Dee Moyza

So, I tried speed dating. It was a small event (five women, four men) at a local bar and restaurant, and I think the venue caught my attention more than the people did. Seriously, I've got to get out there again for some of their food and entertainment. It's such a chill place, even for a non-drinker like me.

Anyway, speed dating. It was about as exciting as could be expected, which is to say, not very. Listing off basic facts, asking basic questions, it just didn't grab me. Add to that the fact that I'm still very guarded about revealing the things I enjoy, and you've got a drab, if pleasantly decent, evening. And by that I mean that the guys were nice enough, and did not obviously judge me to my face, which is about all you can ask of men, right?

I think what events like this desperately need are common activities. Maybe some light trivia, a silly little kids' puzzle to put together in a few minutes, hell, even spicy Mad Libs. Just something to get a pair working together, because that's when personalities really come out.

On the surface, I am an incredibly boring person, but give me a problem to solve, or anything at all to work on, and I can show my creativity and humor. And I'm sure that's true for a lot of people. Just talking for five minutes doesn't really give anybody anything to go on.

Hmm, if the bar asks for feedback on the event, maybe I will suggest something like the above. Sure, it's breaking the mold of traditional speed dating, but shaking things up is what this city is known for! Why not follow that trend and give participants an evening of laughter and silliness to remember? It's speed dating; it's not supposed to be serious.

Slowly working my way through Christmas decorations, bringing out old favorites and incorporating new arrivals. The top third of my tree is complete, except for the sad fact that my tree topper no longer lights up; I've been trying to find a replacement, but nothing I've seen looks good to me. It's still a nice star, and it can definitely carry us through this Christmas even without lighting up.

My tree decorations consist mostly of standard Christmas ornaments and a ton of woodland creatures. There's a little bear in particular that looks so absolutely confused, it's adorable! My mother has taken to giving him a daily boop on the nose. :)

And then, there's this little dude:



I've had this ornament for twelve years now, and nobody who's seen it has been able to reach a consensus. Is it a beaver, or a squirrel? Its stocky build suggests a beaver, but the fact that it's gnawing on a seed or nut suggests it's a squirrel. The tail can be interpreted either as intentionally fluffy (squirrel), or a broad tail made fluffy simply because of the material its made of (beaver). The ornament has become known in our household simply as a "squeaver," and so it will stay, I suppose. The whole set of ornaments this guy is from is kind of on the wonky side proportion-wise. But they're glittery and cute, and fill in any gaps quite nicely.

The next few days will be dedicated to finishing the tree, and the outdoor decorations, and then I can sit back and let the holiday vibes sink in. :)

Time continues to be a mystery to me. It's only been a couple of weeks since I last posted here, but it feels like months. On the other hand, the past month has felt like a week. Whatever. :/

Anyway, I'm still here, still battling my way through the mess that this year has been, and netting a few (very tiny) wins in the process.

⁕ Life Stuff: ( Read more... )

⁕ Writing-wise, NaNo never even got off the ground for me. I'm not terribly disappointed, nor surprised. Every year, I vow to do it, and every year I don't even start. This year was particularly stupid. I was trying to force myself back into creativity/productivity, and you just can't force that stuff. It'll happen when it happens, I guess.

⁕ A couple weeks ago, I went to the local zine festival. The zine scene here is still very small--the fest fit into a library conference room--but it was nice to see the creativity and passion the zine makers put into their projects. I came away feeling very inspired, and later had fun making some of my shorter stories and poems into mini zines, just because.

⁕ Random fandom thought: At what point does crowd-sourced creativity become a "too many cooks" situation? I'm specifically thinking about this in the context of the whole Goncharov deal on Tumblr. For the first few days, it was exciting, watching people take little details here and there and weave together a background, a plot, even a score. It was improv on a large scale, and it was fun to see where someone would take it next. But as the week wore on, under the deluge of art and fic and memes, it began to feel...like any other big fandom out there. Oversaturated, overexposed, a joke that went on too long.

