Blog – Kit Campbell Books

Pondering MileHiCon

Evening, squiders! I’m going mad but on we blindly stumble.

July books: 3/6 (Angel Fire East)

If you guys have been here for a while, you know that I attend MileHiCon every October and have for about a decade or so. It’s a lovely convention, specifically focused on science fiction and fantasy literature, and they let me do panels and feel like a real author for a weekend, and I’ve been on panels with Connie Willis and Carrie Vaughn and others, and once I defeated a Hugo-award-winning author in a writing contest.

I look forward to it every year.

But this year, I find myself… not motivated. They’ve moved the convention from about 20 minutes away to 40. Generally I stay at home and drive into the convention as convenient, but 40 minutes is a lot, which gives me less time at the convention itself merely from commuting. (It doesn’t behoove me to stay there. I have responsibilities at home that I need to take care of before/after convention stuff.)

Secondly, while it is always near Halloween, it is actually on top of Halloween this year. (Oct 31-Nov 2) Which means it’s almost not worth it to go that day at all. Generally the convention doesn’t start until about 3 in the afternoon, and I would need to come home to go trick or treating with the kids. And my daughter’s Cub Scout Pack is doing an overnight at a local zoo on Nov 1, which means that I will also have to leave early that day.

It’s getting to the point in the year where I need to coordinate an author table and sign up for which panels interest me. But I’m so tired. I know part of that is the job transition (and school starting up) and it’s possible that by the end of October I will be back to myself.

But I find myself wondering if, maybe, I should just take the year off.

MileHiCon is good for me, and I do enjoy it. I have friends I only see there, it helps keep the imposter syndrome quiet, I tend to get work done around everything else because I’m on my own, and I do sell books and generally do well for myself.

But none of that is going to fall apart if I take a year off. And perhaps the combination of farther drive + unfamiliar layout + bad weekend + stress is a good reason to do so.

And I can always perhaps go for a day if I’m feeling better and I have the time once the convention arrives.

But it feels weird–always does–to not take an opportunity that is available for me. And there is a part of me that says “suck it up, do as much as you can, and deal otherwise.”

What do you think, squider? Sit it out for one year? Suck it up? Lie on the floor and take a nap?

New Fear Unlocked

August books: 2/6 (The Tea Master and the Detective)

Well, squiders. The last few weeks have been rough, as we talked about on…Wednesday? But at least I’m mostly keeping up with my morning pages, so I’m getting some writing done. Right?

RIGHT??

Maybe not, apparently.

Like I suspect many writers, I am always looking to learn new things. I take occasional classes, watch webinars, read blogs, and subscribe to perhaps too many writing newsletters. I sign up for challenges and try new things and all of that madness.

ANYWAY one of the writing newsletters I subscribe to is run by Hope Clark, a mystery writer, and is called FundsForWriters. She talks about her own writing and what she’s up to, hosts guest posts from other writers, and lists contests, grants, and places you can submit your writing.

A few weeks ago she had a link to get a free copy of the Story Grid, which sounds familiar. Maybe I looked at it before? Maybe I got it confused with Story Engineering, which is the most useful writing book I’ve ever read.

(I’ve done some research because I definitely took pictures of the book in question I was thinking about, and yes, I’ve already read The Story Grid once. Ha. It was a LOT of work but it did seem like some of the process would be useful.

I read the book four years ago and have not implemented any of it.)

Anyway, I clicked the link for the free copy, so of course now I am on the newsletter list, because this is how these things go.

And the very first email he sent out was like, 5 Things That Will Make You a Worse Writer or something along those lines.

And do you know what #3 or so was?

WRITING MORE.

His point was that if you are writing just to write without getting feedback and trying to fix the things you’re doing wrong, you’re just going to ingrain the things you are doing wrong as habit.

Which, yes, fair. I can see that.

So now I’m super paranoid about the morning pages. “What terrible habits am I ingraining?” I ask myself every time I break my notebook open. “Am I training myself to be boring? Predictable?”

Which, like, I’ve been writing for a long time. In general I know what my weaknesses are, and also that those weaknesses are almost all fixable in the revision phase. (The pacing was a major issue, and I have taken steps to fix that at this point.) I am published and my stuff is generally well-received. I am a competent writer by an objective standpoint.

But, still, in some corner of my mind, there’s a voice whispering, “You currently are competent, but maybe you’re training yourself to be worse.”

Anything’s possible, I suppose.

