Tag: writing

Adventures · Book Dragon · Floating Bookshop

Nora Hazelhart’s Floating Bookshop- Character and Setting

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*A solo RPG Adventure based on Ella Lim’s Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop.

Character Description (Very Wind in the Willows-esque:)

Nora is a Capybara who has traveled around the world and is far from home, ready for a slower paced life. Nora is a stout capybara who has world weary eyes and has some gray fur about her muzzle. Despite that, she is strong from a life of adventure and doesn’t like to stay in one place for too long. She has independent means to do as she wishes, as she doesn’t need very much to keep her content. She loves reading and meeting new people. She’s fiercely protective of young ones and other vulnerable folx and uses being underestimated to her advantage when needed. 

Nora was born  on the 12 day of Brink (approximately autumn) Moon. She is creative and capable. She’s particular about her comforts and how others treat her and happiest when going on adventures or creating new things. She enjoys tinkering and since she has been on her own, knows a lot of random knowledge about a lot of things. She always wears overalls- for the pockets, most are slightly shabby and patched with creative patches. She has many cardigans and sweaters, some of which she has made and others that were gifts. She always has a book close by and has a small pair of glasses that perch on her nose. On very hot days, she wears a visor hat that looks like an old time accountant would wear. 

Nora has been staying in Thistledown, which is the town at the top of the river over the Brisk (Winter) moon. While there, she has discovered an abandoned riverboat/bookshop. She’s able to buy it after the previous owner had passed away.

Bookshop Description:

Excerpts from Nora’s Journal titled

“A Dubious Beginning–

The roof was a splintery mess- a faded mess of patchy paint and dry wood. The sides of the boat looked intact, but definitely needed a new paint job and perhaps a deeper inspection by a carpenter or boat maker, just to make sure of its river worthiness. The window facing the dock was patched with what looked like oil cloth on the outside. Even the sign looked poorly. I could tell it was charmingly carved, but some of the letters and the sign itself had succumbed to the weather so now it hung at a lazy angle and stated “ook op” in faded wood letters. The whole boat looked a little hodgepodge and while I didn’t normally mind that look, it was a bit more daunting up close.

Struggling with the cabin door, which seemed to be swollen shut against the humidity along the river, I didn’t answer directly, just gave a vague nod in her direction. Then straining, I pulled at the door and much to my surprise, it finally gave way, almost knocking me back into the mayor. A poof of dust came out, making me cough and I cautiously peeked my head in for the first look at my new home. 

The first thing I saw in the dim light inside was books. Directly across from the door, I could see the edges of a bookshelf. Picking up my mage light lantern (open flames and houseboats don’t generally do well in the same spaces, after all.) A long curved desk sat to my left by the entrance with what appeared to be a half open door behind it.“

Something New This Way… Floats?
Adventures · Book Dragon · Life Posts

Something New This Way… Floats?

LSiehLeave a comment

Hello and welcome to a new and hopefully charming experience that I invite you to share with me. The more I’ve gotten into tabletop role playing games, the more I’ve realized how much I love the games that are either silly, cozy, mysterious (but not too scary,) or a combination of all three. In fact, my most recent friend game was run by my lovely brother and featured 3 of my friends and I playing as racoons in a trench coat trying to be a person to do peopley things. (Look. It was wonderful! We saved the world by accidently stealing some kind of nuclear waste, giving it back, and got an unlimited buffet of trash. Racoon heaven!)

None of this is surprising to me, by the way. I have always been fascinated by fantasy stories and mythology. I’m a bit of a dreamer. In fact, in elementary school, I got in trouble for staring at my much more interesting pencil than actually doing math and don’t think I stopped even after they gave me plain boring yellow pencils. After cutting my fantasy teeth on Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the thought of magical places where talking animals roam and life is idyllic and charming seems like utopia.

It’s hard to get friends together regularly though and not everyone wants to be a cute talking animal doing Hobbity things. Or racoon things, or badger things.. You get the idea. So when I found a solo RPG journaling adventured titled Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop: A Year Upon The River, it was in my online cart before I finished reading the blurb about it. I’ve never tried a solo game before so I wasn’t sure how it would work, but it seems relatively easy. The game is written by Ella Lim and is available here through The Lost Ways Club if you want to follow along with your own floating bookshop. There are also a few more that look fun as well. Here is the website: https://www.lostwaysclub.com/shop

The idea behind a solo journaling RPG is that you use dice and cards to help give you a prompt for what happens during the day/night/time of the game. In multiplayer tabletop games you would have a game master who gives the players those prompts instead, but sometimes you maybe just want to take a little journey on your own!

So for the next few weeks, I’m going to try to post a weekly excerpt of my journey along the river, possibly asking for prompts from you as I go along. My world setting will be something like Narnia, Wind in the Willows, or Redwall. Lots of fun pastural scenes with different animals, wacky interactions with customers, cozy days reading in the rain on my houseboat bookshop. I will at some point, adopt a pet, but who knows what it will be? Maybe a butterfly or a tiny lizard? The possibilities are endless!

