A Look Through the Stacks

To be honest, I’m still recovering from Sasquan. Monday was a bit of a lazy day for me and Ryan, and Tuesday was all about diving into the day job. I’m mostly caught up there, just in time for my annual review later today — at this point, I’m expected to prepare to hand off my current workload as an administrator so I can begin training as an actual support engineer. That means documenting a LOT of processes as clearly as I can.

After that, it’s all about technical training — which as I’ve mentioned before is pretty daunting. I’m excited, though, and optimistic. I think if I put my head down and push through with a clear plan on how to learn the things I need to, I’ll do fine. I just need the time.

In the meantime, there are a number of projects that have been stacking up here on the Writing Desk. I have a number of essays planned about all kinds of subjects — the meaning of bigotry, dipping my toes into the waters of afro-futurism, stepping up my game when it comes to tabletop RPGs, crafting a “season” of podcasts for mental health issues. I want to talk a bit about what sort of things we would want in a “perfect” furry hangout spot; if we had the opportunity to say, rebuild FurAffinity from the ground up, what kind of features would we want? What would the perfect user experience be?

I’m still working on “A Stable Love,” with the hope that it’ll be finished by the end of the month. From there, I’m moving on to three more short stories that I’m hoping will be polished and ready to show by October. I’d like to really get my act together for my Pathfinder game, and start doing periphery writing for my characters in other games. Kraugh the Togorian, Veniamin the werebear, Kerrebuck the Wookiee, and Takoda the troll all have stories that need telling. (Also, holy crap, I really do just play earnest giants, don’t I?)

I’m reading an anthology of furry stories for review elsewhere, and I’m noticing an interesting theme that runs through the stories there. I’m really looking forward to writing my review of it, mostly because I get to talk about the intersection of furry fiction and minority issues. You might have noticed that’s been something on my mind a whole lot this year.

So for now, head down, quiet time, hard work time. It’s time to transmute the excitement of the convention into fuel that propels me through the effort of creative production.