One thing has been consistent, however, no matter where I’ve lived. If I am craving something, I seek to give it to others.

I want a hug, so I give one. I want time and attention, so I give it to someone else who needs it. I want a really enjoyable meal, so I take someone out to dinner.

It’s totally selfless, of course – I am meeting others’ needs before my own.

And it’s totally selfish, of course – by meeting another’s need, I meet my own.

There’s also a wistful aspect to this, a hopefulness lying quiet behind the eyes: if I do this for someone when they don’t ask, maybe someone will do something for me without me asking for it.

That’s the little stuff, though. What about the big stuff? The things that make a day not just memorable, but downright amazing?

I can’t tell you how many times I imagine fantastic scenarios of everyday life in my head. What if a stranger came up to me and gave me a random compliment or started a conversation (an awesome one, of course) out of nowhere? What if someone drove alongside my car, smiling and waving, and went out of their way just to escort me a few extra miles? What if someone made me laugh on a day where I looked a little somber?

But wait, why am I waiting for someone else to act? Why can’t I amaze someone else like that?

What if I went to a coffeeshop with a book or my laptop and put on the table a folded card that said Hey, come sit and chat? What if I walked up to someone and said “Hi, you look awesome and interesting. I’d like to know you.“? What if I went to dinner with my sketchbook and, as I was leaving, gave the server whatever I just made? What if I sat in the park with my guitar and actually met the eyes of the people walking past? What if I saw someone who looked kinda down and invited them to tea or lunch or just dessert?

It’d blast through my mundane filter, that’s for damn sure. People just don’t do these things, except in rare and amazing cases. Even in a small city like this, people don’t meet each other’s eyes and smile. There is no sitting-on-the-stoop-after-dinner-and-chatting. And sure, I grew up in a tiny town, but it was in the mountains, and we didn’t have enough neighbors to really get our social on, either.

What would happen if you went out of your way to give someone the exact thing you’ve been craving? Would you find yourself as fulfilled as the other person, or even moreso?

Hello world!!!

Recently!

Writing

Writing is, ironically, the one thing I have done the least over the past six weeks. However, I did take the time to reread the rough draft of Everything To Lose and my work-in-progress Egyptian fairytale, When The Sun Bathed In Blood… and renewed my determination to finish the first draft of The Last Devil so I can get back to the other projects. I’m also planning on writing three short stories soon: an Everything To Lose outtake and two retellings of two Egyptian myths, which will be submitted to The Kemetic Storytellers for future episodes. :D

Arting

I have done ALL THE ART THINGS. Ever. All of them.

Don’t believe me? Let’s see. In the past six weeks, I’ve made…

• 7 sigil paintings
• 3 myth paintings
• 4 mini-paintings
• 6 hieroglyph paintings
• 5 pieces of jewelry

… for a total of 25 NEW THINGS. Oh my goodness.

An awful lot of those were gifts… but some of them were commissions from my coworkers! My company held a craft fair a couple weeks back, and I submitted this necklace… and won first place! Proceeds went to charity, and the lady who won the necklace commissioned me for matching earrings. Word got around, and I wound up selling everything I’d had on Etsy and getting a handful of commissions in the process! I am amazed and delighted at this.

To see pretty much all of the new pieces, check out the first three pages of the Mythic Curios archive!

Worldbuilding

Say hello to the critters on your right! No, as per the course, I don’t know what they’re called. But I’ve been happily digging into their physiology and temperaments. They have evolved more slowly than humans, due to less-intense ecological pressure, but they are indeed sapient tool-users.

A couple interesting notes…

For one, they’re omnivorous foragers/scavengers, loosely social (traveling with a twin or joining up with another twin-pair), and wide-ranging in open lands. They’re pretty big – roughly the size of a moose, though their build is a little more rhino-like than deer-like – and tight spaces between trees are not their forte. That trunk you see is forked, giving them hand-like dexterity.

