i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Kids book about a penguin trying to figure out who she is. She has wings so she's a bird, only the birds are like "can you fly" and she tries really hard but can't, plus she likes to swim, so they say "you're not a bird, maybe you're a fish" so she goes to the fish and they point out she has feet and can waddle around so she's not a fish either, and maybe a third or fourth thing (cow eating grass points out she likes herring? ("I do," thinks Mika, slurping down a nice ripe herring) or cat points out she doesn't groom herself? Or horse asks if she can run fast?) ...and either a) she finds another penguin or b) finds a label or c) just stops trying to eat/do/be the way other animals do

(Hmmm maybe she goes to the library and asks the librarian -- owl? llama? -- for a book of animals, and the librarian says "hmmm I think I know what you need " and gets her a book of penguins... which fits her perfectly, with swimming and waddling and eating herrings, and she doesn't have to change herself woo)

can't decide if this is in the wild or in a zoo but probably just random animals out living like people

And obviously I'd be doing the illustrations and stuff

...just not before the Yuletide deadline lol. And I'm still working on the poetry-by-pets project. Dunno if I mentioned that yet: poems by Phoebe (ode to a ball) and Yahtzee (the importance of naps) and Loki (my tail is stalking me), with photos. Probably just self published.

I am in the "gaaaah this SUCKS" phase of ficwriting.

(At least I'm over 1k words, even allowing for the fact that Scrivener counts html tags as words and so "<i>this</i>" counts as three words rather than one.)

(but seriously, this sucks so much omg)

Boneheaded minecraftian things I have done in the past few days:

* accidentally discarded my diamond pickaxe into lava ... with no other pickaxe in inventory, and iron ore but no coal to smelt with

(but I did have enough wooden sticks, barely, to use as fuel, and a crafting table plus enough cobblestone to make a furnace)

* gone down to set up a nether portal ... with no flint-and-steel to activate the portal, and while I had flint and iron ore, I still did not have coal, nor did I have a crafting table to make a furnace

* gotten lost in caves... despite using a map. (Round and round in circles we go where the hell is the exit anyway)

* dug a staircase up ... into the middle of the ocean

(yes I did go back down and collect the wiped-out torches)

* went all the way down inside a cave to build a nether portal ... that was close enough to the one near my base that I ended up way high up anyway.

On the bright side, I now have tons of netherrack? and mushrooms.

And, unrelated to that but the usual sources I use for views are kind of disappointing: