I’m fine. Are you fine?

It’s true that there have been some wild fires in my province recently. Fortunately, and I type this while knocking on the possibly wood of my desk, there are no big fires at all in my particular valley, so far anyway. So while our earlier heat wave has been followed by a significant amount of smoke from wild fires rolling in and out, I’m in no immediate danger.

I have been finding it a bit difficult to write creatively over the past couple of weeks, however. I might need to take a little mini-holiday from language.
I logged 12 hours of active German study in July, and I listened to Radio France almost every day, too. (You may have heard they are having some wildfire problems in France…)

I think I’m going backwards in German. My understanding of the grammar seems to be getting worse instead of better, and also I feel like I’m starting to forget words that I already almost-learned. I’m trying to tell myself this is only because I’m trying my learning apps on “hard mode,” have recently started using a third app, and I’m listening and watching some native-level videos now on top of the designed-for-idiot-Anglo instruction videos, and of course this is going to be more difficult. (Sometimes it’s extreeeemly difficult and I tell myself it’s so hard because they must be speaking some backwoods dialect while drunk, but, uh…. it’s probably just because I’m still really bad at this language.) (Side note: It’s also quite disconcerting when these people in their videos speaking in German suddenly throw in a couple of words of perfect English, the show-offs.) (And, second side note, YouTube’s new AI auto-translation voiceovers can go to heck, I click on a video because it’s originally in German not because I want it translated and read to me by robo-voice!!)

I’m having a hard time convincing myself I’m not getting stupider. I’m going to try and keep pushing myself through this German stuff for another six weeks or so to get to the one year mark since I started, and then I’ll re-test myself and see if I’ve made any detectable progress in German since February, when I last took a practice test. Right now, I feel like if there’s no evidence of significant improvement in the past six months, maybe I’ll stop.
I definitely feel like I’m coming to the end of the “exciting new thing” phase on this project.

I’ve also fallen behind on the weekly writing prompts I’ve been doing, which is why you’re seeing this blog post instead of a story or poem – I’m running out of stories to share at the moment!
I am hoping to catch up on the prompts from July, and I started one that actually dates back from May, but I might skip August prompts.
I have been doing a bit more submitting of stories in the past week.

I’ve gotten some more “no, but I liked it, but no” type rejection letters. I’m still thinking about the very nice rejection letter that encouraged me strongly to try writing something a bit more horror.
The thing is, I don’t really like writing horror all that much.
But people – and by people I mean short story publishers – seem to like it when I do.

I’ve started working on the science-fiction short story I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the one with bees. I should be able to finish it in a couple of days, if I can get focused.

I’ve been thinking of starting a mini-series here on my blog about the music I sometimes listen to, because not only am I running out of stories and poems to share with you, I’m running out of anything to share with you, as I try to publish a post once a week for the year.

It would help if I had some “I’m published over here!” news. But I don’t.

I am definitely not doing this once-a-week blog post thing next year. My life is too boring, it gets too repetitive. I don’t want to spend my time grumbling away on this tiny tiny corner of the internet, to no-one’s entertainment.
So I’m going to stop this for now.

Here is a song that I have on my Spotify list after their algorithm correctly guessed I would find it amusing – maybe you will too. See you next week!