Ghost-of-a-Chance

Checking in on all the rest of y’all in the range of Snowmageddon 2026. (Basically, the southern half of the US, northeast downward, half the Midwest, etc.) Everyone doing okay out there?

It’s freezing here in southwest Missouri with snow on the ground, but our neighborhood hasn’t lost power...yet. Tomorrow is supposed to be round two of this nonsense. Cold’s vehicle doesn’t handle cold well, so he’s bundling up like he’s bound for the arctic and walking to work. Heiferlump, meanwhile, is determined to crawl inside my skin to sap all the warmth from my corpse, and let me tell you, that cat has cold toes. Those toes are also equipped with unfailing nipple-seeking stomping hardware, and I have the bruises to prove it. Naturally, I’ve held her up to the window circle-of-life style a few times so she can cuss out starlings on the feeder. 

Everybody, stay warm out there!

When I say, “The world would work better if women were in charge,” I mean just about anyone but me. Why? First fact: It’s “my job” to make sure that all the lights are off and doors are locked when we go to bed because my husband will zombie walk right past a door that is standing open. Second fact: we go to bed when the sun is still up and wake up after dark so customers of my husband’s store can panic-buy their milk, eggs, and bread at the crack of dawn. This means when I check the back door, I get blinded by sunlight through the kitchen window if I’m up too late.

Well, a few minutes ago, I flipped the switch on my way out of the room, but the light only got brighter. I spent probably about a minute and a half squinting at the glowing boob-light, wondering what sort of black magic electrical fuckery I was in for now, and contemplating what a sledgehammer would do to the fugly glass shade. Then…it hit me, just like a sledgehammer.

Y’all. I just tried to turn off the sun. With a light switch. And got pissy when flipping the switch just made the room brighter. So, yeah. Just about any woman except me. I would do my level best only to get knocked down by a barrage of blonde moments. I’d attempt to bring about real, needed legal, societal, and economic change. Instead, I’d get hung up on ridiculous things like declaring boob-lights and whining electric cords illegal and enacting laws decreeing that pets are taxable dependents and people can be considered pets if they’re not fully housebroken. The world would burn.

This year has just started, and it can already can go straight to hell and stay there. We’ve lost our little guy. Woozle. My sweet orange mama’s boy. He’s gone. Fuck cancer, fuck losing cats, fuck death, and fuck this year. Woozle didn’t deserve this.

I’ve said countless times before, on various platforms, that I’ve given Spotify an identity crisis with how varied my listening habits are. My 2025 Wrapped dropped the other day, and hoo-boy. It’s a mess.

My most listened to songs were Labour (Cacophony) and Rasputin; I play them on repeat as background noise while editing so the whine of all the electronics, the sound of the furnace, and even my own breathing won’t drive my misophonic ass bonkers. (I’ve tried countless other sounds, playlists, and various colors of noise, but it all either irritates my ears – my hearing is mildly fucked – or it has “water” sounds that make me need to pee every five minutes. The best substitute I’ve found is, oddly enough, a celtic band that combines bagpipes with hide drums, but I have to tweak the hell out of my sound settings to make it not painful.) My most listened to artist, on the other hand, was Steeleye Span; I listen to a custom folk playlist when I’m trying to write or edit for a certain story that isn’t going anywhere, and it’s disproportionately full of Steeleye Span. My most listened to playlist, however, is 11+ hours of nonstop oldies; it’s “safe” for when I’m outside, with family, or both. Because it’s gotten so much play, the app pegged me as over 70 years old. My second-most listened to list is full of punk, emo, and nu-metal, so I guess it assumed I’m letting my nonexistent grandbaby mooch off my account. I’m a millennial. They just stopped carding me. Ouch.

I feel like I should apologize for gaslighting the app, but...yeah. Nah. I’ve got work to do and my brain is working against me enough. (You sure make me do a whole lotta labour.)

When one considers the size of the target and the size of the projectile, one would think a cat’s foot would miss tender spots more often than it would hit. So why do they always—always—manage to stomp right on nipples and testicles? How does that make sense?

This just in: some school districts in the US are banning books about cats. Apparently, somebody needs to have a chat with the administration and tell them those books “aren’t about that kind of pussy.” 

The people who leave negative reviews on e-books reporting sex scenes are my heroes. It’s easy enough to filter in smut when you’re reading fanfiction, but the e-book writers get coy about it in their descriptions. If not for sex-averse reviewers, we’d risk reading a “spicy book” that never passes first base, get clam-shelled over the lack of smut, and have to go start a fight with our husbands or something. ...not that I’m speaking from experience, or anything. 

But yeah. Someone left a squicked one-star review on a book I was considering. Granted, the review was just the word “sex” written three times – like they’re starring in a demonic possession porno or something - and shoop, there the book went. Right into my cart. I hope it’s filthy. People like that are heroes.

People love saying, “Love is blind.” I have to disagree. I think love is looking at someone, knowing that somewhere out there, a tree gave its all to ensure they have air to breathe, and feeling feel sorry for the tree…and knowing you’d burn a whole forest to the ground if a single tree took offense at supplying your idiot with oxygen. 

I love my husband. He’s an idjit, but he’s my idjit. I’d love him even if he had to be reminded to breathe.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite (age-appropriate and modern) books described a place as “a screen door town.” The explanation was that every time something happened, no matter how trivial or innocuous, every screen door up and down the street would open and slam shut twice in a ripple effect—once when the occupants came out to snoop, and again when, having discovered it was unimportant, they went back inside. 

