Day 16: Which creative activity would you like to pursue but can't? (You don't need to state the reason if it's too private.)
I always wanted to be way better at music than I am. My ears just aren't good enough. If I work really hard, I can be passable at music. The effort-to-reward ratio is really discouraging.
Day 18: What part of your creativity gives you the most trouble?
I don't think any of it gives me trouble. Maybe I misunderstand the question?
Edit: Actually, @benetnasch has a really good point: titles! I hate coming up with titles! Partly, or even mostly, because I find it so difficult to do!
1) I've determined specific birth dates for every character, usually by randomizing it with a little script I wrote
2) I know exactly what end each of the villains will come to (and some of their comeuppances will be real doozies, muahahah!)
3) I can trace the "lineage" of each of my characters back through their mentor and their mentor's mentor, all the way to the first shaman awakened by the City in 1850
#1, the birthdays, was/is true. More details in follow-up toot…
2/4
1) Yup, I wrote a little JavaScript thing, and can even tell it "this is a leap year", so if it comes back with "Feb 29", I'll assign it to the character! The only way I'm diverging from those is that I decided I wanted Jessie's birthday to come near the end of the book, for Character Arc Reasons. But everyone else gets a randomly-assigned birth date.
2) Oh boy, do I wish this were true! I'm not yet sure of any of my villains' endings; I'm pantsing the end of the book.
3/4
3) I have mentor lineages for most characters in the book, but none of them go that far. The longest ones go back only 4 or 5 steps, which takes them to people who awakened in the 1980s. Most are more like 3 steps. A couple of older characters with '80s-era awakenings, I haven't even bothered to figure out their mentor, because they're dead.
Thanks for voting, everyone!
4/4
Day 25: How does photography shape your perception of the world? What subjects or moments do you find most captivating to capture?
I'm hardly even an amateur photographer; I'm more in the "like everyone else who carries a camera in their pocket these days, I occasionally take pictures of things for fun" camp. Given that, it hasn't really altered my perception of the world at all, and my favorite subjects tend to just be whatever I find eye-catching.
Day 26: Describe your creative workspace(s). Share pic(s) if you like.
They say a picture's worth a thousand words… and I can only fit 500 characters into a post! Here's my working (i.e., writing) chair at home. I routinely also write out at various bars, but this'll have to do. It's staged as if I just vanished from underneath my laptop, Miss Sakamoto. The scarf is a cherished gift from my sweetie.
Day 27: Think of something really boring. Now try to describe it in an interesting way.
The toast was a medium-brown that neither contrasted nor blended with the plain, white plate it sat on. But, being unbuttered, it was lying in wait for an unsuspecting person to try biting into it. Biding its time, until it could lacerate gums and parch a tongue.
(Why yes, I do like my toast with lots of well-melted butter, why do you ask?)
Day 28: Have you ever made an app?
Yes, a few of them, though I do them as Progressive Web Apps rather than fucking around with app stores and their insane crap. None of them have much uptake, but that's okay; I made them mostly for myself anyway (except one that I made for my sweetheart, and they like it a lot, so I count it a success).
Day 31: How did it go? Any changes you want to make next month?
I've had distinct problems with focus this month.
Unfortunately, this upcoming month is one where I'll have to spend a fair amount of mental effort on coming up to speed at the new job, so I expect my remaining mental bandwidth for writing to be lower than usual.
Day 3: Did you ever try Kintsugi? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi
No, I don't work in ceramics. However, one of the characters in my novel may very well refer to it as a metaphor at some point.
Day 6: What’s your best dish? What are the ingredients and how do you make it?
A Denver omelet:
Beat 2–3 eggs thoroughly. Dice some ham, onion, and bell pepper (ideally mostly green, with a little red and maybe yellow). Heat a skillet or frying pan to high, and put the ham in without butter. Sear it until the edges start to turn brown and you have some brown stuff on the bottom of the pan. Take out the ham, but leave the brown stuff in. 1/3
Now add butter, get it sizzling, and lightly sear the onion and pepper in that. Set them aside with the ham, give the pan a quick cleaning-out, and bring it back up to medium temperature with butter. Pour the beaten eggs in so they evenly coat the bottom of the pan. Put the ham, onion, and pepper on either one half or the middle third of the eggs (depending on how you like your omelet to look), and cover with cheese — ideally shredded cheddar, but American will do. 2/3
3/3Day 7: Do you plant a garden each year?
No.
Sure, I live in a city and haven't even got a balcony, never mind any larger room for gardening. But there is a community garden just a block from my apartment. I theoretically could get a plot there... but I have really very little interest in gardening. It's just not for me.
Day 8: Create a multiple choice poll listing 4 books you've read, then ask “Which of these have you read?” (Indie/self-published encouraged, but list anything you want.)
I'm arranging them alphabetically by author's surname, so please don't read anything into the order.
Day 9: Tell us about the book that received the fewest votes yesterday.
The only option with zero votes was John M. Ford's _The Last Hot Time_. Luckily, I don't have to try to fit my thoughts about it into a mere 500 characters; I wrote an entire review of it many years ago: https://www.freaknation.com/reviews/books/last-hot-time.php (Please pardon the obsolete styling and design of that page.)
Short version: It absolutely rocks and I wish there were more of it!
Day 11: Do you give any of your work away for free?
None of it is in give-away-able shape at the moment, but I do plan to make some of the preparatory vignettes I've written available as freebies on my website once the actual novel is published and there are any people who might care about the supplemental material.
Day 12: How can we, as adults, get excited about art/creativity again? (credit @SJHoodlet and @Emmacox)
This question seems to presuppose that we got unexcited about them at some point, and I doubt that's the case, especially for the kinds of folks who populate this hashtag. I can't recall a time when I wasn't at least somewhat interested in art and creativity of some sort or another.
Day 15: How is your creativity so far? Anything you want help with?
NGL, I've been having some trouble keeping at it this month. Partly because I have a fair amount of mental energy going into the new job, and also because there's a lot of stress from gestures around at everything, and that makes it hard to concentrate.
Unfortunately, neither of these is something anyone else can help with.
Day 16: Have you ever tried hyperbolic crochet?
I literally (not hyperbolically!) have never heard of it before. I hyperbolically haven't the faintest clue what it could possibly be. (And since that was hyperbole, I do have an idea — but it makes so little sense, I don't even want to admit what it is... partly because, wouldn't that just be a standard failure mode for learners?)
my husband @datasaurus has made several and they're not all as coral looking as the follow-up post as he's played with the rate of increase.
IIRC there's a cool story about a woman mathematician creating the first hyperbolic surface with crochet where her (mostly male) counterparts believed such a surface to be impossible to create.
@gairdeachas @kagan The creator is the Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daina_Taimi%C5%86a). She had seen a delicate paper model of a hyperbolic surface and wanted to make something more robust and manipulable, largely as a teaching aid for her students. So she figured out how to translate it into a crochet pattern. And that let her and others manipulate the surface, fold it and mark it, and really understand how it behaves.
@gairdeachas @kagan It turns out that a ruffly-edged leaf of lettuce is a hyperbolic surface -- and the exponential growth of the layers of cells is the same mechanism as the exponential growth of rows of crochet! People needed to see physical examples of hyperbolic surfaces to start recognizing them in nature.
@datasaurus@mastodon.social
@gairdeachas @kagan Here's a few different examples I've crocheted -- some of which increase more slowly and are much easier to see and understand:
