A Christmas Scavenger Hunt

This year as self-therapy to learn how to enjoy Christmas, my two oldest daughters helped me set it up so the kids would wake up to something different. Something fun, something more than a pile of presents under a tree. Something that required teamwork, sillies, and a sense of adventure.

Happy Holidays!

Christmas is not normally my favorite time of year. In fact, I tend to try to avoid all holidays, not just ones with a guy in a suit who invades my house. It's not really possible to avoid, what with there being six kids and a husband around who seem to think these things are a big deal.

Writing Groups

Pretend for a moment that you want to be an author. To do that, you need to have written something. And for that thing you've written to get polished and pretty and understandable, it needs to be seen by someone other than you. That way you can fix the things you don't know are broken. One of the ways to do this is to join a writing group where you chop your newly written precious into chapter sized chunks and then submit them for critiques one week at a time.

Fear

Fear is a funny thing. It’s just an emotion. It’s that voice inside our heads, sometimes not even a voice. It’s a whisper. A niggling doubt. But sometimes it is claws twisting our insides into knots until we stop functioning. It can be paralyzing and completely destructive.

Playing with Fire

Today I looked at my manuscript, of which I have all of six chapters left to write to finish, and I couldn't make myself write. There are many other things playing through my mind right now. I want to figure out how to enjoy this upcoming Christmas season, I want to let go of things from childhood that haunt me every year come this time, I want to feel the magic. All kinds of things completely unrelated to a slave girl lost in space.

So, when I sat down at my computer today, I decided I wanted to play with fire. I pulled out my tablet, looked through the pictures my daughter has taken for yearbook, and sorted through some background patterns I downloaded from pareeerica and after a couple of hours messing with various brushes and tools in Photoshop, managed to create this.

Yeah, I won't be quitting my day job any time soon. I'm so out of practice, I don't even know what to say. But I had an itch, so I scratched it. (I'm not even sure why I'm sharing this picture... It's unfinished and un-something.)