Blog – Page 5 – Kit Campbell Books

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!

Floundering

Books Read for June: 2/9

(The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 and Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old)

(Still in the middle of 3 books, and doing that thing where I’m reading a little bit of all of them as opposed to just reading one through. This is ill-advised.)

(Also I have a few other books out from the library and the urge to start one or both is unbearable but thus far we persevere.)

I have not gotten a lot done on my revision, Squiders.

I felt so good after my writing retreat! But the first person who did the critique marathon last week threw off my groove, and then I had my in-person critique on Sunday which also went…confusingly.

Like, the story is working for some people and not for others. About half and half.

And, of course, you can’t please everybody and you will always have people who aren’t jiving with what you’re doing, but it’s weird to have it be so even in the critique stage, because my experience has been that the critiquers tend to be more uniform in their feedback. Things are working, or they aren’t.

Like, with my in-person group, which is currently me and two other people, one of the guys loved the level of detail I went into in Chapter 4, but it was too deep for the other one.

Do I even it out to make it more attractive to the person who didn’t gel with the detail to the deterrent of the person who enjoyed it as is?

And questions along those lines. So far I’m running into this sort of issue with both Cpt 1 and Cpt 4, and I don’t know what to do about them because it’s hard to tell if they’re actually issues or not.

(The critique marathon has Cpt 4 this week, so maybe that will clarify at least that issue? Or not. Slim pickings on the critique marathon as well. Right now there’s only 3 of us and it’s normally between 5 and 8 people. So if those two people continue to be divided I continue to be confused.)

So part of me wants to go back and fix things, but I don’t have clear direction on what needs fixing, and part of me wants to continue ahead (I need Cpt 5 and 6 revised before next week) but it feels weird continuing forward when there’s potential changes to be made.

And so I am doing nothing.

One of the many books I’m in the middle of is a productivity book. I listened to the author on a podcast and liked what he was saying about work/life balance and thought I might give his book to my spouse, but for some reason I picked up his first book instead of the newest one, and reading it I see why his latest book is about work/life balance, because this other one is like a recipe on how to burn out. I think I’m continuing to read out of morbid curiosity.

But he mentions that it’s much easier to get things done if you know your next steps, and that’s where the process is breaking down for me. The next step isn’t clear. Do I go back and poke Cpt 1? Do I move on to Cpt 5? Do I give up on writing and turn to octopus husbandry?

Unclear.

See you Thursday, squiders, where I shall hopefully have made some progress somewhere.

Morning Pages Four Days In (Also Submission is a Drag and Comparison is the Theft of Joy)

Afternoon, squiders. I have written in all sorts of new places this week. (Well, done writing-adjacent things. Submitted queries. Wrote this and Tuesday’s blog posts. Did my critiques for the marathon. No actual writing.)

Right now I am at a library that I occasionally visited as a kid (it was the main branch of the library system my home library was in, so sometimes we had to travel afield) which is a bit weird, as I haven’t been here in decades, but it’s apparently five minutes from my office. There is something that looks suspiciously like microfiche or a card catalog in the back corner, and I am going to have to go look at it for my own curiosity here in a minute.

But I’ve also tried two new coffee shops. (Also near work, because my youngest is in camp around there and it doesn’t make sense to go home and then come back between when I get off and when camp gets out.) Generally I work at the same coffee shop, but I think I may actually work better in new places. Wonder why.

ANYWAY.

On Tuesday we talked about the idea of morning pages. We’re on day 4 of that, and we’ve already failed the “morning” part of the idea. Yesterday I did them at, like, 10 pm, because I’d slept extremely poorly the night before and didn’t get up early enough to do them before we had to leave. Today I think I was catching up on sleep, so again I didn’t get up early enough. (I did them here at the library.)

I’ve been working through the same scene for the past three days, which I also suspect is Not the Point, but also these are for me and I should do with them what I want, but I did want to, you know, experiment. Focus on specific things such as tone or mood. Maybe try some poetry because I’m awful at it unless it’s like, a limerick.

So I am annoyed that I am falling into my same shenanigans. But the month is still early, and on we persevere.

Speaking of persevering, God, submission can be a drag. Also critique. I thought I’d dodged my “why did I become a writer again?” depression when the retreat went so well, but I had two queries rejected within hours yesterday, and the one critique I got on the marathon thus far hated my first chapters even though my in-person group had liked them.

(I revised between the two, so now I’m wondering if I ruined something. Also a bad feeling. I sent the revised chapter back to the in-person group with the note that if they have the time/inclination could they please tell me if I changed something for the worse or if this is a subjective thing. We’re meeting on Sunday anyway.)

I wonder if it ever gets easier. I’ve been writing and submitting for a long time, so in general I don’t spiral about rejections, but every now and then they still hit hard. But I wonder if there’s a point where you’re successful enough that you can just brush it off all the time.

