West Coast Wildfires

I just want to let everyone know that I’m ok. I’m surrounded by fires, but there is little chance of those fires actually reaching Salem. Monday night, we had a strong wind system come in from the east while we’re under dry conditions. It exacerbated existing wildfires in the Cascades and started new ones by knocking down power lines in both the east and west ranges. Tuesday morning, I woke up two hours after sunrise in pre-dawn darkness, the whole world cast in an apocalyptic red glow. The day remained dark and eerily red, and it darkened to dusk two hours before dusk as well.

Conditions are improving gradually, the skies have faded from orange to yellow to gray. The ashfall is less today. We now have cooler, moister air coming in from the ocean and hopefully a little rain early next week. However, these fires have been catastrophic for my region. Places I know and love have been razed. Lives and homes have been lost. The worst part is knowing that this likely isn’t a freak occurrence. We are suffering the consequences of greed, selfishness, and a blatant disregard for not only the delicate balance of our ecosystems, but for our own future. I have to hope we can turn it around and learn from our mistakes.

Friday Update #11

I’m emerging from the absolute hell of serotonin withdrawals. Physical symptoms are abating but now to see if my brain can balance out production to a survivable degree on it’s own because right now, I’m really struggling.

Garden Update

Everything is going well. I’ve been planning some new projects in the front yard for when I have the energy to work on them.

Dollmaster & Vagabonds

Everything has been on hold while I acclimate, which is endlessly frustrating because I was doing SO. GOOD. with the pomodoro technique, and now I’ve got to start over with conditioning myself after my downtime.

Worldbuilding

I may not be working on my main projects, but my hyper fixation on the Forsaken Land has been haunting me. When I’ve been able to, I’ve done some work on the wiki, written down some ideas, ironed out character timelines, considered some story arcs. I also worked on a new map! I blew up and printed the section of Meg’s map, traced it, and have been reworking my original concepts into the new map. Here’s the almost-finished product (still need to identify a few new features). I finally justified my purchase of a set of colored mechanical pencils.

Friday Update #10

I should just accept it. Biweekly. But if I do that, will I then slip to monthly? Because realizing I forgot after the fact makes me more motivated to do it the next week!

Garden Update

I did manage to do some garden work in the evenings off and on. I cleaned up my tomato planters–trimmed off lower leaves and thinned them out, cleaned up the companion plants, and gave them a new layer of topsoil and fertilizer. I’ve been able to harvest leaves off the kale and chard multiple times. I also had my first zucchini, lots of sugar snap peas, and herbs! The vining plants (morning glory, moonflower, and spanish flag) that I planted at the bottom of the racks are climbing the racks just as I wanted, but no flowers yet. In the flower bed, the spanish flag and a couple sweetpeas that avoided being slugchow are growing and flowering! I think the soil here still needs more enrichment, but I’ll get there after a couple seasons of permaculture.

Inside, I’m expanding my plant collection too! I’ve got spider plants everywhere that I repotted a few months ago in coconut coir and have been watering with distilled water because they’re very sensitive to fluoride in tap water. I also must confess that I killed many succulents by caring for them much more than necessary. However, I’ve been doing my research! I also learned how easily you can propagate succulents, so I’m doing that too. This week I set out to try and find a venus flytrap, with little luck (but I’m picking one up today from a local gardener!). Instead, I came home with a new porthos (my mom accidentally killed my old one by leaving it outside overnight when we had a surprise snowstorm) and a zwartkop or black rose aeonium on clearance!

I started growing some more basil indoors to avoid aphids. I also cleaned up my little greenhouse–still need to get a new panel on top after Victor fell on it, but Ikea has been limiting services so I put it off. I have my avocados in there, brought in some of the thyme, started some more marjoram and catnip. The catnip hasn’t sprouted, so I think I’m going to toss that soil and plant some perilla instead.

