I do not have my mental reaction to earthquake magnitudes properly calibrated, but 4.6 sounds big-ish if close by. The ones that keep going for a while are unsettling, I know that. Hope it was not too unsettling in a literal sense!

It was unsettling. I grew up in this area (just to the north of where the San Andreas originates) but it was continuous in a creepy amount of time. Long quakes are scarier than short quakes.

Definitely

If I'm going to be unsettled I prefer it to be in a less literal way.

lol I was just watching an interview with Hudson Williams and the interviewer (Evan Ross Katz) was like “I loved the red leather trench coat you wore outside Jimmy Fallon…it reminded me of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and I was like oh shit, the 2000s are def back!!

Tonight I start my writing workshop I bought for Christmas. Hope it's good.

I've yet to experience an earthquake. I imagine it is unsettling.

Enjoy the workshop, erikaj.

Earthquakes: My parents have a few stories about being in Cali as newly-married desert dwellers and facing that. weirdly, those are the more normal Riverside stories, though--I don't have a Giles to check on it, but I suspect the area was part of some kind of convergence in the early seventies. So they came back here...devil you know, much? Workshop: I hope I get some good feedback or meet somebody cool. Even if it's not all that, it should be great compared to the game I've played all month: "What Did I Do With My Christmas Money?" as I pondered everything else that a (comparatively) big chunk of cash could do for me and wonder if my decision was a poor one. Which I know sounds like it's on the border between humblebragging and insanity, but I used to do it every time I pre-ordered *anything*, so I am actually coming along a bit. I think the combination of growing up a kid that couldn't do chores for money and then landing on "benefits recipient" has left me insecure about my decision-making, just because there hasn't been that much of it. And there are two things that are real that are feeding this time more than others, right-- the Medicaid cuts thing--like, what if we need the money next year, and all I got was some stupid feedback, or, say, the virtual equivalent of camp friends, where you write back twice. And, like, everyone has bought something kind of expensive(at least at the time) that sucked. I need this not to be one of those. But I also need to get over it.

I get that, and I hope the quality of feedback, workshopping, and the people you meet are excellent. I had the same feeling about "Did I just waste a chunk of change?" When I took a couple of acting classes in '24. In my case, they turned out great, and I had so much fun, and I got exactly what I wanted out of them. I wish the same for you -- but even more for you as an actual writer. I didn't really have any intention of pursuing acting (I like doing it, but I am not cut out for pursuing it on even the most basic level).

Earthquakes are weird.

I was in northern Pakistan when the 1974 earthquake hit: [link]

Magnitude 6.2, and we were about 100km south of the epicenter, but because we were bouncing along on in a Jeep on a dirt road, we never noticed a thing. (If the driver noticed, he didn't mention it.) We didn't find out anything had happened until we listened to the BBC that night.