Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

The year's coming to a close now. Technically we've got like, a week left, and I know last year I did wait until January to post this, but what the hell, we'll run through it now, let's be real, what else am I going to accomplish in a week? So, writing-wise: dear god so many first drafts. Motherfucker. I did so many first drafts that NaNoWriMo was pretty much ruined, as everyone will see when I eventually post my NaNoWriMo vlogs, which I finally have all edited , but they're not posted yet because my uploading schedule is called what is called time-sensitive, I don't actually give that much of a fuck . Finished WM3 project to the best of my ability. One of my critique partners has it currently. Finished the very last first draft of the first book of my pet project!  Got a bunch of shit in small lit magazines! There's a page up there with all of the links, go read them. Am currently working on a heavy revision of Metallica project, which I think I st...

I've mentioned this before, on a lot of platforms--I work at a pizza place. I make 11$/hr, I am not using my degree for what pays my bills, because yes, I do have a degree, and yeah, it's in English, I know, I know, I know.  And so the reason I don't mind this. Two reasons, maybe three--the really easy one is that it does pay my bills. Like I've mentioned before, I live in a part of the country that is very cheap to live in. It costs me 700$ to live a month, roughly. That's two paychecks. Chuck another paycheck toward student loans and I've still got one to play with or save or whatever the hell I want to do with it. Reason two is that I know I'm not going to stagnate here, because I've already told myself I'm not going to be in this city forever. I'm gonna be either out of here by May 2021 or if I'm not, I'm gonna be looking at getting out then. I've told this to myself and so I'm going to do it. If I tell myself I'm go...

I was born in 1997, so our oldest home videos were on VHS. I'm not sure how many we had total, but there's still one that I have in my possession. It's from 2001, and it's just a VHS tape with 'MO VACATION' scribbled on the front in red Sharpie and my dad's awful handwriting. The other night, I had some Christmas presents to wrap and the night off, so I popped it in. And beyond how weird it was to hear that my dad's voice has really really really fucking changed in the last 19 years (he was 27 in 2001), and how fun it is that even as a three-almost-four year old I was already wearing baseball hats only backward, and how my little brother, who already goes by a nickname, had a second nickname, which was 'Fatty', because in every clip he's eating. Honestly, there's a clip where my dad is trying to explain racism to me, a three year old who doesn't really care all that much, and in the background: Hobie, sitting on the ground eating ...

Hot Topic is maybe the only store that sends me e-mails that I actually pay attention to. And I know, I know: Aurora, is it 2011, are you listening to a steady musical diet of MCR and All Time Low, do you have a long neon fringe. Despite the fact that Hot Topic has 100% rebranded itself as a general pop culture store, those of us who were pre-teens/teens in the earlier part of the decade or sooner: Yeah, that's the emo store. But the thing is, the emo store has some really fucking good discounts, and yes, if I can get a giant Misfits hoodie half-off, I just might buy that giant Misfits hoodie. They have that super-good t-shirt sale a couple times a year. You can pile up your 5$ rewards and use them all at once, if you want, and if you get the base price under it, you don't have to pay tax or shipping! You don't! I don't know if this is a glitch or if they're just cool, but you get your total pre-tax, pre-shipping down to zero? It will stay zero. It's fucki...

I've been in a big West Memphis Three mood again recently. If you missed my giant spiral into that case, lucky you, it's what turned me into what I am today, with all the Metallica and everything. But recently I've been listening to a lot more Metallica again (also the fact that I actually learned the intro riff/main verse riff to Sanitarium probably didn't help either), been thinking about rewatching the first Paradise Lost doc again, et cetera. It's kinda nice to get back into true crime. Beyond that, right now I'm reading The Stranger Beside Me , AKA the Ted Bundy book, and it's super fucking interesting. This isn't the first Ann Rule book I've read, but her other book didn't impress me quite so much--this one is actually super interesting, because you can really see where she struggles to relate Ted Bundy with the guy she worked at a crisis hotline with. If you're unfamiliar, Ann Rule knew Ted Bundy, worked with him, liked him, and ...

