Updates and New Things

May is almost over. I haven’t updated you in so, so long. Sorry about that.

I am here. Alive.

I have been distracted by the health of a family member, childcare, and my own desire to write, play a video game, and/or get lost in media.

I have a dozen half-finished drafts I meant to post here. In many of them, too much time passed. In others, I stopped working on them to meet a writing goal.

I started the year with a new flash horror story. I joke that it is my little story that could. A friend said it is like a scary Toy Story. It is over at The Cosmic Background, “Burn It Down.” If you like it, they have a TON of flash to read, and flash is the best for when you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.

In April I had a story come out in The Map of Lost Places. My story is called “Three Ways to Break You.” It is about the place (and time) I was in HS. It isn’t the first and won’t be the last time I write about it. If you have read the story, and think, “well she broke free of it.” You would be right and wrong.

The small city has attempted in many ways to transform. Perhaps I should do a story about the gentrification of small towns. All those vintage/antique stores and their possessed artifacts. I mean, just imagine what magic goes into a Micro-brewery!

There is a ton of scary history further back. I’m going to try and find a link to a semi-recent documentary that is well researched: Unspoken. Check it out if you are interested in the history of this small town.

If you are like me, you have bookshelves and stacks of books laying around the house. I look at them and think: I am going to read you soon, promise. The truth is that some of them are YEARS old, but that never stops me from buying more. I have a problem.

There is an anthology coming up in honor of Tanith Lee. In my massed piles of books that I haven’t read I have a total of three from Lee. I cracked open White as Snow, a brutal retelling of Snow White. I am in the middle of it right now. It’s a rockstar level retelling so far. If you decide to check it out, check trigger warnings. I hope, after I finish reading it I find the time to write more about the book.

So here is your message to read one of those books gathering dust. It might be awesome! There was a reason you happened to pick it up.

I mentioned video games. We live in the cozy game revolution, and it is the perfect break from writing/calling representatives. Yes, I consider my fake colorful crops actual gaming. And the character cutscenes in Stardew bring me joy. But there are so many wonderful games! One I go back to again and again is Kynseed. It is strange, wonderful, and massive.

I am a mismatched human when it comes to my likes and dislikes. My favorite genre (novel/short stories) are horror, gothic horror, darker SF&F all the way to grim. In video games, give me bright happy simulators with some RPG elements. Oh, I like RPGs, I played BG3, hell I got it in early access. But with a small child—well, things change.

Bye, bye for now. I’m off to find links to everything here, and try to get this up.

My Dad

September is a strange month for my family. My son was born in September. I got married in September. My grandfather died in September and now my father has died in September. In the wake of my father’s death, my grandmother turned 89. September has turned into a reminder of how life and death twist and bend one another, where the line between the two both linger and fade completely.

Four years ago, I brought life into this world and manically laughed as my child was placed on my chest. For a moment I was a god. A few weeks ago, I watched my father’s heart monitor slide to zero, helpless to stop it.

 Before writing this, I was working on a non-fiction piece about villains. How those characters can be the most interesting because humans and what we make are terrifying, and then, a mile or less down the road, there was a school shooting. That half-written piece became impossible to work on. A few days later, my dad was in the ER, and then he was gone.

 How do you write about grief when you are in the middle of it? How do you separate and analyze the pieces to fit them together? I took a book with me over the weekend when my dad was in the ICU. Three days after he’d passed, I couldn’t pick it back up and declared I didn’t want to finish it. Nor could I tell you anything that happened in the pages.

 Last weekend was his Celebration of Life and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about him, and the truth is/was I was uncomfortable. Each person has their own narrative for the man who raised me, because he was their friend, cousin, brother-in-law. Our perspectives are different, but here is what I would like to share:

 My dad chuckled. I can hear it. It isn’t a loud or a deep chuckle, but it ends with him saying, “Awll right” in an accent so thick and slow it sounds like if syrup could make a noise. He would then smile. I don’t know how but this smile was like he was pretending to be shy, but he wanted you to know he was pretending. It was endearing.

