Home Articles posted by KD Sarge (Page 4)

Haunted Inspiration

On the farm where I grew up, we had a haunted barn. It looked sort of like this one. My mom didn’t like to talk about it, and she never told the stories when she knew we kids were around, but I heard them. It wasn’t “and then I saw a pale figure dragging chains” or “Get out!” or anything. It was the night she was milking the cows, and a hand reached in through the gap of the door to lift the hook from the eye-bolt, but it couldn’t reach far enough. The arm was clad in plaid flannel like my dad always wore, so my mom said “Hold on, honey, I’ll get it,” but when she opened the door no one was there. Later she learned my dad hadn’t been in the barn at all. It was putting a horse in a straight stall with the tie clipped to his halter, and finding him the next morning reversed in the stall (butt to the manger) with the tie wrapped around his leg. It was hearing footsteps walking down the aisle between the hay mows upstairs, and knowing the wagon was parked there and no one could be walking across that floor. And then getting the dog for company because she was spooked but she had to finish the chores—and the dog wouldn’t go into the barn. It was trying to bring the horses in from pasture on a wet and windy fall night, and they wouldn’t come near…

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Let It Go, Let It Go…

Oh, so sorry. Did I get a song stuck in your head? Join the club. grumble So I think I’ve decided that I’m not gardening again next year. I tell myself that every year, but this year I think I mean it. I have many demands on my time, and my money, and the bugs around here (and my lack of making a time commitment to fight them, let’s be honest…) ahem. The bugs around here have NO lack in their time or commitment to go after my poor growing things. Anyway. We’ve reached that time of the year, when I think that all I have to do is NOT go out and water them for two days, and then I won’t have to deal with those darn plants ever again. I won’t do that, of course. I cannot give up on them while they yet live. I’ve tried! Who was it, still covering up her last abused tomato plant well into November? Yep, this girl. Really, it would be cruel to murder them now. The poor things have tried. They have certainly done that. I’ve pulled THREE hornworms off my tomato plants in the past week, and those suckers are big and eat a lot– but my poor plants are still trying with less than half their leaves. I drowned the first one, and he almost learned to swim in time. So I dropped rocks on the second and third. I chased some sort of moth that I’m sure…

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Achievement Unlocked

My first job in Arizona was at a day-care center. For years afterwards (and still sometimes, for reasons) I would tell people, “I can handle eight one-year-olds for eight hours alone. I can do anything.” Yes, it was a constant round of diaper checks (every child had to be checked every hour, and changed if needed which they usually did need) but I kept eight one-year-olds happy and healthy for eight hours a day and that is a confidence builder right there. When I worked at Taco Bell, my brag was that I could make a six-pack of tacos, from taking the first shell to closing the box, in twenty-six seconds. And it would be right. Some people over-packed the meat, or under-packed the cheese, but my tacos would be exactly the way the company wanted them made. And I’d do it in twenty-six seconds despite the fact that I couldn’t get all six shells in one hand like some of the “steamers” I worked with. Two was the best I could do, and still move fast. Outside of Taco Bell, that’s not really a very useful brag, though. I stuck with the “eight one-year-olds” bit in other places. Then my dear friend moved from Ohio to Arizona, and I drove her truck. “I drove a seventeen-foot truck from Ohio to Arizona by way of shudder Oklahoma,” I would say. “I can handle this!” For whatever value “this” was. By the way, that’s a seventeen-foot bed. The truck is twenty-three…

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Staycation, Gotta Get -Away- Get It Done

Hullo, friends. it is Tuesday! The day that we blog. Yes. I totally remembered that all day long! I remember which day it is on a regular basis! Confession–I actually didn’t remember today was Tuesday. Because I’m on vacation. It’s so easy to forget, it seems–we’re two actual days into the workweek I’m not working, and I forgot what day it was! Which is even harder to believe I managed, because–well, let me show you. Going into the summer, I had no intention of taking a week off. I had the hours, but I didn’t have any money to go anywhere, and we’re still being careful anyway. Might as well just save the time off till I had something useful to do with it, right? Well, but my admin team was taking a week off. I would still have plenty to do–there is ALWAYS more to do–but I’d be going to work every day, and they wouldn’t. I’d probably end up not doing much but answering the phones and being mad at myself for not having taken the week off. So I took it. At least, I thought, I can get some things done. Ah, yes. That age-old goal of adults everywhere, to Get Some Things Done. I made a list. I collected notes from here there and everywhere, and I brainstormed, and I wrote a lot of things down, and then I put some of them on post-its. And then I put them on my whiteboard. And still I…

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Imagination. It’s Great!

One night when I was somewhere around seventeen, I was visiting my best friend. I was friendly with her mom (who shared my love of Guns’n’Roses, which best friend decidedly did not) so when best friend wanted to go to bed, I hung around in the living room talking to mom for a few minutes before heading home. The big old console TV (remember those?) was showing one of the Critters movies. I was, as I said, around seventeen. But home was a half mile away, and it was a dark (but moonlit!) night. And I lived in the country, did I mention that? It was an empty half mile, with no streetlights, no houses, and probably not a single car passing me. And there were dark patches on the road. Yes, I knew they were spots where the gray asphalt, sparkling a bit with mica chips, had been patched with tar. I’d seen them on the walk to best friend’s house. I’d seen them, walked over them, ridden my bike past them, probably a thousand times. I knew exactly what they were, and I bet I could have mapped them with my eyes closed. That night while I told myself exactly what those dark patches were, I walked wide around them anyway, keeping an eye on them even once I was past, in case one of them tried to come after me. More than being scared, though, I was annoyed. Let’s face it, even in the 80’s, these weren’t…

