Ink-lings

This blog will contain little snippets of creative stuff, from daily prompts or other inspiration.

In 2016, when I did PhotoBlog365, I surprised myself by being creative over 300 days out of the year. The key, I think was the simple but varied prompts. So ten years later, I’m trying that again with the prompts from /r/sketchdaily, which give me a similar feel. Probably mostly writing, but my goal is to let myself be creative!

So beware that nothing below will be polished, and I reserve the right to substitute photos or drawings or perhaps even puzzles if the mood strikes.

August 10 - Animal Farm

First find the animals, then their sounds.

Puzzle:

"Exist!" I declare. (6)
Pee before run (8)
Crime boss be legend (6)
Fight? Aye, fight! (7)
Fine-ass software connector (5)
Gee, standard decay (6)
John Jay sample size (4)
Mug is not out (5)
Not from our commercial (4)
Oh, perhaps Jennifer's active (5)
Scratch off perfect score (6)
See iron file (6)
Stylish Barbie's boyfriend tee (7)
You and I are wicked (6)
You bottom, at the moment (6)

F W S D / L M2 O C / M1 H T / A B P R

Solution:

Each clue contains an extra word that is the homophone of a letter (more or less). The remaining parts clue two words that can be put together to make an animal word.

Before | run, [pee = P] easily: ANTE LOPE
"Exist!" [I = I] | declare.: BE AVER
Stylish | Barbie's boyfriend [tee = T]: CHIC KEN
Crime boss [be = B] | legend: DON KEY
[see = C] iron | file: FE LINE
[oh = O], perhaps Jennifer's | active: HER ON
John [jay = J] | sample size: LOO N
Scratch [off = F] | perfect score: MAR TEN
[you = U] bottom, | at the moment: MIN NOW
Fine-[ass = S] | software connector: OK API
[gee = G], standard | decay: PAR ROT
Mug [is = S] | not out: ROB IN
Fight? [aye = I], | fight!: SPAR ROW
Not from [our = R] | commercial: TO AD
You and I [are = R] | wicked: WE EVIL

If we put these in alphabetical order by animal, we might note that these animals start with the letters given below the clue (the fact that there are two Ms might also give us a clue - these go in alphabetical order). Replace each with the letter homophone from its clue (e.g., F for FELINE would become C) to get the answer: CRIB JUST FOR PIGS

August 9 - Where You Want to Be

Career planning, job interviews, life coaches, counselors - they all ask, "where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?" The truth is, I've never really known my answer to this question and I'm not sure I ever will. For all the time I spend anxiously imagining the what-ifs and what-thens of how things could go wrong in the future if I don't get things right in this moment, I have always had a very hard time conjuring up a picture of what I will want to be doing 5 years from now. Hell, I can't even guess what I'll want for dinner tonight, how can I guess what kind of work will feel exciting and important enough to motivate me years from now?

It has always been much easier for me to get excited by something new than to finish something which once was exciting but is no longer new. Over the years, I've learned a lot about the strategies that help me get back into the work and get things done even when the ask is ambiguous or there are overwhelmingly many steps between here and there. If I hadn't, I could never have finished a PhD, after all.

Yet one of the reasons it feels so difficult to imagine myself 5 years from now is that so much has changed across every 5 years. If I were to pick any time in my life and look 5 years later, I'd pretty much always find myself somewhere unexpected, excited by something I couldn't have predicted, having grown in ways I couldn't have known I would. In some ways, this means I don't want to find a job where I feel like I know where I'll be in 5 years, because a lot of the moves I've made that felt right for me, or the things I've been most proud of, came from going on spontaneous side quests and jumping on the train of opportunity when it passed by.

Perhaps the best advice I've gotten for imagining my future was to focus not on the specifics of the job or the people, but rather on my values, which I'd expect to stay fairly consistent. In what ways would I want the characteristics of this future job or life to align with my values? For instance, even if I don't know what the specific field of work will be, I can say that I want to be doing work that helps make the world a more equitable place. Even if I don't know whether I would want to work for a large organization or for myself, I could say that I'd like to ensure that I support the people I work or collaborate with by providing an environment in which they can be the best versions of themselves.

