wherein Liz talks about writing

I've been poking at my last two mini-ficlet meme prompts to no particular avail this past week. Some of that is simply that I have not been in a very good mental place for creation, but aside from real life issues, branchandroot's prompt is being a massive pain -- by which I mean one idea stalled out around 1,200 words, and the second idea is making a fair bid to be equally stroppy -- and rthstewart's requires me to world-build ahead of myself in two separate unfinished fics -- by which I mean "The Courting Dance" and "A Change of Season," of course -- and that is always tricky.

(Sorry, rth, the Star Wars genderswap just isn't happening. It would require either a novel to properly explore the changes, or for me to have watched the films MUCH more recently than I have in order to accurately and dramatically spin a single scene.)

But I wanted to say that I am still working on them, and will hopefully be done by Thanksgiving. *crosses fingers*

And now to bed, since I'm teaching RE in the morning and need my beauty sleep. :-)

Moral Tales, Week 11: Winter Solstice

Today in RE our lesson was about the winter solstice, which basically involved a picture book about various ways people around the world have celebrated solstice over the years (and why they thought it was a significant day), plus a brief scientific explanation of seasons and orbits and stuff. I just put the book down when I hit that page and gave the explanation off the top of my head, with two pieces of chalk to stand in for the sun and the earth. It's not like the exact wording of the text is going to be more accurate than I am, and I needed my hands free instead of trying to hold up the book.

Then we made sun ornaments out of coffee filters and little foil candy cups, to hang on the tree in the sanctuary in a couple weeks. It was a small class today -- just five kids, and one left early on to spend the morning with his mother instead -- and we asked them to make two ornaments each so their classmates wouldn't be left empty-handed. Two kids agreed; the other two weren't interested. So my co-teacher, our assistant, and I also made some ornaments, just in case.

We had to use glue sticks rather than liquid glue, so I'm not entirely confident the glitter is securely stuck to the coffee filters, but oh well, they look pretty for now!



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