Home Posts tagged "Kit’s random musings" (Page 4)

Tag: Kit’s random musings

Halloween in COVID Times

Hi, friends! It’s October, best month of the year! The weather’s finally cooling off, the leaves are turning (and hopefully will get all the way done before a snowstorm kills them all), I can wear boots without looking like a crazy person, etc. And normally there’s Halloween! I mean, there’s still Halloween. But this year it’s a bit anxiety-inducing, isn’t it? What’s safe? What isn’t? How do I still make it fun for the small, mobile ones? They’ve recommended against trick-or-treating, and it feels like the trunk-or-treats have the same issues (which, I’m assuming, are “lots of people touching the same things” and also “the potential for someone COVID-positive to spread a lot of germs and make it near impossible to contact trace”). Next Door has announced their Halloween map for the year. Normally you can mark that you’re giving out goodies and any specifics (for example, I normally take part in the Teal Pumpkin movement, where having a teal pumpkin set out indicates you have alternatives for kids who can’t eat candy due to allergies), but this year your options are for having decorated, doing a costume wave parade (where, I’m assuming again, you stand outside and wave at the kids and admire their costumes?), or having put out pumpkins. Sad times. I know people who are still planning on handing out candy to trick or treaters (bad idea, but I’m not surprised), or doing an alternative like setting individually wrapped candy out on a table (if you think…

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A Plethora of Star Trek

Hi, friends! When we went into lockdown, I thought I’d be watching more TV and movies. But I didn’t. In fact, I still have a movie out from the library that I got in mid-March right before they shut down. (They’re…probably going to want that back.) When I have watched TV, though, it has been almost exclusively Star Trek. We have a plethora of new Trek right now! It’s great! (Until you get into comments on YouTube or Facebook and find they’re all full of whining about how things aren’t Trek enough, or how they’ve gone all SJW–like they ever weren’t–or how it’s just scifi and not Trek and the heck is wrong with these people? They’re stuck in a nostalgia that never really existed, I think. Also, why do people complain when they get more of their favorites? The lesson here is don’t read the comments on anything.) First we finished the second season of Discovery, which was really good! And I love all the characters so much, which is really the point, you know? No one sat through the early seasons of Next Generation because it was a good TV show, if you know what I mean. (If not, the first two seasons of Next Gen are…bad. There, I said it.) They sat through it because they liked Data or Geordi or Deanna or whoever was their character of choice and they liked to watch them have space adventures. (Though “adventures” in conjunction with Next Gen isn’t always…

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Not Going to Talk About the Pandemic, I Swear

We’ll see how far I get. I mean, I’m still scatter brained as all get out, but I feel like I’m slowly starting to adjust and make progress on things. WE’LL SEE. I mean, I forgot to put red peppers on the grocery list, and it’s possible just a few minutes ago I called my husband to ask where he’d hidden the red peppers that I need to make dinner. And it’s also possible that he had no idea what I was talking about. It’s also possible that I spent an hour and a half this afternoon playing phone games instead of editing a certain short story I owe people or, you know, remembering it was my turn to blog. I blame the non-existent red peppers. That I still need for dinner. Siri always talks about her vegetable garden, which always makes me a bit jealous. You see, I also have a vegetable garden, but invariably something goes wrong and I don’t get much out of it. This year we made it larger and built a fence (the dog keeps eating the irrigation) and deployed Tertill, a weeding robot made by the same company that invented the Roomba. (We kickstarted Tertill a few years ago, but didn’t get to use it last year because we didn’t do a garden. Here’s an intro video for it.) The plan was to plant corn, chamomile, cantaloupe, carrots, broccoli, onions, cucumbers and sugar peas. We planted everything except the chamomile over a few weeks,…

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Help, This is Too Introverted Even for Me

I am introvert. I think many, if not most, writers are introverts. After all, most of us are perfectly happy spending an afternoon with our writing instruments of choice or a nice book, not being interrupted by other people. But, that being said, I do occasionally like to talk to other people. Hang out at a coffee shop. Go for a nice hike. Discuss writing with other writers (or get sidetracked on the latest scifi/fantasy books/movies/TV shows instead). But alas, we are all trapped. Except I am trapped with my family, which means I’m not actually getting any alone time, because if I go off on my own, someone will invariably set something on fire. (They haven’t yet, but you never know.) It’s a weird mix, isn’t it? Alone yet not, yet not in a combination that is generally helpful for anything. I’ve started having virtual coffee dates with my friends. They’re working okay, until one of our children arrive (or, in some awful cases, both of our children). Except I keep watching myself on the screen, or taking note of the fact that the pictures on the wall in the office continue to be crooked, no matter how many times I straighten them, or I somehow forget how to drink coffee and make a mess. But it is good to see people, even from afar, and even in weird circumstances. Even if half the time someone’s Internet glitches and then the whole thing crashes. (I made the mistake on…

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The Art of Finishing

They say the hardest part of finishing a story is getting to The End. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but there’s a lot of “The End”s to get through in the creation of a story. In some ways it feels like it never ends. First you have to finish the draft. Then you have to finish the revision process, then work on publication and all that entails–covers, descriptions and marketing, and the marketing never really ends, does it? Book after book, all it gives you is more to keep an eye on, more upkeep to do. It can a bit exhausting, not going to lie. And a little depressing at times, when you look at everything you need to do. And I think that’s why writers tend to…not finish. Why we’re always picking up new projects when old ones aren’t done, or trying to squeeze one more thing in that we just don’t have time for. There’s something in the act of creation that, even if it’s not going well, is freeing. A story, when it’s still in its nebulous phase, can be anything, is full of potential. Reality hasn’t caught up to it yet. It’s a balancing act, I think, the creation and the rest of it. And if you get out of balance, it’s hard to see any real progress. So, I guess my point is to make sure you call still see the forest for the trees, and that you’re having some fun somewhere, writing or otherwise. Or…