That worked - I did find my way to a career where I felt like I could do the things I was skilled at in support of making science a more equitable place. But then the world changed, and eventually, the same work felt like it was in service of the opposite goal, and no longer aligned with my values. So once again, I'm trying to figure out not what I want to be doing in 1 or 5 or 10 years, but even just what I want to be doing next. But this time, I've been dropped into a new continent and the maps I had sketched out for the possibilities of where to go are no longer useful. I no longer know what areas lie north or east or west of me if I orient myself to my moral compass. I guess it's time to brush up on my cartography skills and start exploring.

August 8 - The Ultimate Chair

I did warn you there might be puzzles some days! Today, the puzzle involves a type of clue called “Printer’s Devilry.” In a Printer’s Devilry clue, one word has been removed from a reasonably sensical sentence and you must figure out what that word is. However! The removed word was originally hidden across multiple words, and the punctuation/capitalization/spacing for the remaining words may have been shifted around after the word is removed.

For example, consider the following clue, in which a 5-letter word must be added back in to make sense of the sentence:

Whip or twill have the best lounges? (5)

If we add back in the word CHAIR within the word “whip”, we can shift the spacing of the words to make the reasonably sensical question:

Whi[CH AIR]port will have the best lounges?

In the puzzle below, each word that needs to be added back in will be some type of chair or seating. After you’ve found the word to solve each of the 5 Printer’s Devilry clues, use them to find the final answer - the ultimate chair.

Puzzle:

Hound played dead; found rabbi talking it (4) [1]
Roasting Ed Brown like hemp (3) [3]
Mat merging as a coffee competitor (6) [4]
Alex tries to phat but Ivan wore it better (5) [5]
Kou ard (shooting, specifically) played for the Lakers (7) [7]

Answers to Printer's Devilry Clues:

As in the example, the first number in the parentheses indicates the length of the word that should be added back in.

Hound played dead; found rabbit al[SO FA]king it
Ro[PE W]as tinged brown like hemp
Mat[CHA IS E]merging as a coffee competitor
Alex trie[D IVAN']s top hat but Ivan wore it better
Ko[BE, A NBA G]uard (shooting, specifically) played for the Lakers

(My apologies for the funky grammar on this last one)

**Final Answer:**

Now we use the last piece of info we haven't yet used from the clue - the number in \[square brackets]. Take the nth letter of each clue's answer in order:

SOFA [1] = S
PEW [3] = W
CHAISE [4] = I
DIVAN [5] = N
BEANBAG [7] = G

And so we find, the ultimate chair is...a SWING!

August 7 - Free Color

Interesting - turns out today ended up being a continuation of yesterday’s post. I might keep coming back to this as a multi-part story. For part 1, start here: https://www.sammykatta.com/writing/2026/8/7/august-6-trees .

---

That first time I saw The Bird, it was dressed as a crow, head to toe in solid black with just the slightest touch of violet iridescence in its wings. It hopped up along the branch closest to my window, the movement catching the corner of my vision as I typed. Deep in the flow of this paragraph as I was, I turned my head, registered The Bird with some sub-threshold part of my brain while my eyes gazed right through it, and continued channeling words from my brain to my fingers.

The Bird tilted its own head, scrutinizing me with its left eye, glancing up and down, and over to my screen as if curious what form my current prevarication on behalf of the government was taking. We continued like that for a moment longer, and then The Bird opened its beak and let out a series of three guttural caws, black ruff juddering with the effort. Somewhere in my brain, the image from my eyes finally dragged itself up above the surface, and I finally looked -- actually looked -- at The Bird, my fingers falling still a moment later.

Despite the clear impression of sound, I had heard...absolutely nothing. Perhaps it was the pane of glass, but our windows had never been that soundproof. The calls of crows perched across the street were often audible through the closed window, and at this distance, even the whistles and chipping of sparrows and cardinals going about their day regularly vibrated their way through the glass. Briefly, I felt a sense of curiosity, but very quickly, the imminent deadline of my assignment reasserted itself. Ignoring the evidence of my eyes, I put the anomaly down to the fact that the window was closed, and turned back to the screen.