The other day, I finished the last draft I'm ever fucking doing of the very first full-length novel I ever wrote. I wrote the first draft of this thing in 2011, I was fourteen years old, I wrote and rewrote and revised and eventually, this year, I was like: okay, I'm rewriting it one more time, running through it, and then I'm done. Granted, this is the first book in a series and I'm not sure I'll be able to keep my grubby little hands off of the rest of the series, but like--this first one, that's it. I'm considering self-pubbing, because this is not one that I'm thinking is good for like, traditional publishing, it's super self-indulgent, but I'd like people to read it, because I'd like to--share, you know? But I'm done rewriting it. What's written there is set in stone. Which is fun, because this is a project that has changed... a lot. We've added characters that are actually extremely important but didn't show up until...

I think I've mentioned this before, but my emo phase when I was in middle school was really not an emo phase. I was mostly into pop-punk; last August/September when I had a real emo phase at the ripe old age of 21, I realized, oh, wait, no, I was actually just listening to pop-punk, like, the closest I got to emo was All Time Low, and they're pretty definitively pop-punk, just not as pop-punky as Sum-41 who were honestly probably my favorite. But like, I'm back on the Pierce the Veil train, so that's fun. In my weird little thing I had last year before I got into the West Memphis 3 and then Metallica and then my entire personality now, Pierce the Veil hit me like a freight train and I was fucking obsessed for a good month and a half. Part of this is because Vic Fuentes has like the definitive emo voice, it's fucking fantastic, part of this is "Bulls in the Bronx", part of this is yeah I do have lyrics from "Caraphernelia" written on my black co...

this post is about my car I used to complain about my car a lot. I used to have this '99 Ford Explorer that had really seen better days ; the laundry list of complaints would include: doors would not exactly open in the back; well, the one without a door handle opened from the inside, crack on the windshield, shook when it idled, was having a Lot of Trouble Making It Up Hills by The End, would really fight me about going highway speeds. So I got a new car before winter started. She's a '91 Mercury Grand Marquis, which, if you are familiar with cars at all, means I went from a four wheel drive SUV to this  . And let me say--she goes better on the highway. Like, in the summer. She's a great highway car. Gets up there, doesn't complain, doesn't start shaking when I go over 60MPH. Gets better gas mileage too! I live on a hill. It's winter. We stormed out on Saturday. My work closed at eight, I got a call at five (was scheduled for 530) that was like, ...

I don't do monthly TBRs or anything, but due to the nature of how fucking big the book wall is, I do tend to pull ten or so books at a time--so here's what I'm gonna be reading next. Tigerheart's Shadow by Erin Hunter This is part of my warrior cat re-read, moving on. Gemini Smile, Gemini Kill by Robert Lory I read The Revenge of Taurus not too long ago. Fucking loved with. Primo stupid cheesy eighties horror--hoping for the same from this one. Forever pissed off that this series only has four books instead of twelve, because if it's zodiac-themed, Robert, write all twelve.  The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule No, I have not read this massively popular true crime book. What can I say, Bundy's never been one of my favorites--but it's also one of the most iconic true crime novels of all time, so I figure I might as well pick it up sooner rather than later. Fun fact, this edition is so old that it refers to Bundy in present tense, even on the back cov...

I am starting to realize just how much of an advantage my lack of a social life is ( was? ) when it comes to getting shit done creatively. Long story short, I'm seeing someone now, and I am suddenly finding that I don't have a million hours a day to do whatever I want whenever I'm at work? I mean, I still do, but people take up an awfully big amount of time, and I don't exactly want to be ignoring this loser to write. I mean, it's still pretty new, so, like, honeymoon phase, or whatever, and probably once we get used to it I'll be more willing to tell him to fuck off so I can work on stuff, but it's just--I don't think I've ever had 'great time management skills' like I used to say, I just never had any social obligations. Or any social... anything. I mean, I had friends and stuff, but I'm really fucking lazy about making plans and I'm honestly fine with like, not doing so--I like having time to do this shit. So, most of the time , ...

