A Development I Couldn’t Have Predicted

Well, here’s a development I couldn’t have predicted — my husband is coauthoring my latest Kringle romance.

It’s an annual tradition (i.e. something I’ve done more than twice) for me to use NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to write a novel in the Kringle Chronicles, a set of light, quirky Christmas romances with the Spirit of Christmas in the forefront. You can read about this year’s in my latest posts.

Yesterday, my husband was presenting ideas for the coming novel, and I told him that if he wasn’t careful, I was going to have to give him a writing credit. He said “Ok.” After twenty minutes of interrogation, I discovered he wasn’t joking, that he wanted to co-author a romance novel with me.

If I don’t seem like the typical romance novel writer, he seems even less so. A bookish-looking guy, greying at the temples, stocky, librarian. But he wants second billing on this romance novel I’m writing.

He spent a little while this morning blocking out the first five chapters — not so much an outline as chapter synopses — and helping refine characters. He didn’t do too badly. I think this is going to work.

What is this blog about?

Every time I try to decide what this blog is about, my fingers take over. What this blog ends up being about is what’s on my mind. It’s an exercise in essaying, in freewriting, in expression. It’s sometimes about the seasons, a fascination of mine. Sometimes it’s about my writing, which has not gotten the niche following I had hoped for. Sometimes, it’s about my cats. (This is Chloe as a kitten). Sometimes it’s about heavier topics, like living with mental health quirks.

I feel guilty because I can’t stick to a topic. I think part of that is because of the admonition “write what you know”. What do I know? A little bit about a lot of things. I know what I have picked up from various places about writing but I am no means formally taught. I know about my subject matter (family economics and resource management) but I don’t want to write a work blog. I need my time off work. I know about moulage (making people look like casualty victims for training purposes) but that may be a little too niche. I know how to make bread, but not how to make really pretty loaves. I know edible flowers. I know Thai cooking, but not nearly so well as a native cook.

So I’m left with making a blog about what comes to mind; again, not something that appeals to a niche audience unless I find one who will ask me questions. I enjoy being asked questions, and will go to some lengths to answer them.

Hopefully I will find inspiration for a blog that people will flock to. More likely, I will find acceptance that mine is not one of them.

A Hole in the Clouds

Out the window, the clouds move away after spilling the gentlest of rain on us. In the clouds, blue-purple and grey, the slightest glimpse of light spills through. This is my mood, perfectly. My life has been grey lately, neither full of exuberant life nor beset by torrents. One day follows another and I do the same thing day after day, more or less. This is not a bad thing.

I worry more about the exuberant than the torrential. I weather storms well and have done all my life. Bright sunshine has its own violence, smashing calm just as much as lightning does. Great happiness tempts its opposite more than great depression does.

I want a little light peeking through my clouds, a bubble of joy, not the torrent that tells me that life is out of control. Because the latter is mania, and it scares me more than depression.

Here’s for a calm day.

I’m plotting!

I’m doing more plotting on November’s Kringle book (now tentatively called Kringle on Fire) than I have done on any book up till now. This is evidence that it hasn’t truly grabbed me yet, so it concerns me. The process is usually easier than this, with my characters and plots developing organically during discussions with my husband.

There are benefits to plotting a book, especially if one uses a framework like Save the Cat! or Romancing the Beat. You can find information on these online. One can also find derivatives of Save the Cat! and Romancing the Beat as Scrivener templates. The templates have significant advantages for writers and readers. Writers use someone else’s research to develop the story in a way that makes sense and the structure takes away a big concern when editing. Future readers can find the peaks and troughs of the plot where they expect.

Because I want to write this book for NaNoWriMo this November, and be part of a worldwide group of writers, I’m going to have to write however I can. That, in this case, means plotting.

The Next Book (for NaNo)

I am laying out the next book, which will give me the opportunity to ~~avoid~~ set aside Avatar of the Maker for a little while. I hope those ideas ripen in the meantime and give me insight on how to edit the document to wonderful effect.

