If I had the skill to make the digital paintings I wanted to make as covers for my books, instead of just a black and white raven drawing, this is what I'd do:

Book one (Dalia Ravenstone and the Vicious Circle): A picture of Dalia Ravenstone -- a black girl with her hair in locs -- wearing a witches' hat and holding her wand in both hands, point side up. Brandon would be in the picture too, in his wheelchair. Sally as well, if I could fit her in. If not, a wider version of the image in which she is in the picture, would be included in the book itself.

Book two (Vedya Ravenstone and the Forge of Ponos): Vedya Ravenstone -- who is a Dalit child with rainbow colored hair -- would be in the image with her best friend Sarah Butcher, the two girls having their arms over each others' shoulders, both hamming it up for the camera.

Book three (Chooli Ravenstone and the Corrupted Spirit): An image of Chooli Ravenstone -- whose appearance is that of a Navajo child, but zee is actually biracial (half black) -- dressed in a tunic and vest for a ren faire, standing next to Felicia Grimaldi (an Italian girl with black hair). The image looks like a professional portrait of the two, but Chooli's attention has been diverted by something not in the frame. We can still see zeer face, though.

Book four (Ressa Akamai and the Bridge Not Crossed): Ressa Akamai -- a Hawaiian¹ woman from another universe -- on the back of a motorcycle with an anonymous biker in the front, everything about their identity hidden by their gloves, bike leathers, and helmet. I'd get the second anonymous biker from that scene in the image too, if I could, on their own motorcycle. This would include having the skill to draw a very specific brand and model of motorcycle that would have to be imported from India.

Book five (Dalia Ravenstone and the Vengeful Hunter): For this one, a bit of a departure. It would be a view of a place much like the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, in the background. (The foreground is a more traditional sandy shore.) It would, in fact, be Fomor. Several Ravenstones would be in the image -- most likely Dalia, Vedya, and at least two of the adults like Nizoni and Orpheus. Morgana as well, if there's room. They would be scattered on the shore, soaking wet, clearly having just been washed ashore.

Book six (Naga Ravenstone and the Envoy of Truth): I think having Naga herself on the cover would be too confusing, even with her haircut being what it is, and her hair being pink. This is because she is a multiverse double of Vedya. So in another departure, I'd probably include the Lichters and Oxythemis Caldwell instead, or maybe just feature the LLS Oneironaut -- an airship that resembles a submarine turned into a blimp. I dunno. Point is, most of book six's important plot is centered around them. The title is not a red herring, it is relevant to the plot, just not as much as other things are. The Lichters are both blond and white and look like they're from Victorian England. They look like identical twins if one was a woman and the other a man. (They are multiverse doubles of each other, and Lady Lichter is a trans woman.)

Book seven (Vasanti Sultana and the Riddle of Hope): Probably Vasanti and Zorana standing in a group next to one or both of the Lichters. Their appearances... Vasanti is Indian. (India Indian) Zorana is a black woman.


1 = Technically Ressa is biracial as well, however her father's ethnicity doesn't really show in her appearance, which is a good thing as I'm not really clear myself what that ethnicity is, as the country he's from doesn't exist in our world, however I would say the most likely cognate for his ethnicity to ours is Mexican, because the country he's from is located in part of what is Mexico here. Mexico exists in that world, but its name is Mexica. And obviously its borders are different.

After years of being too lazy and too sentimental¹ to do so, I finally deleted all my Harry Potter fanfics off of AO3 and FF.net. It was someone commenting on one of them that triggered it for me. I realized I've been getting irritated every time one of those sites emails me about kudos or comments on Harry Potter fics because it means those people are still reading Harry Potter, still supporting a bigot who is using her money and power to make trans people's lives even harder than they already were. And finally I just had enough of it. The series were abandoned, but people kept reading them anyway.

The comment was saying that Rowling had spent time, before being published, in a women's shelter because apparently she'd been abused. And this just pissed me off so much because if true, that means an abuse victim became the worst kind of abuser, abusing trans people and others with her power and influence.² So I deleted everything off both AO3 and FanFiction dot net, with the exception on AO3 of a couple works where I left only one "chapter" up, which is just a long explanation of why I had deleted everything. Also I turned off commenting.

Oh, and I mentioned my Ravenstone series in that long explanation, and put some links in my bio/profile, to here, my website, and my BlueSky account.

Now I won't get anything from either of those sites unless I decide to write fanfic for another fandom. Which I probably won't do, because I'm too focused on my own stuff. But if I did, it would probably be one-shots. The most likely fandom for me to write for now, if I was going to do so, is the Murderbot series. Or maybe Addams Family, but not the Wednesday series. It's a good series, but the makers have gotten some very important things wrong about the family. The dynamic between Morticia and Gomez isn't right, and in season two I've heard they made Grandmama into an entirely different character, basically turning her into that one woman from "The Devil Wears Prada." Unless that's supposed to be the other grandmother of the family that never featured before. I dunno, I haven't seen season two yet.

