Writing a whole post of accomplishment lists has led to pondering WHY I like making “I did this” lists so much. Here’s my answer: it’s a frame adjustment.
I know, I know, “WTF frame what?” Stick with me here. Start with the idea of “progress.”
See, all our lives we’re taught–both formally and informally– to find worth in achieving goals and measuring progress, but that whole plan is fundamentally mismatched with the way life WORKS.
Progress is grounded in linear concepts of direction & endpoints. It’s all about the quantifiables.
When a task is done, it’s done. When a thing is filled, it’s full. When a goal is achieved, it’s over. There are jokes about the reward for a job well done being another job, but the system is accepted as valid.
Except it ISN’T. Reality doesn’t work that way.
Life is built on multiple, interlocking circular processes: sunrise to sunset to sunrise, winter to summer to winter again. Washed dishes get dirty, dinnertime comes around again, dust returns again, plants need tending, laundry piles up AGAIN.
No wonder people feel like we’re always failing. We’re judging ourselves by a metric that’s incompatible w/the medium.
Measuring success & satisfaction by progress is like measuring slices of bread in a loaf by weight. You can do it, but it takes some mental gymnastics.
Lists are my favorite way of somersaulting past frustration & feelings of failure. They line up my position in the endless cycle of Life Doings with the idea of “done,” and presto, I HAVE DONE THINGS.
It’s not only gymnastics, it’s kinda like a magic trick when it works.
Now I’m wondering what neat tricks other people use.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. If you want to celebrate by curling up with a cozy kissing book, may I suggest Weaving In The Ends? I wrote it, it’s all about love, but not only and not even mostly the romance hearts & flowers kind. It’s about the prickly kind of love, sibling love, family love, and formed-family love, the patient kind and the kind that makes mistakes and owns them and makes amends.
Also, there is knitting. And empaths. Available most places books & ebooks are sold. You can find it here https://bit.ly/kmhkindle along with the other books in the Restoration collection.
Sleepy cat for everyone who got this far. Until later!
I’ve had zero attention span the last couple of days. So, minimal writing. Not zero writing, but…discouraging nonetheless.
But! I have dug into a few interesting topics while in Guilt-wracked Avoidance Mode
Thing the 1st
The town where I spent several formative childhood years was in the news recently. My brain did its bouncy thing and sent me (SPROING) to Google Maps to see how close the incident was to my old house. (A couple of miles away.)
That led to checking out the old neighborhood on street view and retracing my route from house to elementary school. (C’mon, haven’t you done that? If not, you should. It’s a virtual trip down memory lane.) Sometimes placed I’ve lived have changed beyond all recognition, but my old school is still there, and still looks EXACTLY like I remember the buildings and grounds looking. So of course I looked it up. Nothing. Doesn’t exist. More digging ensued, starting with peering closely at the map images to make out the bulding names. (Which, no, did NOT match the listed name of the location, interestingly enough.)
Turns out the place has changed names twice and purpose once. It is now a Variable-Credit High School for students who aren’t thriving at the district’s regular grade 9-12 schools.
So, that was interesting.
Thing the 2nd
My cracked & gnarly fingers are doing better, but one cracked open yesterday, which was distracting In the Extreme. That made me wonder, how the heck do diabetics who have to do jab their fingertips for blood draws deal with the constant pain of injured fingertips? And who the hell decided fingertips were the best spot to jab, of all the places on the human body to choose from. And WHY?
Well. I’m here to tell you there are a ton of techniques for minimizing the ouchiness, plus modern glucose meters do allow for “alternative sites” although it isn’t recommended because “fingersticks still provide the most accurate readings.” All the sites discussing the matter seem to be round-robin quoting from each other with regards to that accuracy claim, though. When they all use exactly the same phrasing, and I do mean word for word, despite the sites ranging in visibility & intended readership. And the only journal article I found was focusing on test strip accuracy, not body location issues.
So I remain unconvinced that anyone really THINKS about “why fingers?” or they accept unquestioned the prevailing wisdom that it delivers the “best” result.
