Tippetarius

Still crocheting! So far I've finished a scarf and two beanie hats with the yarn I already had lying around. I've ordered more yarn to keep me busy for a while. Maybe I'll get ambitious and try a sweater one of these days.

One beanie hat is unfortunately so short and lightweight that I'm not sure I'll use it much. It's cute, but I doubt it's going to keep anyone's ears very warm on a cold day. (My husband says it ought to have ear flaps like Jayne Cobb's hat.)

The other hat is thicker and has a pompom, so it should be great when winter comes around again. However, the cuff part keeps rolling back down, so I'm planning to hold it in place by decorating it with a bunch of Disney pins. But I'll need to order special backs for the pins to keep them locked in place, otherwise I'll probably lose some. The original backs love falling off.

While I was looking into pin backs, I discovered that there are Avatar the Last Airbender pins too! Guess what's on my wish list now.

Below are the videos I followed to make the two hats.

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Several years ago I started learning how to crochet. I don't remember why, I just suddenly had the urge to make something out of yarn. I don't remember why I stopped either. I crocheted several scarves before I suddenly I lost interest and put all the yarns and needles away.

Then about a week ago I had an impulse to crochet again, and I pulled out one of my unfinished scarves and picked up where I left off. Why did I stop? Doing one stitch after another is calming, almost a kind of meditation. It hardly takes any brain power once you get the rhythm down, so sometimes I listen to a podcast or an online course while I work.

February was never my favorite month, but I'm hating it more than usual because there's not much I can safely do to relieve the monotony right now. Maybe that's why it felt like the right time to finish my red scarf. Finishing something pretty to wear before the season is over gives me something to look forward to.

I'm toying with the idea of giving Mehra longer hair. Because her hair is going to grow as time passes, and she might not get around to cutting it.



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Challenge #4

In your own space, create some goals. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I've resisted setting goals this year, because when I look at the ones I wrote in my bullet journal for 2020, I get annoyed. They were shallow and based on fleeting interests. My regret comes not so much from leaving them unfinished but from writing them down in the first place.

But I think the problem has less to do with goal-setting and more to do with choosing the wrong kind of goals. If the goals don't resonate with me, if they're not somehow linked to my strongest interests or values, then they're probably not worth much.

I have to say, I don't regret the goals I set as part of the last Snowflake Challenge, even if I didn't stick with all of them. I still want to do them, or at least something similar to them. Reading is important to me, that's never changed. I still want to write every day because I have a story to finish. I still want to draw because it's rewarding, even if I've been terrible about staying with it.

With all that in mind, here are some goals I'm setting for myself for 2021:

Work on my health. Spending so much time at home is taking a toll on my health. I want to offset the damage by doing things that are good for me, like drinking more water, eating more fruits and vegetables, getting up and moving throughout the day, and maybe trying meditation.

Read more good books. Books that help me understand the world better, or that tell the kind of stories I wish I could write, or that teach me new skills, or that change me in some way. (In other words, don't fall back into that habit I was getting into when I was picking short, easy things to read just so I could finish 50 books in a year.)

Work on becoming a more disciplined writer. I write almost every day, but I have a bad habit of putting it off until the end of the day when I'm tired and distracted. And I'm slow. If I could focus and adopt better writing habits, I might be able to finish part two of my Skyrim fanfic series this year.

Start drawing again. Drawing every day started feeling like a chore, and my expectations started running ahead of my abilities, so I got discouraged and gave up in the middle of the year. I'd like to start drawing again-- maybe not every day, but just find fun and low-pressure ways to ease back into it.

Make my journals pretty. Learn how to use my Tombow markers, splurge on more stickers and washi tape, maybe do some actual doodles and drawings, possibly improve my handwriting.

Surround myself with things I love (and get rid of stuff that's just dragging me down). I now have maps and other things on my walls that make me happy, and that's good. But I need to get rid of the piles of junk that I've been keeping out of indecision or guilt.

Keep revisiting my goals throughout the year. I think I'll get more out of my goals if I look at them as a work in progress. Add new ones, change or drop the ones that aren't working, come up with more concrete tasks, etc.

When I write dialogue for Skyrim Nords, particularly if they're not wealthy upper-crust types, I often try to make them sound a little like cowboys. To me that means speech that's straightforward, seemingly simple, but punched up with colorful expressions and metaphors like, "Mean as a bear with a burr up its butt."

For inspiration I've looked to the Lonesome Dove series, the Andy Griffith show, and even Applejack from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Seriously, when I'm writing my Nord OC Kell, one of the questions I've asked myself is, "How would Applejack say this if she were a Nord?"

A few of my favorite Skyrim screenshots of J'zargo casting spells.



J'zargo summoning a yellow magelight.

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More screenshots of Mehra, from 2016 and 2017. I'm in the middle of copying over more content from my Tumblr blog.

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Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

In your own space, tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why? This could be a creator, an actor, a costumer, a set designer, a director, a character, a composer, anybody! What would you talk about? What are you dying to know? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I'll say Patrick O'Brian, if he were still alive. I started reading his Aubrey-Maturin series last summer, and I've been enjoying it. I often read with an eye to improving my own writing, and there's a ton I could learn from him. I'd probably ask him how he did his research, which works of fiction and nonfiction most influenced him, what kind of writing schedule he kept, how he planned out his books, and what advice he would give to writers wanting to improve their craft.

When some authors write period fiction, they often pack in historically accurate details that stick out too much, details that feel less like an organic part of the story and more like a signpost that says, "Hey, just a reminder, we're in the 1800s now, and since I spent hours and hours researching this period, I'm going to explain exactly how a Jacquard loom works."

O'Brian doesn't do that. There's something very natural and flowing about his prose, almost like reading an account by someone who might have lived during the Napoleonic Wars. The downside is that unless you've studied 19th century nautical terms, you're often going to have a muddled idea of what's going on. But O'Brian writes in such a way that it doesn't really matter. I still enjoy the characters and their banter without knowing much about the world they live in (though I really should make an effort to learn more). It also helps that one of the two main characters, Dr. Stephen Maturin, is a stubborn landlubber who never quite absorbs all this naval lingo either.

It's a brand new year, so it feels like a good time to post more Rumarin headcanons. Contains very minor spoilers for the Skyrim fanfic I keep working on.

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I've been journaling for years, but for a long time I had no system. I'd just keep notebooks around and write in whichever was handy at the moment. Most of these I've recycled, because they were just full of rambling notes I had zero interest in looking at again. I wasn't writing with an eye to preserving my thoughts for later; writing was just a habit that helped me think and clear some of the crap out of my head.

But then a system started evolving out of this habit. Thanks in part to bullet journaling, I'm writing things I often do want to look back on later, things that help me make sense of the past and plan for the future. This has led me to keep different journals for different purposes.

My bullet journal is my "just the facts, ma'am" journal. I rarely write long introspective entries here-- more like quick notes about the day, if that. Partly because I want to easily skim it later (when DID I last get my eye exam/go on that road trip/start noticing those weird symptoms?), and partly because I want to make the book last all year.

My main journal is more like a classic diary. Lately I've been writing in it every morning to reflect on the previous day. What happened yesterday? How do I feel about how I spent my time? What did I learn? What could I have done better? Or sometimes I write down lists of ideas, notes about something I'm reading, notes on a thing I'm researching, etc.

I still have scrap journals, the junk notebooks I keep around whenever I need to brainstorm or just get some sludge out of my head. Maybe I'll throw most of these away too, but they still have their value in the moment.