How are you, squider? I’ve been relatively productive from a writing standpoint this week (obviously not a reading one, ha), so that’s lovely.
We had a snow day on Wednesday and I couldn’t get to the cards, so we’re running a bit late. (Also I took the pics at, like, 10pm last night so apologies on the weird lighting.)
It’s come to my attention that I will have 12 days in June to myself. Like, yes, I have to work and all that jazz, but the rest of the family will be off on various adventures and I will be by myself. For the first time in years and years and honestly maybe ever.
(Actually, no, I take that back, there were periods right after college where my spouse would be gone for weeks at a time for work.)
My instinct is to overplan the heck out of those days. That class on music theory I’ve been thinking about taking? A brand new exercise routine? A SCIENCE FICTION SERIES?
Alternately, I’m terrified that I will fall into my worst habits on my own. As I’ve gotten older it’s become more and more apparent that I am probably some flavor of neurodivergent that got missed because I got straight As in school, and I often joke that my family is my executive functioning, but it’s not wrong. My spouse makes sure I go to bed at a reasonable time, and chores and cooking and whatnot have to be done to make sure my children have a functional childhood. On my own I tend to slip into weird hyperfixations and bad sleeping patterns (case in point: my spouse and oldest are away on a campout this weekend, and youngest and I were up until 2 am).
(God, I am so tired. Also I meant to do this blog post on Wednesday.)
But there has to be a happy medium where I don’t get sucked into some hyperfixation for eight hours a day and can do some things I’ve been meaning to get around to. Just got to figure out how to do it.
I’m also going to a writing retreat May 28-30 (it goes through the 31st, but I have concert tickets on the night of the 30th and will have to duck out early). New location, so I don’t know exactly how it will go. But I could in theory do set-up for a big project I start those weeks in June.
Here are possibilities that I have come up with for June, thus far:
Take said music theory class
Spend more time working out (with, like, more of a plan than I’m doing right now)
Eat things that the rest of the family won’t
Start (and maybe complete?) a writing project of some sort
I feel like I had more but I’ve forgotten them at this point. Oh well.
The hope is, though, if I plan out my time, I shall stick-ish to the plan.
Anyway, on to the story. No planning has gone into this either:
~*~*~*~*~
~*~*~*~
I’m vaguely reminded of a podcast I used to listen to called Tanis. Each episode was full of creepy and occult story bits, but when you stepped out of the episode and thought about it, it didn’t make any sense. Not in a “things are mysterious and aren’t supposed to be perceived by humanity” sort of way, but more of a “we’re making this up as we go and have no internal consistency” sort of way.
So maybe at some point I should figure out where I’m going, but that time has yet to come.
(Also, I listened to four seasons of Tanis, so obviously it worked well enough.)
April books: Still 2/4 (in the middle of like five books, why do I do this)
Edited that science fiction short I wrote earlier in the year and sent it out to a market, and have been outlining the short stories from my class. But on to whatever these shenanigans are going to turn out to be:
(imagine time passing here)
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Hm, I wonder if I should include the sketches for this in my art goals.
I finished my interconnected short stories class! It’s live on SkillShare here: https://skl.sh/48HfbY3
Hooray! It’s done! That said, I see SkillShare has, yet again, messed with teacher payments. It used to be that you got a share based on the number of minutes watched per month, but now apparently you have to have at least 75 minutes watched a month before you get anything. So, like, in February I only had 73 minutes watched, and so I got nothing. This seems…scammy. Like, they’re getting my content for free without paying me for it if I don’t meet some arbitrary limit?
This is on top of some shenanigans from a couple of years ago where if you’re not getting enough engagement with a class (people posting comments, projects) they hide the class from new people searching. As I always say, you can’t control other people, so now you’ve got the double whammy of not getting paid because you’re not getting the minutes, and not being able to get found to be watched because they’ve hidden your class.
(At least they stopped deleting classes, as far as I can tell.)
I don’t spend a ton of time on the SkillShare stuff. It’s supposed to be a background thing, a bit of extra income on the side, and I don’t have a huge desire to use up my writing time on marketing it. That’s on me, for sure, choices and all that, but it does feel like it’s purposefully hard to make the platform work if you’re not dedicated to being a top performer. And I wonder if top performers are still making the money they were a few years ago, or if their income has also gone down due to corporate shenanigans.
