Birthday Bash

I'm going in straight for the brag: I make delicious food. Humble check: the aesthetic leaves something to be desired. I don't have the same patience with cooking and baking that I do with most creative things. I focus on taste and texture, which is always the most important, but when it comes to presentation, I'm a prison mess hall slinger.

So since today is my dad's birthday (happy birthday, dad!) I... Damn it, I got boxed cake mix. I knew it was a mistake. There is literally nothing worse and something always goes wrong. Baked up, they looked fine, but it's the first time I've done carrot cake and I had no clue that I should've used parchment paper on the bottom of the pan. Needless to say, the first cake broke in half when it was time to get it out of the pan. Rather than give up, I melted the cream cheese icing and poured it over the top like a glaze instead. Realizing the second wouldn't fare better, I left it in the pan and iced it as is. There's irony here. My dad's eaten enough of my mistakes in life, so this one would literally be a piece of cake. If you've seen the frightening plates of mushed burritos and leftovers he eats, my unpretty cakes are hardly competition.

The birthday preparations weren't all bad. I did, after all, manage to wrap his gift without incident and I made a rather nice and sappy card for him. Little picture of a frazzled guy carrying the planet Earth on his back, along with the message "To the Dad/Pa-Pa who carries our world on his back and a bigger place in our hearts!". That's right, Hallmark; hit me up. I've got all the best words. 

So no more damn boxed cakes though. In my determination to plan ahead, I immediately perused pages of recipes until the ingredients and balance sounded like the real deal then printed it out.

Immediately after sitting it down, my cat She-Ra decided that was the only spot in the house worthy of her to lie on. Not only that, but she thoroughly licked herself while lying on it. After she got up, her sister-brother Seven decided it was her-his turn.

Did I tell that story already? Yeah, we thought Seven was possibly a boy cat. Then she went into heat. Yet we still kinda keep calling her a boy. I would say she's genderqueer, but there's never actually been behaviors typical of a male or female cat outside of mating. All cats are queer as fuck. That's why I love 'em.

So, that's about the start of my day. The little mini-dragons woke me up at 6AM because I forgot to close my door last night. Waking up to my cats attacking the shit out of a cardboard box full of plastic bags is not my favorite way to start the day, but at least I got the birthday prep done. I'll probably go back to sleep for a few hours then figure out the rest of the day. I did start the drafting lines for Totem last night, but I've a lot of reading on my plates too. Play this one by ear...

Love, peace and chicken grease...

A Birth Day and a Shocking Death

I have to admit that this week put a crunch on my plans. Today, I wanted to drop a Happy Birthday to my brother Ryan and my niece Melody (her birthday is tomorrow) but the girl who lived next door to me growing up, one that I've kept in contact with over social media and only a few years older than me...

She died in her sleep.

My condolences to her mother Mary, brother Bobby, husband Korey, their little boy Kendrick (only a few years old) and teenage daughters. Grief is not something I've ever mastered because there's naught to be said or done to salve it. Not that I expect them to read this, but I wanted it to be out there. Just last week, she was having fun with friends, looking healthy in pictures. I know her sciatic nerve was giving her hell, but otherwise I have no clue what the human body is thinking when it just shuts down like that. I know it happens and it's scary and shocking, but we still catch ourselves numb but twitching with one word questions. I don't often cry right when hearing news like this, but this hit hard and fast. She will most definitely be missed and we break to become something completely new again. You don't really heal after loss. You just reassemble on little more than instinct and disbelief and hope. Even nearly 18 months after losing my mom, I still have those dumb moments where I'm thinking I need to call her. Those moments where you laugh at something they would have found funny, those can hang like melancholy instead when you mentally reach for them.

I think I'll leave it at this for today. Tomorrow, I'll aim for something more upbeat or informative. Writing has always been healing so it certainly doesn't stop here. However, I do want to think some more. Even though this marks a week since I got the news, I didn't want to reduce my reaction to an impulse. I might not have been super close to her and her life, but certainly it's more personal than just another celebrity death or something I'm distant from. It's always painful to lose a truly good person. There's such a shortage that its absence is certainly felt.

Kristen Thurman (neé LaManna), you'll be missed.

Sharing is Caring!

As promised, I'm sharing what mischief I was up to in making a gift for my friend's birthday.

You may or may not recognize the hat from Dramatical Murder, specifically belonging to a character known as Noiz. I always feel odd when I admit I'm not a modern anime fan. I haven't watched anything that's come out in the past ten years, my entire influence in the style dating from between my freshman year of high school up to my mid-twenties. I simply stopped being an avid consumer and switched to being a creator. Likewise, I have never seen this anime, but anime costumes are still among the most inventive so they're great fodder for my creative pursuits still.

The crochet version, since I don't knit. I realize it is a ridiculously busy picture, but such is the nature of my sanctuary.

There is also another issue I face and a confession to be made: I absolutely suck at wrapping gifts. My friend Emily must have inherited the superhuman ability from her mom because she is amazing at it. In fact, most people I know are at least decent at it but my attempts look more like a hostage situation. Instead...

 My motto is 'If you can't wrap, rap.' In this case, I whip up some whimsical poetry to slap on the boxes.

Boxes, giftbags, shoving ribbons and stickers on things is my go-to for avoiding the failed origami I produce.

Now, baking, I can do baking! Baking and cooking are something of a superpower. My dad used to flip out because, even on boxed meals, I didn't follow the directions. After surprising the hell out of people that it was just my version of Hamburger Helper, even my dad adopted my way of bumping up the quick meals with some winging it.

And yes, cooking from scratch is not excluded. I'm definitely not one of those crock-pot chefs that congratulates themselves on their ability to swipe a recipe from social media.

So that's my gift-giving share! Feel free to swipe the idea whether wrapping is something you dread or not!