But on we go, writing our silly little worlds with our silly little characters. The writing itself is still fun, despite everything else.

I hope you have a lovely weekend, squider, and I’ll see you next week!

Writing Retreat Aftermath, Revision Thoughts, and Morning Pages

Happy Tuesday, squiders! I can’t believe it’s already June. Holy crapola.

(Also, I did my book tracker for the month this morning, and I need to read nine books this month to be on track, so that’s a problem.)

(I am in the middle of five, though, which is helping nothing.)

My retreat was great! None of the negative feelings I was worried about. I didn’t feel excluded socially (and was actually present for the beginning of the Lore, which was fun) and I strengthened some connections from last year and made some new friends.

I only went to one workshop, which was on setting (historically one of my weaker areas) but it was actually re-affirming, because I was already doing everything she recommended in World’s Edge.

Oh, and I got 13.5K words into the World’s Edge revision, which puts me about halfway through Chapter 4.

(Chapter 4 is more of a mess than I’d originally noted. Holly Lisle had a metaphor she used in one of her classes. Something like, as a writer, you need to do an elephant’s worth of research, but when you write you only put in a berry’s worth at a time. Because readers can’t eat an elephant, but they can eat berries. Or something more eloquent than that.

Anyway, Chapter 4 is definitely more on the elephant side. There’s a section at the end that I think has to come out–the MC never uses what she learns again, and it’s mostly an excuse to get her in a particular place, but she’s in said place earlier in the chapter. So I’ve got to move the plot important stuff to the earlier time and cut the end.

Also it’s a mess in terms of character movement. I’ve mentioned before that the captain’s cabin keeps moving between two decks in the original draft, and there’s a whole lot of movement in Cpt 4 that doesn’t make sense if the captain’s cabin goes into the right spot. I may have to draw out the new movement so I can make sure it makes sense.)

So the revision is on! I did procrastinate it for a good 12 hours of the retreat (I got there about 3 pm on Thursday, and probably didn’t actually start writing until 10:30 am on Friday) during which I went for a walk, read part of a book, chatted with other people, but I think maybe I may have needed to, mentally, after birthdays and the kids being out of school and Memorial Day and everything that was shoved into last week. But I feel good about what I got done, and the critique marathon started yesterday, so I can get feedback almost immediately on whether or not things are working.

And I’ve got my in-person critique this weekend! I want to get Chapter 4 done today, and then I’ll send it and chapter 5 (and maybe 6, depending on length, but if I’m remembering correctly 6 is really long and needs to be broken up) along.

A new thing I’m trying for June is morning pages. I’ve run into morning pages a couple of times in various writing books and things along those lines, but they’ve always seemed a little silly because most of the sources I’ve seen present them more of a journaling exercise.

But I’m reading this book now called Writing Down the Bones (or something along those lines) because I felt like I should read a writing book at the writing retreat. It’s from 1986 or something, so it’s definitely one I inherited from my mother, probably in her latest culling of her writing books.

Anyway, she frames the morning pages as a writing exercise–like, actually write poems, or bits of story, or practice your wording or invoking tones and moods, things along those lines.

Sometimes, when I’m drafting, I can get thrown by my wording. Like, if my sentences feel too stilted, or if my sentence structure feels weird or repetitive. So I feel like maybe practicing actual writing, just 10 minutes each morning, will help when I’m writing new things.

So I’ve decided that every day for the month of June (well, 29 days of June and 1 of July, because I decided this at the retreat and I didn’t have a notebook with me) I’m going to give it a try. Go through the things I’ve saved in my idea file or on Pinterest or on the bingo card I made and have done nothing with, and just write for 10 minutes, and see what we end up with. And then we’ll reevaluate at the end of the 30 days and see how we felt about the whole thing.

We’re 2 for 2 thus far, so go us.

How was your weekend, squider? Any big plans for June?

Writing Retreat Ahoy

(Nautical joke, to go with World’s Edge’s setting.)

Well, squiders, I’m off to my writing retreat tomorrow. I am mostly excited–I got a ton done last year, and it was relaxing, and I did yoga and walked the labyrinth and read a couple of books as well.

But there was also an element of…hm, how to describe it. Like, when we first got there, everyone was super welcoming and excited and the energy was super great.

But throughout the weekend I started to feel left out? But, like, not really. Definitely in my own head. I didn’t connect with anyone that well, and I started to get that feeling I sometimes get at writing conferences, where it feels like I’m not getting anywhere that fast and everyone else is passing me by.

(Like, everyone was super nice, and I sat with different groups and chatted at meals, and I’ve run into a few people since last year’s retreat and they all said hi and chatted and so forth. So I am aware that this is a Me Problem.)

