Hey all,

I’m pretty overdue for an update! It’s mid-morning, and I’m contemplating making yet another pot of coffee to see me through the rest of the morning. (I use a stovetop Bialetti, which makes super strong coffee syrup that somehow I have developed a tolerance to. Recently moved from dairy to soy for my regular coffees, for the taste but also for what could be a dubious attempt at doing the right thing by the environment. Pretty sure it’s ok to use Australian soy? Doing the right thing is so complicated these days.)

I put Felathia aside earlier this year because I was struggling, really struggling, to find my mojo on the project. Told myself I could write anything I wanted, and so I’ve been tinkering on a story about a little girl who adopts an unusual cat from a rescue centre. It’s over 8k words so far, and there’s still more to go, but it’s been interesting to just follow the story with no set preconceptions about how long it needs to be or what it has to be about.

But then the itch has slowly come back and I’ve found myself thinking about the novel again, more and more. I’ve switched writing platforms, because that seems to work in terms of helping me look at things differently. (In case you’re keeping track we’ve gone from Scrivener, to Ulysses, to printing everything out and working on paper, back to Scrivener, and now I’m actually using Microsoft Word.) Word is oddly working for me, though I for the most part agree wholeheartedly with the “writing vs word processing” argument that you should spend your time writing rather than formatting, and the formatting comes at the end.

But! I’m enjoying the easy feeling of Word, after using it for decades in a work environment. Despite all the fuss and extra stuff in the ribbon, I feel secure in the fact that I know exactly how to create first paragraph indents, as a random example. Nested / collapsable headers seem to be a thing now (I’m not exactly sure when they came in), and with the navigation pane open on the left side of the screen I’m finding moving around and navigating is totally doable (perhaps this has come about from my spacemacs/orgmode experiment earlier in the year). Brainstorming on the next draft is going well and I’m hoping that this will be the biggest one out of the way (all the structural stuff that somehow I still didn’t get right last draft).

Lots of other things going on too, of course. Big into pen-and-paper RPGs these days, which probably needs its own post rather than being tacked on to a writing one. I’ve played D&D 3.5 and then Pathfinder (1E) with a group for nigh on eight or nine years now, but I’m totally new to the concept of solo rpg-ing, using GM Emulators and the like. They are totally awesome.