On a side note, my wireless keyboard that has somehow gone for over a year without needing to be charged just started blinking a green light at me. So I plugged it in and the light stopped blinking. I guess it finally started running out of electricity. I wish I knew how long it's been since I last charged it, because it's been at least a year. Possibly two. It's a modern marvel, truly the eighth wonder of the world.



1 = Sentimental because writing those fics helped me polish my writing, and because my Ravenstone series wouldn't exist at all if not for them, because of the polish to my writing but mainly because the Ravenstone series started as an idea for an Addams Family/Harry Potter crossover series. Basically, it was going to be "The Addams Family are witches in the HP universe." But I didn't want to be writing a third fanfic series because it was stressful enough writing two series at once, so I filed off all the serial numbers and made it into the Ravenstone series instead. Somehow, working on that while working on two fanfics wasn't as stressful as having three fanfics. Of course I eventually gave up on the fanfics and focused instead on the Ravenstone series.

2 = It also explains how she got twisted to be a transphobe. Someone abused by men, thinking trans women are just men in dresses? Explains her bigotry but in no way excuses it. I still will celebrate her death date with a rousing rendition of "Ding Dong The Bitch Is Dead," and if someone would help me get a passport and pay my way to the UK, I still will want to take a big fat shit on her grave, and set the gravestone on fire with napalm.

(TW for talk of vomit.)

I've talked on here many times before about "hunger nausea," one of the possible hunger signals my body gives me, usually when the need to eat is urgent or semi-urgent. Which, as you can imagine, is super annoying because it kind of kills any appetite I might have. But at least I have always taken care of it before it got to the point of actual vomiting. Until today. (At least, I don't recall it ever happening before.)

See, I had a small breakfast, then went out to the library and then the grocery store for a few things, then went home. By the time I got home, I was experiencing hunger nausea. My appetite was killed. I looked around for something to try to eat anyway, and didn't find anything I could manage to get down. The only thing I could get in my stomach was Diet Dr. Pepper. I drank the whole 20 ounce bottle and then made the mistake of sitting down to write. When I hyper-focus on anything, my body could literally be doing anything at all short of the kind of gas-like pain of IBS diarrhea, and I won't be aware of it at all.

So, naturally, when I got up to pee or something (I honestly don't remember why I got up), the hyper-focus broke, everything came rushing back, and because I had already been hunger nauseous before writing, and it had been like an hour or more, I got hit with such an intense hunger nausea that I ran to the bathroom and puked up all that soda, or at least I think I did given the color and volume of the puke.

Thankfully, I felt much better after this. I have always been worried that if I puked while hunger nauseous that the nausea would just intensify from the stomach being even emptier than usual. But nope. I felt better. Had some real, sugared lemonade and some chicken, and I'm feeling even better.

Bleh, I hate my body sometimes. But in my absent-mindedness, I ignored a clear signal from my body while being aware of it, and set myself up for a much worse situation. So I hate my brain right now too.

So I've got another new conlang that I've just started literally today because I laid down to go to sleep and my brain was like "Nope, you get this instead." I started with just a few simple rules. I don't really have a plan for this, I'm just seeing what comes experimenting with it. So far, I've figured out some things about the culture it would come from that are interesting, given the logic of how words are constructed.

The rules so far:

1. Nouns start with N (sometimes)
2. Adjectives with B
3. Verbs with T
4. Plural words have the prefix Ka
5. Addition of prefix Ko makes possessive.
6. Addition of prefix Ka is a stronger form of possession, mostly related to Identity and things that are part of you that cannot or should not be removed. (body parts, souls, but also names)
7. Very basic ideas have simple words (kinda, sorta; the definitions of 'basic' here are not standard) and more complex words are made by sticking those together like Legos. (Something I do a lot with these conlangs.)
8. While English uses SVO word order (Subject Verb Object, like in "Sam ate apples.") this language, which has no name so far, uses OVS: Object Verb Subject. So "Sam ate apples" becomes "Apples ate Sam." I have done this before, too.
9. So far the adverb aspect is a bit weird, because some word parts that would be adverbs in English are, well, just part of the word. IE, you don't say "I move toward you," you say "(you) ("move" base word + "toward" modifier") (I)." In the actual language, that is nek tazee nak'az. Though this example is not great because I don't like the logic of the word for "toward," which is that it means "intentional inward movement." It doesn't quite fit the meaning of "toward." I mean it's great for if you're talking about something moving toward yourself, but... oooh. Multiple words for toward, depending on directionality and who or what is moving towards who/what!
It's even weirder, given how many different words they have for movement already. (See "C" in the list below.)
10. Oh yeah. For some reason, I've decided there aren't any capital letters. Yet.

