I am in my new house! My stuff (all in boxes) is unloaded! And I see a whole bunch of you lovely people have given me reviewws lately!
I will respond to each and every one as soon as I can find my coffee pot. I unpacked kitchen boxes for seven hours yesterday and have not yet found the coffee pot...
TEXAS! I have arrived! My house becomes formally mine tomorrow, my stuff arrives Wednesday, then watch out world, Raven will have access to her wits again.
I am quietly cleaning my old house room by room as the movers empty them, and so I am listening to the movers chat with each other about other people they have moved, and discovering interesting things about "one of the bigwigs" of a beverage company.
Moving is, and always has been, a bittersweet experience for me. It's usually difficult to say 'fair well' to the familiar and 'welcome' to the unknown, regardless of how bright and promising the new life appears from the cusp.
Remember, a rolling writer gathers all story ideas. Best wishes as you continue your journey.
We were supposed to camp out in our barren house one more night, but the Husband looked at me this morning and said "I'm getting you a hotel, where we won't run out of soap." And I think I am just tired enough to let him.
But last night was just about the last of the goodbyes--my D&D teens that I have been DMing for threw me a goodbye party at the local game shop, and a bunch of gangly, hairy-legged youths baked me cookies and made me a present and I cried. Today all I have to do is perch awkwardly while strangers put my worldly possessions in a semi trailer.
I read someone the other day thinking about whether they would make a "good" protagonist in a story, and they came to the conclusion that they wouldn't because they hated to initiate change, and, in their words, had to be "dragged kicking and screaming toward anything like a plot".
That made me think about whether I'd be an interesting protagonist--I suspect no, because I am afflicted with extreme practicality. A mysterious and dashing man shows up with a handful of magic beans and asks would I like to go on an adventure? Um, no thanks, Bean Man, I have a dentist appointment later. Good luck to you though! A time traveler stumbles, gasping, into my kitchen and tells me I am the key to saving the future? Sure pal, park it over there, we're calling 911, you probably hit your head. Any superhero except Superman asks me for help of any kind? Buddy, you're the one with superpowers, how about you act like a grownup and just tell your friends the truth about yourself? That would solve so many superhero problems!
I have to disagree. Yes, you'd be harder to railroad. Yes, being anxious you'd avoid the obvious traps. And admittedly never has there been a protagonist like Hamlet, who refuses to just do the stupid thing. One who sees the writing on the wall and stops himself.
YOU GUYS! Go read Phantom's post and also his novel.
This is like reading Ludlum if Ludlum had a sense of humor, or like the big splashy action movies of the 90s. It feels like summer, pure entertainment. And the pair of detectives that are hunting the bad guy are just delightful. It's super easy to read it on your phone while you're cooking dinner, too. (Ahem.)
Source: I've read this whole book--couldn't put it down--even though life rudely intervened with my reviewing. (I haven't forgotten, Phantom Reviewer , and I'm going to be back as soon as my life is not spread between two states.)
Allan Charles 🐾 - I *almost* put it as a comment on your post, and then I was like, no, no, I'm going to leave this all nice for the people who are actually writing good dark haiku. I will take my middle-school-boy sense of humor to my own post...
NOT WANT CUP LEAVE RING
HULK GET OUT NEW CROCHET KIT
MAKE PRETTY DOILY
(THIS ALTERNATE UNIVERSE HULK. WHEN HULK GET MAD, HULK MEDITATE, COUNT TO 10,5,3 MANY, GET IN TOUCH FEMININE SIDE, MAKE WORLD BETTER PLACE. OMMMMMM...)
In other other news, I don't believe in astrology, but just heard someone say they wanted to have a Taurus friend to keep track of their grudges for them in case their memory gets bad, and I DO happen to be a Taurus and I DO have a running list (for me and also others) that my husband calls my Great Book of Grudges.
Listen, somebody has to keep up the long war of attrition against LL Bean's return policy!
I'm sitting in the mechanic's waiting area, waiting for them to finish making my car seaworthy spiffed-up for our long drive to our new town (1,800 miles--this is longer than Frodo's trip to Mordor). And although my mechanic is great and tries to make his waiting area pleasant, it is still a mechanic waiting room.
In other news, I just sent the novel I finished writing in December to my agent, so cross your fingers for me that she likes it?
Finally, here's Ty's story-- this one is the oldest of the bunch, written a very long time ago and fiddled with in the meantime. I think this version is about as old as my oldest kid, which means...ugh, old enough to vote next year.
Another old story (at least a decade, I think more) this one is about Simon, a character I always wished I could figure out how to write more about. (I almost didn't post this one, because it could be read as bearing on current events, but I promise that this is the unchanged text of a very, very old piece. You ought to be able to tell by the clunky prose.)
STATIC
Patron Saint (13+) Simon asks the Weeping Saint for a miracle. Does he get one? #2338200 by Raven
I think this is a story about grief, and conscience.
Tonight I've been unearthing more old stories. This one is the story where I first met Corcoran Gray. He eventually became a much more rounded character and starred in my two published novels--but here he is in his very earliest form:
Even in this story, about 13 years old now, you can get the essence of Gray's character; he gets very attached to his friends, he's a good person but doesn't like to admit that he is, and he's always trying to be the kind of man his grandfather would approve of.
So I am very bad at noticing when I'm feeling stressed. (I know, bear with me, it's really stupid.) For various childhood type reasons, my default setting is to pretty much not notice my mortal frame, this meat mecha I am piloting--until it's *shrieking* at me. It's been a process, the last few years of my adulthood, learning to actually pay attention so I can, for example, take a tyelenol *before* I am knocked completely down with a headache. But! I have found a pretty flawless metric for "is Raven stressed?" and that's "can Raven write when she sits down to try??"
This is different than "I sit down but don't want to write" or "I sit down but don't *know* what to write". This is "I sit down and want to write and know what I should write but brain goes splat and says no". (Note: this is also not burnout. I did that too, in 2022-23, this is a different thing.) The way you can tell when stress is inhibiting the muse is that when the stress relieves--say, when the financing is finalized for your new house and it's way better than you thought it would be--all of a sudden the story ROARS back and you're writing as fast as you can type.
I guess I am telling you this in case you're feeling bad because you can't write while, IDK, a family member is sick or you're waiting on results or (God forbid) you've been looking at the stock market. It's ok. It's just that your brain won't spare extra energy for creativity while it's (it thinks) protecting you from all the man-eating tigers that are waiting in the woods. You can sit with me until your stress abates. We'll hold hands and eat Klondike bars, it'll be fine.
Phantom Reviewer - Luckily this time it was only a couple of weeks, while I was so distracted I couldn't even dink around with chapters. Tonight, with some big question marks about our move answered, I'm happily moving sentences around and restructuring the thing. The stories are always *there*, just sometimes my brain is on too much Tiger Patrol to let me get at them. (Silly brain.)
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- Faithful on large matters, will be faithful in small.
- I am *positive* they will chat about us at the next place. They're very nice guys! I'm just naturally nosy...
Nuff said!
, and I'm going to be back as soon as my life is not spread between two states.) 
- I *almost* put it as a comment on your post, and then I was like, no, no, I'm going to leave this all nice for the people who are actually writing good dark haiku. I will take my middle-school-boy sense of humor to my own post...
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