It would be nice if I had something substantial to show since last year, but querying is a slow and frustrating process, and with Turtleduck Press’s demise, I no longer have an outlet for shorter works on a more regular basis.

But I also realize that the retreat is for me, and the point is to get my head in the game and really focus, and to maybe do some networking, and no one is going to be judging me, no matter where I am in my journey.

But recognizing that something is a Me Problem and knowing the solution so I don’t get all weird and mope-y are two different things.

Something for me to figure out.

(Maybe I’ll make some friends this year, and that might alleviate some of this.)

Between now and then, however, is going to be a little manic. I’ve still got to pack, plus I need to go to work for a bit, and I’ve got to take care of some things for the family, and I’m not 100% sure how I’m stuffing everything in. It’s an hour drive and it starts at 1 in the afternoon.

Main project is to work on the World’s Edge revision, of course. The critique marathon starts on Monday, and I’ve got an in-person critique meeting in a week, so the hope is to get a good lead on those. It’s unlikely I’ll get through the whole story during the marathon, but I should be able to get halfway, assuming I’m not getting a lot of substantial comments.

I don’t really foresee myself working on anything else, but I shall bring stuff for short stories and whatnot in case inspiration strikes.

So! Excited with a hint of trepidation, but it shall be what it shall be, and fingers crossed that I got a lot done.

See you next week, squiders, with the aftermath.

The Same But Different

Hi squiders! Happy Friday! School is out, so I hope everyone is up for two months of chaos.

My youngest asked if she could give her teacher (the one who had me in for the outlining talk) a copy of Hidden Worlds, so I hunted one down from my MileHiCon stash. And then I was like, oh, hey, I haven’t read this in a hot minute, and I should do so.

(It’s 170 pages, and it took me about an hour and a half.)

Hidden Worlds is interesting – I wrote it for my friends in one of my writing communities, so there’s a lot of in-jokes and cameos, but also I was writing it serially whenever I felt like it, and I think I may have pantsed the whole thing. I cleaned it up and published it for said friends, and it’s just kind of random that it’s also been well-received by people unrelated to the Spork Room and that middle grade readers in general seem to really like it.

(There’s rather more sex-adjacent jokes than I remember. I think they probably generally go over the kids’ heads, but now I am wondering what my youngest’s teacher is going to think.)

(She thanked me for it today and said she’d probably start it tonight. So, uh, I guess we’ll know soon. Or I’ll never talk to her again and it will all be left to my imagination.)

It’s an interesting look into the heyday of the Spork Room, which is one of my first writing communities. Writing communities, I have found, have a shelf life of about 5 years during which they are super active, and then they kind of fade away. TSR’s was probably 2006-2012ish, and HW was written 2008, 2009ish, so it’s right in the middle. There are a lot of community aspects in the book that frankly I’d forgotten about.

(TSR still exists, but the message board where it really thrived is mostly dead. We have a Discord server now.)

But what really hit me was Hidden Worlds’ connection to World’s Edge.

Now, of course, I know the stories are connected. I just work on things long enough that sometimes that connection gets fuzzy. Or I forget cuz I’ve moved on.

Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this story before, but I had this story idea about a pirate queen that wanted to raise her dead lover. And I could not get this story to do anything. So when I wrote HW (whose main character is a teenage writer working on her first story), I gave Margery (said MC) this story idea. HW’s setting is the Spork Room, except in the book it is a magical, physical location where writers from all over the world can come to work, and they have the Door, through which all stories come true, and the sporkers can go into the Door to see happen when they get stuck. So said pirate queen (named Cass) is also one of the main characters of the story, though the overall story has nothing really do with the dead lover plotline at all.

And then about five years later, the story finally solidified itself, resulting in World’s Edge.

When Cass first showed up in my re-read yesterday, it really threw me. Because she’s Rae (the captain in WE), and vice versa.

Now, in retrospect, this makes perfect sense. They are two versions of the same character. And if you look closer, they’re actually fairly different. But they have that same core.

Maybe I haven’t re-read Hidden Worlds since I wrote the first draft of World’s Edge. Who knows.

It added a weird dimension to my re-read, though. Rae is no longer a pirate queen, though she’s still captain, and she’s definitely less of a stereotype, though Cass evolves through the story as well. Cass has some problematic coping mechanisms that I unfortunately probably thought were funny at the time. They’re both physically similar.

But while they have the same genesis, I did develop them differently. Rae’s story is not the same as Cass’s, and their personalities are not the same. But every now and then, Cass would say or do something that felt very Rae.

It’s really my own fault, returning to a story idea I’d already used to some extent. But an interesting look at taking the same idea and doing two different things with it, and also looking at how my writing/plotting skills have evolved over the years.

