keep out the stars, turn out the lights

Last Tuesday, we headed back up to the plains again. There was a pretty good thunderstorm chance, so we wanted to see if we could get a good view of any of them.

Eh... mixed results. We did get to see a little bit of nice lightning, but the storms lost most of their oomph by the time they reached us up there. Except for the rain. There was a LOT of water in those clouds! Somehow we managed not to get any hail, which was surprising. The storm eventually reintensified a bit farther north, and while we followed it for a while (through the absolutely wild quantities of rain), we eventually gave up on it. Partially because we didn't want to go much farther, and partially because the rain was so heavy you couldn't see much else, so even if it had done something cool, it would have been hard to see.


Before following it north, we sat in the rain in a parking lot for a bit. This is a screenshot from a video I took of the rain. I'm not sure this even really shows just how intense it was!

Down one of the county roads we were on, we did see a neat old structure. We were able to pull over to grab a couple pictures on the way back, once the rain had stopped.

A couple pictures of clouds, some of swallow nests:

Stormclouds!


More clouds!

We've taken this exit off the highway before, but there's a really extensive colony of cliff swallows:


I love their nests; they look like little clay pots.

Not the most amazingly successful day, but still nice to get out and do things. The old house? church? other? was neat.

I could probably make this a faster post by just copying and pasting last month's, ha.

It's now been half of a year of "not really writing much." It definitely feels really discouraging at this point, and frustrating, because just a few years ago I managed to write quite a lot... and just haven't been able to recapture either the interest/inspiration or the success at just pushing through and getting words on page.

June was a rough month, emotionally, and that didn't lend itself to a lot of desire to write.

My goals for June were:
- finish one more chapter of the iddy WIP (in order to decide whether I wanted to continue with it, or stick it on the back burner)
- outline the second iddy story, which had been the one I was most often thinking about and feeling inspired by
- continue the snowflake outline for the "Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity" fic
- think about the silly holiday AU fic, in the hopes of being able to actually have it completed by the holidays if I were to get going on it now

How did that go?
- I did not finish another chapter of the WIP, but I did get a couple thousand words written on it.
- I didn't outline the other story... and it's stopped being the thing my thoughts keep drifting to, so I'm afraid I lost my shot and harnessing the wave of inspiration. (Nothing has replaced it in my thoughts. Even when I'm trying, I can't really seem to focus on anything.)
- I did not work on the outline for the WFM fic.
- I didn't think about the silly holiday fic even once.

For the most part, I think I'll just shuffle most of the same goals forward into July.

Goals for July:
- Finish up the rest of this chapter of the iddy WIP. I want to reach the end of the chapter just to have a reasonable break point, but I think I will shelve the idea for a while after that. I haven't completely lost interest, but feel like I'm slogging through mud every time I try to work on it.
- I might still try to outline the other story, if only because I don't want to forget the ideas that I did have for it. (More than I possibly already have!) Unfortunately, it's no longer the "yay" feeling of excitement for the project, so it might also be immediately shelved.
- I do want to at least try to get a bit more of the WFM outline done. I have one more character to do "part 3" for, and it's stupid that I have spent months being stalled out on it.
- Holiday fic is getting punted forward... I don't think I could capture the lighthearted tone I want to for it right now.

Goals for August and beyond:
- Seriously, just find SOMETHING that I care about writing.
- Make some progress on the WFM outline.
- ???

Rereading this, it feels a lot more pessimistic than I was intending for it to be! I tend to try to keep stuff pretty positive, even when I'm not succeeding at getting the things I hoped for done. Unfortunately, part of the issue is just that I don't even especially want to be doing any of these things right now.
I'm used to feeling like I have things I want to be doing, but am failing to find the time and/or energy to pursue them. This time, I feel like I'm lacking the time, energy, and inspiration. (I'm coming up on a string of days off, and while we have plans for a lot of that time, to be honest, I don't even have the hypothetical desire to like, set a day of the time aside to write.)