 My dad introduced me to Star Trek TNG, SF Horror movies, and 80s/90s action movies. He ate these shows up and I sat transfixed asking, “What happens next?” I hear other authors talk about how their parents had hundreds of novels hanging around. I had The Terminator and Nightmare on Elms Street. He let me stay up to watch the X-Files, making me promise that if I started to have bad dreams I would stop. It was the two of us who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer together.

 My dad was quiet. The opposite of my mother. He was the middle child of five kids and had an even temper. When he spoke, others would stop to listen—and often he would say one thing to make someone think, as if he was a sage passing out wisdom. It was never condescending and always a little random.

 People asked me if he was mean because of his silence. I always laughed at this. He could be stern. As a child he could embody the face of disappointment that shattered my composure but he was never mean or cruel. And his quiet didn’t last at home. Even when I moved out, he would call me and we would talk about work and life.

He was a diesal mechanic. The garage of a mechanic is full of the scents of oil, grease, and fuel. They cling to the skin and hair. These are scents I will miss along with the scent of the soap he used to wash it away in the garage sink before coming inside.

 He said, “Mm Hm,” to almost everything. This was a common phrase he picked up from his mother. He had two Mm Hm’s, one meant he was thinking about what you’d just said. The other meant he wasn’t listening.

 I spent my life identifying with him because he was the family member that gave the same thoughtfulness to the future and the “what ifs” that hover around all of us. For example, when I was nine or ten, we watched a ghost show—I asked him if he believed in ghosts, he said that, maybe it wasn’t ghosts. “What if it’s time folding in on itself?” he asked me.

 Once when he was frustrated, he shook his head and said, “Maybe we are a snow globe on God’s shelf he shakes up every now and then.” I wondered how many snow globes God might own.

 Most people are going to remember him for his work, or rather how much he worked, even when he was at home. The man liked a project. He would have hundreds of them around and outside of the house. Each involving his hands.

 As a teenager, when I was involved in Art and Drama, he told me in high school he was in a play. This was said with a special kind of pride. He showed me drawings he’d done as a teenager. I remember the illustration of a squirrel. If I can find it, I will have it framed.

 He was pushed into adulthood too young.

 At nine, my mom explained puberty. Not understanding what would happen to my body I broke into hysterical tears. She lost patience and had my dad sit down and talk to me. He didn’t laugh at my fear or anger. He listened and explained the best he could. I hope I would handle it as he did in that situation.

 He built things and believed in being a good person.

 When I got married, he said, “Remember that money is just a number on a piece of paper.”  He was sentimental in the best way. And when we had our father/daughter dance I held back the best kind of tears.

All these things could never be enough to give you the story of my father. In his obituary I wrote, hardworking, quiet, and easy-going. My mom said it was the perfect three words. She’s not wrong, but to describe someone in three words is skimming over so many different parts of what makes us, us. We are different people to one another, a sibling, a partner, a parent, a grandparent, a friend, the list goes on.

I will remember him as the man who helped foster and nurture my curiosity and made sure that I had the space and tools as a girl and young woman to figure out what I wanted out of life.

 If you have made it this far, thank you for reading about my dad. I don’t think there is a takeaway other than death sucks. It rips our loved ones from us and while everything living might die, it doesn’t mean its easy. It doesn’t mean we won’t grieve those that aren’t with us tomorrow.  <3

Parenthood and Memories

Shortly after I had my son, I was on a panel about being a parent and being a writer. Two things that had become oil and water after the first month. At the time, I hadn’t been a parent that long. I trusted that my experience, though new and had value but had a lingering doubt that I knew what the hell I was doing. There was one question I didn’t know how to answer, how does being a parent impact writing, or inform it, or change it? The content of my writing had not changed. But parts of me had. Newborns, babies, and toddlers don’t give their parents enough time to grapple with those changes, let alone understand how it changed their art.

Now, after four years of being a parent, I can say it has changed my art, but I don’t think it’s fair to give my kid the credit. I changed and grew as a person. We all grow or change if you have kids or not.

I just want to write. I want to write a hundred things. I want to explore a dozen different emotions. I want to write things that fill me with joy and then break my heart. I’ve never been a writer that wants to specialize in just one part of the speculative genre. I want to have seasons. I want my writing to reflect my life. This means that I might not know I’ve changed until five years go by and I read an old story of mine. I’ll be brought back to the smells, flavors, and emotions of that moment in time.

