Kate Lowell's Blog, page 40

Playing ‘keep away’ with myself

Remember when you were in elementary, or junior high school? There was that thing we would do to people, where someone would take something of yours, and then toss it back and forth with a friend so that you ran around in circles, trying to get it back and never succeeding.

It’s been one of those weird days. All weekend, I’ve been looking forward to Sunday, because I was convinced that I had the whole day to write. What I was really doing was engaging in a giant game of keep away.

Because it turned out my brain really wanted to write, but my sense of responsibility and that whole ‘being an adult’ thing conspired to make writing a guilt-laden exercise in good old Maritime Calvinism. There was laundry to do, and pony feed to haul to the barn, and receipts to be sorted for income tax, and the wood stove to empty of ashes. As I sit here, thinking it would be nice to finish that scene in Spooktacular where Hal sees David again, I’m thinking that I really need to change the water in the fish tank. And the laundry is washed and dried, but not folded. Nor have my floors been swept since Thursday.

But I’ve been a good girl. I got some stuff done. Not everything, but you can’t have it all. And the promise I made to myself, to make sure there was some time for writing each day, still needs to be kept. Because, at the end of the day, there’s always one more thing you can do. You can ‘one more thing’ yourself right out of the writing profession, if you aren’t careful.

I don’t want to do that. Even as a part-time job, it often feels so much more real to me than the full-time one. Maybe someday, if I’m lucky and work hard at my craft, it can become my full-time job. In the meantime, I refuse to do one more thing, until I’ve had my chance to write.

Filed under: writing Tagged: making time, writer's life

Today, my daughter wore the writer’s uniform

Because she had no school, she stayed home all day. And didn’t wear pants.

I’m very annoyed with her. That’s my job, the not-wearing-of-pants.

And I’ve been doing very well with it, until she tried to take my spot. It’s one of the perks of the position, the not-wearing-of-pants, to compensate for the late nights, absent social life, and the weird looks from people who hear you write about werewolves and then sidle cautiously away from you.

Anyway, I must crush this attempt at usurpation. She’s gone to stay at a friend’s tonight, so I have plenty of time to plan. And tools. I have lots of tools.

I wonder if I could build a machine to Crazy Glue her pants onto her?

*sounds of drills and banging*

Filed under: Random Weirdness Tagged: crazy writer, megalomaniac, no pants

Tuesday Tickle: Pine Nuts and Honey

I’m grumpy tonight, so I went straight to Nathan and Vince for a pick-me-up.

Vince had made the bed and put out some clothes for him. He’d also cleaned up the mess Nathan’d made during his precipitous exit. Nathan pulled the clothes on, a pair of hiking shorts and a dark blue cotton t-shirt that was loose enough to hide his love handles and the slight paunch he’d developed lazing around on Vince’s couch, being fed almonds like some Roman squirrel emperor. He paused for a second before leaving the bedroom and looked down along his body.

I need to get a gym membership. But the smell of buckwheat pancakes snaked under the door, teasing his nose with its nutty goodness. I’ll look into it after breakfast.

OMG, I adore Nathan.

Filed under: Nutty Romances, Tuesday Tickle Tagged: mm romance, Pine Nuts and Honey, shifters, weresquirrel

I’m writing about werewolves, and people keep sending me squirrels

Although, I have to say, this one I totally agree with. It’s not so much that it’s cold (but it is!), it’s that the temperature keeps bouncing up and down from above freezing to “holy shit, I think the lava just froze!”. I do worry about the wild animals, as this kind of weather is really hard on them–they get wet during the warm weather and all the insulating snow disappears, then the temperature drops twenty or twenty-five degrees. I’m guessing we see a lot of skinny foxes and a lot fewer birds and small animals this summer. I’ve been setting feed out, but that only goes so far.

The werewolves are coming along nicely, or not nicely, depending on your point of view. There’s certainly some nasty psychological stuff going on, and I need to chat with someone with more skillz than I have to find out how I might do this certain thing I think I should do. My characters always seem to be conflicted, and they often come down just barely over the line into good-guy territory.

Wonder what that says about me?

Anyway, the progress meter is creeping up, and so is my daily word count. Hopefully, the trend continues. I have a lot of stories waiting for some love and some of them are getting impatient.

Filed under: writing Tagged: breaking writer's block, mm romance, werewolves, winter

Food coma is not a writer’s friend

Coworkers talked me into going out for supper tonight. Boy, was that a good idea/bad idea. Good, because it was absolutely delicious and I had to neither cook it nor clean it. Bad, because now I’m so full I could roll over like a winter bear and sleep until spring. Right now, I’m mainlining coffee trying to stay awake long enough to get my daily wordcount in.

On the bright side, I’m already almost at my January goal, so if I want to take a day off, I can. If I’m only thinking about making my wordcount.

However, there’s other issues to think about. I’m still behind on Bite Me, which also shows every sign of blowing past my length estimate. I have a considerably longer one planned for summer release, which I need to work at. There’s the sequel to Nuts About You, which will need to be ready for mid-summer. A short or two for this year’s Absolute Write fundraising anthologies. The revisions on Knight. And a couple of other semi-secret projects that are in the works.

