Ideally, my goal is to post here once a month. For once, instead of being late about it due to a lack of anything interesting to report, I actually got pulled into a loop of "Oh, well, I'll post after I'm done this other big momentous thing, oh and after this other big thing." So, for once, I actually have a LOT to talk about! Most importantly:
I AM GETTING A SHORT STORY PUBLISHED!
I still can't believe it either! It's my short story, "To Crave an Empty Chest," which I'd been working on for a bit over a year. I wrote it, edited it like twenty times, created an alternate ending, a 6,000 word version, but the version I love the most got accepted for publication by Night Terror Novels for their horror fiction anthology Ceci n’est pas une histoire d’horreur. I'm excited to be a part of what looks to be an interesting anthology.
The publication isn't due to happen until Fall of this year, at which point I will begin a campaign of harassment letting people know when it will be available and how to acquire it.
In the meantime, I'm sure there's some question about the story's contents. Well, it's about gangs on flying motorcycles, trauma, hallucinogenic hellscapes, and the hostility of the universe/divinity. Oh, and why one might desire to not have any organs any more. It's based mostly off one dream I had, then a little bit of another dream, then a little bit of ?????? to make it all come together.
This event has certainly fired up my desire to keep on writing. Not that I was ever going to stop, but now it's more like I actually want to do it, instead of forcing myself to sit down and meet my writing quotas while operating under the solipsistic assumption that nothing will ever come of this but I still need to do it because I get all squirrely if I don't write. Not that I'll never be back in that headspace -- I know that things will continue to be a struggle, and I'll get loads more rejection letters -- but I'll ride the wave while I can. I'll be editing up some short and flash fiction for submission soon, but for a moment there I was preoccupied with another thing, namely:
I finished that godawful NaNoWriMo manuscript???
Sometimes people try to tell me "Oh, I'm sure it's actually good! You're too hard on yourself!" Trust me, I'm getting a more and more realistic sense of my abilities by the day (despite a history of/tendency towards self-loathing), and this is absolutely not my best work. There's so many things I straight up forgot to write in, worldbuilding just kind of drops out of the sky sometimes, the battle scenes are nonsense and hard to follow, the opening is ungainly, the whole thing is ungainly and too long (132k words!! Yikes!), there's more navelgazing and crappy teen drama than action, the plot structure is all messed up, there's times where I was just writing like "this is bad and I know it, but I need to just do this," and so on.
I plan to work on a comprehensive list of everything I did wrong with this draft -- maybe I'll even post some version of it on here. After all, the point was not to create a workable, editable manuscript. Rather, the point was to do a dry run of the book and find what the pitfalls were, what I would need to know for the worldbuilding, what kinds of themes might arise, etc. Because, guess what! I haven't written a novel since 2009! And it's not like I knew how to write novels in 2009!
So obviously I have a long ways to go at that particular skill. But I'm determined to improve. I'm reminded of when I hit about 5+ years straight of forum roleplaying as a relative adult and realized, "Wow, I'm actually good at this medium. I'm having all these ideas about how to challenge and manipulate the medium because I know how it works really well." The fact that I reached that kind of competency with anything at all comforts me when I get stuck in the morass of "I have no idea what I'm doing." Especially since I worked on the medium of short stories for like...3 years I think? and have received an acceptance letter.
Speaking of the general idea of competency, here's another dang thing:
I finished my Certified Gardener course
So I started this online course with CSU back in January and I'm finally done with it. The whole process was more than a little annoying, but I learned a lot: how to prune raspberry bushes, how to diagnose a sick plant, how to prune trees, how much I loathe lawns...
The last one is a whole subject. It's not just because the lawn care course was particularly arduous and poorly organized. My issue came from the course starting with a sentiment of, "lawns have a bad reputation as being a source of pollution, but that's only because people are applying fertilizer wrong!" and then going on for literal days' worth of work about how to properly care for a lawn. Like, heck, maybe lawns are a specialty subject, actually, and it shouldn't be the expectation for your average person to own and care for a lawn, given that it's expensive, time-consuming, involves specific knowledge, and requires a lot of water, gasoline, and fertilizer, along with like five different single-use tools.
There's a way in which lawns are one of the biggest examples of some people thinking their hobby should be everyone's hobby, and making it a chore for everyone. (You can imagine me pointing at my neighbors, who get weird and passive aggressive about us not having a lawn, essentially). Then again, looking at it more broadly, lawns are tendril of the settler colonialist classist oppressor state, as well as a branch of capitalism that is vigorously doing everything it can to not die.
Even so, the course has been really valuable. I will probably be doing one on landscaping (the more applicable trade), I'm just waiting for some information on when. And hey, if I get a job that necessitates me working on lawns, I will know how to do it.
I have set up the pattern of doing little segues which is really awkward because this one is sad! Yay!
Eulogy for Pilea
Our oldest rat, Pilea, had to be put down yesterday, and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about her. We got her in January of 2019, making her something like two and a half years old -- not bad for a rat. She was one of the most hyper babies we've ever had, and would repeatedly scale our entire bodies while we were standing. She was also one of the cuddliest babies ever, and early on fell asleep in Tim's lap, resulting in this picture.
In her prime, she was a bully when meeting new rats, and as tender as could be once she got to know them. She enjoyed popping air-filled packaging with her teeth and letting it woosh on her face. In her old age, she loved to sleep in small boxes, but could also still jump up on the sofa and shoot across the house until the last months of her life.
She had kidney degeneration, which caused her to lose use of her hind limbs and become thin. Her last days were spent sleeping, often in my lap, while we waited for our appointment at the vet's. We fed her her favorite foods -- coconut milk, avocado, chocolate (not toxic to rats!), quinoa, Yogies...
When we took her to the vet, multiple people told us that she was a favorite among the staff, that everyone was sad to see her go. The vet had pictures of her exploring the clinic on her phone. Pilea charmed everyone she met, it seems.
It's an odd little dance with grief over a rat's death. After a few times, you get used to the idea that they don't live very long, that it will never feel like long enough, but that nonetheless a rat has had a full and interesting life and they must be allowed to go when they need to, not necessarily when you're ready. The simple sadness of it becomes laced with the beauty of being able to see a creature from its youth into its old age, and getting to have this window to give them the best life possible. It doesn't bring me down too much any more, to be honest. I tend to wind up feeling grateful to have had the opportunity to meet the rat -- they're all so unique, and have such big personalities.
It's strange to have so many things wrap up and change at the same time. I no longer have to work on that short story, editing it between every rejection letter. I am in the emptiness between the drafts of Book 1 and Book 2. I am in between online courses. And Pilea is no longer here in body, as if her death were the end of an era.
Every time a rat is dying, I fear the brink, as if life without them were an unknown -- as if I didn't live once before them. But afterwards, I see the sparrows chasing the crows, someone waving their arm out of the car to catch the breeze, the trees rustling, the moths crawling on the walls, and the rats I still have dashing around the house on their secret tasks. Life goes on. It might be cheesy to talk about what I've learned from owning rats, but I will anyways. They are experts at living their lives vigorously, even after change, and I hope I can emulate that.