When I re-read my short story, “Eliam is Forever,” I feel transported, not to the doomed generations ship, but my couch in early December of 2020. It’s 3:45am, I just gave my 3-month-old a bottle, changed him, and swaddled him back to sleep. I’m not going back to bed. I don’t risk putting him back in his bassinet, he is beside me as I open my computer. Part of the reason I have trouble sleeping, I never get my words in anymore. I want to write endlessly. I lay in bed thinking of everything I could do, everything I could try. Sometimes, it makes me cry.

A story about a doomed generation ship makes sense when you’ve been trapped at home, trapped in a pregnant body, and then trapped without the ability to use your hands. (We don’t talk about what it’s like, only being allowed to use hands for newborn babies, and while most might think this is an exaggeration, for us it wasn’t.)

In fourth grade, riding the bus to school in the morning, I leaned by forehead against the glass. I was thinking about time as familiar streets slid by. I paid attention to where I was, always. When I got older, I wanted to be able to drive anywhere. Places change as time goes on, and things look different. And in my child brain, I realized that I had become one of those places where once there were only trees, or a cow pasture, and now it’s a grocery store. If I looked back, all I had were memories that were imperfect.

I panicked on the bus as my head hit the window when we went over a bump. I tried to hold all the small things we lose that make us who we are. And I thought, “Now is now, and it will never be now again.” I cannot trap time. But since that bus ride, this is a sentence I’ve said to myself in quiet moments and in moments that I never want to escape.

The small memories that I would like to capture in amber and hold forever. Those are also happening now. They come with full belly laughs and racing monster trucks down the driveway. They are lazy mornings when no one wants to get out of bed or singing in the car to lyrics so garbled no one understands them. Running around flinging a shirt back and forth because the imaginary Joker is coming and we have to shirt him back.

I have always been interested in secret history and small history. The histories that are glossed over in textbooks, left out because they don’t work for the fascist leaning asshats or the history most folks find uninteresting. Small facts that get lost and trapped in time and no one can ever really remember—a scent that became as popular as Tommy Girl when I was in middle school, or a saying left in 1931 that was used and tossed aside.

The writing thing, I used to believe was explaining myself and exploring. I wanted to craft the sky and show others what I could see. Some of that is true. Some of it is because I want to take endless nights and hold onto them forever.

Stuff I Like

Hello and welcome! I hope your seat is comfy and you have a nice drink next to you. I’m writing to you early in the morning with my own warm cup of coffee. For an upper there is a silky-smooth quality to coffee that helps me get out of bed.

I finished watching Fallout last night. It was chief kiss amazing and tons of fun! No spoilers here, but if you haven’t seen it, jump onto evil Amazon daddy and watch it. Damn! The atmosphere is spot on! Did I reinstall Fallout 4? Yes, yes, I did. I love the franchise, well, all but the online one. I do have one complaint and it’s not even a real complaint. I’d never want it changed but after hours of gameplay, hanging out in a world where everything is dark and drab, it starts to get to me.

Because I have a three-year-old, I’ve jumped into cozy games. I finished Botany Manor, A Little to the Left, and Dordogne. I cried at the ending of Dordogne. It was an emotional journey. My kiddo loved the art and the opening music. Something about the story and the writing. Just thinking about it makes my eyes misty. It captures something so real about childhood.

Thinking about capturing things, I’ve been really into scents. I love them and they’re art! It’s a different type of medium but easily causes emotional responses! This all got started last year when a friend of mine, who is really into scents gave me some old testers.

What do I want to smell like? Well, I want an incense perfume that smells like a New Age shop. I want it to be mysterious, edgy, but nice. I knew, when looking up notes that I wanted to smell Purple Mantra by Room 1015. It does smell a tiny bit like a New Age shop but, well, you know how you hear of someone wanting to move to a cottage in the middle of the forest where she hangs herbs in her kitchen and may or may not have a cauldron? This is her scent. It’s heady, mysterious, herbal, and the person wearing this is someone you’re not going to make a deal with that you can’t cash. I’ll link it. The ascetics of this brand work for me and I want to try a lot more of their fragrances.

