Well!! Hurricane Ian is supposedly on his way over here. I will be working on the camping story, the not-pirates story, and hopefully the swamp aliens story, which has Hurricane Andrew in it. I am thinking about drawing up my cenobitesona this week, too. Classes were cancelled Wednesday and Thursday and there’s not REALLY a whole huge hell of a lot for me to do in the meantime. Sigh.
Well, hopefully I will get all of my Goal Writing done before the 1st. I might be starting a new part time job soon, though I don’t believe it will slow my writing TOO much. I might extend my timeframe for finishing the Grimweaver Mythos collection by a month if it does, I suppose. It’s too early to tell, I suppose!
Speaking of writing projects, I have a bunch of like……… research materials and notes and whatnot and I keep thinking I’d like to make a brief podcast about Florida’s haunted ass history, mostly to explain the actual literal historical connections to the places and events I reference in some of these stories. I don’t have THE most soothing, radio-ready voice though, lol. We will see.
Not much to report on besides the usual homework + family stuff+ housework ensemble, I guess. I mostly just hope I don’t lose power. I’m not where the worst of the storm will be hitting, though, and I’m inland enough that even when storms hit pretty directly they USUALLY get settled down to a Cat1 or TS by the time they get me. (Well… except 2004… but that year was a doozy.)
I think I need to do something about making my mailing list bigger/more attractive and I definitely need to make some updates to my art website. I guess we will see if I end up having the time/energy to do that though.
I last drank: a can of coke zero
I last ate: some steak and fettucine alfredo. it’s the rao’s sauce, i like it, my first time trying this one.
Actually a pretty busy day/week. I did a bunch of homework, spent a couple of nights at a hotel to recharge and visit HHN with son worm, finished with my list of new stories/story synopses for the Grim Related collection (21 new stories! Plus probably the 3 from Born Under A Bad Sign!), and went on to do yet more homework, which I will be doing… even more homework… momentarily.
I’m looking into a couple of jobs that hopefully will work out, but we’ll see. (This is as good a time as any to remind that yes, I would still like as many people as possible to buy the book that’s already out!) I’m feeling pretty energized to write this next batch of stories, though! I do need to figure something out regarding art sales – for the most part I need to restructure my artist portfolio website and look into instituting a sales method or possibly a print shop, though I could also see about doing a POD shop, too. I’ve been too busy/hectic to do much art the past couple of months and I think I’m probably not prepared to try to get into any shows or apply for an MFA program this year, but of course that leads me back to “Do I even WANT to be in an MFA program, for the things I want to do with my life?” I generally lean towards yes, but if I want to apply for next fall I would have to put the application in this semester and I don’t really know if I could swing it, and rejection from one of my programs of choice would be psychologically devastating, haha.
But also – I don’t really know if I DO need an MFA. My first several career goals are more entrepreneurial in nature – self publishing, a gallery/communal studio, hotels, haunts – and at this point it feels like it might be me doing my usual “anxious about failing so procrastinating to the point of not starting” bit. Whhhhiiiich I suppose answers the question, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to/shouldn’t do it…. sigh. That’s a decision for Future Sharo.
I’ve got lots of writing to get back to, so I guess that’s it for right now.
Like I do pretty much every year* since 2002, I went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando Resort. Some mild spoilers for what I saw of the event throughout the review!
Definitely just some normal scarecrows.
For a couple of reference points: I used to work for Universal Orlando back in the day, so I became extremely accustomed to attending this event multiple times each season for low or no cost. In the last few years since I left that job, I’ve really only been able to attend once a year (or, in 2019-2020, none times per year.) and for the last couple of years I’ve decided to bite the bullet and get myself the HHN Express pass. Cost wise, most years it seems the best days to do that are Wednesdays and Thursdays. Those tend to be emptier, quieter days as well, and historically I’ve always gone on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Sunday. I did attend a Saturday during opening weekend once, but the crowds are just too overwhelming. I definitely recommend a Wednesday or a Thursday whether you get the Express or not, but if you can do both: I was able to blast through seven houses and two rides in a little under three hours with the Express on a Thursday, and I was back in my hotel bed with a heating pad and a ginger ale by 10pm.
ME AND WHO????
