Selective Attentions

Part two of the monthlyish pet pics! This time devoted to the coldblooded vertebrates.

This time we have:

Berry Mad!


In her most fashionable hat!

(You can see right in front of her that she has started to dig the water out of her pond to make mud for herself. Previously, she would push her dirt into the pond to make mud, but apparently this year, she has decided she likes this way better.)

Four more pictures of Berry Mad:

Sittin' in her plant.


Not the clearest, but 'tis the time of year where she starts to burrow.


Toad? What toad? I don't see a toad.


Buried in her self-made mud. But then I dumped crickets in, and she immediately sat up, haha.

Guava Splash!


So small it makes me want to cry.

Three more pictures of Guava Splash:

(This picture is from Alex. Showing off the other side of the tiniest frog.)


So small.


This picture is from just yesterday. Tiny frog is looking a little chubby!
(Which is actually a relief... I was worried about getting something so small to eat enough to stay healthy.)

And mom and Taylor's garter snake, who has been named Ripley!

(Ripley, because she looks "ripple-y" when she moves, but also because Alien is great.)


She's so cute. She likes her little plant.

Just one more of Ripley:

I love her and her cute little face.

Back on September 18th, Alex and I decided to go do a fun splurgey thing. We went to the Four Mile Historic Park's "Bright Nights" lantern festival display. :)

Four Mile Historic Park is a historic farm in Denver (which was once a stagecoach stop, which is where the Four Mile name comes from, I believe.) They're typically closed on my days off, so we never end up going, but they had a booth at Pride, and we picked up a flyer for the upcoming lantern festival.

It was lovely!


The entrance. (Though I took this picture on the way out; it was still slightly light in the sky when we got there.)


Should have gone back over once it was fully dark, but I do love the peacocks. (The sign about this particular display talks about them representing love. They are, of course, both male, haha. And have a giant rainbow heart. Love my pride peacocks.)


I really loved this fae creature on their throne. <3

Twelve more pictures:

I was, of course, very taken with the jackalopes.


Fun fantasy deer... seaweed? creature.


Some charming little mushrooms.


It's probably zero real surprise, but the rainbow butterfly lights "room" was probably one of my favorite spots.


A kitsune!


Armadillo!


There were a bunch of interactive displays. This one has a crank at the front, and turning it moves the machinery to move the segments of the dragon's body up and down.


The dragon's face.


Some were like this, intended to be photo frames. Very pretty!


Birds and lotus flowers.


I really liked the bluebirds and bluejays in the tree.


And one final jackalope!

I'm splitting the pictures from the lantern festival into a few different posts, since otherwise it'll be very, very long.

(Bella's silly face from a few days ago.)

Today, Alex took Bella to another FastCAT! (I so wish that they were ever held on days that I have off, but they almost never are.)



She did well! Apparently on the first run she slowed down midway because she was distracted by the mid-field judge, ha.

I still hope for her to someday break 10 seconds, but the 10-12 second timeframe seems to be about her "normal."

She has another next Friday, so we'll see how that one goes, too.

I think I've pretty much given up on having anything written—at least to a completed state—this year. It's been a rough year for creative writing for me. I have written some stuff, and I even surpassed my 75000 word goal, but it's been on more meta stuff like this, where I'm planning, or on reviews of the books I've been reading. It is stuff that I count as "writing," but isn't the fiction writing I ostensibly enjoy doing.

World... stuff... certainly isn't getting any better, or inspiring much more creativity. Even so, while I don't think I will get any projects to completion any time soon, my hope right now is to get more of the planning done so that I will be in a better spot to actually get some of that writing done eventually. (Even if that's next year.)

My goals for September were:
- Look into Bluesky and the writing community there
- Figure out what I wanted my "next steps" to be (what process do I want to go through for the potential projects I may work on?)
- Pick a WIP to start on
- Start collecting images from sites like Unsplash, for future use in moodboards, covers, etc.

And how did I do on those?
- Well, I did look into Bluesky a bit, and there do seem to be a lot of writers there. I found multiple good curated feeds for writing topics, but I feel like I don't have a good understanding on how to jump from passively scrolling those feeds to actually engaging with them (much less how to be included in them.)
Unfortunately, bsky then fairly promptly shit the bed with some frustratingly broad content restrictions that will be forthcoming. I'm not particularly concerned that anything I would be posting would fall under the restricted content, but it's sort of a "principle of the thing" issue. Way too often, opening the door to these types of restrictions means that the allowed content will forever be whim to "but the board/high-profile users/advertisers/payment processors/whiny babies offsite think something is icky." Even more often, those restrictions will be used to target specific users, even if it's a massive stretch to do so. I remember strikethrough on LiveJournal. So now I feel a lot less excited to invest time and energy into trying to build a community on a site that I don't trust the moderation policies of.

- I did figure out a sort of next steps plan. I've tried for a while to figure out a way to work on multiple WIPs at once, ideally having different works at different stages of completion, to give myself some variety. (If I was excited about a new project, I could plan it; I could work on writing the first draft of something; if writing brain wasn't working, then I could have something ready for editing, etc.) I floundered when trying to figure out how to get the things to those different stages, because the hypothetical plans always seemed to wind up with lots of things stuck in the same stage. Now I think I did come up with a reasonable "plan" of sorts, by thinking of "types" of projects rather than specific WIPs.
In the short term, it does mean doing like, four planning documents, and then three outlines in a row, but I do think that after that, it'll be easy to keep the projects staggered.

- I decided on one of my WIPs to start with! It's one of the original ones, so it'll wind up on the pen name account. After that, my intent is to poke at the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic (because either it needs to happen or needs to get shelved); then a different original project (maybe the one I wimped out on the draft of earlier this year); then a shorter fic project.

- I did do one unsplash dig, but haven't made it into a habit or anything.

In addition to that:

- I did get the self-intro for the first WIP done! This is just the quick intro that's designed to make sure I can orient myself in the general vibes that I want for the project, and a reminder of all the bits I want to be sure to include.

My goals for October:
- Be a little more consistent with my writing-devoted accounts. It's easy to ignore that for a bit and then realize I haven't even touched those logins for weeks. If it really isn't beneficial to me, I certainly don't have to keep using those accounts, but I want a chance to talk about my stuff without feeling too uncomfortably "seen," haha.
- Get my Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity intro completed
- Get my intro to [Original Project #2] written
- Get my intro for the Alice Isn't Dead/Sparrow Hill Road written

My goals for November and beyond:
- Finish those intros, if I don't do it in October
- Get outlines started (or even done??) for [Original Project #1], Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity, and [Original Project #2]

As I mentioned above, my current goal is to get to a point where next year I might actually be in a better spot to really work on some of my fiction writing. For now, I'll try to do what I can to get the planning portions done so that it feels like something I'm more ready to do.

I am well aware that the new year is an utterly arbitrary designation, but it is a culturally significant one. And having some sort of "deadline" sometimes helps.