But I do find myself in a weird place. I like doing the morning pages. And in this time of upheaval, it’s nice getting some writing done even if it’s nothing serious. (I’m over halfway through the notebook, which is a bit exciting in of itself. I’ve never filled up a notebook before. I may read through it, when it’s full, and see if there’s anything worth finishing and polishing.) But now there is that voice in the back of my head, wondering if I’m doing more damage than good.

And, of course, logically, the point of said email was to sell whatever class or book or what have you, and adding that seed of doubt is supposed to get you to buy whatever it is. I know that.

Maybe it’s just because things are so weird in general that it’s taken up permanent residence in my head.

Sigh.

Anyway, squiders, how are you?

Odds and Ends

Good grief, squiders, I don’t mean to be abandoning you for a WHOLE WEEK. This job transition has been a lot, and to top it off, school is starting right in the middle of it.

(I told my old job I’d work remotely 5-8 hours a week to help with transition and training and doing the stuff that only I do while they replace me–or don’t–and this was a Mistake. It’s rough going from one job immediately to the next, and it feels like the people at my old job aren’t quite sure what to do with me, for whatever reason. I mean, it’s been like three days.)

I’m super behind on all my not-work things. I need to get my den meetings scheduled for the year (it’s our Arrow of Light year so we only have six months to earn rank before the girls cross over into Scouts BSA) but I’m still working through the requirements, and writing/anything creative has essentially fallen into the depths of “maybe someday.”

I did finish going through all my idea files (last Thursday, and yet…) so I have no excuse to not go ahead and do the outlining portion of those stories aside from mental fatigue. Fingers crossed that I can get to that soon. Maybe tomorrow? I’m hoping at least Saturday if nothing else.

Also having some issues keeping up with the critique marathon (doing my critiques). There’s one more week after this, but I think I may quit after this week. I’ve gotten to The End this week though I feel a bit bad about peacing out once I’ve gotten my stuff done, but I think it will be best for my mental health.

I’ve managed to get a few queries out this month, but not my normal goal of 5, and it’s like pulling teeth.

While these last few weeks (last month?) have sucked from an anxiety and Getting Things Done point of view, I do think things will be better in the long run. I do like my new job, and it feels more comfortable in many ways than my old one. I can walk to work, which should help my health in general (though it was 95 degrees when I walked home today). It will take a few weeks for school to get into its routine (and the kids to start their after school activities) and for me to work through doing both jobs, but then I should have a structure to my day that allows things to get done.

Positive thoughts, squiders. Positive thoughts.

How are you doing? Things treating you well?

Why is Everything So Violent These Days?

Morning, squiders. I did my training for my new job yesterday, and I have one week left in-person at my old job (I’m going to support them for a further month part-time and remotely). Weird times.

August book goal: 6 (currently zero)

(And the goal shall remain 6 until we catch back up.)

I didn’t actually get to go to the coffee shop on Friday, but I did have some coffee at the Cub Scout camp my youngest and I went to over the weekend, and there is literally no difference between having coffee and not having coffee. So yay, I guess.

Anyway.

Why is it so hard these days to find a genre television show that isn’t ungodly violent? We recently started watching Fallout, as we’ve played at least some of Fallouts 1-4 (and spent like 100+ hours on Fallout 3), and Holy Moly. I spent half the first episode with my hands over my eyes.

I only made it through two seasons of Game of Thrones because it was too violent for me (and a lot of that violence was sexual violence, which I decided I just didn’t need in my life).

Spouse wants to watch Last of Us but we played those games too and honestly the games (ESPECIALLY Last of Us 2) were almost too much for me, so I imagine the show will only be worse.

Star Trek is the only saving grace right now.

This seems to be a trend right now in science fiction and fantasy shows. Gritty, violent. Like we have to show how awful the world is/could be or we can’t be taken seriously.

Why? Aren’t things terrible enough with having to go through that sort of thing in our “escapist” media? Why can’t we have hope and optimism and your average video game levels of gore?

Like, we’re playing Final Fantasy XVI right now. (Beautiful game, story is making less and less sense as it goes on.) We’re fighting things all the time, but aside from a little bit of blood in the cutscenes (flecks on the main characters after a big battle, or if someone gets run through or some such) there’s hardly any.

Although, maybe that’s part of it. Final Fantasy XVI is obviously a video game. Its characters are stylized and nowhere near the uncanny valley territory that some newer games get into. Maybe the same level of blood that is in the game would freak me out when translated to a live action television show.

I don’t know. It’s just wearying. I don’t want to watch people get killed or their limbs shot off or their heads bashed in.

Any recommendations for recent scifi/fantasy shows that aren’t so focused on violence? Thanks, squiders.

I Haven’t Had Coffee in Four Days

July books: Still 4/6, alas

Afternoon, squiders. I haven’t had coffee in four days.