I did not watch either the seated show or the lagoon show, and due to a combination of inclement weather and crowding I didn’t catch any of the scarezone scripted events. I’d been particularly looking forward to seeing what would happen in the scarezones, so that bummed me out a little. I did see a couple of scareactors in the Spooky Farm zone – including the Corntastic guy, that was a really cool costume – but the cemetery and the pumpkin lord zone were pretty much empty. I really would have liked to see the Pumpkin Lord at all, especially since his house was far and away my favorite from last year. Whatever zone was in San Francisco was so hellishly overcrowded that even when I spotted the scareactors they were being crushed in by guests – I’m at the point where I honestly think they need to find a way to split the crowd into traffic lanes there, because that area ended up being boring and annoying more than anything else. The Candy Parade From Hell zone was really good, though! The parade floats, set pieces, and seeming legion of aggressor/victim characters wandering around were really immersive and fun. I would have liked a better sound design there, and I didn’t catch that some of the food stalls I was looking for were in the area. I think that area would have really been a perfect in the daylight and with a transformation sequence from normal parade to hell parade.
Really fun parade float matching the cemetery scarezone/past cemetery houses!Another parade float, maybe a Spirits of the Coven reference?
Speaking of scarezones… I think Hellblock Horror, which ended up being my last house of the night, should have been a scarezone, probably in San Francisco, which little separated walkthrough elements. I really didn’t get that the house was supposed to be some kind of jail for radiation monsters until like, a little bit into it, but a lot of the elements they used in the house were super cool. I just think for it to be effective they should have had a kaiju or two, and the kind of space/sound design they’d want for that has already been used in previous scarezones. As a zone or as a house, it also could have tied in really well with Bugs: Eaten Alive, what with the nuclear terror/50s monster vibes… if they’d been anywhere near one another. A little bit of planning could have linked a fair number of the houses and scarezones into a single cohesive narrative this year, but like… the Candy Parade+Pumpkin Lord+Cemetery+Farm+Legends+Chupacabra+Coven+Halloween as one single Classic/Vintage narrative, and Bugs+Hellblock+Descent+Winter’s Wake forming their own kind of Fallout-ey narrative.
I wanted to like the Weeknd and there WAS a lot to like about it, but the combination of constant intense strobe lights + problems I was having with my glasses getting fogged up from the rain meant I barely could see anything but what I did see gave me a headache. Weeknd seems like a house that would have really benefited from some kind of buildup in the line, like – idk, clips of an interview before and after whatever caused the … undead Weeknd situation? It was really hard to tell what I was seeing in there. Legends was cool in the way the line to get on the Mummy ride is cool, but it was… kinda goofy. When I went the Wolfman was the winner, holding Dracula’s decapitated head, and I spend so much time around various nieces and nephews that I told him he did a Good Job. It wasn’t very scary and I didn’t really get a good idea of WHY they were fighting, though at least I had the feeling that the Wolfman was a good ?? guy?? And I have no idea what happened to the Mummy.
I’d been REALLY looking forward to three houses: Bugs, Winter’s Wake, and Chupacabra. I would have liked just a teensy bit more time in the first room in Bugs, possibly with a clearer voiceover explaining that the AC unit has a Pesticide Option, a visual cue that the Ominous Fog was the pesticide, and maybe something to indicate why the display lady started Blood Curdling Screams instead of trying to easily escape. That being said, the rest of the house was pretty coherent and VERY upsetting if you’re at all uncomfortable with bugs, holes, parasites, etc. I legitimately felt itchy and twitchy for a while afterwards, it’s probably the best house experience I had that night. Not as good as last year’s pumpkin house, but still pretty good. I did appreciate the uh. Man Pregnant With Spiders. :3
Looking forward to more from BZZZCON INDUSTRIES!!
I… okay, so, I got in line for Chupacabra before Winter’s Wake, because the line was shorter by about 20 minutes before Express. At 25 minutes, I ended up in the door to a house at the expected 8 minute mark. That’s fine. The person checking our Express passes did so for the Chupacabra house. That’s also fine. The lines merged at some point? And so we stepped into the soundstage and… it was very obviously Winter’s Wake, but we didn’t feel comfortable going back through the people behind us? So I didn’t get to do Chupacabra due to having forgotten to take my anxiety meds before the event started, lmao.
Winter’s Wake was good though. Beautiful set. The crashed fishing boat situation was cool as fuck. I really liked that it engaged guests with things to look at outside of their natural field of vision, rewarding you if you look up and around. I have no idea why that pretty girl was violining? I’m not sure how those fishermen became fishmen? I appreciated the one Sweater Wearing Man flying at us but the timing was a little weird and the lighting/costume meant that it was like, oh, he’s. he’s on the little swingy harness. The whole thing gave big Far Harbor Fallout 4 vibes, though, and a big nuclear disaster could explain the crashed boat and the monster fishermen situation. The house just wasn’t… scary, but I would love to do an unmasking the horror in it if I ever have the money.
I really wanted to like Spirits of the Coven. With the timing of the 1920s Prohibition stuff, I thought maybe we’d see some ties to past houses/zones set in that timeframe, or even a nod to the Legendary Truth storylines. I didn’t really feel like I… understood the house very well. Some of the scares ended up being like “Oh! The Monster Is … Normally Dressed Man In A Porkpie Hat!” and I felt like it wasn’t super clear what the witches were doing or why it was… bad or dangerous to us? But the glowing images in the one part really FELT like they should be connected to Legendary Truth. Oh well.
Descent was a good house… to an extent… I liked the set designs and character designs, again. The fungus bit was the coolest part. It felt like a missed opportunity or two in there, though. It didn’t make a huge amount of sense to me how it ended, and, as usual, the Rather Pleasant Cannibal Cookout Odors were more of a distraction than an enhancement. I love Fun Smells as much as the next person, but we gotta retire the Cannibal Flesh Cooking smell, it’s like, identical to the smell in the Sonnys/4River/Dustin’s parking lot. I also just really didn’t catch why we were down in the subway or how all this happened? This is another one that really would have done well with some kind of buildup to explain the setting.
I did not attempt to enter Halloween or Blumhouse, both of which had hourlong lines when I was nearby, because I just! Did not! Want to wait! 20 minutes! In a line! I’ve done the Halloween house a dozen times over, and I didn’t end up seeing either Freaky or The Black Phone, and while I’m sure those two houses are both highly anticipated and appreciated by some, I just couldn’t make myself endure another hour in the rain and crowds. That’s not necessarily a dig, because if I’d gone for a Frequent Fear pass I would have hit the houses I didn’t get to the next night. I just was, at that point, at my limit physically. (The joys of being relatively newly disabled… it’s my second HHN using a cane but I hadn’t taken the weather affecting my joints into account.)
The usual HHN complaints stand, I guess – houses falling into some predictable patterns even for HHN newbies, scares relying overmuch on Loud/Sudden Noise+Sudden Movement, exquisite amounts of lush detail that don’t get enough time to be appreciated and therefore don’t add to a sense of dread, horror, or terror. (This, I think, was the reason why last year’s Puppet Show house wasn’t super scary – it had everything it needed to be scary but TIME.) I would love love love to experience the true anticipation and dread that primes one to be not just startled but truly scared! There have been past years where this felt more possible. Nowadays, I think there would need to be more on social media – no complaints about the Twitter SMM, but I feel like lore drops, small-stakes contests and giveaways, and team building/faction choosing/alliance type activities starting at least 30 days before opening night would be a huge bonus. The fact that I didn’t realize there was a small anthology of official (?) HHN short stories this year because it was apparently on Spotify, a thing I don’t use, until 4 days after I went to the event makes me wonder where exactly the parks advertised this information.
That being said, I had a great time, the lines with express were short enough to get through what would have taken me 8 or 9 hours in past years in a mere 3 hours. If I’d been a little less waterlogged I would have headed over to Cabana Bay for the spooky photo gallery thing, but alas! I made it home to Endless Summer Dockside and spent the rest of the night eating Auntie Annies nuggets and alternating between Zak Bagans and Guy Fieri with my teenager. I do wish there could have been some fun HHN promo/activity stuff at my hotel as well, but hey, at least I had a great suite with a pretty neat view.
NGL the view of Fun Spot made me want to go to Fun Spot.
Compared to the other 16 years that I’ve gone to this event, I give HHN31 a 7.5/10.
Another busy week and busy weekend! You’d think that I’d get a day off sometime, but no, heheh.
A few fun notes: I’ve now got 13 new story ideas written down and notated, some with research already begun. My personal goals for the next short story collection are:
At least 15 completely new stories, perhaps as many as 20 new stories… (!!)
Written, edited, and formatted as the next ebook before December 15th…
That all flesh out and contribute to the shared mythos/universe they all take place in…
…and that I have fun with every one of them.
