Me, 6 days ago: Well, $500 for the junk guys would be great. 😬
Krista: Just put a bunch of stuff on there, like what would really help.
Me, under duress: Okay, I’ll go wild and say $1000. 🤷♀️
My friends: lol how about $10 000.
Me, now:
There’s just enough now to basically cover the processing fees, and $100 of it was an offline donation I added. It’s staying up because, well, my birthday isn’t for another week, and who knows. But this is really incredible and unexpected. I’m committing 25% of the budget (or under) to a new high quality laptop that can handle the graphics work I do and will last for a good long while, but that did take some adjusting to and I had a panic attack originally at the thought so of course I’m watching for sales. Still continuing with the plan and little by little chipping away at some vet visits. Next weekend I’m going to do a thorough cleaning and get stuff ready to call the junk guys, then later this fall I can get a new bed finally.
This year has been so bad with a lot of things. Big expenses I have not been able to get enough saved for. Getting my feet under me has seemed impossible and often I could not see a way out (and if you’re reading this That Way–yes, that’s how bad it’s been, particularly April for two weeks but a few times since as well). So fucking five figures of gift–therefore non-taxable!–money is a lifeline, and I’m very cognizant of how it’s finite so I will be hoarding as much as possible for as long as possible.
I did agree to a few terms, however, and bought a) a Ken doll (the one whose job is beach) to go on my desk with Barbie (it was $22 on sale!), b) Babybels for Shawn (which were NOT on sale) as well as a few bougie groceries for me like avocado and mini burrata balls (okay all that was on sale), and c) preorder of the Silent Hill 2 remake DELUXE edition.
Catie Murphy has another joke goal of $12.5K and Dina wants $15K. I am good with this already, although of course I would not object to being able to buy an new iPad and Apple Pencil for work.
My favourite thing, though, was when it hit that $10 000 round number Thursday night, I immediately got messages and texts screaming “$10 000!” from multiple people who had clearly been refreshing, and tons of @s on Bsky from people screaming “WE DID IT.”
It’s the “we” part. That’s the thing. I love that so many people were so invested in this and cheering and excited to do a nice thing for me. I did nothing here but sit on my ass after being bullied into making the thing and tell everyone they’re all clearly stoned–the “we” here is you guys.
Is it disconcerting? Yes. Do I maintain I did this under duress? Absolutely. Have I mentally adjusted to this amount of money, which is like 3x more than I’ve ever had at once in my entire life? No. (I opened a separate account to put it in so it wouldn’t freak me out.)
But I’m ever so grateful not just for the cash (omg I love cash) but also everyone who chipped in whether they knew me or not and the ladies who were out there literally shaking trees and just excited to get to do something nice. This means a lot. Like has an incredible impact on just my quality of life at home and the mental weight of worry I carry all the time. If you don’t live, or haven’t lived, on poverty-level income for a long time, you might not fully appreciate this (I both hope you can understand and also would not wish this on anyone).
Anyway, I’ve been working all day and have to go back to more freelance stuff, and working tomorrow so I can get as much done by and off my plate by Wednesday as possible, so I can take a few days to clean. No rest for the wicked–even the lucky kind.
I’m at an age where I guess I am deeply boring. I get annoyed with the grocery store shelves are rearranged. I set alarm reminders to take my vitamins. And my big dream is to have enough money to hire the junk removal guys and maybe buy a new bed.
I put a moratorium on “stuff” for my birthday and said honestly I’d rather friends just contribute to the junk removal thing. Gift money that I don’t have pay a bunch of tax on. Krista suggested a little fundraiser, Dina thought that was great. It’s two weeks until my birthday and I started stressing about it–I have trouble even sending invoices to clients asking for money I’m owed, so “Hi, please give me money” for my birthday seemed extremely weird. But it’s been a struggle to try to get on my feet, there are all these big things far outside my budget, so I made some initial vet appointments and forced myself to do it. The old broken treadmill has been sitting in my hallway for over a year now and it’ll be there two more if I don’t do something.
I did this yesterday.
This is today.
No I don’t even know wtf is happening.
I’m having a lot of feelings and it’s uncomfortable.
I’ve got a spreadsheet going–the bed I wanted is down in price a bit, so I’m going to get the headboard as well and factored in tax and shipping; I started the big Vet List; I have not looked at laptops yet, but I’ll start pricing those and watch for Black Friday sales in November–and I opened a separate chequing account to move the money directly into, which is mostly to keep me from having a panic attack because I’ve never, ever had that much money in chequing in my entire life. Or savings for that matter. I consider myself wealthy when I’m sitting in low triple digits after paying my bills for the month.
