on writing, photography, and books.

Guys! I've been writing again! I managed 742, count 'em, 742 words on a fic this week because Mr. Rhod went to his table-top gaming session, and I'd finally figured out how to tackle this section I've been stuck on for MONTHS, and well, I finally wrote it. It felt like pulling teeth, and now that I'm going back and reading the 100K+ words I've already read, I'm not sure it's as good as what I wrote before?

But by God, writing is literally nothing but putting one word down, and then putting another word after that, and then a word after that, and there is nobody who is going to write this fucking trainwreck except for me. So we're going to forge ahead. I think I have another 3,000-4,000 words to write, and then I think I can put this monstrosity to bed.

...

In no particular order, since it's been a while:

• I shot a friend's wedding! I wasn't as good as a professional, but I did a decent job -- the only egregious fuckup was that I got the white balance wrong on some pretty key family group shots, and since I shot in JPG rather than RAW, it meant the software white balance correction wasn't as good as it would have been. But other than that, I did pretty well, and the bride was happy, and I feel like I really pushed my camera body to the limit of what it could do. Like, I have camera body that was released moer than a decade ago, and the main issue I ran into was that the ISO performance was limited, even on the goooooooooooooooorgeous 20-70mm 2.8 lens that I rented.
  
  
  
• I wore lipstick in public! I've never really worn much makeup in my life, mostly because I spent a lot of time as a teenager feeling emotionally crushed by my father/society's demands about how cis women should perform femininity, so I came to being performatively femme late, you know? But I realized that there some really WEIRD perfumes, and then I found out that nail polish could be GLITTERY, and around the time everything went to shit in 2015, I was starting to poke around wearing makeup on my face. And when I went back to work after giving birth, I had some pretty significant gray undertones, and had giant fucking bags under my eyes, so I started wearing a little concealer, and a little low-key lipstick. And then I realized that they made the lipstick of my girly girly girly seven year old glitterface dreams. And then I realized that I actually liked the way that super-vivid lipstick looks. And then I fell down a hole that involved a lot of expensive purchases at Sephora.
  
  But I've mostly been wearing my super-vivid lipstick at night -- work has been super busy, and I end up working after dinner for two or three hours. So to make work a little more """fun""", and to also keep myself from eating out of boredom, I'd put on some Bite Prismatic in the BALLER FUCK YOU IN THE EYE GOLD and do documents. When it came time to shoot the wedding mentioned up above, I tried to put on some of my big shiny vivid lipstick, but chickened the fuck out and ended up scrubbing my lips off, like, twice, in the bathroom, which is no joke if you've seen what it takes to get Kat Von D liquid lipstick off.
  
  Worry not, though, friends! This past weekend, I wore Beauty Bakerie's Cranberry Stiletto Lip Whip to take the kiddo to the museum, and it lasted through the eating of one grasy-ass danish, a lot of tea, some cheese, and almonds, which isn't bad at all. And the world did not end.
  
  
• My sister used all the data allocation for the family plan, and I have been without cell data for LIKE LITERALLY ELEVEN DAYS including at WORK BECAUSE OUR BUILDING HAS METAL FRAMES AROUND THE DOORS and the WIFI DOES NOT PENETRATE NITO THEM and IT IS AWFUL. But our long family nightmare is at an end soon because our data allocation renews tomorrow. Hurray!
  
  
• Books!
  
  1. The Shadow Isle by Katharine Kerr
  2. Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan
  3. The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch
  4. A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
  5. Precious and Grace by Alexander McCall Smith
  6. The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith.
  
  Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency is the first and best and most beautiful cozy mystery series, and I will fight everyone about this. I'm saving the books to savor because the author is balls old, and who knows which one will be the last one? And every time I get disappointed by another series (I'm lookin' at you, Inspector Gamache, which I gave ANOTHER shot again, but I just who gives a fuckkkkkkkk), I go back to it for comfort and joy. And it helps that my library has all of them in Kindle to lend.