So far I’m on the right track, I think! I’m excited about the new stories (ghosts! evil houses! monster hogs! pirates! zombies!) and now that I know how to do what I want to do with self publishing, it should be faster and easier to do it! I want to get as many story ideas written down before I head to Halloween Horror Nights this weekend, though, and I’m still blustering my way through three college classes this semester, too. (Currently: All A’s, and I want to KEEP IT THAT WAY…)
One thing that’s a bit of a bummer, it looks like my dog’s surgery has to be rescheduled, since it… was scheduled for today, and even though I checked with them over the phone 3 times that they were indeed open for Labor Day and got a confirmation text as recently as this past Saturday that it would be happening today… guess who was closed for Labor Day? Which… okay, lmao. I’m just saying, if I could sell a couple thousand copies of this book I could afford the fancy expensive vet down the street who wouldn’t run me around re: my appointments. Sigh. She’s okay, though, it’s not like urgent-urgent. She’s a very good dog.
Today was an email day, so just as a reminder, my email list is usually twice a month + the rare announcement that might happen once every 3-6 weeks, so I won’t be clogging up people’s inboxes. I think in perhaps 3-5 months I will create an archive of my emails for newer visitors, possibly if I end up adding a bunch more subscribers in a short amount of time. We’ll see!
I am drinking: mug of twinings chai ultra spice… after 11pm…
TODAY’S MY BIRTHDAY >:3 AND BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN IS OUT, WHICH I DID POST THE OTHER DAY, BUT STILL, I’M VERY EXCITED!
I have been having a decent chunk of homework every night this week so I haven’t been able to do VERY much other than get this book out there + homework + normal household things the past few days, but I’m hoping the more used to things I become, the easier it will be to power through things. Especially since next week my dog’s having surgery AND I’ll be going to HHN with Son Worm :3
I’m not quite ready to sit down and start updating the website with the relevant links BUT I’m going to link the various ways to purchase Born Under A Bad Sign here. (I’m still waiting for the approval from Google Books, but it should be soonish? It’s been a few days since I tried to set it up…) And of course I have my notebooks and pens ready for my note-taking/prep for the next short story collection. 🙂
Oh! I got my first Amazon review today, which was very fun to read >:3c I just like seeing what other people think and finding out which bits stuck out to them, lol. I’m hoping to at SOME point have the book in the Top 100 for Horror Short Stories so I can screencap it and send it to anybody who ever doubted me in a gloating manner, hahahaha.
Sorry I missed the Monday post, I was very busy with the combination of my first week back at school and THE BOOK IS LIVE, JUST AS AN FYI, IT’S ALIVE ON MULTIPLE!!! PLATFORMS!! AS OF 2AM MY TIME (aka when I was asleep, heh) BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN CAN BE PURCHASED AS EITHER AN EPUB OR A PDF!!!!!!!
I’m SO excited about this, OH my god. I mean also yes school is important and good, too, I’m busting my ass to get good grades bc I’m paying for everything out of pocket, and I’m learning a lot. It’s just a two semester certificate – I’m taking a total of 6 classes, three this semester and three next semester – and my wildest hope CURRENTLY is that I will sell enough copies of this book to pay off the credit card I’m using to pay for tuition and books, weh lmao. But hey!!! Maybe I’ll sell a thousand c- [looks at note re: how much textbooks cost for just one semester] – maybe I’ll sell 1500 copies! heheh.
I’m going to go a little nuts over on social media about this, just as soon as I finish going a little nuts via my email newsletter. After that… well, after that I have homework due this weekend BUT!!! I’m already jotting down notes for the next set of short stories, I’m aiming to have a MUCH longer book next time – though probably not illustrated, that was a killer to format because things kept not doing what I wanted them to do.
I haven’t been reading or watching anything for the last 10 days other than homework and formatting tips, but as this is my birthday weekend (well… Monday’s my birthday so it’s a four day weekend in my HEART…) I will endeavor to enjoy a few things in between working and flogging the book. 😛
Oh! Also, my book is available as an .EPUB from Kindle or Smashwords, and as a .PDF from itch.io! I’ll link those below:
Better late than never: AKA, movies that came out 2+ years ago that I meant to see and never got around to watching until recently! This Saturday I watched Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark!
I do want to preface my thoughts with the acknowledgment that, like so many of my peers, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series of books was the first exposure I had to children’s horror. (Not horror in general – alas, my parents let me consume Stephen King, Tales from the Crypt, and the first DOOM game as a 4 year old… which explains a thing or two, I guess!) There’s a LOT of nostalgia and yearning tied up with these books, especially with the art by Stephen Gammell. I must confess to one of the many misunderstandings that led me to where I am now: for like the first 20 years of my life I didn’t really… realize that the writer and the artist for the Scary Stories books were two different people. I just assumed that everything was done by the same person until I was like… in community college. Which explains why I decided to, and then did, write a collection of short stories accompanied by art, I suppose!
