Jackbird Lee

This is roughly half of the first chapter of Welcome to Dead Man's Creek, which will be coming out in a couple of months:

ETA: Oh, what the heck, I'll just put up the whole chapter!

 

( Read more... )

Total monthly words (July): 70,429
Annual words to date (2023): 276,748
Dinner tonight is: leftover pizza!

 

We drove up to Maine for the long weekend! We just got back, and I'm pretty well tired out.

Here's a picture I took from the top of the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point:

Okay, so this is going in tomorrow's newsletter too but I'm wicked psyched about it so check it out - this is a map/floor plan I made that's going in my next book, Welcome to Dead Man's Creek:

The final image might not look exactly like this - I might decide to add more texture/distressing, mostly - but I'm really happy with how it looks now. The main floor plan itself I made in Inkscape, and then I exported it to Paint Shop Pro to finish off with both the typed and 'handwritten' labels. There'll be an additional map in the book depicting the top level of the hotel, I'm still working on that one.

I put this off for a while because I thought it would be a headache, but it actually turned out to be incredibly fun. I'm looking forward to doing more of these in the future - I have a floor plan made up for Asher Thomas' house from Mortal Magic as well, actually, but I made it in the Sims 3 so it's quite ugly and was really only for the reference of myself + my editor. But I could easily make a nice version of that as well...

In other news, my cat Handsome Boy went in for surgery on Thursday to fix a chronic issue he's been having with one of his ears. The surgery went really well and he's recovering nicely - we took him off the heavy-duty pain medication today and he seems to be feeling fine, all things considered.

Total monthly words (May): 31,225
Monthly words to date (June): 3,508
Annual words to date (2023): 193,208
Dinner tonight is: homemade tonkatsu (Japanese-style fried pork cutlets) prepared by my sister!

One week down! My sister is doing much better, although she's still in her cast and working reduced hours. I am, overall, pretty pleased with myself that I've still been hitting my word count goals while also keeping up with helping her and with keeping the house reasonably clean, too.

I also had time to read Lyn Gala's Claimings series this week, too. Absolutely fantastic. I'm obsessed with her world-building and how she constructs both alien species and the relationships between aliens and humans. It's really refreshing to see a more comprehensive human response to aliens beyond just 'human military is unreasonably aggressive', and I felt like her portrayal of Liam becoming more and more a member of his adopted culture and less human was very realistic and poignant.

Lyn is really great at anchoring her characters in a broader network of relationships, and I've been realizing more and more recently that that's important to me both in what I write and what I enjoy reading. It's important to me to see the characters interacting with people in their community, whether that's family, friends, neighbors, etc. Maybe because that's a big part of how I learn about people in real life as well. While reading Claimings I did get very invested in Ondry's climbing through the social ranks of Rownt society and I loved the fact that it was both a victory and, simultaneously, a source of some discomfort for himself and the people in his community.

Anyway, the other thing I had time for this week was some more watercolor painting. I did this coyote skull:


And there was a sale on both ground beef and ground turkey at the grocery store, so I was able to stock up our chest freezer, which was pretty great.

Monthly words to date (May): 22,271
Annual words to date (2023): 180,746
Dinner tonight is: fresh-made cheese pizza from the grocery store

I'm feeling pretty unstoppable today. So far I've:

• Met my daily word count and exceeded it by 500 words
• Ran the dishwasher with all the cats' dishes in it (plus about half a load of regular dishes) AND put all the clean dishes away
• Wiped down all the kitchen counters
• Cleaned the stovetop
• Swept the kitchen
• Steam-cleaned both halves of the oven and the microwave
• And put away a basket of clothes

Ideally I'd have swept the living room as well and steam-mopped both rooms, but my sister will be setting up the rabbit in the living room for some free-roaming time this afternoon, so I think I'll save those for tomorrow morning before archery.

We've graduated from the Intro to Archery class, by the way, and are starting Beginners' Archery tomorrow. Which means we will be firing at the actual distance expected for adult archers now. Erp.


Total monthly words (April): 53,594
Monthly words to date (May): 6,799
Annual words to date (2023): 165,274
Dinner tonight is: this garlic chicken crockpot recipe. My sister and I can't eat a whole chicken, so I'm just doing four bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and I'm tossing in some sliced carrots to cook with it as well.

I got chapter 6 of Space Between Us up!

I've had a very busy week, but it's been almost all writing. I did have time for a couple of other things this weekend, though.

First there was archery class, which was - as always - a lot of fun, and was extra funny because my sister and I found out that the class instructors had thought we were a couple. This isn't the first time it's happened! We look very different (I got my looks and body shape from dad's side of the family, sister is weighed heavily towards mom's side) and my sister has a speech impediment that people often mistake for an accent from somewhere in the UK. So when we show up at an activity together, I guess I can see why 'siblings' is not people's first assumption!

The other exciting thing: we got a chest freezer! For free! Dad had an old one that works well that he just doesn't use any more, so I asked him a while back if we could take it, and yesterday we were finally able to get together and clean it off and move it over to my sister and I's place. It's going to be hugely useful, I've been running out of freezer space for the homemade batch foods I like to make.

Does anyone have any tips for organizing a chest freezer? I'm already worried about stuff getting lost at the bottom under everything else. Kind of wondering if I can somehow get some kind of shelving system in there, or if that would be too much.

Monthly words to date (April): 53,434
Annual words to date (2023): 158,315
Dinner tonight is: pasta with homemade meatballs

This has been a good weekend!

