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Month: February 2017

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

There comes a time… When one has read all the books one usefully can, gathering information that mostly won’t be used. When one has made and consumed an unreasonable number of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and other forms of comfort food. When one has cleaned the desk, cleared the decks, and even tidied up their browser bookmarks, but is finally stopped in procrastination, daunted in the face of fixing all the Tumblr tags. When one has collected the maps and timelines, hammered out the myths and legends, and nicknamed all the gods. Gathered up the highlighters and the colored pens and the post-its and the sticky flags. When one has picked the brains of any and all acquaintances who might be of assistance, luring them near with promises of baked goods and pestering them with vague explanations of half-imagined magic rules to try out options. When one has spent entirely too much time staring at the manuscript before one, before wandering off to make one more PB&J and ponder the makeup and properties of the human soul over a glass of milk. When one has done all these things, but especially the devouring of the PB&Js, there comes a time when one must dive in or give up. When procrastination runs headfirst into “There’s no time!” and one must either take the leap, or let the leap take them. (what does that mean? I don’t even know.) Friends, I am at that point. The pressure is high, the expectations…

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My Rekindled Obsession: Guild Wars

If you’re not familiar with Guild Wars, it’s a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) similar to World of Warcraft. What’s nice is that there’s no monthy subscription to play, and once you purchase one campaign, you’re good forever. Backing up a bit…up till I discovered GW, I had never been a gamer, unless you count Solitaire on the PC. Sometimes Minesweeper, but that one was a tough one. I did play Atari back in the day, though. Does that count? Anyhoo, 11 years ago (!), I discovered an ex-boyfriend from high school on MySpace and we started talking and he told me about GW. I was kinda intrigued, but really didn’t think it was my cup of tea, but I let him show me stuff. And…I liked it. And….I was hooked. The graphics are so amazing. You can create a character the way you want to (my first character actually was thrown together in my haste to get to the meat of things but I still love her). You choose a profession out of six (well, at least with the Prophecies campaign, which I started with): Warrior, Monk, Ranger, Necromancer, Mesmer, Elementalist). Can you guess what my first character’s profession was? …. If you guessed anything but Necromancer, you have not be paying attention. 😉 So you go through these quests to “learn” your profession. Then you get to select a second profession! So it’s really cool. So you get all these kick-butt skills. You do quests, and missions.…

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Out of my Comfort Zone

Back when I was in high school, I loved participating in theater at my school. This seems like a weird fit because a) I am an introvert and b) I hate being the center of attention, but there you are anyway. I did 11 out of 12 plays my school did while I was there, 4 as tech, 7 as an actor, 2 as student director, and 1 where I actually set up all the tech cues, the order of the play (it was a bunch of skits), scene changes, etc., because our director/teacher was busy with something else at the time. I also spent two years in our children’s theater program (which counted as English and I hated English) (yes, I know how ironic that is coming from someone who writes/edits for a living) and sang in two different choirs. In college, I originally went in planning to double major in theater and engineering, but after I ran into some unfair biases my freshman year (I got a lower grade than I deserved due to not being a theater major–actually verified against other classmates who were theater majors), I dropped that idea. (Also, engineering is hard and sometimes you’re up at 4 am in the computer lab writing a report about ants on a hotplate.) And that was that. There’s not a lot of theater opportunities as an adult if you don’t have college experience or a degree. And what few opportunities there are, there’s a lot of competition…

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The “You Can’t Do It” Voices

Tell me if this sounds familiar… I have a brain that persists in telling me that I am Doing It Wrong and that Everyone Else Is More Capable Than You and also that This Is Hard and You Can’t Do It, Ha Ha. What is “This”? Sometimes it’s writing. Sometimes it’s my day job. Sometimes it’s adulting. I would just like to register, for the record, some recent evidence to the contrary. Since I’ve blogged before about how the brain-voices relate to writing, this time I’ll focus on other parts of Life. Exhibit 1: The Day Job I’ve held the same job for nearly 12 years. Parts of it I’m really good at. Other parts still make me flail around. But on the whole, my You Can’t Do It voices have learned to be quiet more often than not. Then, last fall, my boss asked me to train with a co-worker who was retiring, so I could hold down the fort until she could be replaced. Her position doesn’t have much overlap with mine; I don’t really have the background for the job. To make things trickier, I still needed to do my regular job too (luckily we were able to shift around some of the workload and responsibilities). Cue the voices, loud and clear. But saying no wasn’t an option. I said yes. So far, I haven’t made any horrible mistakes that cost lots of money. I’ve kept things going, mostly. It’s been a scramble sometimes, keeping up with…

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Sun Touched

by Erin Zarro a free serial story in the Fey Touched universe Part 1 Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 I woke up in filth. A dirty, cold floor. Two mice chased each other along one equally dirty wall. It was stained with who-knew-what. Musty, sweat-filled air surrounded me. And, I could smell blood. I looked down. All I wore was a simple cotton shift that opened in the back. I had a bad feeling I knew what that was for. A pool of blood surrounded my leg, so I must have gotten injured somehow. I couldn’t remember what had happened. I was in a small prison cell. A filthy cot sat in one corner, no blankets. A bucket sat in the opposite corner, and apparently, someone had emptied it recently, because I did not smell the stink of human waste. Thank Artemis for that. My prison was in a dark, large room. All I remembered was fighting the rogues with my tribe. I’d spun around to stake one. Then, a punch to my gut, and nothing else. Where were the others? Had they been captured, too? I shivered, curling up into a little ball Freaking hell. Was anyone around? I licked my dry lips. “Hello? Anyone there?” “I see you’ve woken up,” a male voice said from the shadows. He stepped forward, and I saw that he was outside of my cell. And that he was one of the rogues. I uncurled and stood,…

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