What Do You Use?

I like fonts.  I even started designing my own font back in the 90s when it involved a lot more paper, rulers, and scaling of measurements.

If your favorite isn’t on the list, add it to the comments

So, of course, I just had to repost this when I saw it (thanks to Dom Carter at Creative Bloq for his post: What Your Font Choice Says About You).

Maybe it makes me look like a fuddy-duddy,but I use Garamond Antiqua for anything and everything I print up and make notes on at home.  It’s a mono-spaced font much like Courier, but with a more pleasant feel of real “book” text.  The Garamond you normally see in Word and other wordprocessing programs is not mono-spaced, but unless I plan on doing a lot of printing, I usually don’t install Antiqua these days (the font license was for a particular machine and I don’t have it anymore) For most on screen work, the basic Windows installed Garamond works “okay” enough, but I wouldn’t want to try publishing anything with it.

That’s my “work font”.  I also have my play font, which wasn’t on this list.  The closest to my 750words font (Sharktooth) they have here is a cross between Bradley Hand ITC and Rage Italic.  And it weighs more heavily toward the Bradley Hand…  Yeah.  I could definitely wish for more font choices there for my brainstorming sessions.

Maybe that’s why I still spend so much time with pen and paper despite thirty plus years of geeking on a keyboard.

And you…  What are your fonts of choice?  Do you have a specific style for specific types of work that helps you get things done?  Let me know in the comments.

Now it’s time to move on to my….

Row80 Check-in & Weekly Assessment

First a smallish apology to anyone who might have expected a video of my son’s Monday recital.  It’s been an odd couple of days, and I forgot to load the video up to Youtube.  Next week..  since I will likely be doing my WIPpet with my check-in this coming Wednesday.

That, btw, counts as the first bit of happy news for this week’s goal assessment.  I participated in the WIPpet bloghop this week (WIPpet stands for WIP, or Work in Progress, snippet, and involves a group of creative writers sharing pieces of a story they are working on for the sheer fun of it).  If you’d like to be involved too, check out some of our posts at our linky and jump in this Wednesday.

When I count that little bonus plus a creative bursts of Wednesday and Thursday (artwork and a post about birds), this week has gone above and beyond my expectations.  I have made great strides in prep for JuNoWriMo, getting most of the Featured Author posts uploaded and edited.  The Pep Talk post isn’t finished yet, but I have most of my first draft done.

The Boodle and I even found time for a grand adventure with a few of the Burton Bunch, swimming and dinner out, on Friday.

So, despite the continued failure to reach Goal #1, I call this week the best of the ROWnd yet.  May the progress continue!

As for the specifics.

• Goal (#1): working through three chapters weekly of James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure (including exercises)
• Progress: nothing, nada, lots of other reading, but nothing on my craft books.
• Not-progress, but… I did find and spend a lot of writing craft time at Mythcreants
• Goal: catching up in my local critique group (including submitting something this week)
• Progress: Nothing new to submit, but I’m just a quick skim over the crits I did before being caught up
• Goal: typing two pages a day of old notebooks in
• Progress: on track
• Goal: (VIG) Write new words daily! (the Five Sentences thingie)
• Progress:  on track, well, except for Thursday…  that was an odd day of daydreamy character time and very little handwritten work (though I did write a lot on Thursday too, just not by hand)
• Not a Goal but Progress Anyway: continued progress  my languages (except Spanish), and of course, all that JuNoWrMo progress.

Tomorrow will be setting up prompts for my JuNoWriMo sprints so I can be ready for the Wednesday Kick-off and writing the kick-off post (just a short one).  And of course, Memorial Day Parades…  it’s supposed to be rainy, but then Nature has always had a complex relationship with soldiers and remembrance celebrations for them.

Flight of Fancy

Writing Is for the Birds

A lovely crow cousin

While trying to avoid getting immersed in work when I needed to head out early, I found a cool blog about the family Corvidae (crows and their cousins) because of this post about some of those more flamboyant cousins…  the magpies and how impressively colorful they can get.  The magpie-jays (which weren’t pictured in the post, so I posted one here) are stunning creatures.  I have three crows that spend their time in our back yard these days except when the grackles chase them away.

Crows and their cousins are delightful birds for a couple of reasons.  They are intelligent birds in general, gregarious and attractive too.  They also help us keep our world clean whether we want to or not.  And I learned something else about them today…  actually, about birds in general.  It’s about how chicks are raised.  There are two types or processes involved in chick development while in the egg.  One type we’re pretty familiar with from grade-school science experiments with an incubator and some eggs via a local farm.  The other development type we see in the stereotypical cartoon of a nest with pink featherless creatures raising their gaping beaks in the air for the first worm or bug the parent birds can offer.

The first type (called precocial) results in a mostly capable little down-covered fluff-balls that look so cute on Easter mornings, chicks who can peck away at cracked corn and seeds on their own, cheep cheep and scurry away in a panic.

Feed us… FEED US!

