Hi, squiders! How are you? I’ve got the small, mobile ones’ Pinewood Derby cars finished finally (they did most of the work, I just had to attach the wheels and the weights, but we haven’t had time to work on them because we’ve had rehearsal every day for hours on end and impound is TODAY and aghhhhh) so that’s one thing that’s really been stressing me out done.
(Assuming they get checked in okay. A friend is taking the cars to impound because we have dress rehearsal tonight and can’t go. I’m trying not to worry too much.)
And, yes, it’s dress rehearsal tonight, and we open tomorrow, and Saturday we’ve got the Pinewood Derby, a Girl Scout cookie booth, AND the show, so that will be madness.
But it’s got to be better than my spouse being in the hospital and me having to go back and forth between the hospital and performances, like last show (Feb 2020). So, hey! I’ll take it!
Anyway. Enough of that.
Over at Turtleduck Press we’re working on an anthology project. We each provided artwork and/or photos as prompts, and using those, we’re going to write short stories on the theme of “connection.”
So I’ve been trolling through my idea files and looking at my prompts, and I finally came up with a story idea and wrote an outline.
But, let me tell you, it was SO HARD not to go horror with it. I actually had to set a guideline for myself that the plot could not involve ghosts or connections across death in any way.
It was kind of surprising, actually, how difficult this was, and it made me realize that so much of what I’ve written lately is horror. There’s my scifi horror novella, and the Gothic horror novella I just finished, and I wrote that murder mystery (a cozy, though, so not too horror-y), and even a lot of my short fiction lately has had horror elements if not been fully horror.
And it made me realize that, hey, maybe this is how I’m coping with the pandemic and everything else that is falling apart around me. Horror is a genre based on fear, after all.
That being said, I don’t want to write just horror, though. I do like horror–though I think I like writing it more than reading it–but I also like more traditional forms of science fiction and fantasy, and I would like to get back to writing more of that.
Anyway, I guess we’ll see how this goes.
Wish me luck!
