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Month: November 2021

First Minion, Knitter of the Squid

You’ve seen this shirt, right? Sorry I’m late. I didn’t want to write. When you lose a friend on the internet, you may not even know it for a while. It’s sad. You meet someone, in the wilds of the internet, who lives states or even oceans away from you. You form a friendship that is very, very real to both of you, though the world still looks down on meeting people online. Maybe you exchange addresses, to exchange cookies. Send each other gifts. Mention your online friends to the people around you, but if they were into the same things your online friend and you are, they’d know your online friend. Then something happens. There is a friend-shaped hole in your internet, and you go snooping about the edges, maybe reaching out to acquaintances, lovely people you don’t talk to much, but know they shared a different passion with your friend than the one you talked to her about. If you’re lucky, you find your friend. Computer was down, internet broke, they just needed to be quiet–all’s well. If you’re unlucky, you find out your friend passed away, and no one who knew that knew enough about you to tell you. My dear friend Bea passed away last month. I will miss her, more than I think i even know now. She was my friend, and she was my biggest fan. She loved Knight Errant, saying it was one of her favorite books. IIRC, once she declared me and…

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NaNoWriMo Rebelling is Fun

So, this year for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I actually have two projects, which is a first for me! Yeah, quite ambitious, although I have no plans of actually hitting the usual 50,000 words like you’re supposed to do. Let’s not get too crazy, okay? I haven’t hit that since 2008, and that was via voice recognition. The book was Hereafter, which was supposed to be a dark comedy, and ended up being a dark conspiracy/paranormal romance thing that I still need to rewrite. Hmmm. Anyway, um, this year’s projects are the following: my Turtleduck Press novella, Soul Song, which is a paranormal romance about twin flames, and also Esperantaj poemoj (Esperanto poetry). Why on earth are you doing both, Erin, you ask? Are you insane? And with working crazy hours, and the holidays approaching, and your health being wonky and and and — Well, see, it’s like this. We at TDP decided to try our collective hands and sporks (and possibly turtleducks) at the novella thing, and I’m uh, way behind. I figured I’d at least get going on mine. And it’s, uh…going? I’m 2,000 words in. Exciting stuff. 🙂 I’m doing the 100 words when-I-can method, which is really all I can manage at the moment. Man, it’s a far cry from previous years, but it beats 0, which was what I had for most of this year. So at least I’ll end on a semi-high note? And the Esperanto poetry…my friend and study partner and I…

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November Has Fried My Brain

What day is it? Where am I? Who are you? Oh, friends, what is happening? Don’t ask me, I don’t know. Like KD, I’m also doing Nano this year. But is it going well? It is not. And, I mean, the story itself is going fine! It’s fun to write, and the writing is flowing reasonably well. But everything else is kind of melting around it. Seriously. Problems are cropping up left and right, deadlines have come out of the woodwork, people I’ve been trying to get a hold of for months are finally calling me back, and there’s work happening that I scheduled months ago. I haven’t been this busy in a long time. They say that having more on your plate helps you get more done, but at some point you also start to lose track of what’s happening around you. Or things get forgotten about because you’ve got twenty things you’re trying to keep track of. Or your to-do list gets so long it’s overwhelming to even look at it. I want to say that it’s going to get better soon. But I also know that it isn’t. Even if I manage to get on top of everything that’s going on right now, there’s fifteen other things that I’m ignoring for my own sanity that will, eventually, need to be dealt with. Plus the holidays are coming up ridiculously fast and all the grandparents want ideas, and they are very impatient about waiting for answers. Is there…

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NaNoWriMo, So Good to Me

Fifteen years ago, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time. In twenty-four days, I wrote the first draft of Even the Score. I won. In 2007, I pulled the mess that was what I had of Joss together, and wrote the first real draft of Queen’s Man. 2008 was Burning Bright. I wrote the 50k, but the book wasn’t done. I got stuck. The next year when NaNo was approaching, I thought I’d go ahead and finish it for NaNo. Instead I got inspired and I wrote the ending in NaNoPubYe’s NaNo warm-up (25k in two weeks) and ended up doing In the Forests of the Night for NaNo 2009. I wrote over 50,000 words in fifteen days. Two days later, I’d written the entire first draft. My streak of useable first drafts ended there, alas. I won 2010 with 50,000 words of my nemesis story, but I still, eleven years later, don’t have a plot. (the plot? I have lots of…things.) NaNo hasn’t only given me the impetus to write and finish a bunch of novels (Is four a bunch?) It has given me friends. I met my dear friend, my roomie, through NaNo. I met a bunch of other writing friends, with whom I still write, on the NaNo forums, or in my favorite writing forum that grew from the NaNo forums. And, of course, most important to my writing destiny, I met Siri, Erin, and Kit through that forum. We’ve been writing and publishing together for eleven…

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