Three positive things:

The cherry tree bloomed while I slept.
The volcano eating all of LA in my dream isn't real.
My tarot cards arrived today.

Shocker, but a lot of reading the past few weeks has been centered around COVID-19. Only sharing things I really liked b/c otherwise this would be a clusterfuck.

 If you wonder, some ways down the road, how things were during the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, here is what I've been doing so far: 

I have been preparing: 
Hands in the soil.
Conversations with friends. 
Books.
Laundry.

The birds and bees return. 
I dance and sing.
I chant when I wash my hands:
I must not fear.
I appreciate food in my cabinet. 
I go to bed early.

 I've been reading a lot about _monsters_.

As I write two adventures for Monster of the Week, I'm realizing there's a reason they suggest you start with the monster and work from there....the number of monsters, mythological threats, and otherwise spooky entities living in my head is large, but the details on them are thin.  This is how I spent tonight googling things like: 

monsters that guarantee youth
pied piper
doppelganger
curiosity monster

The plum tree in my backyard is blooming.

I'm new to recognizing
The timing on these things, but--

February 28 seems early.

Thin branches reach toward the sky,
Diagonal lines covered in clusters of buds,
opening flowers, pale signs of life,
I find myself looking at it all day.

Maybe the flowers are a sign of the climate apocalypse, but--

They are a sign of plums and honey bees, too.

There have been two opportunities that, at this time last year, I said: Tara, you're doing this in 2020. 

One is a local performance festival called Hear Here, where I'd be writing poetry & making a soundscape in collaboration with a choreographer I don't know yet. The other is Creative Capital, only a massive and very influential award of $50,000 for weird art. 

You can really fall down a rabbit hole here. Once you start noticing where a choice could happen, you start seeing choices everywhere.  "The reader could choose this pronoun.  This color. This timing."  It's exhausting and it's important to trim those decision trees early and often.  

Today I did a one-day writing retreat, and in the spirit of my DIY artist retreat zine (ugh it pains me that there is LITERALLY NOTHING ON THE INTERNET I can link there), here's how it went: 

As I've dug into this Twine experience I'm building (tentatively titled The Neighborhood, by the way), I've realized there's an entire world of people focused on interactive fiction (IF).  

Of course there is, in retrospect.  Every internet rabbit-hole is fully populated. 

I kept bumping into some jargon, and specifically discussions of parser vs. choice-based games.  Time to research!