On Twitter yesterday, NK Jemisin said:

Said to my therapist this morning that I can't plan anything, bc the next few weeks are a singularity of possibilities that I can't see past. She gave me permission to play video games all day — "practice radical self-care," basically. Anybody else needs to hear this, you too.

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 29, 2020

My immediate reaction was, “OMG, yes!” This is what I’ve been wanting. Permission to stop struggling to accomplish things every day. Permission to let go and not worry and not feel sad and scared. Permission to just kill monsters. Or build farms or take care of gardens or whatever non-real simulation thing I want to do. Permission to wander around Pandaria, my favorite land in World of Warcraft, if that is what I want to do.

Writing has been impossible lately. My imagination is broken. I have no stories left. NaNoWriMo starts in two days and first I was planning to finish one of the multiple novels I have underway. But they’re all stuck for a reason: I don’t know what happens next in them. Then I thought I’d start something new and fresh — it’s always easier to begin something than it is to persist through a murky middle. But I don’t have any ideas. Nothing fun is happening in my daydreams.

Next I thought maybe I’d just write fanfiction of my own books — scenes and short stories with characters I already know, no worrying about plot, just character and dialogue and moments in time. I even for a brief moment had Maggie and Max in my head, with Maggie getting annoyed at Max in December 2019, when he provides her with blueprints of a diner renovation that would improve all the little annoyances in her kitchen. How can she shut down for the three months it would take to get that work done? she demands, but he grimaces and suggests she schedule it for the spring. Yay, an idea! But that’s all it was, an idea of that one moment and it didn’t lead me to anything else.

The usual writing advice is just to persist. Keep thinking about it, keep sitting down at the computer, keep opening up the file and staring at the blank page. But I fill my blank pages with endless ruminations about my failures as a parent, what it means to have been so wrong about a relationship. To believe it was one thing — love and affection and appreciation of one another, a firm belief in the other person’s value and worth as a human being, the very definition of family — only to discover that all that appreciation was a one-way street. That while I thought my son was fantastic and interesting, he thought I was condescending and annoying and not even worth reaching out to when the world was burning down. When I called him from the desert, sick and scared and crying, and he didn’t call me back… well.

Can I tell you how much these ruminations do NOT serve me? They don’t serve me. I’m trying very hard — very, very, very hard — to stay out of that black hole, which means that I delete those words and close that file and move on to other things.

I am tempted, of course, to do that very thing right now. (In fact, I did, for about an hour.) Writing words and sharing them, even in the form of a blog that only a few people read, means accepting that other people will judge those words and, of course, the person behind them. Are you going to think I’m a bad mother? Are you going to think I’m over-sensitive? Do I need to care? A helpful friend this summer told me I was co-dependent for hurting so much and I should get help. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine how that felt. Fortunately for my state of mind, around the same time the Best Sister-in-Law Ever (married to the Best Brother Ever) sent me the Best Email Ever. So you, oh, reader, can feel free to judge me for my over-sensitivity and my wallowing; I can pretty much guarantee that your judgement won’t be as harsh as my own anyway.

What does all this have to do with cover design? Well, I was eager to accept the internet’s granted permission to play video games. I truly was! Yay, video games! I actually started downloading WoW again, so I could go take care of my farm in Pandaria. But back in August, shortly after I posted my Daughter of Flame cover, I decided that my graphic design education needed a focus. My daily drawings (never actually daily) were entertaining but it didn’t feel like they were getting me anywhere, and I don’t have nearly enough book projects to keep me learning design via my own stories. So I made up a project, or rather, a series of them. I found a random title generator on the internet, generated a bunch of titles, and started making covers to go with those titles.

This is that project to date:

And this bring us to today. Am I going to create a cover today? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just going to play video games, the internet having given me permission to grieve for my son and my country and our world in whatever way gets me through the day.

But I am also going to pat myself on the back and acknowledge the shine I deserve for having created this portfolio of mostly lousy, sometimes great work in the past two months. I am halfway through my list of titles: I don’t want to stop now. Despite the temptation of video games and escapes from reality, I’m looking forward to what I’ll be able to do and how much I’ll know by the time I reach the end of my list. (Although I’m willing to bet the very last one will be either Gnome of Time, Nymphs And Foes, or the aforementioned Dogs and Goblins, none of which strike me as particularly good titles. I guess that’s the peril of a random title generator.)

