I am happy to announce that I will be co-authoring a book with our very own Me-Me! The book, Archetype Cats, will detail the lives of the immortal cats created by Angel to honor the cat who sacrificed herself to save Lilith.
Me-Me contributes her unique perspective as a cat, and I hope to harness my years of writing into a new venture. Expect madcap adventures, heartwarming tales, and the occasional bout of confusion, as these cats teleport wherever they like.
Sometimes, when writing, I have to talk with my husband about plot points.
“What happens if the rural water goes out?” Richard sits on the couch with his phone out.
“Rural water will not go out, or else lots of people die.” My solution. I believe the water infrastructure isn’t likely to go out for a while, but when it does, the town will have trouble fixing it for a while. Unless the power goes out, and fuel for generators becomes scarce.
“But the collective is going to be prepared for it, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know how. They have less than a week to prepare for it. How are they going to prepare for it?” I type “Where does Mahomet IL get their water?” and I discover Mahomet is sitting on top of a massive aquifer that belts the middle part of the state of Illinois. In fact, it’s called the Mahomet Aquifer. “There’s an aquifer, but I don’t see the collective drilling a well in one week even if they can find someone with the equipment.”
“They could do the pioneer thing and dig it themselves.”
“Eighty feet? How do they get back up?”
“A rope.”
“In a week?”
“Wait a minute. Don’t they have a 100-year-old farmhouse on grounds?” This is where my husband remembers the setting of my story better than I do.
“Yes, but — “
“I would bet that farmhouse has a well.”
“So all they need is piping. And the parts. Lots of pipe and joins, tied in to the water tower — they should have a water tower, right?” (Why didn’t I think of this before?)
“They definitely should have a water tower.”
In my mind I’m painting the water tower because I’m easily distracted. I pull myself back to the current discussion. “Oh, but then we could put the municipal filter in so the water is clean. Hope they can get this done in a week*.”
* They don’t just have a week to refit the well. They have as long as they need because I am the author.
Today I found out that I will be teaching not one, but two of my favorite classes this fall.
The first is Family Resource Management, and this has a bit of history. I used to teach this when I taught in a Family and Consumer Sciences department (that is my background). It’s one of my favorite classes because all management is resource management. It’s part of everything we do and decide.
I lost this class when the FCS Department got disbanded some 12 years ago and I was placed in the Behavioral Sciences Department. I taught Psych classes there, teaching myself as I went along. The classes I taught in Psych included Research Methods, Personal Adjustment and General Psychology. I also taught (and still teach) Case Management, which is a lot closer to what I’m used to.
But now we’re bringing back Resource Management, and I’m teaching it!
The other class is Disaster Psych. This is a class for Emergency and Disaster Management majors. I am, besides being Behavioral Sciences faculty, EDM faculty by virtue of teaching Case Management, an option for the major that few students take. (Most EDM students are high adrenaline students who like humanitarian hot zones and lots of sirens).
I feel at home with the EDM people, and I work with them twice a year doing moulage (casualty simulation) for their disaster/humanitarian simulations. So I love working with them.
It’s funny how, when what we do is a good fit, our self-image becomes more solid. I have felt like an impostor for years, with most of the classes I taught not sitting with my self-image. But now I feel like I’m doing what I trained for.
Several of my books (two published, one nearly ready to publish, two needing a good go-over, one currently being written — that many already?) exist in the Hidden in Plain Sight universe — a world just like the one we’re living in, except with preternatural and virtually immortal beings and their half-human offspring. The stories are just as much (if not more) about how the beings deal with what they call Earthside.
The series is very character-driven, with one extended family of Archetypes (the immortals) and Nephilim (the half-humans) prominent in the plots. There are also several humans featured prominently. The books occur over a timeline of 20 years. As a result, I have to manage events in several characters’ lives.
For example, there was the Baby Boom. At one point, Nephilim were sterile, then their Maker decided they weren’t. (There is a reason, but the book hasn’t been written yet.) As many of them were in relationships and accustomed to not using birth control, there were babies. So yesterday I was going to write a story about four characters in Chicago going on a walk through the powder keg of a city pre-collapse. Three were Nephilim, one human, and all have strong personalities so it was going to be fun. Until I realized: Wait, Allan and Celestine have a kid. And later, wait, one of those two is the father to twins. And the original idea collapsed, because I didn’t see these parents taking the kids out for a field trip on volatile streets. Nor did I see them leaving the kids with babysitters while there were riots on corners nearby. I don’t know how to write the story now.
