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Thank you! The wren was just hopping around in my driveway one day, and my cat got my attention to come look at the invader out the window

I definitely do some post-processing on my best shots, but do my best to keep it in the realm of reality. There's often a degree of brightness and contrast loss between what my eye sees and what the camera can capture - and doing a bunch of photography definitely draws attention to how impressive the human eye handles changing light levels - so I usually do a few nudges to bring it back to what I recall seeing.

Depending on the amount of light in the original scene, the images sometimes need a little sharpening and/or noise reduction in places, so I get a lot of use of my art tablet painting in masking layers for various adjustments to get the effect I want.

(I also have to do two edited versions of each photo, one for web and one for print, since the amount of reflected light off even a glossy paper is so much less than from projected from a monitor or phone screen. Lots of nuances!)

(For the monthly membership I'm usually cutting off new subscriptions on the 20th of each month to give me time to put everything together, but if anyone here is interested in joining, let me know and I'll include you in the June delivery.)

I know I've shared some of my photography previously, and at some of the monthly pubs, so I thought I should tell you folks about my new photo print shop



I bought myself a professional printer earlier this year, and decided I was confident enough in my work to start selling prints of the best of my photos. I'm slowly putting new prints up over the summer as/when I get time to do test runs and make sure I'm 100% happy with the results! I think this one's currently my favourite:



In addition, I'm also running a monthly membership - with different tiers for digital wallpapers, physical postcard prints or A5 prints - where each month I send subscribers my favourite photo from the month, alongside context for the shot or a short microfiction.

My goal long-term is to see if I can build this up to a point where I can take more time off between my dayjob contracts to do more photography, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes!

Just to check, I don't think I got an invite link email to last month's pub (not even in spam folders). Did anything change on that side of things?

As both writer and reader, I'd both agree with the above and also say that it's often a matter of flow, like punctuation on a macro scale.

Sometimes you may want to vary chapter length a little for pacing; shorter chapters feel faster, like things are moving; longer chapters tend to feel more grounded in the details, but can feel sluggish if not used carefully. Sometimes authors will put in a single page chapter - or a single sentence - for effect, but do that too often and it threatens to draw the reader's attention, so they're looking at your chapter choices rather than being absorbed in your narrative.

As usual in writing, there isn't a wrong way of breaking chapters, just different choices having different effects on the reader. So be aware of the effects, and choose the most suitable.

I've recently been on a short story kick, assisted by InkFoundry, who are creating a searchable index of short stories by category and theme.

This was last night's read, a fictional research paper on cheese and prognostication, and I could not help but read the entire thing in Jubal's voice:

"The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Prediction of Upcoming Misfortunes of Divination Colleagues, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University" by Amanda Helms

30th is fine with me, too

I'm a big fan of VGM arrangements that do more than just play a track with an orchestra, and Merregnon Studios' Symphonic Fantasies concert has been an all-time favourite for me. I was telling someone else about it this evening, and took the excuse to have another listen, and gosh it hits my brain just right

Penblwydd hapus, Exilian!

Especially given the rate of internet churn, it's remarkable for a place to have existed for such a time.

I can absolutely see that, and as usual FromSoft do an exceptionally good job of reusing assets in ways that - at least during playing the game - don't *feel* incongruous, but certainly allow them to make much larger games than they would otherwise be able to afford to.

(The ruined churches - in particular - are neatly handled. They function as sanctuary spaces in terms of gameplay, but they are also named in such a way that they are essentially lore footsteps of a semi-divine pilgrimage of a key deific figure in the game's mythology, and so the similarity of the architecture and so on does make a sort of sense as a "her religion went back to all the places where she rested on her journey and built identical churches on those spots")

Making a real push to finish the rest of these albums by the end of March, so here's the next two:

Mountaintops & Snowfields

Miquella's Haligtree, Branch & Root

Thank you!

In exciting news, my first professionally-published short story just came out! These Hearts, Who Once Held Up the Sky

It's a flash fiction about burnout, managed collapse and finding the road to recovery in the company of others.

I'm particularly grateful to you good Exilians, because this story was inspired by some excellent conversations we had about burnout and recovery back at the Exilian pub last August. It wouldn't be the same story without this community <3

It's Alasdair Stuart's The Full Lid. I know Al from the before-COVID times when I used to go to writing conventions, and he's a wonderful force in the community.

As of yesterday, I crossed the "1000 Elden Ring photos edited" milestone, and I'm rapidly approaching the end of the editing process for the base game.

I'm kinda hoping to be able to wrap up the curation of the base game albums by early April - a year after I started - then I can move on to the DLC in earnest.

In related news, one of my friends has asked to feature a handful of these photos in his weekly newsletter (which has a *significantly* larger reach in SFF circles than I do), which I'm very appreciative of!