The Dollmaster & Vagabonds

I made some great progress, but this week I’ve been dealing with some health stuff, so I haven’t been feeling well and struggling to focus. I’m about half-way through the revision of the chapter 5 material, added some new content to that chapter.

As for Vagabonds, I was eager to get back to work on it… and then all my edits from when I came back to it hadn’t saved. Normally I have autosave turned on, but it had been disabled somehow, my computer auto-updated, closed my docs, and then reopened it without recovering the edits. Nothing kills motivation like losing work you felt good about.

World Building & Other Writing

So I had some ideas about Danaij floating around and I started revising the original article and putting it into the wiki. This also led to me thinking about the Forsaken Land storyline I have planned, and ended up writing 10 pages and over 6k words on an erotic backstory piece for my character Adriel. So, um. There’s that. Maybe that’ll get some attention on Wattpad if I put it there.

Friday Update #7

I missed last week, but I’m back this week. And whew, what a week it has been in this world. I haven’t gotten much writing done, again. In part, it is the continuation of isolation. Both my focus and my partner’s focus on his work from home is wavering. The first month or so was great for a couple of introverts like us, but we’re feeling restless and need outside human contact. We’re brain-fogged, our minds are begging for a change of scenery and new stimuli. My son has also been trying a new medication and it has been severely impacting his mood while we determine an appropriate dosage. This is his last week of school and we’re trying to wrap up his coursework. Also, I’m getting really sick of sitting on the floor to work because Sung kicked me out of the office while he’s working from home (tbh, neither of us can focus on work while the other is in the room).

The other part of my lack of focus are world events, and American events. I have watched, horrified by the brutality being faced by protesters nationwide. Angered by agitators, often the police themselves, who are giving themselves excuses to escalate peaceful protests into riots. There have been protests against police brutality against black Americans for years. I was a child during the Rodney King riots, which happened a couple years after I left California. There have been protests and riots over extrajudicial executions and careless murders of black people over the last three decades. Some of these have led to small shifts in laws and regulations, but it hasn’t addressed the core of of the problem, which is cultural.

A friend of mine said something that made me think. She said, “white folks: don’t divorce yourself from whiteness because you’re not like other white folks.” It’s not uncommon to hear white liberals/progressives who are anti-racist say things like, “I hate sharing a race with other white people,” or “On behalf of white people, I’m sorry,” and other similar statements. You’re not a monster for feeling this way, but you also aren’t helping BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) or yourself. I have felt this way in the past too, and I understand that people who say these things are trying to show their care. However, trying to excise yourself from your whiteness helps no one and by believing yourself removed from it, you are turning a blind eye to the lingering effects of white supremacy that influence your life.

I am white and I am infuriated by the actions and beliefs of those who share my heritage and complexion. But I can’t just deny my whiteness because it has shaped my life, though it was something I was never aware of until I educated myself.

My immediate family was very progressive and anti-racist. My grandparents have often spoken up against racism (and homophobia). My mother carried on this mindset into my upbringing. My father wasn’t much of an impact on my life, though my mother told me that his family was ashamed of their mixed heritage (my great-grandmother was supposedly half-black and half-Seminole, though my DNA test only showed a trace of African ancestry). My stepdad came from a racist upbringing–he told me several times how his parents told him not to touch black people because their color might “rub off on them”–but he rejected their ideas and believed in being anti-racist.

The fact that my immediate family was empathetic and anti-racist was not enough. The moment I stepped outside that bubble, whether it was school, extended family, TV, or just being in public, I was influenced by white supremacy. I still passively absorbed racism from my environment and my lack of awareness. I have committed acts of microaggressions and simply been ignorant because I was isolated in a primarily white society. It’s taken years to unlearn those things and there might yet be more things for me to unpack.