And you know what? It has changed absolutely nothing.

(I had some pain around my lower sternum, and I thought it was stomach pain, and I’ve run into issues with coffee before. But it turns out it is NOT my stomach. My sternum hurts. Maybe I ran into something.)

I’m immune to caffeine, so having coffee or not doesn’t make it easier or harder to get going for the day. I just like coffee.

Arguably, I am addicted to coffee (as we discussed in February of last year) (and since that post we’ve acquired a Nespresso which is Highly Dangerous). I like it, it’s comforting, and I associate it with writing even though more often than not these days I drink it while I am not writing.

I also associate it with writing with friends, although I have no more writing friends these days. I had a group I met with once a week up until my oldest was about one, and then I switched to a discussion group instead, but both of those groups are dead at this point.

It is hard to find people to just write with, these days. At least for me. I know there are some out there, but the times are never good. They all meet in the evenings or on the weekends, and I’ve got to do kid or family stuff in that time frame. Nobody wants to write at 1 pm on Mondays.

But seriously…I would have expected some withdrawal symptoms or something. I maybe had a headache on Tuesday, but, also, I’ve got a bit of a cold, so maybe it’s just related to that. No change in energy levels or anything.

At this point it’s a bit of experiment. Do I miss coffee? Absolutely. But it is not as much as an urge as I would have thought. Like, I’m not going through my day craving it.

I do think I will go to my favorite coffee shop tomorrow and get my favorite drink, which is called a Florentine. (I’ve done a web search, and there’s fifty million variations called a “Florentine,” but at my coffee shop it’s coffee with a bit of milk and chocolate syrup. So you get that chocolate fix without all the sugar/calories a mocha gives you.) See if there are negative aftereffects.

But it is good to know that if it came down to it, I could give up coffee.

How do you feel about coffee, squiders?

Still in Upheaval Mode

July books: 4/6 (Reign of the Fallen)

Good evening, squiders. My major stressors are essentially taken care of, but I’m still having a lot of anxiety as this is an era of change. (I’m switching jobs, and I have now taken care of telling my old job and finalizing the details on the new job.) I’m sure everything will be fine once I have settled into my new role but for now everything is a bit…weird.

This is really the first time I’ve turned in notice at a job with the full two weeks and all that. I’ve done intra-company transfers, and I’ve straight out quit. And I do like my current job, and my coworkers, so there is a lingering sadness to the whole thing.

Creating through upheaval is doable, but you’ve got to make changes in your expectations. In 2020, when my spouse was going through cancer treatments (and lockdown and all that jazz), writing fiction just was not working. So I worked on nonfiction (and created the Writers’ Motivation Series) until I was ready to move back to fiction, and even then, I wrote a lot of horror for the next two years, which I fully believe was a trauma response.

So, yeah, everything is a little uncertain right now. Things are weird. My current coworkers and I have had a couple of awkward conversations. I don’t know how long it will take me to settle into my new job, so there’s some anxiety about that.

So, while I am not doing anything especially taxing right now anyway (as it turns out the critique marathon is the 12-week one, not the 8-week one), I need to remember to give myself grace for the next few weeks. Let myself focus on lower energy things. More joy, less stress.

I’ve still got to do my critiques for the marathon, but it’s not as intensive as it has been in the past as there are fewer people participating this time.

But other than that, I think we shall read, or game (House Flipper WAS saved in the cloud, all is fine), or draw and paint, and slowly work through my story ideas in the hopes of organizing ideas into stories, and continue on my morning pages.

And if all that really happens is reading and movies, well, that will be okay, too.

What are your go-to activities when life is uncertain, squiders?

Back in Business

Good afternoon, squiders, I am writing to you on my laptop, which has been wiped and re-populated (and, while I have not yet re-opened House Flipper to see the state of things, it does say it’s up to date in the cloud, so I have high hopes).

(The resolution is a little off where it was before, but all the numbers are right, so who even knows.)

I’ve also gotten new headphones that I bought from Prime Day, over the ear ones with noise cancelling, and thus far they seem to be working great, with the added benefit that the chaos the kids are up to in the background is dampened to an ignorable level.

So I’m feeling pretty good about that, at least, even though I have also somehow managed to make it so my spouse’s laptop stopped talking to the monitor, and my bluetooth mouse no longer seems to work on bluetooth mode (it also has a dongle). Technology and I do not always get along, and I guess we’re just in one of those phases.

Also much less stressed in general than I was for the last week.

I very much almost said that now there’s nothing to stop me, and I can hopefully get a little bit of creative work done every day, and maybe I can still get all my goals for the month done. BUT that feels a little risky, so instead we shall be cautiously optimistic.