(Every so often I consider taking my classes to another platform, but none of them work quite the same, and it is easy on the backend on SkillShare. But I spend time on my classes and not getting paid when they’re making money off of them is all kinds of BS, so I shall have to look again and make some decisions. Not right now, though. Summer, probably.)
In other corporate shenanigans, Draft2Digital has announced that they’re going to start charging $12 a year maintenance fees for any author not earning at least $100/annually on the platform. D2D bought out Smashwords and is an indie book distribution system that almost everyone uses. In theory they’re doing it to try and limit the amount of AI slop being put out through them, but once again it’s really only going to hurt indie authors who are already not doing well. I’m not sure I make $100 a year through them. The majority of my sales come through Amazon, and most of D2D’s markets are tiny without much of a user base. Most of the sales I do make through there are to various library systems.
I’ve done some math because why not. If an ebook costs $2.99, you’d have to sell ~56 of them through D2D to hit the minimum threshold to not have to pay the fee. A quick search tells me 90% of indie books sell less than 100 copies. (That may include the AI slop books. I’m not sure.) And I suspect most other indie authors also sell 99% of their books through Amazon, so essentially everyone except those people doing extremely well or those purposefully marketing outside Amazon (and doing extremely well) is going to have to pay this maintenance fee.
Smashwords was completely free aside from their cut of the sales for, like, fifteen years, just saying.
And I know the AI slop is a problem, and I don’t know what the solution to it is, but it does seem like penalizing those not doing well isn’t going to help it.
Whew. That was a lot of Thoughts.
In other good news, I had a story accepted by an anthology! I turned in the contract and edits yesterday and I’m looking forward to seeing the final product.
Next steps moving forward is to actually write the short stories I outlined for my class. I also had some writing friends read the scifi short I wrote at the beginning of the year and provide feedback, so I’m going to do a few edits on that and then send it out as well.
Not a lot of the querying front (I also haven’t sent out queries in a few months due to the Scouting drama) but I have been talking to my SFWA mentor, who has been lovely and very helpful to talk to. If nothing else, it’s good to bounce my feelings off of someone who knows what they’re doing.
Anyway, hope you’re doing well, squider, and I’ll see you later in the week!
Well, squiders, I have finished recording and editing my videos for my SkillShare class. This proved more annoying than necessary as I’ve been using ClipChamp for editing, and apparently it decided to eat the last 20-30 seconds of each of my videos, meaning I had to re-record whole sections in some cases. So now I just need to get the class ready to go in SkillShare and make it live (and hope SkillShare doesn’t find something to be grumpy about) and then the class part is done, and I can focus on writing the stories and doing what I will. It will be nice to see the other end of the videos, which are always the worst part.
I also had a story accepted to an anthology, so that’s fun!
I’m also starting to think ahead. I’ve got my writing retreat at the end of May, and then I’ll have a few weeks all to myself in June as the rest of my family will be at various summer camps. So, in theory, I will have a large block of potential writing time to perhaps start (and get through) a new project. The gears, they are a-turning.
Did more of my card story. Do I know where it is going? I do not.
As I mentioned…recently…at work I was donated a stack of weird yellow cards with a hole in the bottom. (I did ask various peoples, and the older woman who helps me on Tuesdays told me they were most likely rolodex dividers, as normal rolodex cards would have lines on them for the information.)
(I then realized that my kids probably had no idea what a rolodex even was, as even I have only seen like, two, in my whole life, and they were near the beginning. And I did ask, and yes, they had no idea.)
ANYWAY, I had this idea that maybe I would use said cards in some sort of story, and this week, I’ve started. Except I realized that it would be weird for everyone in the story to be using the same weird, archaic possibly-rolodex divider cards. In the same bag, I was also given purple index cards that are the size of normal index cards, were they cut in half.
So, without further adieu, whatever this is going to end up being:
~*~*~*~*~
So I guess we’ll see where this goes.
Have a good weekend, squiders, and I’ll see you next week.
I had grand plans to get my videos for my class edited over the past two days. Part of the issue is still ongoing drama and mental burnout, but some of it is technology related.
When I was younger, most notably when I was in college, I carried my laptop everywhere with me, and I would break it out whenever I could to get some writing done. On the bus, in my fraternity’s offices between classes, at the local tea shop, sometimes even if I got to class early. A lot of authors–especially ones in busy times of life–swear by doing a little whenever you can, stealing ten minutes here, fifteen minutes here.
