Cross Stitch

Hallo, hope everyone's been well! January was a rough year, but at least February's proving to be a shorter one.

Like usual, I fall off of Dreamwidth about midway through January for whatever reason and then come and go like a hummingbird too jacked-up on sugar-water to remember where its roost went.

I have been resolving for months to do the weekendwritingmarathon weekend challenge (to do it every weekend, in fact!) but I keep being extremely burnt out by Saturday, and then use Sunday to get all my chores done, and then suddenly Capitalism has shoved me back into its little hamster wheel and off I go again for another week! I've been also documenting my travels with ADHD for the last three quarters of a year, and there's a very specific and hefty amount of that which blocks my ability to focus, both on creative habits and self-care. So it's been pretty rough.

However, I managed to wangle myself back into my WIP's doc for everwood ficlets and rainbowfic prompts, and managed to tidy up two shorts which are now up on both communities.

The first, Creature Comforts, follows a short blurb about the dryad Daphne and the lumberjack Boyce, from Daphne's point of view. (I love writing from her perspective because Boyce is not a small man, but she is just as big as he is and probably is twice as strong. It's fun trying to get into the heads of the POV characters as I go through each of these ficlets!)

The second, Blood Siblings, was posted nearly a year ago in Everwood, but I hadn't popped it over onto Rainbowfic yet. It's about Brandili's misuse by her political-marriage, her escape from that, and her burning desire for revenge when she realizes that her husband knew of her hiding place all along and had in fact been allowing her to think she'd escaped him. If everything else lines up, I'm looking forward to when she can slice him up with her badass old pirate's sword or have her real beau shoot him through the heart with a cursed arrow. Forgiveness for past wrongs? Nahhhh.

Everwood is composed of many characters over about a decade or so and it's got a sort of ensemble, episodic bent to it, but I do have an overarching plot and message that I'm trying to weave through it all: Found family and found community are stronger in their day-to-day moments than the unceasing sprawl of colonization... and working through the everyday poison of the effects of colonization can in fact be what makes those bonds stronger. It's meant to be hopeful, in the end. Every one of the characters in this story are weird in some way and a lot of them are on the ropes. There's something about writing them recovering from all the blows they've taken that makes me a little happier.