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This post is the first thing I’ve written in a month

August 7, 2024 /

Greetings from Fresno, California! Your intrepid blogger has relocated from the Sonoran Desert to the San Joaquin Valley, trading 100+ degree temperatures for… more 100+ degree temperatures.

Yeah.

Anyway, I’m slowly settling into a new routine, and writing this month’s IWSG post is another step on that journey–writing again after a month of packing, cleaning, moving, learning a new place, starting a new job. It’s… a lot. But I’m still standing (or actually sitting–in my makeshift home office, typing out these words).

For anyone who’s new here, this post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) blog hop. On the first Wednesday of every month, we IWSG-ers share our doubts, fears, struggles, and triumphs. Our awesome co-hosts this month are Feather Stone, Kim Lajevardi, Diedre Knight, C. Lee McKenzie, and Sarah – The Faux Fountain Pen. Click those links and leave them some comment love.

Each month our fearless leader (Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh) gives us an optional question to answer. This month’s question: Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio? I actually partially answered this question a few months ago with a post called Two ways fiction writers can use AI ethically. I haven’t used AI other than experimentally. Someday I’d like to take a class on prompting so I can better harness its power to do my research and scut work, but for now, I’m content to manage all aspects of my writing on my own (when I’m actually writing and not packing and moving and… yeah. Where is the AI assistant who can pack, move and unpack all my crap?)

I have to leave for the aforementioned new job soon, so this post will be short, but I do want to include a couple of updates for those of you who’ve been following my journey.

  • I’m ready to start writing again. I’m settling into a new routine and figuring out how to fit writing into it. It’ll be difficult, because my new job requires significantly more time and energy than any job I’ve ever held (except for my brief stint as a high school teacher. Teaching is exhausting, y’all. If there’s a teacher in your life, buy them wine and/or chocolate. They need it.) But I’m determined to get back on the write track–with bad puns, apparently.
  • I mentioned many months ago that my short story, “The Fine Print,” had been selected for the Best of Deathlehem anthology. That project appears to be on hold. I’ll plaster this space with over-the-top announcements as soon as it gets moving again.

Thank you, dear readers, for sticking with me even when I’m not blogging or writing much. Your comments and care mean the world.

The memery

Just a couple of memes this morning, but they’re pretty good:

Too bad Dickens and Schrodinger weren’t contemporaries. Perhaps then we would have had a very nerdy parody entitled, “A Tale of Two Cats.”

That’d have me out of my clothes faster than an 80s groupie at a Def Leppard concert.

And on that disturbing note, I’m off to work. Catch ya next month!

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