If for some reason you haven't heard, like I guess if you haven't seen any of my social media posts at all, I went to fucking Slayer Sunday night. They were in Fargo, the weather was good, so I went. It's not that far of a drive, and I did wait a while before picking up my ticket, because I wanted to make sure the weather was good, and Phil Anselmo and Ministry and Primus all opened then holy fuck I was like. so close to fucking. tom araya??? and gary holt??? and kerry king??? and their drummer whose name i still don't know??? it's not dave lombardo anymore. It's still kind of wild to me, like I can't actually believe that I was so fucking close to these fucking thrash gods. It is insane. I almost died, probably. I was second row right behind the barricade. I've never seen so many battle vests in one place at one time before in my life. I've retired mine for the season and, honestly, I probably wouldn't take it to Slayer anyway, because it is...

reading: tiny pretty things by sona charaipotra&dhonielle clayton: a lot better than i thought it was going to be. or at least, i'm enjoying it more than i thought i would. lots of "what the fuckery" going on here, which is pretty chill. river of fire by erin hunter: yes we're still on those warrior cat re-reads. watching:  i've been watching a lot of movies recently. most recent was i finally watched the crow which is just. the gothest thing i've ever seen so that's fun. dug all the one-liners and everything. it is kind of a shame that movie is overshadowed by tragedy because it sure is a fun one. listening:  the soundtrack to this year's nano is a lot of pink floyd, so ive been listening to a lot of pink floyd. mostly "wish you were here" and "the division bell" but sometimes i go to "the wall" bc it's the fucking "wall." i have "dark side of the moon" coming in a tape lot so that...

So I've hit a new high point on my book wall. I'm not going to say what it is, because it'll be shrunk by the first of December, when I will air my shameful amount of unread books that I own on Twitter, but it's definitely still going to be over 912, which was the previous high point. The reason is because I did a book haul, and so those books got added to the wall, and that's when I add them to the spreadsheet, and-- Yeah, I don't really think that the book wall is ever going to be completely depleted? I've been thinking about going on another book buying restriction. I think this only happens immediately after I add things to the book wall, because then I'm messing with those for literally like, two and a half hours and I'm a little worried that it's going to fall like, all the time, so-- I'm not sure! I might! Who fucking knows! Maybe I'll grab a notebook and like, I dunno-- But I don't really want to, and I'm actually ...

[NOTE: this is a legitimate journal entry that I wrote in 2011. Any names have been redacted, and sometimes I comment on 'what the fuck Aurora' in brackets/bold. In 2011 I was fourteen years old.] November 7, 2011 I do believe I'm an Athiest. [You are, but I don't know why you capitalized it.] Just thought I'd throw that out there.  Why do I believe that? Well, yesterday in church, I was thinking about my NaNoWriMo. And how controversial it is. You know the fact that it's about Hell [this is now what I call my 'pet project--fun fact, 2011 was my very first NaNo, and my very first completed draft, ever] , and that the devil is a FAIRLY decent guy... and the fact that one of the main characters is bisexual [update: the main character I'm talking about here is the straightest kid alive, but in a twist, the one I had designed to be the prototypical 'Straight White Boy' is now uh, very much not so it's fun how characters evolve.] I was like...

To put it simply, this has been the most difficult, teeth-pulling NaNo of my life thus far. I don't know what it is about this year. It started out pretty much the same as any other year, except for the fact that I'm not at school this year, and yes, I am a couple days ahead, but I just--the project is a dud, I think, which is a shame, because it was one that I've been considering a while. I am 11k in and already I've considered dropping and doing something else, or simply murdering the main character. I'm going to finish it. And maybe it's just not the right time for this project. Maybe I'll come back to it in a couple of years and be like, oh, yeah, all right, we can work with this. I'm noticing a new trend in my works where I've just gotten really into naming male side characters Izzy, which definitely has nothing to do with Guns'n'Roses.  It takes place in the pre-smartphone days, because smartphones just make everything easier. There...

