A Week of Adventures

First things first, CUTE CAT PIC. I would’ve posted Friday or last night, but every time I sat down with the laptop, my lap was instantly filled with this cat. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

Sleepy kitty in the sunshine.

Okay, THAT’s out of the way, onward to the main part of “this week in a writer’s life” things.

It was a darned good week, actually. I got to talk about my characters with some folks online, I made great writing progress, I spent a long afternoon collecting a long list of supplies at the hardware store and got a bunch of fun things that weren’t on the list, someone sent me cool pics of Dex’s Hope Crow decal in the wild, and I spent productive introvert time with friends on Friday AND it seemed like everyone had a good time. (I know I had a good time. That counts, right?)

What did I write? First, I started Yet Another Little Blog for myself, a “sit down at the start of the day and jot down notes for Future Me” kind of thing. No pressure to curate, filter, or spellcheck, even. AND I put entries in it multiple days in a row, go me! I also started a webpage for recording books I’ve read or reread and shows/movies viewed, because I don’t want to clog up blog posts, but there are zero decent trackers out there, and I do want to keep LISTS.

Of greater interest to everyone not-me, I did plotting work on Treasure Haunt and added substantially to Angry Izzie and Sad Cat Lady Bond Over A Stray. (This story refuses to tell me what its title is, so I keep playing with it) I have a much better idea where it’s GOING now, and that’s a happy thing. I also wrote a couple of short WTF rants, because the world is a dumpster fire the news keeps providing me with material. (sigh.)

The Major Action of the week was the soft launch of Bring Your Own Book Or Whatever Club. Three friends who had never met one another before showed up at various points in the afternoon and we all got some reading, writing, or project work done. Some folks had to depart, Spouseman joined in after his workday, and we all collaborated on simple supper. (Tomatoes were picked! And chopped! Cheeses were sampled! Pasta was boiled!) And then some of us watched a low-stress movie & chatted. Spouseman went downstairs to play Helldivers.

We watched Meet The Robinsons. I’d never seen it. Now that I have seen it, I do not understand how it got made by Disney even in the freewheeling twenty-aughts years. I loved it, but it is seriously unhinged in a “were these people on LSD when they wrote this?” kind of way. And the title is a downright awful mismatch for the movie.)

ANYway. The point is, the basic lowkey “show up when your schedule permits, leave when you need to” format definitely works, as did the “there will be food after X time, and An Activity after Y time, but no pressure to join in either activity unless desired.”

Next time, I’ll undoubtedly watch another movie after supper—Brother Bear is next on the “I didn’t see it when it came out” list—but there may also be low-stress tabletop gaming, as a couple of folks mentioned games they’ve been wanting to want to try out. It’d be nice to see the game table getting more use. We ordered it RIGHT before the 2020 lockdown, poor thing barely saw any use until this summer.

But yeah, I can see throwing open the house for this kind of gig pretty regularly. I’ll send another group email out to Those Who Have Expressed Interest soon.

And that’s that. That was the week. Have some pics.

First, check out the pretty. Dex Greenbright’s awesome Hope Crow decal went to the Adirondacks last week with its owner, who takes amazing nature photos when she isn’t writing fab poetry.

And finally, a not so artistic photo of my flowers, and another Pippin pic, because no post is complete without that.