My problems feel deeply unworthy of this help but it’s for the cats primarily, which helps me tremendously, because they’re what keep me up at night, and why my lows have been so low this year. Because I’ve been feeling like they’re all better off without me, that others could provide more for them, and that’s a very hard mindset to battle.
And the world is terrible, there are many worthy places to spend your pennies. This is just folks who wanted to do something for my birthday–it’s what I need, what helps me, and a way to contribute. So the GFM is staying open if you decide to throw a fiver my way for my birthday, and I will not buy magic beans with it, although a friend talked me into getting a “My job is Beach!” Ken doll (he’s on sale! for $22!) and I got a celebratory mocha frapp today when I went out to get my vitamins. I am very boring.
I’m also still flabbergasted and there might have been tears but I will deny it if you ask me.
I keep wanting to say deeply inappropriate jokes that would make people uncomfortable to deflect from feelings right now, so I better get myself offline and go back to work.
The deeper first person that I’m writing, the more I have to actively work at following the other points of view in a story–usually that ends up in the later revision passes, particularly with Waverly’s books. She’s so entirely focused not only on her own perspective but on the way she characterizes others (which may or may not always be accurate) that usually the first draft is all her, and subsequent drafts involves fleshing out everything else and understanding other perspectives.
I had some trouble with the fourth book during the revision process–there were some early scenes not sitting right (that I still need to go back and work on) and I realized I was missing my understanding the POV of that crucial other lead series character. Music is often how I crack those kinds of problems (a big part of A Dark and Distant Home ended up hinging on me clicking with”I Don’t Want to Change You“) and for this book, I landed on “War” by Poets of the Fall–or more specifically, this acoustic version.
When I thought that I fought this war alone You were there by my side on the frontline
I’ve long looked at his point of view as “Out of Sand” and use that as a guide. But by the time we’re here in the upcoming fourth book, he’s now seen the files Waverly has accumulated over the past decade. She has never let this go. She has never stopped seeking answers. And for someone who was in many ways forgotten, this was about realizing all that time without knowing it, there was someone else fighting the same “war”, so to speak.
When I thought that I fought this war alone We were one with our destinies entwined When I thought that I fought without a cause You gave me the reason why
Whether it’s not letting the past itself go, or the case, or the people involved in it, she was also there on the front lines. (And maybe their destines, for whatever value of fate you want to apply here, are entwined.)
While I don’t put a year in my books, I do know where every story slots into an actual calendar.
I didn’t used to, and it was fine, but I found twelve years ago when I was first drafting Livi, I had to keep track of different timezones while Livi was travelling so I had a chart with what day of the week and time it was back home vs what day and time it was wherever she was treasure hunting so her calls back home lined up. It was less of a concern with standalones, but when it comes to series works where things like birthdays and holidays and weekdays are mentioned, I need to ensure for my own peace of mind that it works (so if Halloween is a Wednesday in one book, it’s not a Saturday a year later story-wise in another book). Solomon’s Seal takes place in 2016 (The Pulse, actually, occurred on December 21, 2012); Charon’s Gold was October 2017.
So I’ve got a stack of calendars printed out to chart the events of the Waverly Jones series, since dates come up a lot–primarily the timeline for her sister’s murder when she was a teen, and when the books started up again. Waverly’s birthday is August 24th, and if you’re lining up the calendar–The Killing Beach is set in 2024–that’s her twenty-ninth birthday.
I’ve confirmed this week that working twelve hours a day really is my brain’s limit. I hit that point and I struggle to focus and start blanking on words, so I don’t think I can push it farther (as I’d hoped). This is in an effort to catch up and I’ve gotten a lot done, but, god, time keeps moving and I still feel like I’m drowning.
I’ve been doing around eight hours a day freelancing and then four at night on writing stuff. I’m doing a pass on Hell Fire and it definitely needs some rewrites, particularly in the front half, but I wanted to get it compiled for patrons and to also remind myself what happened for when I draft Demon Fall. Then I owe a bunch of Patreon extras although I feel like the least qualified person to come up with a writing-related post or essay right now between burnout and considering whether I’ll still be able to publish at all in a couple of years.
I also owe a bimonthly short and I’ve had zero idea what to do…right until I was writing this post and realized “oh wait, tomorrow is Waverly’s birthday in the story–I could write a couple thousand words about that”. So I’m going to try to do that right now (before and perhaps for a bit after my DnD game), and I’ll still be behind on everything but it’ll be one thing knocked off my plate.
