Kestrel Casey's Blog, page 3

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

From now on, all book-related story posts will be free for the public on Patreon.

I’m making this change because I don’t want access to book universe stories to be contingent on your ability to pay. I sell plenty of books. I give away books to people who come to me and say they can’t afford them. This is the new extension of that practice.

You can find the first two here and here.

Writing Process Notes

I was talking to someone the other day about how I write, integrate life into writing, and vice versa, and she basically shamed me for not posting writing advice on my blog. I don’t really have any writing advice; what I do have is habits. Here are some of my habits.

The Idea Jar. The first iteration of this was a Hershey’s Cocoa tin with a slit cut in the top like a piggy bank. The current one is a Ball jar. Its purpose is to serve as a repository of all the ideas that don’t have a home yet. Sometimes, when I get stuck or feel like a piece of writing is bland, I’ll rummage around in there and see if anything fits. Recently, I ended up combining several into a description of a car a character was thinking of buying* and it worked out magnificently. Some things might never find a hole and make no sense out of context: A place that generations of spiders had discovered was a useless location to set up shop. Some of them are just quips: You can’t steal boyfriends, honey, they’re ambulatory. This is where all those little things from dreams go. The lines that come to you on long drives. The things your friends say that make you laugh and ask permission to put in a book. My favorite example of this last one comes from Midge: You’ve kicked my ass, ma’am! Asses off to you!
Phone Notes. Digital version of the Idea Jar. Easily accessible from home screen. Vital for turning observation into fiction, especially on road trips. Can be converted to analog later when you have paper scraps and post-its available, then stuffed into the Idea Jar.
Aleatoricism. The integration of chance into the creative process. Yes, sometimes I really do roll the dice. Sometimes I ask Twitter. Sometimes I click though Wikipedia until something hits me in the face. The exception to this is the question will the dog survive? The dog always lives. I flipped a coin one this once, and realized while it was in the air that I had made a mistake. This is my promise to readers; the dog always lives.
The Wall of Notes. Novels are big. Like, really big. And I have never once sat down to write a novel knowing everything that happened from beginning to The End. Sometimes, though, I know that about two-thirds of the way through a character is going to do something specific. This is why I prefer the wall of notes (or picture window of sticky notes, as I’m using now) to the notebook. I can leave gaps, or move things around. Digital cork board works just as well.
Theft. Using things from real life is really the best thing you can do to make fiction. Give your ethereal fluff some real bones. Write in a bumper sticker you saw in real life. Recycle that funny story about the guy at the bodega. Steal. If your friend says something great, steal that, too, but ask first. If only to be sure that they didn’t swipe it from someone else.

 

* Excerpt from a short story about Zelda:

“Look, hon, I’m happy to sell you this car, but you should know some things about it.”

The woman eyeballed her purple PT Cruiser.

“It’s basically a rebadged toaster. It purrs like a cockroach. It doesn’t start on full moons. The left turn signal goes on if you hit a pothole too hard, but the trunk only opens if you kick the bumper. And it smells like chihuahua. That’s never coming out.”

Zelda sighed a happy sigh and hugged the grape-popsicle hood. “She’s perfect.”

Now On Itchio!

Select works, starting with The Big Book of Post-Collapse Fun, will now be available on itchio. This move comes in response to a conversation about the future of book distribution and encouraging independent options.

To celebrate this new store, The Big Book of Post-Collapse Fun is on sale for just $1.50 US from now until Halloween.

 

Going To A Punk Show In Your Thirties: A Guide

Step One: Get dressed. Be mad at the respectability of your clothing. Get dressed again. Realize you have forgotten how to put the scene uniform together. Give up. Wear jeans and a black shirt. Add a belt for fun. Realize that this was all you ever did when you were young, too.

Step Two: Arrive an hour late, because you know from experience that this shit never starts on time. Be faintly nervous that it won’t be like it used to be. Pull into the parking lot, look around, and realize that it’s exactly the same. People are drinking in their cars.

