Overwhelmed, Overworked... and Utterly Inspired

“The Road” Cover Art by Elle Otero

Dear readers,

I must admit that I meant very, very much to publish the third novella for the In Caves and Catacombs series a year ago exactly. I also meant very, very much to update this blog. But here we are, at the tail-end of 2020, and I am just now wrapping up what I swore I'd accomplish 12 months ago.

I'd give you a laundry list of reasons why this year was awful, but I’m so dreadfully tired of the sadness. The anxiety. I don’t wish to fixate on the relentlessness of COVID and its expanding impact on our world. On top of that, enough terrible things befall the characters in The Road that I just need to inject some (hopefully not toxic) positivity into the world right now. We have been so very, very fortunate that very few members of our family have caught COVID. It is such a deeply frightening experience, as so many of you know. So I'm going to attempt to share a bit of levity and joy by focusing on the good things that have come out of this year for me and my family:

1. Evie: Our daughter is a constant source of goodness and love. This year she turned 2, and she is the sweetest child "that ever I seen", to quote her directly. Her request of Santa this year was "To give mommy a present". Hand to God. She is an incredible human being, and I'm 40% positive she's not manipulating me for more fruit snacks.

2. Steve: My husband Steve and I have grown closer. We have shared our deepest fears, done our best to prepare for the worst contingencies we could imagine (many of which did not come to fruition, thank God), and have practiced patience and understanding with each other. I don't have anything funny to add because I'm being sincere AF. Steve is a lovely human being and I am grateful for him every day.

3. Gardening: Our garden that we panic-expanded (well, rushed our existing plans for) in February has been incredibly bountiful. I'm still shockingly bad at growing good corn, but we can grow the heck out of tropical and semi-tropical rare fruit species, so, a net win. Also, we have added chickens. Ever since we sold our country property and moved to a smaller lot in the city, we've been chicken-less. Not so anymore! There's nothing like waking up to their lovely little clucking. Also, Steve has since fixed the dog door so we no longer wake up to it, but it's nice to hear when we go outside.

4. Work: Work is insane. I work in the field of online education and technical training, and we were understaffed before the COVID crisis began. Going from approximately 5% online courses to 100% virtually overnight was crazy in March, and the repercussions of that switch are still reverberating to this day. Despite feeling overwhelmed and overworked all of the time, I still consider this to be an incredible privilege because there are so many out of work, losing their businesses, or scraping by on unemployment. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to continue supporting the transition to online learning.

5. School: School is also insane. Yes, in late 2019 I began working towards my PhD with no idea what 2020 would bring. And now I've made it a full year into the three-year program (am I dreaming? does anyone finish in 3 years?) and there's no turning back now. About half of my motivation to complete my doctorate is pure, but the other half is because I'm totally going to make people I dislike call me Doctor. I challenge you to find anyone who's doing it without that in mind. They know in their deepest, darkest place in their hearts exactly what I mean.

6. Writing: What? How did I find the time? I still don’t know how, but I've actually finished The Road, were you even paying attention??? Artistic inspiration is one of the few things we can rely on when the world feels upside down. I have furiously scribbled during my breaks and stayed up too many late nights, but I’ve finally finished the third novella. While it is not the drafted novel that I’ve been kicking around for years, The Road is a major accomplishment for me nonetheless because it required a total rewrite. I was ready to hit publish one year ago when two very dear friends told me to wait. Let it sit. As much as it pained me then, that process of rewriting made the story far better and more developed than it would have been otherwise. Furthermore, it has also given me the opportunity to seriously workshop it with my writer friend, Marysia (I will link to her work as soon as I can, because she's amazing). The workshopping process has been delightful and such an incredible learning experience, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

There are so many more things to be grateful for this year. Breadmakers, for instance. Jellybags. And growing closer to our family, friends, and neighbors, even at a distance. Seeing our communities band together to get through the COVID pandemic has its own kind of beauty, and it shines a light that cuts through the darkness of death that has shadowed our world for the better part of a year. 2020 has indeed been awful. If you lost someone, I am so, so sorry. I hope that you will find peace, and hope that you will find a way to honor that loss.

If you can find it within you, let’s come together to celebrate what we can. Merry Christmas, dear readers, and Happy Holidays!

I'm a bad blogger (and other motherhood things)

Truly. I am a bad blogger. But I am here! And somehow, still writing (if slowly). The last eight months have been utterly life-altering. I’m a new mom and we’ve moved! These are both good things, but I’m left feeling a little …unsteady, perhaps, when it comes to picking up where I left off.

I’m finding that it’s hard to write when your whole world view has changed. Ironically, one of the characters I’ve been having the most trouble working on is a mother. You’d think having my first child would get the writing to flow from my fingertips. But instead it’s ripped me out of place and the first three chapters I’ve written are all wrong. And maybe it’s because I was imagining what motherhood would be like for so long that this character strikes me as inauthentic. And if I can’t relate to her because she isn’t real enough, then neither will anyone else.

Ah, yes. This. This is why I blog. Writing inspires… more writing!

As the dust settles around our new “normal” life, I solemnly swear I will find time to develop my characters. Look for more updates on Book 3 of In Caves & Catacombs: The City, coming soon! And if you need some light Halloween reading, check out The Man in White, a spooky short story now available for pre-order on Amazon.

I thought I was a gamer

I came to a conclusion about my identity the other day that was a bit surprising. I've always considered myself to be a gamer. A gamer "light", if you will. I started with my first Gameboy in the 90s, and continued with early Apple computer games (Lode Runner, especially), and then progressed to the life-changing Nintendo 64 (Zelda, what what!).