Picking back up at the start of the paragraph to remind myself where I was going, I re-read my last few sentences, until I hit the end:

"...terminated to align with Administration priorities. However, new programs How interesting You are shiny Yet your eyes have no shine"

What? Confused by what on earth had caused me to type this, I fell back on my default staring spot, the tree outside my window. Fluttering greens played shade along the branches, full of leaves, but otherwise empty of avians -- The Bird or otherwise.

August 6 - Trees

It is a surprisingly marvellous thing to have lived in one place long enough to notice how a tree has grown. I don't mean that I've never seen a tree be bigger than it once was, but as with humans, the radical changes you see in a tree's early years are much more noticeable than those you see in maturity.

In my mother's garden, there were plenty of these young trees - those brought and transplanted by my mother as saplings, tenderly cared for, watered, fertilized. I watched them slowly put out leaves and begin to bloom as they overcame the trauma of being uprooted and displaced into a new environment and began to interact with the nitrogen-fixing residents of their new home soil. As fruit trees, however, they were lovingly pruned each year to help them grow more fruit. Some were dwarf varietals and some were more actively shaped to remain short, in either case aiming to both avoid the power lines above and keep the fruit within reach for my mother below.

In contrast, when I moved into my urban-ish apartment on the edge of suburbia, the tips of the most eager branches greeted me from the bottom of my third floor window. This was a tree that was already twenty-some feet in height, branching out just as far in diameter. Peering past the top of the tree, I could see its fellows alternately lining the rest of the street, trees of similar size clearly planted many years ago around the same time. Even back then, this was already a mature tree, its welcome shade in the DC summer the result of someone else's foresight.

Each day when I worked from home, it provided a welcome place for my eyes to focus whenever I turned away from my screen to think. It occasionally provided drama and intrigue, as a sometimes hangout for a passel of sparrows and the occasional crow. In spring we'd often see the sparrows flying up from the tree to the corner above our window, beaks laden with twigs, and know it was time to keep a careful ear out for the peeping of stray chicks in the walls near our dryer.

This spring, I began to notice some sparrows flying higher up than before, not to our window but perhaps the one above. And with a jolt, I realized that indeed, the top of the tree was now to the fourth floor what it had been to ours, seven years ago. The tree had grown, both up and out, a dozen feet since I had been here. Where once I could see the buildings across the street all year round, now I could only see them in winter when the branches were bare. It was a few days after I first stared into the tree with this realization, appreciating the extent to which the tree had grown and become an ever greater haven for the sparrows, that I first met The Bird.

August 5 - Yellow

Brave (adj.): having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty: having or showing courage

Imagine your friends are have started clambering down the slippery rocks by the waterfall - specifically the area your parents have told you is dangerous, and you should stay away. You've never done anything like this before and it's a long way down and kind of scary and you're sort of afraid of heights…but sometimes you have to try the scary things to find out they're not so scary. On the other hand, you've moved around all your life and this is the first group of friends who've taken you in - are you risking your chance at having friends if you tell them no and refuse to follow?

Is it braver to go?
Or braver to stay?

Imagine you have built yourself a career, finding a satisfying niche that that takes your unusual combination of disparate but technical skills and puts them to use toward serving the people of your country. Then, the most interesting and important work is taken away, and those who now lead seek to harm rather than help the people you and your colleagues planned to spend your careers serving, and part of their plan for doing that is explicitly described as traumatizing and chasing out the employees who most want to help those in need.

For how long do you struggle against the constant attacks and demoralization, the moral injury of the harm now being done by your hands on the keys…for the occasional chance to protect someone from the worst of the harm - or even to protect the truth? On the other hand, can you leave the team you've built, the friends you've made, your livelihood, your entire expected future…for a chance to find the sense of self you've lost, and the major question of whether there will actually be a way to make a difference from outside?

Is it braver to go?
Or braver to stay?

And if you find yourself choosing the less brave path,
Are you failing [yourself | the world]?
Or is it okay?

August 4 - Muddy Waters

Stream of Consciousness

Flowing, flowing, always forward 'til the land turns up before me, then off I bounce and swirl and flare. Forward now at an angle, forward but I’ve lost the parallel, lost my banks, ‘til gravity grabs me, takes my mass and points me back down there.