So... is there a reason for me to push forward on any of this at all right now? Would it be better to just kind of let it all lay fallow for a bit? Maybe just focusing on media intake for a while would be a good idea. More reading, maybe even like... playing a video game for a while, which is something I haven't done at all this year, I don't think (minus the FFXIV playthrough with Taylor.) To be fair, I haven't been doing much writing at all, so it's not like this will free up vast quantities of time to put toward other things, but maybe if I'm not feeling bad about failing to write, I'll feel better about doing other things?

In light of that... Maybe I will still try to get the current WIP chapter done, just so I can put it away at a decent stopping point, and maybe finish out the third part of the snowflake outline, because that's really such a tiny commitment. After that I think I'll pause things until I feel a little more interested in something. (Or can at least see if a full, on-purpose break brings back that interest in any way!)

Oof. Only three books this month, which feels rough. This was a rough month as a whole, and that definitely did have an impact on my reading and just how much I wanted to do anything in general.

Maeve Fly by CJ Leede
Horror (subgenres: erotic(?), psychopath/serial killer/torture/slasher-y) (background f/m) - ebook novel
2.5/5

As a teenager, Maeve ran away to Hollywood, seeking out a grandmother she'd never met. In her grandmother—retired Hollywood royalty of the silver screen—Maeve finds an unexpected kindred spirit. Her grandmother recognizes that Maeve is, like her, a predator among ordinary humanity, though she warns her that she must keep that predatory instinct firmly leashed, lest she be found out. Maeve loves Hollywood and LA as a whole, adoring the artifice and artificiality, the desperation of so many of its inhabitants. She loves very few other things: her job as the "Nordic Princess" in a carefully-unnamed destination theme park, her grandmother, her coworker and friend Kate, the weird erotic and misanthropic literature that she tries to find reflections of herself in, Halloween. 
Maeve's carefully curated and controlled life begins to fall apart, with her grandmother falling into a coma she'll never wake from, and Kate beginning to leave her behind as her career as an actress takes off. Kate's brother, hockey player Gideon, moves to town and seems to believe that he understands Maeve on some deeper level... though she's certain that with the exception of her grandmother, there is no one out there who could.

My thoughts, some spoilers, and pretty significant content warnings:

I'm going to be clear that my rating is largely a mismatch of taste. I like a lot of horror genres, but torture porn is one of the few that I just don't care for. No shade, and if you are a fan of it, then this book is probably going to appeal a lot more. If that's your jam, I recommend this one! Because yeah, content warning for some eventually very graphic descriptions of torturing people, sometimes to death. Much of the torture also has a sexual element to it. The book itself I think was well written, and enjoyable from the "be in the head of a terrible person" perspective, it just turned out to be very much not for me. 
(I saw some other discussion of this book call it "part slasher-romance" but I mostly disagree; slasher vs. torture porn are, to me, pretty distinct from each other, and this falls more firmly in the latter category, even if both are under the "serial killer/psychopathic killer" umbrella. If you specifically like slasher-romance, this might scratch that itch, but I wouldn't say it is that. Maeve's relationship with Gideon is highly relevant to the story, but is also very much a subplot.)
Maeve is clearly pretty psychopathic from the start, and this is very much a negative character arc, so she very deliberately gets worse. I don't dislike that, and it's the obvious throughline for a theme of the book (and one that Maeve expresses for herself): that women aren't allowed to be monsters the same way men are in fiction. For female characters there's often a question of what happened to make them "like that," or to have pushed them to that point, where male characters can just be monsters. This isn't fourth-wall breaking, but I feel like just sort of cozies up to that fourth wall, when Maeve deliberately styles herself after and takes inspiration from monsters in fiction, (ultimately channeling American Psycho.) She is the example of that thing she wishes she could find: a female character (written by a female author) who is monstrous not because of some secret trauma or tragedy, but because she just is, and because she actively chooses to embrace it.
I wouldn't say that I ever fully liked Maeve, but I don't think she's intended to be liked. She certainly wouldn't want to be! She was at least interesting, even if it was often in a "ah, so you're just horrible!" way. Other times she was... maybe a bit tedious, if only because she was a little too much like some "yeah, I'm into the really dark stuff, no one else gets it" sort-of "guy in your MFA" subtypes that I've met, haha. Of course, Maeve makes sure to earn her "no, I'm genuinely a monster" cred in a way I hope none of those dudes I've spoken to did, lol.
There are times where she is still sympathetic in her loneliness or her strange brand of protectiveness over the few people she cares for. There are other times where the book goes out of its way to make sure she isn't too sympathetic. (Like... one of her hobbies is targeting people online in order to ruin their lives, often by outing them as having abhorrent views. But even as she's revealing a woman's desire to join the KKK to keep non-whites out of her neighborhood, Maeve remarks that she really doesn't care that the woman is racist; she wants to ruin her because she's self-righteous in a way that Maeve hates. It is made clear this is not a vigilante "channeling my dark impulses to do harm to bad people" situation or anything.)
The book goes to excellent and often darkly funny lengths to never mention anything too directly Disney-related, while still making it completely and inescapably clear that Maeve is an Elsa face-character.
I liked the twist at the end, and the way Maeve sets herself up for it, but won't spoil it.
Perfectly decent book, but wasn't my thing.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Horror (subgenres: queer, religious/cult/demonic) (background f/f) - physical novel
3.5/5

