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2019 has been a Year Of Change over here, in a thousand and one ways both large and small. Off the top of my head: we sold our mid-century fixer in a valley and bought a Victorian bungalow on a hill, we welcomed some old friends from the south as new neighbors in Seattle, my husband had some professional changes, I had some professional changes, we lost our beloved ElderCat at the (approximate) age of 22, and we even traded our old car for a different old car. It’s kind of been one thing after another, ever since the new year rolled over.
And of course - as you know, if you clicked your way directly here - I have a new website!
For the last 15 years or so, my web presence has been managed and hosted by my pal Greg Wild-Smith - out of the goodness of his heart. He has been a total sweetheart all these years, but I hated making my own dumbassery his responsibility. Therefore, we nuked the old site from orbit, and now you get this cute little SquareSpace jobbie. It’s vastly less complicated (so that I can handle it myself), but woo boy howdy, did the old site need a good cleaning. Hell, it still had reviews on it that dated back to (I shit thee not) 2003.
The time for a reboot had come.
And the time to start writing again had come, too. I spent the first couple of months of 2019 working on a work for hire project (of which we shall speak no more), and then The Toll arrived with a lot of promotion and some travel, and then we were selling our house and buying another house - then we were moving house, God help us - and we’ve only been more-or-less settled in the new place for about a month. So (it could be argued) I had a good excuse for not getting much accomplished on the writing front, but I still don’t like it. This is probably my lowest word-count year since maybe 2006.
So now I’ve gone back to the project that I’d juuuuuust started at the beginning of this year. In my copious downtime (lol) I’d been plotting on it, fiddling with it, and setting it up… but I hadn’t actually started writing anything on it until recently. Now I’m off to the races!
So here's progress on my modern gothic ghost story about the fallout from a school shooting 22 years ago, told from the POV of four survivors, their now-teenage children, and their own parents - with Bonus! memories both faulty and true, intergenerational violence and grace alike, and a boarded up school with thirty-two ghosts who know something the police never figured out. This bad-boy is one part The Haunting of Hill House, one part The Frighteners, and one part Bowling for Columbine. Wish me luck.
Project: Kill Me Now
Deadline: none ::throws confetti::
New words written: ::shrug emoji::
Present total word count: 9456
Things accomplished in real life: Walked the dogs; took the dogs to the groomer; picked the dogs up from the groomer; did some more tweaks on the new website; cleaned kitchen; did some laundry because Lucy peed on my bathmat overnight and I might as well run some towels while I’m out it.
Things accomplished in fiction: Got about halfway through chapter 4 + introduced second major character (out of four). Began investigation at a haunted campground.
Darling duJour: “Much like doing drugs or LARPing, the main problem with ghost-hunting is the people you get stuck doing it with.”
Number of fiction words so far this year: Approximately 80k - most of that in the work-for-hire project, alas. But let’s see how much I can bang out by the end of 2019, eh?
And of course - as you know, if you clicked your way directly here - I have a new website!
For the last 15 years or so, my web presence has been managed and hosted by my pal Greg Wild-Smith - out of the goodness of his heart. He has been a total sweetheart all these years, but I hated making my own dumbassery his responsibility. Therefore, we nuked the old site from orbit, and now you get this cute little SquareSpace jobbie. It’s vastly less complicated (so that I can handle it myself), but woo boy howdy, did the old site need a good cleaning. Hell, it still had reviews on it that dated back to (I shit thee not) 2003.
The time for a reboot had come.
And the time to start writing again had come, too. I spent the first couple of months of 2019 working on a work for hire project (of which we shall speak no more), and then The Toll arrived with a lot of promotion and some travel, and then we were selling our house and buying another house - then we were moving house, God help us - and we’ve only been more-or-less settled in the new place for about a month. So (it could be argued) I had a good excuse for not getting much accomplished on the writing front, but I still don’t like it. This is probably my lowest word-count year since maybe 2006.
So now I’ve gone back to the project that I’d juuuuuust started at the beginning of this year. In my copious downtime (lol) I’d been plotting on it, fiddling with it, and setting it up… but I hadn’t actually started writing anything on it until recently. Now I’m off to the races!
So here's progress on my modern gothic ghost story about the fallout from a school shooting 22 years ago, told from the POV of four survivors, their now-teenage children, and their own parents - with Bonus! memories both faulty and true, intergenerational violence and grace alike, and a boarded up school with thirty-two ghosts who know something the police never figured out. This bad-boy is one part The Haunting of Hill House, one part The Frighteners, and one part Bowling for Columbine. Wish me luck.
Project: Kill Me Now
Deadline: none ::throws confetti::
New words written: ::shrug emoji::
Present total word count: 9456
Things accomplished in real life: Walked the dogs; took the dogs to the groomer; picked the dogs up from the groomer; did some more tweaks on the new website; cleaned kitchen; did some laundry because Lucy peed on my bathmat overnight and I might as well run some towels while I’m out it.
Things accomplished in fiction: Got about halfway through chapter 4 + introduced second major character (out of four). Began investigation at a haunted campground.
Darling duJour: “Much like doing drugs or LARPing, the main problem with ghost-hunting is the people you get stuck doing it with.”
Number of fiction words so far this year: Approximately 80k - most of that in the work-for-hire project, alas. But let’s see how much I can bang out by the end of 2019, eh?