I love sharing so writing novels is always going to make me squirm with impatience. I'm very guarded about how I share my unpublished work. In any case, I want to offer up something a little different. Even though I started a short story on here that hangs in limbo for now, I am thinking of working on some short pieces branching off of UnNamed. Because I had once entertained trad-publishing it, I kept the word count low, but I really felt like I would have liked to stretch some things out a bit like I have been for UnSung. It's very difficult to sell agents and publishers on big manuscripts, which is one of the main reasons the first Harry Potter book was so small in comparison. Since I've decided this series needs creative control more than the industry standard offered, it was a real breath of fresh air being able to expand the idea without staring a word count. It grows or shrinks depending on the story's need, not the market.

So keep an eye out for a short story scene branching off of UnNamed. Might be a bit of a spoiler if you haven't read UnNamed, but I'm actually going to build these scenes around his life prior to events in the book so while you'll recognize the mention if you have read it, it doesn't actually overlap the book itself or spoil the main plots.

Happy Birthday to my BFF!

I'm also happy to count Emily/Evan Roberts as one of my first fans. She's one of the few people in my life that really gets the complexity of identity and puts up with my garbled mess of a working brain. And I don't mean in some bullshit PC context-- we don't fuck with needing a vocabulary to communicate. She's someone who is just okay with having hours-long conversations about being confused, not becoming less confused, and still walking away satisfied by the experience. Well, wouldn't life be boring if we could just wrap it all up and call it a day? She's a huge part of my own journey towards self-acceptance so I owe her at least a little dedication. Happy birthday! We've had a lot of ups and downs, but you mean a lot to me. We're both swiss cheese brains these days, but that works to our advantage somehow. 

I'll be posting what I made for her birthday in the next few days too.

Today is the Greatest... (Don't Sue Me, Billy Corgan...)

Yes, I'm a huge fan of Smashing Pumpkins. When CDs became a thing, my very first CD purchase was the SP Adore album. After seeing him on one of those late night shows as a musical act (probably one of the Jimmy shows), I can say for certain the man still has a voice that gives me tingles.

NO! That's not what I'm here for! The ultimate milestone is finally here and I'm gloating! My first nine book series is published in completion... or is it? Technically, yes. I have a couple of possible spin-off ideas for it, but I've wanted to tuck this one under my belt so I could move onto other series and ideas and genres.

Let me give you a sexy little roster of my published works:

1. The Truth about Heroes: One of Many
2. The Truth about Heroes: Two Sides to Everything
3. The Truth about Heroes: Menage a Trois
4. A World Reborn: Children of Heroes
5. A World Reborn: Higher Reasoning
6. A World Reborn: Deicide
7. Each Endless Universe: Close Encounters
8. Each Endless Universe: Dual Decisions
9. Each Endless Universe: Original Sin
10. UnNamed

Heh. Poor UnNamed, all alone down there... Not for long, since UnSung is in the making and even its two sequels are in planning. Hey, how about a quick look at some future projects in the Bingo ball machine while we're here...

• UnSung (UnQuadrilogy, Book 2) (adult epic fantasy)
• UnHeard (UnQuadrilogy, Book 3) (adult epic fantasy)
• UnVeiled (UnQuadrilogy, Book 4) (adult epic fantasy)
• Dreampunk Chronicles 1: Through the Golden Doors (YA steampunk fantasy)
• Piscine (Sci-fi Crime Thriller)
• Rock My World (webcomic) (sci-fi romance)

Now, those are the ones I feel okay with confirming, each either in advanced planning or a few chapters set up at least. I do have a romance novel idea I'm tossing around as well as a non-fiction idea on the joys and discipline of drawing. I'm actually going to start working on the YA fantasy book next. It will be shorter and kid-friendly, a very different challenge from UnSung, which is an important draw in writing for me-- don't stay comfortable in any one place. I came into this wanting to try anything and everything and test myself. As long as I'm relatively obscure, I can just keep sneakily building my library with whatever I wish, see which ones build momentum. I'm also very careful to choose genres and ideas that I would not hate to keep writing. While I would certainly take a demand into concern, I also have no intention of pandering to one. Having the freedom to work and grow while making it available for public consumption and support is a nice balance.

UnSung will be a work in progress for the next few months yet. I have yet to draft the third part and epilogue and even once they're written, I will attempt to pull in some beta readers and run many edits regardless of how beta reading goes. I'd love to get some eyes on it, but I also don't intend to hold it hostage. As I've said, where I am now, I have no intention of growing stagnant. As long as the ideas keep coming, I'm going to keep moving forward. One of the advantages to living in these times is that we don't have to sit and wait for approval to keep running along the path to growth. I'm not a traditional girl and I won't wait for traditional means. It's just not happening and it doesn't have to.

Don't let gatekeepers stand in the way of your ambitions. Gatekeepers don't mean that your work is ironclad or guaranteed or even that your job is easier. It's not. There are many people who see traditional publishing as appealing because of the amount of work they don't have to do. Whatever your ambitions, bask in the fact that you have options suited to your vision. I'm sure you've seen these before, but there's no shortcut to a masterpiece any way you go. You can count on only ever being able to pick two...

It's not a hard rule for every type of creative pursuit, mind you, and when you're the only one involved you can usually tell yourself you can be all three. However, any outside help you get, it's realistic to expect it to fall under this rule.

Damn it, I just can't avoid the creep into advice mode...

CELEBRATE, YOU WORKAHOLIC, YOU!

In any case, another birthday, but these milestones are a rare beauty indeed. Want to give me a cheap birthday gift? Grab one of my ebooks or two, write a review (and no, I'm not going to act as if the world has ended if you don't like it either-- my career aspirations aren't nearly that fragile).

And look forward to more work ahead!