One Down and…

Things are Blazing

Okay, maybe not quite that extreme, but I’m extremely pleased with myself after these past few days.  Not because I got so much done, but because of WHAT I got done.

I just sent that sponsor post out to our fearless leader (and now suddenly have ideas for a few others…  maybe I’ll prep a few if my characters will give me a few more days of nudging them aside to do so).

YEEAASSS!

I’ve also been (finally) rockin that creativity goal of mine this past week.  I need to remember to start carrying pencils with me for my doodles—otherwise I get a lot of art that looks like this:

a ballpoint pen, a writing/drawing journal and time at a B&N cafe

But if I’d stopped or put off drawing for when I had the correct tools, I’d have never met this fellow.  Not sure WHO he is yet, but definitely feeling he has a story to tell.  And I’m fairly sure he’s Hastor…

Who do YOU think this is?

Row80 Check-in & Assessment

So how’s that for a week?    I’m thinking good things.  Not ideal things.  I know I set aside some work I should have done to push past the block that was my sponsor post.  Some call it prioritizing…  I guess I should call it that too.

Sometimes it’s hard to admit I’ll never be Wonder Woman.  Wondering Woman, yes…  I’ve got that down well, but I am no Lynda Carter. *pouts*

• CRAFT
  • Goal: spend ~three hours a week delving into writing craft related learning
  • Progress: I’ve been reading John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.  A lot of process and general perspective on writing, and maybe 3 hours of this so far
  • Goal: Hand-write new words daily! (the Five Sentences thingie)
  • Progress:  *hems and haws*  I wrote a lot of handwritten stuff (not only on my new phone love the handwriting app), but not much of it was story related
  • Goal: typing two pages a day of old notebooks into the computer
  • Progress: I managed two days of typing and not a full two pages each
• SOCIAL
  • Goal: maintain local critique group submission of excerpts and critiques during non-NaNoWriMo months
  • Progress: behind; I owe a submission and one more critique
  • Goal: return to regular posting in the WIPpet and WeWriWa blog hops
  • Progress:  managed a WIPpet but as I noted last Sunday, I’m not rushing to jump into the WeWriWa
  • Goal: sponsor duties for the ROW80 twice a week
  • Progress: on track
• PERSONAL
  • Goal: Explore my creative side daily
  • Progress:  *high fives self*
  • Goal: Daily languages (except Sundays)
  • Progress: done, though Saturday became my Sunday
  • Goal: daily exercise amounting to a minimum of 30 minutes a day
  • Progress: Doing pretty good.  I missed … no days
• Temporary! Goal: write and submit my sponsor post
• Progress: THIS IS DONE *happy dance*

And before I start trying to post happy dance pictures of me trying to Zumba (cheers to you, ReGi), let me end this.   It’s been a…  pretty good, and very interesting, week.

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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.

The Morning After

Here I am a day late for my ROW80 check-in, and I feel completely unapologetic about it.  The last few days have been, to quote the prolific Chuck Wendig, amazeballs (actually Chuck has a lot of really awesome, though mostly NSFW* terms for writers to… um, ponder).

Anyway, absolutely friggen amazeballs!

Not only have I again caught up with all of my goals, I’ve been exceeding them (well, not totally, I still haven’t started that creative art thingie I was going to do, except a bit of coloring on one of those so-called “adult coloring pages” I printed off a while ago and had lain around.  I’m working on it slowly, bit by bit.

Here is something I drew myself for that very purpose you can download and color yourselves if you’d like.  It’s not Great Art, it’s just a sketch I made once.  If you click on the image before you download, you should get a full page image.

Just an old pump to color

And besides…  I have had too much fun with my wonderful characters to want to do much more than spend my free time with them.   Especially Atyr…  she’s hard to ‘relate’ to, a lot harder than most of the others.  I find myself not connecting to her, a lot.  She’s got religious and political views that are alien to most anything I’ve been raised around.  And while I’ve made some study of martyrs, there is a deep difference between knowing the acts of someone so devoted to a belief and the inner feelings of such a person.

And a long time ago, I realized that for all that she lives through her choices, Atyr is a martyr to her faith.  To her, life is her punishment for not serving in her religious duties better, even despite the fact that those in charge of the temples she had been raised in were not acting in the interest of the people they served or the good of the world at large.

But Atyr believes in ideals, not individuals.  And I’m more the opposite.  I believe in individuals, then groups with more caution.  Ideals…. no so much. It always seems to me that everyone has their own interpretation of an idea—there doesn’t seem to be a universality to many things, and those tend to not involve higher level thought: basic needs, etc.

Yeah…  she’s a zealot.  And I think a lot of my problem with working with her is because people with that dogmatic a personality make me very uneasy even to be around.

But enough of my writing problems (what few there are…  one character out of several, and lots of words to write about all of them)…

Here’s some nori before I start the assessment of my goals.  I think I want to make something like stained glass out of this stuff.  Isn’t it just awesome?

And now my weekly assessment:

• Goal: working through three chapters weekly of James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure (including exercises)
• Progress: still detoured progress here, though I not done much Syd Field’s Screenplay either; some other library book reading… and an overdue fine to pay tomorrow
• Goal: catching up in my local critique group (including submitting something this week)
• Progress: group is on hold for the month of April; however, finished all the critiques I owe; now need to submit something
• Goal: typing two pages a day of old notebooks in
• Progress: one page ahead of count
• Goal: (VIG) Write new words daily! (the Five Sentences thingie)
• Progress:  getting ALL the words…  am so loving this time with my characters
• Not a Goal but Progress Anyway: managed to sort out and discover several files for bits of story and notes I’d thought I’d long lost and place them in Scrivener projects with the stories they belonged to *happy dance*

Again, since this post was late, and I was having serious doubts about getting anything done on Wednesday, I’m holding off one more week before I consider adding in extra projects.  We’ll see how things are by mid-week (fair warning my mid-week check-in will be on Thursday because this one is a day late).

Hope you had fun reading and plotting your own creative endeavors.  Before you go, why not visit a few other awesome ROWers here!

• or most daily life…  you can do serious damage choking on that latte if you read these while drinking