Year: 2014

  I saw that on Tumblr the other day—the writer knew she was an adult, but she needed help from a higher-level adult. It resonated. A lot. I don’t think I’m particularly bad at being an adult. I pay my rent, maintain my car, and mostly keep my kid out of major trouble. But I don’t really feel like…a higher-level adult. I mean, I’ve been adulting for more than twenty years and I still can’t make myself keep my bedroom neat. I like it neat—I just don’t always keep it that way. And writing. You’ve read Siri trying to find ways to write more. You’ve heard from Erin and Kit when they don’t get enough writing in. Well, I’m with them. It may look like I produce, but I know that I spend way too much time not writing. So I’m trying to organize my life. To level up. To get my stuff together. I mean, if I can learn to think of doing the dishes and keeping up on the litterbox as grinding, maybe I can make this work.

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Here we are with another Progress Report.  (For reference, here is my Year of No Fear Manifesto).  This covers July, August, and September. Things have wound down a bit for me.  Hubby and I spent most of summer camping and when we weren’t camping, I was working on Grave Touched. 

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Friends, I love October. There are so many lovely and wonderful things about it. Summer’s heat finally breaks. The leaves turn beautiful, vibrant colors. It becomes okay to break out your boots and sweaters. There’s cocoa and roaring fires. There’s Halloween. And there’s the promise of magic in the air, in the crisp breeze, in the crunching leaves. Also, my birthday is in October.

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This past month, I’ve had a health scare — both my wrists just quit on me. I didn’t do anything in particular to them. Holding a cup hurt, mousing hurt, lifting a bag hurt…but I was pretty sure the culprit was *gulp* typing. As you might imagine, that’s a writer’s worst nightmare.

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Turtleduck Press is excited to announce our first ever major sale! Included in the sale are all of our novels and anthologies, all just 99 cents for an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords from October 1 to 7. If you like… …fantasy stories about women rescuing guys, try our anthology Under Her Protection, featuring short stories by all four Turtleduck Press authors …m/m science fiction romance, try Knight Errant and Queen’s Man by KD Sarge …paranormal romance, try Erin Zarro’s Fey Touched (with dark fey and science fiction) and Kit Campbell’s Shards (with angels) …YA portal fantasy, try Hidden Worlds by Kit Campbell Be sure to check out our other books as well! Again, the sale runs October 1 to 7. Buy early and often! Tell your friends! Tell the world! And may the odds be ever in your favour. (Okay, maybe not that last bit. But you never know.)  

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There’s been something missing in my life that I have been in denial about for a very long time.  Something so important to my inner artist that I haven’t felt whole.  I have dreams about it weekly.  I sometimes daydream about all the possibilities, everything I could accomplish.  And yet, due to circumstances and a whole lot of fear, I’ve resigned myself to being without it. What I’m talking about is darkroom photography.  I won’t go into the whole thing, because it’s a long story (you can read about it here) but I’ll give you the quick-and-dirty version, emphasis on the dirty.  I started studying b&w and darkroom photography after meeting my fiance from college.  He was into it and had a home darkroom.  From the first moment I spent in his darkroom, I had been in love.  It was amazing, and I came to find out later that my grandfather, unbeknownst to me, took pictures and had his own darkroom.  That was such an unexpected thing to learn, and fitting.  So I took as many photography classes as I could at college along with my Journalism major, thinking it would help my job prospects.  And I ended up learning –and loving — b&w and darkroom photography.

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This past weekend was spent at our local Scottish-Irish festival. This is one of–or the–largest festival of this type in the country, and my husband and I went for the whole weekend, because we’re fairly active with our respective clans and like to go all out at this sort of thing. During some downtime on Sunday, I got out my current read–Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (time travel, on the humorous side)–and had just settled in when someone wandered by and asked what I was reading.

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Way back in June, I told you about my new adventures in gardening — last year we tried vegetables, this year we decided to add flowers. Here’s how it went… Last year, our yard was 1/6 vegetables and, ahem, 5/6 weeds. This year we finally sprang for landscaping — nothing fancy, just grass and three plots, one for vegetables (about the same size as last year’s) and two for decorative vegetation. Having grass instead of weeds made the yard look fabulous even before we started planting stuff. Then we populated our vegetable garden and flower beds, and sat back to see what would grow.

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I’m going to be frank with you all, okay?  I’m about to talk about erotica, sex, and sex scenes.  I don’t want to offend, only explain.  You have been warned. I’ve always stayed away from erotica, thinking it was the written equivalent of porn.  Then an indie author named Kendall Grey smashed that to shards with her Hard Rock Harlots series.  I’d read her urban fantasy novels (the Just Breathe trilogy — AMAZING) and when she started sharing teasers of the first Hard Rock Harlots book, Strings, I was hooked.  It was the voice.  And the hot sex.  And, most of all, it had a beautiful love story at its center. How can an erotica novel have that?

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So. Robin Williams. Dammit. The first Robin Williams movie I ever saw was Mrs. Doubtfire. I was 13, my parents were getting a divorce, and my father thought that some related comedy might be healing. He was right. He and I saw a lot of movies together — RW’s and otherwise — throughout my teen years. This was a time when I was angry at my father for the divorce, unhappy at school, and in dire need of something uplifting. I won’t say that RW was my only solace, or the only reason that my father and I were able to rebuild our relationship, but he sure helped. My father loved RW. They were close in age. My father was a pastoral counsellor; RW often played psychologists and doctors. RW sometimes even sported a beard that made him look a lot like my father. I think the reason RW’s work resonated so much with my father, and with me as well, was his wistfulness. He was a comic, but behind the comedy was always something a little sad. Now, of course, we know he couldn’t fight it back any longer.

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