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singedsunWe have our house back to ourselves for a little while. My friend, after making sure she's safe, has gone up to stay with her parents until the end of the month. I'll admit it's been so nice having another person around after spending almost all of last year at home where it's just Matt and I. Also, it was so nice having other dogs in the house too so ours had friend to play with. A and her now ex-fiancé were always the ones to watch our dogs when we went out of town so they're all very good friends at this point. I think our two boys were very sad to see her and her dogs go. They spent every night running around like crazy puppies even though only one of them is actually a puppy anymore.
The timing worked out though. Saturday I had my first Futurescapes class. Class is sort of a misnomer, it was really an all day event with three lessons. It was sci-fi day starting with Mary Robinette Kowal, then Dan Wells, and last S.J. Kincaid. Of the three, I think MRK's was probably the most interesting (for me). She talked about sci-fi character and world-building. Dan's lesson was interesting, but more interaction than instruction and tbh it felt a little more like padding/filler than actual class content. His lesson was about SFF character obstacles and flaws and where we see those things cropping up in sci-fi media. The last one with S.J. Kincaid was a two-parter, the first half was about query writing and timing in the market. She let us read over some of her queries both before and after being published and told us how they were received (or not) in the style in which she wrote them. For the second half we talked about action scenes and how to set up and pay off character emotions even in a physical fight.
I had my second class today with Kathryn Purdie & Nephele Tempest, both of which were lessons regarding writing characters and deep character POV. Both of these were really good, I made a ton of notes from both days but I think there were more notes from the two lessons today. We've got homework assignments from both days so far, thought I'm not sure exactly what will be happening with those. I've got another class tomorrow about story structure and then the last one is this weekend on publishing. That'll be the last of them until the workshop in March. There was a class on worldbuilding with Fran Wilde that sold out before I even got in, but if you signed up for all the classes they sent out the link to that. So at some point between now and March I've got that to watch too. We're supposed to bring about three thousand words to work on to the workshop, so aside from any other homework, I need to polish up what I'm working on from my project to have ready.
I will say it's nice to be able not to take days off work to attend this, since they're able to stagger all the classes out and send us the recordings if we can't make it. As long as I don't have meetings, I can listen in and take notes and still work during the week when these are happening. So it's worked out really well.
Since everything else since Christmas has been a pile of trash, I've decided I'm only going to be picking up books that I've left "currently reading" in Goodreads for the last... idk YEARS? I picked up a book about Sylvia Plath that I started three years ago when I was in the hospital after having gallbladder out. I never picked it back up when I got home, so I was only like three chapters into it. The book Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder is about the summer internship at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953. It's not my usual reading style, but it was really interesting. There were twenty women in that summer internship and many of them are still alive to be interviewed and of course, remembered Sylvia and the whole experience well enough.
I've also picked up Buddy Walker's Stunt Water book of poetry which someone gave me four years ago and I apparently just forgot about it? When we put up the bookshelves again last fall, I found it in a bag of books that I'd all just stopped reading a chapter or two in.
I'm also reading Silk and Silver by Andrew Shields, which is a Blades in the Dark book. It's also written by the husband of a friend of mine, who has written a number of things for the Blades in the Dark TTRPG now and I have been sitting on all three of his books in the series for far too long now.
There are like another 12 books on my "currently reading" stash and I think only one of them is not something I have a copy of myself. So at least for the next month or two I've got plenty of things to put my hands on when I want to read, or have time to read, or am sitting around in places with nothing else to do but wait and stare at my phone. I'm tired of doomscrolling, so ebooks it is. Of course, I did just pre-order three new books coming out between May and June, so this is a good incentive to make sure I get things crossed off before then.
A while back I posted about using Notion. I've been poking at it more and I downloaded my entire Goodreads archive and uploaded it there so I could play a bit more. It's been very useful to be able to make multiple lists out of the same data and in a more interactive way than just building an excel spreadsheet. I do love a good spreadsheet, but this just does more for me. Also, little fiddly things like this tend to be real good on my brain when I'm stressed out. Just the right kind of hyperfocus activity that lets me relax after dealing with friends, family and work stresses right now.
