From my desk to yours …
Another week has passed, and we are here again of a Monday morning.
The sun is hot now, warming everything up. It feels like last week, I was still seeing bare branches but there’s none left today, all the trees are fully leafed and the air smells like lilacs and honeysuckles and the last dregs of the flowering crabapple trees.
Short week last week, ‘cause of the May long weekend up here in Canada. It was busy, nevertheless. My job keeps me pretty occupied during the day, which is both good and bad. Sometimes, I forget to have lunch! I really feel like I didn’t do much of anything last week, we mostly puttered around at home and watered the plants.
I did put the hummingbird feeder out finally, so now it’s just up to the hummingbirds to find it. My partner says that he saw one going to it last evening, so I’m hoping to catch one myself sometime. I love a hummingbird. We have the ruby-throated ones here.
I went down to the city on Saturday for an appointment, and treated myself to lunch and a wander through a big box store, and when I came home, I planted a round of herbs into pots - parsley, basil, chives and dill - to go with the oregano, thyme and rosemary I already have growing.
Decided that next year, under the kitchen window, I will be digging a pollinator garden. I’ve got a bee balm out there now under the hummingbird feeder, but the neighbourhood is very much full of lawns, so I think giving the pollinators a place to come will be very amazing. I’ll have to look up what’s good to grow.
We also have made plans to put a trellis + the morning glory seeds in along the back wall, so I just need to dig the soil, sow the seeds and set up my trellis. I don’t know what colour the flowers will be since my aunt gave me her jar of seeds and didn’t know herself what colour they were.
Very looking forward to my garden plans.
What am I reading?
Finished The Winter Sea! What a lovely ending that book had, also finished Rust in the Root, which was SO neat. I really enjoyed the magic system and I always like an alternate history.
Next up is What Moves the Dead, as well as as much of the Inheritance Trilogy as I can get through before my hold is up and I have to return it. It feels so good to be reading again. I’ve got so many books on hold again on libby, it’s delightful.
When I’m reading this much, I tend not to be watching a lot of TV or other things, which is probably better for my brain, so we’ll continue down that path.
Writing (or the lack thereof) …
Anthology piece came back with edits and comments this morning and I’m afraid to open it. My editor is amazing and insightful and her comments are always helpful and make my writing stronger, but the notification of 73 suggestions and 23 comments does make my heart thump painfully. It’ll be okay though, the piece will be better for having done the work even if the work seems daunting right now.
Otherwise, I put some words down into a fanfic wip over the last week, and I feel pretty good about that! I’ve been picking at this wip for ages, and I think I might actually get it done if I just keep adding words to the doc, even if I hate them as I’m putting them in. I think what I’m struggling with is making sure that the sex scene I’m writing feels hot and sexy and also fresh, and different. Sometimes, I struggle a lot with making the sex read as hot, to me - I know it’s very different to experience it not as the person who wrote it, but coming off writing the sex in the anthology piece was so easy, as opposed to this piece, which feels like pulling teeth.
I’d really like to figure out why that is, but I don’t have it in me to interrogate it currently, so instead I’ve been talking to friends about how they plan and execute smut scenes in their writing, and what sorts of things they keep in mind as a writer while they’re writing them. I’m going to try and plan my way through the block, which’ll hopefully help.
I might just have a bit of dick fatigue, for lack of a better way to explain it, which is why a sex scene without a dick came easier than one that involves two does. Part of the reason why I want to finish this wip is because it’s not a usual way to handle adding a third to the relationship, and even if I only end up getting feedback from the six people who read everything I post, that’ll be okay, because I did a neat thing.
Tangentially related to these struggles, I have been doing such a good job of writing most days of the week for an hour every morning and I’m really starting to think that I could be disciplined enough to write for a living instead of doing my day job. I’m a long way off from that though, so for now, I will have to settle for being able to write for a solid hour most mornings of the week and get my words in that way.
Miscellany
I love Lincoln Michel’s newsletter, and I read it voraciously every time he publishes one. This past week’s was about using metaphors that make sense, and wow did it resonate.
In the evenings, I often put on nature documentaries to unwind a little and this week I’ve been making my way through one narrated by Ewan McGregor about the Scottish Highlands, and I am open to suggestions of where to go next.
This article about anti culture in fandom spaces was really interesting, but it would have been better if the author had defined ‘pro ship’ correctly.
Remember the WGA is still on strike! If you’re able, donate to a strike fund, provide support at a picket, and amplify striking writers’ voices.
With that, I’ll leave you with a wish for a very good week.