Don’t worry, if the storytelling isn’t your thing, I’m still going to try to get some updates about the garden and Piggy’s tomato stealing ways, life in general, and other fun things happening in my life. I have still been sewing and doing some cooking, although lately not so much with the cooking. The Husband and I got Covid after 4 years of narrowly avoiding it. Luckily it’s mild, but it’s made cooking extremely tiring and I was already been in a slump anyway.

For now though, I’ve left some music to inspire you to join me on my river journey.

Adventure is calling! Will you answer?

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Writing

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If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Late into the night I write and the pages of my notebook swell from all the words I’ve pressed onto them.
It almost feels like the more I bruise the page the quicker something inside me heals.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“You’re writing, you’re coasting, and you’re thinking, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever written, and it’s coming so easily, and these characters are so great.’ You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart,” she says. “That’s the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it’s the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.”
― Jacqueline Woodson

“If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. ”
― Charles Baxter

Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.”
― P.D. James, Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Writing

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“I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn’t know.”- Carrie Fisher

“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.” – George Orwell

“I always had plenty of ideas. I didn’t exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it. After a person, then a little corner of a place for the person to be in.”- Carol Emshwiller, Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories

“Silence is a cage. These words are my wings.” -Jenim Dibie

“The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word – a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.”- Ian McEwan, Atonement

“So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.”- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”-Isaac Asimov

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Writing

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“In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.”-Pearl S. Buck

“That’s what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.”-Anne McCaffrey

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”-Benjamin Franklin

“We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.”- Mahatma Gandhi

“Writing is like travelling. It’s wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.”-Langston Hughes

“Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.”-Octavia E. Butler

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Fantasy

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“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”- Dr. Seuss

“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.”- Carl Jung

“I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you’ll let me be in your story.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”-Terry Pratchett

“The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what’s impossible? What’s a fantasy?”- Alan Rickman

“I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children’s stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, ‘Can’t you write anything normal?’”- Octavia E. Butler

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Writing Quotes For Nano

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“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” – Beatrix Potter

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” ― John Steinbeck

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

― Dorothy Parker

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London

“My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.”

― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”― Terry Pratchett

Monthly Review And Recipes
Monthly Review · Recipe Roundup

Monthly Review And Recipes

LSiehLeave a comment

Another month gone by! I’m excited to be getting into the holidays and to be finally being down to one job. My current plan is to transfer everyone by The end of December. So far I’m on track. My Fridays are going to be Etsy and errand days. And blogging, of course. 🙂

I made two new recipes this week. One was good and was very good.

1- Gershwin’s Greatest Gumbo from Musical Feasts from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

I have no pictures, since we ate this on Halloween. I do have a picture of some of the leftover Halloween candy. We only had about 30 trick or treaters and two Costco bags of candy…

The Gumbo had Cornish hens and smoked gouda chicken sausage. I would switch to smoked turkey sausage instead. The gouda sausage was a little weird. This was delicious though. It had a little kick to it. We will make this again. We had it over rice. It made a perfect meal to have on a cold night.

2- Scalloped Potatoes and Ham from A Quilter’s Christmas by Louise Stoltzfus and Dawn Ranck. 

This was eaten while I was at work, so no pictures. I had a few bites when I got home. The Husband said it was a little soupy, but tasted good. It didn’t originally call for that, but I just threw some sliced ham in it. I would make this again.

Now for my monthly review. I made 20 recipes. 9 were new cookbooks or internet recipes.

We had a couple of hits, the gumbo, Fancy’s dog treats, jerk chicken, and the cuban steak.

Misses were Dad’s bread method and the Hungarian Beef Stew.

I tried using Dad’s method for my new technique and will try it again. I made some more frozen meals to keep and they have turned out good so far.

Crafting wise, I made my goal of finishing an item of clothing and my UFO goal on one fell swoop with my flamingo pjs. They are so cozy!

I also made my elephant bag, but couldn’t bring myself to sell it. It needed to be mine.

I also started Nanowrimo this month, so my challenge will be getting my writing done as well as maintaining  sewing and cooking. I foresee a lot of crockpot meals this month.

So to explain Nano, the point is to write 50,000 words in the month of November to end up with a short novel. I’ve attempted this before and only “won” once.  This year’s novel is a Steampunk novel involving political intrigue and magic. Somehow while writing yesterday, cowboys showed up. It was weird, but it kind of worked out. I think. It’s going to be interesting to see where it goes.

So my goals for this month will be a little smaller, due to Nano. I plan to still keep the 2 new meals per week. I also want to try cooking something familiar with a new recipe.

Sewing goals are to find my serger pedal and to try sewing with knits. Also, to finish one of the quilts that I have tucked away.

Now, I have to go get the dog off the bed. She snuck into our bedroom while I wasn’t looking. She likes to steal blankets and pjs and snuggle them.

Oh, and make word count. Wish me luck!