Downstream now, the rocks appear, and oh the rush, the rush! Here the rocks, never moving, yet spearing constantly toward the sky. To each successive surge of water, stone presents a new encounter, as my waters swell with rain or dwindle down to dry.

Smoothly, I glide o'er their humps, under the surface. Part my flows around their protrusions, at that threshold where it all bubbles up as I splash and I leap and let myself mingle, ever so briefly, with the air.

And in this amorous interaction, we three lovers carry each other, shape each other, shifting our paths and changing our futures, some for now and some forever – the earth, the air and I.

August 3 - Red

Today I'm struggling to find an image in my head for "red" that pulls me into writing. So maybe that's a chance to reflect on my process of creativity as I begin this exercise, exploring what makes these prompts work for my brain. One the reason the sketchdaily prompts appealed to me more than anything I found while searching "daily writing prompts" is because they are not writing prompts, but rather are chosen with visual art in mind. The first three days of this, that's what worked - I had a strong mental image in my head and was able to start working off that, deciding the direction the story might take as I went.

But I'm also remembering now that when I did #photoblog365, there were a few different paths my inspiration tended to take. As with this, it was easiest and most exciting when the theme immediately spurred a visual idea - a high-level blueprint for the layout of elements in the frame, a color contrast, a memory of something I walked by each day. Then I would plan my workday around making that photo (thank goodness for grad school giving me such flexibility with my schedule), getting together the people or objects I needed, getting to the right place at the right time of day, planning out the range of camera settings to try.

Sometimes, instead of visuals, the idea was driven by emotion - a feeling I wanted to capture, a life or world event I was struggling with, an opinion I needed a way to express, or something vulnerable I wanted to share. These too, felt like powerful sources of creativity.

Other days, the theme would sit in my head and wait for me to notice something as I went through my day. It felt a little like exploring, choosing to see something already in my world in a new light, or from a new perspective, looking for something related to the theme.

And then, there were the days when none of the above really happened. And sometimes the thing to do was just to take a photo of something vaguely related and try again tomorrow.

August 2 - Reflections

No

Alone, we are all after love.
Is love…love?
First, the being.
Knowledge is: effect your self with peace.
Ultimately, find group that may be people -
Those who read "gayly" and reverse course.
Of hope, what is there?

↕

There is what?
Hope, of course!
Reverse, and gayly read who those people be.
May that group find, ultimately, peace with self.
Your effect is knowledge, being the first love.
Love is love, after all.
Are we alone? No.

August 1 - Mechanical Garden

Floria absolutely loved her work, but absolutely hated telling others about it. When pressed by folks who didn't yet know her, she would say she was a gardener. It wasn’t even a lie, not really. It was just a more expansive definition of a garden than her people generally used.

After the collapse, the remnants of local communities had really taken to heart the need to stop living off the land and start living with the land. Generations later, this cultural shift had brought with it a deep mistrust of mechanical and electrical technology.

It was a slippery slope, the argument went. Machines by definition allowed you to do more work than one person could, extracting more from the environment than the community could give back. That way lay a race to death: overpopulation, ever-increasing exploitation of the land to support unsustainable growth, and the eventual descent into resource hoarding, scarcity, and war.

Yet there were still machines her community simply could not yet do without, the sources of light and heat on which they were forced to rely because of how thoroughly those who came before had fucked up the sun in their quixotic quest to harness every watt of energy. "Sustainable energy", they'd called it, with no regard for what sustainable usage might look like.

Floria understood why her people resented the need for these machines, and she too, felt that rage at their ancestors for stealing away the heart of the solar system. But the machines themselves, she found utterly beautiful. The synchrony of their actions, the slow and elegant rotation of the mirrors throughout the course of the day, a waltz of gargantuan proportions.

In her mechanical garden, Floria fertilized the plants with oil and pneumatic fluid, watered them with current data about the state of the land and the needs of its flora and fauna, pruned the broken ones to repurpose parts for repairs, and harvested their fruit in the continued survival of the land. So she said she was a gardener. It wasn't a lie, not really.

July 31 - Friendly Monsters

Damien rang the doorbell politely, smiling for the camera. The door swung open, and Rupert grinned back. "Hey there neighbor! What can I do for you today?"