For approximately 15 years, I was in a relationship with a bi-racial man–half-black, half-white. We had a son together. While he is a person who caused me a lot of trauma and that I have many personal issues with, none of that is relevant for this topic. Through him, I observed a great deal of what it was like to be black in America. He told me how he was curb-stomped by skinheads when he was just 12 years old, walking through his neighborhood. How his white friend was pulled over while he was a passenger, the cop coming to the passenger side, looking directly at him and asking him for his ID. A number of other incidents where he was harshly reminded of his “othering” in society simply for his complexion. It left him with traumatic scars. He grew up with a white mother, a white step-father, and a biracial brother, surrounded by predominantly white friends. Racism influenced his entire life.

You hear white people frequently say, “I’m not racist, I have black friends/a black partner/a mixed child.” I had probably said this, or at least thought that my relationship with my ex meant that I was excused from racism. Looking back, after years of self-work, I see how that statement is absolutely false. I still was tainted by white supremacy. I didn’t fully grasp his experience as a black man in America until after we had separated and I engaged in that self-work.

My mother confessed that she had been reluctant to accept my ex at first because he was black, though she was disappointed in her knee-jerk response and took it as a learning opportunity to better herself. My stepdad would make racist jokes in a flippant manner and my ex would just laugh along. I saw a lot of that with him. Microaggressions were shrugged off. He’d laugh off racist jokes. He made himself palatable to white people because he just did not have the energy to fight back for every little slight leveled at him. I didn’t even see this until later. Having a black boyfriend/husband did not excuse me from racism, nor does his relationship to any other white person in his life excuse any of their racism.

White people, no matter how progressive we think we might be, have a responsibility to constantly evaluate our thoughts and behavior when it comes to race. White supremacy is insidious and toxic and deeply ingrained in our society. It lives in the roots and grows outwards. To deny the influence it has on one’s self, as a white person, is to ignore the sickness. To treat it, you must confront it, uproot it, and cut it out. We all have this sickness in us and we can’t ignore it. And this is not just for each individual, because the sickness won’t be cured until we destroy the source.

I see our society on the brink of an enormous shift. I am both terrified and hopeful. Terrified for the violence, suffering, and pain that comes with change. Hopeful because at the other end of this, I can see the potential for a better world. Hold fast, stay strong, and keep fighting the good fight.


The Dollmaster

Working on Chapter 4 slowly but surely.

Vagabonds

I haven’t been working on this since I’m slogging through trying to focus on the other project, but Lianora has been on my mind a lot and I’m mulling over this interpretation of her character, as well as my earlier version of her.


Today is my birthday, but it also would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday. Breonna was murdered in her home by police who invaded her home on March 13th in Louisville KY. Without warning or announcement, police entered her home acting on a search warrant in the middle of the night. Believing that they were intruders, Breonna’s boyfriend shot in self-defense and defense of their property. The police opened fire inside the home and struck Breonna eight times. Instead of offering your well-wishes to me, I request that you do something for her family–either donating to her aunt’s fundraiser, joining a protest, or at the least, signing a petition to make certain that those responsible for her death are held to account.

Friday Update #6

My focus is gradually coming back. It’s a fickle beast, swayed not only my deficiency in certain neurotransmitters, but seemingly by the weather itself. Medications can only do so much, I suppose. No garden picture this week, but things are still gradually growing and we’ve had enough alternating sun and rain that everything is staying watered and getting good growing light.

The Dollmaster

I’m back to work on revising chapter 4! I made some good progress Monday. If only I could do that well EVERY day.

Worldbuilding

I’ve been stuck for awhile on figuring out how to do infoboxes in a wiki, but I’m starting to understand now. I wish I could outsource the work to someone else, but I’m afraid it’s only me. This week I’ve been doing some research and adding extensions for the wiki. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to use them and satisfy my organizational needs.

Friday Update #5

I got a little bit of work done, but my focus has been pretty bad this week. I didn’t sleep well last night and I’ve been stressed about my son as he becomes more and more teenager. Five more days until he’s officially a teen. We had a sunny weekend, followed by some good rain, so my plants are happy. So far I can really only harvest lettuce, but I can’t wait for tomatoes and strawberries and fresh herbs!