For two, they’re unisexed. Humans would call them female, since they’re all child-bearing, but here’s the interesting part: they aren’t asexual. They’re born as twin pairs, and the more dominant twin becomes the fertile one – the other twin doesn’t produce the proper hormones unless the fertile twin dies or leaves long-term. This makes for a tight social bond between the breeding individual and the other, who becomes the protector. When in heat, the breeding individual will seek out another breeding individual, and – using the handy-dandy trunk – they’ll exchange genetic information; their babies are not direct clones of the parent. During the mutual pregnancy and the infancy of the younglings, the two twin-pairs will stay together for protection, and the two non-breeders serve as guardians and look-outs while the two parents raise their children until they can safely split and resume their more-solitary lifestyle.

…did I mention humans are trying to colonize their planet and see them as nothing but food-animals?

Languages

Fun fact: I handwrite Kalash as quickly as I write all-caps English.

Newer fun fact: Thanks to six half-day training sessions at work, wherein which I sat in a room and did nothing but listen to people talk, I have been practicing Kommu, my letter-for-letter cypher. This weekend, when I settled in to try to write a song in Kommu, I found I could translate on the fly… outloud. Without writing it down first. O_O

Now I know why I have such a terrible short-term memory. All of my synapses are busy mapping letters. Oh, brain.

Musicking

FAWM has started! :D!

For the unfamiliar, FAWM is February Album-Writing Month, a musical peer to NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 14 new songs in the month of February – no length requirement and no specification of voice/instruments/etc. Recording and sharing is optional, but encouraged.

I participated last year and, let me tell you, that was an amazing trial-by-fire experience. I did not, in fact, succeed in writing 14 songs – I think I only got 10 or 11 – but this year, with the power of GarageBand to supplement my voice-and-acoustic-guitar pieces, I feel very confident. :D

So far, I’ve gotten two songs – you can hear them both right here!

Upcoming

• Create and record at least 12 more songs in the month of February for FAWM!
• Finish The Last Devil before the end of the month!
• Two new hieroglyph paintings: Set and Bast!
• Three new short stories!

Female asses are… mysterious creatures. ~David Attenborough

The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel. ~Steve Furtick

Acquire inner peace and a multitude will find their salvation near you. ~Catherine De Hueck Doherty

What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful. ~Brené Brown

Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely: no part left out. ~Izumi Shikibu

You’re going to mess up sometimes. But the good part is, you get to decide how you’re gonna mess it up. ~Marilyn Monroe

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing. ~E. E. Cummings

The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace. ~Carlos Santana

He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Much like how a flock of crows is called a “murder,” a collection of mistakes is called a “life.” ~Robert Bennett

When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your self is a sun with a thousand rays. ~Picasso

When we are gentle with ourselves, we are naturally gentle with others. ~Sakyong

BUT FIRST, I would like to let you all know that I now have a Pinterest account, where there are many shiny things. Come see!

This Week’s Shinies:

• First Transgender to be Ordained as Catholic Priest – Progress! Huzzah!
• R’ha, a Scifi Short Film – This is freaking amaaazing! And NO HUMANS.
• Billions of Earthlike Planets in Milky Way – *geeks out!*
• The Rainbow Serpent…s
• World’s largest natural sound archive now fully digital and fully online.
• 1912’s Perfect Woman Was From Brooklyn, Weighed 171 Lbs, Had Pear-Shaped Body – This. Yes.
• A sweet, slightly sad comic about friend-love.
• MCA Hogarth’s Year Round-Up – If you want to know how an indie author/artist makes her monies, this is a refreshing insight into the work it takes.
• Draenei Barbershop, by Kyoht – Because I am still a WoW geek. =3
• How to say “Happy New Year!” in approximately a zillion languages. – I know it’s a bit belated, but I still think it’s awesome.
• Writing is for the Heart-Broken
• Tolkien on Language Invention
• Real Spaceman Tweets to Fake Spaceman, From Space – So much geekery, so much love.
• Female Parkour on Youtube – Jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly amazeballs.
• Moments That Restored Our Faith in Humanity – or made us cry like babies. Ahem.
• Supporting authors when your heart is bigger than your wallet
• Receive a personalized piece of new artwork in your mailbox every month! – An extremely affordable offering from a very talented artist!
• Tor Reviews Good Books – And Wants Recs – Specifically, in fact, recommendations of books by or featuring women and/or genderqueer people. :D!
• Real Book Tea – O_O
• A Quick Checklist for Books Reviews – Useful for those of us less-accustomed to leaving thinky reviews!
• WTF, Evolution – “Evolution, you are drunk. Go home.”