"Good morning, Rupert! I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to finish up a project today, and it's been a little hard to focus with the noise – would you mind toning it down a bit, just for the next few hours?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it had gotten so loud!" Rupert replied. "It's just like comforting background noise to me at this point. You know how it is, like when you see someone everyday, you don't notice how they've gained weight little by little, but someone else who hadn't seen them in a while would notice it immediately!"

"Of course, of course," Damien said, relieved that Rupert wasn't offended. "And I'm not asking you to be completely quiet, just…turn things down a bit so we can't hear it over in our house."

"Will do!" Rupert agreed affably. "By the way, how's your friend Ralph?"

"Oh, he's still in bed – and normally I'd be right there with him too. But I just woke up with a really great idea about my project this morning and had to get it down on paper, so here I am!" Damien explained.

"Well, you know, it's been a while since we've all gotten together. Why don't you both come over for dinner tonight?" Rupert asked. "I'd love to test out some new recipes on you!"

"That sounds lovely! I don't think we have any plans tonight, but I'll check in with Ralph and let you know. I've got to get back to my project now, so thanks again for being understanding about the noise!"

*****

The screaming grew louder as Rupert wended his way through the living room and into the barely living room. He paused at the door and cocked his head, trying to pinpoint which of his victims was making enough noise to be heard next door. It kind of felt like a tie between the one he’d picked up for not having papers and one he’d picked up in the wrong bathroom…but the latter had been one of the first he'd brought in, so maybe it was time to wrap that up.

As Rupert filleted his catch, the screams turned to whimpers and then dwindled into silence. Rupert separated out the edible portions and tossed the rest into a bin for composting. It was a shame to lose the screams and his freezer was still partially stocked with his last batch, but at least this stuff made great fertilizer for the Pilea peperomioides in the back garden.

You know, it really was unfortunate that his neighbor's house was so close to the property line on this side. Damien was generally one of the good ones too, only mildly flaunting his lifestyle and rarely making some sort of scene. The big issue was his noise complaints – Rupert didn't understand why Damien made such a big deal about the screaming, but he was starting to get annoyed at being constantly called out about it. Well, he'd deal with that at dinner.

*****

Damien savored the blissful quiet as he sat back down at his desk. He pulled out his notebook and quickly became absorbed in sketching out his grand idea. He'd been trying to design some sort of helmet or earmuffs that would help him focus, and the epiphany had come to him this morning as he dreamed of the beach on Waikiki – sand! Sand was the key! It was dense and would easily dampen sound! Now if he could just find a way to incorporate sand into this helmet design, he would never have to hear those dreadful noises from next door anymore!

July 30 - Rooftop View

As the sun rose, so too did the wind, and the sky began to fill with fluttering diamonds. From her perch on the edge of the water tank, Navya watched as the battles commenced, airborne fighters bobbing and weaving as they sought to gain purchase on each others' lines.

Just below, she heard the excited clamor of voices as her cousins spooled the string and argued cheerfully over who would get to launch the kite. She felt no rush to join the fray. As always, it would be the eldest cousin, who could most be trusted to run along the roof without falling off or tripping on the pipes snaking their way across the flat expanse.

But there! A few streets upwind, a pink patang swooped under and up, catching a gust and spooling outward to cut the line above it, freeing a white kite with a large blue spot.

Navya very carefully skirted the opening of the tank – her aunts' stories of children falling in and drowning had at least partially stuck – then scrambled quickly down the ladder, wrapping her small hands as best she could around the thick, knobbly rungs. She ran to the closest end of the rooftop, leaning on the whitewashed concrete wall as the kite glided toward her. Would it soar up in a gust? Would it fall before it reached her and get tangled in the trees? Would that boy on the next rooftop manage to grab the string as it passed?

She tracked the kite as it passed just barely over the corner of their building's roof, and reached as far out as she could without falling over the edge, just barely snagging the string. She laughed excitedly as cousins jostled around and congratulated her on her capture.

It was always a bit of a risk, trying to fly a losing kite. Maybe the pilot had simply made an error…or maybe the kite just wasn't maneuverable enough and would be cut again as soon as its string was knotted onto theirs and took to the air again. In the end, though, kites would come and kites would go – the joy lay in the striving.