Meanwhile, I’ve actually started another cover design project, which is maybe going to turn into something I share with other people some day? I got tired of re-inventing the wheel typographically. I like playing with fonts but I also wanted to create some cheat sheets for myself of fonts that look good together, specifically for book covers as opposed to web sites, and that are also genre-appropriate for given genres. The last two covers in my list are actually part of those genre tests. I’ve got multiple versions of Crown’s Power using all kinds of different fonts, most of which I rejected, while Chasing Destiny was my Roboto test. I used Roboto for the title (with some playing around with tracking and leading) and then tried out approximately nine or ten other fonts for the author name and tag line before settling on versions of Roboto.

My notes say:

Roboto  – Available on Google fonts. Roboto was designed for Android and is sort of a mix of styles; a rounded san serif that feels straightforward and simple. Per Wikipedia, Google was aiming for “modern, yet approachable” and initial reviews were mixed. But it’s everywhere and has the kind of clean lines that could easily work on a science-fiction or modern tech cover. (It might also work on contemporary romance if it was a geeky romance.) Because it’s used on interfaces (Android, Switch), it feels familiar. I’d say it’s not a noticeable font, but possibly a good choice for a cover where you want the art to stand out more than the type treatment.  

Pair with Lato, Josephin Sans, Rubik, or stick to a different weight of Roboto. 

Note: this is NOT Roboto Slab, which is a serif font and which doesn’t work for me. It looks more typewriter than tech. One source suggested pairing Roboto and Roboto Slab, but while that might work for a web page, it doesn’t work at all for a book cover, IMO. The Slab would be better for blocks of text, rather than display. 

See Chasing Destiny cover for Roboto example. 

I’m going to try to do one font a day from a fairly lengthy list of fonts I generated by reading all the articles on “best fonts for book cover design” on the first couple pages of Google’s search results. I’m hoping to end up with five to seven sets per genre — enough that I have plenty of flexibility and choice but not so much that I feel consistently overwhelmed by the thousands of font combinations that are available. It doesn’t feel like information I should share on my blog — admit it, even if you’ve read this far, you skimmed that block of italicized text, didn’t you? — but maybe I’ll make a new blog for indie author cover design tips. Or maybe I’ll turn it into a tiny ebook or something. Or maybe I’ll just have it as a useful tool for my own future fun in cover design.

Meanwhile, if you need permission to make it through the next few weeks/months by playing video games all day, you hereby have my permission. And NK Jemisin’s permission and her therapist’s permission, too. Go forth and conquer Azeroth! Or Animal Crossing or wherever your gaming takes you. But please vote first. (Um, for Biden-Harris. If you’re planning on voting for this guy, you might be codependent and should consider seeking help.)

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1321692442983366656

At the beginning of the summer, Suzanne had a dozen chickens in a coop next to the tiny house, with a second, smaller coop near the shed at the far end of the yard. The ground of the enclosures around the big coop was bare dirt, all traces of plant life gobbled down by the birds inside, but the area by the back coop was surrounded by brush and weeds with plenty of opportunities for thriving communities of bugs and spiders. You’d think this would be a no-brainer for the chickens, right? Smaller coop with prolific food and snack sources should always win out over bigger barren coop, right?

Not so much. Chickens do not like to be separated from the flock. The small coop — overflowing with snacks! — was the punishment zone, and the chickens hated being relegated to it. Suzanne, however, wanted them to clear out the weeds for her. Her solution was to add a few more chickens to the flock: young ones, who would start out in the small coop and stay there.

She bought four… teenage chickens. I’m sure there’s a name for that in the chicken world, but I’m equally sure that I’m not in the mood to start browsing the internet looking for it. Well, it’s not that I’m not in the mood, but if I fall into an internet rabbit hole today, I will probably not manage to pull myself out anytime soon. So whatever, four teenage chickens, mixed breeds of ameraucana and something else that Suzanne can’t remember.

Suzanne, having had many chickens over the years, doesn’t feel the need to name every chicken anymore. She calls the flock of them, “the ladies,” and pretty much leaves it at that, although a few of the older ones do have names. I’m not so nonchalant about cute teenage chickens, though, so within a few days, I’d decided that these birds should be named after the queens of England.

If you look closely at the above picture, you’ll see that the bird who’s looking out at the camera has some dark fluffy feathers around her beak. Another one has white feathers in the same spot. I named the one with white feathers Elizabeth, for her Elizabethan ruff, and the one with the dark feathers Victoria, for her expression of disapproval. The other two, somewhat interchangeable, were Mary and Anne.