Oh and while I was going through photos of my grandpa, I managed to find the Glamour Shots I had done when I was fifteen going on fifty. I loaded a couple up to twitter because they are just the most 90's things I've ever seen from the hair to the clothes to the hat. Clearly I was channeling some latent goth fashion I wouldn't discover until I was in my twenties.
The timing worked out though. Saturday I had my first Futurescapes class. Class is sort of a misnomer, it was really an all day event with three lessons. It was sci-fi day starting with Mary Robinette Kowal, then Dan Wells, and last S.J. Kincaid. Of the three, I think MRK's was probably the most interesting (for me). She talked about sci-fi character and world-building. Dan's lesson was interesting, but more interaction than instruction and tbh it felt a little more like padding/filler than actual class content. His lesson was about SFF character obstacles and flaws and where we see those things cropping up in sci-fi media. The last one with S.J. Kincaid was a two-parter, the first half was about query writing and timing in the market. She let us read over some of her queries both before and after being published and told us how they were received (or not) in the style in which she wrote them. For the second half we talked about action scenes and how to set up and pay off character emotions even in a physical fight.
I had my second class today with Kathryn Purdie & Nephele Tempest, both of which were lessons regarding writing characters and deep character POV. Both of these were really good, I made a ton of notes from both days but I think there were more notes from the two lessons today. We've got homework assignments from both days so far, thought I'm not sure exactly what will be happening with those. I've got another class tomorrow about story structure and then the last one is this weekend on publishing. That'll be the last of them until the workshop in March. There was a class on worldbuilding with Fran Wilde that sold out before I even got in, but if you signed up for all the classes they sent out the link to that. So at some point between now and March I've got that to watch too. We're supposed to bring about three thousand words to work on to the workshop, so aside from any other homework, I need to polish up what I'm working on from my project to have ready.
I will say it's nice to be able not to take days off work to attend this, since they're able to stagger all the classes out and send us the recordings if we can't make it. As long as I don't have meetings, I can listen in and take notes and still work during the week when these are happening. So it's worked out really well.
Since everything else since Christmas has been a pile of trash, I've decided I'm only going to be picking up books that I've left "currently reading" in Goodreads for the last... idk YEARS? I picked up a book about Sylvia Plath that I started three years ago when I was in the hospital after having gallbladder out. I never picked it back up when I got home, so I was only like three chapters into it. The book Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder is about the summer internship at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953. It's not my usual reading style, but it was really interesting. There were twenty women in that summer internship and many of them are still alive to be interviewed and of course, remembered Sylvia and the whole experience well enough.
I've also picked up Buddy Walker's Stunt Water book of poetry which someone gave me four years ago and I apparently just forgot about it? When we put up the bookshelves again last fall, I found it in a bag of books that I'd all just stopped reading a chapter or two in.
I'm also reading Silk and Silver by Andrew Shields, which is a Blades in the Dark book. It's also written by the husband of a friend of mine, who has written a number of things for the Blades in the Dark TTRPG now and I have been sitting on all three of his books in the series for far too long now.
There are like another 12 books on my "currently reading" stash and I think only one of them is not something I have a copy of myself. So at least for the next month or two I've got plenty of things to put my hands on when I want to read, or have time to read, or am sitting around in places with nothing else to do but wait and stare at my phone. I'm tired of doomscrolling, so ebooks it is. Of course, I did just pre-order three new books coming out between May and June, so this is a good incentive to make sure I get things crossed off before then.
A while back I posted about using Notion. I've been poking at it more and I downloaded my entire Goodreads archive and uploaded it there so I could play a bit more. It's been very useful to be able to make multiple lists out of the same data and in a more interactive way than just building an excel spreadsheet. I do love a good spreadsheet, but this just does more for me. Also, little fiddly things like this tend to be real good on my brain when I'm stressed out. Just the right kind of hyperfocus activity that lets me relax after dealing with friends, family and work stresses right now.
Oh and while I was going through photos of my grandpa, I managed to find the Glamour Shots I had done when I was fifteen going on fifty. I loaded a couple up to twitter because they are just the most 90's things I've ever seen from the hair to the clothes to the hat. Clearly I was channeling some latent goth fashion I wouldn't discover until I was in my twenties.
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