It isn’t a Springtime fragrance but those aren’t always for me. I like heavy fragrances. But there are acceptations. I love water notes and those work well in the Summer. I’ve been wearing a lot of Tocca’s Stella which is more of a summer scent because of the fruit and water note. It’s light, breezy, and juicy. A lot of the Tocca scents disappear on my skin, but not this one.

A fun writing exercise is that after I wear a fragrance for a while, I try to write what I smell on my skin and what imagery the scent invokes. That’s where I got witchy cottage from when wearing Purple Mantra.

Ha! I hope you’ve enjoyed the list of things I’ve been enjoying. I wouldn’t mind knowing what you’ve enjoyed lately.

Favorite Reads of 2023

I am guilty of not having kept up with my blog. Guilty of not keeping up with a lot lately. Some days and months I have a hard time balancing motherhood, writing, and just being myself. One thing, no matter what’s going on in my life, I read. If it’s 4am and I cannot sleep, I am reading. I am a reader of in-between spaces, waiting, and procrastination. That being said, I don’t get large chances to read everything. A large portion of what I read didn’t come out in 2023.

These lists are not in any order and I have provided one sentence thoughts on each that might or might not entice you to read them. I have not linked physical books. If a short story is available online it has been linked.

Novels/Novellas:

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison Has been on my shelf since 2016 and shame on me for taking so long to read it. I now have the other books in this world.

Semiosis by Sue Burke Another long shelf sitter and shame on me.

Nocturne by Alyssa Wees I love dark, gothic romantic tales.

Girl at War by Sara Nović Made me cry in a grocery store.

The Stolen Heir by Holly Black Yes. I am here for a good time.

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher And people say cozy horror isn’t a thing.

Out of Body by Jeffrey Ford We did a lot of cleaning house together.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky Thank you for the recommendation. Fear the spider.

The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland Vampires will always live rent free in this heart

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie Reads like a wonderful movie. We’re all in.

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery I read and write spec fiction and this might be my strangest read of 2023.

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer Blown away by dialog. Seriously.

You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce Beautiful horror, just pay no attention to the body parts hanging in the trees.

Short Stories/Flash:

Natalya by Puloma Ghosh Cut into some lovely horror

Power is Love in the Devil’s Eyes by Dafydd McKimm I like fish.

Evidence by Grace Shuyi I relatable on a level that popped my socks off.

The Air Will Catch Us by Rajiv Moté For the atmosphere.

Ghosts Can Be Boyfriends Too by Daniel Zomparelli Confidence!

Thank Mother for Your Life by Mary G Thompson Lives in my head and comes to remind me of it in quiet moments.

The Changing Dust by James Bennett We love a historic setting that gives us mystery.

Moth Girl by Anna Madden Read with my first cup of coffee in the morning and was ready to write the things.

Picture Books 3: Trees and Pups

Welcome to the third installment of what I’ve gotten at the library for my toddler. At the time of writing, one of these books I’ve read enough times I feel as if I have it memorized. As always, my toddler picks a book and I pick a book, and then we see whose pick works. This series isn’t a review but rather ad adventure into children’s literature where I take you with me.

 My pick was, We Planted a Tree by Diane Muldrow and Illustrated by Bob Staake. The illustrations caught my eye off the bat. I LOVE the art style. It brings me peace in each page. Unfortunately, the toddler was not as amused. In fact, he demanded we closed it halfway through a dozen times. We have very different tastes. I thought it would be a win because of the short sentences and there is a lot to discuss on each page.

 My toddler’s pick was PAW Patrol: The Movie: Big City Adventures by Nicole Johnson and Illustrated by Wedoo Studio. The toddler has decided in the last couple months that PAW Patrol is just as good as strawberries. We haven’t watched the movie this is based after but I have read the book at least once a day. He loves naming the characters on each page and telling me some of what he hears them say.

Picture Books 2: Squares and Socks

Hello friends, and those with a healthy dose of curiosity! I bring to your attention Squares and Little Sock Makes a Friend. As with the last library picks, my kiddo (he’s two) picks a book and I pick a book for us to read. These two books worked for us and we got a lot of milage out of them!

