Year: 2015

I’m on a journey to get healthier. It started earlier this year with a cheap pedometer that wasn’t very accurate. Now I have a Fitbit Zip, log everything I eat, and actually spend time thinking about how to get more plant matter into the mix. I’ve always loved mason jars, so the leap to mason jar salads was a short one. I took my first to work today. Okay, really nice, KD, but what’s with the writing comparison? I’ll tell you. 1) I can throw anything in there I want. I’ve seen a lot of variations. Some people put salsa in their mason jars first, then everything else to make a Chipotle-copy burrito bowl. Some are making normal-ish tossed salads with creamy dressings in first. One person (at least) is making “noodles” with zucchini and a “spiralizer” whatever that is. The variety is amazing, and fascinating, and I’m looking forward to trying a ton of cool stuff.

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So, I’ve been in between projects for a bit. I haven’t felt motivated enough to dive into Fireborn or Survivor yet, so I’ve been noodling about what comes next. Per my muse, it needed to be brand spankin’ new so most of my projects were disqualified. And I have plans of getting back to the waiting ones (**cough** Fireborn and Survivor and maybe Ever Touched **cough**) but I needed a break. So that’s when I rediscovered The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. If you’re not familiar with the idea of ghost marriage, it’s where a woman is married to a deceased man for various reasons — to placate a spirit that’s restless (hauntings) or to provide lineage to a child, or even to elevate a concubine to wife. (Here is the Wikipedia link that goes into more detail.) When I first learned of this, months upon months ago, I thought it was really intriguing. How would a woman feel to be married to a ghost? Would the ghost acknowledge the wife in any way? And, lastly, how does it work, exactly (apparently using an effigy dressed in wedding attire as a stand-in for deceased spouse-to-be)?

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Good morning, friends! I hope you’re all having a lovely Tuesday and that the sun is shining and birds are chirping, but not too loudly and at a reasonable time, unlike the birds that chirp outside my bedroom at freaking 5 am. You know what sucks about being a creative sort of person? You have SO MANY things you want to do, and the majority of those things are never going to get done. Yesterday I was going through my story idea document, and I noticed several story ideas where I had plotted out a short story or novel in its entirety, and then apparently I’d never gone any further.

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It’s springtime here in southern Ontario, Canada. We’ve had a long, cold winter and everyone was heartily sick of it months ago, but spring took its sweet time getting here. A warm day now and again, and then the thermometer would dip once more. Such a tease. Finally, this weekend, we had gorgeous sunny weather. I went out of town on Friday. (I was visiting Ottawa again. Only six weeks ago, it was a frozen winter city; now it’s warm enough for patio dining.) By the time I got back on Monday, the season had changed.

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Yesterday was a rough day for me. I hurt my knee just walking and had a hard time getting my steps in. I discovered a mistake I made that could have cost my school thousands of dollars.† I came out of work to a flat tire with two nails in it–and the other front tire had a nail too, it just hadn’t gone down because the nail was blocking the air. Both had damage too near the sidewalls to be repaired. $228 later, the kind gentlemen at Discount Tire had put me in their long queue to put two brand new tires on my car. As I sat down to wait the estimated ninety minutes, the pharmacy called to say that my daughter’s prescriptions weren’t covered.* Did I want to pay cash?

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Since we’re less than 2 weeks away from the release of Grave Touched, book 2 in my Fey Touched series, I thought I’d talk about, well, Grave Touched. So, for your reading pleasure, ten facts you must know. Like, now: #1 –  I started Grave Touched three years ago in June, right before I released Fey Touched (book 1). It went through three separate rewrites and countless revisions to become the story it is today. #2 – The grave touched were originally zombies, but zombies were getting overdone. And I liked the idea of ghosts possessing people so they can have bodies again.

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So, our local Museum of Nature and Science recently opened a new traveling exhibit entitled Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids. I’m going to let that soak in for a minute. Our museum of nature and science has an exhibit on mythic creatures.

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Two months ago, I blogged in this space about my struggles with imposter syndrome – the sense that you’re faking it and everyone else is more capable than you. Two weeks ago, I attended a conference that was kind of eye-opening, and kind of healing. It wasn’t a writing conference. It was a gathering for organizers of English and American folk dance, my other current passion. I’ve been doing contra dance for about five years now, but hadn’t been involved in organizing until last fall, when a volunteer friend talked me into taking the tiniest step: helping out with the Facebook page. Then this conference came up, a five-hour drive away, and he talked me into going to that too. I took a lot of convincing – not because of the distance, but because of imposter syndrome. I’m not really an organizer, I said. I don’t know the issues, let alone the solutions. I don’t know what our local community has done in the past; I’m not even sure I know much about what we’re doing now. My friend finally convinced me that I didn’t have to know everything to deserve to be at the table. So I went.

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