chewmeister

It’s a freezing winter’s day (“feels like” 3 degrees C in Lower Hutt, apparently) and I’m sitting in the kitchen at the breakfast bar, looking across the harbour to the city. Right now it’s drenched in sun, there are yachts sailing around, and all the little white houses on the hill are shining, nestled in the trees.

It’s fucking cold in our little bush-pocket. This time of year we barely get any sun, and I usually find myself wondering where else we could live. Then spring rolls around and I forget how cold I was, until winter rolls around again. But winter’s meant to be cold, right?

Anyway. Been working on Trash Planet (or Trash Life, as it sometimes gets called in my mind). Also simultaneously trying it out in Highland2, a screenwriting app that also supports long-form writing. I like the feel of it but I still don’t know if I will wind up using it for anything longer than a novella. Scrivener is still tops for really long projects, but I find I don’t enjoy working in rtf format any more (nor do I like the fact that in both Scrivener and Highland they save projects to a proprietary format). It has a built-in tracker for writing sprints though, which is wonderful and brainless to use.

I’m also writing this with the beta of Zed, a code editor by the same people who made Atom (which is now defunct). So far it seems good for my purposes (super basic coding for the blog), but I’ll need to use it more in anger before I can confirm whether it does everything I need.

Been reading lots of…what do you call it? Gothic fairytales? You know, books by Juliet Marillier and Robin McKinley and Patricia McKillip. Summers at Castle Auburn and Heart’s Blood (both very good btw) and even a romance where everyone speaks in a slightly-bastardised form of Middle English: For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, which had an impressive amount of worldbuilding, (as well as people pressing themselves up against knights in plate armour) and brought back memories of reading Chaucer at uni. All a far cry from the slightly-new-weird sci-fi attempt I am doing, which probably is the right way to do it.

I’m finally getting on with doing Korean on Duolingo (as well as Latin, which I really need to get back to) — I signed up for whatever the paid verson of it is called, (the family version) because Leila has been rabidly studying Japanese and I’ve been instructed to learn Korean so when we go on our next family trip she can be the guide in Japan and apparently I will be the expert in Korea. I shall attempt to rise to the challenge.

In the meantime, I’m taking a small break from the epic CDramas I’ve been watching and am currently enjoying “Dear Fair Lady Kong Shim” which is wacky and makes me laugh out loud…(weird youtube thing here) … the main character has a bald spot from stress and so wears a terrible wig, the love interest eats food off the floor and torments children, and also wears capri pants with jandals…it’s great.

I'm with you, sister

(yeah that’s a photo of my laptop screen…I still cannot find a way to take screenshots of dramas and get both the picture and the subtitles)