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Month: June 2023

Happy Camper

So I probably shouldn’t even say this, but camping without my bio-kid is a lot quieter than camping with them. Shh. Don’t tell. Last weekend was spent in a lovely campsite, overlooking a canyon and shaded by evergreens. No one in my campsite was complaining, for most of the weekend. It was the most relaxing, peaceful, joy-bringing experience I think I’ve had in a very long time. Except that I did miss bio-kid. Negative or not (they are) I do love that kid. In their place, though, there was a chipmunk. We watched him explore the campsite with a great deal of cheek–until he hopped up into the bear box to investigate the fudge I bought at the general store, and I had to leap to its defense. I meant to take a lot of pictures. I meant to walk down to the possible-creek. (Water flowed in it last month. Does it still? I meant to find out.) Here is one picture. I meant to do a lot of things. Instead I mostly just sat vegetating in the beauty, and/or reading Howl’s Moving Castle. That is such a freaking good book. So wonderfully written. Did you know Dianna Wynne Jones was a student of J.R.R. Tolkien? Neil Gaiman wrote a lovely blog post about her, after she passed. Anyway. One of the many things I meant to do while camping was write my own blog post. As you may tell by this weak and also late effort, that didn’t happen…

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When the Muse Wakes Up

So it’s been a month and four days since Hailey’s passing, and we’re still grieving. We’re adjusting, little by little. I’ve been working a lot and trying to write, as I always do when I’m coping with something I’m hurting over. But this time…it’s like my muse suddenly woke up from a long slumber. Or, I just got tired of not writing. One of those two. Or both. And there is so much I am trying to do now, it’s not even funny: ~Poetry submissions to contests and literary magazines (online), often requiring revisions to existing poems or writing new ones, as they usually don’t accept poems published on social media (and most of my newer stuff is on Instagram). ~My short story for the TDP anthology, theoretically due next month, on its third rewrite. I scrapped what I was doing, rethought it, pulled Tarot cards on some things, and wrote 3,000 words on it already. Most I’ve written on one project all year. What?! It also spawned a SERIES IDEA which I am contemplating. ~Thinking about my poetry chapbook, Eterne (Esperanto for “Eternally”) — I wasn’t planning on publishing any more chapbooks, buuuuut I have so many new poems that it just makes sense. Already bought a premade cover. Just need to, write more, organize it, all that stuff. ~My Radish erotic contemporary romance — experiment to see how that goes (it’s a serial website similar to Kindle Vella) and how writing contemporary romance works for me. I’m about…

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Let’s Talk About Books!

Oof. May was A Month, friends. But it’s behind us now, and let us not dwell on the many disasters it contained (except perhaps the basement, which is still having, shall we say, issues). (Also, if you missed it, the first part of my new serial, Across Worlds with You, is now up! You’ll get a new part every month until we’re done.) But anyway, let’s talk about books. Specifically the books I have read lately. I mostly read scifi and fantasy (and my guilty pleasure, cozy mysteries) but I do try to read outside of that periodically to expand my horizons and all that jazz. We Have Always Been Here, by Lena Nguyen (2021, science fiction) I really liked this one! Aside from colony missions and strange new planets and other things you’d expect in scifi, you also get an interesting delve into consciousness, what makes us human, androids, and interpersonal relationships. I basically read it all in one sitting, which is hard because it wasn’t short. Built, by Roma Agrawal (2018, nonfiction) We have a local restaurant that uses random books for decorations, and this one caught my eye, and then when I looked it up it sounded interesting, so I hunted it down. Ms. Agrawal is an architectural engineer, and she explains how things like skyscrapers and giant bridges and what have you get built, as well as looking at historical examples and how they worked (or didn’t). I learned quite a bit! Not least of which…

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Across Worlds with You, Part 1 by Kit Campbell

Across Worlds with You, Part 1Kit Campbell Will was six before he realized his reflection was wrong. Oh, sure, most of the time it was nothing, but every now and then his reflection misjudged what he was going to do, and would have to flail a bit to catch up. And once, when he was about ten, his reflection sneezed when Will did not. At first he’d tried to point this out to the adults in his life—his parents, his teachers. But his reflection was always perfect when someone else came along, and after a while Will had stopped trying. It wasn’t hurting anything, after all. As he got older and into college, he came across stories of ghosts and other paranormal entities and mirrors, but his reflection wasn’t like that at all. Will came to think of it as a slightly-confused but mostly well-meaning friend who just happened to look exactly like him. Well, mostly, he didn’t really think about it at all. It just was. On his twenty-second birthday he woke up, rubbed his eyes, and stumbled into the bathroom. After splashing water on his face, he toweled off and looked into the mirror to find…nothing. His reflection was gone. The towel dropped out of Will’s hand. He could see the dingy tiles of his apartment’s shower, the mismatched towels hanging haphazardly on the towel bar, the toilet which leaned subtly to the left. But he—or his reflection, at least—was conspicuously absent. Will rapped gently on the mirror.…

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