Blog – Page 2 – Kit Campbell Books

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.

A Month of Morning Pages

June Books: 7/9 (Haunting Ecologies)

Alas, but hey, much better than being nine books behind! We’ll set a goal of six books for July and see how we do.

So, if you guys remember a month ago, I came home from my retreat on June 1 and decided I was going to try a morning pages exercise out of a writing book called Writing Down the Bones. Unlike other times I’ve seen morning pages brought up, this was more of a writing practice than a journaling practice, and hence it appealed to me more.

(I am not much of a journaler. Or am I? I guess I have maintained this blog for almost fifteen years…)

I said I’d do it for a month, and we’d see where we were.

Well, the month is up. And, squider, I really enjoy the practice.

I’ve been sitting down at some point during the day (I’d like to say that I’m getting up and doing it first thing, but that has not been consistently true. A few days I did it past 10 pm at night) and writing for 10 minutes straight. Sometimes just whatever popped into my head, sometimes off of prompts, sometimes poking at existing stories and working on worldbuilding or plot issues.

I chose a notebook off my shelf of notebooks (I have a Problem), and on the cover was a note to my mother. This had apparently been a gift at some point, and I’d inherited it when she downsized her writing stuff (the Writing Down the Bones book also used to be hers). But it was kind of depressing. The note said that the giver couldn’t wait to read all the stories my mother would write in said notebook.

My mother gave up writing about fifteen years ago, the constant sting of rejection finally getting her down enough. I started writing because my mother wrote; she’s always been a major influence in my own writing practice.

So in some ways, it feels good to be filling the notebook with stories, like it was originally intended. But I do think about my mother giving up her dream periodically as well.

(I have asked her whether or not she’d like to get back into it, but she always says no.)

It’s nice, just to write to write, with no care of whether the story is good or original or makes any sort of sense. It really is just practice. (Though there is a story or two that might actually be worth poking at further.)

So I’m going to keep it up. I did miss two days this month, but that’s practically nothing in the great scheme of consistency. But I do need to figure out a time. The problem with trying to do it first thing in the morning is that I don’t tend to get up earlier than the rest of the family, so I need to get myself and everyone else ready for whatever for the day (and oftentimes drive somebody somewhere). This month has proven that this is not a good time frame for me. But I’m not seeing a clear time that would be better either.

For example, I wrote during my lunch break at work a handful of times, but today, for example, I went out to lunch with my coworkers and so couldn’t do any of my own projects at that time. I’ve also written while making dinner, but it only works if dinner needs to simmer for at least 10 minutes at a go. Something that needs regular attention doesn’t give me enough room. And I could do it right when I get home from work, except I tend to be tired and it’s hard to get right on other things without a break.

I also worry about setting a time later in the day in terms of actually getting it done. Right now, it’s kind of on my mind all the time, so when I come across an available time frame, no matter when it is, it gets done. If I don’t start thinking about it until after work or whenever, then there’s less time for me to get around to it.

So I guess for right now I’ll stumble along.

See you later, squiders!

More Broken Mirrors, and Other Musings

Howdy, squiders, did you miss me? I wasn’t gone, I’ve just been sitting on this post for two days.

Oh, yeah.

June books: 6/9 (The Poison Season and The Productivity Project)

Can we read three books in the next three days? Maybe! I’m in the middle of four, so it’s not completely unreasonable (though I’m less than half way through all four, so).

I finished reading through the draft of Broken Mirrors that I’d found yesterday and oof. It’s kind of a mess. Kudos to me for putting it out into the world, I guess. The confidence of youth.

Anyway, now that we’ve looked at what Broken Mirrors is, it’s time to brainstorm what it could be. I don’t think we need to keep much if any of the original plot, and hence I find myself at a crossroad.

The original idea for BM was a witch and a princess who were best friends. (In one of my writing communities at the time, there was a user with the name princesswitch, and that’s where the spark came from.)

BM has a LOT of viewpoints (five, I think), which is more than any other novel I’ve ever written, and unfortunately a couple of those are only once or twice and mostly serve to infodump various plot points. I definitely don’t need to keep some of those (and arguably, maybe not even one of the characters, depending on where we land).

The problem now is, if I don’t keep the original plotline (and I don’t think I do, it’s very silly, and badly executed), I could do…whatever. Whatever I want.

