#LoveMakeShare 23/6: What is fascinating you right now?

Ways of teaching reading comprehension, fiddle tunes and my garden.

#lovemakeshare June 32: What is fascinating you right now?

The new #Minecraft update. I've learned how to make sulfur cube tetherball, and am trying to figure out what blocks polished cinnabar goes with.

#LoveMakeShare for June 23: What is fascinating you right now?

Sleep. Sleep is very fascinating at the moment. I look forward to studying it more closely in a few hours...

#LoveMakeShare for June 23: What is fascinating you right now?

Adapting an old story I wrote to full on yuri. I usually avoid AU, but this is def. that and is a ship I have been dying to do Rozemyre/Hannelore (#AscendanceOfABookworm)

#NMLMS #NMPrompts

#LoveMakeShare 6/22: They say “never meet your heroes.” Is there a creative influence on you whose legacy has soured, or at least become complicated?

My writing has been greatly influenced by turn-of-the-20th-century authors, 1880-1930. The racism, sexism, and colonialism bother me much more than they did.

The flip side is that since I write fiction that intertwines previous eras, my increased awareness helps me write more believable text. I avoid the golden glow of romanticism; at the same time, I try not to impose modern belief systems on it.

#NMLMS #NMPrompts #HistoricalFantasy

#LoveMakeShare for June 23: What is fascinating you right now?

As hard as it is for me to want to play a sit-down video game after a long day at work, VEIN has really grabbed me lately. https://vein.gg/

And yeah, another early access zombie survival game - but something in the alchemy of this one makes it more than the sum of its parts. The chillest possible apocalypse, most of the time. Space to carve out a safe spot in the world. Quiet. Problem solving that flows one thing into the next into the next. I really enjoy it.

This isn't a creative thing, I realize. I think I've slipped into "input" mode for a minute, where I need to stop creating things so rapidly and absorb new raw material so that I can get back into it. So maybe that's the thing that's fascinating me - this part of my process that happens every now and then before a new surge.

#LoveMakeShare catchup for June 22: They say “never meet your heroes.” Is there a creative influence on you whose legacy has soured, or at least become complicated? What has that complication done for you?

Gene Roddenberry is waaaay more complicated than any Star Trek fan wants him to be.

The Trek creator, I think, had his heart in the right place. I will often cite two things he said. First:

"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear."

Hard to argue with that.

And second, once he was confronted by a fan at a convention who subscribed to the "ancient aliens" conspiracy theory about the pyramids. Roddenberry took the fan to task. "No, *we* did that," he said. "Human beings can do these things, because we're clever, and we work hard."

When you pair the impact Star Trek and its idealistic secular humanism has had on my life, and moments like that, it's an uphill battle to acknowledge the stuff that's come to light about the man over the last twenty years or so.

But the man was, by all accounts, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad boss, a bad collaborator, an addict, a bad friend, and an abuser, not necessarily in that order.

It's important to learn from people's stories, but Roddenberry really shook my idea of having "heroes."