March Already? a few short thoughts after a short month
My federal government is a trash fire, my friends, colleagues, family, and myself are at risk of injury, incarceration, and deadly illness thanks to said trash fire, and I’m writing stories about an angsty dying young adult, her cranky feral cats and their adopted old auntie.
That’s where I’m at, here at the end of the longest February in history.
I described myself as fifteen opinions in a trench coat recently, and the more I think about it, the more accurate it feels.
A thing I keep forgetting to mention: When I got my new phone and ‘ported over all my old data, I sorta-accidentally/semi-intentionally nuked my Contacts list. It had cloned itself multiple times over the years, was full of multiple obsolete entries, and was generally annoying the hell out of me.
So I nuked it. Which was immensely satisfying, and I do not regret it a bit.
But yeah, I should’ve made an archive copy first. I thought of that a few seconds too late.
Anyway, if I’ve seemed even more reclusive than usual, it might be because I no longer have your phone number.
So if you have my phone number IRL, please-please send me a little text with your vcard or a note identifying yourself so I can rebuild my Contacts app.
This has to be my fourth or fifth rewatch of Farscape. So that means this is the fourth or fifth time I’m remembering afresh how utterly, delightfully unhinged this show really was.
The first half of the first season is incredibly muppet-intensive, and the rest of the series remains richly populated by puppets & actors in heavy prosthetics. The plotting goes fast, has no patience for narrative norms, and gets seriously trippy. The acting…well. The core cast shakes down around the mid point of season one, getting less stilted in their line delivery and developing on-screen rapport…or they don’t, depending on whose reviews you believe. I think there’s a visible development and improvement right around the Homage to the “Kirk Gets Marooned with the Space Native Americans” episode of Start Trek: TOS. (Which has its own problematic elements, but it dodges a lot and subverts others to excellent effect.)
I always forget the emphasis on torture & trauma, too. Could have done with less of that. But I digress. (that’s how you know I’m really me.)
Okay, one tiny whiny mope, personal edition. Every so often, online posts kick me right down to the sticky bottom of the “I guess I’m not <insert identity here> enough after all” self-judgment pit trap.
It annoys me how easily that happens. It usually happens when someone goes off about writers doing a bad job portraying characters with traits I share, but which I don’t display the same way or as overtly as others. (Like, I have a whole list of neurodivergent traits, but I compensate & mask well. I’m demi-bi but happily monogamously bonded with a cis-het man. I’m exceedingly gender-non-conforming, but not trans….the list goes on)
So I end up wondering if I should even bother attemping to write characters who are queer, or neurodivergent. That’s pretty niche as insecurities go, and I generally ignore it, but it’s still a squirmy, unhappy, painful thing to have to work through, over and over again.
IN MORE CHEERFUL NEWS, I have embarked on A big Writing-Adjacent Project: compiling all the Rollover wordlbuilding material into one big semi-organized series document. I have a lot of individual documents and notes, but it’s long past time I made a record of all the information outside the narrative itself.
Otherwise, with two books complete, two more finished stories and three more in various stages of development, I’m ether going to screw up continuity or spend ridiculous amounts of time hunting down details to make sure I don’t contradict my own continuity.
There’ll be a master list of all named characters with descriptions & which story/stories they appear in, a master timeline of all mentioned world events, a timeline for in-story events,, lists of fictional locations and organizations, and so on.
Which of course has turned into a much more complicated wild research rabbit warren than I originally intended, since doing the events timeline means deep-diving world history from WW2 onward & thinking about all the ways powered populations would affect matters.
It’s all work I’ve done before, but I was always concentrating on events and issues that would directly affect the characters in a given story, rather than trying to pin down the whole of it all.
I am enjoying it, though. Changing history is big fun.
Okay, that’s more than enough. I’ll probably grump about politics next time. Or talk about my house projects. For now…cat pic!
Pippin is grumpy about the state of the world. Me, too, buddy. Me, too.
Until later!
What’s on your bookshelf?
This is the part where I talk about my books.
Relics From A Traveling Show
The newest of the new! A collection of all my short fictions in one handy volume, available now from your favorite booksite or local shop.
Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.
Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:
Title: Relics From A Traveling Show
Author: K. M. Herkes
ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)
Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.
If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.
I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.
All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.
Support your favorite independent bookseller! Find a local shop via Indiebound
Be a potato.
" Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground."
Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)