Got the official notice for the start of the summer critique marathon, so I’m looking forward to delving into World’s Edge and hopefully making it the best version of itself.

Happy Memorial Day weekend to my American squiders, and happy weekend to everyone else!

Let’s Do This (Around the Madness)

Hi-ho, squiders, hope you’re doing well!

I finally finished my readthrough today, and it has worked–I am ready and willing to dive into the madness that is revision (though I will admit, since I feel like the draft is in pretty decent shape except for my inability to remember what deck the captain’s cabin is on, that I am worried that I might actually make it worse).

Of course, my timing, as always, is bad.

It is the last week of school. A time of chaos, where all schedules go out the window and where we try to stuff everything in last minute.

My oldest has some sort of special park day tomorrow. He asked me what he’s supposed to bring to school. I can find no information to give him. Thursday is some sort of grade/pod battle day, and who even knows about Friday. My youngest had field day today (I forgot to sunblock her), has an orchestra concert on Thursday, and a half day on Friday. I have bought gift cards to give to the bus driver and my youngest’s teacher (she would also like to give her a copy of Hidden Worlds so I need to go see if I have any floating about), but have yet to figure out where the middle school teacher gift card distribution system is.

And then, of course, Memorial Day stuff, and it’s my youngest’s birthday next week. Have I bought her a present? No. Have I distributed gift ideas to the grandparents? Mostly. (Note to self: text Mother-in-Law) Have I done anything for her party aside from texting out invitations to her friends’ parents? Also no.

All this to say that, realistically, it may be next Thursday before I actually make any real progress.

Why Kit, you may ask, why Thursday?

Because that’s when my WRITING RETREAT starts! 😀

This is the same one I went to last year, which was so lovely and productive, that I immediately signed up again when registration opened (which was a good plan because it sold out after like a week). General plan is to make good headway on the revision and try not to get too down on myself.

(I have a string of query and short story rejections over the last few days, which has been a bit rough.)

(Oh, I found Giuseppe again, but promptly misplaced him immediately.)

Of course, the dream would be to start before then. But it is good to be realistic when life is being Life, so one does not get too depressed about lack of progress.

(Hoping for Friday morning. Friday afternoon is already lost. Alas.)

Happy Tuesday to you!

Productive Procrastination

Happy Friday, squiders. Hope you’ve had a good week!

So, I did end up writing that short story for the submission call, and I submitted it before the deadline (though I have not gotten a confirmation, and they say to email if you don’t get a confirmation after a few days, but that’s for tomorrow). The story was fun and easy to write. Who knows if anything will come of it, but it’s been a while that a short has flowed that easily, so that was nice.

I also looked at the horror story I’d started last fall, decided I really didn’t care, and did not finish it. I also closed the tabs I’d been keeping open to go with it. It may never get done. And that’s okay! Life’s too short for bad short stories.

I did go through a couple of other stories that I’d written a while ago and do some revisions, and this morning I spent some time sending them and another story out to markets. I used to spend a little bit of time every month sending out shorts, but I haven’t really written any lately, and the practice has fallen by the wayside.

I will say, though, that there were considerably less markets than I’m used to for spec fic. Not a surprise, I guess, in this economy, but sad to see.

I also sent out a couple of queries to agents.

All this to say that I still haven’t gotten to revising World’s Edge.

It was on the plan for today, but submission took longer than expected and now I’m out of time. Alas. But now I have hopefully gotten all the weird wiggles out of my system and we can buckle down and get to it.

(May reread the draft again. For Reasons.)

Things do seem to be spirally in general, though. Amazon emailed to say they were raising their printing prices, and I would need to raise my prices as well or else they wouldn’t pay me royalties. (Sigh. I should do that here.)

(Holy crap this is more complicated than expected, they’ve redone the categories as well. Okay, I’m going to have to dedicate some time to this. Later.)

Mailchimp, which I use for my newsletter, emailed to say they were removing features from my level of plan, and wouldn’t I like to go up to a higher plan to retain them? And the answer is no, no, I would not. My newsletter is something I use very fleetingly. I’ve never really gotten the hang of it, and I don’t email enough to retain engagement (God, I think it’s been a year at this point) or have enough news to justify emailing more often.

I was emailing out weird stories I’d found (such as the Bennington Triangle, or ghost words, etc.) but it took time to do research and write everything out and it was a lot of top of everything else. Which is why the schedule got less and less frequent until, indeed, I have now given up.

So I will need to adjust my Mailchimp to get around the loss of said features (which is mostly going to affect my ability to mail out reader magnets) or look at other options or, I don’t know, just light the whole thing on fire, I guess.

(I wonder if there are zines out there that want weird, “true” things that would want those stories? Something for another day.)

A lot of little things like that building up. Sigh.

How are you doing, squider? I hope the economy’s not getting you down. See you next week!