Step Three: Find a place to sit down while the opening bands play: not because you’re too cool to show the opening acts love, but because you are old and tired and the idea of pogo dancing for three goddamn hours makes you nauseous now.

Step Four: Check out the people. Compare their ages to yours. Realize that this is a reunion show for a favorite band from your old scene and most people are your contemporaries. Sigh with relief that you aren’t the old weirdo yet.

Step Five: Between sets, go outside like you used to, even though you have quit smoking. Find outside two people vaping and a horde of other people standing around wondering why they’re outside, because they have also quit smoking.

Step Six: Hear a song permanently engraved on your teenage heart. Join the stampede back inside. Realize that one of the original band members who you KNOW you saw tonight is not playing with the band but standing against the wall looking somber. Wonder what happened.

Step Seven: Let yourself explode with joy. Sing loudly. Be transported through time. Dance. Realize three songs in that you need to sit down again or you’re going to faint. Push to the back. Sit down. Keep singing.

Step Eight: Hear a song that grabs you by your nostalgic bones. Somehow manage to get up again. Pogo for five seconds before settling down and tapping your foot, feeling suddenly like the action doesn’t matter because the feeling is the same.

Step Nine: Watch the original bass player come away from the wall and politely request the bass from his replacement. Tear up a little when your heart expands seeing him put it on.

Step Ten: Pour everything you have into dancing, singing, and celebrating the last song with all these old friends, including the ones you’ve never met. Be emptied. Glow. Get a patch from the merch table even though you have nothing to put it on now. Go home.

Step Eleven: Go to bed sore as hell and smelling like other people’s sweat. Be disinclined to care. Listen to your ears ring. Know both that you are too old for this, and that you will do it again until you die.

***

Thanks for this post to the River City Rebels for their return, a strange and wonderful event. Dan, you’ve still got it. In fact, the only way we know you’ve aged at all is that your ink has faded. Here’s to many more shows.

Take A Quirk, Leave A Quirk

I recently started a Twitter thread that took off and makes a great resource for writers, so I wanted to share it here. Read the replies! Save a cardboard character from their fate!

Introducing the

TAKE A QUIRK
LEAVE A QUIRK

thread.

Reply with a thing you habitually say or do that is unusual.

Read replies to borrow traits for fictional characters from real live people.

—

Patreon Is Live!

Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, and a number of other authors I respect immensely were talking today about using Patreon to fund some of the things that keep authors alive and working, like health insurance and a cushion in case of expensive disaster. They make a lot of sense. So I’ve started a Patreon. Patrons will get access to exclusive content, and it can also be used to ‘hire’ me as an editor.

Become a Patron Here.

Q&A on Periscope!

I will be doing a Q&A while wearing raccoon pajamas and probably playing ukulele or something at 9 PM EST on Wednesday.

Follow me on Periscope so you don’t miss it.

https://www.pscp.tv/WrrrdNrrrdGrrrl/follow

Every Day

Common advice tells you to write every day.

I never got the hang of it.

NaNoWriMo is coming soon, and then, I’ll write every day. I’ll live in one project (the last of the full Planetary Tarantella novels, An Epitaph For Everything Else) so completely that I’ll dream it and forget how to talk about anything else. But that’s for one month. The rest of the year, I tend to tinker with existing projects when I feel so moved. Occasionally a story idea hits and I write like lightning for a glorious moment in time. I think I’ve told you before that 99% of all writing advice is garbage, and I stand by that. You don’t have to write every day. I don’t feel like a failure for not writing every day.

You know what I do, though? I play with words every day. I read, I listen, I do crossword puzzles, I learn about the origins of phrases. I even talk to myself while I do other work to see if anything interesting comes out. These practices, I can recommend.

***

There’s a lot of life stuff going on for me right now, and someday soon I’ll tell you all about it, but I’m not ready. The short version is, I am in Vermont. New York City was wearing me thin. If you need me, I’ll be in the woods.

