The past week has been FULL of changes in the less-creative portions of my life: my love has a new job, and I’m changing jobs myself at the end of the month! Lots of paperwork and logistics-discussion and fingers-crossed-for-best-possible-outcomes!

Recently!

Writing

I’ve chosen my NaNoWriMo project! For those unfamiliar, National Novel-Writing Month occurs every November with the goal of writing 50,000 words on a new piece of fiction; this will be my 10th time participating, and hopefully my 9th time crossing the 50k finish line! Normally I choose my project at the last possible moment, lest I change my mind on November 1, so we’ll see if I switch it up at the start!

I maaay have bribed my partner to finish Spots the Space Marine faster by promising him that he could request a short story from me when he was done; his choice was a follow-up to the xin story I’d written a while back. So I wrote that! And I am now re-intrigued by the characters and setting, and made plans to dig deeper into the worldbuilding necessary to make it Actually Good…

Arting

Haven’t aaactually done anything, but we have new beads, which my love made into a breathtaking jade-leafed bracelet for his mama’s birthday…

Worldbuilding

So, about those xin? Yeah. I poured several hours into hashing out with my partner what the world looks like in 2054, 19 years into a peaceable alien occupation, and how the war went, and how the main character’s life would’ve been shaped by living through the war as a child and then the first and roughest stages of “peaceful” cohabitation in the subsequent years. I’ve also gone into detail about the xin’s homeworld, their evolution, and their current physiology, and my partner has fought me every step of the way about the xin’s lack of ears until he lighted upon a possible adaptive reason: brain mites. Xin can close their eyes, mouths, and nostrils, but not their ears, so those with external ears would have been selected against until none of them had any. (The inner ear structure is still intact, albeit vestigial now, and allows them basic hearing through their bodies – they are especially good at picking up bass.)

Languages

Related to the above, I’ve been reading up on American Sign Language, since that’s what the xin have pidginized with their own sign/body language in order to communicate with humans. I am learning some wonderful linguistically-fascinating things about ASL, and also discovering that I remember a whole lot of the basic signs from classes I took in middle school. Huzzah! I am probably going to brush up on that and get moderately conversant in it again, and since my partner wants to learn, we can practice on each other. :D

Musicking

Nothing new to report, other than the nigh-constant study and analysis of the music I listen to every waking hour to glean more insight into how it’s built…

Upcoming

• I will probably go back through the few short stories of the xin, rewrite them to be consistent with the worldbuilding thus far, and contemplate maybe even serializing them!
• I will finish the remaining 22k of edits for my Secret Project!
• I will paint wee mini-sigils for my coworkers before I switch jobs, as parting gifts!
• I will probably practice and record the ocean orisa song I wrote while in Ocean City!