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Month: November 2023

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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