Sidebar: If you think my suspicions overblown, entertain yourself with a peek at the vast amount of scientific detective work that had to be done to debunk the medical research community’s entire foundation for deciding what size particle constituted aerosol contagion. The medical community had its standards & JUST KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT, but as it turns out, they were WRONG, because their fundamental size value was based on a single solitary set of experiments done DECADES before modern aerosol measuring tools were available, AND the results came from an outlier, hard-to-catch respiratory disease, too. Interested? Start with the Wired article titled “The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill”. There’s a lot more info, but this is all a digression, so ANYWAY…
I’d need to do a LOT more digging to find the primary lit behind “why fingers FFS?” and that’s more distraction than I need right now. If I ever write a story about a diabetic character who has to test, I’ll get out th research backhoe. Until then I’ll stick with my gut feeling that this is another of the many medical, “we’ve always done it this way” situations where “accurate means “all our systems & tools are designed for the reams of data we already have” as opposed to “what systems and tools should we design for the best comfort and convenience of our patients.” See also: cold metal speculums for vaginal exams, among other things.
Humans are not as eager to acept new things as we think we are, sometimes.
Thing the third.
There was a bug in my office today. A big roughly hexagonal beetlish kind of bug. I would describe it in more detail, but Pippin woke up when it buzzed past us (he was on the desk, quelle suprise) and he intercepted it and ate it before I got a decent look at it. He has impressive reflexes and spectacular aim. He scoped it right out of midair.
From his expression as he chewed, I got the impression it did not taste good, which made me think it was probably a stink bug. A couple of hours later, another bug went buzzing around the room. (This time of year, a lot of different bugs often hatch out of plants I bring in from the garden. Some combination of warmth & increasing light, I suspect.)
Anyway. Pips was snoozing downstairs by that time, so I had to gently capture and flush the bug myself. Carefully, because this one was indeed some kind of stink bug. But what kind? There’s an invasive species (known as the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, how’s that for a name) that’s been seen in the Chicago area this year, but there are also at LEAST two lookalike native species similar in appearance.
Which one had mine been? I didn’t know! So of course off I bounced to investigate stink beetles.
Beetles are fucking amazing. I had a good time combing through the various agricultural university extension documents and nature websites, but I still don’t know which variety of bug I flushed. ID requires close examination of things like antennae stripes and protrusions on the shell, and…honestly? Invasive or native, it was in my house, and it had to go.
And now the day is done and so am I.
Still had no focus in the evening, but I’ve made supper (don’t get excited, it’s green salad & leftover takeout gyros meat mixed into boxed rice mix & baked in the oven because I’m too distracted to cook on the stovetop) and now I’m playing Wordles from the online archive and drinking wine while I watch Witcher Season 2.
I am a powerful creative force to be reckoned with, eh?
Anyway. That’s it for this installment of “writing something even if it isn’t BOOK writing. Until later, enjoy this pic of the Ferocious Critter Cruncher.
But it’s a post on New Year’s Eve so it counts, I guess?
Spouseman & I are ringing out the old year with leftover steak dinner from yesterday, plus lots of popcorn and hot apple cider, while watching a 2021 movie–Black Widow. Which is nothing wild or partylike, but it’s basically the kind of thing we usually do on NYE. Cozy & quiet. That’s my brand, I guess?
Earlier in the day garage cleaning occurred (EXCITEMENT!) and some visiting with a friend, and there was also writing in front of the fireplace with the cat. More progress on Serena’s dog story was made. Snacks were enjoyed. And Pippin snored a lot.
photographic proof of fireside presence.
Every time I took a writing break and surfed through the news I saw people sharing their big accomplisments from 2021. AND I AM NOTHING IF NOT A FOLLOWER. SO.
The big thing I did in 2021 was send my new book out into the world.
The Sharp Edge Of Yesterday, in case you have somehow missed all my posts about it until now, is a fantastical novel set in a world much like this one except that 10% of the populations develop unexplainable powers when they hit middle age.
It’s a story about family, secrets, mistakes, and betrayal, it’s about the power of trust and cooperation, it’s about the evil of dehumanization, and it’s about redemption. There a characters ranging in age from radical teens to badass grannies, and it stars a wicked heroine who takes charge of her own life.
Or, as my wonderful author-friend Shannon Eichorn puts it, it’s about middle-aged moms with superpowers making the military very nervous. What’s that? You think that book sounds epic excellent and want a link to find it? Here ya go: bit.ly/sharpedgekmh
It looks like this. Isn’t it pretty?
Sharp Edge didn’t get a release party, because pandemic, and for the same reason I only got to show it off at two conventions, one big, one small, but somewhat to my surprise, it released really, really well. Best of my six books so far by a long shot.
People bought it–LOTS of people, people who’ve never heard of me & didn’t know anything about the book except its blurb–they reviewed it, they bought copies for other people, and they told friends to buy it. That’s as good as it gets as far as I’m concerned.
