Uncategorized

Free Writing, The Chaos of Organization, and Other Stories

annabowling Leave a comment

Wednesday’s blog on Thursday should give an iindicator of how acgtual Wednesday went. I had the very odd (for me) experience of oversleeping yesterday, which gave an element of surreality to the entire day. I meant to blog. I meant to edit. I got most of my social media current and then played Sims.

Theoretically ideal wakeup time today, and since I get a feel for the things I need to do the next morning, the night before, the task list wasn’t too hard to make. Unfortunately when it came to “what do I want to blog about today?” the immediate answer was “the fluff if I know.” “Fluff,” in this case, being a family word for a word that rhymes with “duck,” and is not often said around small children.

In practice, butt in chair and fingers on keyboard allows me to move on down the list instead of beating myself up over not knowing what to write. Because I do. I do it every morning in my morning pages, aka free writing. That means whatever is in my head goes on the page. This morning, for example, I filled two entire pages out of arranging the pens in my ballpoint pen cup in rainbow order and writing down my opinions of each one. That’s all. Not earth shattering in importance or creativity, but I did it and came out of it ready to take care of this whole Thursday thing, or at least figure out my priorities.

Right now, they feel like a jumble. My main job ondraft two of Drama King is to look for missing scenes, smooth out rough ones, and get word count up to goal. For A Heart Most Errant, I need to get back to addressing the first round edits and get it back to my editor. I paid for her services. I should use them. I want to use them.

There is also prep work to be done for this upcoming Saturday, where I waill present my workshop, Play in Your Own Sandbox, Keep All the Toys. This is my most popular workshop, and I love giving it. I also need to reacquaint myself, because ehhhh, it’s been a while. I could probably learn from taking my own workshop. Going back to the well, as it were, is usually a good idea.

Photo by JESHOOTS.com on Pexels.com

Yesterday, I had to run some adult-y errands in the morning, and planned to attack my backlog of work like a valkyrie, but what did I do instead? Completely tear apart my shelves that hold notebooks, pens, paper, etc, and re-making them with the help of some distressed wooden crates, putting, as my mother would have termed it, “like with like.” I hated that term when I was younger, but Mom was on to something. This also means that my inability to find the set of A5 divider pockets I bought on that same outing extremely vexing because it’s not where it’s supposerd to be, even though the binder and papers are all ready for them to join the fray. I can only assume they are hiding because they know what I have in store. I don’t blame them. I also know me, and I know that utter chaos is the black moment that comes before things snapping into place. Aka, don’t sweat it, keep going.

Photo by Elly Fairytale on Pexels.com
there will be fairy lights

Which is basically where it leaves me right now. I have work to do, soem right the fluff now, and soem that cam be done after. Butt on chair, fingers on keyboard. Stock photos are fine when bookshelves are not ready for their closeups. The important thing is to keep making progress in the right direction.

New (Clickey-keyed) Kid in Town

annabowling Leave a comment

Still working the bugs out of this new laptop, but I think we are going to get along fine. I’ve spent most of the day setting things up and writing down passwords, figuring out what the low vision options are (and my, my, are they welcome) Right now, I am at the kitchen table, writing my very first blog post on the new baby.

Photo by Anthony Shkraba on Pexels.com

Not going to lie; unboxing a new madhine doe scome with its trepidations. Am I going to figure this out? Oh, the files to copy over. What did theychange? What did they come up with that’s new since the last time I did something like this? I’m not too worried about this, actually, as I seem to be doing a lot of it these days. Not only because it’s spring, but because I am starting to really, truly believe, things are going to be okay. Having a computer I didn’t lug around in the back seat of our car for a year kind of goes along with all of that.

It seems there is a turn your blog into a podcast thingamaboodle that may be a new option, and I might be up for trying that in the not too distant future. If there is one thing I like to do as much as I like to write, it’s okay, plan. If there is one thing I like to do as much as write and plan, it’s talk. A lot. Those who know me in real life will not be surprised. Part of being an extrovert is that we tend to think and talk at the same time, so “be quiet” is often very close to “don’t think.” Writing seems like a very reasonable workaround, as it’s like talking on paper, real or digital.

