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  • Published on

    An Overdue Change in the Website

    Blog Talk

    For well over a decade, my website has been hosted on Weebly.


    I liked Weebly. A significant portion of my job involves management of a large CMS based website, and that meant that coming home to do editing on my writing website needed to be easy, simple—straightforward in a way that the work site is not. Weebly did that.


    Then a few years ago Square bought Weebly. Square is commerce based and while they gave us the option to try their web options, for an author site they were... not what I needed. I deferred. I waited. My cost at Weebly climbed as I was forced into more expensive consolidated plans.


    My writing has taken a back seat to the pandemic and an injury that I've alluded to before. I considered just dropping the site. I considered abandoning writing entirely.


    But I couldn't do it. I've maintained and maintained and... finally switched to something new. I know, I know, it doesn't really LOOK like I switched to something new. The look and feel of the site is largely the same and except for a few pieces here and there... the dashes at either side of the navigation, the font size for navigation submenus, a few changes in font color and size in a few places... the site doesn't look much different.


    It is different. And maybe even if a lot of the changes are simply a new way of doing the same things, it will still mean I'm paying more attention to something I'd let fall to the side. We'll see.

  • Published on

    Stalled...

    Blog Talk Thoughts Writing
    My writing has been stalled.

    They say real writers don't get writer's block and that's not really true. We totally do, but usually we have strategies to cope with it. The ones I usually use just aren't working well right now.

    I only got the two releases in last year. I did manage to write during Nano. In a terrifying twist... I remember writing but have no idea whatsoever what I wrote. I know that's from depression which is part of my core bipolar illness, and I struggle. I love my writing. I don't want to forget it.

    So, I'm trying to find a direction. Find some joy. Some happiness. And focus to write. More later.

    But in goal setting, I am going to set a goal of two releases for this year. We'll see if I can manage that.
  • Published on

    Measuring Progress

    Thoughts Writing
    So, I’ve been feeling a bit of a failure.

    But in two years, I’ve managed to release, as a mixture of new and old releases, six novels, five novellas long enough to publish as short books, and five shorter novellas. 

    That can’t be what failure looks like.

    I’ve added individual print editions to the Sam’s Cafe Romances.

    I’ve published a fifth book in the College Rose Romance series: Forgiving James.

    I’ve released the first of two long novellas meant to book end the Sam’s Cafe Romances as a prequel and sequel to wrap up that story.

    Even if I just look at this calendar year, I am on track for two to three releases. Fortune’s Pawn, which came out early in the year; Fortune’s Price, which is overdue, but should still release in July, and that leaves me with five months to get another release out before the end of the year. 

    I’m going to err on being kind to myself. I’m going to remember that this has been a brutal month, and that my dad just had open heart surgery, and that my mind not being on my writing is totally normal. I’m going to get that last novella out this month, and then I’m going to put out something else new. And it will be new, because all the old published stuff has been released. 

    ​Wish me luck.
  • Published on

    Create a Story - Pressing Pause

    I'm pressing the pause button on my weekly prompts using the Create a Story book. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that I want to get my next book released, and I'm afraid this is drawing what little energy I have away from that.

    There's more to it, of course, though the underlying reason is true. I really want Fortune's Price out by the end of June and that leaves me just about five weeks to get the work done. It's written and edited, but on a reread I felt there were some places I needed to look at closer, and I need to focus for that.

    But there are some underlying frustrations. The prompt shorts aren't getting an audience and I'd hoped for a more interactive exercise. They haven't been creative tasks as much as technical ones, I think in part because they are so brief, and have so many constructed requirements. 500 words. include fifteen specific words. Specific genre and prompt. The creativity becomes bound rather than freeing, and feeling bound isn't a sensation that is helping me right now.

    So, I'm putting it on pause, and maybe I'll come back to it after a break, perhaps with less binding restrictions (freeing myself from a need to use all the words, or perhaps longer spacing between prompts to allow for longer stories).

    I might also dip a toe into a different kind of prompt, with something like the The Story Engine Deck or the Deck of Worlds.

    Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, coming soon, Fortune's Price. I'm determined to get this done and released, since I've had it written since literally before COVID hit. 
  • Published on

    Create a Story - Week 9

    Prompts
    So this one is life experience, from Create a Story page 74. It didn't go the direction I expected and though there are a couple of life experience stories I have that resemble these events, it sorta picks and chooses elements from several to create a whole—which I suppose, if someone was writing my life or creating a screenplay of it, they'd probably end up doing, so I'm not going to feel bad for it. For life experience first person just feels right, so that's what I did. We'll see what comes for next week.
    Picture

    Schoolyard Bully

    I didn’t want to be here. Surrounded by Trevor’s goons. That wasn’t my way.

    But Eric had taunted them just a little too much. Intention doesn’t really matter, only results. The results were goons surrounding us. And Trevor was someone I couldn’t deal with. I had no influence. Nothing he wanted.

    Which just made the waiting feel stupid.

    The result was inevitable from the moment Eric had gone too far.