 Squares by Pamela Hall and illustrated by Sharon Holm is about squares! It’s what I would call an early math or science book. A cat and dog play and eat together, all involving square shaped items. This worked so well because we pointed out together all the square shaped objects. I tried to get him to find square shaped things around us, but after reading his attention was exhausted. That’s not to say I didn’t try again later, and yep, he knows what squares are and how many sides they have. I call this a win for both of us. This was his pick and worked out well for us.

 Little Sock Makes a Friend by Kia Heise and Illustrated by Christopher D. Park is about a sock making a friend. My kiddo asked me to read this about a dozen times. The art work is bright, colorful, and a lot of fun. As an adult, I love that the sock sneaks into a tube in the dryer to find another land full of socks. Everyone, with kids and without, relates to a missing sock. My missing ones sit on dressers waiting for their lost friend to come back. Anyway, our sock finds a friend in Sock City. For the two weeks with these books, I was asked to read this one on repeat. I will end up buying it. Additionally, there is another book that features Little Sock.

Picture Books- A Donkey and Homes

One of my favorite things about having a kid, other than the kiddo, has been picture books. He is on a journey of first-time discovery and I’m on a journey of rediscovery. The art is amazing. The prose is at times poetry. They hold emotional gut punches that sometimes bring me to tears. Today is a library day, meaning it is time to release some of the ones we picked up and pick more. We both pick one book, sometimes more than one each if we can’t decide. Being that he is two, he is more likely to pick a book with an animal or automobile on the cover. I like heavier prose and the art style.

Before we make our selection, we do not know what is inside the books. It is usually based on our moods and how much time we have.

Last week his pick was The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith and Illustrated by Katz Cowley. This was picked because it has a donkey on the cover, and my mother has a retired donkey he gets to pet and feed. I’ll find a picture and add it below. I appreciated the rhythm of the book. If you’ve had kids after a certain point, you’ve read this one. I have one big, BUT that I’m sure a hundred other people have complained about: The language in the text is problematic.

My pick was Home is Where the Birds Sing by Cynthia Rylant and Illustrated by Katie Harnett. It caught my eye for three reasons, the art, the title, and how many words were on each page. If the paragraphs are too long my child’s attention will disappear. (There is a joke here when it comes to writing short fiction.) This was a huge win because there are a ton of objects to point out. While the book focuses on different types of diverse homes, we discovered cats, cars, windows, and a bunch of words. It is a book that can easily be explored.

I intend to post more of these. They’re not meant to be reviews but explorations.  

Horror and Monsters: 2023

Welcome to 2023. The new releases (books) are on fire this year in the best possible way. Unfortunately, the world is also on fire, so we have that going for us. Have you checked out your library lately? Holy shitballs, (Is that one word or two? I’m making it one because I can.) my library new release section used to be all Thriller and Mysteries with a sprinkle of Historic Fiction, now we’ve moved into Horror. They’re sparse on the Science Fiction. As a side note, I was told that SF & F is niche when I inquired about why it—unless you skip over to the Young Adult New Releases.

 I’m complaining now and you’re not here for that. I’ll get to it.

 So, every time I go, they have a New Release book I’ve heard of or is an author I recognize. Horror often slips over into the speculative and if you’ve read some of my published short stories, you know I like a good creeptastic story. So, I don’t have a choice. I check it out. I mean, it’s right there. What else am I supposed to do?

 How often do I go? Once every other week, or more. Depends. I have a toddler and we load up on picture books. By the way, have you read out of the kid section lately!? The art, the poetry, it’s so simple, so…. I should do some blogs about these books and our experiences. We buy the ones he likes.

 Anyway. I try to read new releases, but the truth is that I’m so far behind. There is so much to read, and I have so much I’ve purchased last month, two months, and three years ago. My reading back log is a thing of beauty. I think I’m starting to hit books that were released in 2013 but occasionally find 2011 and 2012 hold outs. I’m told I read fast but I’m not sure that’s true.

 Perhaps my eyes are bigger than my brain.

 I just finished A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher. This book said hold my beer. I didn’t know horror could be cozy, or is it because I tend to find campy things cozy? And while I’m sitting at 4am reading when I should be writing a story about a weird west monster hunter (Why? Because I haven’t worked on a story like that before.) I think to myself, why am I engrossed in horror right now?

