Ceramics and transcriptions

I’ve been keeping busy! Sort of. Too busy to write blog posts, apparently, or not busy enough to have anything in particular to write about? Maybe both. Anyway I have been doing lots of novel writing, and also some working and some day drinking with friends, and lots of going to the gym and yoga, […]

Updates and Herbs

I haven’t been posting much on here lately because now that I am basically a strong, functional, “normal” (whatever that means) person, it feels odd to spew nonsense about the random things I’m cooking and doing into the cyberspace void. I’m not sure why it feels like that’s more acceptable if you’ve got something wrong […]

Things that happen on airplanes

First time out traveling alone after all the weirdness! What fun to be able to deal normally with public bathrooms, staircases, low airplane seats… Only a trip to Iowa, where it’s 30 degrees instead of 80 and covered in gray snow, but still good movement. The sound of car tires crunching snow outside in the […]

More pioneer family

I’ve just read a second fascinating account of my pioneer family history. This one centers around my grandmother’s great-grandfather Peter Franklin Clark (related to William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame, apparently). He managed to hit all the major 1800s pioneer highlights in his life: the California gold rush, the Civil War, and the Oregon Trail. […]

Five-year diaries

My most prized possessions, certainly the items I would be most distraught if I ever lost, are my five-year diaries. These diaries consist of one page for each day of the year, with a small paragraph marked for each of five years. You wrap your way through the book and end up able to compare […]

Festive December

Done with NaNoWriMo! Grand total word count: 67,445. Now back to blog posts. I think that was the longest slog I’ve had with a NaNo month, literally bored myself to sleep a couple times trying to get words done, until inspiration finally took hold at about 45,000 words. The rest was much easier and ideas […]

NaNoWriMo incentives

Now that I actually have a blog, I have a place I can put these incentivizing social media writing badges NaNoWriMo sends out! Maybe not quite as incentivizing as the fact that I’ve told myself I can only have more candy corn if I crank out a 5,000 word day (no candy corn yet) and […]

Notebooks and inspired writing

When inspiration is abundant writing is the easiest thing in the world for me. Not to mention the most fun. If I’m in an inspired groove the words can just flow out for hours and hours, NaNoWriMo days clocking in at 10k words, and the words are good. But sometimes, (often), getting there isn’t so easy […]

NaNoWriMo is coming

The very exciting month of November is almost upon us! Exciting for me because November is National Novel Writing Month. For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge that was started nearly 20 years ago by some cool folks in San Francisco and has grown into an international event with over 400,000 participants each year. The […]

Pioneers and family history

I happen to have in my possession a copy of a family history account written by my great-grandaunt (my father’s mother’s father’s sister), that just kind of blew my mind. First off, it amazes me what a short distance I can go back in my family tree and find someone homesteading in “Indian country” and […]