Tag: coffee

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love what you do, do what you love

Every story I write, there comes a time somewhere in the writing or editing (or both) where I decide the whole plotline sucks, when I’m ready to chuck the whole thing and give up writing forever. Every single time. Sometimes at multiple points in the journey from concept to published story.

I’ve recently hit this again on The Blood Witch. I’ve pulled the complete set of stories together so I can work through some continuity issues and plug some plot holes, and as I’m reading/editing to weave pieces together, I hit a point that I’m sure it sucks.

Fortunately, having been here before, I know to step back and stop until I’ve sorted through what in the plot is bugging me. Always, when I remember to do this, I come back after a few days of rumination and I re-find my love of the story.

And, Readers, I do love this story so much! I love the characters. I love the way the plots of each of the three books is different, and takes us new places. I love my MC’s voice, which is important since she is telling the story. I love getting to play with mythology and mythical creatures.

I’m not sure of the ending just yet, but I’m getting there. And really, getting there is the better part anyway!

Okay, off to prep for a meeting for the day job. And maybe more coffee. Coffee is life!

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the morning ritual

Human beings tend toward ritual, even if it is in an informal manner. Take for instance the morning coffee. There is a precise manner and order for arriving at a delicious, hot cup of coffee. For me, that ritual begins after my morning ablution.

And, because I’m owned by two cats, it includes their morning treat time too. For me, this looks something like:

  1. Put down a handful of treats for the kitties
  2. Fill the kettle
  3. Put the kettle on the burner and turn it on high.
  4. Rinse out the French Press and fill it with hot water
  5. **go do other morning ritual stuff while the water heats**
  6. Measure out beans into the grinder
  7. Grind
  8. Dump water out of French Press and add grounds
  9. Fill with water
  10. Let it brew
  11. Press
  12. Pour
  13. Savor

Most of this I do most mornings without really thinking about it. That’s part of the purpose of ritual, I suppose, to make things easy to do through repetition. But there is something very rewarding that comes when you narrow your focus, when you keep your mind and attention on what your hands are doing, rather than letting your mind wander off into the day ahead.

We all have little rituals, whether it’s making the coffee or the order in which we get dressed/undressed, or the way we get ready to leave the house or go to bed. Today, pick one of your daily rituals and be present in the motions, in the steps you take. Keep your thoughts centered on what you are doing and why. Make it purposeful and deliberate.

Either way, I hope your coffee is tasty, your day filled with kindness and your ritual fulfilling. I love you, Readers!

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about time

We’re almost to the end of June already! Is it just me, or does it feel like we’re barreling through this year at breakneck speed? Are we making up for the dragging pace of last year? Are we trying to outrun the virus?

Time is such an odd thing at times. It messes with my head!

How is it that the week can be dragging and speeding at the same time? Like yesterday and Tuesday seemed to go on forever and ever, and yet today feels like it should only be Tuesday.

Life is crazy busy at this time of year, though this year, without SF Pride eating up a chunk of my time, it’s not quite as busy as usual. I guess that contributes to the strangeness of time these days.

My big work project eats up a lot of time during the day, and I have writing time and editing on the Sirens anthology, and I have a crochet project I need to finish.

Speaking of which, I should pour that last cup of coffee and get back to the day job. Happy Thursday, Readers! Make it a good one!

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the enemy of good

I am a perfectionist (…somewhat recovered). I hate making mistakes. Even more so when those mistakes are visible to the greater public. This is a reason why my first novel took me so many years to finish, and why every crochet project gets ripped back at least once.

In my day job I often have to balance my desire for perfection with the truth that good + fast is often more important than perfect.

It’s a lesson that’s taken me years to learn, and when I’m working on a huge project (as I am right now) that gets built behind the scenes, it is easy to fall back into the idea that it must all be perfect before I throw it into the public arena.

Fortunately, this current project also plays into my obsession with organizing information, clarifying language and teaching, and it is all going on where most of my company won’t see it until I show it to them. That means I can keep tweaking it and perfecting it as I go along, so long as I meet my deadlines.

