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Month: December 2019

Happiest of Holidays, Whichever You Celebrate

It’s Christmas Eve. My 21-year-old kid is regressing to wide-eyed childhood as I write. It’s the third night of Hanukkah. Kwanzaa begins this week. For my beloved witch friends, solstice just passed. Islam doesn’t seem to have a holiday coming up right now, from my quick look around the interwebs, but I don’t want leave out a whole lot of people. So I’ll say it with all my heart–happy holidays. Whatever you celebrate, I hope it is joyous. I hope you find rest, and peace, and comfort. I celebrate Christmas, but one of the best I ever had was the time I stayed home alone with Chinese takeout and a Bruce Lee movie marathon. Take that time if you need that time. And hey. I get it. Sometimes family is just not what you need, so you go on the internet and read blog posts. I’m here for you, hoping to give you a laugh. Please enjoy this video of cats and Christmas trees. There are a lot of tweets about this, too. I used to have two cats. Frito would take down the tree at two in the morning, and Rohrschach would come wake me up to snitch on his brother. Unfortunately I don’t have any video of that. Cats and menorahs apparently are also a bad combo, but I didn’t find a funny video of that. Perhaps because when your beloved cat sets itself afire, you help the cat instead of recording? One would hope. Are there other…

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I am a horrible boss

This year has been crazy for me. I had surgery on my right foot in March and then had months of rehab. I started having severely painful headaches and discovered that I had a pinched nerve in my neck, and by the way, I have several herniated discs in my neck as well. I’ve expanded my freelance business again. I’ve been trying to stay organized and efficient through all of this, and I think I might have succeeded except…my writing had to be put aside. I didn’t take this decision lightly. Anyone who’s known me for awhile knows that I usually write every day. I am always trying to reach a goal — a completed novel draft, complete a revision of a novel, or maybe an edit — and I work like hell to make it. I’ve always been this way. One of my main goals for the future was to publish at least one book a year, maybe even two if I could manage it. This was before my health got dicey again and I had a lot less time and energy to devote to it. I did start transitioning to dictation again, mostly to speed up the process, and I’m still working out the kinks. I had a deadline for Reaper Girl #3, The Vanishing. January 1st. Which would have been doable…had I had time to finish the draft and revise. I need at least three weeks minimum and that’s pushing it. My drafts change significantly in revision,…

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Flame Isfree and the Feather of Fate

A novel of the Spell-Wracked Lands Bucking thousands of years of tradition, Flame ran away from her elven heritage, her glorious destiny, and her arranged marriage. Now she’s an expert treasure-finder in the human world, one job away from buying out her indenture and setting up a tower somewhere full of pretty things and pretty men. Just one more job–but her employer doesn’t know exactly what they’re questing for, and also the world has changed since his map was drawn. Flame can handle all that with her usual sarcasm and skill, but when her intended husband turns up at the fateful meeting of the moons, ready to fulfill his destiny and help her save the world, she really just wants to run again. All Flame really wants to do is nothing, but failure in the quest means a price on her head. Failure in the world-saving would be even worse. Why can’t everyone, fate included, just leave her alone?

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December: The Creativity Sink

So, as I mentioned last month, like Siri, I too attempted Nano for the first time in many years. And I did it! It took some finessing (I wrote 7K in the course of a night to catch up at one point), but it got done, and without any fudging on my part. Every year that I am successful at Nano, I swear I’m going to keep going. Sure, not another 50K month in a row, but a significant amount, and the draft will be done in a few months, hooray! Every year it doesn’t happen. (Perhaps the worst offender of this was Shards, actually. I hit 50K at a rather privotal moment and stopped there, not even bothering to wrap up the scene. And every time I tried to go back to it, for months, I couldn’t figure out where to go and it got absolutely nowhere.) (I mean obviously it did eventually, but you’d think I’d learn.) (But apparently I haven’t.) And this is true every winning November. Despite my best intentions, I can’t seem to keep going on my Nano novel, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether things were flowing well during November or not. I’ve come up with some theories: Burnout. Maybe I’m just tried of that particular project. That doesn’t read particularly true, since I often spend several months to a year of consistent work on revisions or rewrites, but maybe! Or maybe I’m burned out on the pace and I need a break…

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NaNoFail?

This year, I set out to do National Novel Writing Month for the first time in most of a decade. I’d won NaNo six times between 2005 and 2011, and then hadn’t really tried again since. Oh, I had made halfhearted attempts to use that NaNo energy to finish a partial novel or edit a draft, but I’d never come close to the wordcount and the free abandon of my six 50,000-word drafts. (No, none of them are available on Amazon. Because, that’s why.) So I really wanted to prove to myself that I still had the chops. Then Real Life hit. It wasn’t entirely unpredictable. In fact, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. I was out of town the first weekend, then back to work without a break. Then I started some new meds that gave me horrible insomnia for a week (a known side effect, so that wasn’t even a surprise). By the time I caught up on sleep from all of that, the month was half over. It’s not that I wasn’t writing. I took my laptop with me on the weekend trip and squeaked out a few hundred words each day. I came home and every day, even through the insomnia, I would put down another few hundred words. But for NaNo, you need to write 1,666 words every day for a month. If you miss one day, every other day requires more words. So I kept thinking that my daily wordcount would pick up after I…

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