I don’t operate that way as much nowadays, but I would like to do it more. Twenty minutes between the end of work and when I need to pick up the first child from school, fifteen minutes while dinner is in the oven, ten minutes while I wait for my youngest to get dressed in the morning.
It’s a nice idea, but I run into complications, and it seems to be timed both to when I’m trying to steal a few minutes, or when I, in theory, have several hours in which to work.
And all these complications are technology based.
My laptop of twenty years ago at college was great. Open it, turn it on, off you go. But it feels like modern technology has somehow made things worse.
Here is a rundown of some of issues I have run into over the last few months when I’ve sat down to work:
Laptop has forgotten how to turn on and needs a complete refresh (which sometimes takes hours, and then you have to reinstall everything)
Laptop has forgotten the pin I use to log into it (today)
Laptop cannot figure out how to connect to a wifi network it has connected to hundreds of times
Laptop has decided that the menus will not load in Windows itself
Laptop has decided to drop network for no apparent reason (as evidenced by other devices continuing to have no problem)
Laptop was last connected to the dock and has forgotten how to operate independently
Laptop was last not connected to the dock and has forgotten how to connect to the keyboard/mouse and/or monitor
Laptop has decided it does not like this particular power supply
Of course, in the old days everything was on the laptop itself and now everything is in the Cloud, which is good in some ways but frustrating as heck if we’re playing “What Internet?”
If I have fifteen minutes to work and I have to spend ten of them fighting with some dumb “our technology has gotten too smart for its own good” problem, then I cannot actually steal ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there.
(Also if the laptop has forgotten how to turn on and needs a reset, then we’re looking at hours of work before the laptop is useable again, so forget it.)
I mean, yes, storing things on the Cloud is nice! I haven’t lost anything to not being backed up in years! But I do wish I could just reliably turn the computer on and get going immediately without any shenanigans. And maybe it is specifically this laptop, and this is all a sign that perhaps I should save up to get a new one. (Please tell me if you are having these same problems.)
All this to say that I had time, and I did not get as far as I wanted.
How are you doing, squiders? Do you have a laptop you like and that works reliably?
Happy Wednesday, squiders. I have managed to drag myself away from BTS’s 2.0 music video to write you today’s blog post.
Like many avid readers, I have more books than I may ever be able to read. In addition to that, I maintain two digital TBR (to be read) lists: one on Goodreads, and one on my library system. Periodically I will go through these lists and pick out books, usually once a month or so, because I do try to not be in the middle of too many books, and also not to have more books out from the library than I can actually read in a time period.
(I picked up two books from the library about an hour ago, one from my library TBR and one by my SFWA mentor.)
(It is interesting how it’s easier for me to select a book from a digital TBR and request it from the library instead of looking at my book shelves and choosing books I own to read. I wonder why that is.)
Last month I picked out The Deck of Omens from my Goodreads TBR list. This is the sequel to The Devouring Gray (which I do actually own), which I would classify as YA dark fantasy or perhaps horror. According to Goodreads I read the first book in Sept of 2020 and shelved the sequel.
Squiders, I am not great with series. I read a lot of first books and decide not to move forward. I almost never move directly from one book to the next, even when I am interested in continuing on. (Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom earlier this year was an exception, as is Armageddon’s Children and The Elves of Cintra, which I have started.) Often with series I am interested in, I shelve the second book and come to it some time later, which is obviously what I did here.
Until last month, when I pulled The Deck of Omens out of my TBR, I’d forgotten that there was a sequel.
Now, obviously, reading series like I do is kind of dumb. But in my defense, I’m generally pretty good about remembering what was happening and being able to jump back into the world and the story.
But almost six years is apparently the limit. The Deck of Omens was well-written and the author left plenty of reminders, but even though I enjoyed the book and the story, I felt like I was missing something the whole way through. (Also I noticed after the fact that one character did not have a viewpoint in this book though I believe he did in the first book. Like, he was still there, but not as a viewpoint character, which was a very interesting choice and kudos for that.)
So don’t be me, squiders. Don’t leave sequels for years and years.
Will I learn a lesson from this?
I mean, probably not. But there’s always a chance.
Have a good week, squiders, and try not to fall for too many April Fools things. (Though I’ve seen, like, none this year?)
