Right. Umm... Yeah. So far 2016 can go eat a bag of d*cks. Like a giant one. The industrial fifty-five gallon drum size.

And I'd like to say something thoughtful and coherent about exactly why that is (and I will, but it's going to take me time) and it's already been entirely too long since my last post. 

So this is a short note to say I'm slowly crawling my way out of the Canyons of Suck and when I reach the lip and I can take five minutes and put the take-away from what my life turned into this spring into words (it'll probably be a lot of words, be warned) then I will. 

And I'll also have a guest post from a wonderful lady who just published her first novel and maybe we'll do a contest and I'll pretend I'm actually back at work (select people have been watching me pretend to this particular dance for months now) and it'll all be golden.

I'm telling myself that anyway. Positive thinking is a thing, and increasingly one I need to work on. 

I'm supposed to be writing blog posts tonight, so I can get through this week without having to literally chain myself to the computer just for blogging.

But I can't, because my late evening--my work time on Mommy days--started with my kid coming into my room, looking at me with big sad eyes, and saying "Mommy, CoCo's dead!"

He wasn't wrong. I wish he was. Never mind Coco had a pretty sweet, life, for a tiny little rodent that makes it about a year in the wild. Never mind he outlived the curve for any small animal I've had, ever, by like six months. We hit one of the crappy parenting milestones today. My son experienced death for the first time. 

And don't get me wrong, Little J is just fine. We had an impromptu burial, and discussed a short respectful break from pet ownership (other than the cats) before we embark on Coco Mark-2. We discussed the fact it's always okay to be sad, just don't purchase real-estate there. Yay healthy coping mechanisms blah blah blah.

I don't know. I don't have anything profound to say. I'm just sad, and I'm spilling it all over here instead of being productive. 

Yeah yeah, I know, that's a healthy coping mechanism too.

Enjoy the big hamster-wheel in the sky, little dude. 
At least you didn't get eaten by a cat.

Alright, I'm done crying over the hamster. 

If I knew what I was doing Wednesday, or on the Art of Procrastination, I'd put it here. But I don't. I might figure it out shortly before you do. Life's a ride, and I feel like this is going to be one of those bumpy weeks.

I'm trying my hardest not to turn Well Written Wednesday into "This is everything that's wrong with the slush pile."

Because seriously, there is so much wrong with the slush pile.

Anyway. We're going to talk about Oath-breakers.  Yeah, alright, I get nobody likes a liar, but that's not precisely what I mean. I mean oath-breakers in fiction. When you sit down and write, when you tell me a story, you're making a promise. Maybe it's not blood on the dotted line, but it's still a promise. 

"Hey, you. This thing I'm telling/showing/sketching out for you, it'll have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It'll have a purpose as a story--maybe not a higher one, but whatevs, it'll still be a purpose--and it'll do all the things it's promising to do before you get to the end. We cool?"

Because when it doesn't do those things? There are whole lands of failure devoted to stories who fall down on those. The kind you need a sixteen-mule-team and a magical compass to navigate. Stay away from magical failure land, storytellers. Stay far far away. 

It's not hard, just actually freaking finish your story. Finish it the way it should finish, after you've begun. Finish it like it's the last story you're ever going to tell, and it should hold up to the light of the ages, eligible for reprint in the Ancient Gazette when we're winging our way toward Andromeda Prime in a thousand year's time. 

I have utterly no clue what I said I was going to do this month. I think it was said with the full understanding that if I hadn't mentioned Golden Fleece Press yet, it was already hovering in my work folder and therefor whatever I thought was going to happen was more or less slated for failure.

It's hard to say I failed last month, when I sit back and look at everything I actually did. Did I do the stuff I said I was going to do? Well...no. I'm pretty sure I did nearly none of it. 

Whatevs. It's a new month full of new beginnings. I opened a publishing company last week! Arguably with a crap-ton of help and the coolest business partner in the universe, but I digress.  So. Goals for this new month.

• Ignore the faintly horrifying number of blogs I am responsible for upkeep on and ACTUALLY DO THEM. I know, this one might be a little difficult. Still, moonbeams and stardust and all that jazz.
• Edits. For the thing that's my placeholder in this whirlwind snowball of doom. I have months, but given everything else I need months so...
• I am doing Camp Nano. Because you all know I am crazy and I said I wouldn't, but you all knew that was a lie. You did, come on, admit it. I'm writing content for projects to be announced later and I know for a fact at least one of them is going to be utterly unhelpful in the way that means a 25k word project decides to be ten books. So. I've got that to look forward to. 
• Plan out a blog tour. Because my professional life isn't full to the gills already.

Right. So. There's my July, mixed in with my birthday and my kid's birthday and two visits from my parents and one national holiday and...

I wonder if there's a floor on my attic. That seems like a legitimate place to hide.