What It’s Like to Live With EDS (Because Clearly People Still Don’t Know)

Yesterday, I found out that a friend who shares my illness, a friend who was instrumental in my pursuit of diagnosis and proper treatment and who is a publicly visible advocate for disabled people, was being stalked by someone who accused them of “faking” and “has a friend who is writing an article about it.”

The “proof” that my friend is faking their illness? Sometimes they stand up to take selfies. Sometimes they go to see a band. They have tattoos even though EDS affects the skin.

In short, they do things that most people with EDS do, when they can. We can’t always, but when we can, we post about it online because this is the life we want people to see us living. Because we can’t tweet about our aches and dislocations and accessibility nightmares all day. No one would want to be friends if we did that, and we know it. So we cultivate carefully, and try to show as many “good days” as possible, even if a good day only lasts three minutes.

Sometimes I save pictures and stories instead of posting them right away. I wait for a day when I can’t leave my bed, so I’ll have something to talk about while I’m applying ice packs and heating pads and medications. The pressure to seem normal and fun is enormous. I am working with fewer materials than most.

If you go around trying to poke holes in people’s stories of medical journeys, thinking that you know what life is like for them and how it should look on the outside, I want you to imagine something for me.

Imagine you got a car for your eighteenth birthday.

The car looks good, but it has some problems. Sometimes the A/C quits. Sometimes it stalls. It pretty much always shudders and knocks, but you and your friends all get used to that. You hardly notice it anymore. Over time, though, you start to think that somebody rolled back the odometer on this beast; it seems to have more frequent and serious problems than your friends’ cars. When you take it into a mechanic, it’s never just the brake pads that need replacing, it’s always the discs. The mechanic seems a little baffled by your old-new car. They’re still happy to charge you, though.

You can’t afford a new car, and you can’t really afford to keep taking this one into the shop, either, so you go through a lot of duct tape and Bondo. You learn to do some work on it yourself, even though you don’t have all the tools. You spend a lot of time washing it and touching up paint to make it look presentable. Once in a while, someone compliments you on it, and you’re a little baffled because you know how it runs, but they don’t, so you smile and thank them.

At some point, you decide that even though your car is unreliable, you want to take a trip out of town. It breaks down in the driveway. You stay home and don’t mention your disappointment to anyone.

When you take it back to the mechanic, he says things are getting worse and will be even more expensive to fix now, but you don’t have a choice. You get the worst of it fixed. And still, it rattles and shakes and the driver’s side doors won’t lock and sometimes it breaks down for no reason.

Now imagine you can never get out of the car.

 

***

 

There is never a reason to interrogate a stranger about their disability.

Health Update

There’s a lot going on in this body.

It’s amazing to me that so many people get to go through the first thirty, forty, fifty years of their lives without thinking much about their meatsuit. It doesn’t interrupt them. It doesn’t stop them from going places. It doesn’t rebel when they eat perfectly normal things. Amazing. If you have that, please take a moment to appreciate it.

As for me, physical therapy has resulted in more injury than progress, I’m shedding weight again despite all efforts, and now it turns out I need fairly serious nose surgery.

(TW: Surgery, gross.)

My breathing has gotten worse over time, and recently I had a sinus infection so bad that it made my teeth ache. For most of my life, I have avoided going to a doctor about my nose. It’s a little damaged and a little funny-looking and a little dysfunctional, but I chalked it up to “has character” a long time ago and wasn’t interested in changing it. Unfortunately, it turns out it’s getting worse and needs changing.

I finally got it examined. I have a significantly deviated septum and also need something called a turbinectomy. As this will change the structure of my nose, I discussed it with two different doctors and the best plan is to have rhinoplasty done at the same time, effectively to reconstruct a nose that isn’t all caved in from scar tissue removal. That part won’t be covered by insurance. I won’t be able to take my usual regimen of painkillers in the weeks before surgery. Insurance won’t cover some of this.

So some time this year, I’ll be out of commission for a month for a very expensive surgery that will leave me with a mystery nose. Maybe I’ll breathe and sleep better. Maybe it will look “normal.” Maybe my body will repair itself well enough that this will actually be fixed.

Cross your fingers for me.