golden teeth, crooked track

I spent the day doing more stuff around the house, but really I spent the day listening to several videos from the Vegas conference and then going down a rabbit hole with other videos from one of the conference speakers. The speaker is a certified Clifton Strengths coach (formerly StrengthFinder) and has built a community of writing coaches...and she has made a bunch of 45-60min videos discussing each of the 34 Clifton strengths in detail from the perspective of how those strengths impact / influence a writer's craft and career.

I took the test way back in the day, and I've come back to the results a few times - mostly because literally all of my top five strengths are in the 'strategic thinking' bucket and I don't have any 'execution' strengths in my top ten, which is probably part of why I don't get things done and would rather just read / talk / brainstorm / daydream all day. The videos were surprisingly super helpful, though - obviously there are a lot of writing benefits to being able to generate a lot of unique ideas and then game out what would happen along a million different paths if an idea came to fruition (my top two strengths are Ideation and Strategy). And my third strength, Context, is a lot about knowing everything about the past to predict the future + people's future behavior, which is spot-on and also ties into why I need to know so much about characters' backstories before I can really write them.

So, I only watched the videos for my top three strengths, but I think I'll go through my top ten and see what they have to say. All in all, it was a v. worthwhile exercise, and I'm looking forward to digging into it some more.

Beyond that, I have v. little to note - construction continued, and Randy is making excellent progress. It was 29 degrees and windy, and is the warmest that it will be in the next ten days, which is unwelcome. I went to my parents' house with a tub full of dirty dishes to run through their dishwasher (partially because I'm lazy, partially because I wanted to disinfect from [censored]'s covid) and chatted with them for awhile. And I decorated my Christmas tree, which sparks a lot of joy - maybe I'll leave it up until February since I put it up so late, but we'll see.

And now I must sleep - goodnight!