One of the reasons I wanted to get a new laptop, besides up to date technology and protability, it’s that it has a front facing camera and built in microphone, which ara ll one technically needs to jump into this multimedia thing. Expect to see me try a few different things now that we have the technology. We’ll see what sticks, and I am certai that the process of finding out what sticks will be an adventure all its own.

Naturally, the main reason there is a new laptop in the house is that it’s for writing. Writing is the thing I’ve most wanted to get back to on a regular basis. Having a new machine free of old mistakes and drafts that petered out is a nice change of pace. Not that there won’t be such things in the future. As a matter of fact, I am counting on it.

This is a ramblier post than I had hoped to write, because there are oodles of things that need installing and updating and transferring. There’s deciding how badly I want Scrivener on this machine, because that will require digging into the wayback of the sbook with not only the codes but instructions. Maybe the desktop will stay out of storage torage unit for my storage unit, but that’s also where my classic keeper historicals are (I think) so it might be worth the aggravation. I’ve mostly been using GoogleDocs and that seems to work pretty well, so I am not in a hurry.

Maybe that not being in a hurry thing might be useful in the whole writing plan. Take the page in front of me for what it is and do the best I can with it, then on to the next. I’m still not sure if I’m going to do CampNaNo this year, though I think I’d like to, but zero idea what project I woul dlike to use. What I want the most, though, is to find the modern version of the way it felt in college, to race back from the last class of the day and park myself at my typewriter (yes, dating myself, but that’s okay. I like me.) and furiously pound keys because the story kept coming and coming and coming.

Granted, I was seventeen and didn’t know any better. I don’t have that manuscript any longer. If it exists anywhere, it is at the bottom of a trash heap. Probably where it belongs, because there were a lot of rookie mistakes in that one. Still some of them in what I produce thesse days, but that feeling of running to the keys, that I think I can find within my reach. Doesn’t help that said reach is rose gold with black keys, aka exactly what I would have designed if given free reign to make the prettiest laptop I could imagine.

We will need to spend a lot of time together, this new gal and I. We’ll make some missteps, have some fun, and boldly go (yeah, Star Trek reference) where no romance novel (at least none I have written before) has gone before.

about time for a new signoff pic; it’s a work in progress

Typing With Wet Paws: Ides of March Edition

annabowling Leave a comment

Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. It’s a sunny day here in NY’s Capitol Region, and Aunt Anna is doing writer stuff, so you are going to have to enjoy a greatest hits picture of me for now. She will probably take new pictures later in the weekend, but that’s okay, because I am gorgeous all of the time.

I look this good every nap

So anyway, things are in full spring cleaning mode around here. The humans are also using words like “truck” and “storage” and “floor space.” There is talk of furniture coming in, which probably has something to do with Aunt Anna promoting the kneeling chair to cat tree. I am not sure, however, if I am allowed to still like the kneeling chair if it is not Aunt Anna’s work chair any longer. Must check the kitty code on that one. She and Uncle Rheuben are also saying “storage” a lot, and sometimes with bad words. They really don’t like piles of things out in the open. I think piles are interesting but what do I know?

Aunt Anna has been fighting the insomnia monster the last couple of nights. On the one paw, I don’t like to see her not feeling great. On the other paw, midnight parkour partner! On the other other paw, sleepless nights mean she will crash in the daytime, and then she will be grumpy if she sleeps through the morning. On the other other other paw, awake Aunt Anna does make midnight snacking a lot easier, and sometimes she even joins me. Well, she eats people food, but it still counts.

Photo by Lina Kivaka on Pexels.com

Aunt Anna’s Goodreads Challenge is moving along at a very nice pace. As of this writing, she is 32 percent of the way to her goal, with 29 books read out of 90. That puts her 10 books ahead of schedule. Right now, she’s reading a lot of YA thriller/horror, but she’s thinking that maybe she might want to lay off that particular flavor before bedtime. That’s okay, since it gives her more time to dedicate to historical romance. I don’t care what genre she reads before bed as long as she cuddles me, so we are okay either way.

