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Coyote Time
21 May 2023 11:03 pmOne 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 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