But, now, Readers, my coffee cup is empty and I have a meeting to prep for. I hope your Wednesday is wonderful!

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the beauty in brevity

There is something I love about the freedom in a short story. There is no obligation to begin at the beginning, in fact it is sometimes more fun to jump in somewhere in the middle.

Short stories ask more skill of us authors, in some ways, than a full length novel. There is the challenge of brevity, which is a thing I often struggle with. If you have five thousand words to tell the tale, each of those words becomes important. Your characters need to be able to convey not just story, but personality and point of view quickly, but without making your reader feel rushed.

Often when I’m working on a short story, I throw words on the page to start, far more words than necessary and often imprecisely used. Then I use my first edit pass to tighten up the language, replace the imprecise with something more fitting. I boil down descriptions to the best words. I render ten words down to three or four.

All the while, I’m whittling away at not just the word count, but at the story itself, distilling it down to a more perfect form. Think of it as a block of stone. We know that there is a work of art inside of it, but we have to work to chip away the parts that obscure it.

There are a bunch of short stories on my hard drive in some state of doneness, some begun for a specific project, others just to get the words out of my head. Maybe I’ll consider an anthology of these works at some point, but for now, I am off to finish polishing and buffing one for this year’s Sirens anthology.

Happy Saturday, Readers! I hope the coffee is good, the sun is shining and your day is filled with kindness.

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to office or not to office, I’ll just stay home, thanks

This has been a tough week, and I’m not even really sure why. But the good news is that we have made it to the Friday and there is only about 6.5 work hours between me and the weekend. I’ll admit to a certain amount of anxiousness about this whole “returning to normal” thing that is starting to happen.

To be fair, I really love the whole working from home dynamic, and would not welcome a return to the office even in “normal” times. It suits my agoraphobic, introverted self quite well. But I’ve noticed an increase in bedtime anxiousness, an inability to turn my brain off and put my phone down, almost as if I’m expecting some disaster to befall us while I’m asleep.

I’m happy to have found a company that values me and has no issues with the working from home forever dynamic. There are so many companies out there that treat their employees like high school kids who need to be controlled. Worse even, because even in high school they trust you to do your homework at home.

I get that working from home isn’t for everyone and some people need the daily interaction/schedule to do their best work, but I will never understand why people whose work can be done at home aren’t allowed by so many to do that.

In my experience, I get more done in less time at home than I ever do in the office, and I’m not burning my batteries with the commute and being social, so I have more me left over at the end of the work day.

Another thing I’ve noticed about working from home this last year is that it helps me treat my non-work writing as I treat my job, which means that I have times set aside to do that work, and I don’t see it as eating into my “free time” anymore. I don’t have to choose between writing and all the other things. There is this “this is writing time” and “this is time for other things” dynamic to my entire week, not just Monday through Friday.

It is, however, as I said, Friday. That means another cup of Death Wish Coffee and writing time that is on the horizon. I hope the day is good to you, Readers, and that your weekend is filled with love.

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what goes around, comes around

At the risk of alienating some of you, I’m going to talk about being a woman of a certain age, with all the attendant drama and bodily functions. If this might bother you, please just keep going about your day and ignore me.

I find it interesting that here, on the approach to fifty-three and entering the twilight of dawning menopause, my “monthly” cycle seems to have come back around to what it was like as I entered through the door labeled “puberty” all those years ago.

Back then, my cycle was a bit erratic, and it meant not really being able to predict when it was coming, as well as hormonal swings that could give you whiplash, zits everywhere (and not just on my face), and pain that I was told was “normal” for whatever that’s worth.

Here today, my cycle is a bit erratic, and I never really know for sure whether I’m going to have one or not. My hormonal swings are not as dramatic as they were at fourteen or fifteen, but they are deeper and last longer. My face is full of zits. The “normal” pain stopped being normal years ago and now can knock me off my feet for at least three days.

Getting old is not for the weak, I suppose.

And maybe, if this is me circling back to the beginning, and that means an end to the semi-regular torture that comes of having a uterus, I can only beg it to move a little faster.