Photo by Anthony Shkraba on Pexels.com

On the writing front, she is full up on editing and revisions, which is okay by her. She really doesn’t hate that kind of thing. Some writer friends find that unusual, but whatever. She’s hit a part in Drama King where she gets to add some more detail to things that she was only able to sketch out when she and Aunt Melva were writing the first draft. As Aunt Melva said in their chat this week (which I sat in on, by the way; it was awesome) writing is a lot easier for Aunt Anna when she has a regular home and her computer is set up all the time. Aunt Anna has to agree.

Aunt Anna did not mean to take a break from her edits on A Heart Most Errant, but she will be back to those in the coming week.; There aren’t a lot of them, and when she is done with that, she can send it back to her editor for formatting and cover art and all of that good stuff, and then it will be time to launch her first historical romance in coughty-cough years back out into the world. Scary and exciting to be sure, but it’s forward movement and she is all about that. Maybe this year’s spring will be kind of a second autumn. She’s already getting excited about writing in the park on nice days, while scoping out baby ducks. She says I wil have to stay home, because because I am apparently an “indoor cat,” but I can get my outdoor fix by sitting in the open windows and sniff and watch everything, with zero chance of getting lost. Win win, pretty much.

There is still time to figure out what Aunt Anna wants to do about Camp NaNo this year, but she is kind of leaning toward yes, because A) she can set her own goals, and B) she is in one of those Write All The Things moods, and it’s usually good when she leans into that particular skid.

Anyway, Aunt Anna says it is time to get off “her” computer (maybe I will have more computer time when the new laptop gets here and she has two computers) so she can do more of that writer stuff.

Headbonks!

The Me-est Me That Ever There Me’d?

annabowling Leave a comment

Two days without using the folding chair, and my back pain is gone. I think we may have found the culprit. I put the monitor on top of a plastic shoe storage box (blush pink to match other desk things) and increased the font size, and now working at the computer is a lot more comfortable, which makes it possible to stay there longer, which makes doing things like sitting in front of the keyboard, blogging, editing, and transcribing, a whole lot easier. Also less painful and squinty. I can go for less painful and squinty. To be clear, that is less painful and less squinty, not less painful but still squinty or more squinty. Nobody wants any of that

Photo by Maria Gloss on Pexels.com

I’m not going to try and duplicate the vanished post here, because that one was straight off the cuff, due to my being insomnia’s chew toy for two days straight. That sort of thing irritates me anyway, and leads to overthinking, of which I have already done far too much for a lifetime. I don’t think -in fact, I know- I am not the only writer prone to this sort of thing. It’s more of an occupational hazard.

The kitchen chair with cushions thing isn’t permanent. We have one office chair in storage, and may potentially snag another one like the above, as I will need one chair for my computer desk and one for my secretary desk, an antique I have loved since I was two. I have said before that I have drooled over it since I was two, and before that drooled on it, as my parents got it before they got me. Fitting, I think that a historical romance writer do her longhand work on a relic from the past.

Fitting also that we are looking into a new laptop, because I also write (well, co-write, with the fabulously talented Melva Michaelian) contemporary romance and the days of typing manuscripts one page at a time and sending them off in manuscript boxes are long in the past.

There’s also the plans for the great stationery purge, which does not include chucking it all into the metaphorical sea, but making sure that I keep the stuff I love and use, and that it all looks like it belongs to the same person. Keeping things “on brand,” if you will, because things are moving forward and I have one of those, whether I know it or not, and knowing is the better option.

This week is the second week in a row that I have taken off from planning in my catchall classic planner.

Not that I don’t still love it, because I do, but because I am over the whole re-dating every single month and week and day. That’s not fun, that’s tedious, and I would rather use that time doing something that moves me forward. Which means I will be purse planner only for the second half of the month, unless I want to experiment with some printables or bullet journal style, and then go to an undated expansion for May and June, then, July, BOOM, new planner. Which I may be obtaining in the next few days. This means excitement for this planner geek, and to know that the planner I am planning on has completely neutral pages, so I can do anything I want to make them the me-est me that ever there me’d, well, that’s a good thing.

That’s where I am headed, across the board. For writing, oh definitely so. The stories I have to tell now are different than the stories I had one, two, ten, years ago. Then again, there are stories that have been waiting for literally decades, tapping their toes in restrained impatience. One day, they’ll break free of the restraints (and if it is my hands that untie the knots, so be it) and we will meet upon the page and the adventures will be glorious. Until then (and after then) it’s one foot in front of the other. This fits, that doesn’t. What I feed, lives.