Their royal majesties, however, did not grow up to be interchangeable. To begin with, three of the four of them were escape artists. The area around the small coop was enclosed with soft fencing, boards, and buildings (the shed and the coop), but Victoria, Elizabeth, and Mary treated that whole enclosure thing as more of a suggestion than a rule. I’d regularly go out into the garden and discover chickens wandering free. After all, given a choice between gobbling on thick weeds or tender basil plants and strawberries, who would choose the weeds? Anne, apparently, who never seemed to wander with the others.

Because Suzanne wasn’t inclined to let the chickens feast on the plants that she wanted in her garden, she decided their majesties needed to move into the main coop with the rest of the birds. I was worried about them — wouldn’t they get picked on? Were the older chickens going to share their food? I’m not going to say Suzanne laughed at me, but she definitely didn’t share my concern. And rightfully so.

Possibly I shouldn’t have named them after royalty, because the teenage hooligans took over the main coop within a few weeks. They stay up later than the others — everyone else has gone to bed and they’re still roaming, hunting for the last of the daily pellets of food — but despite their late bedtimes, they sleep on the top rung of the roost. They share it with a couple of the others, but all four of them wind up squished in on the highest row, which is the power position for chickens.

And Mary, formerly the Queen of Scots, now known as Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary, has continued her escape artist proclivities. She’s still light enough to fly to the top of the fence on the big coop, then fly down on the other side and wander around the garden, selecting leaves of basil and flowers to snack on at her leisure.

Initially, getting her back into the coop was a challenge for me. But chickens are not nearly as stupid as I was always told they were. Now when Mary-Mary gets out, I grab a chicken snack — maybe some scraps of vegetables leftover from cooking, or a handful of berries, or maybe a little granola — and head to the door of the coop. Mary-Mary hurries back to get her share of the fresh loot before I can leave her out of it. She would probably say that human beings aren’t as stupid as she always thought they were.

Yesterday I spent $20 at the feed store to buy a big bag of chicken treats. Suzanne laughed and said the chickens would adore me. I, somewhat smugly, said that her chickens already adore me, and she promised that adoration would turn to worship. I am pretty sure that Mary-Mary is not the worshipping type, however. She thinks those treats are nothing more than her due.

I am ridiculously fond of her.

The cave photo from a few days ago, made just a little more fun. I didn’t actually do any of the complicated compositing things I’ve learned about — atmospheric perspective and balancing light and shadows and so on. I just gave it a magic bird and a path of clouds and a pretty sky and some sparkle. It was very satisfying. Sharing so Carol can see!

I didn’t check the temperature, but I’m pretty sure the night we spent in the Oregon desert was the coldest I’ve ever been in Serenity. That was mostly because we hadn’t been on the road for more than a meal or two before my propane died again, which meant I had no heater. Fortunately, I’ve been living in Arcata long enough to have stocked up on my warm layers: I wore a t-shirt, a sweater, a thermal layer, a fleece, my jacket, leggings, socks, and blue jeans, and huddled under a sleeping bag and three blankets and I was fine. Even Zelda got to wear a jacket.

Our spot in the desert was located outside Plush, Oregon, near the sunstone Public Collection area, at the Spectrum Mine. The people at the mine apparently also thought it was too cold. We got there after a day of driving at around 4:30. According to their sign, the office was open from 9 until 5, but no one was there. We wandered around for a bit, then found our way to their camping area (free for the night) and settled in.

The next morning, we waited some more. 9AM went by with no signs of life. 10AM also went by with no signs of life. Eventually — and I’m going to say it was probably within fifteen minutes of our deciding to give up entirely, despite having driven twenty miles down dirt roads to get to the mine — a guy showed up and said it was too cold to do the conveyor belt, but maybe we could do it in the afternoon, if it warmed up. Meanwhile, we could dig in the dirt if we wanted to. So we did. I wish I’d taken some pictures, but I was too busy digging. 🙂

We debated whether we wanted to stay or not, but it was a gorgeous day, (albeit chilly) and the conveyor belt mining experience felt like one of those things that you’re only ever going to do once. Once we left, we knew wouldn’t be making the drive back to give it a second chance. So we stuck around until 1 or so, when a woman came over and told us they’d start the belt running for us, and explained how it worked.

Basically, they take a big load of dirt and bulldozer it into a machine that breaks it into smaller pieces and then sprays water on it and dumps it onto a conveyor belt. You stand by the belt and take the sunstones as they appear. The belt goes pretty fast and you don’t get second chances — if you don’t grab the stone as it goes by, it falls off into the big pile of dirt and is gone forever. Within a couple minutes, Suzanne was making jokes about Lucy and Ethel and within ten minutes, I knew for sure I didn’t ever want to work in a factory. It was bizarrely stressful. But also really fun.

I have no idea what we’ll do with our piles of sunstones: it’s almost as bad as my Mason jar of Oregon beach rocks. Most of them are pebbles, really, so maybe we’ll sprinkle them around the rose bushes so they can sparkle in the sunshine in the garden. Or maybe I’ll put them into another Mason jar to sit on my windowsill. But it was fun collecting them — they’re not worth much, but it still feels like hunting for treasure to find the sparkles in the dirt.

After the conveyor belt finally stopped, however, we hurried on our way. I’d found a hotel in Lakeview, Oregon — Hunter’s Hot Springs Lodge — with a hot spring and dry camping in the parking lot and we wanted to get there before dark. Within three hours, we were immersed in the steaming hot pool, which was lovely.

That said, they charged $40 per night/per camping unit for dry camping in a parking lot which was way, way over-priced. Actually, let me add another “way.” Way, way, way over-priced. It was a parking lot. A noisy parking lot. And the hot springs didn’t have any of the basic amenities, ie a shower in the changing room — it was just a warm swimming pool. That said, it was a delightful warm swimming pool. But still, for $40, I would have liked to rinse off the minerals when I got out of the water. But when you’ve been freezing cold and then digging in the dirt all day, a hot spring is a sweet luxury. If I got to go back in time, I’d still spend the money, I think. Although probably I would have suggested paying a little more to get a room with an actual shower and less noise from cars coming and going at all hours. Live and learn.

The next morning, we headed back to California. We were about six or seven hours away from Arcata, so we could have made it all the way here if we’d wanted to, but we didn’t. We knew we were going to spend one more night camping on the way, we just weren’t sure where. Our final decision was influenced — strongly! — by the rising temperatures on our dashboards. When it passed 90 and kept climbing in Redding, I knew if we were actually going to spend another night camping, we needed water. Not drinking water, but atmosphere-cooling water. At some pause along the way, I suggested we take a look at the Douglas City Campground, a BLM campground with 23 sites. The selling point from the description in the Allstays app: “beach.”

I’m gonna say, “beach” would be… an exaggeration. River access might be more accurate. But I would happily stay at that campground again any time. Our campsite was set in trees, within easy walking distance of the river where Zelda and Riley were both happy to splash. It was a perfect place to spend a relaxing afternoon, even with temps in the 90s. It was one final burst of summer. The next morning, we had a nice walk through the trees along this fine trail, then headed home to Arcata.

Suzanne had camped at Indian Well, the campground at the Lava Beds National Monument, before, so she knew exactly which site she wanted: #18.

Or not.

The campground and much of the surrounding area had burned, recently enough that the damage was still obvious. Site 18 was black and charred, looking out onto a vista of ashes and soot. Fortunately, other parts of the campground had survived and we found two sites together without any difficulty.

And the fire didn’t damage the fun parts of Lava Beds, aka the caves. Suzanne was still under the weather, but not so under the weather that she didn’t want to go clambering around underground, so we spent our Tuesday wandering from cave to cave, managing to explore five of them — Golden Dome, Sunshine, Indian Well, and Upper and Lower Sentinel.

Was I efficient enough to tag my photos with actual names of the caves when I took them? No, of course not. Honestly, though, pictures of caves don’t strike me as all that interesting in retrospect — rocks, rocks, and more rocks, really, with not a lot of color — so it’s probably just as well.

My favorite cave, though, was definitely the one that most reminded me of every video game I ever played in my childhood. As we climbed down into it, I told Suzanne that I fully expected to be attacked by either orcs or goblins any second.

Lava Beds also had truly spectacular sunrises, sunsets, and night sky. Desolate scenery is always good for a good sky. So are wildfires, for that matter. (There were none burning anywhere near us, of course, or we wouldn’t have been there, but fire season isn’t over and I’m sure the amount of ash in the air had something to with the colorful skies.)

This final photo is only sort of a photo of the Lava Beds. Or rather it is, but it has been extremely thoroughly tweaked in my image-editing software. Those aren’t the real colors, that’s not the real sky. The weather, in fact, involved beautiful blue skies with spectacular clouds every day that we were on the road. But I was experimenting and I liked the way this one turned out. And it does capture the charred desolation well, even if it was a lot less apocalyptic in person.