Would I like more reviews? Of course I would. I want 100 reviews for each of my books. Why? WHY NOT? It’s a nice round number. Also a ridiculously ambitious one. Some great novels take years to hit that. Some brilliant ones never do.
On a practical level a book needs 25+ reviews specifically on Amazon before I can begin to promote it through most of the best channels available to me. (I only have 1 title over that threshold, alas, and it isn’t Sharp Edge.) And would I like more sales? Hell yes, of course, what recovering bookseller doesn’t love seeing their book fly off shelves virtual or physical?
But honestly, I only care about that part because sales mean readers, and no story circle is complete without that happening. I love the idea of sharing this world I’ve dreamed up and squeezed into existence out of nothingness. I can talk about my characters and their conflicts all day long, and I have a hundred more stories to tell about them. Hundreds more. At least.
ANYway. That’s a good place to wrap this up. Black Widow is over, and now I need to watch some Marvel What If?
Good-bye, 2021, (aka 2020 the sequel) hello, 2022. May there be new stories completed, nw stories begun, new friends made, and many good times shared.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays often bleed together. They’re my library shift days, so they’re more structured and have exactly the same rhythm, week to week. That makes them the same day in my head:
Get up, putter through chores, get in some writing or computer puttering, have a walk with Spouseman, have a snack, write a bit more, go to work, come home, crash on the couch with supper & something to view.
That’s what I did yesterday, and today was very much a “rinse and repeat.”
I only got more writing done on the dog story, rather than digging into Ghost Town as planned, but I enjoyed myself and don’t regret a minute of it.
Tonight’s couch viewing was another foray into the world of Studio Ghibli has been The Secret World of Arrietty, which if I’d known was a Borrowers adaptation I would’ve seen AGES ago.
I adored the Borrowers books and reread them multiple times. On my all-time early faves list, right up there with Boxcar Children, the Mary Poppins and Oz series, all of Joan Aiken’s books, and The Wind In the Willows. IThen in fourth grade I discovered Narnia and the worlds of Andre Norton and never went back.
Huh. Now I want to read all the Borrowers books all over again, just to revisit the happy memories and compare the adaptation to the original.
The movie was sweet.
We’ll be working our way through Studio Ghibli pretty steadily over the next month or so. Next, it’ll be Howl’s Moving Castle. Tomorrow, if Spouseman’s tolerance for watching television holds up. Three movies in three nights!
Shopping for cat trees is on the schedule tomorrow too. That should please Pippin. I’ll report on the results.
It occurs to me that if I’m going to keep rambling here like this, I should probably be plugging my books here, too.
I write unapologetically progressive science fiction and super-powered fantasy novels. Disability representation, female protagonists, found family vibes. Also crafting, cats, thrills, laughs, and more.
Get them here online https://bit.ly/kmhkindle or as audiobooks on Audible or order them as paperbacks anywhere books are sold.
Didn’t sleep well, for no particular reason. Woke slow & groggy, couldn’t get any mental traction. After puttering around to no good effect, I resorted to my usual backup plan: when in doubt, clean something out.
I went through my WordPress posts folder & deleted a bunch of old drafts I wrote to vent and never intended to publish. So I get to say I cleaned something. And some of the titles made me smile. There were not one but two labeled as “Ranty McRanty Post.” And then there were these two:
Batshit I am not touching with a 10-foot pole.
Not enough facepalms in the world.
I have to find new topics to go with those headings, because I like them that much.
The cleanup puttering eventually developed into a writing groove, and I logged another scene about Serena and her unruly pack of emotion-dogs. So now the short story starts with her as it should. I need to finish that and trim a bit of description from one spot so I can glue it in where it belongs. Then I get to write the most-fun part, where Parker teaches her some basic tricks. Good times!
But tomorrow is reserved for digging into a Big Revelations scene in Ghost Town. Arson & fisticuffs! Mysteries unearthed! Cats rescued! Should also be fun.
Another highlight: it snowed big fluffy snowflakes from noon ’til sunset, but barely any of it stuck, so that was lovely. I felt for all the folks who had to be out driving in the muck and slick wet, but it sure did look lovely outside the window while I sat with the cat by the fireplace.
In other doings, I worked a quiet shift at the ‘brar, then settled in for a couch evening (re)watching Princess Mononoke with Spouseman & Pippin. It’s still an amazing movie. A thing I noticed for the first time this viewing: how much its soundtrack reminds me of themes from The Lord Of the Rings score.