I talked to my original writing group, The Spork Room, yesterday, and I’m going to put together some sort of accountability system. When TSR was young, in the late aughts, we all shared snippets of our stories all the time, and it was a great creative environment because people were always writing. But we were all young, some people still in high school, and now we’re old and have jobs and kids and other distractions that make the constant creativity of young people harder to maintain.

But I would like something like the old days, where we post snippets and it feels like we’re writing together as a community again, and others also expressed interest, so we’ll see how that goes.

We are either in the last week of the critique marathon, or I’ve messed up and there’s a whole ‘nother month. One of the critique marathons goes 12 weeks, and it probably is the summer one. I’ll know Monday if/when Week 9 gets posted on the forums. If we’ve got another month on the critique marathon, then I’ll need to push back the start of the World’s Edge revision planning as well.

That’s a problem for next week, though, and we will adapt as necessary.

Hope your week is ending on a high note, squider!

Chaos and Mayhem

I have been having a very strange week, squiders. Also a very stressful week. Something that is not easy in general is proving to be harder than anticipated, which helps nothing.

BUT. I do have a new refrigerator as of yesterday. And it came two weeks earlier than expected. (Our last one started leaking for no foreseeable reason about…a month ago? Six weeks ago? It took us three days to get it to stop AFTER we’d turned the water off to it. And we discovered it was leaking because there was water in the basement. Hopefully it had not been there for very long.)

Shopping for refrigerators was also very stressful because there are fifteen million different refrigerators and something wrong with all of them. Our old one was 21 years old and with all the new ones it seems like maybe you get 10 years out of them. Oh, and it was $3000. On sale.

(So it must have been a month, because now I remember we bought it for a 4th of July sale.)

(I mean, if a major appliance is going to die, during a sale is conceivably the best possible time.)

Anyway, so the refrigerator crisis is over, for now, and we just have the current crisis, which I am not going to talk about because we’re smack dab in the middle of it, but hopefully it will be resolved by the end of the day tomorrow, and then I can worry about other things, like the backpacking trip my spouse wants us all to go on this weekend. (My camp sleeping pad is not holding air and I do not know if I have the spoons to look for leaks in the next 48 hours.)

(I’m trying to get it downgraded to, like, eight mile hike.)

My laptop messed up an update Monday morning and proceeded to dig itself further into the FUBAR hole with each step I took to fix it (“oh, do you want to roll back the update? well, that didn’t work, would you like to restore to a backup? That worked–just kidding, it didn’t.”), so now I think we are at the point where I have to wipe it and reinstall everything. (Trying to just reinstall Windows has failed multiple times.) I’ve hijacked my spouse’s for the near future, but it did eat my whole Monday, and of course I had such plans to be productive.

So, on the writing front, well. I’ve done my critiques for the critique marathon. I had started actually going through my story ideas for outlining purposes, but now I’ve lost my place and I’m going to have to start over. Also, while I can get into my OneDrive here, my Google Drive refuses to install which means I have to run everything through the browser, which I hate.

Trying to give myself grace. It’s been an upheavily last week, and my stress levels have been awful, and maybe we’re just not going to get any writing done. And that’s just got to be okay.

Reading is happening but some of it has not been books (I read a volume of manga, and am most of the way through a graphic novel that I maybe have already read once? Some of it seems familiar. I am going through the older things on my Amazon wishlist because they’ve been there forever and just consuming them at this point), though I am in the middle of three books, and I could conceivably finish them in the next week. Maybe.

Gaming is NOT happening because Steam got eaten with the rest of the laptop. I did buy myself some new games for when it is fixed because I feel like I deserve a treat. The only thing I’m really worried about is House Flipper, but I think my progress there is saved on the Cloud (fingers crossed).

I finished my New Mexico sketchbook earlier in the month but have not gone back to it since then.

Anyway, squiders, it’s been madness. I hope you’re faring better in your endeavors!

Unplanned Books

Hey ho, squiders. Madness! And so forth.

(Still 3/6 on the July books.)

I don’t know about you, squiders, but whenever I go someplace for a few days for a more relaxing sort of vacation, and there’s books sitting around, I tend to read them.

I always take books with me. But there’s something about a book that can only be read while you are in that particular location that is very interesting to me.

I suspect this is at least somewhat related to my childhood. I was a voracious reader, and while I got hooked on science fiction and fantasy fairly early, I also tended to read whatever I could get my hands on between library visits. My dad’s book that had every Marx brothers movie told in stills and bits of dialogue. Art books. Things my mother told me absolutely to not read, like her Interview with the Vampire and Dick Francis mystery books.

