AW: Morning Pgs. 2025: Day 21

 Well, I've set my timer into motion and I have music playing but no inspiration. My thoughts are jumbled up. I have some anxiety going on about political stuff. Well, some is a huge understatement but it's there. I also have my mind clicking away at the question of how to prepare for my next depressive episode so that it doesn't knock me down as badly as the last one did. And I am trying to figure out what I need to do so that I can make sure that all the supports I need for the kids are in place for next year. That IEP meeting last week was helpful but there needs to be more.

Aside from worrying about these things, I have a measure of dread regarding a phone call happening this afternoon. I will be talking with an attorney about challenging the denial of my social security claim. Last year and the months of being so out of it that I couldn't function tells me that I couldn't even handle a part time job. It makes me feel like the part of my brain that insists I am lazy is wrong. I have evidence that I can't shake a stick at which proves that I am disabled. It is a big pile of evidence but last year's depressive episode really hammered it home.

I want to be productive. I want to work. But I have to recognize my limits. If I push myself too hard, I'll slide right back into that pit of despair and be useless to anyone. The bare minimum just isn't enough. It is part of the reason why I wasn't cooking daily which lead to my kids losing weight. It made the doctors concerned and they literally ordered that the kids get desserts and snacks whenever they want them. The kids' friends are jealous. I'm just trying to figure out how to make it all work so that the kids have what they need the next time my brain goes haywire.

I'm not half so clever as to have a better plan than using my planner religiously and attempting to be more stubborn than the depression. I'm trying to come up with a better plan than that but I'm not having much success. My mood is stable and ok. Even in the face of the wild anxiety going on. I just have to have a plan for when things go sideways because the guys are depending on me. That includes Beloved, who is super busy between work chaos and helping take care of his elderly mother.

I just don't know what is a good plan. It makes me nervous, to be honest.

AW: Morning Pgs. 2025: Day 20

 My week has been just bananas. A ton of appointments and work eating up my writing time. On the plus side, however, my eldest is making good progress at taking care of his braces and was taught a new technique for getting between tight teeth. He goes back in two weeks to get his wire put on again. In that time, I'm sure he will master the skill.

Housework has been exasperating. I am not sure which pile will topple over and bury me. There is another huge pile of dishes and there is a huge pile of laundry. Of the two, the laundry is taller and more worrisome. At least we managed to get some of the clothes that no longer fit out to the car to be transported to the thrift store and donated. I've been trying to convince the kids to go through their laundry and they have been staunchly resisting me. In some cases, going so far as to put clothes on their stuffed animals to say that they don't have to get rid of it because it fits the bear. This is not going to be an easy battle.

More birds are singing outside. The cardinals still sound like squeaky toys. The goldfinches still bicker over the sunflower chips. And the downy woodpecker still big foots it around and chases the other birds off from the sunflower feeder. We now have a thistle sock to hang up and suet blocks. Those will be going up this weekend. I think that the goldfinches will be mobbing the thistle sock as soon as they figure out it is up and that the woodpecker will be terrifying the squirrels that try to steal from the suet block. Either way, it will be amusing and noisy outside.

It's not warm enough to garden yet but planning is happening. Once the danger of frost is past, there's going to be a lot of work done at my mother-in-law's place and over here. The neighbors in the apartment across the hall are talking about putting in a vegetable garden. I told them where the last tenant in that apartment had their garden and their solution to deer trying to raid young plants. Apparently deer do not appreciate ghost chilies.

Flora & Fauna: Dragon wings?

Dear Reader,

If you have been following the paleontology blogs, I am sure you have heard about recent discoveries and exciting theories. It is sort of a hobby of mine that has been on the back burner. I enjoy collecting fossils. My area of the world is where you can find Devonian era fossils pretty easily. I was spoiled as a kid to go out walking through fields on the farm and finding all kinds of interesting rocks. The running joke in my parents' household was that my room was going to crash down into the one below if I found more rocks. To no one's surprise, I took my rock collection with me off to college and went fossil hunting while I was at college. I donated one of the best samples in my collection to the college's fossil exhibit.

Now, one may wonder what my love of fossils has to do with fantasy creatures like dragons. The old stories of dragons in Europe were based on the discovery of dinosaur fossils. These people tried to make sense of what was discovered and from here was the European dragon lore born. I have a love of mythology and folklore. It is part of the fuel for my fantasy series. The dragons of Evandar are heavily influenced by European dragon lore.

As I thought about it all, I realized pretty early on that my dragons were going to have some aerodynamics problems. While I could just say 'it is fiction and doesn't matter!' I really felt like I had to address them. It doesn't come up in the books at this time because it's all background material and there's no reason for it to be at the forefront of the storyline. This lead me to study birds, bats, and bugs to figure out how they managed to stay up in the air. While the fossil record indicated that many of the dinosaurs discovered in Europe had a heavy bone structure, I realized that my dragons needed a bone structure like birds. 

For a brief moment, I considered if they had feathers but I fell back to the old concept of webbed wings like what you see in bats. The dinosaur concept that I grew up with was that they had scales and they were more like lizards than birds. (More evidence is showing they were more like birds. It's really neat to read about.) I then had the question of how do they fly and how do they stay in the air? That piece of the puzzle didn't fall into place for a long while. Then I read about humming birds. The way they hover in the air is by flapping their wings in a figure 8 motion. This allows them to have greater ability to move in any direction. I knew this immediately was the answer to the question of how dragons fly.

