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Year: 2023

Meandering in Not-My House

I am a good provider. I don’t know exactly when it became a big deal to me. Well, yes. I do. It was probably hanging around before the pandemic, but when COVID hit and nothing could be counted on, when I couldn’t even reliably find toilet paper—that brought it to the front. I needed to make sure I was providing for my family. And I have, I do. Probably more than I really should, but hey. We all have our hangups, and there are worse ones. For instance, Christmas dinner. Child 1 wanted ham. Child 2 cannot eat ham. Did I override child 1? Did I just get something small for child 2? No. No, dear reader. I got a ten pound ham, and an eight pound rib roast. For four people. And dessert? I love pumpkin pie. It’s necessary. If it’s available, I’m having it. In order to take it easy on us in a strange house and awkward kitchen, we decided we’d get dessert from Costco. But child did not want pumpkin pie. They wanted Costco’s wonderful tuxedo cake. Fine, then—I would get both. Only when I got there, all the tuxedo cakes were gone. So I got a cheesecake along with the pumpkin pie. And a chicken pot pie for Christmas Eve dinner. Can you say “leftovers?” One advantage of this house is that the fourth bedroom is part of a mother-in-law suite. So it has its own refrigerator. Thank goodness. It’s been such a plus that…

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2024 is Coming

To piggyback off Kit’s post (because I have no creativity whatsoever this week), I’ve been doing some noodling about 2024 and what I want to accomplish. This year has been a bit of a mixed bag writing-wise, some good, some not-so-good, and I’d like to ramp it up a bit, assuming there are no horrific crises or emergencies or general ongoing unpleasantness that makes things, well, unpleasant. So let’s talk about how things went this year first, shall we? I had a few goals. They were: To publish an erotic contemporary romance novella on Radish (similar to Kindle Vella), which was a pivot/experiment to see how readers would respond to my writing in a different genre. Result: The novella, BAV, as I am calling it, is about 1/3rd done. It’s on hold a bit while I figure some stuff out. It ended up being a bit deeper than I’d intended, delving into subjects like parental control, religious cults, and BDSM. Sooo I am deciding if I want to go all in, or if I want to rein it in some. To finish my anthology story. Result: I rewrote it twice, and started yet another rewrite which I believe will be the last. It just wasn’t working the first two times. It’s about 5,000 words now. Again, on hold, but I have full intentions of finishing. This antho has had a floating deadline, so I’ve been sort of waiting for the muse to get back on board with this one. To…

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2024 Looms

Good afternoon, friends. It is so cold in my house that it’s hard to type, so that may be my cue to go elsewhere (and get coffee). I had such grand ideas for today, my friends. And then I got distracted by…I don’t even know. I went to the gym, came home and took a shower, read forty pages of a book (Guards! Guards! at the moment), and then…who knows. Something. Being cold, perhaps. I have a to do list app on my computer called Today, which is lovely because you put what you want to do on it, just for the day, and then it deletes everything so you start each day with a clean slate. I use it in conjunction with Todoist, which is my main to do program, because sometimes seeing what you’re behind on is only discouraging. HOWEVER I am getting ready to retire this particular computer because it’s ancient, so I did spend some time looking for a Today-like app to download onto my phone. Which didn’t work, I don’t think. I’m trying Microsoft To Do which in theory should only show me things due on the day I’m on, but we will have to wait until tomorrow to know for sure. If you know of one, let me know. All this is a very roundabout way of saying, oh my god, it’s almost the end of the year, when the hell did this happen, and how do I get it to stop. At this…

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Things You Didn’t Know About Me