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Playing Around

Hi, friends! I hope you’re having a lovely Tuesday! (Also, I was looking at my post from last month talking about how nothing was a catastrophe, and then three days later I had a car accident. Still not a catastrophe, but March was really determined to make life hard.) It’s always interesting to write these posts each month, because it is only once a month, and it’s hard to remember what I was talking about, and because Siri, Erin, and KD have come in and talked about different stuff. Do I build off of the other posts? Do I wander off on my own? But anyway. 2019 has been a year of exploration, for the most part. Aside from the anthology, most of what I’ve been working on has been trying new things. I think this is an important part of creativity, really, to help you think of new things and give your brain a workout. Plus I was feeling a little discouraged and burned out, and having fun doing new things always helps. So, what am I working on? Children’s books of all shapes and sizes, from picture books to chapter books. Mostly just playing around, but writing some. Nonfiction books and potentially video classes Workbooks and journals Writing a book to a new technique from a class I’m taking Drabbles just to drabble New genres It’s a bit freeing, though I will admit I feel a little guilty about not working on any “serious” projects, though the story…

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I Look Like Groucho Marx

This has been a year so far, my friends. Yes, it has. The first half of January was eaten by Disney World, and February’s first half isn’t going so well either. I spent most of last week doing stuff for the kids (and also I got a very minor case of the flu over the weekend, yay), and yesterday I had sinus surgery. This has been a bit of a roadblock, as you can imagine. Surgery is, of course, not cheap. Plus there’s the fact that I’ve never had surgery. Or anything remotely like anesthesia. So, panic! (Though, when I told my anesthesiologist that I was feeling nervous, he said, “I have medicine for that,” and duly went and got something and put it in my IV and woah, that stuff works fast. And is also a little disconcerting.) Anyway! I won’t go into too many details. Surgery was had, I have survived, and now I’m in this weird place where I feel mostly like myself except also occasionally very sleep and a bit dizzy. Should I just plan on this being how this year is going? Only half a month is usable? Maybe so. Maybe that’s not a bad thing to assume anyway. Keep our expectations realistic and all that. Anyway, I’m going to take a nap.

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The Elusive Tom Sawyer’s Island

Last week, we went to the Happiest Place on Earth. (Or is that Disneyland?) It could, potentially, be labeled the most overwhelming place on Earth, but we’ll ignore that for now. I hadn’t been since I was a child, which was a long time ago. And while many things have changed over the past twenty years (at one point I stood in the middle of Fantasyland with the weird sensation of knowing that someplace should be familiar and yet failing to find anything that was at all recognizable), some things have stayed the same. One of my very favorite places in Disney World is Tom Sawyer’s Island. It’s an island in the middle of a lake between Frontierland and Liberty Square which is, as the name makes obvious, is based of the book Tom Sawyer. It’s got Aunt Polly’s house and Harper’s Mill, and secret caves, and a fort, and is generally a really fun place to explore. The only way to get to it is by river raft. And I’ve missed it the last two times I’ve gone. It closes pretty early in the day, basically as soon as there’s any hint of the sun going down, which I assume is for safety reasons. But it means that if you’re not on top of it, you’re out of luck. When I last went, at 14, we had a single day at the Magic Kingdom, and I missed the last raft. And I missed it last week, too, though we…

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The More Things Change

I have an actual hometown. You know, the kind you see on TV, where it’s smallish and quaint and has weird tics that everyone who lives there knows about and just accepts as something that is something that you do. Or is. And it is an actual hometown for me, because I was born there and spent most of my childhood there, and because most of my family (sibling, parent, grandparent) still live there, and still live in the same houses. So it was formative in many ways. Now, some time after I left home for college (which was quite some time ago, but I’m not going to tell you exactly how much because it makes me feel old) my hometown decided it was going to reinvent itself. It’s always been kind of a weird relic of the Old West, despite having been absorbed by urban sprawl, but it was decided to, hm, modernize it, I suppose might be the right term. Tear down some of the old things that had been there forever and make new, modern versions of the same thing that was supposed to evoke the town’s history. Pretty up the historic things that were too valuable to replace. Urbanize the “downtown” area and make it the sort of place that young people with lots of money would want to hang out. You know, that sort of thing. I’ve watched it happen with mixed feelings, as I suppose most people do/would in the situation. Sure, that 3-story…

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I Miss My Kitchen

Oh, friends. I have no kitchen. I have not had one for slightly over a month, and it is terrible. (I am also aware that this is such a first world problem. I have had to wash the dishes BY HAND OH NO) (But seriously, I hate doing the dishes even under ideal circumstances so this has been hell.) We live in an early ’80s house, which is an interesting period architecturally in that it lacks the vintage chicness of older houses and the mod openness of newer houses. Also, sometimes they put carpet in bathrooms, because that makes logical sense somehow. In an attempt to improve Feng shui or whatever, the previous owners of the house essentially removed all the cabinets from the kitchen. I mean, they were hideous; we saw another house of the same floorplan that had left them in. They stretched the entire length of the kitchen, leaving a weird foot-and-a-half gap between cabinet and counter where you could kind of see into the family room. So removing the cabinets was a definite improvement, Feng shui wise. From a functional kitchen standpoint, it was less than ideal. So, for six years, we have had a single cabinet to store all our dishes, and apparently this was slowly driving my husband mad. And now this madness has resulted in the complete redoing of the kitchen. And I do mean complete. We tore out the floor. The walls. The ridiculous drop ceiling. The wiring. The lights. The plumbing.…

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