Every Kind of Craft

Supernatural Summergen is a gen fanworks exchange I've taken part in every summer since 2013. Spring comes and I start looking forward to it, every year. But, well, the show's been off the air for a long time now, and the fandom's been in decline ever since, especially the lj fandom that spawned this exchange. (Although about 70 fics for this fandom have been posted TODAY, and it's just after ten in the morning as I write this. !) For all that, there was still a lot of participation last year! But this year, the time when they usually announce it came and went. We were sure there wasn't going to be a summergen this year, because weeks passed beyond the time they usually announce it. My friend even asked the mods if it was happening this year and got no response ... but about a month after the usual time, they announced it's happening again this year!! I don't write for Supernatural anymore except for this exchange. It's not where my fannish heart lies anymore. But I'm not over this exchange! I would write fics for this forever. There's a core group of fans who've been there, participating in this thing together, for all this time. It's become a part of the fabric of my life. I'm so glad I don't have to give it up yet.

The seed company was upstanding and sent me replacement seeds for free. We concluded something must have happened to the seeds in transit. She encouraged me to still try planting the first set of seeds, noting that some seeds are more durable than others, so I did. To my delight, the sorghum seeds are coming up! I tried sorghum syrup for the first time recently, and it is indeed delicious. The other thing I considered growing in that bed was corn (which looks almost identical to sorghum, oddly, but apparently they don't cross-breed), but it was such a pain to get the kernels off the cobs to can them last summer, and grocery-story corn is so cheap and delicious, that I decided instead to plant the thing I've never grown before that's rare and expensive to purchase. So, until one of the apocalypses that seems to be headed our way necessitates my growing my own corn, I'll have a little fun with sorghum.

In the meantime, if you have any tips on how to more easily remove kernels from corn cobs, I'm all ears. Some people use a method of pushing them through the center of a bundt cake pan, which seemed like a brilliant miracle solution when I first heard it, but since then I've tried it myself, and watched videos of other people doing it, and ... I dunno, I guess the first person I heard about it from must have gotten lucky, because it turns out it's not generally an easy solution after all. I even bought an electric knife to try to help with it, which didn't work at all, so I just laboriously hacked the kernels off with a knife last year, which is both dangerous and hard on the hands and wrists. So I'm really hoping for a hack that makes it at least a little less dangerous and arduous.

I finally realized the next step in my journey as an author of original work is to make physical copies of all my books available. I've been working on that lately, and tearing my hair out at every stage. What should be minor technological issues easily overcome invariably end up being hours of maddening frustration. For example, I've always saved all my images as I worked on the covers at various stages of completion, and was extremely careful to save a copy before the layers were merged so I could go back and make changes later, only when I went to work on it this time, surprise! No files with layers. I looked up the problem and discovered my image editing software automatically overwrites the existing file with the new file of a different type! (!!!) (!!!! :-#) So all the unmerged files I saved as the filetype specific to the editing program right before trying to ALSO save a .png or what-have-you were erased. I've never before used a program that didn't keep files of every type you saved it as! Well, extremely frustrating lesson learned, I guess. I'll be saving them under different names, on different drives -- everything I can think of to make it so they can't overwrite them! But in the meantime, I'll have to start from scratch with all too many of these covers.

When I was a kid dreaming of being an author, I thought making the covers would be the funnest part! Instead, once I've finished a book, I've just been so excited to publish it, bogged down by all these difficulties that I seem to encounter every time I try to make a cover. It's like trudging through sand, every step of the way -- not least because every time I release a book and make a cover, I always have to learn a bunch of stuff about the image-editing program I use, which is powerful but not intuitive, which I then forget by the next time I release a book, lol. Also because for some reason I always end up deciding I need to use some complex effect that requires hours of research, watching YouTube videos, and then accounting for more recent changes in the software that make the videos out of date, etc. etc. Maybe it can be fun, if I just stop being impatient to get the words out there and put the effort into delivering it in as appealing a cover as possible, because what's the point in publishing the book if you don't end up with a product that looks appealing enough to attract readers?

I remember in high school, I and everyone I knew who submitted stuff to the school literary magazine were always writing untitled poems and stories. Coming up with a title seemed kind of pretentious and like a lot of effort -- sometimes more effort than writing the poem! We felt like, the poem's good! Just read it. But the literary magazine required every submission to have a title, so we'd labor over what to call it, and usually just end up throwing some half-assed title on there. Now, though, I get it. Yes, the poem is good. The book is good. Good enough to deserve whatever must go into its presentation. It still seems kind of pretentious, or slick, to put so much effort into sales when you just want to think about art. A cover that's both commercially appealing and art is even more challenging. But it's worth it.

I discovered this morning that my sound card died. :-( It was 17 years old, lol. But I thought of it as my "good" sound card, as it's the only one I ever actually installed rather than just using what came with the computer. Meanwhile, the computer seems to have forgotten entirely about the soundcard that it came with; it doesn't even show up in the hardware list, though it's still physically in the computer. So I bought a very cheap little dongle that just has inputs for mic and headphones, so at least I can hear my old favorite casual games and listen to music if I really want to on that computer. And after 17 years, I guess the technology has improved so much that I hardly notice a difference between it and my fancy sound card! *sigh*

I took a chance on a new seed company that was pretty well reviewed on reddit because they had lots of varieties of something it's kind of hard to find seeds for (sorghum). I bought a ton of seeds for a bunch of different kinds of plants, planted at least fifty seeds, and so far, after six weeks, only two have come up! One of which (a pumpkin) randomly died a few days later, and the other of which is still -- just barely -- alive. I'd say it was user error, except that nearly every other seed I've planted from other sources is doing great. So that's a bummer. I was so excited about those seeds.

Also, I'm currently totally obsessed with this hauntingly beautiful song, and this artist. I already loved the songs he contributed to 86, then when I found out he did the AWESOME theme song for To Be Hero X, I went looking for the rest of his stuff. Turns out pretty much everything he does is amazing: