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| EXTRA! EXTRA! Important update! I just learned a thing! Tardigrades (microscopic beasties also called water bears) HAVE TOES. Toes! On their little fat legs! |
| Beasties, now that's a story in the making. I want to create an amazing story about beasties with toes, thanks for this idea. |
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| If the continued research is not "yes, but do they have toe beans?" I will be greatly disappointed. |
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| Next lesson: How to give Tardigrades a pedicure. |
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| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Mine today were about how difficult it can be, sometimes, to figure out what other people want, especially when their actions don't seem organized toward any particular end goal. Is this about writing? Yes, sort of; characters in stories should want things, or they're very hard to keep track of enough to enjoy the story. They should want little things, like to get out of the rain, and they should probably also want big things, like "for the Dark Lord not to zap us all with his People-Zapping Ray". ("What about highfalutin' literary stories, Raven?" The characters in those tend to want highfalutin' literary things, I notice, like "to be sure I have the right kind of soul" or "that guy over there".) The problem with this is that humans are pretty bad at clearly stating their wants, and sometimes they want contradictory things, and sometimes they say they want something but take actions that tend to make sure they don't get the thing. This is, then, one of those places where fiction has to make more sense than real life. (In real life you get weird coincidences, luck, mistakes, and so on, all the time. These things really do determine outcomes to big events. In fiction, your reader will call these events "cheating". You can do maybe one per novel.) So you have to figure out what your characters want and need (not what they THINK they want and need), and make them take actions to get it. If you have a scene that feels flat, this is almost always the answer to de-flatting it. |
Psst, everybody, listen to Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  and Kurt Vonnegut. (Also listen to Vonnegut when he said "What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow." Make art! Get big souls! Fly, my pretties!) |
Raven  - I've often had the same thought. I've also decided that when I go visit Japan to try fugu sashimi, I'm not going anywhere near Tokyo! In that city, one runs a far greater risk of being mooshed by a giant, intergalactic monster than of dying of fugu poisoning. Heeeyy!! Why don't the Japanese just feed those monsters some badly-prepared fugu? One untrained chef could kill the beast with a single ginsu and a pound of Tiger Fugu! I'm a problem solver! |
| You wanna know what is a sensation I never do get used to? Looking at a thing and going "wow, this Thing is a very good example of the type of thing it is. Someone who likes Things would probably really like this. Not me, tho. I really do not like this Thing. But not because it's bad at being a Thing! I just irrationally don't like it!" There are entire movies like this to me. I cannot defend why I don't like the thing. It's a perfectly cromulent Thing! There's nothing wrong with it! I just... don't like it. Usually because it annoys me, but sometimes I can't even pick out why or whether it does annoy me. I just look at it and think "blehhhhhhh, no". I conclude brains are silly. |
| Coconut. I can't STAND it. I spit it out at even the faintest taste. One of my earliest memories is holding a bite of a coconut cookie in my mouth at one of my mother's club meetings, waiting until we got home to spit out the nasty thing. I couldn't have been much more than four at the time. Irrational, I know. But I hate the taste of it to this day. |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - My father-in-law can't stand it, either. I will sometimes throw it into my homemade granola and since he always eats granola with yogurt for breakfast, I always make a separate batch before they come to visit so he won't starve. (Instead of coconut and dried blueberries in his I put dried cranberries and either sliced almonds or pecans. I don't get complaints...) |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? This morning mine morphed into choosing to focus on the good things I have in my hands. I did this on purpose for a while, back when I was fighting my SAD without knowing what it was (get a light box, kids. They're like $30 and there's some evidence they even help with regular depression, along with whatever else your doc recommends). Anyway, back then I read all the articles about being depressed and then angrily did everything nonprescription they recommended, which is why I spent a bit more than a year writing down 3 things I was grateful for every day. I quickly had to make a rule it couldn't be BIG stuff ("my house, my kids") or I would default to the same thing every day. So I trained myself to notice 3 small beauties every morning. ("I like my coffee cup. I found a new song I love. That yellow velvet pillow makes me happy.") What with The World And Everything, it might not be a bad idea for me to re-up this practice, although (thank God) I am not depressed at the moment. (Get a light box, kids! Even if you live in Texas!) What do you think, friends? I bet some of you already do the "gratitude/find 3 good things" thing. (I bet some of you are thinking "that would just make me do sarcasm three times every morning." To each their own, I am not your mom.) |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - I think we need the sarcasm team, as a society, and I myself have been traded there before. |