Research and experience says that having a release every 3 months is the optimal schedule in the MM Romance genre. I’m already late on my story, and the one after will likely later still. I don’t have time to take a day off.

Kameron Hurley was right when she spoke about persistence, although she spoke about it on a macro scale, applying it to the career of writing. For me, it also fits on the micro scale, in the small daily additions that eventually add up to a completed manuscript. It’s not the long days that let me complete a story, but a certain persistence that means I add at least a little bit to something, every day.

If you write, or if you want to write, don’t let the lack of chunks of time stop you.

Filed under: writing Tagged: bit by bit, persistence

Squirrels and Cakes

This, from CakeWrecks, has perhaps salvaged what had started out to be an absolute shit day.

I hope that’s just the cat, and not a plot bunny grabbing at my ankle…

Filed under: Random Weirdness Tagged: mm romance, weresquirrels

Tuesday Tickle: Bite Me (Later)

Just a quick tickle tonight. I’m dead beat getting ready for another winter storm and the cat keeps trying to help me type. Now she’s sitting on the mouse.

Here’s a little bit from after Levi’s been changed. You can tell things kind of suck already:

Levi shook off the last shivers of his change back to human and stretched, feeling his muscles pop back into place with relief. He dug his clothes out of the hollow space under a fallen tree. It was a good place to keep them when he went running on his own, and a plastic bag kept the dirt off, so there wasn’t any evidence afterwards.

Pack politics got on his nerves. His solitary runs did more to settle him than the pack ones. He seemed to spend more time avoiding trouble than enjoying the woods and the freedom to jump and tear around amongst the trees when they all got together.

Clothes back on, he followed his own scent-trail back to the clearing where the pack was gathering. About half had already made the change, and were just waiting for Zachary to arrive and set them loose. Several of them looked up when he broke through the trees. A few actually moved away, putting some distance between them. Levi ignored it; no one likes to sit next to the kid that’s always in trouble, in case it rubs off. He found himself a spot near the edge of the clearing and sat down at the base of the tree to relax.

As usual, still pre editing. But the story’s getting there.

Now, time for bed.

Filed under: Bite Me Later, Tuesday Tickle Tagged: mm romance, werewolves

The Nut Job

Tonight I took the youngest to see The Nut Job.

We’d been looking forward to it–she, because she just likes going to movies, me, because I was hoping it would jog loose some good story fodder for Pine Nuts and Honey. As a pantser, I rarely have all the hijinks worked out at the start of the project, and I’m always looking for stuff to up the ante with.

Well, I won’t say I was disappointed. It was cute, there were some clever pop culture references, but that was about it. The main character was kind of unlikable and, because I didn’t care about him, I also didn’t care about his redemption in the end.

Most of the characters were actually caricatures. The dumb sidekick, the tough heroine, the ‘hero’ who is actually dumb as rock and a coward, fart jokes, burp jokes, the evil power-hungry leader who is out to get the main character, cop/donut jokes. The human villains were as 2-D as you could make them in a 3-D movie. Even the plot had nothing new, not even a new treatment of an old idea. (Yes, they did the tail-in-the-mousetrap gag. *rolleyes*)

I was reading one of Chuck Wendig’s writing books and I wish the guys who had written this had read it before they put the movie together. Because, to be honest, they broke every ‘rule’ that Chuck sets out in his books. In fact, the only character that caught me at all was a fat, red cardinal with a bad attitude. Since I know that they are cranky in real life, it was entertaining to watch them capture that personality in the character of the film. The fact that he resembled the red bird from Angry Birds upped the hilarity factor, and they actually played that one right, leaving the audience in a ‘did they or didn’t they’ situation, where you spent most of the movie wondering if the Angry Birds reference was an accident or not. (It wasn’t, and about 3/4 of the way through the movie, they stick him in a kind of slingshot and launch him through a window–almost the best part of the whole movie).

If you do go to see it, stay through the credits. The song Gangnam Style plays throughout and all the characters, plus a CG version of Psy, dance right through it. This was better than the movie.

But I’d wait for it to come out on video.

Filed under: Random Weirdness Tagged: bad movie, cgi squirrels, movie, nuts

I have the cutest assistant, but he’s very distracting

Meet Ares…

 

 

 

 

 

He likes to ‘help’ me write…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here he is, checking my grammar…

 

 

 

 

 

 

He won’t let me post the picture I took when he fell into my cleavage. Besides, it’s blurry.

**Ares is a Russian hamster. My daughter wouldn’t let me name him Rasputin.**

Filed under: Random Weirdness Tagged: hamsters, procrastination

Anyone feel like flashing the internet?

Not like that! But I adore you for thinking of it.

We’re talking flash fiction, and my critique group, The House of Manlove, will be blog hopping and flash-fictioning the internet for all we’re worth around Valentine’s. It’s kind of like one of Josh Lanyon’s codas, except we aren’t so well known or fabulously handsome.

In the giving spirit of Valentine’s, we decided to open it up to anyone who wants to join. The details are here, at Heloise West’s blog. I’m thinking about revisitng Robyn and Justin. What would you write about?

Sign up and flash us all!

Filed under: Random Weirdness, writing Tagged: blog hop, flash fiction, mm romance, The House of Manlove, Valentine's Day