Rose is a perfectly happy and ordinary member of the Christian cult church Kingdom of the Pine, a denomination that all but owns the town of Neverton, Montana. The church's main claim to fame is Camp Damascus, a gay conversion camp that boasts a 100% success rate. Rose is devout, happy, and content living with her loving parents. Then strange things begin to happen: she sees a strange humanoid figure lurking in the shadows, she vomits up masses of flies, and she experiences glimpses of memories that could never have happened. Her parents and her church-approved therapist seem only mildly concerned, implying that any of these circumstances may have been brought on by her own failings of faith. As the mystery figure haunting her escalates to violence against her and others around her, Rose begins to identify gaps in her own memories, and becomes increasingly certain that there is something deeply sinister going on.

My thoughts, mild spoilers:

This one is right between a 3.5 and a 4 for me. I did enjoy it, but I didn't love it the way I'd hoped to. I went with the 3.5 because I felt like it had a stronger start than finish.
I did really like the early parts, where the hints of weirdness were starting. I wouldn't say that the end was disappointing per se, and parts of it certainly delivered well on the premise, but I just couldn't quite connect with all of it. There were a few aspects of the ending that I didn't feel fully explained what they were meant to. (Okay, we have this [spoiler] substance to induce memory loss... but that memory loss in practice seems more targeted than seems plausible. Okay, [spoiler] explains why the whole 'puking flies' thing happened, but also... does it explain that, really? There's enough extra-dimensional weirdness to handwave the bits that still feel off, but I don't want to handwave!) This wasn't like... Lost levels of "excellent creepy setup, zero payoff" or anything, but the setup felt stronger than the explanation.
I enjoyed Rose's perspective, and how very attached to her devout upbringing she was at the start - lots of Bible verses and instinctive "what would the church want me to do?" thoughts, which was certainly different than I'm used to reading. Watching doubt creep in (consistent with the ways in which she was already a very curious and analytical person) was a good arc, as is later realizing just why she may have had those "instinctive" thoughts in the first place.
But as the book went on, it felt like the perspective on religion was a little too... tepid? I'm not sure why exactly it felt that way, because it's not like I disagree with any of it, really. But her friend Saul comes down on the side of wanting to maintain his Christian faith, just in a way that feels more affirming and loving. Willow is an unspecified type of witch. Rose initially takes a pretty staunchly atheistic position, but almost immediately decides that that would be swinging too far the opposite direction from the coercive religion she's disconnecting from, and that she should settle somewhere in the middle, that she still "should" have some amount of faith. On the one hand, I get it: the book isn't trying to say that all Christianity or all religion is a bad thing! It's specifically about the damaging, abusive attitudes of a fundamentalist and extreme version, so it's good to make it textually clear that there are alternatives even within religion. But... on the other, it just ended up feeling meh.
I did enjoy the specifics of how the cult was operating, and what decisions they'd justified for themselves.
I pictured Pachid, Rose's demon, as the Pale Lady from "The Dream" from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark the whole time (except wearing a polo shirt), which is really neither here nor there, but it was a strong image.