I’m a collector of lists. I used to keep a list on lined paper of every movie I’d seen; I still keep an equivalent list for books, although now it’s on GoodReads. My TBR list is fearsome to behold. My browser tabs are equally fearsome, on more than one device. I’ve got long lists of things to watch on all my TV/film streaming services, and things to listen to on my podcast app. Sadly, all the lists are growing. It might be that I like making lists more than actually consuming the media, the way people (ahem) buy books faster than they read… Funny thing about podcasts. I always swore I was a visual learner, couldn’t do audiobooks, much preferred transcripts over training videos and online newspapers over radio or TV news. Then…well, things changed, I needed to rest my eyes more and had to get my story fix somehow. I started out with a queer SF audio drama (Moonbase Theta Out) and have been really enjoying a short-story podcast (LeVar Burton Reads…yep, I’m a child of the 80s and have been a fan since Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I will listen to that man read anything). Most recently, I’ve added a couple of non-fiction/self-help shows about neurodivergent self-care and housekeeping (Struggle Care) and decluttering (A Slob Comes Clean). Maybe I’ll finally end up hooked on Welcome to Night Vale. An early adopter I am not! Speaking of being a late adopter, after some 7…

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Across Worlds with You, Part 7 by Kit Campbell

Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5 Part 6 Across Worlds with You, Part 7Kit Campbell Despite being hyperfocused on listening, Will heard no sign of the dragging, hissing sound he associated with the Deathcrawlers. Of course, he’d always come across them in built-up areas—areas made of concrete, and stone, and asphalt. They probably didn’t make the same sound if they were crawling through flowers. Despite that, they made it to the town across the field without being eaten or whatever a Deathcrawler actually did when they caught you. Theo, once again, sped up as they approached the amulet. This one ended up being embedded in the back wall of an inn. Destia distracted the innkeeper with questions about the safety of her establishment while Theo plunged his hand into the wall. This amulet was silver with a deep blue gem. It, like the last one, went into Theo’s bag. “Are you going to stay or not?” said a particularly frustrated innkeeper. “I’ll have to check with my employer,” Destia replied. “Come on, boys, duty awaits.” Back outside, the fog was more obvious. And definitely getting closer. “Does it normally move so quickly?” Will asked. Theo had gone pale, though that could have been the drain of the spell. “I’m not sure. We had it mostly contained by the time either you or I were born. I don’t know what it was like at the beginning.” “It swept in from nowhere,” Destia said, her gaze distant, remembering. “It liked wooded areas…

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Motivation is Key

Theres a house. It’s in way north New York state. It’s beautiful. I mean, I’m sure it needs tons of work, but look at it! Eight bedrooms. And a carriage house! Apartment(s) above the carriage house, too! Look at the windows! Look at that price! https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/301-Main-St-Antwerp-NY-13608/31411504_zpid/ But kd, you say. Don’t you live in Arizona? Yes. Yes, I do. But not because I want to! I mean, day by day it’s fine. I have a great job here, doing important work. It could pay a bit better, yeah, but even that is okay. We even have a house already! But, well… One of the young ones found this shirt the other day, and announced it’s me. And it is. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1485595635/if-your-family-doesnt-accept-your A couple people around me lately have told me, as I vented about stress and money and children, that I should stop adopting children. One of them I just told no. The other (who I knew would laugh) I flipped off. I will stop adopting children when people learn how to love their own damn children. Damn it. Ahem. So. Eight bedrooms. Extra apartments. Lots of space. Makes sense, right? Right. Okay, so we’ve established that I need a bigger house. Fine. But northern New York? They have weather there, KD. They have snow. You know, winter? I know! Isn’t it great? Astonishingly enough, I am not here in Southern Arizona because I like heat. I never wanted to live in the desert! I wanted to see it, but not…

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The Nano That Wasn’t

So last month, I talked about participating in NanoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) with two books, alternating or working on whatever book I felt like working on. And at the time, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable, doable plan. Especially since I wasn’t planning on trying to make the usual 50,000-word goal. And then November actually hit. For the first half of the month, I had a lot going on with work, which is fine — I never complain about money coming in — and I figured, okay, this first half is a wash. Maybe I can just do Nano for the second half then. I’m chuckling to myself because it’s the 21st, 9 days from the end of the month, and I have yet to write a single word. I haven’t even written a poem. Nada. Nothing. So what the heck happened? Life happened. Life. Life stress. Health stress — nothing serious, but just enough to cause some…fun motivation issues. Chronic extreme fatigue being one. I’m still battling that. The holidays are approaching, which are their own unique brand of stress. Things are imploding. The thought is there, but every time I think about actually, you know, actually writing, my muse side-eyes me and says, Seriously? In the middle of this freaking mess? Have you lost it? And I sigh and set the thought aside yet again. It’s pretty awful, because my main way of dealing with stress is…you guessed it…writing. And I haven’t consistently written for years now.…