Things I've figured out so far:

A. If I did it / can do it right, you can tell at a glance if a word is an adjective, verb, or (sometimes) a noun depending on the letter a word starts with. Nouns are trickier because nouns so far tend to be descriptive, apart from some very basic ones. Like the word for "sound" basically means "inherent movement of air." ("Inherent movement" means that, by definition, whatever you're talking about has movement of some kind as an inherent part of its identity, like planets, the sun, rivers, and sound.) So it's a noun made from a noun and a verb. And the verb part comes before the noun.
      Taking things a step further, their word for "word" is basically "sound of/from the mind." The word for "name" is the same, but with the appropriate possessive prefix, changing the meaning to "my sound-from-the-mind." Or broken down even further, "my 'inherent movement of the air, from the mind.'" (Their word for name, for now, is thus ka'taymum. [kaa tame uhm] The apostophes are just there to make the meaning and pronunciation easier to parse.)

B. There are two different words for 'flesh,' differentiating animal flesh from plant flesh. This culture also thinks of themselves as intelligent, ensouled animals, therefore they use the word for "animal flesh" when talking about their own bodies. Their word for "person," nams'oom, means "animal flesh with soul." In-universe because they assume all animals have minds, but really I just thought namsum'oom sounded weird and clunky. I kinda want them to have something in their language that shows they think all animals have souls and minds, while still differentiating their own kind of soul or mind slightly due to complexity or something, but I haven't worked out how to do that yet.

C. They have different word parts for movement differentiating inherent movement, intentional movement, accidental movement, and intentional movement that is malicious. Not really sure what this says about them, but it says something.

D. Their language's pronouns are: I. Combined "I/me," II. Combined "they/them," III. Combined "we/our," IV. A singular "you" and V. A plural "you." | To make a pronoun possessive, add the appropriate prefix ("temporary possessive" or "identity-inherent possessive." See rules list at the top.) This is just "so far."

EDIT: Changing the logic of the word for sound to something else. Not sure what yet. I like the idea of it meaning "intentional movement of mind," but there are other ways of interpreting that, like "any action you do intentionally" and/or "telekinesis."

Also having Thoughts about words that describe size. With words for wide, narrow, long, short, big, and small... do I even need words like fat, skinny, thin, and scrawny? Are these not just synonyms for the others I already have? Are there any good reasons to include words like them? Can a fat person not just be described as 'wide'? A skinny person as 'narrow'? I mean I guess "fat" as it means the stuff in your body would be an important distinction to make, I guess, if only for its use as something in your diet. Hmm... it's just, I'm trying to determine how many size descriptors a language really needs, and not just translating things willy nilly.

After all, I'm building potential word parts by this metric:

measurements: (vowel)+B
pronouns: (vowel)+K
elements: (vowel)+M
flesh: (vowel)+MS
directions: (vowel)+T OR (vowel)+z

movements: T+(vowel)
Nouns: N+(?)
Adjectives: B+(?)

Work in progress of course. But between that and cutting out C, Q, and probably X, that leaves 18 consonants to use with various vowel combos for the (vowel)+(consonant) thing. Only vowel sounds so far are A, E, I, O, U (uh), and OO. (ish) And 8 x 6 is 108. Since I've got 17 consonants for (consonant)+(vowel), plus Ka and Ko, that's 102 words/word parts. 102 + 108 = 210 possible non-compound words. Add S to the ends of the vowel+consonant pairs, and that's another 108 words, for a total of 318 non-compound words. I mean... I guess Toki Pona only has like 137 words in total, but still...

And that's before any kind of testing to see if some words are too hard to say or sound too similar to another word.

Libraries are so cool. I had a writer's question that I sent to both the two local library systems, LINCC and Multnomah county, which was: Can a homeless kid get a library card? I provided some details like he and his mom live in their van, and they have a PO box. This is because one of the characters of book 7 is a homeless witch named Raven.¹ I was fully expecting the answer to be No or similar, but I was pleasantly surprised by the answer. For the Multnomah county system, which he would be most likely to be using, they've got a student connect thing where if he has a student ID for the area, he can get a library card that way. But they did also say a PO box is enough to get a card.

The librarian for LINCC -- the Clackamas county library system -- said "Yes, we would work with the patron to make sure they could use the library. Typically, we would provide a temporary card if they did not have proof of address and photo ID. So that would allow them to check out 5 books and use the other library services. In most cases, if someone is houseless and is in shelter or has a PO box, we would work with them to give them a full access card which would allow up to 80 checkouts.  We have a lot of options for patrons that are houseless to access services in the library."

I don't know if the numbers are the same in Multnomah county; I asked in a reply and am still awaiting a response. But still... neat.

And like sure, Fae Springs is a school of magic. But it canonically has a website on the mundane Internet AND is on the website for the US Department of Education. Mainly because of mundane parents of magical kids.


1 = His mom is a 'middle spectrum' witch, IE not powerful enough of a witch to be able to use magic for much of anything. Chooli is also in the middle spectrum, but zee can see spirits and talk with ghosts. Raven's mom cannot. Her magic is very weak and she never got much past first or second year level spell-work. Basically she's barely a witch at all, and works two mundane jobs: one at Walmart and another at Safeway.