Unincorporated Areas

Daily writing prompt

Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.

I have this fascination with unincorporated areas in the US — these are not quite towns, but places that have names and very little population. They fascinate me because they obviously have a history and, at least at some time, an identity, yet many of them are forgotten now.

Some of them have road signs, such as Quitman, which is in the county where I live. I have been to Quitman and seen the small collection of houses there. According to Wikipedia, there are 45 people there in 23 households as of the 2010 census (Wikipedia, 2025). However, an unincorporated area’s road sign doesn’t have a population posted, which is part of how one can tell it’s unincorporated.

Other unincorporated areas are unmarked, but can be found in the memory of people who lived there. Wikipedia may have information on unincorporated areas in a county. Having the name of the unincorporated area, one can often locate them on a maps app on the phone. Even Gaynor, MO, which is listed in Wikipedia as ‘extinct’, can be found on Google Maps.

I have not been to Gaynor, but I have been to both Quitman and Wilcox, the two other unincorporated areas in Nodaway County, Missouri. And I remain fascinated by these former towns and not-quite towns that haven’t quite disappeared from human memory.

My First Name is Lauren

Daily writing prompt

Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.

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My first name is Lauren, which I’m sure is buried somewhere in this blog. (My full name is Lauren Jean Leach-Steffens, in case you care).

The name ‘Lauren’ comes from Latin, meaning ‘crowned with laurel’, or so I was told as a child. Interestingly enough, it seems to be one of those deterministic names, the ones that shape one’s future. These typically are last names, like the doctor my mother had whose name was ‘Dr. Sickley’ or the undertakers ‘Blood and Wolfe’ in our hometown. But the Lauren who got all the academic honors in high school seems like another deterministic name moment.

I often wonder if I would have been less clumsy if my parents had named me ‘Grace’. I really am a very uncoordinated person, to where I have fallen off chairs and tripped over invisible turtles. Maybe the right name would have fixed it. But no, I’m Lauren, and at least when I was younger, that meant something.

Grading

Today I have to crawl into grading a major assignment. See you tomorrow.

Test note

Just checking something. Nothing to see here; move along.

The Election

I’m speechless. America will not be great again.

Call me Pygmalion

Have you ever gotten a crush on a character in a book?

As a writer, I know I’ve gotten crushes on my characters. That makes sense, as everything I write has a romantic bent, or at least a relationship bent. (My model for writing relationships comes from Elizabeth Scarborough’s Nothing Sacred; specifically the relationship between Viveka Jeng Vanachek and Lobsang Taring. I tend not to write hyperbolic characters or tropes. Sometimes hyperbolic scenes, though.)

What kinds of characters do I get crushes on? Josh Young, the aikidoka mystic in the service of Gaia. Luke Dunstan, world-weary Archetype with a way of getting around rules. Brent Oberhauser, the history professor who wrote A History of Father Christmas.

My app says this is aikido. I am doubtful.

When I create a character and live with him so long, I can’t help but be smitten.

The Home Stretch

On the professing front, all I have left to grade for the semester are two class assignments and one final. Not a bad thing; Finals run next week. I will make it.

Summer might be a light one — I only have 10 interns so far for summer. Normally I have 20. I could use a light summer, because I still don’t know what’s going to happen with my medication. It hasn’t happened yet, at any rate.

That means writing. This means finishing Carrying Light, editing Kringle Through the Snow for October 1 publication, and doing a final edit of Reclaiming the Balance, for Jan. 1 publication. If I get the guts to publish the latter. It’s such a unique book. The conflict is personal and internal to Barn Swallows’ Dance and its residents. One of the main characters is non-binary, so I wrote the book with they/them, so I expect reaction from the more bigoted.

I might also write on Walk Through Green Fire, in which the lead female rescues a prince of Faerie. That one is hard because I expect it to have sex scenes, at least one. Unless I chicken out.

We shall see what the summer brings when it gets here, which is a couple weeks from now.

The Ides of March: Q and A

According to Ken Jennings, there are many misconceptions about the Ides of March, the day that Julius Caesar was assassinated. I’ll try to summarize here.

What is an “ides” anyhow?

An ides was a calendar entry in the Roman calendar used to divide the month into two halves. In most months, it was on the 13th of the month; in others (including March) it was on the 15th. The Roman calendar was odd; all days of the month after the ides were labeled as “x days before the beginning of next month.” Almost as if the second half of the month wasn’t worth much.

What is this “Beware the Ides of March”?

That goes back to Julius Caesar, who was warned by a soothsayer (psychic) to beware the day. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have reliable soothsayers today? “Don’t go to work today.” “Avoid the tuna salad at lunch.” “Beware the Amway Salesman.” I could use someone like that.

Do I have to worry about the Ides of March?

Not unless your name is Julius Caesar.

You also don’t have to worry about the early 70’s American rock band of the same name, famous for the song “Vehicle”.

The NaNoWriMo Controversy

I’m slow on the uptake, living in my own world where I write, teach, grade, and look at pictures of cats. But today on Reddit, I saw something that shocked me out of complacency and made me start to take a look at NaNoWriMo.

Apparently, a moderator of the Young Writers Program at NaNo was steering some of the young writers toward a diaper fetish website. This is clearly grooming and thus abuse. This, however, might not reflect on the NaNo organization — except that they did nothing about it initially and, when they did, allowed the perpetrator to remain on the forums. NaNo needed to safeguard children and failed.

This brings me to the question: How will I respond to this? I feel I must boycott, but it’s difficult because I have been involved in NaNo for 9 years. I don’t know how to boycott an entity that is free and won’t even know I’m boycotting. But I am thinking of how to vote against brushing a serious problem under the rug.

Update on the Kitty

Kitty’s name is Pumpkin, even though she’s pure black. Not sure how that happened, except I called her a little pumpkin.

She’s a sweet cat. She does not like being picked up and emphatically doesn’t like her belly rubbed like Chloe, but she enjoys rubbing against my legs and getting petted.

Richard needs more quality time with her. We want him to have a cuddlebeast in his life.