Ani Was Writing

  PR #092025 Reported on 13 October 2025 Project 1: Writing     Novels Worked On: 2 of 7     Novels Completed: 0 of 7     Blog Posts Completed: 39/52 Project 2: Weight Management     Current Weight: 231.4     Weight Loss/Gain: +0.1 in September (-2.0 total in 2025) Project 3: Christmas Gifts     Part 1 Progress: 50%     Part 2 Progress: 29% Project 4: Savings Plan     Amount: $50/$10,000

August 23, 2008     Holy shit, today was the best day ever! I never thought I would have fun like this at the Centennial Red fair. This definitely takes the delicious angel food cake! I am so telling Deanne about this when I see her at school on Monday.     First off... Holy shit, the fair was so boring! I had to go for a music thing since the band director wouldn't let me just go hang out. But no. We needed to be there to twirl our flags and rifles around while the band played their stupid show about dragons or whatever we're doing this year. I mean, I'm a freshman, but come on! But the fair became less boring when I met these new friends. The first one was this really tall blue dude. He seems really chill after he curb-stomped a guy for stealing my prize from the Opera Lady that shows up every other year. Then this other dude! The other dude looked like a big, fat guy from the anime Deanne watches. He could probably beat someone up... Anyway, he showed up to look a...

 Whip & Spur / "Dawn From Twilight" By Dr. Iver Arnegard     This is the book I am most positively biased toward. I will just state that up front.          Dr. Arnegard was one of my favorite professors for my Creative Writing degree, as he could probably guess if you were to ask him. He has a more genuine personality than most people I've run across seem to have. Using some of my new spirituality jargon, he was - and still is, in my opinion- a more authentic and honest person who didn't mind sharing the occasional vunerable moment in times he felt he could. There were many conversations we had about random writing shenanigans to the occasional comment about society and the world at large. I could not imagine what kind of writer and person I would have become had he not been part of my Creative Writing journey.     I am coming back to both this short story collection and the bonus short story with about eight years between graduation...

    Of course we didn't know what we were doing. We were all seven or eight, and that is not a time to form large organizations.     Honestly, I should have told Auntie not to get my cousin that dinosaur egg. But she thought little girls like my cousin needed to have all kinds of different toys, not just the ones "society thinks she should have." But hey, Auntie gave her a dinosaur egg.     It came out after the pi ñata was broken and all the party favors were handed out. My cousin was excited with her spread of gifts: toys, candies, some books, clothes galore. The main thing she was excited about was her dinosaur egg, realistically cracked like it was ready to hatch. One of those humongous ones that took a minute for my cousin to pick up and carry to the backyard. Several of us -mostly cousins, I think- followed her outside onto the back porch to watch her open it. All of the uncles were out there, so it wasn't a big deal, even with the beer cans littering...

      At the time of writing this, I am finishing up the first session of a year-long campaign. My first DM campaign (Sept 2024 to May 2025) has definitely re-taught me how to tell stories and the true chaos that unfolds when others enter this space with me. It was an absolute blast and got me back in touch with a universe that I hadn't touched in almost a decade.     With all that, I learned a few things.     One, Dungeons and Dragons is a clunky system for me to handle. And absolutely a system that I need to work with more than I did in my first campaign. With that in mind, I feel as if the pre-written campaigns are a little dry. Maybe it is the fact that they are meant to be guardrails for generic groups. They seem to be the boring yet filling rice and beans that groups are meant to flavor on their own. Mind you, I am basing this off of what I've seen and heard from different D&D related podcasts and livestreams. Then again, these sections of th...