After that, I started playing games like Age of Empires, where I could design and explore my own kingdoms, or Petz, which allowed me to create my own cat and dog breeds and customize my own "house" (backgrounds where the animals romped around, in essence). But what really lit my 14-year-old fire was my introduction to online role-playing games with "Vampires! The Dark Alleyway".

"Vampires!" was very basic mechanically: I'd click these dark squares to "move" through the city, clicking white underlined text to drink the blood of humans or other vampires I encountered. But where the game came to life was across Yahoo group forums, where self-proclaimed "clans" of vampires would write pages and pages describing their movements around the city, envisioning their characters and locations, and detailing their interactions that other players could then play off of, adding to the script. There were wars, marriages, clan raids, vendettas... and I continued seeking out games like that, ending up in SecondLife, where you can be anything, meet anyone, travel anywhere.

I thought all of that made me a gamer. That, and Grand Theft Auto and Halo and Guitar Hero and Archeage and other WoW-style MMORPGs (and too many other games to list). But I've come to realize that the games that most captured my attention were the ones that allowed me creative freedom. The bigger the world, the more invested I became in my adopted identity. And it wasn't because I'm a gamer by nature. It's because I'm a writer. And that identity has always felt too big, too lofty to aspire to.

I'm beginning to come around and accept my identity as a writer. The more I put down the games, the more I focus on honing my craft, and fitting into that role. The same inspiration that made me click that white, underlined "drink" button, the same imagination that allowed me to visualize the human brought to their knees in front of me, that's what fuels my writing.

Identities change. And it's very rewarding to find yourself proud of your identity when you finally realize it fits.

Evolving Process

As I edit the draft of my novel, I've noticed my writing process is evolving. My previous process went something like this:

Me, staring angrily at my computer screen instead of writing.

But my writing process changed, and now I've been able to write a full length novel and several short stories. There were two Big Things that changed to liberate me from angry staredowns with my laptop. The first is outlining, and the second is counting my words.

Outlining. *Shudder*. The word brings me back to middle school. All of my English teachers taught me that step one was to create an outline for my essays. I hated it. I much preferred writing out all of my ideas, and then going back to organize them. I hated outlining so much that when I had to turn in my outlines for points, I sneakily wrote the essay first, then crafted the outline to turn in. Thus, when I began writing creatively (not for points, and not for dollars), I still shunned the very idea of an outline. It seemed antithetical to include something so academic in my creative outlet. 

I don't even know how I'm going to finish this blog post with this image in here, it's that uninspiring.

Eventually, I decided that I would finish a novel, but I didn't know how. I had so many beginnings, so many ideas scribbled on looseleaf, so many chapters saved onto my hard drive, and not one full story arc to my name. So I began outlining instead. I found it deeply satisfying to create a story from beginning to end, and it made me excited to fill in the gaps. It directed my energy, because I knew what had to come next, and even if I wrote like crap to get from Chapter One to Chapter Two, at least I got that far.

Outlining gave me direction, but it was counting words that pushed me to follow through. I became obsessed with my word count when I began NaNoWriMo, but what's in a word count when you're writing something that's not a minimum of fifty thousand words? Motivation, that's what.

Not that kind of motivation. REAL motivation.

But if outlining is academic, surely adding math would ruin the artistic process, right? Nope, not for me. I'm so Type A that I find meeting my word count goal inspiring. And the truth is that I tend to think I'm finished with a chapter with only half of my needed word count. That's where I push through. I look at my count, review my outline, and more often than not, it turns out I haven't written enough or described enough, and my characters haven't developed enough. And that's where my best writing comes from. When I'm motivated to meet this tiny little chapter word count goal, it gives me what I need, piece by piece, to meet my hundred thousand word novel goal.

So try combining that crap from school that you hated with your writing. You might be surprised by the results!

Music that inspires

I can't imagine writing without music playing in the background. When I'm writing--and I mean really writing, where I lose myself in the narrative and forget who I really am--I always have some kind of music going. And I don't mean pleasant, boppy music. I'm talking deep, dark moody music that drowns out the nonsense of the real world and rips your heart out through your throat. I'm talking Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Marilyn Manson, or Korn. I'm talking the Queen of the Damned soundtrack, or any Deftones album ever created. (Yeah. I write about merfolk to metal.)

In pursuit of inspiration, I went to see my all-time favorite band, the Deftones, a few months ago. They performed at the Berkeley amphitheater, and it was one hell of a show. And what made it great wasn't the lights or the stars overhead or any measured, choreographed routines like you see all the popstars doing now. It was all about the shared experience of the music. The lead singer lost himself in it, like he was putting himself up on a pedestal in front of God and everyone, turning his face to the sky and closing his eyes, then doubling over with the beat as it rocked through his body. Everyone watching became a part of it, crooning along with him as he belted the lyrics we've all lost, and then found ourselves in.

There's something surreal about sharing that experience with a stadium full of strangers. It strips us down to what we really are, just a group of animals that crave connection and search for meaning in the ordinary. I think about what it must've taken for him to write the music. How much of his deepest longings went into the lyrics? How much pain, how much joy? We forget how much of artists are in their creations because we put ourselves in it instead. And I suppose that's part of what our motivation is to write. Even if it's not perfect or planned or polished, we want to be able to lose ourselves in our own creation. And we want to provide others with a space in which they might be able to find themselves.