Yesterday, my sister and I started an Intro to Archery course at a local archery club. It was my sister's first time shooting, and basically mine as well (I did a little bit of archery at a day camp one summer when I was a kid). Since it was the first class of the course, most of the time was taken up with measuring us for equipment, reviewing safety, practicing our stance, etc. but we did get to shoot a total of nine arrows, and it was so much fun! I missed the target entirely a couple of times (to be fair, we were sharing targets, and I was lined up kind of off-center on mine) but I also got a bulls-eye on my final arrow for the day.

We've already signed up for the next series of classes after this one, to continue advancing. It's a little difficult for me, because I'm a naturally very shy person with strangers, and - understandably - the instructors expect you to show a certain amount of assertiveness, since this is a sport that involves firing a weapon. For the sake of safety, it's important that if you're participating, you also show an ability to speak up for yourself and make decisions independently. But the instructors in the course are really great - there were some younger people in the class as well who were also naturally shy, and the very straightforward way the instructors set their expectations with them was helpful for me as well. And it was just nice to be outside doing something that was both physically and mentally engaging.

Also, an interesting fact that arose during the first lesson: it turns out that my sister and I are both cross-dominant, meaning that our dominant eye and dominant hand are on opposite sides. We're both left-eye dominant and right-hand dominant. In cases like this, you basically just pick whether you want to shoot lefty or righty, and if it doesn't work out, you switch. They started my sister shooting lefty and me shooting righty, and it's working out well for both of us so far.

Today we had family dinner for Easter at our father's house. I made a couple of batches of cookies to bring - one batch of walnut chocolate chip cookies, and another batch of the same recipe but with butterscotch chips instead. They were very popular.

My sister and I also took the opportunity to walk our father and brother though the eye dominance test. Dad is right-dominant for both his hand and his eyes, and brother was cross-dominant in the same way that we are. We concluded that it was probable that mom was also cross-dominant and it was genetic. Also notable: apparently cross-dominance can make you predisposed to migraines, and me and my sister both have migraines, and so did mom.

The day went really well otherwise. My brother is doing really well, it's great to see him looking so healthy and engaged.

Between the busy weekend and some other things (I'm pushing through the final draft of Welcome to Dead Man's Creek right now) I'm a bit behind on the next chapter of Space Between Us; it might not come out until next weekend, although I'll try and see if I can get it up before then. But I'm giving myself some breathing room. Ultimately, SBU is more of an experiment for me than anything else - it's the first time I've ever tried to release anything on a chapter-by-chapter basis - and although I am absolutely determined to finish it, it's always going to be the first thing that gives when I'm tight on time.

Monthly words to date (April): 19,626
Annual words to date (2023): 124,507
Dinner tonight is: a handful of mozzarella sticks, plus mango-pear juice with aloe jelly chunks from our local boba tea place (more of a snack after that heavy Easter lunch!)

This week, I had a conversation with my doctor that was long overdue, and now I'm scheduled to see an endocrinologist in July to discuss HRT. (That's hormone replacement therapy - in my case, testosterone, as part of gender transition.)

I feel like I've been in a sort of personal stasis for a long time, caught between two worlds. Since college, I've identified as a man among the people I'm close to in my personal life, but I put off medical and legal transition for a variety of reasons - in part because I prioritized the financial goal of owning my own home - which I do now! My sister and I bought our condo in 2018.

And then when I was finally in a financial position to consider pursuing transition in 2020, the pandemic hit, and then my mother got cancer, and my brother went into liver failure. All in the same year.

It's take 2.5-3 years to reach a state of relative equilibrium again, but I'm finally in a place where I have some energy left to spare for myself, and I'm ready to use it.


Monthly words to date (March): 29,418
Annual words to date (2023): 100,267
Dinner tonight is: fresh cheese pizza purchased from the grocery store hot food counter

I haven't used DreamWidth in roughly a decade, but it feels so much like coming home.

I spent a lot of formative years on this platform, and on LiveJournal. I'm not going to link my old accounts here - for one thing, they're absolutely full of embarrassing stuff that I wrote years and years ago - but I might see if I can log back into those old accounts and link here from there, just in case anyone's still looking for me.

Or maybe not. Sometimes a clean break can be a good thing.

My goal with this blog is to put myself out there more. To reach out to readers who want to hear from me more often than once a month, and have a way you can talk back to me, and talk to each other. I know the standard way to do that these days is with Twitter, or Facebook, or even Discord; but I simply do not enjoy modern social media. Using Twitter or Facebook feels like trying to decipher alien technology. I do enjoy Discord, but the idea of running my own server on a real-time chat client is...intimidating. Maybe I will have a Discord server some day! But for now, I'll start with something that feels familiar. Something that I'm excited to use. And that's DreamWidth.

I'm going to aim to post at least once a week. I think I'll include some word-count stats in every post, because I've been keeping a running word-count spreadsheet this year and I love it. I'm equal parts math nerd and writing nerd, and it turns out that watching the numbers go up is very motivating for me.

And, since this isn't being delivered directly into people's inboxes (unlike my newsletter), I'll feel free to get a little more personal. There are some things I'd like to talk about without feeling like I'm chasing people down and stuffing that information into their email, you know? If nothing else, I'll be able to post my visual art here, and I don't often feel like I can put that stuff in my newsletter.

I'm excited. I gotta go tweak my blog style now.


Monthly words to date (March): 13,754
Annual words to date (2023): 84,603
Dinner tonight is: leftover Chinese food and some homemade chocolate chip walnut cookies.