Vagabonds

I wrapped up a scene about Lianora. It’s been so long since I wrote about her that I’m discovering her all over again. She may be interesting–I can see readers disliking her at first glance from an outside perspective, but from her own perspective, she certainly shows a lot of complexity and room for growth. Her tense relationship with Thalia came up and may play a role in her development, even if Thalia is nowhere around.

The Dollmaster

I got back to work on revising chapter four, exploring Talen’s upbringing and setting his stage. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted. Focus has been such a rarity this week.

Friday Update #4

I’m starting to get myself back together and finding new methods to cope with my restlessness. I hope everyone else is doing well and staying healthy!

I’ve made progress on my gardening and I think I have everything planted that I want to grow. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to handle squashes, but I do have some sprouting and it’ll be good to have fresh zucchini on hand again.

My set-up (mostly) finished this week. Lots of companion planting!

Vagabonds

I didn’t finish Camp NaNoWriMo satisfactorily, as expected, but I have made a little more progress on the story since. I haven’t switched back over to working on Dollmaster. I’d like to wrap up a scene or two first. I’ve had some real moments of good flow writing fresh material from Zharis’s and Lianora’s perspectives. I am having trouble reworking the original role-play, but after that, I’ll be less constrained.

Other Writing

Yesterday I started work on a personal essay on emotional regulation and ADHD. For the last week or so, I was mulling over my understanding of the topic as it pertains to my experience, and as things really started to crystallize, I figured that I should just get it all out and share my experience with the emotional disregulation piece of ADHD.

EKD Archive

There were some issues with the EKD forum that had to be addressed. Firstly, Dreamhost upgraded all sites to a new version of PHP, but the old forum had been manually set to an older version when I transferred because of some issues setting it up. Secondly, when the old domain expired, I realized I had never fixed the MySQL hostname. With the PHP issue, I decided to just go ahead and update the forum to the latest 3.2 phpBB version, as I had with the Aserra forum. Had to manually fix the hostname in the config file, but everything is up to date. The old style is gone, but oh well. What matters is that the archive is still there.

Friday Update #3

Aaaand things crashed back down again. I think I discovered my limit to isolation (with family) is six weeks. After that, I start wanting to burst out of my skin for a change. At least that’s what happened. I just got hit with so much restlessness that nothing but a change in pace could fix. We couldn’t go anywhere, so I ended up just working out some of my frustrations gardening, and then talking to an old friend over the phone. It worked, for now, but I expect I’m going to be feeling the urge to flee again soon.

Vagabonds

I finished out NaNo with just under 5k words, which is better than I’ve ever done, but not as much as I would have liked. I’ve been struggling to get my focus back this week after breaking. I’m also a little stuck on how to work in satisfactory introductions for our major characters, but I’m most of the way there.

The Dollmaster

With Camp NaNo done, I expect to return to working on the next scene in my chapter four revision, but I would also like to wrap up the current scene in Vagabonds first.

Here’s hoping that May is a little less bumpy for me than April.

Friday Update #2

Things are coming back together this week after last week’s mess. Distance learning is being worked out, but I still need to be involved a fair bit to keep him on track. I really feel for the parents of multiple school-age children right now.

I reached out to a number of people from the role-play and I would like to put together a monthly newsletter. I only got a response from a couple folks so far, so I may end up messaging people individually through other means. I don’t know if it’s quarantine or just the result of revisiting old memories, but I feel the urge to reach out even further to old RPG friends. If you would be interested in a newsletter, please let me know.

Vagabonds

Currently, I’ve been focusing my effort on the Voyage to Ertia/Vagabonds rewrite for Camp NaNoWriMo. I’ve made a good bit of progress off and on this week, and I’m hoping I can push for more. I don’t know if I’ll hit my 20k word count goal but if I get even half-way there it’ll be a good start and a lot of good practice for daily writing. You can keep track of my progressing word count on my NaNo profile.