March Books: 4/5? (Armageddon’s Children, obviously)
Howdy, squiders. How’s life?
If you’re new around here, or even if you’re not, here’s a quick recap. The Wishsong of Shannara was the book that introduced me to epic fantasy back when I was a kid, and seeing how I’m still hanging out in the epic fantasy genre decades later, it was definitely a formative book for me. So at some point I decided that I’m going to read through the whole series in chronological order. Armageddon’s Children (2006) is the fourth novel, coming in after the Word and the Void trilogy, which was originally written as a separate universe and then retroactively added into the Shannara storyline.
I’ve been reading about a book a year, but I suspect that will have to change. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Armageddon’s Children and the other two books of the Genesis of Shannara trilogy are the bridge between the urban fantasy Word and Void trilogy–where there are demons and faerie creatures, and the Lady of the Word (good) and the Void (evil) vying for control of humanity and the world–and the more traditional high fantasy books in the Shannara series, many of which date from the late 70s through the early 90s. You’re welcome to go back and read my thoughts on those three books (search “Shannara” in the sidebar), but the Word and Void books are quieter, darker books that, aside from demon attacks and whatnot, explore issues such as grief, addiction, homelessness, and others. They take place in more or less modern day, in the real world.
At the end of Angel Fire East, I found myself hard-pressed to see how we were going to make the transition, but I was optimistic. The early Shannara books were some of my favorites as a kid. How much of that is nostalgia? No idea! I guess we’re figure that out when we get there.
So, having read Armageddon’s Children, how am I feeling?
Squiders, I am ANNOYED.
Spoilers, potentially, but the book is 20 years old, so do with it what you will.
I have no idea why the decision to add the Word and the Void books into the Shannara timeline was made. Their magic systems are completely different, and there is not a logical way to go from Point A to Point B. I got the impression from the Shannara books that there wasn’t magic before the apocalypse that ended everything, and that all the different races that exist had originally come from humans.
I suspect it came down the marketing. Maybe the Word and the Void books didn’t sell very well on their own. I have no idea. It’s not like Terry Brooks didn’t also have other multi-book fantasy series.
First of all, the structure of the book is aggravating. You can barely go five pages without getting a massive backstory dump about someone. You can only get away with this sort of crap when you’re 20 books into a best-selling series. There’s head-hopping and POV issues that I’d never be able to get away with. And most people’s backstories are very similar–they had relatively good and safe childhoods until their parent or parental figure was killed by demons or what have you. Repetitive.
There are also a lot of viewpoint characters, but that aligns with earlier Shannara books so is to be expected. We’ve got two Knights of Word, Logan Tom and Angel Perez, several members of a street gang called the Ghosts, and demons occasionally (including our best friend from the last two Word and the Void books). We jump kind of willy nilly among all of them, and honestly I kept forgetting about the Knights because we don’t see them all that often. The world here is still very much that of the Word and the Void, just 80-100 years later. Humanity has fallen, demons are everywhere, things are sad, boo hoo.
And THEN about halfway though, THERE ARE ELVES.
The same elves! From later! With the Ellcrys and elfstones and everything! THEY’VE BEEN HERE THE WHOLE TIME.
The transition from gritty, dark urban fantasy to the normal Shannara elves was so badly done I had to put the book down for a minute.
So, what, we couldn‘t figure out how to transition from Point A to B? The elves have just always existed? Squiders, I am so let down. It’s like we didn’t even try to figure anything out.
On one hand, I can see the reasoning. The Word and Void series has established faerie creatures as being real, from the sylvans that guard the forest to tatterdemalions that are created out of the memories of dead children. There are literal demons. So why not elves? The modern fantasy elf from Shannara and LOTR has its roots in the Tuatha De Danann from Irish mythology and the elves that are said to live in Iceland and other nordic countries. So it’s not a huge stretch to be like, oh, hey, there’s other faerie creatures, so why not elves?
But on the other hand, one, the elves just…live in the forest. Not like a magic, through the veil, otherworld forest, just the literal forest of the Columbia river basin. And two, from a worldbuilding standpoint, you have the Ohmsfords from the original Shannara trilogy who are part elf, so if the elves are a separate species and always have been, how are you interbreeding a thousand years in the future or whatever it is?
