped. ( Mild thematic spoilers. )

One of the things that's really interesting here is the through-line of how the world is getting worse, piracy is getting worse, civilization is crumbling. Gull/Pythia can see that all of this is getting worse during her journeys with the black ships, and has gotten worse since the previous Pythia's days. And yet, as the reader knows, and as Pythia comes to dimly see, the arc of civilization since that time will curve upwards, and Aeneas will be part of that. (And I find this a somewhat comforting thought in some ways...)

I'm rather impressed that this was Graham's first book, which I had no idea about until I finished and went looking for more books by her! Occasionally there may have been a bit of unevenness, but all in all I thought it was extremely strong. Sooooo now I'm gonna reread Judith Tarr's Lord of the Two Lands to get myself in a proper Alexander mood, and then I shall go on to read Graham's Stealing Fire :D

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is the linkback perk for the July 5, 2022 Poetry Fishbowl, originally hosted by Dreamwidth user Dialecticdreamer. It is spillover from the March 1, 2022 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from Dreamwidth users Heartsinger and Zeeth_kyrah. It also fills the "Colored Pencils" square in my 3-1-22 card for the National Crafting Month Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series Arts and Crafts America.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

sovay

Today was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.

Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.

The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.

Current Music: Wolf Alice, "Planet Hunter"

china_shop

1. I am ridiculous and not even managing to keep up with Dreamwidth.

2. Just listened to Bujold's Penric's Demon in audio. Aww!

3. Watching Younger on Netflix, and wow, nothing dates an American show like all of the regular cast members being white. In New York. (Other than that, it's light fun and about what I'm in the mood for. Kind of like an Amy Sherman-Palladino show with less wealth porn.) Also started season 2 of The Pitt, despite intending to rewatch season 1 first.

4. (Burying the lede.) Andrew's surgery went well! We played two games of Scrabble this morning. I'm spending most of my time at the hospital.[a] Halle is confused by his absence and seeking an injunction.

[a] I've spent so long in North American fandoms that I've forgotten when we put "the" in front of "hospital", but I'm pretty sure this is one of those times, it being a specific hospital.

redbird

In no particular order:

*Last night, I talked with cattitude and adrian_turtle about possible text for my mother's gravestone. I emailed this to my brother today, with a note that these were what I was thinking of.

*I went to TJ Maxx to look for slippers. Disappointingly, there were none that came close to fitting: the ones that might have been in my size were all significantly too tight across the top of my foot. I was wearing thin socks (specifically, lightweight compression socks). It continues to be annoying that not buying slippers (for example) is as tiring as buying some.

*Also, my hips started hurting while I was in the store, so I decided not to look for other things, but headed home with only a quick stop at CVS, and not a grocery store.

*Today was definitely a good day to be outside; yesterday wasn't particularly, and tomorrow is likely to be a lot colder than today (with an afternoon high a little below freezing, so not horrible for January in Boston).

*I got email today from state senator Pat Jehlen, about a bill to ban the use of masks by law enforcement. This is noteworthy because I haven't lived in her district since 2019, and didn't think I was still on her mailing list.

*The skin on my fingertips, and on the rest of my hands, is doing a lot better. I will need to remember to keep applying the serious lotion, so it doesn't start splitting again. However, my shoulder is bothering me, which may be from doing a lot of mousing when I was avoiding using the keyboard.

dialecticdreamer

Gathering Options
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 1 of 1, complete
Word count (story only): 1572
[September 2016]

:: A typical day for Cas and Hali involves a gigantic grocery run. They meet a boy who might be a good fit, but who certainly needs a bit of help. Part of the Broken Angels story arc in the Polychrome Heroics universe, this story was written for the January of 2026 Magpie Monday, and sponsored with my deepest thanks. ::

Cas pushed one cart ahead of him, where Hali sat holding the largest bunch of bananas that he could find in the display bin. The cart that he pulled along behind them held boxes of canned goods in the bottom layer, then a flat of five dozen eggs and , most importantly, the next two weeks’ worth of decent chocolates.

“You ready to get in your new car seat?” Cas asked, but his eyes drifted up to the granite sky above them. “We’d better hurry or we’re going to get soaked.”

Hali hefted the bananas. They wobbled in her small hands but did not fall. “Snack now?” she asked hopefully.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake

ysabetwordsmith

My partner Doug tipped me to "Hordes of the Khan" by Scott R. Brooks, a Johnny Quest fancomic.

Check out the "Quest for Knowledge" page. That is very typical of comics in Terramagne, which often throw in some fun facts about the setting, history, flora and fauna, etc. even if the story is wholly fictional.

Current Mood: busy

soc_puppet posting in

queerly_beloved

How is it only the third Thursday of the year? It feels like it should be the twelfth Thursday at the very least!

Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!