On that note, I should wipe my eyes (yes, I am crying over nothing, why do you ask?), drink my coffee and kick this day into gear.

My love to you all, Readers. And may the Friday be kind.

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thoughts of spring

Happy Beltane, my friends. Traditionally a holiday associated with fertility and sexuality, Beltane is a celebration of life. It marks the start of the growing season, at least here in the northern hemisphere, when we turn our attention to planting gardens and the birthing period for many animals, both of the domestic variety and the wild.

One of the things that drew me to Paganism many moons ago was this attention to natural cycles, the celebrating of the cycle of life. While I’m not a very active Pagan these days, this is still very resonant for me.

Spring really starts for me when I can get my hands into dirt, planting seeds, transplanting plants. It calls to the nurturer in me. This week I got a cherry tomato and a jalapeno pepper planted, plus did some thinning of my carrots and planted some more potatoes. It’s a small little garden, but it suits me.

I’d love to have a huge ornamental flower garden too, but as I am allergic to most flowers, I’ll have to just admire them from afar.

Today is a traditional Saturday however, which means coffee and writing, followed by housework. I hope to have good news about that poetry collection I was talking about last week soon. Until then, Readers, I hope your life is incalescent (today’s word of the day on my Facebook post…it means increasing in ardor or heat).

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tear stained alleys and sun drenched fields

Sometimes, when I feel stuck working on a book, I’ll sidestep to a short story or some poetry. Sometimes into one of the other books in some state of written languishing on my hard drive. This last week, I’ve been wading into the poetry waters again.

I have a deep and abiding love for poetry. I can spend hours on a single line some times, working and reworking it until it’s perfect. Other times the words just drip straight out of my soul and stain the page permanently.

I have an entire bin full of pages of poetry, some dating all the way back to the 1980s. And sure, some of it is truly suctackular, but I never do seem to be capable of throwing it out. Each piece is a part of who I am, or who I used to be.

If you were to lay it all out in chronological order, you’d be able to watch me grow up, follow me from the angsty teen years to the angsty adult years, hear the changes in my voice as I got to really know myself. It’s almost a biography in poetry, if you will. My life story told in emotions and ideas, images painted with words.

This past weekend I spent some time immersed in those paintings, wandering down tear stained alleys and into sun drenched fields, gathering wildflowers before carefully putting the past back to bed.

Soon, I hope to be able to share with you what I found.

Until then, Readers, it is time for more coffee and the day job.

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cancel this

Let’s talk about “cancel culture” for a minute. I got to thinking about this the other day, and how folks are up in arms about the idea of “cancel culture”. I mean, what do those words actually mean?

I always thought that canceling something that is a waste of time or money was the right thing to do. Got a subscription to a magazine you never get around to reading? Cancel it. Moving and your new place doesn’t use the same utility companies? Cancel them.

Canceling something that no longer serves you is a good thing.

Let me say that again, canceling what no longer serves you is a good thing.

That celebrity espouses views you find harmful? Stop following them. That politician proves they don’t even hold to their own standards of behavior? Stop supporting them.

That doesn’t make you dismissive. It means that you know the value of your own time and money. It means that you expect those you elect to represent you actually do the job you elected them to do.

Yeah, I struggle sometimes in dividing someone’s behavior or beliefs from the work that they do. When it is heinous enough behavior or expression of beliefs that I feel hurt people, I will choose to no longer give them money. Is that canceling them? Or is it moving my money toward those who do not denigrate others?

And if you decide that it is canceling, then explain to me why that is a bad thing?

We’ve been doing the same thing as long as we’ve been on the earth. Why is it suddenly something to complain about? We each have to decide what is good for us, what we believe and what we support. We each get to decide where and how we spend our money.

Personally, I believe that cancelling something before it begins to weigh you down is one of the healthiest behaviors we can do as adults. Cut it off, cast it aside and keep going, unencumbered by that which no longer serves you.

As always, your mileage may vary, but don’t be afraid to leave that baggage at the baggage claim and get to motoring.

Now coffee and some migraine meds are on deck. And kitty cuddling. You have a great Friday, Readers!