The book itself was so influential on me, on how I thought about folklore and horror as a kid, that I really avoided the movie for a while because I was worried about whether it would or even could live up to my expectations. When I read those books at seven, eight, nine: I could FEEL the Black Dog looking at me. I could HEAR the spider crawling on my face. I dreamed of rooms with checkerboard floors and empty houses with faces in the windows. I started telling those stories to my not-quite-old-enough-to-read little brothers, and embellishing them, and then eventually making up my own stories. It’s a lot to put on a single piece of media: not just that it would define a feeling for people the way the book did for me, but that it would make storytellers and wordslingers and horrorcrafters of them the way it did for me. I was afraid that I would be disappointed, even though I loved the source material and the director and everything I’d seen of the trailers.
The movie is rated PG-13, and in a way that says everything: it would have frightened me and haunted me and fascinated me as a teenager, it would have scared the bejesus out of me as a child. It’s a movie about teens at the end of their time in high school, the prime setting to deliver anxious mystery to middle-schoolers about what the future might be like, with characters who are still within reach. As an adult with a middle-school tween, I found myself experiencing the movie not as a child who could feel the characters’ fear but as a parent. (And wow, Dean Norris, good job? You really got me, dude.)
The movie’s 1968 setting makes it clear from scene one that there’s a social anxiety simmering constantly around the horror of the ghosts and whatnot. Boys in their varsity jackets sign up for the war in Vietnam, bouncing off one another in the street. Richard Nixon is elected president. A teenager, reeling from his brother’s death in Vietnam at the beginning of the summer, is racing through small-town Pennsylvania to escape his own draft notice. The police leer at and suspect the only Latin character in the entire movie; Our Good Football Boys call him slurs left and right; our Earnest Actually-Good Boys allow soft-racist baubles like pearls of shit tumble from their lips as they try to impress him and fawn over his beautiful face and cool demeanor and instant attraction to their Troubled Girl Pal. (As a Latin person who has spent a couple dozen summer and spring breaks in small-town Pennsylvania over the last 35 years, yeah, that tracks.)
Some parts of the movie are scarier or more horrible than the book. Movie “Harold,” which scared me way too much for a city kid who to this day has never seen a real scarecrow, affords its victim both a cleaner death than the book and a more horrifying, spirit-crushing end. “Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker” removes the hypnotic call-and-response of the original story to give us The Just A Horrible Guy Doing Horrible Things, Actually from “What Do You Come For?” (At least the dog’s alright in this version….) The terribly sad woman from “The Dream” trying to warn the dreamer to safety is… kind of the most nightmarish part of this movie, and brings forth a lot of Adult Feelings And Fears.
There’s a hopeful note at the end, even as it is soured by the reality of the draft and the long years in Vietnam ahead. It’s the kind of thing you’d hope a kid of ten or twelve would see and later ask about, and devote long hours to pondering. I’m not sure if it makes the kids who watch it want to be writers, or filmmakers, or storytellers at all, but… it really wasn’t for me? It’s a movie for children, to give them their first horror anthology without all the tits and drugs and buckets of gore. The fact that it’s exactly what the book was made to be is, I think, enough to tuck it gently away, like a beloved old storybook with dogeared pages and bathwater stains on the corner. Everybody starts somewhere in horror. I think it’s a pretty good start for the kids out there who don’t have the baggage of nostalgia to weigh them down.
As a side note, wow, those kids acted their little butts off. Good job, guys.
Paperwork has… I think… been completed! I don’t know of too many freelance artists/writers locally who have registered with the county+state as a small business (the notary who helped me out seemed to think the entire thing was a silly endeavor and that I should just… sell this stuff without including all kinds of tax stuff.) I’m also not 100% sure how to include taxes in sales going forward, but hopefully the state business tax department will get back to me soon on what to do and expect there. It’s tough because a lot of it relates to “tangible” objects or goods, and like… yes, when I sell a physical painting that’s a tangible object, but is a JPG of a digital art commission a tangible object? Is an ebook file a tangible object? Is early access to content on Patreon “tangible”? I’m guessing no for that last one, but I will be able to call them up with more questions once I have my registration form.