Jon Little (they/them)  - It makes a difference, doesn't it? The big things in our lives (I have shelter, I have food, nobody's chasing me with an axe) tend to be limited in number and stay steady. (Well, hopefully. The lack of axes thing would be stressful if it was unpredictable.) But the small good things are legion, they change every day, and they kind of make up the texture of our lives. |
Psst, Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  , I found the book with the story "Bach In A Minute" in it. Isn't the cover awesome?  I'm pretty sure I bought this at either the used bookstore where I used to work as a youth or at a library sale. I probably paid more than 95 cents for it, but probably not MUCH more than 95 cents. (My 15 year old wandered past it, did a double-take, and said "Is that an evil hippo pulling a hearse?" I...think it is?) |
Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓  - Also the singing voice on the original Grinch, I think? And definitely one of the parrots in The Magical Tiki Room. (My grandparents had some Disney LPs that were just the soundtracks of some of the rides, so I learned the voices long before I ever went to the park as a kid.) |
| Raven - I'm pretty sure you're right about Ravenscroft singing the Grinch song in the original cartoon. You're probably right about the Tiki Room parrot, too. I'm listening to the parrots now, and I'm hearing a Mexican parrot, a German one, a French one,... but I can't seem to hear the voice of the fourth parrot. Most little birdies will fly away, but the Tiki Room birds are here every day! I need to pull it up and watch it all the way through. I don't recall a parrot that might have been voiced by Ravenscroft, but then the Disneyland (CA) show might have been different than the Walt Disney World (FL) show. Plus, the last time I saw the Tiki Room show was in 1991. Side Note: You must be much, much younger than I, if your grandparents had LPs. (My grandparents had wood core 78s.) I had LPs. I wish I had them and a player now. They were a little crackly at times, but unlike CDs, one tiny scratch didn't void the whole album. |
| Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓 - My grandparents also had 45s, they were just groovy, man, and kept buying music. My family is like that. For that matter, *I* have a collection of LPs and a player. Some of them are inherited, some of them are because when I was a teen you could still find records and record players at thrift stores for like a buck (they've mostly smartened up now, alas), and some of them are because I don't like renting my music from streaming services. I'd rather own it, and I'd rather the artist get paid more than whatever tiny percentage Spotify et all give them. Lots of new bands put out LPs these days, which is nice. (As for youth, I was born in the thematically appropriate year of 1984. Or as my kids like to say, "way back in the NINETEEN HUNDREDS".) |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? The electrical storm passed us by last night, though we got to watch a supercell shoot lightning around at a distance, and that was something I have never seen before. We are all good here, albeit it's raining pretty hard today. A good day for housework, both literal and literary. How are you all today? |
| So here is an interesting thing I'm starting to see professional authors do, which is making me think hard about some stuff I have--they are serializing novels. Not via traditional publishers, who are pretty much still doing the thing Hollywood did when it decided that we should make sequels, prequels, remakes, etc. forever and ever amen. But via things like Patreon and Substack. They're releasing novels a chapter at a time, and with different subscription tiers you can get extras, like "bonus scenes". (Side note: I write bonus scenes for every book. I tend to feel like they slow down the pacing and/or are inappropriate for the genre conventions and/or are in the wrong POV, which is why they get cut, but they exist.) Anyway, who can say if this will actually make money for these authors, but I just found it fascinating that we're kind of back in the model where Charles Dickens would have to work frantically to come up with a chapter to be published that month, for a book everybody was buying in installments. I wonder if the modern version will have some of the Dickensian tells (like a random chapter of people doing something like have a picnic, or a plunge into a side character's backstory, or whatever he was doing to buy time because he hadn't figured out what happened next in the main plot yet). What do you think? If you liked the author and the first couple chapters (surely you'd have to give them the first chapter or two free?) would you sign up for such a subscription? |