I don’t have to be any of the authors who inspired me to begin writing, or those who inspire me to keep going. I don’t have to compare myself to long-established superstars or bright young things. I only have to compare myself to me, an write the best story I can, from where I sit, right now. That, I can do.

Typing With Wet Paws: And We’re Back Edition

annabowling Leave a comment

Tails up, Storm Troopers. I’m Storm, You’re Awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. We are now two weeks and change in the new apartment, and a few days past my very first Gotcha Day with these guys, and Aunt Anna’s birthday is coming. Last year, she got ME (a little before her birthday, but we are still counting it and crossing Birthday Kitten off her bucket list. You’re welcome.) so that’s going to be pretty darned hard to top, but we will see what happens.

Still getting settled here. Aunt Linda has the week of Aunt Anna’s birthday off, so that’s when she humans are going to get a truck and bring in the furniture. Except for the stuff they don’t feel like lugging up the stairs, and in that case, they will order that kind of furniture from a store and have it delivered in a box, and put together when it’s upstairs. I am all for this, because cats and boxes are a natural combination.

I am very much looking forward to Aunt Anna busting the new printer out of its box. She has a lot of things she wans to print. Some of those will involve pictures of me, so I consider that a worthy cause. There will probably be noise, though. I don’t care about noise much. I’m pretty well adjusted. Aunt Anna actually was gong to set up the printer earlier this week, but Uncle Rheuben did some extreme work activities, and was so sore that people vets were involved, and he had some sleepy medicine, but he is feeling much better and is back at work now. The point I was making is that the printer would have had to be set up in the bedroom and she didn’t want to disturb Uncle Rheuben while he rested.

greatest hits picture of me because Aunt Anna is still figuring out how pictures work on Uncle Rheuben’s laptop

Anyway, things are starting to settle down around here. We are all snug and comfy and ready to put down some roots. Personally, I find nothing wrong with all the boxes around the apartment. They are really fun to sproing in and out of at two in the morning, which honestly has nothing to do with Aunt Anna’s insomnia. They are two things that happen to happen at the same time. It, um, happens. The humans say they want to put a kitchen table (which I will not be allowed on) where the boxes currently are. Meh. I guess kitchen chairs will come with the table, and I can sleep on the chairs, so that’s one bright spot.

Another one is that Aunt Anna and Uncle Rheuben agree they need to get Aunt Anna a new laptop, because their room, which will also be Aunt Anna’s office, is cozy. That’s human for “small.” Also, Aunt Anna wants to use her antique secretary desk for handwriting and a laptop could be on the desk only sometimes and then somewhere else when she wants to do things with pens and paper. We will see what accomodations she makes for me during her writing sessions. Right now, I sit on the bed next to her if she is there, or under the coffee table when she uses the desktop there. Unless she has her legs straight out in front of her, under the table.

We will get back to regular updates next week. Aunt Anna has not been reading that much but getting back to it. She has, however, been watching a lot of European dramas on Netflix, especially postapocalyptic survival. : The Rain, Dark, To the Lake, that kind of thing. If you know any other shows like that, please let me know in the comments, and I will tell her.

Headbonks!

Typing With Wet Paws: Already August Edition

annabowling Leave a comment

Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. Can you believe it’s already August? My humans can’t, but here we are, and all of Aunt Anna’s planners agree, so I guess we are at another month after all. That’s a good thing. Here are a few reasons:

  • August is when summer gets ready for fall and fall is Aunt Anna’s faaaaavorite season (also the season when she met me, so, you know…obviously)
  • August means Uncle Rheuben’s birthday, right in the middle of the month, too, which is very convenient. Since this is the first time he’s had a birthday with me around, I have to make this year special. Think I should make his present myself?
  • August also means it is back to school season, which makes Aunt Anna very very very happy, because she loves papers and pens and all those kinds of things, and they are everywhere. Sometimes she and Aunt Linda pop me and my adventure cave in a shopping cart and they take me, too.
  • August means days are getting shorter, and nights are getting cooler, which means kitty cuddles are all that more welcome. Lucky for my humans, I love cuddling.

