Ghost-of-a-Chance

Whoever has the Ghost Chance voodoo doll right now, if they could give it a break, that would be nice. I don’t want to share details, lest my family find this site, recognize those details, and realize it’s me—right now, the last thing I need is a mass-shunning because I’m bi in a family of homophobes. But…

Woozle. Our cat, Woozle. The little bag-obsessed orange garbage-baby. Our sweet, smelly, mouthy, single-braincell-bearing fur-son. That Woozle. We just found out he’s incredibly sick, the kind of sick that creeps in without warning, may not even show, and will eventually end his life. Right now, he’s still healthy and happy enough that his quality of life isn’t in question, but that could change without much notice. It could be a few years, or a few days, or who knows how long, but my little monster is terminally ill, and I’m a fucking mess right now. We’re doing everything we can, but there’s not much we can do to begin with.

So. Yeah. Give your pets some cuddles for me. I’m probably going to go cry again because this fucking sucks.

No. No. HAY-ell to the no!  We have had enough fucking tornadoes  here for several lifetimes, and I’m fed the fuck up with them. 🤬

Yes. Tornado in 2011. Tornado several years ago. Tornado last month, and another last freaking night. Yes. Last night. My family, husband, and I are all safe, and I believe all our friends are safe. We didn’t live within the danger zone this time, but my PTSD was already kicking up over the season and impending trauma-versary. This? This is going to give me night terrors. Again. Can’t have Ghost go more than a month without dreaming about Cold dying a bloody, gruesome, tragic death in her arms, now can we? 😭 It’s a good thing I put everything on hiatus because I’m barely able to function right now, and it’s just gonna get worse.

If you see this post and you live in the United States, take this as your cue to go buy a weather radio and keep it on and stocked with batteries. The sirens in my hometown didn’t go off, and they weren’t sounded in another nearby town last month. Weather alerts on your phone won’t go off if the cellular network fails, and you can’t count on hearing the sirens, and a tornado can happen anytime of the year, on any continent, given the right conditions. If you’re looking for volunteer opportunities, there are several communities that are going to need help over the next week or so.

Seriously. Fuck tornadoes.

It’s never an easy decision to make, but I’ve had to make it: all my active stories are now officially on hiatus. 

Nothing (very) bad’s happened – at least, this time around, nobody is dead, dying, or terminally ill. Life’s just thrown us a curveball and Cold and I are even busier than usual. Most days, I barely have the energy to handle day-to-day work, let alone time and energy to write. Heck, I haven’t even gotten anything written on my most recent chapter of my novel in a few months now; that’s how crazy it’s been lately. Since my fanfiction may not be updated anytime soon, I decided to head it off at the pass before readers start deciding I’m dead.

...yes. That’s always a possibility, considering how infrequently I can update.

It sucks, but better to give myself permission to not write than continue to bludgeon the desktop with my head when my brain is too stress-fried to write. On FFN and AO3, I put notes in my current stories, and updated the summaries of the stories that have fallen by the wayside. AFF frowns on author’s notes as chapters, so I’m not sure where to go beyond adding something to the summaries.

I hope the fanfiction writer’s curse has missed more of y’all than it’s hit, that spring is treating you well, and that this doesn’t last too many months. Now if any of y’all need me, I’ll be in my burrito-blanket muttering there’s no place like home and fuck-this-shit-I’m-out.

So. Is it colder than a witch’s cunt where y’all are, too? No? Just us? Muh-zurr-uh’s done froze over, folks. 

That moment when you keep hearing a soprano velociraptor playing one-sided Marco Polo out in the hallway and realize, oh, no, it’s just the Velcro cat wailing pitifully because you locked him out of the office. 
Woozle. Because of course, it’s Woozle. Never mind that I locked him out because I have cramps, a headache, and writer’s block, and I don’t feel up to fending off his usual shenanigans. By Shenanigans, I mean shaking slobber everywhere, whining, trying to insinuate his fat butt between the desk and my rack, and trying to scale Mount Mom’s-Desk and causing a landslide.

Kid, Mama needs to work! Stay in your box!

Y’all, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. I’m editing a new chapter of A New Lease on Life <500 words at a time with ProWritingAid, and the Readability checker gave me such a double take I heard my neck crack. I posted a screenshot on Tumblr because pics or it didn’t happen.

An (admittedly wordy) paragraph got a hard to read flag. Everything is spelled correctly, but it has several big words regarding language and its various parts and traits. You know. Words like consonants, syllables, dialects, and pronunciation. Hard, however, seems excessive.

Right above this paragraph is one marked easy to read. The entire thing is written in (intentionally) misspelled Scots and Scots-Gaelic that gave the spelling and grammar checker a stroke…and it’s easy to read…

…what…the actual…fuck… 

While my husband fed the cats a moment ago, I squirted the younger one’s liquid medicine down his throat. Woozle, the little shit, let half the dose drip out of his mouth and roll down my shirt and shorts. I grumbled about it—because that medicine stains, turns into tar, and smells like rotten fish a roadkill—and what did Cold say?

”Well. Pussy likes to dribble.”

 I married this clown. I married him. (He’s not wrong, though.)

Using AI to edit your smut can be so wild. ProWritingAid decided that this sentence…

Quote

Kai’e’ie is insatiable—ravenous, breath-stealing, and covetous—and its expression is primal and passionate fucking.

…needs this correction: 

Quote

Kai’e’ie is insatiable—ravenous, breath-stealing, and covetous—and its expression is primal and passionate about fucking.

I mean, sure, I’m as passionate about fucking as anyone, but that isn’t quite what I was going for there. I can only assume the algorithm assumed Kai’e’ie is a name rather than an emotion and that I was trying to make small talk instead of comparing two different emotional states—Kai’e’ie versus mi’lee’veez—related to intimacy. (Kai’e’ie’: combined from syllables from words meaning love, say, life, and bond; combined, the meaning is, literally love said, life-bound, or figuratively, without you, I die. The fictional people who created this word are apparently as dramatic as I can write them. Mi’lee’veez: the root words in their entirety and proper order mean my dream heart. Sappity-sap-sop, someone get a mop.)

This is what I get for creating a fictional language for my novel. 🙄 J.R.R., you’re a horrible influence.