And I loved the creepiness of the demons wearing polo shirts with nametags. The whole "this demonic horror is simply an employee" vibes were great.
There were a couple writing quirks that weren't my favorite. It felt like an attempt to avoid overuse of pronouns, but Rose frequently referred to her parents in her thoughts by their first names (which felt weird, and didn't seem to be a narrative choice to show distance or anything, as she did so even when she felt very close to her parents), and she repeatedly referred to Saul as "my friend" in her narration in a way that felt weird, too. These may just be character quirks, or deliberate emphasis on what these characters are to her, but it felt unnatural to me.
I feel like the ideal medium for this story would have been like... a SyFy original movie, but it would have been a really good one.

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire
Book 8 of Wayward Children
Fantasy - physical novella
5/5

The first and most important thing that Antsy loses as a child is her father. After, her mother remarries, to a man Antsy cannot force herself to like. When he proves that her mistrust was extremely justified, she runs away, eventually arriving at a mysterious junk shop. There she meets an older woman named Vineta, and a talking magpie named Hudson. They explain that the store is a nexus world, a place connected to all manner of other worlds by way of the magical Doors, which Antsy is able to easily open to explore. Theirs is a kingdom of lost things, providing a safe place for them until they can be found again. Antsy settles in to work in this new place... but something seems wrong about the time that passes, as if there's a secret that Antsy has been kept from knowing.

My brief thoughts, minor content warning:

This book does come with a content warning up front, because Antsy, who is a child, is repeatedly targeted and gaslit by an adult would-be abuser, who ultimately does threaten her with non-graphic, but clearly implied future sexual abuse. None of this comes to pass, because she escapes before it can.
I really enjoyed this one. It was an extremely quick read. (These are all fairly short novellas, but this one seemed to go particularly fast.)
While it's been hinted at previously, it's interesting to see more information about the Doors between worlds, and the fact that they have some form of will and sentience, and it's ambiguous what their motives and purpose may be.
This world itself is a fun one, and I particularly love it being the world from which all magpies originate.
Fun cameo from Jack and Jill, when Antsy ends up briefly in The Moors, though she is directed to retreat before they can interact with her.
Antsy's story is another tragedy, made worse because so little of what happens to her is her fault. I hope that we get to stick with her as a character long enough for things to work out for her (though that's far from a guarantee, I know!)

I am currently in the middle of four books:
- Dead Silence (my current main read)
- Buchanan House (still my side read)
- Duma Key (with Alex)
- Installment Immortality (with Taylor)

---

I also finally got a LibraryThing account set up! I looked at it based on olivermoss's recommendation, as I was looking for something to keep track of books read and such, but really didn't want to use Goodreads. (In part because they're Amazon-owned, but also people can also be real weird about stuff on there at times. People can and will be weird anywhere, but Goodreads drama can be a lot, lol.) Storygraph is a popular alternative, and I know I did set up a login on there, but it didn't seem to mesh well with how I actually wanted to use it.

LibraryThing definitely works for what I want to use it for! It's been easy to find and get books added, easy to rate them, easy to edit any other information about them, easy to tag them in whatever way makes sense for me... so it's currently working really well for me. 

