Little progress and other projects

This week hasn't been overly productive in terms of my outside-of-work writing. After all that positive energy from creating my Dungeon & Dragons character's backstory, I just haven't been able to set aside any more time this week to write even a single word. I'm drowning in stuff at work and am wiped out by the end of the day. I don't know how authors hold full-time jobs and still somehow manage to write entire novels on evenings and weekends. For me, even finding the guts to look over the stuff I have managed to put together has seemed impossible.

But at least I can always fall back on my old standby, writing about not writing!

You'll note that I finally added a proper header image to the site. I've had this idea of photographing the plants and animals I encounter on my daily walks, researching and writing a bit about them. It would be a fairly easy project to force me to write and I'd be learning some important things about the native (and invasive) plants and animals in my area. I've taken a bunch of pictures so far, but still need to organize them and figure out if I want to buy a physical book on plants and animals of my area to identify anything I don't recognize, or use a website or app. I still have no idea what the wildflowers are in the picture I've attached to this entry!

After searching a little, it doesn't seem there's much out there on the web that can help ID plants and animals with just a picture you've taken and writing a description into Google isn't overly helpful in identifying flora and fauna either. I came across an app called iNaturalist that lets you submit pictures and it will provide suggestions on the plant or animal shown, but you have to agree to license your images so they can be used by scientists for various environmental studies. I'm cool with contributing to science but worried about data security and am not sure I want to give up the rights to my photos. I'll have to look into it some more.

The app is run by National Geographic and the California Academy of Sciences, so you'd think they'd be careful with people's data, but even big, respectable companies and organizations have been easily hacked before. It would be nice to contribute to science, though it sounds like your photos need to be of decent enough quality to be considered "research grade."

On the other hand, I'm worried that if I try to do too many little projects, I'll become even more burned out and not get anything done at all. But, the whole point of this site was just to get me writing, and I don't think it matters whether that writing is short fiction, blog posts or factoids on plants and animals.