Last week, Suzanne and I went camping. I brought my computer, but I barely used it — I didn’t even write morning words most days, which is something I’ve done every day for years now — and I never connected it to the internet. It was so relaxing. An escape from the news, even if only for a few days.

Our first campground, Junction City, is only a couple hours away from Arcata. Suzanne had caught my cold, so after a reasonably relaxed morning of loading up, we agreed to drive for a while, then stop for lunch and consider our options from there. She was sure she’d be fine to keep driving for a few more hours; I, having just spent several days with presumably the same germs, thought she probably ought to be resting instead. By the time we made it to Junction City, the germs were winning so we snagged two sites side-by-side and made it a stop for the night.

The campground has twenty-two spots, I think, and definitely the nicest ones – in terms of privacy & aesthetics — were the higher numbers, but those were also deeper in the trees and seriously buggy. The campground hosts (very friendly and helpful) warned us about the bugs before we picked our spots, so we walked the dogs around the campground before deciding and then chose two spots that were more exposed, but much less buggy. The highway – 299 – was within view from our spots and definitely within hearing, but apart from that, the spots were nice. Very spacious, great trees.

Zelda, as always, let me know at about 3AM that she was ready for a walk. Sigh. But the night sky was fantastic. Beautiful and clear, with no moon, the kind of night where so many stars are visible that it’s impossible not to feel like an infinitesimal speck in the immensity of the universe. Well worth getting up at 3AM.

The next day was mostly a driving day. We stopped at the Veterans Living Memorial Sculpture Garden outside of Weed for lunch and did not do nearly a good enough job of exploring. Zelda was doing the slow-mo, elderly dog walk and Suzanne should have been in bed with some chicken soup and bad television, so we saw the Memorial Wall, which is basically in the parking lot, and I managed to walk to the nearest sculpture, just to prove that there really were sculptures out there, but it was very low-key touristing.

After lunch, we kept driving. Our destination was Indian Well Campground at the Lava Beds National Monument. Spoiler: we made it there with no trouble. But for some reason this blog post has taken me forever to write, perhaps because I’ve spent so long playing with the images, so I think I’ll write about Lava Beds tomorrow. It was excellent, so there’s lots to say and many pictures to play with!

I’ve been sick for the past few days, which has seemed extremely unfair. Also, practically impossible! I’ve been such a good isolator. I stay at home, I go nowhere, I see no one except Suzanne… how could I have possibly caught anything? But there’s a ton of smoke in the air and I realized this morning that I might have a sinus infection, not a cold, which would explain how I could have gotten it without being exposed to someone else’s germs. Bacterial infections just need a good environment and all the smoke has left me permanently congested.

The good news, of course, is that sinus infections are mostly easily curable with antibiotics. Alas, the bad news is that I do everything in my power to avoid taking antibiotics, because my gut bacteria have the fragile, delicate sensibilities of Victorian women wearing ten pounds of corsets and laces. The slightest hint of aggression and down they go, turning my already limited diet into one that includes yogurt, yogurt, and more yogurt. And not much else. But I’m feeling better this morning than I have been, so maybe I’ll continue with the zinc and elderberry syrup regime prescribed by Suzanne and hope for the best, at least for another day or two.

My entertainment during my sick days has been watching youtube videos about my graphics software, Affinity Photo, and then playing with the software. Ostensibly I’m still learning how to design my own covers, but I have no idea what story this picture would be a cover for. Maybe I’ll write one someday. I really like it, though, mostly because that path is actually the path running alongside my dad’s house. If you look closely you can see the chainlink fence. And I love the thought that such a familiar path might actually be leading to a castle.

I actually have a vast collection of photos of paths. I’ve been taking them for years, all sorts of paths. Some roads, too. Most of them have been backed up on different USB drives, but I might spend a few days organizing photos and looking for them, because playing with this software might not count as “productive” but it definitely counts as “creatively satisfying.”

In other news… nope, I got nothing. Life goes on, one day at a time. Suzanne and I are planning another small camping trip next week, so hopefully the weather and the fires will cooperate. I’m trying not to worry about my failure to write words — well, actually, I’m trying not to worry about anything. It’s not an easy task these days! But I remind myself of all the things that I’m grateful for — hot running water, a happy dog, music playing, a comfortable bed, good friends, toast… so many things. Including the opportunity to learn more about my graphics software, which I am now going to get back to. Take care of yourselves and if you can, vote early!