Random. Things.

I’ve been doing some blog housekeeping, repairing or deleting old, broken links, removing reviews of indie books that aren’t available anywhere anymore, and fixing formatting glitches that happened when I exported from the janky old Wordpress site. And in the course of that work, I’ve noted some commonalities in my writing over the years.

First, the number of blog posts with the word random in the title was a ridiculously large number I am not going to share. Yes, I’ve been blogging a long time (since 2006, if I count LiveJournal, which I do) but proportionally, It’s still an absurd number of “random” observations. I’ve been recording diary-ish entries and musings since LONG before 2006, but LJ was the first effort in the blogging format.)

ANYway. Second, I like lists a lot. Shocker, I know. And third, I cyclically get in the way of my own writing by making things more complicated than they need to be. I will blame the ADHD, as the complications are almost always tied into me finding a New Shiny Thing. Distractions are real. The worst ones are the Shiny Things I don’t even like but can’t ignore simply because they’re there. Those are usually Shiny Things the Online Success Experts insist are important, so there’s an extra heft to them, mentally, that makes it hard to set them aside.

But eventually I do get disgusted with them, or the annoyance of dealing with them outweighs the Shiny Distraction of poking at them to see how they work, and I get back to the reason I made the bog in the first place: writing about things on my mind.

So here we are!

Yard Wildlife Tally this week:
1 small orange cat—no collar, but well fed, well groomed, and so cute with a little white tip on its tail
multiple rosy house finches & goldfinches sampling the seed pods on my bolted mustard greens
1 toad, (I HAVE TOADS IN MY GARDEN AT LAST!)
3 monarch butterflies
1 black swallowtail butterfly bustling over the rue plants. I’m hopeful it was laying som eggs!
1 happy cardinal couple playing in the birdbath
2 empty hummingbird feeders. Zero hummingbirds lately, but the feeders do not empty themselves.

Other blog evolution/victories: I figured how to make a blog summary PAGE instead of using the default blog template from the sitebuilder. I was just duping posts to keep the footer material, but most of that content gets dated quickly and it’s a PITA to delete.

(I spent a few hours clearing outdated clutter from the posts on here and never want to do it again.)

Now I have a blog landing page with all the latest posts, footer feature sections, and links to the rest of the blog posts. Much easier to swap out sections on that single page. I’m okay with the posts themselves feeling dated, but promotional material should go away when it’s no longer relevant. Here’s a link to that page in case it isn’t where you found this post: The Blog

I also messed with the site theme colors. Why? Answer a: because I could. Answer b: because no matter what I think I like when I start a project, I eventually gravitate to red, gold, & black with splashes of lavender purple.

I am still working on Ghost Town. The map is being a royal pain, so no show-and-tell just yet. I’m making better progress on the treasure map that will be a central element of book 2. It will have multiple parts, and involves ciphers and the map of the town and some entertaining research on what kind of buildings in old towns have cornerstones, and what kind of things are usually written on those cornerstones. (If you happen have any photos of mid-1800’s building cornerstones you would like to share, I’m trying to collect a bunch for inspiration.)

“Book ciphers are fun!” is a thing I have never said and never will say, but I can say with confidence I know much more about them than I did last month.

That’s blog done, now it’s back to the mapping/cursing-at-Canva project! My reward to myself for getting sections of it done is that I get to spend time playing with the “Angry Cat Girl And Retired Librarian” writing that is refusing to be a story but makes me happy to write anyway.

And that’s all until later. Except for the cat pic. Because CAT.

Midsummer update