I mean, I work tonight, but I'm planning on watching Amityville II: Possession tonight, so, like, Halloween, motherfuckers.  I did wear my costume somewhere. I had DnD on Sunday, and I just. Decided to show up looking like Nikki Sixx. See at the bottom of this post, the photos that my very professional twelve year old sister directed and took. She also did the hair. And yes, that wrecked-looking place is my parent's old kitchen, because my dad is currently tearing it apart . But yeah--Halloween. Like I said, I work tonight, and I am pretty antisocial outside of work; I love being around people, I fucking hate committing time to people. Like, every so often, it's nice to hang. You know, I've got DnD every couple of weeks, and that's a solid four hours of hanging, you know. But mostly I'm like, you know, I like to use my time off to get shit done, you know, writing and everything. I've got too many irons in the fire to spend time with people outside of wor...

I started re-reading Homestuck. I've read it about two or three times. I used to be big into Homestuck. I was Gamzee for Halloween one year in high school. There's a picture floating around the internet somewhere; anyway, because of the face paint, literally nobody at my school knew who the fuck it was under there so that was kind of fun. On my ITV class one of the other people asked me if I was a member of the Insane Clown Posse which was. Fair. Anyway, the story gets a lot of flack because the fans went totally fucking nutso, you know, over everything. I'm from North Dakota, so I didn't meet another Homestuck fan in real life until college, and honestly, by the time I got to college, Homestuck was already one of those things where you were like, "ha, yeah, I did... used to be into that..." but I did roleplay on that fucking site, you know, where you could roleplay, like chat as the characters, and because of who I am as a person I mostly played as Cronus...

I don't sleep. This isn't like a, 'oh i can't fall asleep' or I'm 'tired all the time.' It's just. I don't sleep. I mean, obviously I sleep, but I don't sleep all that much , like, this morning I woke up at 7:30 and that was weird , like, normally I'm up between five and seven, sometime in there, and it's not like I generally go to bed super early, either; normally I'm at work until 10:30/11, and I normally have some shit to do before I go to sleep. Like, five or six hours is my normal. Five or six hours is what I function best at, honestly; sometimes when I get more I'm more tired, and that shit's weird. It does take me a little bit to fall asleep. I've started listening to music as I fall asleep lately, and that's been helping, even though my music taste is the kind that makes Spotify.me tell me to calm down. So most of that music is fine, except "Rocket Queen" or "Nightrain" because t...

Maybe I'm out-of-touch or maybe the rest of the online world is, but so much of the shit I see online baffles me. Like, people talking about shit that they feel like they need to have--maybe it's people chasing some sort of upper-middle-class kind of life and I work at full-time a pizza place making 11$/hr (and surviving fine , thanks North Dakota), but I just--it baffles me, you know? I read this blog post/online article whatever, where the author was talking about how 'it's okay to wear the same clothes twice guys!!!' and it's like, fucking duh? I wear my Guns'n'Roses shirt every time it's fucking clean, man, I'm not going to chuck it just because I've worn it. Like where do these people come from? Why--what the fuck, you know? And like, I know that there are certain things where I am out of touch like, for certain. Pop culture. I don't know. Right, I'm stuck in the 80s/90s when it comes to pop culture. I can tell you a lot abou...

It's Thursday, and, since I switched my grocery day from Friday to Thursday and don't have the self-control to just get groceries on my way back home after the lunch portion of my shift today, I got groceries this morning. It's October, you know, early in the morning October, and the weather's telling me it's about thirty-two degrees. Not enough sun to burn the frost off of my windshield and windows, not late enough for the radio to be playing music. So I grabbed "Master of Puppets", rolled down my windows so I could see without scraping them (fight me, I did scrape the windshield), and skipped to track four. It was around this time last year that I started listening to the LPOTL episodes of the West Memphis Three. I was still in college, and I would take these long morning walks. I have very specific memories of certain points of the episodes at certain points of campus, cold, before the sun rose. Once I finished those episodes and before I got my tap...