The Dollmaster & World Building

Progress on The Dollmaster is being paused for the rest of April so I can focus on NaNo, but I will continue with the revision of chapter 4 in May.

Worldbuilding on the wiki, likewise, is paused while I catch up on a week’s worth of missed work for NaNo.

Maybe the start of a weekly update

Maybe I can stick to something like this. We’ll see.

The last couple weeks were pretty good. I was productive, I made progress on the things I’ve been working on, it was fine. Life was good.

Then, Distance Learning arrived.

My son started his online lessons for school. The instructors themselves had individually organized their plans, but for us, it was a bit chaotic to start. In true 12 year old fashion, I got a lot of pushback and arguing. Though, by the end, I set it up for him to work with limited distractions and get used to the lay out. Maybe it’ll be ok. Holding his hand through his school work killed my time to work, so I really got nothing done Aserra-wise this week. Add in the tragedy of saying goodbye to a beloved pet and it was just a wash. But here’s the current projects:


The Dollmaster

So, I have updated with a scattering of chapters over the years, but I’m doing a final refinement of the story organization now. To clarify, this is the current progress…

  1. Prologue: Voris claims his first victim, Avaline, along with her friend Chera.
  2. Chapter 1: Naclia and Terin emerge from the Ardir and enter the village of Worrell at the border of Kosony.
  3. Chapter 2: Naclia and Terin have found themselves in a bar fight, but the merchant Laban steps in and takes them under his care.
  4. Chapter 3: The story switches to Naclia’s perspective as she reflects on a previous visit to the village and overhears some rumors before departing with Laban.
  5. Chapter 4: Currently in progress. We switch to Talen’s perspective at his family estate where he is preparing to meet his bride and dealing with old scars–physical and emotional.
  6. Chapter 5: Talen meets his bride for the first time, the day before the wedding. Forthcoming.
  7. Chapter 6: The day of the wedding begins. Pharen is introduced in the village and meets Thalia, who is to officiate the Drecloud-Kyrden wedding. Meanwhile, Talen is preparing for the ceremony. Forthcoming.

I am currently working on revising my original draft of Talen’s introduction, which may have been another number, but is now chapter four. I rewrote the role-plays for this segment entirely, but it’s also a bit to heavy on exposition and inner dialogue that I’m trying to whittle down to something easier to digest. The original draft also covered the entire day and a lot of information, so breaking it down into more manageable pieces is important too. Chapter 4 will introduce us to Talen in the present, his home and family, and end with his elder sister’s arrival and her giving him a stern lecture that snaps things into perspective for him.

The next chapter will cover Adra’s arrival and introduce her worries over Voris. After that, I hopefully won’t have to edit Pharen and Thalia’s introductory chapter because I did a big revision of that in a class. Some of my original chapters need to be split in half because they ended up way too long.


Vagabonds

My second project is what I may spend the rest of the month primarily focused on after losing a week of working time. I started the month with about a page and decided to use it for Camp NaNiWriMo. “Vagabonds” is the beta working title for what began as the Voyage to Ertia RP. What I’ve decided to do is work on an episodic sort of series for Wattpad using this RPG’s first plot as a starting point for “Season 1.”

Wattpad is a good jumping off place to get my name out there and build a network, hopefully a fan base, in a writing community. As I want to publish The Dollmaster traditionally, I didn’t want to put that out there. My attention to detail on the Dollmaster manuscript is extremely precise, but this story will be less editing, more just getting the story out there.

The first installment of Vagabonds will jump off from our RP with Zharis, Rissya, Zaole, Gurt, Lianora, and Breagan helping a girl escape an arranged marriage in Samonight to be with an Ertian merchant’s daughter. Their ferry to Ertia will be attacked by a privateer hired by the girl’s father and betrothed, whom they must escape and fight off. It will probably also include a lot of character building to establish our main party.