 In 2020 I developed insomnia. It happens a couple days out of the week. I rise like a zombie horror at 2-3am and there is no going back to sleep. I am filled with anxious energy that I tell myself I’m going to put onto paper and be done with, but instead bury myself in someone else’s made up horror.

 These are the reasons I’ve come up with, and pre-warning this will mention some of the very scary shit happening around the states. I have a toddler and soon he should be in school and before that I have to have a talk about active shooters and drills and being super quiet. Maybe it is because in 2020 I was pregnant and watching body bags on the news. Maybe it’s because I won’t have another child while I live in Georgia and if something goes wrong, I’m kind of fucked, not as fucked as other places. We probably couldn’t afford it anyway. And how can I sit and write when rights are being taken? Holy shit, I didn’t even get into housing and environmental crisis.

 And then I think: I sound like this old lady I used to work with who would come in and tell me some awful story from the news. Or how I hear people say, “There is a lot more violence now.” And I think, That’s NOT fucking true, it wasn’t as documented. 

 Anyway. Anyway. Anyway.

 So yeah, Monsters. They’re wonderful. I mean awful, but in a wonderful way. The protagonists are scared but have agency. They might get to DO something about it. They might escape and the world might be better off. Oh sure, the monsters might still lurk in the shadows, nothing ever goes away. Even a haunting leaves bruises but there is life at the end.

Trip!

I will be at World Fantasy this year. I haven’t been to an in-person con since 2019. I’m over the moon with excitement!

The Kid and Nostalgia

Today is the day of my kid’s 2nd birthday party. Here, a party is expected. To not do it might be close to abuse. I was telling a friend of mine, whose child is around the same age, that it’s exhausting to be the party logistics person— just complaining/venting to a friend type of thing. She asked a couple questions and we started to realize that maybe there was a cultural shift between us. To her, planning a party for someone so young is extreme.

“Well, it’d be just a shame not to have a party,” is what would be used in my direction. People always think we use “Bless your heart,” for everything, but really we use the word “shame.” We say it in a special tone made so sweet it’ll sting your teeth. It’ll be wielded against me like an angel’s fiery fucking sword.

Luckily for those who might be like that: I LOVE parties. I don’t care if they’re for occasions, kids, adults, even pets—any group setting of friends and family getting together to laugh, play games, or just joy in being around each other is special. I didn’t realize how much I took it for granted until Covid. (Not to worry. I know the Rona beast isn’t over, no matter what anyone fucking says.)

I plan a party for ease and fun. I do not go all out. This isn’t a structured thing. This is a handful of friends and family who will gather outside to eat pizza and cake. I have decorations, bright Cars theme, like the movies and show. It’s that theme because my child LOVES it. I have made attempts to get him into a dozen other shows and movies, but nothing beats Cars.

When I was a kid, maybe turning 6 or 7, my mom asked me what I wanted for the theme. She probably thought I’d pick The Little Mermaid or Lion King (Maybe it wasn’t out yet.) But I picked Rock’N’Roll, or rather, a rock star. At three, and still at ages six and seven, I was sure that I would front a band. I made up songs on the fly everyday. I didn’t own the first musical instrument other than my voice. My parents promised vocal lessons if I got A’s in school, but they knew, even before I did, that my learning disability and an allergen to authority meant I was going to have a hard time in school.

My mom cranked out black guitars and edged everything in neon pink for the party. Records danced in confetti. My party might have been a handful of kids on small plastic tables in a garage—eating pizza and cake. But I remember it as fucking awesome.

My kid won’t remember today. He will only have pictures and video. This is about the trappings, the nostalgia of our youth that has me getting the right number of plates with cartoon faces and my husband going out of his way to get the goodie bags when I refused.

For now this’ll be a get together, a small party to laughand enjoy company as safely as possible.

Sometimes I find it hard to get past the fucking trappings.

Beth Writes Stuff

Looking back on 2019 I was delighted to have two stories come out. The first in January in Apex Magazine -Issue 116, The Pulse of Memory. It was the first story of mine ever podcasted! The second was a flash story of an apocalyptic nature in If This Goes On titled, Tasting Bleach and Decay in the City of Dust. Now I just need to figure out how to make this website.