(Kit, you might say, this is fantasy, why are you worrying about interbreeding? After I wrote the first draft of Book 1, I gave it to some friends to read. At that time my main fantasy race had green blood, because they were inspired by Star Trek’s Vulcans–who also have green blood–and because they had green skin and it was a motif, okay? But I also had humans in the story, good ol’ red-blooded humans. And one of my friends said, Kit, how do you have two sentient species on the same planet whose evolutionary paths are so different and distant that they don’t even have the same circulatory mechanism? That’s unrealistic.
And arguably I could have been like IT’S MAGIC, LISA but she was right. And now everyone has red blood, which has nice symbolic connotations.
Anyway, my point is that you can get away with a lot in fantasy but you have to be internally consistent, and especially now that we have rooted the beginning of the series in the real world, with real world mechanisms, you’ve got to stick with them, for goodness’s sake.)
(Also, is it just the one set of elves in the Columbia River basin? How? Why would there not be other elves in other forests? I have questions.)
Anyway, I’m frustrated that the best we could come up with to transition magic systems is that the elves have been there the whole time, and they just are what they are. Missed opportunity to do something really cool with evolution and magic.
Now, to get back to the once a year thing. Each of the Word and the Void books were self-contained. This ended on every cliffhanger it could. Nothing was resolved. Nothing was accomplished, arguably. If I leave the series and meander off for another year, I am going to forget everything that is happening.
So, alas, I guess we’ll be on to The Elves of Cintra sooner rather than later.
Read the Genesis of Shannara books, squider? How do you feel about the elves? (Do the books get better?)
(I’m also most of the way through Armageddon’s Children, which is, as I was warned, pretty dang awful. I may need to decompress with something else before I read any more.)
Last week I was on a cruise for spring break, which was lovely. All the stress and anxiety I’ve been suffering from for the last month vanished, and I was able to live in the moment, which is actually pretty rare for me. My internal monologue runs pretty constantly, and often it cycles around whatever is bothering me. There were a number of times while we were on the trip that I realized my internal voice was silent.
Of course, it couldn’t last. I had a vague hope that I’d be able to take this as a learning moment and integrate some of this silence into my normal life, but the stress came knocking pretty much as quickly as my phone reconnected to the Internet.
(Probably the lesson is to hide the phone for hours at a time. Unfortunately, we live in a society that will not wait for you if you don’t get back in touch fast enough.)
Along with the bad, though, I had a couple of pleasant surprises waiting for me.
The first was that I was accepted into SFWA’s mentorship program. This is a 3-month program that pairs you with an experienced author and I have been trying to get in for years. (SFWA is the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Association.) My mentor has already reached out, and I’m hopeful that this will be a rewarding experience.
The second is that I got a 5-star review on Hallowed Hill from Readers’ Favorite, and it is actually one of the most thoughtful reviews I’ve ever received.
Reviewed by S. Mathur for Readers’ Favorite
Hallowed Hill by Kit Campbell is a suitably creepy, entertaining, gripping tale set in a remote prep school in Vermont. This book is a real treat for fans of the horror genre, with all the classic elements present: a sinister landscape with ominous trees, a haunted mansion, a neglected cemetery, a sad ghost, and a heroine who is quite alone in the world. Newly-orphaned Martina Torsney wins a scholarship to the elite Greyson Preparatory Academy, with all expenses covered. The thing is, she did not apply for it, nor did anyone else on her behalf. Once there, the mystery deepens, as it seems none of the other scholarship students before her graduated from the school.
There are other mysteries as well; someone trashes Martie’s room and classroom, making sure she gets the blame. There are flickering lights, doors that lock themselves, and cryptic messages left for Martie in notes and on mirrors. The tension builds slowly and surely. The characters are perfectly defined; the rich kids with varying attitudes toward a presumably poor scholarship student, the teachers, good, bad, and creepy, and Martie herself, who must find the courage she didn’t know she had to face inexplicable terrors. Kit Campbell tells the tale with style and conviction, and crafts a very satisfying, unexpected, and genre-defying ending. Hallowed Hill is one of those books that will send chills down your spine, keep you up way past your usual bedtime, and leave you approaching mirrors with caution. Highly recommended.
Interesting that I got two bits of good news after months of silence, but I’ll take it! Cautiously optimistic that this is a sign of good change in the near future.
Plan moving forward here is to finish up my class (hopefully before April) and work on writing the short stories associated with that.
