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Watching the Clouds, Listening to the Birds, and Finding Joy in Small Moments

Author

Andrea Blythe
June 25, 2026

Puffy white clouds against a bright blue sky.

Admiring the clouds.

This morning (as I’m writing this), I’m up at my sister’s house settled in the mountain pine trees. I’m sitting outside on her porch, sipping my coffee while reading poetry (Night Owl by Aimee Nezhukumatathil). The birds are chattering all around me, and the sun is making the verdant trees glow green.

I’m trying to be present to beauty when I can, to ground myself in small moments that remind me that the world is good and beautiful.

Yesterday, when I was walking out to my car, I looked up and was awed by the glowing white clouds in a watercolor-blue sky. The crisp whiteness of their puffy forms.

I’ve been having a hard few months. Or maybe not “hard” so much as busy to the point of loosing space for myself. I can always tell these periods in hindsight, because my posting patterns whittle away to nothing, except my monthly culture consumption (the writing of which is a habit deeply ingrained in me that skipping it feels impossible).

From March to May, I have shared nothing but culture consumptions. The months have been thick with social obligations, my weekends full of bachelorette parties, bridal showers, birthdays, holidays, and helping family members clean, prep for events, and complete crafts. There’s joy in these moments. And laughter. And good times. But they also drain my social battery, leaving me exhausted in the absence of quiet and solitude.

The last time I experienced a multi-month-long set of travel and social obligations, I had an emotional breakdown. I just burst into tears one day, overwhelmed at the idea of yet another event-filled weekend.

With this season of social events, I’m doing better than before — partly because I’ve gone in with a clear understanding of what would be expected of me and my limits. I keep looking ahead at the next week(s) of events and mentally preparing myself. I schedule in days (or even hours) of solitude, find moments of quiet to myself. I’m treating myself with care I need to maintain my wellness.

A grid of photos, showing jagged red rocks in Sedona Arizona, including Devil's Bridge (a rock outcropping). Also pictured are desert flowers, a cactus, and a photo of a woman dressed up for dinner.

One of the bachlorettes I attended was in Sedona, hiking among the red rocks.

I’ve started up an irregular habit of going to the gym in the morning. I don’t know if I’m properly optimizing my training routine, per se, but it doesn’t really matter. I love the feel of lifting weights, the clanking rhythm of the machines. I love thinking up what exercises I’ll do that day, shifting my plan on whim and mood. I love counting out the reps and dancing and stretching between sets.

I especially love the good tiredness of my muscles after the workout, the next-day soreness that comes with pushing myself. Evidence of the body I live in.

My birthday passed recently (end of May), and I couldn’t help but return to my birthday post from last year, in which I wrote of turning 45, the longing of Molly Grue from The Last Unicorn, and my own endless search for wonder.

Looking back, that post feels almost like a spell casting. In the time since, I’ve made some vital and import steps toward creating my own magic. I moved to a new city, into a new apartment, a place I could fill with art and books and new furniture, making the space my all my own. I write and read and play video games as I please, and I’ve started to learn how to cook more (and to actually enjoy the process).

At the start of the year, I joined a mentorship program for game writing and made strides toward my goals. I wrote and wrote, crafting blog posts and essays and game projects — and this writing led to new connections in the industry, with the invitation to participate in other creative work. In turn, I’ve had opportunities to support others in their own projects. And I’ve found clarity on the creative life I want to create.

Can I claim I’ve found my unicorn? Not necessarily. Really, what I’m finding is that the work itself as the magical creature.

Over the weekend, I followed my sister down a dusty trail, the sun hot on out backs. With each step, I could feel my toes wanting to cramp in my flip flops — but before they did we reached a secluded copse of shade under the trees next to the river. It was the kind of magical forest nook I dreamed about as a kid.

We stripped down to our swimsuits and stepped into the river. We sat on a rock, our faces tilted up to look at the mountains, listening to the rush of a nearby waterfall.

The water was a chill contrast to the heat of the sun, and we laughed as we eased ourselves deeper into the water — up to our stomach, then our shoulders. We settled into slight depths, bracing ourselves against the tug of the current.

Two photos, showing a bird's nest with four speckled eggs, and the next of the bird sitting on her eggs.

A little bird crafted her nest in a potted plant on my dad’s porch, making it easy to go out and check on her speckled eggs whenever we’d like.

My creative work has fallen away over the last few months (nothing but culture consumptions). After work and all the social events, I haven’t had the energy to fully engage with the blank page. This absence weighs on me, adding to the frustration and stress of all the constant busyness.

It would be easy in these periods to give in to depression, to count all the words I didn’t write and string them up as evidence of my failings. But that wouldn’t be fair.

Life shifts and ebbs. Sometimes we have the space for great creative abundance. Sometimes our world is too full, every nook and cranny of our time and mental space already filled to the brim.

I am learning to let go of “productivity,” the need to be constantly busy working, busy making, busy doing. I am learning to carve out moments of solitude. I am learning to look for small moments, quiet moment of beauty or physicality to connect me to the present. All lessons I have learned before and will have to relearn again.

I’m also learning to recognize and acknowledge the good work I’ve already done, to be grateful for past efforts rather than just moving onto the next project, the next networking event, the next and the next and the next. It’s so easy to be always moving forward to forget what you’ve accomplished — to keep reaching for the goal post that always just little further away than it was before.

Because even with these several months of creative hibernation, this has actually been an amazing year of creativity for me. Early in the year, I’ve written a number of review and essays, interviewed some amazing game developers for Women in Horror Month, and have worked on a number of game projects I’m excited about. And when I’m not creating narrative works of my own, I’m doing what I can to support fellow creators, from writing up reviews to support local game developers to providing mentorship support for a project being developed by Girls Make Games.