Now this is all just my personal opinion, and I'm definitely not here to dump on anyone who's enjoying the nascent Goncharov fandom--you do you and have fun doing it--but for me, the biggest thrill was in the initial creation of the concept. Now that Tumblr seems to have more or less solidified the characters and their motivations and some sort of overarching theme, the magic is gone. It's just another fandom now.

But that electrically-charged creative chaos of the first 48 hours or so was glorious, and I'm really glad I was able to watch it unfold.

⁕ Yelling at one more cloud: I love seeing Transistor fanart cross my Tumblr dash. There are some incredible artists out there, with innovative takes on characters and situations, but why, WHY do so many of them depict Red in high heels?! Her boots are flats, and that little detail alone made me turn a little bit of my heart over to Jen Zee. Finally, an artist who understands that high heels are impossible to do much of anything in, other than stomp and waddle and maybe shimmy down a catwalk! Red's shoes were a ridiculously refreshing detail in female character design, and I guess I just get a little salty seeing that ignored, in favor of what we all seemed to be conditioned to expect a female character to be wearing.

⁕ Despite the grumping above, I'm really not feeling bad at all; in fact, the grumping shows that I have enough energy to care about more than basic survival tasks. I'm doing pretty good at the moment, and I'm hoping this continues, and carries over (just a little bit, please!) into my creativity. Fingers crossed! :D

- My job search continues, though I take heart in the fact that I have had glimmers of interest from jobs I wouldn't actually mind holding. Last week, I got the official decision on the job whose interview I botched, though I'd pretty much accepted the result from the get-go. I also had to cancel another interview because life happened and I couldn't spend a week cramming my brain with Titanic facts (which don't particularly interest me, anyway). But I'm currently in the middle of the interview process with another museum here in town; they'd like me to take a tour first (I last visited in like, 2014), and then set up an in-person interview (to follow up on the phone interview I had last week). It seems like a fun place to work, and the pay and benefits are decent; I only wish that it wasn't swing shift hours, but that's due to the nature of the museum, and nothing can be done about that. So, fingers crossed!

- My mother and I got our updated boosters yesterday. A smidge of fever last night, and a little sore today, but nothing too bad. Certainly better than my first booster, when my lymph nodes swelled up and I couldn't put my arm down all the way for a few days. XD But I feel pretty good about being up to date on vaccines. Next up, flu shot! XP

- I still haven't done much writing. I was hoping that once I offloaded the stress from my old job, I would be able to focus more on my creative pursuits, but life has a way of finding new avenues of stress, and I just can't quite focus. But I keep trying, because what else is there to do?

All in all, though, I'm doing all right. I'm certainly over my bout of petty jealousy from a few weeks ago, and trying to focus on building my own life in roughly the shape and style I want it to be. :)

Ugh. ( Life stuff. CW: depression )

Anyway, enough moping! I did manage to write a little bit between Christmas and New Year's, to bring my 2021 total to just over 118k. Not bad, considering there were weeks on end where I didn't produce anything at all.

And I'm incredibly fond of the fic that came of it, that "Bracken and Fir" I'm talking up on every fic meme that catches my attention. I fell in love with The Blue Castle and its lovely couple, and I was inspired. Come on, spending a summer night on a bed of bracken in the woods? Sounds pretty darn romantic to me (as long as I don't think about wolves and bears and the like ;))!

2021 Year-End Stats!

Total words written this week: 1,895
Total words written in 2021: 118,279
Total days written this week: 2
Total days written 2021: 82

How has it only been a little over a week since that post?!

( Update on Life Stuff )

(Yikes, the earlier version of this post was weird. Apologies for that; I've fixed it.)

Oops!

I did pretty good with my goal of posting here more frequently until last week. Some days, I was busy; some days, I was tired; but mostly, I just don't have a lot of interesting things to say.