Last year, Cold and I moved into “a lawnmower neighborhood”—meaning every day, there’s at least one person outside mowing somewhere on the block, and most days, their neighbors join in whether or not they need to mow, and the ripple travels further and further until everyone in earshot is mowing. Cold and I sleep during the day and we can only deal with the lawn very early or on his days off, so the constant mowing is a sore point. 

Well, earlier today, I heard the mowing start up again while I was trying to drudge through beta-reading a chapter from someone who might not have proofread first. As close as the mower sounded, I figured it must be that one neighbor who has an overpowered mower and an undersized lawn. I suffered through reading the same sentence half a dozen times, then stormed into the kitchen to get some tea and wait it out. When I heard Cold come through the door, I started ranting about “whatever asshole is mowing this time can kiss my ass” and a few things otherwise.

Then I saw him and I froze. My husband was sweaty and covered in grass clippings. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Asshole. I mowed your lawn. Prepare to give me butt.” 

Awhile back, someone on a random Reddit post suggested I might be neurodivergent. I’d only heard the term used for people with autism – yes, I live under a rock – so my initial response was disgruntlement. My husband, after all, is autistic, and I had a mental image of the time he met my prudish religious neighbor for the first time and made a joke about his dick; if we were both that awkward outwardly instead of just on the inside, we’d be a right mess. There was also a sidenote of, “shit, I’m even more fucked up than Cold, how dare this person compare him to me? He doesn’t deserve that insult!” indignance. 

Come to find out “neurodivergent” applies to several diagnoses and disabilities; it applies to most (any?) condition resulting from deviations in how the brain is wired...including mine. Apparently, I am neurodivergent. So is Cold. So many things make sense now. That Redditor was right and I had no idea.

That said...I’ve been editing a chapter of my novel with Boney M.’s “Rasputin” playing on repeat for...uh...an hour? ...or three? Because it’s stuck in my head? Okay, so maybe there were signs. Maybe. 

Cicadas when I’m trying to write late at night: “I respect you and want you to succeed, so let me sit on your window and scream about it.”

I just opened my office window and told the damned bugs on the screen to go get laid somewhere else because I couldn’t think straight from their noise. Our neighbors probably think I’m nuts. Meh. They drive ugly cars; people who drive ugly cars don’t get an opinion on my sanity or lack thereof.

If life could just take a break from randomly skull-fucking me for once—or at least schedule a time and ask consent—yeah, that’d be great.  (In which Ghost is a cis-woman who gets sick like a man and requires medical intervention on the regular and inevitably ends up with horrible cramps AND yet another random household crisis, all at the same time.) I’ll live. I feel like roadkill, but I’ll live. 

The other day, I noticed a draft coming through gaps in a few of our windows (it’s an older house, but not old enough to have been built well) which led me to this long list of actions:

Find appropriate sealant. Fix one window (it looks like a toddler finger painted with dad’s tools but whatever) and move onto the next. Prep window frame. Realize the windowsill was probably last cleaned in the 90s and is full of grease, lint, dust, and animal hair. (Hurk) Decide you don’t want to seal that junk into permanence with something that dries clear. Grab cleaner and scrub the gap clean with a bristle brush (cleaner sprays brown crap everywhere, barf) and knock loose some paint that may have been white back in the 80s. Realize the cleaner will need to be rinsed out and the paint touched up before sealing the gap.

Give up. Sit on the couch and question your life choices while staring at the tube of sealant and convince yourself that cussing at inanimate objects is immature and you’re better than that. (I’m really not.)

Realize that the entire time, you were standing in the window with the blinds open and the lights on at night wearing a man’s shirt and no bra with People-of-Walmart hair, and your next door neighbor is out on their porch watering their plants…at night.

Homeownership would definitely keep my millennial ego in check if it ever got big enough to worry about.

Would anyone be up for a second opinion on a single chapter of a work in progress? I don’t really need any editing. (…unless someone notices a missing word or comma both I AND my editing app missed.) I asked on Reddit and got a reply, but they ghosted me. Ghosting someone who goes by “Ghost” is a bit on the nose, but whatever. It was a dick move.

To put this as simply and briefly as possible, my brain got fried with the packing, moving, and all that entailed. I had no time to write. Now that I have time, my brain is struggling to switch back to non-crisis mode—the storms and renovations aren’t helping—and focus. It’s stuck in a hamster wheel of “so tired/gotta keep working/where’s the box tape/shit, is that bug something to worry about/fuck, my ass hurts, why do I hurt so much,” and so forth. My writing muscles are atrophied to noodles and I’m struggling to get sentences out. I’m not really happy with the second half of my most recent work, the flow, or the pacing. It’s been well over a year since I updated the story, and I won’t even get started on the delay my others are experiencing. If anyone can help, I’d appreciate it more than my fried brain can express.

This can be a one-off, and I’m happy to correspond by Google Docs. The chapter has some cursing and questionable humor but nothing really dirty; the bulk of it, sans headings and notations, is just over 3,100 words, and I’ve already done what I can for editing. You shouldn’t run into any mistakes. Also, if you’ve read any of my other writing, I’m not writing any accents or using non-English language aside from a couple of words in elvish. I’m trying to keep this story simple, easy, and posted in small bites unlike my usual approach to writing. Fandom is Dragon Age: Inquisition; I’ve got the other chapters posted in the archive if anyone is morbidly curious.

Earlier tonight, I fed one of my non-fanfiction short stories through Pro Writing Aid’s “chapter critique” to see how it measures up against my fanfiction. I never thought I’d see the day when AI would smut-shame me.

Yep. Seriously. “…some might find the level of detail in the sex scenes excessive.” What if I don’t wanna associate with that sort of person, huh? Fade to black is for wishy-washy people and FFN, not my filthy shapeshifter plowfest. Stay in your lane or bend over.