The UI looks very simple in a lot of ways, but is very robust. It's intended to be usable as a catalog for libraries as well as individuals. I really like how easily customizable it is. I can easily edit the publication date if the one it pulled isn't the correct one for the edition I have (a problem I think caused by how Amazon does their listings, where hardcover/paperback/ebook/audiobook are all part of the same listing, despite having different pub dates, and Amazon is one of the easiest places to pull book info from.) I can edit the title field to standardize the way it includes series information (since that's not completely standardized in what it defaults to.) If it defaults to a cover I don't like/the wrong edition for a book, I can check the site to find alternate covers that have been uploaded, or could provide my own. (But you also don't HAVE to do any of that.)
I also appreciate how easy it is to sort the way it's displayed. I wanted the dates for when I read each book to show up, so I was able to add that as a column to my default view and then sort the whole library based on those dates. There's also a lot of information that isn't relevant to me (the dimensions of the book, some extremely specific cataloging or publishing info, etc.) and it's extremely easy to ignore all of the stuff I don't find important, haha.

The only annoyance I've really found is that reordering collections doesn't seem to be working (as it hasn't worked on three different devices/OSs and two different browsers). [When in doubt, check the forum! Other people have had the same issue, but there's a page that serves as a workaround, so I was able to do that.] The "pulling the wrong edition's publication date" or "inconsistent series title/number formatting" are mildly annoying, but so trivially easy to fix that it's a non-issue.

I went back as far as 2022 to list the books I've read, up through everything I have in progress. (I don't plan to include anything farther back than that, though I was considering at least adding in the earlier books in various series in... but most series will eventually get reread, so I can probably just wait for that, ha.) I also feel bad not including a lot of favorite books... but again, they're on the TBR list as rereads, so they'll get there eventually.

I haven't yet put the rest of my TBR in, and am trying to decide if I want to do that, or if I want to keep it as a record only of the things I have read. I'm torn! Wanting to track the TBR is part of what I wanted a site like this to do, and limiting how many things you could mark as officially "to be read" was part of what I didn't like about some sites. However... I also don't know that I want to completely overwhelm my library with books I haven't yet read and likely won't get to for a few years. I will likely compromise and maybe add in the next five or so books that I plan to read, to keep it a bit more manageable.

On Monday we decided to head up toward the Pawnee National Grasslands. Back when I was in college we lived much closer, and went out there pretty often. There's a birding "trail" (it's a driving route with a handful of stops around where certain birds are frequently seen), some good scenery, and sometimes other wildlife. We were hoping to see a rattlesnake, since we often did when we were up there before, but alas.

We didn't have a terribly specific plan, beyond maybe some of the birding areas, or just anywhere that seemed interesting to pull over and check out. Part of the road for the birding route is closed, and while it seemed like you could still go through, it also headed into a fee camping area, which I do not remember from before... but it has been 15+ years since we were exploring up there, so things may simply have changed! (The website also has one stop on the birding trail crossed out, just saying "this stop has been removed" and I want to know why!)

We pulled over at one informative sign, and went on a brief walk into the grasslands. Mostly there were a ton of wildflowers! It was lovely.

Unfortunately I also got bit by a fuckoff big mosquito and some of her friends. I swatted her while she was biting me and there was a pretty gross explosion of blood. Uuuuugh.


A beeplant! Actually mostly being visited by ants. With a photobomb from a little tiny wasp or some sort coming in from the lower right.


I took more cactus flower pictures than anything else, ha.

Ten more pictures:

Globemallow again!


A mystery fungal pod. (Probably some sort of small puffball?)


A lone prickly pear.


Asters.


I just really love prickly pear flowers! The petals are so delicate looking for something so stabby.


More prickly pear flowers. With bonus bug friends.


Not sure what these are, but they looked neat.


Seems like we'd just missed whatever these were blooming.


One more cactus flower picture!

We did drive one stretch of the birding route, and we did see quite a few birds! Lark buntings, horned larks, a few I couldn't quite identify... of course they mostly flew off as soon as the car was close, haha.

But...