I think I'll keep up this posting goal for a little bit longer, though. It's encouraged me to be more active in drabble communities, and I really like what I've come up with for their challenges. And it feels good to just get some words out, whether they contribute to my yearly count or not.

The next few days are going to be quite busy, but at least I've got a long weekend to look forward to. It's all about the small joys, at the moment! :D

I tried NaNo twice, several years ago. It wasn't for me. Still, the idea of a monthlong challenge is appealing, and this year, I'd like to challenge myself to be a bit more active here on DW. While a post a day is a great goal, realistically, I'm shooting for 3-4 posts per week, in addition to my weekly writing update.

These posts are not going to be significant by any stretch of the imagination. Just maybe some rambling about inconsequential subjects, some snippets of whatever I'm working on at the moment, etc. This challenge is really about developing a routine, especially during a time when things are changing (I lived 30+ years without Daylight Savings Time; I will always be bitter--and confused--about sudden early nightfall at this time of year).

All that said, I really don't have any idea how to start this routine off. XD Well, I did have pretty nice Halloween, and the kids that came by for candy were so adorable! Little princesses, fairies, werewolves, pirates; a tiny Captain America; an itty-bitty dinosaur who tuckered out not long after he visited my apartment and had to be carried home, already half-asleep. :)

It was sweet to see; after months of anxiety and doom and gloom, it was such a welcome change of pace to see people relaxed and kids happy. :)

Heading back to work tomorrow night, and I'm a bit apprehensive. As I mentioned before, it has more to do with the schedule than anything else, as well as wondering whether there will be enough work to go around with the building still half-closed, or if every shift will be a long, seemingly interminable slog of pointless busywork.

No writing to report this week, though the fanfic meme did reignite my interest in my poor fics hovering in WIP limbo. It's not a lack of ideas that's stopping me, at this point, but a lack of confidence. I'm always worried I'll ruin an idea. But once I get it written, I find that's rarely the case. I just need to force myself to dive right in.

I got no writing done this week. I ended up padding out my Camp NaNo word count by tallying up blog posts and notes and half-finished scenes, which might technically have been cheating, but I couldn't bear the thought of coming so close to my goal only to falter at the end.

The anxiety I said was receding last week didn't, so, after a few restless nights, I sought out something cute and inoffensive to drown out the fear and negativity swirling through my mind, and I found it in a game that is, essentially, Harvest Moon Lite. And that surprised me, because, usually, farming/life sims stress me out: the clock moves too quickly, or there's too much to get done, or my little character's energy drains way too fast. The only one I've really gotten into before was Harvest Moon 64, and even then, I couldn't relax and enjoy village life until I had a full barn and a steady source of income.

World's Dawn, on the other hand, was refreshingly laid-back, with a forgiving clock, a small pre-tilled plot that didn't require weeding, animals that actually responded to the bell in the barn (no more shoving my character's face into a cow's backside to force them into the barn for the night! XD), and enough sweetness and fluff all around to cause cavities. Though it might be too easy for real fans of the genre, it was just what I needed to relax, and I happily flung myself into its pretty little world for a few days.

Unfortunately, it's also too darn short. You can keep playing after the first year, but the festivals (and the character reactions/conversations therein) repeat themselves. And then there is the Buggy Husband. During the second spring, he just randomly ... stops working. His sprite faces different directions, he won't always respond to the talk button, and when he does, he only says generic lines. (I looked through the game's forums and saw that this bug had plagued the first set of marriageable guys, but since the one I chose was added later, I assume they didn't catch it. Either that, or my character's boundless energy and relentless chattiness just plain broke him! ;) )

Despite these issues, I really enjoyed my time with the game, though it majorly cut into my productivity. I feel a bit guilty, and will try to get some stuff done in the next few days, before my Switch Lite arrives and I get to find out what all this Animal Crossing hullabaloo is about. Something tells me I won't be too happy with my word count this month ... ;)