Let’s see if I can compile all the creative things I’ve done in the past month and a half… oh my.

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!