Even my culture consumption itself (which I often treat as unimportant) is evidence of how I continue to be creatively engaged. Each culture consumption is filled with work I loved, the books, movies, shows, and games that moved me — works that may inspire me at any moment to reconnect with my own writing process.

A surfer rides a wave on a cloudy day in Santa Cruz.

Surfers in Santa Cruz. I was also captivated by how the clouds split the ocean into cerulean blue on one side and moody grey on the other.

For my birthday, I treated myself to self care, a meditative hot tub, a pedicure, and a massage. In the evening, I sat by the ocean and watched the surfers in Santa Cruz — all of them in their black wet suits, lining up in a social hierarchy I didn’t understand. I watched them sitting on their boards, until one slide onto their belly and began paddling, trying to time their movement with the formation of the wave.

Some caught the wave, riding it through the foam and curl as long as the wave allowed. Other missed the timing and had to return to the row of surfers, waiting for their chance.

I kind of feel like those surfers right now. I’m in a holding pattern, feeling the rise and fall of the water, like the ebb and flow of life. I’m watching the rolling patters of the water, waiting for the right wave to come my way.

Though, maybe that’s not the right analogy right now. It’s more that I’m in a period of rest, and I’m watching the surfers because they are apart of this beautiful world full of ocean and waves and clouds and sky. And I love remembering that the world is beautiful sometimes, and sometimes I feel compelled to write about it, because writing is another way of loving for me.

What I’ve Been Working On

Since it’s basically been four months since I shared what I’ve been working on this is going to be a long list. (I could almost do this as a separate post.)

Games & Game Design

Lost Lake Games released the trailer for Vaunted, a sci-fi tactical RPG about three cut-throat criminals coming together to pull off a major score. I’ve been working with Lost Lake (off and on) for a couple of years now, mostly writing branching dialog — and that’s really all I can say. But it’s so cool to finally see the trailer and hear the characters talk for the first time.

Cover image for Letter Lost, which is written in an art deco style font. Beneath the words are several people with shadowy faces, staring out at the viewer.

Letter Lost was recently released by FlatNine Games. The game is all about working in a most unusual post office. The player is conscripted into managing a tiny post office with very specific hours of operation and rest. You run around checking addresses, stamping envelopes, weighing parcels, and generally making sure each letter or package is delivered to the proper place. Throughout the day, you may be interrupted by customers, some just seeking to send out a message, others with their own mysterious stories.

My contributions to this game were incredibly minimal — a few scenes of random customer dialog — but I loved every second of it. Coming up with these characters, making their dialog both generic enough to be randomly slotted in and also unique enough to be interesting was a fun challenge.

Illustrated cover image for Haiku Hike, with the words written on paper tags tied in a tree.

Haiku Hike is a narrative adventure game that I collaborated on at the end of March for the Unlikely Collaborators Game Jam — and it won first place in the jam!

Haiku Hike is a poetic adventure, which allows you to hike the mountain, chat with fellow hikers, and solve puzzles to clear out the brain fog so you can write haiku about the awe-inspiring beauty of the mountain.

It was such a delight designing the narrative for this game and working with Josep V. (who did some fantastic programing and puzzle and haiku system design), Emily Pearson (who provided wonderfully charming artwork), Sam (ch3ckpo1nt, who provided the calming music), and Otter 841 (who provided supporting graphics and UI and puzzle design).

You can read a breakdown of how I developed the narrative design for the project here.

“Inside My Eyes” is a little game poem I made in a few hours using Flickgame, a simple design tool, for Flickgame Game Poems at Play Praxis - London Games Festival 2026 under the loose theme of "Mind." It takes under a minute to play in your browser.

Interviews & Essays

My essay, “Drawing Inspiration from Form to Enhance Your Game Narrative,” was published in The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, a collection of more than 100 essays on the craft of game writing, collated by Jon Ingold.

With contributions from the writers behind some of the world’s most successful titles – such as Prince of Persia, Control, Black Flag, Call of Duty and Baldur’s Gate 3 – alongside indie and upcoming writers, this collection aims to capture the full breadth and complexity of this young artistic medium.

Filled with practical advice, inspiration, deep truths and simmering disagreements, every turn of the Kaleidoscope reveals a new perspective on interactive writing

In April, I had a fabulous time conducting interviews with games devs for Women in Horror Interviews. Here’s the full list:

I published two game round ups on Once Upon the Weird, highlighting game demos I enjoyed playing at recent events.

Good Reads

But can AI do an illustrator’s job? Or any artist’s job?

Let’s think about that for a second. I have been a working artist since I was 17 years old, when I sold my first short story. Here’s what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, a poem, a painting, a drawing, a dance, a book or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind.

But the image-generation program does not know anything about your big, numinous, irreducible feeling. The only thing it knows is whatever you put into your prompt, and those few sentences are diluted across a million pixels or a hundred-thousand words, so that the average communicative density of the resulting work is indistinguishable from zero.

It is possible to infuse more communicative intent into a work: writing more detailed prompts, or doing the selective work of choosing from among many variants, or directly tinkering with the AI image after the fact, with a paintbrush or Photoshop or the Gimp. And if there will ever be a piece of AI art that is good art – as opposed to merely striking, interesting or an example of good draftsmanship – it will be thanks to those additional infusions of creative intent by a human.

And in the meantime, it’s bad art. It’s bad art in the sense of being “eerie”, the word that cultural theorist Mark Fisher used to describe “when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something”.

AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it is missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it is undetectable.

Thank you for reading and spending a little of your precious time with me! If you’d like to support my work, you can subscribe for free or, if you are a generous soul, you can buy me a coffee.

I make games! You can play some for free on Itch. If you’re a game developer looking for a writer or narrative designer, please check out my portfolio.

I also write poetry! Find my books here.

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