The second arc will merge with the “Scourge of Thervordel” RP, where they solve that mystery, pick up one or two characters from there, then continue onto Ertia for the third arc. After that, I would like to explore Ertia with them and pursue personal plots–Zharis’ reunion with his sister, Rissya finding other Asath and uncovering her birthright, Lianora’s “quest,” etc. I don’t have an end point, but I want to explore the world, give these characters their resolutions, and just get ideas out. I may give the school RP the same treatment in the future too.


Worldbuilding

I was trying to keep this part to the weekends while I did more work during the weekday, but nothing got done last weekend. Anyway, I’ve been working on the wiki in the last couple months, putting up worldbuilding stuff I have, revising, updating, adding some more here and there. I was a little scattered, but I wanted to focus on updating the races next. The weekend before last I completed the Mariel revision. Before that, I did some work on the Nafod, and the Zaedyn article was revised a couple years ago, so I just copy and pasted and did a little editing on what I had there.

I’m making a few tweaks to certain aspects of the races from the original drafts we used during the RP–things to make the world a little more interesting and dynamic. Here’s some of the changes to races I’ve made in the last couple years while I was revising off and on.

Iengi

The giant race has been altered from being just big and dumb. They were an early front-runner for the dominant human race on Thiskel. They established societies and had a rich culture, but the War of the Gods devastated them. Their lifespan is an increase by a factor of three, but this doesn’t just affect how long they live, it also affects their maturation rate. Unlike the elemental races that mature at the same rate as humans and then their aging process freezes, Iengi take three times as long as humans to reach maturity. They have been gradually dying out for thousands of years and live in scattered small populations that have failed to recover what they lost.

Kiar

The Kiar were originally short lived, but I’ve made them the opposite of Iengi. They age faster than humans by a factor of three, meaning they live shorter lives and mature much faster. Their origin has also been moved to Ageond (the original continent) and I’ve made them the progenitors of the Kuzo. The ancestral Kiar were corrupted during the war of the gods to make the kuzo a fast-breeding, fast-maturing, and easily replenished army of footsoldiers for the followers of the dark gods. Kiar who survived the pogrom in Ageond escaped to Kalesten where they established new isolated colonies.

Kuzo

As mentioned above, the kuzo originated from Kiar corrupted by the dark gods and their followers. Their intelligence was decreased, but there may be occasional throwbacks, like Gurt. As they were essentially canon fodder, their handlers did not often care about them, so when survivors of the war retreated, kuzo were abandoned throughout the world and quickly went feral.

Mariel

Increased the amount of time spent on land to five years, as one year is not enough time to significantly travel in a pre-industrial world.

Idayn

I will be adding another (I know) Idayn off-shoot. I’m not entirely sure what I will call them, but they will be East Asian in appearance, as they are descended of Idayn and western Thiskel humans. The Idayn, being as uptight as they are, were unwilling to accept mix-blood children after the war, and with their long lifespans, these children would never fully integrate into human society. Instead, they took up residence in forests to the west of the Chasm where they have intermingled with Nafod and humans, eventually homogenizing into an Idaynian race with the phenotypical features of the humans of the region. I’m not certain if they will have any inherent magic, but I think they may have a magic system of their own devising.

Nafod

The progenitor race of the Ochae’nafod, Dra’nafod, and Marfod did not have a fixed form of shape-shifting, but within a few generations after their creation, the Nafod split into the three current races, then further into distinct tribes bound to a single species in the case of Ochae’ and Dra’nafod. Crossing the different Nafod races will lead to a throw-back with more shape-shifting freedom, though descendants of this individual will be likely to return to a fix form of shape-shifting.

Marfod

I haven’t done this entry yet, but I want to mark this idea out. Marfod will be predominantly an all-female race, but each individual is capable of transforming into a male for reproductive purposes (like some fish). I’m not sure how it will work (one time period of their lives? Triggered by some dynamic?).


So there’s the summary. I may end up doing some catch-up work on Vagabonds this weekend for NaNo. Fingers crossed!