Kindle actually set up a service where authors could serialize novels. Readers would buy tokens and spend them on the stories they liked, which generated revenue for the authors based on how many tokens were spent on their work. I had Broken English on there and a couple of novellas. The service was called Vella, and I made several hundred dollars from it. It started in 2021 and was ultimately deemed a failure. The 'zon shut it down in February of '05 ... |
| Phantom Reader - It is sadly in character that Amazon would retire something that made money for authors (or, if I remember how it went before they retired it, make it much much harder to make money). I'll be interested to see if the structure of using Patreon or even sending chapters directly to an email list works for these authors. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Mine today were about a concept I read about last week, which was "don't shop for plates at the shoe store", which is more or less about "don't try to get someone to give you what they haven't got in the first place." The thing I read was about emotional needs--like if your cousin consistently greets your writing news with disinterest or worse, stop going to her to get writing support, go to a writing buddy instead--but I thought it applies to stories, too. For instance, if what you really are wanting to read is a space story, don't read a fantasy story and think "ugh, you know what would make this better? some spaceships". Just go find a story with spaceships already in it. Of course, this means that if you can't find what you want to read ("but I WANT a fantasy story with spaceships, Raven") you'll have to write it. Oh no.... |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? It's foggy here and I got up too early, and my pages are about geopolitics again, so we will pass over them and look at something less horrible, which is gardens. Whoever built this subdivision scraped all the topsoil away when they built the houses, so I'm not going to plant any vegetables in the ground this year, but vegetables in pots should be plenty doable. Tomatoes, obviously. Possibly also some peppers. Mint, rosemary, basil, thyme, I'd plant cilantro but the stuff bolts if you blink--maybe I will succession plant cilantro? And I think if I keep after picking it, spinach and lettuce, although they suffer from the same problem as the cilantro. My real curiosity is green beans. I always plant green beans in the ground, and am having a kind of difficult time imagining them in a container, but perhaps a long skinny container? With a trellis? What say we? |
| My wife gardens using totes to create raised beds that are also movable. https://youtu.be/zDfO6w8Y70w?si=2fr47iIHcyu2jRbV |
| I don't do veg, but I plant dozens and dozens of annuals in totes and planters every year. Far cheaper than planters, and when the trailing plants fill in, you'd never know the difference between the totes and the more decorative 'actual' planters. You can also make the totes self-watering , which I do for all the swamp donkey plants that I can't be bothered to babysit. |
| We are late, but we are here! This week over in the forum we are talking about "Week 9, Recovering A Sense of Compassion, Good Parts Version" , in which Julia opines that "laziness" is really fear, and I opine that "laziness" is really like six things that people tend to smush together when they're feeling annoyed with each other. (Don't get annoyed with each other in creative pursuits. Just keep your eyes on your own paper.) Swing by the forum if you like and chat about it, or argue with me, or chat about something else entirely. (Forum: "Do The Artist's Way With Raven" ) |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Stormy day expected here, but if it's not too windy that means it'll be perfect for sitting on my covered porch and breathing the good, non pollen air. Maybe writing? I have a feeling D&D day will eat up that time, however. (Beginning Curse of Strahd with a bunch who have never played it, for those who know and are curious.) |
| This thunderstorm is making it so I can't take my normal walk, but on the upside I already got the revision made, so maybe the thunderstorm is actually making me productive. Now, to get my haunted space station people to their next realization... |
| We had torrential downpours overnight, and there might have been a flash of lightning. I caught it out of the corner of my eye; there was no thunder, so I either imagined it or it was very far away. |
| Do you enjoy walking as an activity or do you walk mainly for exercise? Is it maybe a combination of both? |
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