I am planning on inserting a scene where the principle characters are dealing with a dragon in flight and the challenges of confronting one. All of this research and planning is going to make for a really awesome scene to write that I know I'm going to have fun working on.

AW: Morning Pgs. 2025: Day 19

I really have to get back to working on that critical analysis of The Artist's Way. That means re-reading the book with a notebook on hand to look at things like how the book is put together physically, how easy it is to read on the basis of the type font used, and dissecting the language of the book. It is going to be a big task but I am not planning on getting it done in a week. I have to review what I have already posted about it and see how far I have gotten into the book.

It is a good book for ideas and inspiration. Some of the techniques that the author shares are pretty useful. At the same time, it has problematic elements that need to be addressed. I want to be as fair and balanced in how I address the book as I can be. I have found it to be helpful and I regularly reference it when I get stuck in my artistic efforts. At the same time, I can't ignore the problems and just blithely say it will work for anyone.

I did that in my initial post about it and I feel badly about that. I have to acknowledge that post was made in a rush of enthusiasm for how it was helpful for me overcoming my writer's block. It has more to it than what I gushed about. This critical analysis is going to dissect the book into it's parts and put things into context. My hope is that with that analysis I can make the book more accessible to others and (if something wild happens) influence a future edition of the book to address the problematic elements in it. Because I truly believe that Ms. Cameron wanted to help her readers and wanted this book to be accessible to as many people as possible.

Craft of Writing: Pocket Notebook or not?

Dear Reader,

Among the various tools I have used to capture ideas that pop up at random is a notebook that is the size of my palm that fits in my purse. I have used a pocket notebook (which I think is the actual name of the product) for years to record prompts, snippets of dialog that I want to put into a scene, and random facts that interest me. To anyone else looking at it, it is a jumble of hastily scrawled randomness. For me, however, it is a record of ideas that I draw on as I sit down to a writing session.

Now for some people, this is an idea that isn't going to work well. I have tried (back in the days of cassette tapes) recording ideas and playing them back. That was awkward for me. I discovered that I didn't particularly enjoy my speaking voice. It was also a challenge to replay details multiple times so that I got them right in my projects. I suspect that it is easier with digital recording opportunities with your phone. I am not that great with tech and I still don't understand all the functions of my phone, hence the notebook.

The goal with whatever method you are comfortable with is to record ideas and inspiration as they strike. I have done this with the pocket notebook and with a bullet journal. The bullet journal got jumbled up pretty quickly with things from different projects mixing together. One would think that would have been the fate of the pocket notebook. Because the bullet journal was larger, I was putting more than a few ideas on a single page and it turned complicated pretty quick.

What tools do you use to capture ideas and corral plot bunnies?

AW: Morning pgs. 2025: day 18

 It irks me that the date of the post doesn't match the calendar date. It is something that just grates on the perfectionist in me. I am attempting to not let it annoy me too much, but it's there. I am more annoyed with myself over the fact that the kitchen is a disaster and I forgot to water the plants last week than anything else, to be honest. I am finding myself having a hard time remembering things. I know that it is stress doing it. Hormones may be part of it, but I know that when my stress levels hit a certain threshold, my brain gets wonky.

It would be easier if my antianxiety medicine didn't put me to sleep. It is ok to take a nap once in a while, but doing that on a daily basis makes it hard to get things done. A part of me says that if I avoid the news that I would be doing better. I can't do that, however, because there's too much at stake. They're literally stripping away vast swaths of the protections that people have on a daily basis. I need to know if my family is safe or not.

I hate the government right now. Hate is a pretty strong word. But that's what I'm feeling. I also feel betrayed by Congress because they're enabling Trump. No one has stepped up and even told him to knock it off. I suspect that we're not going to have four years of this garbage but longer because there are toadies in the halls of the legislature already batting around the idea of a 3rd term for him.

Food of the Seven Kingdoms (Evandar)

 In my world building, I have thought a lot about food. It may seem silly to some authors and more than a few readers to spend my time thinking about what someone eats in a fantasy setting. Honestly, I didn't start out thinking about what my characters ate. At first, I just didn't consider it important. All it was to me at that time was background color for the story.

After all, I wasn't writing a cookbook. Then, as time went on and I looked at the fiction I had read and enjoyed, I realized that truly immersive settings were what I deeply enjoyed. These stories gave the characters greater depth and realism through the inclusion of daily activities. I have attempted to emulate these techniques in my writing. You can see a progression through the books that I have out as I included more details about the world.

I really think that it is forcing me to grow as an author. Asking questions about regional differences in the Seven Kingdoms lead to my describing clothing and climate. Then I found myself thinking no one in these stories sits down and eats. You have to eat to survive. I tried to put more scenes about food into my books. I don't think I've been as successful at that as I'd like to be. I acknowledge in some cases, it comes off as contrived and rather forced.

But, as I look at it all, I think about what the different regions have in common and what is unique to each one. I also have been thinking a lot about food because of my diabetes. Somehow, this turned into my questioning what food is popular in what region, what food is most common, and what do they use to season it. At one point, I started working on posting recipes that would have been served in the world of Evandar. 

I am going to pick that thread up again after some experimentation in the kitchen and a deep dive into the kinds of food you can find in our world. Research and experimentation is what promises to make a recipe work. It is my hope that I will stumble on to things that my kids will enjoy because they're picky eaters. I also hope that I will eventually have recipes that literally add flavor to what I'm writing. It's a tricky part of worldbuilding that most authors don't get to. I think, however, I am up for the challenge. Who knows, maybe a cookbook will come out of this fantasy series after all. Wouldn't that be funny?