Hello again Fellow Adventurer,
It’s difficult for me to believe that whole months have passed since I last posted and, for all intents and purposes, basically fell off the face of Internet-Earth. But I have a good reason. Dear reader, a week after posting the previous post, I started a new full-time every-day-in-the-office-can-you-believe-it job.
A quick update
The office is in the same general direction as my previous office job, but quite a bit closer, so the commute is more of a time for me to get into and out of work-mode than what seems to be endless hours spent in traffic. And it helps that I take public transport as I get to listen to music or a podcast, crochet (because it’s easier to stop in the middle of a row than knitting… at least for me), and people watch.
The great thing about being able to crochet basically through muscle memory and without having to look at it the whole time, is that you can watch people (or TV, for that matter – even with subtitles) while you’re busy. It also apparently works as a deterrent and you get two seats on the bus to yourself. Magic.
Also, I really enjoy this job and the people at the office are all nice, and that’s always a good thing. I’ll admit that it all happened quite fast and it has taken my brain a moment to catch up with my new routine after all that had happened during the past few months (okay past few years).
Line edits for Where the Stars Used to Sing
I’m finally busy writing again – albeit slowly – and am busy with line edits for all the flash fiction in Where the Stars Used to Sing and deciding on a final order for the stories. It really is time that I finish this collection once and for all and get it out into the world!
As my brain is still in recovery mode after the dumpster fire, this will probably be about two months from now…
I’m overall happy with the stories for Stars, so it really is just doing the last edits and cleanup and making sure that they’re all as good as I can get them before publishing the final volume.
Books I’ve finished and books I’m currently reading
I’ve also been reading a lot more (huzzah!) than I’ve read in quite some time. (My mind is finally feeling more like my own again and it’s awesome.) Some of the books are more self-help type books that specifically focuses on creativity, while others are essay collections, and the final one is a book about books:
The Story Solution by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant
Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World by Clara Parkes
Growing Gills: How to find creative focus when you’re drowning in your daily life, Jessica Abel
Endless Ideas: Master Bottomless Creativity, A Stone Tablet Single by Sean M. Platt and Neeve Silver
The Amazing Thing About the Way it Goes: Stories of Tidiness, Self-Esteem and Other Things I Gave Up On by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History, Edward Brooke-Hitching
Another book that I’d like to get my hands on is The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany.
It’s a year until the next SASMARS Conference! (And I’m already preparing)
With a year to go until the next SASMARS (The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) Conference – with the intriguing theme of “Beneath the Surface” – I’ve started to ponder what I can write a paper on.
So far it’s a bit of a vague idea, but it involves Yggdrasil, Mimir’s Well, the Norns, and Odin sacrificing his eye and hanging himself to get wisdom/knowledge. I’m using both Eddas and perhaps some of the sagas. I’ve found some papers on Academia and JSTOR that I’m currently working through, but I’m afraid my ideas are still a bit amorphous. Hopefully I’ll have a more concrete idea soon! (And I’ll try my best not to fall into a rabbit hole!)
Then…
So, while I’m working on getting my brain unstuck from the rut that it’s fallen into, a thing called “Alphabet Superset” came along. Here is the video explaining where it came from and what it is:
Well, I went and signed up for it (it’s officially starting today! [4 September 2023]). I’m hoping that it’ll act like kick-start to get me creating again and get me back into a creative routine as well.
I’ve decided to write flash fiction – although I’m capping it at 3 000 words and not 1 500 because you never know – for the challenge and will post it here on the Substack every week. (Gasp!) You see what I mean by a kick-start?
As theme I’ve chosen “Textile and Fibre Arts and Crafts”. This will allow me to incorporate various other elements as well (like mythology, folklore, consciousness, etc.). It will most likely also help to serve as inspiration for Ruon Chronicles as some of the research, especially, will overlap. Poor me, I’ll probably have to read all the Piecework Magazine back issues…
I’ve decided not to simply focus on one craft within textile/fibre arts and crafts to give me extra space to play in. Lots of these crafts are also multi-faceted and can easily intermingle – for example lace knitting, as opposed to other forms of lace or tatting or, say, Irish crochet.
So, here’s to the next few months of creating and writing – cheers!