August is also when, according to the copious notes Big Sister Skye left, when Aunt Anna’s super powers come back, and that once we are in a permanent apartment, they will probably come back in grand style, so I have to be on top of my mews game. I think we’re going to do great.

Aunt Anna, Uncle Rheuben, and Aunt Linda would like to thank everybody who has been helping with our work to get into a permanent place. If you’d like to help, you can do so here .Things are moving along and the humans are talking with a potential landlord. Watch this space for updates.

Speaking of updates, Aunt Anna is back at Buried Under Romance, with a new update here, about the benefits of reading romance when real life gets tough. Hop on over there, and see what she has to say, maybe even put in a word or two of your own. Any ideas what you’d like to discuss over there? Drop it in the comments and she’ll see what she can do.

In other updates, aka me, there is still about a week to watch me for physical changes (aka signs of incoming kittens) but so far I am not showing any signs of an encounter with any boycats. The cats who live near Aunt Linda’s work are all TNR spayed/neutered, so none of them are making kittens with anybody. Aunt Anna is also pretty sure that they didn’t pick any fights with me, because I don’t have any scratches on my face (winner marks) or bottom (“and keep going!” marks) and I only smell like healthy cat, so she’s reasonably satisfied I didn’t make any skunk enemies. Not saying a word about the possums.

This doesn’t mean that the aunts didn’t come out of this with no extra kitty friends. Thanks to Cat Lady Sue, who did a lot of listening and asking of good questions when I first went missing, Aunt Anna and Aunt Linda are now helping Cat Lady Sue feed the feral kitties that live near Aunt Linda’s work. I’ll call them Tux and Tabby for now. You can guess what they look like from there. Cat Lady Sue was very very happy to hear I was safe with my people again, and also very happy to have help with feeding the colony. Anybody who helps cats get food is okay by me.

As for the writing, Aunt Anna is getting back into her groove. She has a new tablet arriving later this week that should be a big help filling her well, as that has proven to be a favorite venue for reading as of late. There has also been a lot of sharing of electronics going on because a bunch of things all died at the same time, so another device in the mix will make things a lot easier. When she gets her MacBook laptop up and running again, she says she will take her Sims 2 game off Uncle Rheuben’s laptop and then put it on the MacBook instead. Uncle Rheuben isn’t so sure about that.

greatest hits picture of me, just because

Okay, I think that covers most of the big stuff. Still here, still doing things, will be blogging more again soon. On that note time for the aunts to head out and pick up a few necessities, like cat food, so I’ll test out part of my new signoff: Calico got to go!

Headbonks!

Typing With Wet Paws: Summer Heat Wave Edition

annabowling Leave a comment

Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. I know what you’re thinking: Storm blogs on Friday, and this particular day is a Monday. Unusual, I know, but that is par for the course around here. I’m a word, it’s hot.

When we are vagabonding, that is kind of a big deal. Here is a fun fact: many JoAnn Fabrics stores are pet friendly, and putting a panting kitty in her adventure cave in a shopping cart and pushing her around is both cooling and super fun. Aunt Anna, Uncle Rheuben, and Aunt Linda all agree I am going to LOVE my future cat stroller. I also strolled around a different store like this, but the aunts like JoAnn better because it has art and craft and planner stuff. Uncle Rheuben was happy that store has a men’s room where he couiut hang out, away from all the craft stuff.

Aunt Anna never does very well with hot days, and there have been a bunch of them. The other humans don’t like it much either, but it’s not as big a thing for them. I guess all humans are different. As long as we are not out in the hot hot heat, we are fine.

Since this is a Monday post, I will save the usual updates for Friday, but Aunt Anna does have two new book reviews up on Goodreads, and there is a post on Buried Under Romance about the late, great Karen Ranney. Aunt Anna will get those links to you ASAP, or they will be in Friday’s post.

Get in, hoomans. We’re going to PetSmart!

What’s been taking up a lot of time is the whole vagabonding thing. The humans are pretty much over it, and while I love adventures and going places, and all that good stuff, getting too hot is scary and I would rather not do that again.

one thing Aunt Linda would rather not do again is put the master lock of the storage unit on upside down, because that doesn’t leave any room to get the key in and turn it. They are working on that today, hopefully without having to cut the hasp and buy a new lock.

