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Month: December 2022

KD Boldly Ran Away, Away

For various reasons, the last few years have been a bit rough for me. To make things even better, my haven for so much of my life, my writing, has not come easily. It’s a problem endemic in writing books– if you want your characters to resonate, then even sci fi and fantasy must reflect reality, and reality has really not been something I wanted to think about. I like to write hopeful, I mean. And hope has been hard to find. Anyway. So there have been various crises. There’s been All The News You Need to Hide From. And then… I’ve heard there are people out there who just use Word to write books. I am not one of them. I remember the day I gave up on Word. I’d been typing up something for work, and three times in a row I typed “7th” and Word made the “th” superscript and then crashed because it couldn’t handle its own autocorrection. When I got done swearing the third time, I went and found and downloaded OpenOffice. OpenOffice was great! I was devoted for years–but then came the siren call of dedicated fiction writing software. I wanted. But I was poor, and it was expensive, and OpenOffice worked fine… Winners of NaNoWriMo 2011 received a code for (IIRC) 50% off a Scrivener license. People on the NaNo boards loved Scrivener. I think I downloaded the trial version halfway through, and then bought a license when I got my discount. Since…

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Christmas is in…how many days?!

Is it time to panic? I think it’s time to panic. To be fair, my family’s been hit pretty hard with some challenges this year. My husband just tested positive for COVID, despite all efforts toward being safe. Three years he dodged it. Only to be hit with it five days before Christmas. What terrible luck! The good news is that it seems to be a mild case, and he’s already feeling a bit better, so we may have a chance of having our holiday celebration on Sunday. However — and here’s the tough part — we’re worried about anyone else coming down with it in between. We are quarantining, distancing, masking, and doing everything we can to avoid catching it, but you know how that works — sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. If anyone does get it, then it’s game over. We are already having a second celebration the Wednesday afterward to accomodate my sister, who can’t be with us for Christmas due to having to work, so we could, theoretically, have the whole thing that day — if everyone’s okay. But prep-wise, which my mom and I are doing (as usual, and in some considerable pain as we both have a genetic hip/back issue that’s acting up), we don’t know what to do yet. Do we make the food as if we’re having it Sunday? Or do we wait a bit? I already cleaned the bathroom (my usual job) because regardless, that needed doing. But…having…

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Who Designed This Thing?

Hello, friends. I am broken. I slipped a disc in my lower back, and said disc is pressing on my L5 nerve, which runs down the outside of my right leg. This is such a stupid problem. My leg thinks it’s getting stabbed constantly, when in reality it’s just got a bit of…(quick break to Google what discs are made of)…cartilege or gelatinous goo or something pressing on the nerve, nowhere near the leg itself. Plus my back hurts where the disc is out of place, and now, randomly, my hip also hurts, no doubt because I’ve been doing something dumb to try and minimize the pain from the other issues. It’s been three weeks now, and, if anything, the problem is getting worse, despite regular chiropractor and physical therapy appointments, exercises, and me taking things easy. It is ungodly frustrating. I feel like I can’t do anything, like my own body has betrayed me, yet, on the other hand, I feel like I’m being a huge baby, that lots of people live with chronic pain, and here I am, with a single point of inconvenience when normally I’m fine. Who designed these bodies? I have complaints. About the brain parts too. The whole pain system is stupid. In the great scheme of problems, a slipped disc is hardly anything. It’s not actually doing anything that bad. I still have most of my range of motion. Nothing is actually wrong with my leg, despite what it thinks. And yet it…

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The Birth of a Story

I’ve just turned in the story that will become TDP’s next long work for sale, so I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the steps I took getting here. (Good luck trying to replicate them, though! The process of story inspiration is anything but linear, at least if you’re like me.) A few years before the pandemic, I was generating story ideas by looking at calls for submission from themed short-story anthologies. How those work is that an editor and a publisher collaborate to come up with a theme, often they’ll tap a few better-known authors to headline the anthology, and then they’ll put out a call to fill the rest of the slots. I wrote and submitted a few stories that way. More often, I wrote lots of notes about potential stories, but they needed more time to percolate, so they didn’t get finished in time for the anthology deadlines. That’s okay because most anthology themes aren’t so specific that the story would work only there and nowhere else (and if they are that specific, I don’t write for them, for exactly that reason). This story was one of those that needed to percolate. As often happens, I had an image in my head and a nameless feeling that came with it, but no plot, no character, nothing I could dig into to make it a story. Then the pandemonium arrived and, well, not much writing happened for a while. In the meantime, the…

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