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Month: October 2021

May the Best Ghost Win

Four Teams. Thirteen hours. One very haunted house. Team GargoyleAnton Berg doesn’t believe in ghosts, so why is he in a ghosthunting contest? Because Lammie, that’s why. Anton’s best friend since the first grade, Lammie has a knack for finding things, especially trouble. And even without ghosts, running around a two-hundred-year-old house in the dark holds plenty of real dangers. Anton can’t let Lammie go alone. Team Flower PowerQuonzhenay is a librarian. Penny has a big stick. They’re on a mission to win a bet. Team WitchRavyn Wyng Starcrossed didn’t want to come, but her Tarot cards told her to. The Four HorsemenIt started as a prank. Now four members of the Fulsom College football team’s starting lineup are spending Halloween in a haunted house, and Blake would prefer to be left behind, please. Unfortunately for all of them, ghosts do exist, the haunted house is much more than an abandoned Gilded Age mansion, and a dark power has Lammie in its sights. When the night of spooky fun turns terrifying, escape is cut off. The teams unite with one goal–survive until dawn. The ghosts may be the least of their problems.

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Re-entry, Part 2

You’ve got me for a second time this month because KD is busy putting the finishing touches on her awesome haunted-house ghost-chaser found-family novel, which will be out just in time for Halloween! (Are you excited? I’m excited.) [CW: pandemic, mental health] I blogged a couple of months ago about facing down the prospect of re-entry, and enough has shifted since then that I thought it would be worth revisiting… Since getting my second shot in June, I’ve seen friends a couple of times a month (not that far off from the frequency in my pre-COVID social life, except that pre-COVID there was dancing, which meant seeing a lot more friends each time). I’ve been to restaurants a few times, either on patios or in very well-ventilated spaces or with very few other patrons. I’ve stayed in a hotel. I even got to see (and hug!) a few family members I don’t live with. I’ve gone out to run errands more often. I’ve been to the mall once or twice. I’ve been to the dentist, the hairdresser, the optometrist. It’s gradually getting easier and less weird to be around people again. November, though, will be the big test. I’ve been working from home since March 13, 2020 — quite happily, aside from this whole pandemic thing. But my dayjob is calling people back into the high-rise office one day a week (which, for me, also involves a long public transit ride). I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t causing…

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Mardo estas esperanta tago (Tuesday is Esperanto Day)

So, September marked a full year since I took my first class in Esperanto. It also marked a full year since I met my study partner and continued studying with him after class ended. We began a series of video lessons from the 90s called Esperanto Pasporta al la Tuta Mondo (“Passport to the Entire World,” basically). It’s really cheesy, but it’s really great as far as the content for learning goes. There are also PDFs you can get that go with it — an entire transcript (which is so helpful), a vocab list, and excercises you can do as well. Quite a few of them! Let me tell you, this has been awesome for my learning. I’ve picked up so much, more than I probably would have with Duolingo alone. The excercises force you to use the concepts and actually solidify the ideas and grammar points in your mind. So it’s not just passive reading or watching, you’re doing it. And hell, the videos are cute — I often call it a soap opera because that’s what it reminds me of. Just with not-so-great acting. But the Esperanto is spot-on. At least from what I can tell, anyway. So my partner told me about a group in England that was having free classes in Esperanto. Beginner’s classes. At first I couldn’t make them. But this go around…I could make the Tuesday one. He talked me into the Course II – instead of Course I – because he felt that…

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The Best Laid Plans

Hello, friends. (I reserve the right to be a day late on my post, since yesterday was my birthday.) I’m working on outlining some stories! You see, I had this great plan. I need to write a novella for TDP. I need to make a new class for SkillShare. I shall combine the two. ???? Profit! Anyway, earlier in the year, I did an outlining class for SkillShare, and I thought, oh, I could do an OUTLINING WORKSHOP! It will be helpful so people can see outlining in action AND I will end up with an outline ready to go for a novella for TDP, and then all my responsibilities shall be fulfilled. I am A GENIUS. Except you can’t just jump into outlining. Well, I can’t just jump into outlining. I’ve got to do some general brainstorming first. And I thought it would be best to pick a couple of stories for the brainstorming phase, so I could demonstrate picking the best idea or something. So I started with three (plus one more, because my bigger, mobile one recently read Hidden Worlds and has sequel ideas. And, uh, they’re actually REALLY GOOD sequel ideas.), brainstormed them out, did some story reconnaissance through my inspiration boards/story idea files, etc. So now I have three (four) mostly workable story ideas instead of just one to outline. I understand that in many cases this is the opposite of a problem. Workable story ideas! In plural! But I just started a new job…

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This Time, I Will Breathe

It’s that time again, friends – the time when I come back from vacation vowing that Now Things Will Be Different. This time, in my day-to-day life I will get outside more and move my body more (like I did during vacation…we walked 8 km / 5 miles upriver one day, and went kayaking downriver the next day!) and get on top of all those niggling appointments that need to be made (the kicker is when you get them made and then they spawn MORE appointments). This time, I will make my house feel more like the hotel I just came back from – calming, nicely decorated and nicely lit, not stuffed with random crap – and take care of all (or at least some) of the little things that have been bugging me. Oh, and this time, I will make sure to relax more. Right. You can see the problem. The goal, of course, is to stop feeling like vacation is a precious breath of air before I go under again. I’m not drowning, exactly, but I am swimming very hard. My day job is the lake I’m trying to cross, with a shoreline that seems very far away and is always moving. The pandemic is a constant undertow that makes everything ten times harder (mentally/emotionally, that is; I’m lucky that my work isn’t directly affected, except for having gone virtual). Bad news (pandemic-related or otherwise) is the slap of a wave in the face. Weekends are when I…

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May the Best Ghost Win–Sneak Peek

May the Best Ghost Win will be available for purchase on October 31st–naturally. From the tiny town where signs proclaimed, “Last Gas No Kidding” and “Ice-Cold Pop” to the top of the mountain where a dark destination waited, a narrow road snaked through wilderness. On one side of the mountain, the last rays of evening turned the world pink with alpine glow. On the other side, in the only moving car in twenty-five miles, Anton Berg drove alone except for his best friend who Anton thought was only pretending to sleep in the passenger seat. It was October thirty-first. Outside the car, dim headlights picked out gnarled black-limbed trees huddled close to the narrow, twisting road. Inside, the dash lights cast a green tone over Anton’s hands on the wheel and limned the edges of Lammie’s shape where he had curled into a ball, face pressed into the passenger seat. Hell, maybe he was asleep now. It’d been hours since he’d moved. Anton pondered what besides sleep could keep Lammie quiet and decided he didn’t actually care. Quiet was good. Quiet was what he wanted. Just get the trip over and— Static spat from the radio, finally overwhelming the DJ entirely. Anton jabbed the button to turn it off. Now he didn’t even have bad music to keep him awake. Silence filled the car, only enhanced by the rattles of the canvas top in the wind, the creaking of the woods around the car, and the soft sounds of the…

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