One lark bunting, I swear! (On the top fence wire.) Lark buntings are the state bird of Colorado, but I only ever see them up on the plains here.

A pretty long drive both there and home, but it was still nice to see some areas we haven't been in quite a long while.

I've read 30 books this year, which is something I'm really happy about. (That's more than the last several years combined!) Yet somehow the TBR list just keeps getting longer.

I finished up my old writing notebook (the bugs-and-mushrooms one that I keep getting gifted new copies of, haha.) Starting a new notebook always means I copy over a few pages of things that I refer back to fairly often, and one of those things is my TBR list, because I like having a physical version of it that I can look at. It got a minor reshuffle from the version I put together at the beginning of the year, accounting for some new purchases, and moving a few titles up or down based on interest. (According to a complicated system of vibes, trying to space out the books I am most excited about, as well as the ones I expect I might struggle with, or to avoid a bunch of really long or short books in a row, going back and forth between physical and ebooks, etc.)

I was upset at the beginning of the year when I discovered that I had more than 90 books on my list, which is what prompted me to really start pushing to read more than the 25 I'd originally set as my goal for the year. (I also quickly realized I'd forgotten some books, and I knew that didn't account for instances where, say, I have book one of a series as a TBR but may end up liking it well enough to immediately add the rest once I read it, etc.)

And then of course I acquired more:

I bought a charity book bundle of queer-themed ebooks, so I'll start on those once I'm done with the horror ebooks. The physical books I got for my birthday, and the ones I bought for myself a couple months ago have been added in. Toward the later part of the list, I did start working in the Ursula K Le Guin books as well as some of the Terry Pratchett ones, though I haven't added in all of their works yet, so there are plenty not yet counted in the total. The TBR list also doesn't include all the other ebooks I've acquired. I keep picking up free indie romances and such from promotional events, and now have SO VERY MANY of them. I count them toward my total number of books read, but I pick them based on the whim of the moment, so they don't get TBR slots. It also also does not include some that I want to read but don't own yet. (They probably deserve to be formally on the list, but I have enough books on there that I do own in some fashion, it makes sense to focus on those first.)

That dismaying list of 90, minus the 30 I've read this year, has turned into... 153. :/

Not sure how, but it feels like I really need to pick the reading speed up a bit more!

-

Unrelated, but I got a really sweet comment on one of my fics this morning, and it made me really happy.

Last Tuesday was the day after we lost Cy. We didn't really... feel like doing anything, but also felt like we *should* do something, rather than just stay home and be sad.

Bella had spent almost all of Monday stuck in her kennel, so we wanted to let her go do things, too.

We decided to go to Matthews/Winters, a county park. It was a good choice: it kept us from dwelling quite so much, and it was a nice day to be outside. It was a park Cy always really liked, because of the creek at the front, and I kept getting teary at random, but it was still good.


View from the parking lot.


There were tons of wildflowers. The lupine is very happy this year!

Twelve more pictures, mostly wildflowers:

Mushrooms!

Matthews/Winters is the site of the Mount Vernon Cemetery. There are only two remaining headstones, though the cemetery likely includes additional burials. As far as I know, there's nothing else remaining of the town.

The helpful informative sign provides a little bit about the two known graves:


James H. Judy, died 1867, aged 21 years, 8 months, 15 days.


Rev. Isaiah Rogers Dean, died in 1860. [Apparently he moved to Colorado to try and treat his consumption (tuberculosis).]


Globemallow.


I love all the new growth on this prickly pear!


Just a nice view.


More of the lovely lupines.


Yucca flower.


Red-tailed hawk, high overhead.


Blanketflower.


Bluebells.


Silly, but I was trying to get a picture of the fritillary butterfly, but here it looks like it was pursuing Alex and Bella down the pathway, haha.

It was a very warm day, and it did wipe Bella out a bit, but she got to wade in the creek at the end, which she was more enthusiastic about than usual. As usual, she napped for a bit and was ready to go again, ha.