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Whiff of Death, Manuscript Style

Last week I had a Moment. It was more than a moment long. I fell into despair. I’ve been working on this book for a year. It has been, as most anyone would agree, one hell of a year, and I’ve been trying to write this book the whole time. And I, in that very long moment, hated it. I never wanted to look at it again. Everything was wrong, it was all wrong, it was trash and it would never be anything but trash. The characters were boring, the plot was stupid, and I can’t write anyway. I suck. But I’ve been there before. When writers advise other writers to “finish something, no matter what” this is part of why. I’ve finished a number of books at this point, and I know now that every book I write has that moment. Also, it’s not just me! Many authors know that awful moment. I’ve talked friends through it more than once. Neil Gaiman wrote about it. The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber,…

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Progress Starts with Writing It Down

It’s been a good bit more than six months since my last Organizational Freakout. (Listed and linked in this, the previous post.) This time, however, I’m not starting a new system. Nope. Not this time. This time, I am reporting that a system I already started, expanding what was my bullet journal with elements of Control Journal (Flylady) and Getting Things Done (GTD) into what I now call my Flight Manual. Because I’m gonna freaking FLY, y’all. I am! Ahem. Yes, I know, you’ve heard it before. But this time I didn’t announce my attempting a new system because I have tried and tried and tried before, and failed and failed and failed again (though a little better each time!) This time, though, it’s still working. I am so excited by that fact, you have no idea. One thing that’s making it work, this time, is that I’m actually looking at it. A lot! I have a look at my goals every morning, rotating through the week, and then on Saturday I review the week and Sundays I look forward at what’s coming. So each morning as I do my 750words, I may not ONLY ramble about the goal of the day, but I definitely do some rambling on it. Turns out that “oh, I should do something about that sometime” is a lot less useful than “okay, first step is this, I will do that on this day, and the next step is this and I will schedule that for this…

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The Other Cabin Fever

No, not that one. Well, originally that one. A few months ago I did something extremely out of character—I jumped on making reservations for a cabin I’d never seen, in a park I’d never visited, because there were nights available. Mount Lemmon had been closed because of the pandemic, then caught fire, and I didn’t know when we’d be able to go there again and I couldn’t imagine staying home any longer, and so I started looking elsewhere, and then I jumped on the first thing I found. Camping, you see, is about as safe as you can get right now, especially the way we camp—as far as we can get from everyone, avoiding people like they might carry plague long before the pandemic. Anyway. This past weekend was, at last, our weekend. Behold our weekend home, as the sun set. Ahead of the cabin, the lake. Behind the cabin, the mountain. I took this picture farther around the lake, so our cabin is in it. Meet some of our neighbors. Several of these guys dropped by Friday night to see if we’d left anything out for them. Sadly I did not take a picture. I did take a picture of the one I ran into raiding the snackbox (read: trash can) outside the restroom at four in the morning, but all you can see are its eyes glowing red, so we’ll skip that one. These birds would come in the evenings and chatter and flit about these reeds sticking…

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A Rare Snow Day

In most of Southern Arizona, snow is a rarity and a delight. A few years ago, the main school district here had its first ever snow day–and no one in admin or the state knew how to handle it. They didn’t want any buses going over any bridges (ice! ZOMG!) but they didn’t want to cancel school because we don’t build snow days into the schedule here. It would have thrown EVERYTHING off. So they ended up having a four-hour delay, and by then no one was coming to school. I think we got about fifty kids total, out of eight hundred, who had shown up before the district decided what to do. They spent the morning playing in the snow. Now that I own my home, I’m aware that hoping for snow (and obvi, the cold weather that comes with it) is a silly thing to do. Citrus trees like I have in my back yard do not love snow. The new trees that I had planted back in November aren’t ready for snow. Heck, the mature, huge palm trees in the front yard aren’t big fans either, I’m sure. The last struggling tomato plant of my garden, with about five green tomatoes still clinging on, is not going to do well in snow. (And, worse, the 29° predicted for tonight.) But it’s so pretty. This morning driving to work, the Catalinas were white all the way to the foothills. The Rincons too, when I could see them beyond…

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New Year’s Plans

Pretty sure I say every year I’m not doing resolutions, but…and I’m still not. But. I have been thinking lately about how I want to make some changes in my life, and what better time than the new year to give me a bump in the backside about getting moving on them? One thing that, I think, really changed things for me this year was getting furloughed back in March. I spent six weeks at home, happily puttering. I (belatedly, it turns out) decided to do a little gardening. I say belatedly because I was not the first to come up with the idea, so I waited forever for my seeds… One tomato plant is still out there, struggling to turn some tomatoes red for me. I also started writing every day, twice a day. Morning and evening, my friends and I would gather online and write through the pandemic. It drew us closer, it got us words, and it got me more in the habit of looking at myself and my life, because even though I was attempting to write fiction, when the story-words wouldn’t come in the middle of a sprint (coordinated timed writing time, after which you report your word count) I would just journal instead. Enough of that and, I’ll tell you what, you end up writing fiction just to stop the navel-gazing. Anyway. Another thing that came along, was a “wellness” app that comes with my insurance. Normally I wouldn’t be interested–I have enough apps…

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