I start my BRAND NEW job today! I AM EXCITED. Also terrified. But in good ways!

As a result of the job switch, I had the last four days (Thurs-Sun) off. Which means I got to do creative things!

Recently!

Writing

NaNoWriMo has begun! I spent the last four days writing like mad, and I put down just over 22,000 brand new words on The Last Devil, my NaNovel for the year. It is incredibly odd to write a humans-only story! (The only other NaNo that lacked non-human sapient characters was my very first, so this is a nod to the cycle of NaNoing, this being my tenth year participating.)

I know the new job is going to eat up all my time, so my idea was to get as far ahead as I could before starting, then write like hell on the weekends to make my 50k before midnight on the 30th. So far, this is a pretty strong start!

Arting

As planned, I painted tiny sigils for each of my close coworkers, including my bosses, as parting gifts! Each of them has a unique meaning, and each used my coworkers’ favorite colors (and avoided their least favorites) – this was a surprising challenge, since I normally tie the colors to the meanings of the phrase, and I had no control over the colors for this, and had to choose a phrase (or single word) that was meaningful to the person and didn’t clash with the colors!

Here’s the whole set:

Worldbuilding

The Last Devil is a pretty… mundane… fantasy setting for me. I’m used to amazing creatures (aliens, monsters, etc) and complex magical systems and quantum-level tech, so to lack all of that… oh, what a challenge! I gave myself the boon of two non-sentient critters that aren’t strictly par for the course, but everything else is just… Renaissance-level Earth, with magicless, steampunkless humans.

However, in an effort to flip the bird to trends in this kind of fantasy, I switched the gender stereotypes all around. Women are the strong ones, the competent ones, and the ones in charge; men are the beautiful ones, the marginalized ones, and the ones who get massively outnumbered as named characters.

The consequences of this choice are very, very entertaining to write.

Musicking

November is the month of Hometaping! While I cannot promise I’ll be able to record twenty minutes of new music, in addition to participating in NaNoWriMo and putting roots down at my new job, I may as well try… :D

Upcoming

• I will keep working on my NaNoWriMo project!
• …yep, that’s probably it. I have other things what need doing, but a new novel and a new job will keep me quite busy for a bit!