    There were too many to run from. Running worked when you had a lead, somewhere to go—somewhere to hide. Without those things, and given a group, as Trevor had and we did not, it became math. Someone was always faster. Between Eric and I, that was Eric. So he ran, darting between then, knowing I couldn’t, and left me to reap the rewards of his behavior.

    Their reactions, predictable to a fault, were abandonment by a few to follow the cause of the fiasco. I couldn’t hope that they would catch him. That would be wrong. But some small part of me couldn’t help wishing for consequences that might balance his actions.

    To be fair, in effect, he’d reduced the number of people that I had to face. I might appreciate that if there were not still too many. If Trevor, as much a skinny, weak kid as Eric, wasn’t standing behind them, pretending he was a threat as though power was some preordained destiny.

    I never much liked Trevor. I didn’t hold much stock in anthropomorphising people into mousy, foxy, built like a horse. But if there was ever a young man who deserved the moniker of weasley—and not in any modern Potteresqe connotation—it was Trevor. 

    None of them considered me a threat, of course. I might be big, but I was a gentle giant, the kind that didn’t even like to curse out loud.

    Eric had known me long enough to know there was something percolating under the surface. If he’d ever guessed at the many possible things it might be, he’d never said. But he knew there was something. Perhaps I was being generous in thinking that Eric had any thought for something beyond his own safety. He had, after all, left me to face these goons by myself.

    No one would mistake me for simple, but many might think me unworldly enough to miss that Trevor was more than a bully. He ran drugs through the school. How serious I could never be sure. Weed certainly. LSD, probably. Other things? Yeah. But I couldn’t be sure what, except it wasn’t heroin. The kids went to the dorms just over the hill to get that.

    My parents would probably be appalled that their kid who spent most of his time listening to celtic harp music knew that much about drug culture at school.

    The fists started to fly. It didn’t take long. One boy, bloody and screaming on the ground and the rest ran.

    Eric was right to worry about what got under my skin.
    This one came in at 500 words, which honestly surprised me, since I was still having trouble at 200 and then BAM, I was wondering how to end it in the word count. Yay me? Anyway, this catches me up, so all I need is to make sure I write one this week to be back on track.
  • Published on

    Create a Story - Week 8

    Prompts
    The continuing saga... I got this one done a little early, from Create a Story, page 51 - a romance prompt. Maybe since this one completed early, I'll manage to catch up and get the skipped week done this week and have a clean slate. We'll see. In the meantime, here it is:

    Fortune’s Kiss

    When you’re little, running around the fair, gorging on cotton candy and sneaking your way on rides that you can sneak onto in a local carnival while you couldn’t at a proper amusement park, you don’t notice the seedier parts of carnival life—the housewife struggling to maintain control over too many kids, and only half of them her own or the way no one ever seemed to win the big prizes in the ring toss.

    I    t was only when I was older that I noticed the little people wore scarves that hid their ears or that the fortune teller was a proper witch. It was apparent enough if you looked past the shady light on the table illuminating the crystal ball. Enough to repulse if you could make out the shapes. But it was a carnival, so many stayed and had their fortunes read, letting it pass with a grimace as they held out a hand for the witch to work her magic, reading the lines of the palm like a spell woven of sorcery and fairy wings.

    I was old enough now to be losing my appreciation for the carnival. Cotton candy loses its appeal when every teen is judged by the perfect bodies on social media every day. When every outfit has to be perfect. I gave up on being perfect a long time ago. Which had a lot to do with the carnival losing appeal, since it was all about doing things with friends. Which is how I found myself in front of the witch, and how I knew the various suspect floating things in jars were far more real than most visitors might suppose.

    Only a glance—a fingernail drawing across the lines, and she spoke. “The kissing booth at every carnival is enchanted,” she said. “A first risk can bear fruit, it must, for that risk has cupid’s power bound, but which risk is never guaranteed.”

    I pulled my hand away. “Not that desperate.”

    She shrugged. “It’s still twenty bucks.”

    Which was how I ended up glaring at the line. The boy and girl in the booths were perfect. I’d been watching for hours. Long enough to see the boy take his doublet costume off and rinse off under a hose to cool down. The attraction was too real to pretend.

    “A first risk,” I whispered to myself, losing myself in the way his lips swooped. I didn’t even notice paying the ten bucks for charity. 

    I barely noticed the attendant shake his head. “You can try kid, but it’s up to him.” The girls in line snickered.

    ​    My heart skipped as I got closer. He was in front of me, lips kissed full. His cheeks reddened. But he still leaned forward, one hand helping my head know which way to go.

    ​    Suddenly I knew what being lost in a kiss meant. Maybe there was some magic. Because afterwards, breathless with wonder, he pressed a paper with his phone number into my hand.
    Again 500 words, though I confess this one was edited down from about 525 to hit that mark so exactly. I also think this one could have gone on longer, had I not been in the depths of work on several critical work projects. Maybe I'll come back to it. Till then, we'll see if I can get caught up this week.