At the library, too, I enjoyed the thrill of the hunt. I would wander the stacks, looking for the scifi/fantasy sticker, and then I would take home anything that caught my interest. (These often turned out to be middle books in series, but that never deterred me. I did once read the last book of a series though, and I was so mad about how it ended that I’ve never read anything else by that author, though in general I would probably like her stuff.) I did have some favorite books and series that I would go for, but I always seemed to come home with more.

(While I do not tend to wander the library stacks anymore, I do still end up with unplanned books when I go in. I always check the new books, and any special carousels the librarians have set up.)

When we were younger, my spouse’s family had a beach cottage up in Michigan that we would go to for a week or so. There was never any set itinerary for these trips, though I would often cook dinner a few nights a week. Sometimes we’d go sit on the beach or wander over to the lighthouse, or hike up the dunes, or get out the tandem bike and meander through the backroads outside the cottage community. We’d go into town for dinner every now and then. But in general, we were left to our own devices.

There were books throughout the cottage. I’d scour them to see if there were new ones, and would generally get through a few. There was one, written by L. Frank Baum under a pseudonym that was autobiographically about the cottage community, that I read a few times.

Last week, we went and stayed at a mountain resort for a few days–same sort of idea, just chill and occasionally hike somewhere–and I found an old book from 1923 called The Owls’ House. I like to read old books occasionally. They’re so very different from modern novels, and as a writer it is interesting to see how structure, plot, and viewpoint has changed over the years.

(I did have a writing friend tell me once that you shouldn’t read any book older than 5 years, because doing so would train you for writing to the current market, which is probably a good idea. He is a bestselling fantasy author now, though he wasn’t at the time of the conversation. I just hate it.)

My reading tastes have always been fairly eclectic, so reading a single genre in a single time period drives me up the wall.

And, quite frankly, I am probably going to continue to read any old book I find sitting around if it sounds interesting and I have time to read it before I have to leave wherever I am.

How do you find books to read, squider? Do you ever just pick up a random book and give it a read?

In My Pinterest Era

July books: 3/6 (Native Star, The Owls’ House, and A Posse of Princesses)

Hey, squiders, sorry! Didn’t mean to disappear for two weeks!

I wish I could say that I have gotten SO much done in that time, but I sure haven’t.

(Where was I, even? Hold on.)

I’d like to say that I’ve spent the last two weeks brainstorming on Broken Mirrors, and I have solved all its myriad of problems, and am ready to outline a new version of the story.

Alas.

What I have done is made Pinterest boards for the three things I’m supposed to be outlining (Broken Mirrors; a sequel novel to Drifting, which is my story in the Under Her Protection anthology; and a series of short stories in the same world of the Trilogy/World’s Edge).

As I’ve mentioned before, I keep two different idea files–a text one, and my Pinterest boards. In Pinterest I have general boards (for scenery, characters, prompts, ideas, vibes), and I also have story specific boards that I tend to keep private.

I’ve been focusing on Broken Mirrors, but it’s been frustrating. I’m not finding pins that are helping me solve any of my problems, and Pinterest keeps giving me ATLA pins to look at which are very interesting and completely unhelpful. I haven’t even touched the Drifting board (the setting for Drifting and its unnamed sequel is a large family house where any corner can potentially be a portal for elsewhere, and there is so much potential there) and I have put some pins on the shorts board which were actually sparking ideas, but I haven’t gone back to them because of the Broken Mirrors issue.

(If I ever figure out the story, I’m going to change the title. It only vaguely makes sense in current context, and if we don’t keep that plotline–and basically everything is on the chopping block–it will make no sense whatsoever.)

Pinterest board for Broken Mirrors — Part of the Broken Mirrors board–as you can see, it’s almost all characters cuz that’s all I’ve got

Pinterest obviously isn’t working to fix my problems, but I haven’t had time to go farther afield for story ideas. Pinterest is on my phone so I can do it in the car on the way to taking kids to and from various camps, or in a slow moment while cooking dinner, or wherever, whereas I haven’t had time to sit and think for any amount of time in the last two weeks.

(I think I’ve missed my morning pages two or three times this month as well.)

But maybe I should at least abandon it and work on the Drifting/Shorts boards, and maybe something will spark while I’m working on something else.

(Part of the problem, I think, is that because Broken Mirrors is so broken, and basically any and all changes are on the table, that it’s hard to find good search terms for what I want, because who knows what I want.)

Anyway, squiders, I hope your July is going well, and I shall do my best to keep up my normal posting schedule from here on out.

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Books by Kit Campbell