Under the Surface

I said I was going to share some of my recent experiences with poetry, didn't I? Things keep getting away from me because the big writing project I'm working on has gotten over some obstacles and is now flowing ! I can't know if it will flow like this until it's finished (at least for the first draft), or if I'll come to another stretch of obstacles. With this blog being a side thing that I do for myself more than anything, sharing poetry hasn't been at the top of my priority list. I don't forget, either. That's why we're here.  I love poetry! I read Shel Silverstein poetry collections over and over as a kid. Some of his poems reveal more layers when I read them again as and adult. As I got older, the list of poets I read grew. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou, e e cummings, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost... I was introduced to a lot of poets' work by school assignments, but I continued reading long after the assignments were done because I e...

I was getting ready to write about what I've been playing with recently when it comes to poetry, when I realized I'll have to do that some other time because I still haven't posted about Forest Tales !  (Cover of Forest Tales  by LK Nesse. A tunnel through a forest formed by trees. The title is in letters that have simple shapes with just a touch of fairy tale flair.) Super short summary: Six short stories that give glimpses of daily life in an enchanted forest. You can get it  here  or through  my ko-fi   in both epub and pdf formats. Summary too short? I'm happy to tell you more! I started writing these stories just for the sake of writing them, sharing them on a Substack I closed earlier this year. There was no planning or schedule for it. I think I only wrote three before I shut things down over there, and it took well over a year for me to do even that. Editing what I already had and adding to it was one of the first things I thought of whe...

If you look at things here regularly, you might be confuses by posts having moved around. I promise I didn't wait until the month after a book bundle sale to say something about it!  I updated some posts to add book titles to the tags, and it rearranged things to give those posts the date they were updated instead of when they were originally posted. I'm willing to bet I could fix that if it bothered me enough, but it doesn't. It's only a few posts, and my brain is kind of exhausted from getting a lot of writing done the past couple of days. I intend to post about writing soon. If it comes down to it, though, I'll choose getting the writing done over just talking about it.

I've got a growing list in my mind of things I want to talk about, but there have been things of higher priority to focus on. I want to make sure, though, that I let people know about  this book bundle !  (Bi Pride colors of pink, lavender, and blue as a background. Silhouette of a dragon and rocket ship. Text on image reads, "Bi Visibility Week itch.io mega-bundle. September sixteenth through twenty-third. Fifty books by bi/pan authors for fifty dollars. Fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror, and literary fiction.) One of the fantasy books in this mega-bundle is my Forest Tales, which is a collection of six short stories set in what our world recognizes as an enchanted forest. There are books by authors I'm not familiar with, and books with author's names that ignite the "Oh, I bet that's a good one!" reaction in me. It's a great opportunity to experience work from authors you aren't familiar with, as well as getting some books that may ha...

I really wanted to work on my Art Grimoire map one day. I didn't want to do the normal rolling the d6 to find out which Mystery I would be working on. I just wanted to work on the map I already had going in my book.  So I did! (Fantasy map of an island drawn in a sketchbook. There are strange symbols in various place on the land and water, some forests and sea creatures, and places marked with warnings in red ink.) Maps are an easy thing to stay focused on while still seeing your sorcerer's sanity numbers go up and down. The cards, which raise and decrease sanity, are a big part of the prompts for maps. All I had to do was keep rolling the dice to find out which sections of the map to do and keep drawing cards to find out what I was doing.  To do this with other Mysteries, just make sure you remember to draw a card and see what it does to your sorcerer's sanity before you make another entry. You can go into things knowing you want to do an Herbalism entry, for e...

I have surprised many people over the years when they find out about my passion for divination. Sometimes it's cheerful surprise, and sometimes it's disappointed surprise. "Oh! I didn't think you would believe in something like that! Do you do readings for clients?" (In case you're wondering,  the answer is yes . And I'm doing what I can to keep things as affordable as possible.) Or, y'know, then there's the other surprised group. "Oh. I didn't expect you would believe in such foolishness." I often find those people get a lot of their ideas about divination from tv shows, movies, and things other people who don't really know anything about divination say. Actually, in some cases, they do know how divination works, at least from a purely psychological approach. The problem is that they think that completely disproves it. They think they're explaining how a magician didn't really make something disappear, but what they'r...

I wandered off from working on the big story I'm writing for a while. There are elements of the story that make me sometimes need to take a break, and there's been a lot of research. As a fun side project, I created a solo journaling game/art journal of sorts.  (cover of Art Grimoire by LK Nesse) Art Grimoire is available  on itchio  and  through my ko-fi . It's the same price, and available as an epub and pdf in both places.  If you aren't familiar with a solo rpg, it's essentially a tabletop roleplaying game that you don't need a group for because the game is designed for one player and no need for a game master. You need a sketchbook, d6 and d20, and a deck of playing cards (no Jokers) for Art Grimoire. You'll probably want at least a few sheets of extra paper for tracking sanity (I'll explain that in a minute) and maybe working out a few rough ideas before they go in the sketchbook. Excuse me, I mean the grimoire . The game guides you thr...

I thought about talking about this a couple of weeks back, but I had other things to pay attention to and then it felt like a post on this might look like I'm responding to some specific thing without naming it.  I'm not. Maybe I kind of am. But I'm really not. It's Our Year of Dumpster Fire 2025. That's the specific thing that isn't really a specific thing. Social media's never easy for me, and this year has added many layers of Not Easy to everything.  Social media moves too fast for me. I don't just mean videos, because I'm not watching most of those. My sound stays off, so I'm definitely not watching any that don't have captions. I mean the flow of social media is too fast for me. I can't handle topics bouncing back and forth, 18 conversations happening across three or four different apps, commenting on everything that pops up in the news while still replying to threads that have been continuing throughout the day... That's too mu...