Aunt Anna is also getting to know a writing app called WriterPlus so she can see about boosting productivity on days when sitting at a desktop is not an option, like when the lock is on upside down. She’ll tell you more about that later. 

Think that’s about it for right now, so stay cool and I will be back on Friday.

 

Headbonks! 

Storm

 

 

Typing With Wet Paws: Under the Influence Edition

annabowling Leave a comment

Tails up, Storm Troopers! I’m Storm, you’re awesome, and this is Typing With Wet Paws. We’re going to be changing it up some this week, because Aunt Anna has been doing exactly that, and my job is to report on what she’s doing. Yesterday, she didn’t even turn on the computer to work, if you can believe that. Instead, she spent the day doing a deep dive into reconnecting with historical romance, which she has been kind of unconsciously avoiding for a little while.

Part of that is because real life has been chaotic, and getting her head into another place and time took too much energy. That happens. People change genres. That is not what is happening here. She and Aunt Melva are closing in on the first draft of Drama King, setting the stage (pun intended) for Queen of Hearts, and making plans for more contemporaries to come. That’s all good.

What hasn’t felt so good, and here is where I have done some active mews duty (thinking is much easier when rubbing a lonnnnng kitty belleh, specifically mine) is that looking at her Goodreads challenge (still super duper ahead, so she has wiggle room) showed that her reading has leaned, at times heavily, to YA over historical romance, and that she is not okay with that.

This led to a long time in what Aunt Anna calls the soft office, with notebook and pen, and me cuddling close, writing down how she feels about that and how it came to be, as well as a way back to what feels like a better balance for her. Some of this comes as she prepares material for future video blogs, and some of it comes from Buried Under Romance doings. Where Aunt Anna has landed on this is that it’s okay to go through times of not having a lot of energy (cats totally understand this) but it is not okay to use not engaging in something a human loves because of that.

Yesterday, Aunt Anna wrote down a lot of things, including a list of some of her favorite classic historical romance authors. It included but was not limited to:

If these names are familiar to you, you might notice that they have a few things in common. If they are not, consider clicking these links, and keeping an eye on this blog for more about them inthe future. These are big stories. Sometimes it feels scary to want to write big stories, especially when a lot of things in life are very very big. That is, though, maybe exactly when and why big stories are needed the very very most.

Aunt Anna is excited not only to revisit some of her favorite historical romances, by these authors and others, but to look into how they have and continue to influence her current reading and writing.

Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time for the important stuff, aka me. I have talked in the past about my adventures with the butt warmer, but I have not shared yet about my special trick (because I just learned it) and that is that I can turn off Uncle Rheuben’s trackpad. I won’t give my secrets but when Uncle Rheuben couldn’t find his cursor and the trackpad wasn’t doing anything, he asked Aunt Anna for help (she has a lot more experience with cats and computers) and she did some Google-fu.

What she found was that the number one cause of this particular problem is cats on keyboards. There was a post that told her what buttons to push to undo my trick, and she did, and boom, back in business. This does not mean that I will stop doing it, because sometimes humans need feline intervention to know when it is time to stop with the clickety clack and make with the belly rubs. Speaking of which,

Headbonks!

Rainy Days and Mondays

annabowling 2 Comments

When I was but a wee princess, back in the days when I only needed one digit to state my age, and, I believe, in the grade that comes after K, my parents (or perhaps the NY educational system) put me into one of those newfangled open classrooms. Basically a mishmash of traditional education with a dash of Montessori is a decent description, and we kiddos were often allowed to pick our own activities for part of the day (as long as work was done.) This allowed the teacher (whom I saw as Grown Up, but was likely in her midtwenties at best) to observe young humans in their natural state (um, that came out wrong. I did not mean naked.) and note what activities and/or behaviors affected their traditional learning, for good or for ill.

Surprising nobody, I did better when I spent time in the book corner (spot the baby writer for one hundred, Alex) and the art area (artist’s kid, no-brainer) but where I showed the most marked improvement in my worksheets and cuisinaire rods learning was on the days when we were allowed to bring our own toys, and I pretty much always brought fashion dolls. I won’t mention the brand, but my preferred dolls stood eleven and one half inches tall (when my friend, V and I did not remove their legs to make them stand in for kid dolls, usually their own kids, or kid-selves. Yes, we knew how to get legs off and on safely. That’s not at all creepy. We could do heads, too.) could swap clothes like nobody’s business, and took on more roles in one afternoon than Meryl Streep in a good year.

