Home 2019 June

Month: June 2019

If You Feed Them, They Will Come

Friends, I am tired. I was up late and also up early, dealing with teenager crises. Today after a (false alarm) freakout the roomie had over a potentially pet-harming bug in the kitchen, I promised her we didn’t have an infestation of cat-eating centipedes. I also jokingly apologized for the recent infestation of teenagers, but promised they fell into the mostly-harmless household pest category. The more I think about it, the more I think I was only a little off. They do have some similarities to many household pests. Where there’s one, there’s more. The kid’s room is like a clown car–just when you think there can’t possibly be one more human being in there, out pops another. And that one is probably a young’un you’ve never seen before. They’re nocturnal. Turn the light on late at night and they scurry for dark corners. They leave messes everywhere. Sometimes you only know they exist in your space because of the mess. If you feed them, they will come. They eat like–well, like a plague of locusts. Grocery budgets cower before them! But while I sometimes want to knock some sense into them, I never want to step on them. So…more like puppies. I’ve been known to swat them with rolled up newspapers (teenagers, not puppies, I’m aware we have better ways to train dogs now.) Yes. Like puppies. So cute when they’re asleep in little piles of adorable (how do teenagers sleep 3-5 to a bed? How?) So destructive when…

Continue reading

Face Everything and Rise

This is my new motto. The idea behind it is that F.E.A.R. can be an acronym — Forget Everything and Run or Face Everything and Rise. And I need that so much right now. Recently I started having these weird, head-in-a-vise kinds of headaches. They are mostly in the back of my head, but sometimes I’ll get pain on the sides just behind my ear. It is mostly on the left side (which is my TN side), but once in a great while the pain will migrate to the right. They also tend to flare up the TN which makes it a double whammy of pain. At first I thought it was the trigeminal neuralgia, but the trigeminal nerve doesn’t go to those places. The occipital nerves do, though. But according to my research, there would need to be some sort of damage, so I don’t think that’s it. These headaches can at times be worse than migraines. There’s the feeling of major pressure, and I find it difficult to concentrate. Maybe it’s from having migraines for years (since I was eighteen), but it’s difficult but not impossible to work with a migraine (I once worked with one that lasted six days. I actually wonder now if it was a TN attack and I just didn’t know it). So it’s affecting my work, my sleep…everything. And I’m in constant fear of the next onslaught. While at the neurologist on Wednesday, I told her about the headaches and she believes it…

Continue reading

Ah, Fanfiction!

Good morning, friends, me again! (Since Siri took my spot last month and now I owe her.) Fanfiction is such a weirdly controversial thing among writers, which is strange to me. Are there writers out there who don’t start off with something derivative when they start storytelling? (I certainly did. One of my first “books” was a re-write of a kids’ puzzle book I was especially fond of, except with a female lead and an actual plot. I took the characters from Sonic the Hedgehog, made whole families (this was before Knuckles and all them showed up, back in the Genesis days), and made stories for my cousins and I to role-play. I tried to write Star Trek novels. (They were bad.)) I think it’s perfectly natural to take something you love and expand on it. Most source material is limited, after all. What happens to the characters outside the book/movie/TV show? After it? Before it? How would those beloved characters act if they were somewhere else? It’s an excellent writing exercise, if nothing else. And I don’t think it should be looked down on as not real writing. I’ve read some dang good fic in my day. I read some yesterday, in fact! (I may have spent most of my day, yesterday, reading fanfiction. I don’t really regret it aside from I really need to get some work done on various projects.) My current fandom fix is Good Omens. The miniseries is out on Amazon, if you guys have…

Continue reading

Taking Time to Try New Things

Howdy, friends! Did you see my new story on Saturday? (It’s here, if you missed it.) I wrote it completely for fun. One of the writing communities I belong to has this neat challenge every month called a genre stretch. The idea is to try writing outside your comfort zone, to try new things and to stretch your writing muscles, in theory making you a better writer overall. “Deserts and Domes” was my story for the February genre stretch. Each month, two genres are offered, and you can write in either one. Or you can combine both, which is what this story is. Genre 1: Gilded Age romance. Genre 2: Dystopia. You see the appeal. It’s like a writing prompt, but you can write basically anything as long as you incorporate the basics of both (or either) genre. I prefer to do the combo, versus just one, because it provides more restrictions and also gives a basic form to the plot. I also did April’s, which was: Genre 1–Campus Novel; Genre 2–Slipstream. So far I’ve been pretty pleased with the results. As a writer, you have stories you like and ones that you’re more lukewarm about, even when they’re decent stories, and I’ve liked both I’ve done this year. I don’t know, but there’s something about working in broad, new genres that is very stimulating to creativity. That’s what they say, right? Keep learning, keep trying new things, and you’ll only get better, and you won’t go stale. And it’s…

Continue reading

Deserts and Domes, by Kit Campbell

Deserts and Domes Kit Campbell ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Globes of electric lights flickered overhead as Mia stepped into the ballroom, smoothing the pale green silk of her gown. Below her spun dozens of the Dome’s finest, dressed in their best, each trying to outshine the rest. Purple seemed to be the color of the evening. Mia must have missed the signs somewhere. Alas. Well, there was nothing to be done about it now, except to find some other way to blend in. Deserts, how she did not want to be here. But it would not do to miss this, not after all the work she’d put into her persona, not after the sacrifices others had made to get her inside the Dome, not after the risks her “father” had taken. Matthew Ashwood stood beside her, resplendent in blues and greens, either also having not seen the signs for purple or, more likely, not caring. After all, if he cared about Dome society, he would not have taken her in. “Do you see him?” she asked, quietly, though she would not be heard over the music anyway. It came from all angles, amplified through speakers mounted on the walls. It was a waltz, scratching in a way live music never would, and its origins were unclear. Were there actual musicians hidden away somewhere? Some people could afford that, certainly, or justify attempting to, though there were very few musicians left. Probably it was a recording, or a recording of a recording. Matthew leaned…

Continue reading