The reason I am starting on another novel is that NaNoWriMo is coming up in November, and I have an annual ritual attached to that. Every November I write the next Kringle romance so that I’m inspired by the holiday season. It’s now part of how I celebrate.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

This year’s, which I don’t know if I have a title yet, involves a single mom/student/barista and a firefighter. These are common tropes of romance, but I’m hoping to make them uncommon. I’m trying to figure out what quirky elements to include in the story. In the past, I have included medieval reenactment and Krampus. I know that the Human Society is involved and the male protagonist is going to be a cat person (somewhat unusual, and something that gets voted down on dating sites, if you can believe that.) Maybe that’s enough, but I like to write for nerds, so maybe I get inspired.

There also needs to be a dance involved, in homage to regency novels. Where would a firefighter and a single mother dance? They don’t have money to go to the hospital Christmas gala. Is there a dance in the fire station? A Christmas party?

If you’re reading and have any ideas on these, let me know!

Ever Vigilant

I’m irritable. I have a crush on someone again^*. It’s a change in season. An ordinary person would think nothing of this, but I have bipolar disorder (bipolar 2), and this makes me worry. Am I becoming manic (hypomanic)? Do I need to check in with my pdoc? (Actually, checking in with my pdoc would be a good idea, as our last appointment got canceled.)

I’m probably overreacting; I often do. It’s easy to overreact when one has bipolar disorder, because the mood swings wreak havoc on one’s life. Even hypomania puts strains on relationships and budgets, and the full-fledged depression can make wanting to live difficult.

The states of bipolar mania/depression are hard to explain. It’s hard to explain that my judgment is great unless I’m in one of my extremes, and then I need a trusted voice to walk me through things. Even then, my judgment is not impaired but influenced by intense moods. I do not act on my moods as much as I suffer frustration.

As I wrote this, I got a call in to my pdoc and made an appointment, which will be in two weeks. If I’m still feeling like this then, I’ll bring it up to him.

^*I know I’m married; I still get crushes. I have a crush on Jason Momoa; nothing’s going to happen there either.

Ruminating

My day has periods of silence. Silence in my office hours, silence when I walk to the Student Union for lunch, lots of silence when I work at home on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

In the silence, I ruminate about my faults, about whether I am a good person. I think this is not necessarily a bad thing, because I remind myself that I don’t want to have those failings, and I decide to think a different way. In fact, I decide I’m a pretty normal person in the good/bad continuum. I come out of this feeling pretty okay.

Perhaps my reflections are excessive, because they impede my progress revising the first third of a novel. (They don’t keep me from doing my day job, of course. Nothing keeps me from doing my day job.) There are things I would rather do in the silence, such as plot this darned book better. Why can’t I ruminate about Leah’s decision to act upon her visions?

My ruminations might simply be a procrastination tactic, preventing me from tackling some pretty hard work. I know I have to move parts of the novel and rewrite other parts eventually, and I don’t want to. I haven’t figured out what the book is yet. Reflecting on my pettiness is easier work.

I need to do something new to move my mind to the doing work rather than ruminating. Maybe working with pen and paper for a while. Maybe red fountain pen. Perhaps going out to coffee. Anything but this ruminating.

My Big Audacious Goal

Choosing my Big Audacious Goal was difficult. I can define BAGs as much by what they aren’t as by what they are. I couldn’t choose little management goals as “getting better on my publicity game” (I will anyhow) or goals that don’t require a big learning curve such as “write another book”. “Write a vampire novel” would be a goal with a big learning curve, but it’s an example of the third thing to avoid, which are goals you really don’t feel moved to adopt.

I spent a couple days with my husband bouncing ideas off each other, which meant I usually rejected his ideas. This is a good thing, because it helped me define and constrain the Big Audacious Goal further. I almost chose his suggestion of writing a screenplay based on It Takes Two to Kringle, but I don’t think my talent in screenwriting will trump my utter frustration with the formatting.

Then, finally, my Big Audacious Goal came into sight, and it had nothing to do with writing. It concerns my other hobby, moulage, which is otherwise known as casualty simulation. Yes, I make people look like victims for training. I have created convincing (simulated) victims for mass casualty simulations, car wreck docudramas, hospital evacuation simulations, and more. I have gotten the nickname “Goddess of Gore” for my efforts.

One way to sculpt wounds is by using wax to create depth. The problem with that is that it can melt in warm weather, which is always. I can get around that by using airbrushing and a greater amount of shading.

That’s what I want to learn to do for my Big Audacious Goal.

