Finishing outside, you take a shower and then check on weird little blobby lizard again. Finding that its pushed the lettuce and piece of catfood onto the water dish and is now just sitting inside the mess blinking up at you with its goofy little smiling face.

You reach down to clean this out so you can refill it with fresh water, and the lizard with a sudden move hops onto you and clings wetly to your wrist. Wrinkling your nose, you try to gently shake it off. It seems to be clinging to you with sticky toe pads and you're worried you might hurt the small creature trying to pry it off.

Then, a wave of dizziness washes over you.

Before you know it, you've staggered over and are resting on the couch. Very sleepy. There was something important though....the lizard? Right! You'd meant to try and look it up again to identify it. Maybe even email Professor Lagrande.

But you just can't seem to muster the energy and your mind fades back into a sleepy uncaring daze. You tell yourself could probably move if you wanted to, but you just don't want to.

At some point you become aware that there's something moist and a little sticky crawling steadily up your arm. But, that doesn't seem important enough to react to.

Then its lightly touching your face.

Then....something happens. There is a blank spot in your memory when you come back to awareness. Your vision is fuzzy, and you're standing unsteadily. But a moment later that all clears, and your balance seems normal.

"Hello Jeanna," comes a crystal clesr voice from inside your mind.

I'm starting to get a lot more interested in my projects now that I've realized that cheesy rip offs of major sci fi properties is just what I like to do....

I will have a few nice swan photos as part of it, and maybe a section with trivia to make it more educational.

This one will mostly be to track my progress. I'm aiming for two pages a day, or roughly 800 words. I'm sure there will be days when I do a lot more than that but I'm trying to leave ample time for school and family things without making it stressful.

I don't like having my games in sneak peek, but I'll just post the first page here as proof I'm working on it:

######

Pen and her husband Cob had been resting in a pond thick with reeds since late morning, diving and pulling up vegetation when they were hungry, and then preening and cleaning their feathers while caressed by the cool breezes.

It was not until the evening air began to deepen in color when the two swans took to flight. The sun hung low over a dip between the hills and washed the world in a brilliant orange. With each beat of their powerful wings--the span of them spreading six feet across in flight--the couple rose higher and higher until they were barely discernible against the fluffy white of the clouds.

Flying north, they could see the patchwork farmland spread before them, and long twining roads snaking up to the distant lights of a city. But it was westward and away from it that they turned, aiming for the gap between the hills, two white specks striving for the sinking sun.

Their destination was a isolated lake nestled against a curve in the landscape, its still waters reflecting and doubling the gold and purple glories of the clouds in a display fit for royalty. There were other swans who made their homes here, and they all began arriving from their daily errands in ones and two, touching down alongside the last rays of sunlight caressing the water.

Pen and Cob glided across the lake to a spot where a tiny inlet flowed up between the roots of seven trees, each bending slightly to touch their leafy crowns together, creating a vaulted ceiling of sunlit green and cool shadows overhead.

In a hollow by the seventh tree rested seven sleepy cygnets. Each of these young swans is covered in a pale grey fuzz, the graceful white feathers of adulthood having not grown out yet.

One of them, of course is you.

######

Just an aside, has anyone read The Trumpet of the Swan? It's by the author of Charlotte's Web and it's pretty old but it's the first chapter book I ever read. So in a way I always liked swans.