Second Sundays - August 2022

Happy Second Sunday!

Thank you for joining me in this new experiment. My hope with this newsletter is to provide updates on the books I'm writing, the art I'm creating, and other projects in the works as well as share some things I've learned and discovered during the past month, provide some inspiration, and engage in more than a bit of nerdiness.

I hope you enjoy!

Overall, Camp NaNoWriMo was a win! Although I didn't write every day or meet my writing minutes, I did revise three full scenes of Dragonstone and started on a fourth, which is almost four times more writing than I had expected to get done. Every little bit counts!

I also re-designed another creature from Dragonstone, the ground-dwelling burrowbun (I also have a tree-dwelling species that I haven't designed yet). They're inspired by pangolins, porcupines, and echidnas, and I imagine them as golden balls of loveable joy. They're slow waddlers but fast rollers, love to fatten themselves on fruit, veggies, and insects, and have no respect for personal boundaries.😅 But don't let their cuddly nature fool you. They can be prickly as porcupines and feisty as badgers when threatened!

Continuing my sojourn through the Tolkien-verse, last month I read both Unfinished Tales and The Children of Hurin. In retrospect, I wish I had read Beren and Luthien before The Children of Hurin, but only because chronologically the former takes place first and Hurin refers to their story often. If anyone else has been, or wants to, read Tolkien's books "in order" so to speak, I'd amend my previous list and recommend reading Beren and Luthien before Hurin.

Before I get to that story, though, I'm taking a brief detour to the world of the Seven Kingdoms and reading Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin to get ready for "The House of the Dragon" show, which begins next week! All of Martin's books are bears to read because they are so thick, but having read all of his A Song of Ice & Fire (Game of Thrones) series released so far, I can say without a doubt it's worth the time investment to read Martin's stuff.

So, I love most nature shows in general, but I am a BIG Shark Week fan. Normally the episodes I look forward to the most include tiger sharks (my favorite species) or prehistoric sharks, but this year the episode that stood out to me (if a wee bit over-the-top in terms of the hosts...but hey, it's Shark Week) was "Island of the Walking Sharks."

These little epaulette sharks are pretty amazing nuggets of nature. Although they don't technically "walk on land," they can use their fins to walk/shimmy from one pool of water to another. If you missed it, here's a video from Discovery's YouTube channel showing the shark doing its little shimmy. I wonder if eventually evolution will make them fully amphibious. It's an interesting concept to think about!

I've shared this tip/trick a few times over the course of my "social media life," but it came up a few times at the bookstore last month that I thought I should share it again for my new newsletter folks:

If you do any type of writing on a regular basis, I highly recommend keeping your old dictionaries and thesauri, as well as investing in new ones.

Words go in and out of fashion, and when they fall out of popular use, they are typically removed from new editions of dictionaries and thesauri. But that doesn't mean they aren't still words of use. It's happened to me on more occasions than I can count that a word or synonym I need isn't in the newest version of the reference I have, so those old copies really come in handy.

Now, of course, we have the "almighty" Google at our fingertips, as well as nifty programs like MasterWriter (which I actually used a lot last month), but sometimes it's faster, or honestly just more enjoyable, to flip to a page in a book.

This was probably the most inspiring thing that crossed my path last month:

I'm SO EXCITED that we are going to be seeing practical-effects orcs in the "Rings of Power" series, and it reminded me that doing things the "old school" way is sometimes most definitely still the best way.