In other news, whew! I’ve got a little more than half the art done for Born Under A Bad Sign and I’m almost done with the final edits for the last 2 short stories. (The second to last one is more… me trying to decide how goofy I want to get with the formatting in google docs or openoffice before I try to actually format it as an ebook, anyway!) I’ve got plans in the works for a second collection of short stories that p much only feature content/lore/etc related to my specialest boy, but I’m thinking of writing up a copy of a piece of writing that’s only referred to in one of the stories and using that as a fun bonus for people signing up for my email list at the end of Born Under A Bad Sign. I’m still debating because it might also fit if it’s inserted into the short story it’s related to…. hmmmmmm. We will see. It might be the kind of thing that works better as a heavily illustrated PDF than as a work of prose.
I’ve been pretty busy lately – multiple emergency trips to the eye doctor for glasses repair, surprise babysitting, vet visit for my dog, planning the surgery date for my dog – but it’s the kind of busy that mingles with desperation enough to get me to work on my other stuff. So there is that!
I’m starting classes on the 22nd – I’m going back to school for a business certificate which will hopefully make it easier to jobsearch (I don’t MISS having a day job but whoo I know this whole Beloved Author Career may take a while to get moving) and also will entail getting like, microsoft office certified (probably a plus!) and 2 semesters of ASL. I have come to accept that I don’t qualify for student loans because it’s an undergrad-level course and I already have a BA, but oof ouch. At least it’s a local community college (practically down the street) so I’m looking at “only” 1100$ per semester. It’sssssss…. going on a credit card. But hey! The skills I learn and the documentation I receive will be a huge benefit to me, and this is basically a beta test to see if I want to go and get an MFA or whether I really feel like I’m done with academia. I’m also homeschooling my kid again for the 2022-2023 school year, which will be starting for us next Monday. We’ve done it before but I’m hoping to get Kid prepared for In Person School in the 2023-2024 school year.
That timeline is a big part of why I’m trying to really get this book completed and out into the world before I have to focus most of my attention on my classes/homeschooling/dog’s surgery in September/etc. I started this project back in… March, I think? I did faff about for a few months there, and I already had 2 of the short stories written, but I still think that getting 7 short stories written in roughly 4 months was pretty good, considering I’ve also been illustrating the stories, painting a bunch of fun little eyeball paintings, doing a constant stream of paperwork, and babysitting a giant shifting pile of toddlers for the past two months, haha. That being said, if my classes permit it, I’m probably going to start working on Collection #2: The Clownening during NaNoWriMo this year.
A few notes: I’m still sitting at 22% funded for my Ko-fi Goal, which accounts just for the costs of registering as a small biz for taxes (aka: things I’ve already paid for because I didn’t want to wait) and some costs related to publishing the ebook (aka: things I haven’t paid for just yet but will be soon.) I’m also hoping for more email list sign-ups, which will largely just be bite-sized updates condensed down from these big long blog posts, fun facts, mini horror reviews, and announcements. The email list is a twice-monthly+book announcements+initial welcome email thing, so it’s going to be a little less often than the blog posts.
I am drinking: strawberry kiwi gatorade zero! (it’s my favorite right now!)
Today I got some important paperwork notarized so I can make sure all my tax stuff is in order for next year, got my mailchimp set up… I THINK. Knuckled down and created a basic logo after weepily failing to figure out how to use vectornator to make a very complicated logo, which I will be uploading onto the site soon enough. I’m about to get back to writing the 9th and final short story for my upcoming collection, Born Under A Bad Sign, which I’m about 20% of the way through as of this morning. So, clipping along pretty well, I think! I need to find a way to get more of the art done because I’ll need to get formatting this, too. I think I’m still on track to have this book out in time for my birthday.
Speaking of which – it’s August 1st! Since this is my Birthday Month, that means today is the official start of Spooky Season. Also, I’ve decided over the years that we will honor the Victorian tradition of Christmastime ghost stories, so Spooky Season doesn’t end until the day AFTER the 12th Day of Christmas, January 6th. January 7th can be the start of Smoochie Season, which I have yet to determine an enddate for.
Tomorrow I will likely be a bit busy due to accidentally booking a vet appointment and a doctor appointment on the same day, but here’s hoping I hit the halfway mark on Story #9! I’m also still fundraising on ko-fi for moneys to cover the cost of some of the publishing stuff like ISBNs and the fees for the tax paperwork, and I’m currently 22% of the way to my goal!
I am drinking: strawberry kiwi gatorade zero!
I last ate: tillamook sharp white cheddar snack!
I have not read anything substantial in the last few days…
I recently rewatched: season one of Reservation Dogs!
Oh well.
SHARO CREATES 