The main character is Winnie, who I told you about on Tuesday, I believe, and her familiar Igor. Right now Kayleigh, the princess, is the other major viewpoint, but she is actually quite useless throughout the story. Kayleigh’s brother William serves as a third viewpoint, and then King Matthias (Kayleigh’s father) and Queen Gaea (the antagonist) also have a chapter here and there.

Winnie’s not going anywhere. I love Winnie.

BUT I could make William the second main viewpoint and focus on a romance subplot. Or I could keep the princess/witch best friend angle, keep Kayleigh as a second main viewpoint (but do some major character work on her), and stay closer to the original plotline as it exists today.

I’ve thought a bit about doing viewpoints for all three of them, but I can’t think of any examples where you have two viewpoints with a romance subplot plus a “third wheel” viewpoint. I’ve seen multiple viewpoint works where a single character out of however many is going through a romance, but you don’t normally get both sides at the same time (or everyone has some sort of romance arc going).

(If you know of examples, please let me know!)

I really don’t know which way I want to go. I did find the notes I made about a potential sequel, but the storyline in there is different than what I was remembering, so I don’t know how helpful they’re going to be. I may just need to go through my idea files and pick out things that seem appropriate, and then throw things at the wall to see what sticks.

Or, I could, I don’t know, go do something else. This is supposed to be just one of the things I’m poking while waiting for the World’s Edge feedback.

(I did do my quarterly RaTs on Thursday, and I finished my New Mexico sketch journal last night, so things are happening elsewhere. But not quickly.)

(Oh, and SkillShare is driving me up the wall again, so once again I find myself wondering if it’s worth it to continue creating content there instead of focusing on other things, or if I should pull the classes off SkillShare and put them somewhere else. YouTube maybe? I’m obviously not inspired to make video content on a regular basis, so maybe I should just give up on the whole thing. Retire the classes and my SkillShare account.)

(Or maybe I need to focus more on it, so it’s hitting the algorithms better, but that doesn’t sound like fun and I don’t know that I’m much motivated.)

(At least they didn’t delete the classes this time.)

Does anyone have any experience with SkillShare or online classes in general? Thoughts and/or tips?

Anyway. General plan is to keep on keeping on. Brainstorm where we can. Summer is a nightmare.

Hope you’re having a lovely weekend, squider!

Delving In

Evening, squiders. Last week, with your lovely help (it’s amazing what I can work through as I write things out here on the blog), I decided to leave off the World’s Edge revision until the critique marathon is over and use it like a beta reader, and then come back to the revision in August.

In the meantime, I made a list of things to do:

Outline at least 5 short stories that take place in the same world as the Trilogy and World’s Edge
Write said shorts
Finish the SkillShare class I started in October
Potentially start a new SkillShare class (or consider their new digital products and 1-on-1 options)
Catch up on my trip sketchbook
Outline a rewrite of Broken Mirrors
Outline the sequel to Drifting

And because it’s the hardest thing on this list, I promptly decided to work on Broken Mirrors.

We talked briefly about BM before I started the World’s Edge revision, as it is the only other YA fantasy project currently floating around in my backlog. I wrote BM a million years ago (like, 2006 or 2007) and I actually queried it back in the 2011-2012 time frame (with some requests) and entered some contests with it (which I think is why I stopped querying, because the contest feedback was pretty brutal).

It has a lot of issues, the biggest of which is that it’s supposed to be YA, but has the complexity and tone of a MG novel. Also, it just doesn’t make sense in some places. There’s incomplete worldbuilding, I wrote it before I started outlining so some things come out of nowhere, and things along those lines. Pacing issues out the wazoo. I’m reading back through it right now, and I’m five chapters in and have already found two chapters that are pacing disasters.

Basically, though, it’s the story of two best friends, a witch and a princess, who are not supposed to be friends at all. There are a lot of things I like about this story, though! Winnie, the witch, is one of my all-time favorite main characters (Kayleigh, the princess, is a tad annoying, though that is perhaps to be expected), and I love her familiar, Igor, who is a cockatiel. Why? Why not?

Also her Great Aunt Gertrude lives in a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest.

BM has a lot of nods to fairy tales (and also the Wizard of Oz, as one of Winnie’s relatives was melted), and I’m not sure I can maintain that if I move it toward more of a YA tone. For some reason, you don’t really get humorous/silly fantasy in the YA sphere. In the MG sphere, absolutely, and again in the adult sphere. Not sure why things for teenagers need to be so serious.