This happens all the time. Are Batarel and Ty in Chicago or at Barn Swallows’ Dance1 right now? (Barn Swallows’ Dance, ever since they completed their field trip.) How do I keep Josh from being held hostage with the English Department during the siege of Illinois? (He has a vision and stays home from work that day. I knew a guy who survived 9/11 because he didn’t feel like going to work that day.) Just where is Hard Promises located? (Cook County IL sold off a lot of its forest preserve property, and the collective’s founders grabbed Beaubien Woods.)
It’s hard to take notes on these twists and turns because I can’t predict what I’ll need for the future. So I search through the previous books (thank goodness Scrivener has a pretty robust search engine) and find the details I need.
I’m sure this will keep happening. When does Barn Swallows’ Dance first connect with Hearts are Mountains?
1: Barn Swallows Dance, Hard Promises, and Hearts are Mountains are all agricultural collectives. They have as residents a mix of humans, Archetypes, and Nephilim.
The clouds are moving in. Light clouds right now, but there is a chance of severe weather – winds, possible hail. A tornado would not be unheard of. The weather service says this should start about the time I am conducting a meeting that I would rather skip.
I might not be conducting. I may be looking out the window at the storm. The storm speaks to me; it speaks louder than this business meeting. It speaks louder than this white-walled room with its whiteboards and white screen.
If I could walk out into the storm, I would.
What is your favorite type of weather?
I love thunderstorms. I live in the Midwest, which has a fine number of thunderstorms each year. The pounding rain, the flashes of lightning that hit all too close to the house, the ringing thunderclaps are all dear to me.
When I was younger, I had the perception of walking through a bolt of lightning. I did not really walk through lightning because I had no charring or lightning trees on my body. But I found myself completely surrounded by a hot white light, no clap of thunder. I always felt from that point forward that lightning had claimed me.
I like the drama of thunderstorms. I am not dramatic; I have aged into a pretty staid person. But I claim thunderstorms as my alter ego.
What do you wish you could do more every day?
I wish I could write more. That doesn’t mean I never have enough time to write. Sometimes, something else gets in the way.
Sometimes it’s my focus and I find myself taking a detour on the Internet. Sometimes it’s negative self-talk that makes me not want to write. Sometimes it’s too much to think about.
Today it’s my iPad is down to zero and is recharging very slowly. I can’t always do something about it.
Today feels more like spring (at 42 degrees) than did the weather in the 60s a couple of weeks ago. It could be the quality of the sunshine, or yellow forsythia flowers chilling on the bush. Or the mobs of robins on the lawn and in the trees.
I have gotten through the winter without depression dogging my steps. I don’t know how I did it, other than luck. Definitely luck. I feel a bit tired right now, but not depressed. Not crying, not dreading work, not denigrating myself.
I’m still keeping watch. I am in the middle of the 12th anniversary of the most stressful time of my life. My best friend died, then my department disbanded, and I was hospitalized with suicidal ideations and a medicine-related problem. I spent the summer overmedicated and yanked off of supervising internships. I am always afraid this will happen to me again.
But in the meantime, it’s Spring. I watch the birds to see what might surprise me today. I write, feeling the words become part of me. I look for crocuses, for daffodils, for a reminder that all is bright again.
I am going to write about the patron saint of this day, March 17.
Not that one.
I’m writing about St. Gertrude. St. Gertrude is the patron saint of cats for reasons that do not appear in her history. It might be because she was the patron saint of rats and rats spread bubonic plague so we have to bring the cats out to rid us of the plague — but no. Early Catholicism was brutal on cats, especially black ones.
Nowadays, though, in this cat-loving world of ours (the cats won!) Gertrude can be portrayed with a cat in her lap and the rats scurrying away.
St. Gertrude is also the patron saint of gardeners, widows, the recently deceased, the sick, the poor, the mentally ill, and travelers. She sounds like someone I’d like to hang out with.
How does one celebrate St. Gertrude’s Day? I guess by petting cats. They’ll be happy for the attention.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Words Like Me 