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Can We Not Have Drama

Good evening, friends, how are you doing? I’m mostly okay–I’ve worked on my revision every day for two weeks, which is probably a record in recent times. I’m making excellent progress! Hopefully. Or maybe not. Sometimes hard to tell in the middle of a revision whether things are getting better or just getting moved around. Everything would be going swimmingly if we could just have a little less drama, if you please. Why are humans like this? Why do people come along and see something and be like, “ah, yes, I’m going to ruin this”? The big drama of the week is the Nanowrimo drama. I’m not going to go into details, because it is upsetting and a pretty big deal, but you can definitely find stuff if you’re interested in that. And having Nano tarnished by this sort of thing is upsetting, because I, like many people in the writing community, have done Nano many times and feel a sort of nostalgia for it (even as we continue to do it). It’s kind of like having your childhood ruined. Aside from that, there’s been drama in the volunteer organization we do with our children. As happens more often than not, there’s one parent who has decided they know better than everyone else and is determined to yell and bully until everyone else gives up. Most of this parent’s ire is currently directed at my spouse due to a misunderstanding, and instead of acting like a functional human being, she’s…

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The Merits of Quitting

Every time Halloween rolls around, I have a problem. See, I like some of the Halloween trappings, and Gothic tales (Crimson Peak!), but I’m a wuss when it comes to horror, whether gory or psychological. Finding movies to watch that fall in the sweet spot? Almost impossible. Especially because my spouse and I have developed a bad(?) habit of quitting. See, when we met, he was a Film Studies major and I was an English major and film buff. We’ve seen a looot of movies together. We’re also both storytellers, so what we generally do is watch a movie and then dissect it. By now, we’re having trouble finding movies that engage us. It doesn’t help that we prefer science fiction and fantasy, which is currently dominated by the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and we grew tired of that several phases ago. So looking for spooky seasonal enjoyment, we tried: We didn’t last longer than 15 minutes with any of them. And it’s not a matter of attention span — we both read novels still. It’s just…have we seen too many movies in our lifetime? Has all that dissecting meant that we can spot the lines of the Matrix from a mile away and can’t blur them back into an entertaining tale? Every once in a while, we happen on something we enjoy enough to watch to the end. (And then still dissect, because it’s fun.) It doesn’t have to be a “perfect” film, whatever that means. It just has…

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Across Worlds with You, Part 6 by Kit Campbell

Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4 Part 5 Across Worlds with You, Part 6Kit Campbell “They’ve got to be tracking Will somehow,” Theo said around a mouthful. They were back in Helstena. Theo had managed to close the gate before the Deathcrawler had gotten through, but it had been with shaky hands that he’d opened a gate straight back to Helstena instead of going back through all the waystations. The amulet had been put somewhere safe and guarded, and now Will found himself eating dinner in one of the nicer houses in the village, though he’d not followed whose house it was or why they were feeding him. “That’s not good.” Destia ripped a chunk of the loaf of bread on the table in front of her, not actually seeming concerned. Will glanced down at his own plate, where he’d only managed a few bites. What was not good was how the amulet hadn’t responded to him. If he were the one from the prophecy, and the amulets were the key to stopping the Darkness, that was a major issue. Or he wasn’t the one from the prophecy, everyone had been wrong all these years, and they were all going to die. He tried to muster the thought that he was having a psychotic break, just to see how it felt, but it rang empty. His brain would never have come up with all this on its own. “Or,” Destia said, “maybe the Darkness was just lucky.” Theo stared at her…

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