Instead of writing an intro I will be outside enjoying the gorgeous weather that has finally deigned to grace my town with its beauty. It’s incredible what some warm days and an hour of sunshine can do. Last time I wrote one of these, I had a migraine and chronic fatigue. Now I’ve had more creative energy in the past week than in the past 3 months.
Won by 1 point: 8/13 Goals
Become more active on Tumblr and try to help revive Writeblr community: Since all the Dramas with twitter and tiktok going around, Tumblr is flooded with bots, as well as new people who don’t understand how to use the site and get blocked on reflex. The writeblr community has also been feeling rather dead, as people move on and change blog topics, and so I wanted to try to bring things back to the way they were in 2019 when I first joined. I made a post asking for new Real Human Person Writeblr twitter refugees to reblog and introduce themselves, and it quickly blew up, so I followed it with a post about how to get started on tumblr if you don’t understand how the site works, which also blew up. I’m very pleased with the turnout and I’m looking forward to meeting all the new folks!
Website and IG scheduling: Tadaaa! Another successful month down.
Finish Changeling ARC: The first of my two book reviews this month, you can read my full thoughts here!
Finish A Rival Most Vial ARC:The 2nd of my book reviews for the month, you can read my thoughts here, and my interview with R.K. Ashwick here!
Finish Tress and the Emerald Sea: I finished the book on April 4th which I’m saying is close enough because it’s before this list goes up lol. I probably won’t do a full review of this one because I’ve got other books to move onto but this is probably my new favorite of the Cosmere books by Brandon Sanderson. Tress is such an endearing and deeply relatable protagonist, the POV narrator is delightfully sassy, there are so many references to other books, and the story is like an inverse Princess Bride which is one of my favorite stories in the first place. I loved it a lot and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the Secret Novels coming out this year!
Look into the rest of the Adventurer’s Soul series: I’ve added them to my TBR after reading and reveiwing Pyreflies, but haven’t had the chance to start any of them yet as I’ve had a bunch of other books on deadlines. Looking forward to them though!
Finish Howl: Same as the above.
Finish printing out stickers/investigate commissions: The new stickers are back in stock and available on my shop!
When I was printing the Plotting Potion stickers, I had a funny misprint in which they turned out much pinker than I expected, and so if you want an Evil! Special Edition! Grape Flavored! Plotting Potion! I’ll throw an extra one in with your order until they run out.
I also put up a poll on tumblr asking if I should start offering commissions, and the verdict was that people were interested in theory, but didn’t want to actually spend money, which is understandable, considering the lackluster sales on the sticker shop anyhow. I want to focus on my personal work anyhow, so I will not be opening commissions at this time, but I’d reconsider the idea if there’s interest in the future.
Write short story for newsletter: “First Flight of Spring” is now live! If you missed it, you can still read this dragonriders story as well as the rest of the backlog by signing up for the mailing list here!
Optimize foundry for Planescape:For those unfamiliar, I’m running a DnD campaign set in the Planescape setting for a bunch of my friends and a lot of my creative work recently has been prepping that. Foundry is the virtual tabletop system we use to run the game, and I’m still learning the ropes. I don’t know if I’ll ever optimize it, because there are new updates and features being added all the time, but it’s been a great time experimenting with it.
Draw character portraits for planescape npcs: These are mostly finished! There are so many npcs I’ve mostly resorted to using piccrew but I’ve got two more side characters to finish.
Run two sessions of planescape: AND A GLORIOUS 2 SESSIONS THEY WERE. Any ttrpg player knows how hard it is to schedule and I have 7 people at my table and so it’s a feat that we’re playing biweekly at all.
Submit a short story to Nature Futures: Some of you may know that I’m an engineering student, and I do undergraduate research work with one of the professors at my university. In my lab group, there were a couple international postdocs who I grew close with last year, before they moved back to Europe. I briefly mentioned my writing to them but never discussed my stories in detail and we fell out of contact after they left the states. Out of the blue, one of them emailed me saying, “Hey I was looking for a journal to publish this scientific paper, but they have a short story column as well. You should go for it.” It was super encouraging and so I set out to write a 850-950 word hard science fiction story about a robot onboard Voyager 3 leaving home for the first time. It’s called “Pale Blue Dot” and I submitted my pitch earlier this week. I won’t hear back if I got accepted for nearly a month, but I’m very excited about dipping my toes into the publishing world for the first time ever. Wish me luck. Godspeed little robot.
Thanks for reading! I want this blog to be more than me shouting into the void. If I can use this platform to help boost other creators, I’d love to see your work too. If you want to have your recommendations and/or your own writing featured in a Resource Rec post, or if you want to collaborate with me, you can leave a comment below for both, or contact me on either tumblr or IG! If you feel so generously inclined, you can support my writing by leaving me a tip or buying stickers on my Kofi. Until next time, thanks for reading and happy writing!
Etta Grace: Author 