Your indicators also tell pedestrians what you're going to do. Using your indicator when you intent to turn at an intersection isn't an optional if-you-feel-like it funsies you do just when other cars are around.
Me, to Girl Guides at the door selling cookies: "How much are they?"
Girl Guide, crafty and wise: "They're six dollars a box. If you have a twenty dollar bill, I have a twonie for change."
Me, realizing I am in the presence of an entrepreneur, handing over the twenty: "Here you go."
Girl Guide, all sweetness and light as she hands me the coin: "Thank you!"
In "Stuck With You" I had to come up with titles once the book was written, having not known ahead of time that the publisher wanted titled chapters, and so I came up with the whole "Caleb Khoury" statements, where Ben notes something about Caleb with every chapter, like "Caleb Khoury Ruins Everything" and so forth.
Just got my first statement re: Stuck With You (it came out last year, so this is my first royalty statement!) and holy crap, thank you to everyone who championed my wee queer Hi-Lo YA rom-com.
Publishing is such a long-term game; these moments of joy can be few and far between, but thank you.
I'm really chuffed about reaching episode 10—and the end of the first season—for my player group of (mostly) Trill crew on the Nebula-class USS Curzon. We're just reaching the end of 2371, they've been assigned to help with Admiral Leyton's Excelsior-class refit project, and the shift from "we're explorers" to "we must defend the Federation" has started to tip over given the political climate.
Almost didn't put out the garbage this morning because it's the 24th. My brain: "Oh wait, when is the Victoria Day Weekend stat holiday this year?" Looked it up, saw it was the 20th, and completely auto-piloted right up until realizing it's freaking APRIL right now, not May.
Husband has just left for the airport, Husky is now pacing around with his usual look of utter betrayal when one of us leaves, and I am ready to attempt to make my lap-top send a day's worth of Can*Con Virtual watching to my television. Prepare for hijinks.
Well, we managed to see it through our glasses, and while where we are it isn't total, the sky was clear enough that with the lenses we got a good view of the sun all chompy-chompy by terra luna. Very nice.
Next week! For my local Ottawa peeps, tickets are still available for the April 12 "From the Ashes: Celebrating Banned Books" fundraiser for ALSO Adult & Family Literacy.
If you don't know them, they work toward adult and family literacy, and are—naturally—staunchly opposed to the way books are being stamped out via censorship and bigoted, hateful book-banning efforts.
Link for tickets (or donations, if you're a non-local, but have a buck or two to spare):
Today in reasons I loathe Amazon, trying to update my biography and it freaked out when I described my books as queer. Then, even when I (grudgingly) tried removing "queer" and changing it to "gay/bi" it kept getting flagged as "no no no, you can't use that language here!" So then I only left in the two uses of Gay and one use of Lesbian that had been fine before I edited... and rejected.
Every day they seem to find a new way to treat us like less.
"You've Boiled the Kettle Three Times Already, Fucking Remember to Make the Goddamned Tea, You Fool!" and other short stories in the life of a forty-nine year old gay man.
#WritersCoffeeClub 03/23—How important is humour in your work? How do you work it in?
Fairly important, as humour tends to be my personal coping mechanism of choice, which translates into my POV characters quite a bit.
Also when I write romance, humour is fun. Also sexy. Like, being funny on the fly is clever, and cleverness is sexy, so my love interests tend to know how to land a joke.
As for the "how" part? That's... hard to articulate.
For the most part, I tend to lean into dialog and internal monologs for humour, and work with that angle through that lens of "coping mechanism" for the most part.
So, drop the character into a situation of some sort, and have the character choose to react via humour.
#writerscoffeeclub Mar 17: Have you taken high school or college courses in Creative Writing? Were the classes useful?
I tried my university Creative Writing class, offered by a prof who'd had a book picked up from Random House, I believe. He read my sample stuff—queer and spec-fic, to be clear—and wrote "Trite" and "Common" and didn't accept me into the class. Was soul-crushing. Didn't write for ages.
Anyway, he still has that one book. My sixth small-but-trad-pub novel releases next month.
Max is an amazing seat-thief. Like, you get up to make a cup of tea, you come back and there he is, wherever you were, curled up and looking oh-so-smol-and-cuddly.
So, I've been writing since I was a kid—mostly what I suppose now we'd call "prompts" or fanfic off artwork inside D&D manuals, boxed sets, and/or magazines; then writing up TTRPG sessions/snippits about characters, but that was for me.
Writing to be published started once I was at the uni, speed-bumped by a creative writing prof who tore me to shreds, then given a shot via people I'd met via bookselling, who were editing anthos.
I can't overstate how much the Creative Writing Prof was a negative effect: I stopped for a good while after he told me I was writing "Trite, Common" crap, basically (I was writing queer spec-fic/contemporary magical stuff) and then I had this day at the Bookstore where I realized that was actually a positive, really, not a negative? Or sort of.
But it was through reviewing and loving queer books that I met other queer authors and an interaction with Rob Byrnes that connected me to others.
The year Mulroney's last (latest? I don't know) book came out was a year all us bookstore managers had been brought to Toronto for a big meeting, and they made us all go into a particular room and then told us we couldn't leave for some reason (like, not even the bathroom) and then brought him in.
We were ambushed with him, not allowed to leave, and had to sit there while he talked to us about his book and how misunderstood he was.
