Category: Blog

Taking inspiration from other works is literally not plagiarism, and while one can argue about the artistic value of AI art, I have yet to see a single case of an artist being able to point at a specific work that is actually plagiarism.

You can’t and shouldn’t be able to own a style. People copy each others’ styles all the time. Continue reading “Stable Diffusion is a Hammer”

The publisher I was hoping to land my sci-fi horror novel with says they’re not publishing things that dark. Given that I’ve had my attempts at writing horror be called “cute” before, this is new for me. It’s also pretty heartbreaking.

I’m trying to take comfort from the fact that this now means I’m probably 20k closer to finishing the sequel, as I no longer need to try to meet that publisher’s word count requirements. I’m much more comfortable working in the 30k – 75k range than trying to get up above 80k. Continue reading “Horror Too Dark”

It’s mediocre Christmas movie season!

Starting off with “A Christmas Movie Christmas,” and it’s better than average! (If you haven’t watched a bunch of these things, you may not know where “average” falls.) Continue reading “A Christmas Movie Christmas & The March Sisters at Christmas”

Daniel and I were discussing maybe taking the kids on a trip to Hawaii, and the 9-year-old announced: “Why would you take me there? They don’t have internet!”

The kid course corrected pretty quickly, admitting they probably have internet, in response to our baffled expressions. Continue reading “Tidbits of Fiction, Reality, and the Space In-Between”

I found this in an email I sent to myself at 4am last night. Seems like a solid reason for having been awake at 4am.

King Anduin wasn’t standing in the right spot for my shaman, so I just spent like half an hour opening up Kul Tiras for almost no reason. #Warcraft

I’ve spent a great deal of the last week entirely focused on helping my 15-year-old focus on all the schoolwork they need to get done as the term wraps up… and I’m pretty burnt out.

So, now, it’s time to spend an evening with my mom watching space vampires in Stargate Atlantis. Continue reading “Tidbits of Stargate, Parenting, and Writing”

My local writing group has strict rules about how we critique the story, not the author.

Nonetheless, when I put “Anger is a Porcupine, Sadness is a Fish” through, the then-leader decided it was about her & I was subjected to several senior-most members—people I thought of as friends—picking apart every aspect of my feelings & intentions. It was humiliating, heartbreaking, and my trust in the group never really recovered.

Honestly, I’m still kind of broken up and angry about how I was treated over it to this day.

My sleeping brain, apparently, can’t tell Topher Grace and Noah from the Scream series apart, so it tried to do a Home Economics dream last night… got as far as Topher Grace, thought, “oh, he always hangs out with Audrey,” added her character in, continued trying to write a sitcom dream, but kept adding in characters from Scream until the killer showed up, at which point my brain was like, “this one is clearly a secret murderer!” and the whole dream snowballed into a Scream-style murder mystery.

I looked for a book about a kitten who would come running “hurry, scurry, worry” that I remembered from my childhood for yeeeeeears before a kind commenter on Twitter, responding to a post from seven months ago, helped me find it. ❤️

I’m so happy to be able to read this book again!!!