Home Archive by category "Bloggish Things" (Page 3)

Category: Bloggish Things

Thoughts, essays, and comments from the writers of Turtleduck.

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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To Nano or Not to Nano, That is the Question

It’s seven days till the big day — the first day of National Novel Writing Month, which is basically Christmas for a lot of us writers who love to participate every year (like me), and I am wibbling on what to do, like my fellow Turtleducker Kit Campbell talked about in her blog recently. Normally, because of work, I’d say no way, or sign up and attempt it and maybe write a few hundred or thousand words and call it “a valiant effort,” and feel like I tried, but damn, the experience was lost, again, because I couldn’t fully participate like I wanted to. It’s been this way for a long time. I can tell you already that I have an editing job hitting at the end of November. Not too bad, but…I have an ongoing job that got put off a bit due to some extenuating circumstances that needs to get done, preferably before this one hits. I have assorted author assistant things happening that are the usual things, but they take time too. It’s all part of my work, which I love, so this isn’t a complaint by any stretch. It’s just…I’m still trying to carve out the time to write more consistently. I can’t seem to manage it. I am hoping I hit upon the sweet spot, that method that’s been eluding me for literal years since I started my business…so I can maybe do something this Nano. It won’t be 50k like it used to be…

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Chronic Stress

Hello, friends, how are you? I’m actually pretty decent, today at least. We’re taking a few days to just rest. Nothing planned, nothing in particular, just chilling and not worrying about anything. Well, in theory. In practice, my spouse has had two work meetings he hasn’t been able to get out of, the kids have whined about being bored, we had a miscommunication about how long to spend on an art project versus making dinner, and I’ve spent about four hours at the pool, which is a lot of pool but I suppose isn’t too bad. (May also have gotten sunburned. Whoops.) I’ve used the non-family time to read 75% of a novel and 60 pages of a nonfiction book, finish revising a chapter and start another, and take a nap (which was not terribly successful because everyone kept coming in to bother me, oh well). And I am purposefully not thinking about anything that’s been giving me anxiety lately–nothing related to school or volunteer commitments, nothing related to the basement flood or the tornado, nothing related to my furnace failing, nothing related to upcoming conventions. Will I have to think about all those things tomorrow? Oh, absolutely. Dance classes, a book study, an email to the other volunteers, choir practice, the furnace people and the landscapers, my neighbor whose wife just died. But those are for tomorrow. Today, we let ourselves relax. Today, we find joy and comfort where we can. I can’t imagine the chronic stress that we…

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Dabbling in Languages

I’ve always been a linguistics geek, dating back at least to Grade 8 when I did a presentation on the language family tree (none of my classmates found it as fascinating as I did). I still get lost in Wikipedia learning new things. (Did you know that Romanian has a lot of Slavic in it, despite being a Romance language like French, Spanish, and Italian?) And don’t even get me started on writing systems. One of the things I found most fascinating about India, when I visited ten (!) years ago, was that every state had not only its own language (many unrelated to the others) but its own alphabet. Northern India uses Hindi as its common tongue, and southern India uses Tamil, but if they’re going to speak north to south, they resort to English. Which is why there’s more English on the signs than you might expect, even in non-tourist areas… Unfortunately for me, I’m not a polyglot (fluently multilingual), though not for lack of trying. I’ve learned tiny bits and pieces of Klingon (really!), Spanish, ASL, and Hindi. Like most Canadians, I studied French in school and came away with enough knowledge to read food packaging (and occasionally other things) but not to converse fluently — especially in Quebec. I also studied Norwegian in university, enough for me to get by quite well on my first solo trip overseas, visiting extended family in Norway. That meant I could more or less understand written Danish and spoken Swedish,…

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A Rustling in the Bushes

Well, here we are again. I had honestly begun to think it wouldn’t happen any more. It’s so easy to tell other writers that their muses haven’t abandoned them. It’s just a dry patch. You’ve got a lot going on in your life. It’s tough times for everyone. We’ve been through hell the last few years. The creativity will come back! Telling yourself that, though–no, that’s easy too. But believing it? Now that’s hard. Once upon a time, story ideas tackled me frequently. The kind of ideas that would grab me by the shoulders, or maybe the neck, and shake, demanding to be written. It hasn’t happened in a long time. Like, a really long time. Oh, I’ve had ideas, like maybe once or twice a year. And sometimes I even wrote them. But they weren’t the kind that pounced me like Tigger or Hobbes would do. Maybe the ideas that jump me like that aren’t better–in fact they probably aren’t better than something I’ve really thought through–but dammit, they are fun. And it’s happened. A great loud song I’ve heard a hundred times collided with a picture of a smartass redhead (have you noticed I have a thing for smartass redheads? Perhaps you haven’t been paying attention.) and an unrelated news story in my head, and BAM! KD is flat on the floor under a very self-satisfied tiger. via GIPHY Looks like I’m in for some fun coming up, and I’m quite excited about it. I’m poking writer friends…

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Another Update on the Bad Poetry Project

I didn’t want to update on this so soon, but I just have to give you all my news…. I have FOUR poems accepted for publication. Three for Naked Cat Literary and one for Free Verse Revolution. I am very, very honored, proud, and excited. I knew that someday I’d get there, but the question was when…and lo and behold, both acceptances came in my email the same day. How’s that for wild? I’m still on Cloud Nine. Today I just submitted another poem to Naked Cat Literary (love that name!), the one that accepted the three poems. Interesting story about this acceptance. I sent my poems in. I didn’t hear anything, and they had mentioned in their Twitter (X?) feed that they were starting to send replies, but didn’t indicate that they’d sent all of them yet. So I sat tight, waiting, on pins and needles. During this time, I had a weird prescient feeling that they would be the first ones to accept my poetry. Why, I couldn’t tell you. It just was. So then a week or so later, they tweeted that they were working on their next publication. And I wondered, were they done sending replies? And I hadn’t gotten anything? Not even in my spam mail? Hmmm. Time to politely — very politely — nudge. So I did that, via Twitter, and overnight they’d tweeted me back that they’d look into it (they were very apologetic, which I appreciate) and when I got up the…

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Playing Catch Up All the Time

Hey, friends, do you ever feel like you’re always catching up on things you should have done a while ago? Like, you can never start the day with a clean slate, because something’s already hanging over your head? Just me? Cool, cool. September is traditionally a busy month for me, and things–more things than normal–seem to get left by the wayside. So I spent today catching up on things–this blog post, some surveys for one of my kid’s schools, a bunch of important emails that I’ve been ignoring (still more of those to go, ugh), three emails worth of Moby Dick (I’m subscribed to Whale Weekly, though it’s not consistent on arrival), two chapters of a book for a book study, etc. It’s exhausting. My to-do list app has about six items in the red, and they’ve been there for about three weeks. What’s one to do? Is there a point where you abandon the things that haven’t gotten done? Change their due dates? Make sure you’re fitting in new things instead of always focusing on the past? I wasn’t one of those kids that was super eager to grow up, but I wasn’t against it. Little did I know adulting would be all never-ending to-do lists and eternal house repairs. Oh well. It is what it is. How are your Septembers going? Ready for spooky season? (Yay, spooky season!) Enjoying Across Worlds with You? Thoughts on the eternal drudgery of life?

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