So there’s a lot of work to be done.

How do we keep the fairy tale references but tone them for YA?
How do we add complexity into the story so it’s appropriate for a YA audience (I planned a sequel, and I think I might be able to grab the majority of that and put it into this story instead, which will help)
The worldbuilding is piecemeal and doesn’t make sense, and finalizing that (why are the royal families tied to their lands? how are they? why do some people have magic and how does it work?) will be hugely beneficial toward not only the worldbuilding issues but the plot issues.

Right now I’m reading through the current draft (except I’m not actually sure it is, because I had to pull it out of my email) and making notes, and then the idea is to see if I can’t brainstorm some answers into place. And outline it.

But not write it. We cannot continue to switch novel projects every two months. That way lies madness, and nothing will ever get done.

Should we work on one of the easier projects first? Probably!

But will we?

Apparently not.

Hope your Tuesday is going well! Mine is weirdly chill.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Hey ho, squiders. I did sit down and do some thinking, and it doesn’t make sense to continue with the World’s Edge revision in its current state. So I’m going to treat the critique marathon (and my in-person critique group) like beta readers (and, to be fair, I never had anyone beta this story) and gather data, and start on a more in-depth revision in, say, August.

I’m frustrated with myself, but it doesn’t make sense to do a half-ass revision only to do a full revision later. So here we are.

But that does make two failed revision attempts for the year, which is. Well. I’m annoyed at myself and my poor planning.

That does mean that my writing time can be rerouted to something else for the next six-ish weeks (I mean, I still need to do my critiques for the marathon, but other than that), and I think I’m going to focus on my side goals. I’m not going to go into another revision for another project because that’s madness.

And my side goals haven’t really been getting done, so.

I may also outline a few new projects which we may or may not get to writing.

But let’s not talk about that anymore.

Let’s talk about…personalized license plates.

These are fairly common here in Colorado. Not sure about other states/countries, but I see at least a few each day, and they’re always a little distracting because most of them you have to decipher.

For example, yesterday I saw one that said “4E4EVER.” ??? And also “LITTLE1” on a decidedly midsized SUV. Both a mystery.

When I was 16-ish, my dad got me a car (he did not buy me a car, but he did drive to my grandmother’s house in Washington state to get her old car), and as part of that he bought me a new aftermarket stereo system with a CD drive (the original one had a cassette player) and a personalized plate, which I think was, like, $60 or something. Or maybe now they’re $60. I don’t know.

I was (and still am, to some extent) super into Star Trek as a kid/teenager, and I very much wanted a Star Trek license plate. Something like “NCC1701” or “WERBORG” or along those lines. My father hated all my ideas. We fought about this for weeks, and in the end, he put in a submission for what he wanted, which was “KITSKAR.”

Ew. I still hate it. The k for car. The putting of my name on my car, which is not necessarily safe when you are a teenage girl. The complete lack of anything clever about it.

And, squider, do you know what?

The plates never came.

And I don’t know if I just never told my dad, or what, but we never did anything about it. Which was great, because I would have hated those plates forever, and I really, really liked the car. It was an ancient Ford Escort that I affectionately named Bob (because it had the personality of a grouchy old man, and he hated my friend Eli, which is still funny to this day).

Bob, wherever you are, I hope you are still kicking ass and taking names.

Oh, and that stereo system my dad bought me? Shorted out the electrical systems in the car. I would carry a box of fuses around with me to replace them when they invariably blew, which was in shorter and shorter increments each time.

Poor Dad. 0 for 2.

Do you have personalized license plates where you live, squider? Any you particularly like? Able to help me interpret the ones I saw yesterday?

Flaily Flaily Flail

June Books: Still 4/9 (oh no)

Hey ho, squiders, how are you? It is a million degrees here and only getting hotter, god I hate summer and also climate change.

Still not making much progress on my revision, and feeling very wishy washy about the whole thing. I did sit and ponder for a bit this afternoon about why this might be, and I suspect it’s something like I really enjoyed it when I read through it, and then running it through the critique gauntlet has unleashed a whole bunch of issues I didn’t see, and now I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

And, I bet you, the reason why a whole bunch of issues I didn’t see is coming up is because I didn’t do my normal revision prep because I felt really good about its state.

(I went and looked at what revision prep I did, and it was basically my plot sentence and a list of problems I noted when reading, almost all of which are continuity errors.)