Once again, Spot The Baby Writer gets another point. Unfortunately, subsequent classrooms did not hew to this model, and my plastic repertory company was relegated to my room at home, and occasional play dates. I did try collecting as an adult, but not being made of money, or having limitless space, and needing to do adult things, as well as discovering actual writing, that chapter, alas, needed to close. Merely having the items in question wasn’t the same as actually having hands on and acting out the stories in my head with reasonable facsimilies of human beings.

But then — because there is always a But Then- I discovered a few things. Fandom, especially fanfic (ah, so that’s what I had been doing all by myself with Wonder Woman, The Bay City Rollers, and reruns of Family Affair, all along. Not at the same time, mind you.) Finding the plot holes (did you know that the fate of the father in The Partridge Family was never addressed? He doesn’t even get a first name or cause of death. It’s established that he’s dead, but that’s it. When? How? Were he and Shirley happy? Was he musical, too? Did they want a big family from the get go, or did it just kind of happen, because Shirley and Whatshisname loved each other very very much? Come to think of it, what did Mr. Partridge do, to be able to afford that big house and still allow Shirley to be a stay at home mom to five? I still want to know these things.)

Fanfiction was a huge discovery, though I never wrote for any of the above fandoms. I did hunt down licensed Partridge Family novels and comics in used bookstores and flea markets, and Wonder Woman does count as my first fandom, as I collected anything I could about the comic and TV series, and blew through two of the fashion dolls. Yep, I fanned that hard. The first fandom in which I wrote was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even then I had to do it my way, creating an original love interst for a canon character, and I never budged from that. They are canon to me. They were also some of, if not the very first characters I made when I ventured into my next discovery: The Sims.

Sim versions of a (non-Trek) OTP

Since I am getting chatty on this one, I will stop here for now and pick up again on Wednesday. Need to get some novel work under my belt before I can play (and by play, I mean my current save of the Sims 2 adapted to Sims 3, which is far more fun that should be allowed, but more on that later.)

That Time of Year Again

annabowling Leave a comment

Even though the calendar has said it’s been spring for a while, and even though this is probably March the Blur-ty Second, my sure shift occasions happened a couple of days ago. I was getting into Housemate’s car for a grocery run, and that’s when it hit. Time to switch out my everyday carry (EDC) planner. Can’t force these things. They happen on their own.

Since fall, I have been using and loving my black Pen + Gear B6 travelers notebook cover, with a mini Happy Planner for guts. Still looking for my B6 mojo, insertwise, but that’s another story. For planning, this works. I’ve been carrying it in my burgundy tote bag, the fall and winter version of my beloved blush tote, which I will be busting out of stuff jail as early as the end of this week. Carry burgundy faux-suede in May? Perish the thought.

current EDC

First world problems, definitely so. Not saying that having anxiety and depression and being in between permanent addresses during a pandemic is a picnic, but the fact that I am having strong opinions on stationery and stationery accessories, well, I am going to file that under signs of life. The more chaotic life becomes, the more I want to organize it.

For my EDC, this will probably mean slipping my HP mini out of the black cover, sliding it into the blush one, and moving over decorative ephemera. My current planner, last year’s eighteen months version, ends in June. I will replace it with a new 2020 mini, with different layoyt, and th current cover (and some dividers) will find their way back into the black cover, with filler paper in place of planner pages. Et voila, notebook.

Feeling spring-y

These things work best for me when they happen organically (odd for planning, but it works.) Forcing them generally does not work at all. Funny enough, there are similarities to writing. I would like for there to be more writing, and there will be, and one day I will look up at the screen or down at the page, and the most recent line will read “the end.” Huh. How’d that happen ? I

Bit by bit, usually. One step at a time. Days when scrolling blankly through Facebook or Overdrive are the pinnacles of productivity, and says when writing hits a roll. Neither, in my experience, is anything I can force, but things like “time to switch covers” or indie pubbing book x makes sense, ” those show up when they will, and give a solid foundation for the next phase.