Anyway if you haven’t dived in yet, get out your murder boards and binge the first three books this weekend.
My Deals page is generally up to date with current and upcoming sales, so worth checking before buying somewhere if you want the best price. Solomon’s Seal is $2.99 at Kobo for another week, and Dweller is $3.99 at Kobo and price-matched at Amazon for the rest of the month as well.
There’s a point in the back half of The Taiga Ridge Murders where things are going very badly for our heroine–trapped with no power, isolated by the snow, no way to get help–and Maya looks at the stray cat who has adopted her and notices how oblivious she is to all the worry.
She stops wandering and stands there in her room, staring down at her cat curled up near the fire. Holly is oblivious to any danger, any worry. She trusts, it seems, that there will always be food. There will always be warmth. That Maya will provide it for her. If the trip this morning was traumatizing, she shows no sign of it—she’s satisfied to pretend the whole adventure didn’t happen.
I’ve been sitting here drinking my coffee trying to wake up enough to function–I’ve switched back to the dual-release 10mg melatonin I used to take and that’s been helping me sleep finally (better than a prescription hypnotic did) but it’s extra hard to get moving in the morning. And I’ve been watching Shawn play with his toys, oblivious.*
He plays with the other cats sometimes but has long been comfortable playing on his own. I wasn’t sure after Gus died that he would be, but he entertains himself just fine. He romps and plays oblivious to worry (unless I am very sick, in which case he gets Very Upset) because Mom Has Always Provided and he doesn’t believe there could be a world in which that changes.**
Working in the arts feels like death from a thousand cuts, and those cuts much of the time are fees. Amazon charges a delivery fee, now Apple wants a *30% fee from Patreon iOS app purchases*, Etsy tacked on a new regulatory fee atop the others (FYI the even charge me a cut of the shipping fee, which I don’t set; Canada Post does).
Or the cuts are dwindling visibility and further theft. Twitter collapsed and that had a direct impact on most small creators I know; Bsky has sold some books, absolutely, but I’ve noticed the last couple of times there were a few people doing the “I love these books” things, I just got a spike in piracy instead (indeed, seeing someone download dozens of books from three series, representing over twelve years of my life working, was deeply depressing). And at a time when we should be lifting one another up, remember only one of my close writer friends bothered to acknowledge my last release date.
Or the cuts are because everyone is suffering everywhere. Numerous people have been laid off. They buy fewer books. They’re no longer able to support the work. This is all understandable but it trickles down everywhere.
Or the cuts is just the 2d8 psychic damage from every single day seeing news articles and ill-informed people and sometimes even your own audience telling you your work doesn’t matter, you are replaceable by plagiarism machines, you should not make any money on your labour even though they want to consume it, and also this is somehow all your fault that your work doesn’t matter and you deserve to starve. And then you have to take time away from creating new work to find another income stream for existing work. Again.
Actually replace all the “or” above with “and”. And the cuts come from everywhere. And everyone I know is so fucking tired.
I have no idea what my situation is going to look like a couple of years from now. I had something I was hoping would work out so I’d have a small chunk of money that would buy me time off freelancing so I could focus on writing the last Livi book (that’s not a simple task and will require a lot of devoted time and focus) but that’s seeming less likely the more time that goes by. And there’s no simple solution, because it’s a lot of systemic forces just driving everything down. If I have to quit publishing, I will have to look at something else to make a living on rather than freelancing as well, because while I do like what I do, I know eventually I’ll be resentful if I have to spend all my time working on other people’s books rather than my own (I used to work in publishing so…I know what my tolerance level is).
But that is not today. Today I will go take a shower and get another coffee to do a day reset and get back to work.
Because Shawn trusts. I cannot, but I can try to be worthy of that trust even when the power goes off and supplies dwindle and the storm closes in. I can just keep focusing on what I can do now and believe I’ll figure out alternatives in the future.
“I’ll come back,” Maya tells Holly, but Holly doesn’t look up. Holly sleeps, contented, and Holly trusts.
* Please ignore my awful carpet, that’s how it looks even after vacuuming and washing it. It’s very old and worn down and cannot get clean now. ** The exception is, of course, if he has to miss a meal because of a scheduled surgery, in which case you’d think the sky is falling with how expressive he is about his hangriness.
Writer of horror, mysteries/thrillers, and urban fantasy.