I vaguely recall, a couple of days ago (alright, so it was nearly a month and that's how lost I am) that I was going to stop missing days, on this whole blogging thing.

I'll wait until you're done laughing.

We're getting closer to the point where I can be honest about that giant project in the background that's eating my life. Granted, I'm relatively sure everyone who actually reads this thing already knows about it...

But we're not quite ready for launch yet, and I'm keeping quiet until we are. 

It's Well Written Wednesday and since I'm allowed to talk about writing (spuriously) I'm going to talk about what it feels like to have an 'author's' life on the internet anymore. 

There are currently, on that nifty little panel that Google gives you to pick which username you want to sign in with, eight choices. My to-do lists in Wunderlist consistently exist about a half-step away from being utterly out of control. I am either responsible for--or nearly responsible for--four blogs, three twitter accounts, probably more like twelve email addresses if you count the non-google ones, one web forum I have utterly failed at for months, and three websites. Not counting the giant PROJECT OF DOOM I'm not actually owning up to yet I've got Nano, some involvement in First Book, my own writing career, a position as the Enrichment Coordinator for my son's school, the Book Lover's Bazaar coming up in September, and another nine and a half weeks as a full-time childcare person.

Arguably, at the end of all of that I should be talking about the impending crash, should I?

But I'm fine. Not even pretending at fine, I'm actually fine. Sure, there are moments where it feels a little big. Like tonight, when I signed out of Google for a second and got slapped in the face with way more directions than I needed right then. There's a sort of constant cloud of things that haven't made it on a to-do list yet swimming around in my brain, and I'm still having dreams about the PROJECT OF DOOM that basically equate to my brain getting caught in circles because I'm spending a lot of time staring at the same information is sixty different ways. 

Someone mentioned Camp Nano, next month, the other night and I just laughed hysterically. We won't tell anyone I was laughing because it should be 'oh god NO' but I will absolutely, I nearly promise, be writing something. 

Welcome to life as a modern writer. I'm decently hopeful it's not like this for everyone.

I finished my first, official edits this week. Well. I say 'finished.' I never actually feel finished, but it was deadline (I had a whole hour and thirteen minutes to spare, it was fine). 
Which has left me staring at the calendar, determinedly not thinking about the few days of freedom I have left until the summer starts. 
And wondering what to do now. 
So, in deference to that, this is all you're getting for Well Written Wednesday this week, and I'm going to go do something fun. I suggest you do the same.

And dear god, don't fall into your 'old projects' folder, whatever you do. 

“A book's a strange thing. It's ideas, feelings. It's fragile and complicated. You can't make them like refrigerators or cars.” 
                                                                                                   ― Étienne Davodeau, Les Ignorants

I got my first professional edit letter this weekend. And I was all set to tell you about how that was going for Well Written Wednesday. Not that I had the first clue what I was going to say yet. That was the plan.

And then Maya Angelou died Wednesday.

I spent most of Wednesday and a good portion of today trying to find something to say about that, and at this point I think I'm just accepting that brevity is the soul of wit. 

She's one of a very few select writers who get credit for getting me through my teens with a manageable, almost normal, amount of angst. Someone who made me understand the power of a universal story, and the visceral reality of the human condition.

My world was a better place for her being in it. That's probably the nicest thing you can say about anyone you don't actually know.

Photo from here under this license. 

I don't want to talk about what happened to Sci-Fi Friday last week. You don't want me to either. It involved a twenty-four hour stomach flu buggy type of thing that stole 48hrs and about every drop of water in my body.

I had plans to talk about something interesting for Miscellaneous Monday today, but I'm nearly too angry to function, to be frank. I can't reference you to a long saga on social media because I have this weird hang-up about how nobody really wants to hear me complain about things, but it's not been a pleasant few days for me. I'll try and spill it all out the short way round so we can all go back to our lives. 

The state I live in has emissions requirements for my county that I could give you chapter and verse on my opinion of but it doesn't add anything to the story and it makes me sound like a card carrying socialist. The pertinent bit is that every year since we've moved here I've spent at least six-hundred dollars a year to get over this hurdle and keep my car tags active. And that's just on my car, not counting my husbands which is an epic, annoying story for another time. I totaled it up this weekend, when for the first time someone looked at me blankly and said 'no, you don't need to clear your check engine light to pass your safety inspection'.

Five. Thousand. Dollars. 

Now, in the interest of fairness three years of that the work needed to be done because my emissions inspection was due. Last year the repair shop I took it to charged me $1900 dollars to clear my board. You can imagine my surprise when I found out they didn't report my emissions pass for last year. It was about equal to when I found out this year they don't even do emissions inspections. Apparently they no longer do safety inspections either. 

My sister in Kansas suggested I could just buy a new used car for that. And maybe I could, and maybe I'm cynical because I don't think that'd fix the problem. I'd just be doing this with a newer car I hadn't payed off yet.