Derik Badman's Journal

My week continues mostly as before. No walk to the bakery in the morning, no dinner out on Tuesday, but still mostly staying home. I've tried to take some walks, though the weather has been hit or miss all week. I was determined to go for a walk this morning just around the block (it's a larger block) only to discover it was raining. Lianne discovered the local distillery was doing deliveries, so we got a few bottles delivered yesterday for us and our friends. And we got at least a little socializing outside, when █████ and later █████ walked over to pick up things from us. Standing outside on the porch talking to someone standing on the walkway, is more how I'd talk to a canvasser or something, not friends, but it's what we do now I guess. I'm probably reading too much news for how little I can do about any of it.

I wrote a short story over the past couple days. A little fantasy story about an artist. I've been wanting to do some writing and try my hand at fantasy, but I didn't want to fall into a clichéd archetype for a protagonist: knight, wizard, rogue, really any of the D&D classes (though cleric might be an interesting one), nor any chosen one, youth, type stuff. Thinking about other professions and ones I might know something about, I thought about an artist. In a less medieval, more renaissance type setting there would be artists, religious painters, painters to do portraits of the wealthy, but also, someone to draw wanted posters. And someone has to make the illustrations for books of monsters and demons, or tomes of arcane lore. And so my protagonist is an artist, and I'll see where I get with that. My first attempt (first draft just completed) is ok. It probably needs more specificity, or at least markers of specificity. In fantasy it is easy to name things without explaining them, to hint at depths that are mere surface, until maybe later, at another time, you fill them out. We'll see there it takes me, if I continue to have ideas about the concept.

When I walked over to █████'s yesterday to deliver their gin, I heard then saw a Cooper's Hawk fly into the big tree in their yard. I could hear another one behind me and then it too flew over, chased off the first one, and perched on the branch. It was making quite the racket, at times it almost sounds like a crying cat. ████ saw one in their yard the other day gathering sticks, so maybe these two are a pair building a nest.