Yeah, I know. I haven’t really added anything here because I’ve been in a serious lull / rut. As I’ve joked with a few people, after getting “Untimely Encounter in Kethyras” finished, my muse kinda checked out, saying “Welp, that’s one. I’m going on vacation. Back in a couple of years or something like that.” And that’s seriously sucked.
On the up(?)-side, I’ve reached out to several people for some story brainstorming in my “Kethyras” setting as possible collaborators (no, I don’t mean that in an evil way … or maybe I do? Who’s to say?) for more Nonna & Helene stories. I’m hopeful one or more of them will get back to me with a “Sure! That sounds like fun,” but time will tell.
And, in other news…
I’ve also been working with an artist / illustrator (the same one who did such a great job on the story banner art for The Thief’s Tale) regarding character images for both Nonna and Helene. Once those are done, I’m sure I’ll have a separate post just gushing over them as well as (most likely) adding each to their respective stories. He’s also (most likely) going to be doing some illustrations for “Untimely Encounter“, once we agree on what scenes are … deserving … of getting artwork, so, as they say – “stay tuned“.
Oh, and also…
One of the “leads” (for collaborators) a friend gave me was to a local brick-and-mortar game store (Gilded Raven Games), and I’ve spent a chunk of time there this past Sunday and then again yesterday evening. Most of that time was chatting with one of the owner and other patrons of the store, but – last night, I “sat in” on a gaming session (RPG) as an observer (with only mild editorial commentary – shoot me! I can’t help it!!!) and the end result of having done so is, next Thursday, I’ll be joining that game as a player as well. It was a fun group of players and I fully expect to be able to contribute to the “shenanigans” (as several players called their adventuring).
Note: I do not expect to document these games in any fashion. I’m there, for this one, just to have some fun, not for more writing material / inspiration. I’m allowed some fun! If something completely “ridonculous” (cue “That’s not a word! You just made that up!”; guess what, buttercup – all words are “made up” 😝) happens, I may mention it here, but that will, most likely, be the extent of any documentation of “game time” for this stuff.
And finally…
I hadn’t mentioned it here, but … a few weeks ago, I got a shiny new MacBook M2 Pro Max. This thing is an absolute beast of a laptop and I’ve more than somewhat “taken over” my older son’s bedroom desk. (He’s been at his mother’s place for the past year, but expects to go back to college – and a dorm situation – in the fall, so he hasn’t been using his room in over a year..) This also involved setting up a monitor as a second display, but it’s been a wonderful situation for the work I have managed to get done. It’s also, in some ways, a bit nicer than my downstairs office (certainly more convenient, at the very least).
No, for real; now, finally …
Since I am actually spending most of my “computer time” on the MacBook, it certainly had a lot of … quality-of-life (and -typing) aspects. One of those is significantly easier access to “simple” (all right, not really all that simple) “weird characters”. For example, it’s trivially easy to generate letters with accent marks of some sort (typically vowels), or ellipses and em-dashes.
“What the eff is an ’em-dash’?” I can hear you say. Simple answer: There are “technically” two different dash characters in typography, known as an “en-dash” and an “em-dash”. Traditionally, these differ as being, respectively, the width of a lower-case “n” and “m”. So an “en-dash” looks like this: – (also typically known as a “hyphen”), while an “em-dash” looks like: –.
Trust me, they’re different.
If you see a dash between words – for some sense of emphasis or separation of clauses (like this sentence), those are traditionally em-dashes. It’s not in the standard ASCII character set, though – it’s UNICODE.
Likewise, suuuure you could just type three periods to “simulate” an ellipsis, but, again, an ellipsis is an actual “real” UNICODE (not ASCII) character.
Mac keyboards have shortcuts for both of those (being Option+- and Option+; respectively). Consequently, while I was always fairly liberal with my use of them, these days, I’m using the “real” ones. “Yay me!’
Oh, Mac’s also provide very easy access to things like trademark and copyright symbols, as well as somewhat-easy access to emoji.
Look: ™ ©! (Option+2 and Option+g this time).
Woo-freaking-hoo!!!
So, if you, too, have a Mac – just explore what else you can doooooo!
