I was going to make a test post so I could evaluate journal themes, but then I realized I might as well just make an introduction!

Yes, like probably most other people joining right now, I am "from Cohost," you could say, except I was really just a Very Invested Lurker there. I expect to make more comments than posts here, too, but also more than zero posts.

I am a lapsed photographer. Do art somewhat more often than that. I like making little paper guys. Here's a photo I took when I first got my DSLR, which remains the clearest picture of a jumping spider that I've captured to date:

But mostly, I write. Lately I've been trying to do a few drabbles per week. Exactly 100 words each. This is partly a warmup exercise, but mostly because I have a tendency to RAMBLE GREATLY and I am out of practice with succinct descriptions. Most of these drabbles have been turning out more like vignettes, but that's fine. (The real problem is finding ideas. Used to have a goal to do a drabble a day, but THAT well ran dry fast.)

For the sake of playing with formatting, here's a couple of the less awful drabble attempts:

The chicken, suddenly, is not.

It—she—flops backward into the mud, flapping her terrifyingly naked arms in a vain attempt at balance.

“Gaw?” she croaks. “What?”

What is she saying? How is she saying? How does she know what she is saying? Her nearby flock—still chickens, the rest of them—clucks inscrutably.

“God damnit. Not again!”

Oh! The Man Who Bears Food! He’ll fix this! She tries to strut over to him, but can’t puzzle out these long, long legs.

“Figure out how to stand up,” he sighs, “and we’ll take that damn wizard his eggs, I guess.”

\

Every day I am made a little more from mold.

It began kindly: a hasty signature for a clinical trial, strings of self-healing slime reattaching a mangled leg that should have been lost. I was careful not to look until the skin healed over; by then the mold was only visible as a slight yellow tinge behind a pale scar.

Each new wound followed suit. The slime would crawl out, make me whole. Every cut. Every bruise.

Everything smaller, too.

I lift myself up from bed carefully, wishing I could sense the threshold where muscle use becomes muscle growth.

\

Sable tears the streamers from the wall. A few papery scraps refuse to be scratched off, but fuck it! They can stay. What a joke.

Crumpling up the rest, she dumps them atop the body in her living room. Her PhD lies beneath, soaked in blood barely fresher than its ink.

Five years. And only then had her friend bothered to tell her about magic. Only after her dissertation—which had seemed so clever—when the real problem was that nobody accounted for magic!

Sable wishes it had stayed fictional. Though—then she couldn’t use it to hide the body.

...Hm. Can't figure out how to make boxes separate without something between them.

...OH WELL! That's all I've got to say ig! Journal customization time baby!!