Tag: #amwriting

No Kings 2

I had to wrestle down my social anxiety  to do it, but we (my husband and I) went to the No Kings rally this weekend. 

Selfie!

I’m so glad we did it.  It wasn’t a protest as much as a hangout.  People gathering with costumes and signs to say, “We’re not okay with this. And we’re not afraid of you.”

You know New Orleanians are going to be creative.

CNBC was correct to name it a street party vibe. It certainly was in New Orleans.  Drums, music, crazy costumes.  Kind of a festival vibe, but a serious festival. Deep play.  Play for now, but it will turn serious if needed.

My favorite inflated animal costume: the Axolotl!

Almost seven million people turned out to say “No kings in America.” Ordinary people like me, you.  Us.  There were no serious incidents nationwide.  In New York City and Washington, DC, there were no injuries or arrests arising from the protest. There were no gun incidents. 

Old farts can rant about the “radical violent leftists” of their youth.  Half a century ago.  Things have changed. 

Progressives, leftists, Democrats are not the violent ones in this moment.  Not the gun nuts. Not the ones who spawn shooter after mass shooter.

Now, it’s the Christian Nationalists, the militant white supremacists.   Ultra-right and ultra dangerous. 

I rant.  The march made me —  us — feel good. Feel hopeful.  We’re not alone in seeing how crazy this all is.

No Kings!

Let’s hang onto that feeling and let it fuel our resistance until the next big action.  The next will be even bigger.

See you at the barricades. 😏

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Nanowrimo 2023

So I’m grinding away of my current book, Majestic Seventeen, 1000 words a day. I really hope to get it done by the end of the year (but I don’t want to overpromise.) But it’s November, National Novel Writing Month, why not join up and have the camaraderie of other Wrimos while you push through to the end? The daily quota is only 1227 words a day, I can do that!

So I surfed over the the Nano website and set up my novel and freshened up my profile. I’ve been doing Nanowrimo for years, 8 or 9 times, won four or five, about a 50 percent win rate. (Two of those losses were when we had deaths in the family, though, which really knocked me off my stride.) Some of those books I haven’t looked at since I uploaded them to the Nano website for validation at the end of November. One of them I lost to Hurricane Katrina (yes, been doing it that long.). But one of them became Daughter of Atlas, the first book I published, available here.

But it’s been a while since I’ve done it, and I forgot a few things. The daily quota to make 50,000 words in a month is 1667 words a day. Rather more than I thought. And that includes working every day. I’ve been taking weekends off lately. Writing is a job, you deserve time off. 1,000 words a day is a lot to me.

But that’s okay. The point of Nanowrimo is to push yourself, to make yourself work, to push through creative blocks. If I can just get this damn first draft finished by December 31, 2023 I will count it a success.

I lost all my Wrimo buddies on the Nano website, probably during a website upgrade. My handle over the is Kbot, all the way back from when I was still working shitty customer service jobs. So if you’re a WordPress denizen and you’re also doing Nano, hit me up. I need buddies!

And now I must return to the word mines. But I’m counting this blog post in the daily quota! 🙂

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Inching Closer

Still a couple fiddly layout bits to fix with my manuscript, and then it will be ready to publish! I’m so stoked! Publishing THE PONO WAY was the one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year.

Credit: OCEANIX/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

This picture is much what I imagine my island-state, Pono, to look like, although this is a coastal city and my Pono is in the deep ocean. This is an architectural concept of a floating city called Oceanix. It’s synchronistic how it popped up in the news as I was drafting my novel.

Tomorrow I will share the cover reveal! Meanwhile, here is the blurb for Amazon. What do you think?

A refugee crisis tests a utopian island community to its limits.

In 2050, the United States of America finally crumbled.  Jake Weintraub’s family fled the burned-out ruins of Chicago for the safety of the artificial island steading of Pono. Now grown, Jake works as an independent journalist, but the horrors of the Chicago River Riots still haunt him.

As Pono watches, safe in the Pacific Ocean, the successor West Coast state of Cascadia collapses under a further series of catastrophes.  Thousands of desperate refugees arrive on Pono’s shores – homeless, stateless, and hungry.

Jake throws himself into covering their story, even as their plight evokes memories of his own trauma and flight.  Can Pono, a carefully constructed island society, accept this influx of strangers? Or will this crisis tear Ponoan society apart?

THE PONO WAY is a solarpunk science fiction novel in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s THREE CALIFORNIAS or THE FIFTH SACRED THING by Starhawk. Find out what happens by buying your copy today!

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500 Words

Following the publication of my novel, Daughter of Atlas, I’ve started working on a new project.  It is a solarpunk novella for a shared world anthology, with a couple friends.  I have been working on it pretty consistently, and I feel pretty good about it.

I write 500 words a day.

I’ve always struggled with writing consistently.  Indeed, I stopped writing at all for almost ten years.  I was feeling too burned out and beaten down.  So I know I won’t ever be able to make a paying career out of this, but that’s okay. I’ve started again, that’s the thing.

But even in my not-writingest periods, I’ve always known that you need to write every day to make a go of it.  And not just dicking around in your journal, either.  You need to write something that you hope or intend for people to read, every day, to produce work and to improve.

It is only now that I have come to do that. Write every day.  I want to now, like I didn’t want to before.  (The book The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield helped me understand my not-wanting, and confront it. I recommend it.) And the amount that I’m writing is 500 words.

So far, it’s working for me, because it’s such a small amount.  One page.  It is extremely hard to talk myself out of writing it.  It would be embarrassing. 500 words. Come on, man.  Embarrassing to not write it.  One page. Hard to rationalize blowing off a single page.  That’s the key, so far. That’s what’s working for me.

To be honest, I don’t write every day.  I write in the evenings, because I’m just not a morning person.  And I close at work one day a week, so I don’t get home until late. I usually don’t write then.  And my writer’s workshop is on Thursdays, and then I don’t get home until almost ten.  No writing then.

But I write most nights.  And every night that I do, I have 500 words more than I did the night before.  It’s good enough. Far better than all the many nights when I had no words. 300 nights of 500 words makes a novel. How do you eat an elephant?  One 500-word bite at a time.

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