Happy Thursday, Aledan Merfolk! Every time I jump back onto the blogging bandwagon life decides to smack me with the busy stick, so it’s been a few weeks. I’ve decided to change Science Tuesday to a monthly post, so most of June’s science news will be posted next Tuesday (the 28th). But I’ll still be posting custom ponies every Sunday when I can find them. I have one for you this weekend and it’s so beautiful!
Last we talked, I was in my reading cycle (I’m now in my video games/HGTV/recover cycle, which is kind of backwards from normal…but I’m not complaining because I’ve been playing WoW for the first time since the Panda expansion came out!). I finished TAMING OF THE QUEEN and HALF A WAR. I really enjoyed both of them, but TAMING was really really really good. It gave me nightmares about King Henry VIII, and even though I already knew the history and what would happen, I was seriously on the edge of my seat in places. That’s how well done that book was. I definitely recommend it, especially if you’re a female author (Katherine Parr was the first woman to publish under her own name in English). I’m now reading THE NAME OF THE WIND by Patrick Rothfuss and listening to ANCILLARY JUSTICE by Ann Leckie.
I’m about to roll into the writing cycle, and as I was trying to fall asleep two nights ago I realized the issue I was having with Enfields. I’ve got two MCs who’re trying to fight the big bad guy, but the big bad guy isn’t fighting back. The MCs are too small to really be much more than an annoyance to him – he’s focused on something else until the end of the book. So it’s time to restructure this sucker, rip apart the worldbuilding and stitch it back together, and get the big bad guy to see the MCs as a threat and actively work against them.
And I still need to find a place for that sex scene I already wrote…
I’ve joined Camp NaNo next month in hopes that my cabin-mates will help kickstart my brain and make the pieces fall together so I can finally make some headway on this book. I also picked up STORY FIX by Larry Brooks (you may have heard me praising STORY ENGINEERING in the past, which I’ll also be re-reading with an eye towards Enfields).
Last but not least: the Littles have become Ladies! They started laying eggs this weekend! Little eggs, because they’re still half the size of Mona 😛
<–Look how teeny the eggs are!
Have a wonderful weekend, Aledans! I’ll see you on Sunday for Custom of the Week 🙂
I am glad to know that you, too, still have reading cycles and writing cycles. The Fella is confused by this. “What do you mean you don’t want to read a 1200 page epic fantasy while you try to work on your own first real attempt at worldbuilding?” he says in confusion. 😛
Oh absolutely! Usually I write til I can’t, game/hgtv, then read until I’m full of ideas again to write. This time it’s backwards: wrote, read, now gaming!
I came away from The Name of the Wind with a desperate need to improve my vocabulary, lol. But it was so good.
And your teeny egg is awesome! We’re incubating eggs for the first time! One of our 4 yr old’s went broody (though she only ended up sticking with it for two weeks), and so they’re in an actual incubator on my kitchen counter now. Whee! Will have a mix of black australorps (since we have a black australorp roo and several BA hens), Austra-whites (BA and White Leghorn mix), and potentially whatever comes out of a BA and red-sex-link mix. Because the eggs from my red sex links and my BA’s look pretty much the same, lol.
Oh, how exciting! Soon you’ll have little baby chicks running around making those sweet little peeping noises <3 I'm a little bit jealous 🙂
And here I was feeling guilty that I will, occasionally, do nothing but play games when I should be writing. I can read and write at the same time, but I thought I was the only one who took gaming breaks.
It’s been a while since we’ve owned chickens, but I remember when the young ones would start laying… teeny yolkless things. The only thing funnier was the young roosters learning to crow and the looks they’d give you when you did it better. 😆
Stephen King wrote this little known book called LISEY’S STORY, and it has a great theme of needing to take a break from writing to “go down to the well to drink” and get your creativity back. I’ve kept that in mind ever since. Burnout is real, and if you don’t occasionally take a break to refill that well, you’ll go dry.
Oh gosh, when our roosters learned to crow they went to the local farm 😉 But yes, the little eggs are so sweet! And their egg-song when they first start laying is so sad and adorable <3 Like "OMG WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME?!"