I may fail. I may give it up. But at this moment, this is my Big Audacious Goal for the year.

Considering Big Audacious Goals again

It’s my birthday eve-eve-eve

It’s three days before my birthday. I’m almost 59, or almost-almost 60, so I don’t have a “birth month” any longer. I have an extended celebration, bits and pieces here and there.

This last weekend my husband and I traveled to Kansas City, in part for a writing retreat and in part for my birthday. I got to see a Studio Ghibli double-feature and spend quality time in coffeehouses. We postponed the visit to the classic, elegant steakhouse until the future when we could get reservations in on time, but we ate Middle Eastern and Indian food.

My actual birthday is on Sunday. I’m expecting more coffeehouse time and maybe dinner at the local steakhouse (which is not as fancy as The Golden Ox in KC). Maybe a Kris and Kates’ Birthday Cake twister, although I’m off sweets right now.

Making Big Audacious Goals

What I really want for my birthday is a good day, a calm day with a little joy. A day with a little surprise, hopefully pleasant. Hugs and kittens. I don’t ask for much. Besides, Sunday is not a day for Big Audacious Goals to be met.

I will make the Big Audacious Goals for the next year on my birthday, because it seems to be the right time, avoiding the treachery of the New Year and the spookiness of Halloween. (There’s also Asian New Year and Rosh Hashanah to select from for New Year, if we want to get more complicated.) But instead of correcting bad things (resolutions) I’ll make Big Audacious Goals.

What are Big Audacious Goals? The name spells it out — they’re gutsy and magnificent and perhaps harder than we expect them to be. The idea is to use them to push ourselves beyond our notion of ourselves.

A Big Audacious Goal is best when it specifies the action you’ll make rather than the result you will get, because we have less power over what results from our actions. For example, writing this blog twice a week (which I have only done consistently lately) is a better BAG than getting 100 followers, which is something I have no control over. Coincidentally, I have over 100 followers. I didn’t get to my goal exactly, but close enough to celebrate.

Choosing Big Audacious Goals makes us feel more powerful, as if we have chosen something heroic to perform. I read somewhere that dogs define themselves by what they do: “Hank, fetch!” Now the dog’s name is Hank, fetch! I argue dogs become heroes in their own minds by what they do. We do too by adopting Big Audacious Goals.

What if you don’t succeed? It was a Big Audacious Goal; attempting it in the first place puts you a great deal better than before you adopted it. One of my BAGs was to indie-publish Gaia’s Hands, which I did. Not too many people have read it, though, which was the other half of the BAG (I should have known better). But look at the BAG of indie publishing it. Gaia’s Hands is a highly personal novel, and the one which I found hardest to write, so publishing it is a grand step. Putting it in front of readers, even if they don’t read it, is a grand step.

I don’t know what I’m going to adopt as Big Audacious Goals this year; I’m going to talk about that with my husband. Writing something I’d already planned for writing is not a BAG; the goal should be above the ‘do’ level and into the ‘dream, then do’ level. If it’s another book, it has to be something I think is beyond me. Maybe it’s doing something dramatic in marketing like better TikTok or a podcast (if only I had something to talk about!) A few cups of coffee and I’m sure it will come to me.

Glorious Break

I’ve missed a couple days writing this blog, but that’s because I spent a couple days in Kansas City on a writing retreat. Writing retreats consist of soaking up coffeehouse atmosphere, eating good food, and writing. This writing goal was to clean up some formatting and language on Gaia’s Hands that I missed the first time around. Luckily, uploading corrected versions on Kindle is so easy that I did it in half an hour, and 20 minutes of that was tweaking the cover.

I have editing to do with Avatar of the Maker, especially as I’ve separated it from the Maker’s Seeds plot. That’s something I’ve learned over my years writing, that there is such a thing as too much plot. As I have one-third of the book written, this will probably be painful. Maybe I will rescue it later. I have another book, although a fluffy one, waiting in the wings.

I get intense focus on writing retreats, even though I’m writing in a crowded coffeehouse. Or, as it so happens right now, writing in a quiet hotel room while my husband snores. (Oh yes, Richard, you do snore).

Today, I will write my newsletter and get caught up on my promotion tasks. And feel rested for the week to come.