Typing With Wet Paws: Summer’s On Edition
Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. Even though the calendar says summer does not officially start until later in the month (I am only two, so I don’t know a lot about calendars) for Aunt Anna and the other humans in my family, this counts as summer. It is Aunt Anna’s least favorite season, but our basecamp, as Aunt Anna calls it, has air conditioning, so the summer really doesn’t bother her or Uncle Rheuben at all. They have also found that they share a desk really, really well. If I am feeling especially sproingy, we can all three share the same workspace. That’s what I call efficient use of space.
Even though summer is usually Aunt Anna’s worst time when it comes to productivity, she had a super good writing day yesterday. It all started with hauling herself over to the computer with the promise that if she could write some notes on the stinkybad movie in Drama King, and then send it to Aunt Melva, then she could play Sims. Aunt Anna is super easy to bribe with Sims, especially since she had to reinstall stuff when the latest patch broke pretty much everything (whoops) and she had to start fresh. Surprisingly, she did not mind that at all.
[image error]Aunt Anna says making this stuff helps her think
Starting from scratch was actually kind of fun, and she got to use one of the premade families to test out some new gameplay features, fiddle with custom content, and maybe a mod or two. If you think that sounds kind of like writing fan fiction, you are not wrong. Aunt Anna sees that, too. As a matter of fact, Aunt Anna had Sims stuff open in the background while she read a lot of Wikipedia articles about movies (stinkybad or otherwise) to know what kind of information goes into such a thing, laughed a lot while using name generators to get over herself already, slap down a placeholder and move forward, and refresh herself on the recipe for a romantic comedy movie, plus all the ways one could go wrong.
In the middle of doing all that, she also had Scapple open. It is kind of like a whiteboard on the computer. If you don’t know what Scapple is, click here to read about it on Ginny Frost‘s Apps For Writers blog. (Miss Ginny also writes contemporary romance for The Wild Rose Press, so check out her books while you’re over there.) While Aunt Anna had the seeds of a scene on her mind, she might as well get a few things down where she would be able to easily access them.
That’s when something clicked open, and a whole bunch of stuff came out of her head and onto the screen. It’s kind of messy, mixing tenses and Aunt Melva (who has a PhD in English) may have a headache from switching from script form (many of Aunt Anna’s first-first drafts of dialogue are in script form when they fall out of her head) to dialogue and narration but then again she knows how Aunt Anna works and still wants to write books with her anyway, so there’s that.
That stuff is now in Aunt Melva’s hands, so Aunt Anna is now turning her hand to writing a faux Wikipedia article for a different fictional movie, and getting ready to do the same thing with Her Last First Kiss, but there won’t be any movie stuff in there, because there were no movies in 1784. Probably no YouTube mouse videos, either. It was the dark ages.
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Speaking of mice, Aunt Anna and Aunt Linda got me some! Uncle Rheuben stayed behind to give me pets while the other humans went for groceries, and they found themselves in the cat toy section. Ever since my red dot died, I have taken to going to the corner near the door and giving big kitty eyes, to indicate that I really need a new red dot. Well, the store didn’t have any (the nerve!) but they did have a package of three catnip mice. Aunt Anna figured they’d see how I liked them, so she threw me one as soon as she got back, and I LOVE IT. I call them all “Prey.” When I bring Prey to a human, the human is to throw Prey, which I will then chase and CATCH, and then I have no idea what comes next, but a nap comes after that, and the whole thing starts over again.
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Before I fur-get (hah, see what I did there?) Aunt Anna was at Buried Under Romance this past Saturday, with a topic that comes to a lot of readers’ minds this time of year (or so I have heard. Again, I’m two.) and that’s weddings. Are they really needed in cotemporary romance? If that is a topic that interests you, read about it here, and pull up a chair in the comments to chime in with your opinion. Aunt Anna already talks to herself enough. Trust me on this one. Part two will be about historical romance, and probably will go up Saturday but might be Sunday because she just got done being sick and is running a little behind.
Okay, I think that’s it for now. No Goodreads update, because mostly Aunt Anna read a little bit of stuff and fell asleep and then her loans expired, so she is starting new books now. Maybe I will start telling you when she starts reading a book and then what happened to it. First, though, this Prey isn’t going to chase itself.
Headbonks!
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