My Story Is in a Thing

Been fighting a massive headache and the precipice of migraine all day. I just wanted to get done early tonight with work and watch Loki and maybe take a nap... but then I spent three and a half hours on an emergency bridge call dealing with something the contractors messed up again... It is so tiring to have to keep pointing out that not only has this been the way things had been done all the times before this new contract team came on board, but the reason it was never a problem to this extent is because we touch the systems manually to get our jobs done and there are literally three times as many of them (all of whom are woe-fully under-skilled to do the jobs of two people). I am just not physically capable of following all those people all day long. I'm exhausted.

At yet something I felt the need to do (because it's something in my control) is redo my media tracker I built myself in Notion. Now instead of having separate trackers for movies versus television, I've been able to combine them and build different views to show them instead. BUT ALSO I managed to create a specific page for my friends and I to keep track of all our bad movie night watches. So I have a collection of all 42 movies we've watched for bad movie nights in the last year. We've been talking about do some monthly themes moving forward - like for shark month, or the fall holidays... recently we watched a rash of small movies with 90s pop-stars. If you're interested at all in either our bad movie night fare, or just how I have it set up in Notion, I've got images behind the cut.
( images )

I'd written a while ago about feeling kind of down about writing, or more about being like 'a writer' with my name out there where people could associate me with the things I write. But I'm a little more over that now. I did leave my name on my flashbang story and I'm happy about that. It's not huge, but the collection has been in the best top ten sellers on DriveThru Fiction for the last week+ which is pretty neat. And it's something I can point to when submitting to bigger things later. The collection is here should anyone be interested in checking it out.

Some of my calmness came with this post from Nebula winner John Wiswell last weekend, who is a super cool guy I've met at 4th Street Fantasy a few times. In his acceptance speech, which is linked here on his brand new Patreon and free to read, he talks about the stories he's excited to read. And it's just really an amazing speech. I'm proud and happy to have someone like John win, especially for a story like “Open House on Haunted Hill", which was clever and wonderful and a unique twist on the haunted house genre in a short story.

Towards the end of his speech, he says this:

in my career my various stories were rejected over 800 times before I won this award tonight. And that’s why I hope this author is listening.

You, who think you’re not a good enough writer because you don’t write like someone else.

You, who haven’t finished a draft because your project seems too quirky or too daunting.

You, who are dispirited after eating so many rejection emails.

You, who are going to write the things that will make me glad I’m alive to read them.

What the field needs is for you to be different, and to be true to your imagination.

Please, in the next couple weeks, go back to that document. Finish that story, and then go write the next one, and the next one. You don’t know when you’re going to come into your own.

And... yeah. I have these stories and I want to finish them. And I want them to be known as mine in some way when they're finished. I want to be able to claim them, and I'll have to navigate the rest as the time comes. I mean also, just don't fucking perceive me as a person still, but I'd like it if people read my things and knew they were mine.

It's convinced me to try for Camp in July in the hopes of at least finishing the rough draft of what I started in November. I've got a lot of bits of it, good stuff I can keep. And I've got my notes from Futurescapes earlier this year. I think as long as work doesn't wear me completely down, I want to give it a try.

Oh, and good news on the ants front. I think I've convinced the rest of them to get the fuck out. Even after my deep clean last week we were still seeing several every day. Sunday I thought they were gone, but nope, they've been hiding in and around our kitchen sink. But last night I found the new trail they were using under my kitchen table. So I broke out a pretty tried and true method of mixing apple cider vinegar and water, with a little dishsoap for extra stick and sprayed that everywhere. Sure the kitchen smelled for a bit, but I happen to like the smell of apple cider vinegar, so it didn't bother me. And the scent only lingered for a few hours. This morning? Haven't seen anymore. So hopefully they've learned their lesson.