Current Earworm: Wolf by First Aid Kit. I cannot get this out of my head!

Some of those weeks were holidays, and boy howdy did I do so much crafting and driving and enjoying-family-time and snow-watching. Some of those weeks were preparations for my new year, which included a lot of wrapping-up and future-planning. And the rest of those weeks were recovering from a really busy time, both at work and at home, and trying to do further wrap-ups before February 2… which happens to be today.

To my credit, I’ve been blogging pretty consistently all January over on my Kemetic blog, Grave Moss & Stars. And I’ve still been earmarking the links I want to share in the compilation posts. And I’ve still been creating a metric tonne of paintings and jewelry, which I will share in the Monday creativity post.

I just… haven’t gotten the gumption to resume posting here. Suspecting I have fewer than 3 readers didn’t help my motivation. ^^; And, as you probably know, the longer you let a silence linger, the harder it is to break it.

BUT.

Since it is February 2, I am back.

And I will resume posting, at least twice a week, and hopefully on the same days. (Though my Friday link posts will probably move to Saturday…)

And if you’re out there reading, give me a wave. :)

This post written explicitly to break the ice and the silence, to pave a way back in. I know it’s useless otherwise. More goodies on the way, though!

This Week’s Shinies:

• Dave’s Mapper – A dungeon/city/map generator with a great hand-drawn feel!
• Stars (requires Chrome!) – This is jaw-dropping and just… I LOVE SPACE YOU GUYS
• Celebrating Women in Tech: Grace Hopper – She invented the first code compiler!
• How eBooks Saved My Father’s Reading – This is a pretty awesome thing. :D
• Photos from Seattle’s First Day of Marriage Equality – Yep, I got misty-eyed.
• Hack The Cover – On designing a good ebook cover.
• Dogs Can Drive – Yes, literally. O_O!
• Cheetahs in Super Slow-Mo
• The Star Trek Medical Tricorder Is Real – !!! Why hello, Future, please do come in.

Current Earworm: Forever One by Kobra and the Lotus, thanks to my sister seeing them live as an opening band recently!

The Friday Quote:

Don’t let your struggle become your identity. ~Ralston Bowles

Instagrams of the Week:

In the spirit of the season! Our in-progress tree, and OH MY GOD IT SNOWED A TINY TINY BIT THIS IS INCREDIBLE BECAUSE IT’S TEXAS:

Recently!

Writing

I… slacked. I finished one chapter of The Last Devil and started another, but there’s not a ton of progress there. =/

Arting

A wee gift painting! The tiny letters spell out “ocean heart” in Kalash.

Languages

More word study posts in Uhjayi! One all about love, and another about forms of “change.”

Musicking

I’ve begun the process of using GarageBand for full-length, with-lyrics songs. It is considerably more challenging than making entirely random go-with-the-flow instrumentals. BUT I SHALL CONQUER.

Upcoming

• Still working to finish the rough draft of The Last Devil before J and I go visit family for Christmas!
• Crafting Winter gifts for family!
• Four Egyptian mini-paintings! Yes, still.

This Week’s Shinies:

• Sample Issue of New Language Magazine – *geeks out*
• Ancient Greek Sky vs Ancient Chinese Sky – Because starmaps are always beautiful, and the cultural differences are amazing.
• Lexember – A new conlang word every day for December! What’s not to love?
• Earthrise by MCAH – A new scifi serial, free to read and already awesome!
• Poseidon never looked this good.
• A very odd gait. – The video is… well, kind of surreal!
• This is your brain. This is your brain on harmony.
• World’s oldest D20.

The Friday Quote:

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule. ~Samuel Butler

Instagrams of the Week:

On the left, you have my friend from the third floor balcony of my workplace; on the right, you can see what a well-insulated nap I had! (Two dogs, two cats, one me, and one panda pillow.)