Dai Stihó

Ha. So — so far at 3/4 for rejections (for jobs and writing submissions) over the last, er, month. Jobs — one I just did not hear from (the posting was removed and then relisted), and the other was a mismatch between what their ad said and what they actually wanted (they were nice about it, but it wasn't a fit). The writing thing I figured I would be rejected for, too, since right after I submitted, they shared on their social media, "we're especially interested in stories about [SOMETHING I DID NOT WRITE], as we've been inundated with stories about [WHAT I DID WRITE]", which...oops.

It's...I dunno. As I said to Ed in therapy yesterday, I know that if you don't submit stuff, you can't, like, expect to have any chance of getting stuff published, and if you don't apply to jobs, you won't get hired, but both processes suck a lot and I am not a fan.

I have one more piece currently out for publication. It was an even longer shot than the first one, so, er. I'm preemptively going, "yeah, I'm going to guess I didn't get in for this one, either" and shrugging. At least I tried?

Right, anyway.

The upshot to this is that while I was very much In My Feelings yesterday re: rejections and just feeling low, I got a very nice comment on one of the things I have on AO3 that I'm most proud of (The Road Through the Mountains, because...yeah, anyway). Like, nice enough that it made me teary, because it came in very shortly after the extremely impersonal writing rejection (like, they misspelled my name, that's how impersonal we're talking, ha), and it was very clear from what they'd written that they loved the piece, which was a great feeling. ♥

And, er, well.

The auctions for Fandom Trumps Hate opened for bidding today — they'll be open through Friday — so imagine my complete and total shock when I opened the bidding sheet for the writing I'm offering and saw that there is, in fact, a bid — one placed pretty early, even, for 5x what my minimum bid listing is, from someone I don't know.

I had sort of half-expected that I was going to need to send someone $5 to bid on me, so this is a very pleasant surprise. ♥ Almost offsets the "ugh, applying for stuff is the WORST" feelings. :)

If you're wanting to bid, then, looks like you have to donate more than $25.

If you want tabletop (bespoke tabletop!!), that one is open and doesn't have any bids yet — you can find it here.

if I could travel anywhere, where would I go/what would I do?

I mean, honestly? I'm kind of boring. I'd go back to Spain and spend a week or two doing nothing more important than eating good food and visiting all the historical sites, maybe hit up Portugal while out there.

Max wants to visit Japan, someday I would like to visit Chile, but like — for the most part, "go back to Europe now that I'm older and theoretically have money" is near the top of the list. :D


Anyway, er — the sourdough adventures continue! I made crackers from discard (very good, worth doing again), and today I experimented and did a weird loaf (this recipe).

It turned out pretty well, actually!

It's very high hydration, which means it stuck awfully to my brotforms, but I'm going to drop it for next time, I think, and try again. "Next time" as in, "I'm probably going to make more bread this weekend, because Why Not".

We are moving ever closer to the cranberry walnut loaf of my dreams, which is the Important part. :D

talk about a TTRPG system other than Dungeons and Dragons

Easy — there's a number of them I like. Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week/Thirsty Sword Lesbians/Apocalypse World/every other PbtA game out there come to mind, as do some lovely GMless indie ones (Stewpot! Rusalka! Fiasco! The Quiet Year!), BUT.

Honestly, okay, the top complaint I get about tabletop?

"I don't want to play online, I don't want to play with strangers, and I don't know anyone offline that wants to play with me, where do I even start?"

The answer for that is:

SOLO GAMES.

There's a bunch. I'm not talking about the weird D&D hacks, either, though those do exist (and I don't recommend them!). Solo tabletop as a genre has expanded a lot and there's a bunch of wonderful stuff out there now. I've played a few, but my favorite, by and large, is Thousand Year Old Vampire.

In TYOV, you play as a vampire made sometime in history. You pick when, give yourself a handful of possessions, and then roll dice and respond to prompts to figure out what happens to you. Do you survive and thrive, or do you die? What do you remember, what do you forget, and how do you adapt to being a vampire? It's extraordinarily well-done, and unlike a lot of journaling games, which can feel like writing prompts, it manages to capture the experience of roleplay extremely well. I played it for the first time a couple of years ago, and ended up documenting what happened to a Roman peasant girl as she lived through the collapse of the empire and into the Middle Ages. Some of the choices I was faced with and things that my character had to do were among the hardest I've ever made as a player, and it required a great amount of consideration and thought to move from point A to point B. The game broke my heart (in a good way), and I highly recommend it. It is, to this day, one of my favorite games. ♥



In non-Talking Meme Month news: reveals happened for the January round of a remix exchange I'm involved in, so I now have something new on AO3 that is (surprise!) not rated E.

And I Awoke on the Cold Hill's Side (rated T, 7.5k words) is a love letter to growing up queer in Salt Lake. It's set around the time that I would have been in undergrad. It's not perfect (what is?), but I hit the mark for what I set out to do, and, well, yeah. People familiar with the valley can probably pinpoint exactly which warehouse I'm talking about for where the party toward the middle of the piece takes place.

...I also have another piece up that is, uh, rated E. Slaying the Dragon (E, 14k words) is about grief and how we recover from it and come back to ourselves. It's set in the same universe as The Road Through the Mountains, though it's obviously not the same characters or set-up, and no familiarity with it is required. ♥


Not much happening. Have thus far been ghosted or rejected by every job I've applied to. I feel mostly okay about that. I have some freelance work lined up for the fall (we're drawing up contracts), so I am perhaps less worried about money coming in than I should be. Still noodling on various and sundry stuff; been dealing with some pretty awful chronic pain things lately so that's taken most of my focus, and I'm trying to like, gently remind myself that I can in fact take this time to simply Be and not worry about, you know. Everything.

( talking about FOSS/software stuff, probably not interesting to most people. )

favorite tarot card (whether for art, meaning, or something else)?

(As per usual, I will do the writing ones when I get my shit together, preferably on a day when I'm not dealing with a migraine.)

I have a few favorite cards, less because of art, and more because of meaning. As per usual, in no particular order:

The Magician: The Magician represents ambition, manifestation, resourcefulness and inspired action. I have a lot of fondness for this one simply because it was one of the major arcana I used to pull most frequently when doing readings for myself. One of the potential interpretations of the Magician is that it represents balance and having the ability to do things because you have all the resources at your disposal — and, yeah, I liked that. Ha. In my favorite (goblin) deck, he's a juggler and it's quite pretty art, but it doesn't appear to be online (boo), so I suppose you'll have to take my word for it.

Death: Not literally about death; also the card I tend to pull the most these days. Er, hmm. Death is about change, transformation, endings — it's a pretty positive card and it is only rarely about literal death. One of my favorite books about tarot talks about accepting Death as part of life, and I think about it a lot in that context — there are constant deaths in the form of endings around us every day, and part of finding meaning and purpose in life is learning to accept this.

The Ten of Cups: Cups as a suit are meant to represent relationships and connections, both romantic and not. The Ten of Cups is specifically about having those relationships/connections in abundance and feeling connected and cared for — it's basically "happiness: the card".

At one point, one of my very good friends, who does tarot, offered to tell each of us what cards in her deck she associated with us. She left it to us to figure out the "why". Most of my friends were major arcana — I still remember being mildly jealous of the person who was told theirs was 'the Star' — and I was sort of upset at the time that I was the 10 of Cups.

Now that I do tarot, I think it may be one of the best compliments I've ever been given. So. Yeah.