The second type of development results in a baby that desperately needs its parents.  If an altricial chick falls out of the nest, its mostly featherless body could suffer from hypothermia and the chick could die without the warmth of the nest and its siblings.  It can barely move, expending most of its energy to raise its head for eagerly awaited offerings of regurgitated insects, seeds or meat made by its parents.  (Not only birds are considered altricial—many mammals, including humans, are too.  The term is related to parental investment in the raising of young.)

Crows fall into the second category.  Another cool fact about crows?  Their eye color changes.  North American crows have blue eyes when they are young…  I never would have imagined that, but it is very cool.  And pretty, pretty too!

Yep!  I totally fell down the internet rabbit hole this morning.  But it’s O.K.  I have some good news for…

My ROW80 Check-In

Maybe I got tired of the lack of progress in gradually increasing my goals the way I had planned.  Maybe I missed the old crew.  Or maybe I got fed up with all the dancing through hoops I’ve done for others at the expense of a few simple (nearly free) pleasures…

Either way, I just did it!  I not only managed to meet my one added goal of doing something artistic (a fifteen minute tea break at Panera this morning), but I also got up this morning and posted a non-ROW80 post–a WIPpet no less.  Yes, I participated in the WIPpet Wednesday bloghop again.

Asking for Inspiration

I suspect my participation will be inconsistent as June moves in fully, since JuNoWriMo (50K before the Summer doldrums hit).  I’m going to try for every other week now and see what happens.

I am nearly back on track with all my other goals as well.  I missed my Five Sentences on Monday, but made huge headway on an inspirational post I’ve been asked to write for one of the JuNo pep-talks Sunday and Monday, so hopefully my characters will forgive me that (they seem to have done so with great consideration—today Valichii, Lan and Acarii spent a few hours with me, filling me in on history and social details I’d never guessed at; I really understand their points of view a lot better now).

It’s been a happy morning.  I still have a lot more to get done before the day is over, and I am tired.  But even if I only get a bit more handled, I’ll count it as a win.  And I learned something in trying to draw those hands today…  I had so much trouble seeing them in the lines I drew—the picture only came real once I added the shadows.

Not quite sure what lesson to take from that yet, but I know there is something to ponder there.

Not the Other Way

Hi! It’s been (or seems like it’s been) AGES since I posted a WIPpet last. Almost a year… I’ve tried to get myself back into regular writing and regular posting (thank you, ROW80, for that boost), and now I’m trying to branch back out to some of the other blogging bits I loved.

Since the WIPpet was first of my writing bloghop loves, it makes sense I’d post here first.

Now, a year later and I’m getting so old and decrepit, I’m not sure I’m up to a solid run of WIPpet maths. So I’m going the lazy route. Thirty sentences from a section I’ve JUST written (so yeah, a bit rough) of the that Unnamed Story I used to post here. Five for the month of June and 25 for the day.

I confess, I wasn’t super careful about counting, because I’m never quite sure how to count those one word sentences. The number should be close.

The Dean sighed. “You looked like you needed a distraction.” This time the man did reach for the lighter.

Though he’d have preferred to let the air clear itself, he tipped the table lightly with his boot so the cylinder slid down to the man’s hand. “Remind me the next time I’m doing admissions to put you in a class with the diplomatic pool.”

Lan grunted before he lit his cigar. “We each have our specialties.”

‘Listii resettled himself with a nod to the other man. “True. Thanks.”

They spent a small moment or two discussion the recent training class and Vant’s present performance. But it was a dangerous topic at the present, as least as far as he was concerned. And though Lan was clearly trying to avoid saying it, the man was the one to give up the woman’s name.

“Atyr noticed it–” Lan stopped himself short, then tipped his head apologetically. “Sorry. I know this has been difficult. At least according to Alanii she’s taken a T2. She won’t sense the varia if you don’t let her.”

‘Listii chewed his lip, knowing the gesture would stave Lan from anything more. When he’d finally gathered himself enough to speak, he didn’t waste words. Until last night Lan had been one of only three people to know the truth about his feelings for Atyr. The man hadn’t been more than gently accepting of the sacrifices he’d made for the woman in all the time he’d known.

And ‘Listii thought he preferred it that way.

“She knows about it. We ended up talking last night.”

Well that had to be a first, he thought to himself as the older man started to gasp then choke on the mouthful of smoke he’d taken. “She—is that why you came racing down here this morning like a first year trainee with one of us after his hide?”

‘Listii didn’t wince at the analogy as accurate as it was, only because he’d spent as long as he had training for his profession. The fact that he needed to call on his training though also spoke volumes. And the fact that Lan had seen fit to ask spoke another ten or so volumes.

At least, Lan’s misapprehensions were easy to settle. “I left her, Lan, not the other way around.”

So that’s it for me. Why don’t you head over to the WIPpet linky and visit some our other awesome members? Thanks and memorial chocolate to KLSchwengel for her inspiring me to this party a few years ago and to the delightful Emily Witt who is holding the crew together with all our silliness. 😀