The revision prep is A Lot. I feel like, for Book 1, it took me almost six months to get through. It involves systematically going through all aspects of the story–characters, worldbuilding, items, theme, pacing–as well as looking at each individual scene and determining what its point is, if it’s important to the story, what the conflict is, etc.–and then re-outlining based on all the crap you’ve gone through and looked at.

It’s very thorough, and it takes a hot minute, but I don’t tend to need to do another revision after the fact (aside from line edits).

So, of course, it’s a large undertaking, and sometimes it can be very…overwhelming to get into. And I think, with starting the revision process with my scifi horror and finding myself not really feeling the story, the thought of going through it again (especially when it felt like the story was working!) was not appealing and so I just…didn’t.

But what do I do now? Is it worth it to continue doing what I’m doing when I’m getting mixed feedback from my in-person group and the critique marathon? If I stop I will probably miss the rest of the marathon, which is not ideal, but getting feedback on a draft that needs work may not be the best use of anyone’s time either.

I mean, arguably, continuing with the current draft will put additional eyes on the problems, which may mean that when I do the full revision it will be more complete.

But even by that logic, the revision I have been doing, which involves fixing continuity errors, cleaning up filtering and word overuse, and working on the pacing, is basically for naught. I should maybe just run the existing draft through the marathon and give up on the current rewrite.

And then I work on the revision prep while getting feedback on the first draft? But does that make sense? Some of the prep may change based on feedback.

So run the first draft through the critique marathon/critique group and…do something else?

Good grief.

At least the morning pages are fun.

How are you, squider? Getting things done in a less frustrating manner than some of us, I hope.

Morning Pages Twelve Days In (and More Floundering)

June books: 4/9

(The Ministry of Time and The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen)

It’s Friday, squiders. Unlike many people, I am not a Yay Weekend person; weekends tend to be stuffed full of activities and not terribly relaxing, so the approach of the weekend does not fill me with relief.

Alas.

This has been the first week both kids have been out of school for the summer and home (last week my oldest was at Sea Base and my youngest had a day camp) and it has been trying for all involved. That may be why we’re not getting anywhere on the revision, because I honestly haven’t had time to sit down and think about anything. Or think, in general.

Do flounders flounder? They’re weirdly flat.

Sorry, stray thought.

(You know what’s a really big flatfish? Halibut. They’re, like, freakishly large.)

(I saw one try to eat a diver at an aquarium last summer and now they haunt my nightmares.)

(I suspect halibut are filter feeders and can’t actually do any damage, but seeing an eight-foot fish lunge at a diver is still frightening.)

(Sorry. I suspect I have ADHD and that is part of all my problems in life.)

ANYWAY.

I took the kids to the coffee shop with me today, which turned out to be a terrible idea, because the oldest’s computers (yes, multiple) wouldn’t connect to the Internet which was A Problem that I had to deal with, and the youngest was playing a wedding design game and kept wanting my input.

Every so often I have to take the kids to the coffee shop with me in the hopes that they are finally old enough to work on their own while I work. We are not there yet. But it could happen at any point.

And then my laptop’s battery died, and I had gotten nothing done, so here we are. Not revising.

I did do my morning pages though. Not at the coffee shop, once I got home. At like 2 in the afternoon. In general the morning pages are great! I’m really enjoying the exercise of just writing for 10 minutes on whatever.

The morning part continues to be a misnomer. I think of the 12 days I’ve been working on them (I didn’t get them done on the 10th, which we shall just ignore), only 3 days have been first thing in the morning, which is kind of the point–to do them before anything else.

It’s a combo of things, from not being a morning person to trying to get everyone coordinated first thing and running out of time. Oftentimes I’m getting up and rushing out and about, and don’t have time to sit down and do anything, let alone write.

The logical thing would be to figure out a time when I can reliably do them, but I’m not sure that exists. So maybe just doing them whenever I get to them is the right option. Except, like Tuesday, that might mean that they occasionally get skipped. (I went to the Coldplay concert, so, you know, trade-offs.)

I would like to do them first thing. Start the day off on a good foot, tap into early morning creativity before the weight of the day catches up with you. But it may not be, and I don’t feel like they’re harder to do at other times. I actually really liked what I had this afternoon.

The experiment continues. I suppose I might get my life together and start doing them first thing consistently. Weirder things have happened.

Hope your week and projects are going well! See you next week!