It's October 15th. This means it's halfway to November, which is important for a couple of reasons. First up, Slayer' s coming to Fargo, so that's pretty cool. Second up, the temperature is steadily dropping, but if we're lucky we might stick around in the thirties through November, hopefully, probably. Also, thirdly, NaNoWriMo. I've been doing NaNo since 2011--that was my first year. I've won every year, because I'm not going to fucking lose, why the fuck would I do that. I've had years that are better and years that are worse--highlight, I think, being last year's 100k in 12 days, with the first 50k being done in four fucking days, Jesus Christ Aurora . I've done 130k before. I've done 51k before. So, what am I doing this year? Hell if I know. It's only October 15th and I'm a fucking pantser. I have zero clue what I'm going to write about. I have a couple of ideas bouncing around in my head, and I figure, whichever...

Welcome, and by welcome, I mean, fuck you. I no longer have any expectations for the weather. I've lived in North Dakota my entire life, for a whole goddam twenty-two years, and I no longer have any expectations for the weather. Two days ago it was nearly seventy goddam degrees out. Now we're in a winter storm warning. Listening to the guys on the radio talk, they're saying things like "and snow, and winds ranging from 20-40mph"--just say it's a fucking blizzard, man, we know.  I no longer have any expectations for the weather, but that doesn't mean I'm goddam happy about it. My car is fucking dying, I'm buying one off my brother, and while I'll be glad to have a car that can make it up hills at more than 10mph (seriously, the Boy is dying ), I'm trading a fucking SUV for a Grand Prix. My boy is a 1999 Ford Explorer, and one thing about him is that if he starts, before this whole new 'I hate hills' thing, if he started, he could...

I love it. I've obviously only been playing for like, two weeks at this point, and the initial learning curve is like, going from zero to like, point seven five is even an amazing difference, but it is so cool to be able to do shit. What I've been doing mostly is this unholy mashup of power chords and bits and pieces of intros and riffs from various different songs all one after another, like, just unrecognizable as their original things, and it goes Sanitarium Money for Nothing Cult of Personality Master of Puppets I Love Rock n Roll Symphony of Destruction TNT Paranoid Even Flow Creeping Death. Just little bits and pieces; the only bit that has more than about three seconds worth is Sanitarium. I'm having a lot of fun. Since I got a cheap-o kind of guitar/amp situation, the amp is like, already dying so I did order a new practice amp (off of eBay, my love) so that should be fun. I'm actually pretty sure it's in my pile of boxes for my next eBay unboxing but as...

Not my town, but other bits and pieces of NoDak got snow yesterday. I don't think it stuck. I don't know; there wasn't any in my neck of the woods. Neck of the giant flat wasteland. There aren't trees here. Right now it's thirty-four degrees out. Next Tuesday it's supposed to hit sixty-nine, which is what I am pretty much living for at this point. Sixty-nine and sunny . Maybe there'll be a little bit of hope left. And like, I know it's October and all, so it's not like I'm surprised. I'm just sad. I'm just starting to get that little feeling of hopelessness, you know? I half-expect to look outside and see a foot of snow on the ground. Even though my car doesn't stop starting until you get below-zero temps, I have expect the boy not to start every time I go out there. Note to self, I gotta find an extension cord for that bad boy so I can plug him in when it gets cold. Winter is coming. There is nothing we can do about it. We had ...

This morning, I was on Facebook. I was just scrolling, you know, looking at all the pictures of people I knew in college in engagement photos, 'I'm having a child' photos, things like that. Facebook memories popped up, and what Aurora of two years ago thought about October: Because man, I fucking love candy corn. Candy corn is one of my favorite kinds of candy. My number one is obviously Bottlecaps (even though the one place in town that fucking sold them hasn't restocked them and I am afraid that they no longer sell them, god damn it Dollar General ), but after that it's candy corn. Then probably those chalk-y Valentine's day sweethearts, and Mike'n'Ikes, and Hot Tamales, and cherry sours, and fucking GUSHERS-- But I love candy corn. I love candy corn with all my heart and soul, at least that that is not taken over by Bottlecaps. I remember when I was a freshman in college, my grandma gave me this fucking, like, seven pound bag of candy corn. It ...

I have news that is, perhaps, probably technically good, but is also, honestly, a little sad. That news is that I am ~ no longer technically unemployed ~, which is like, I  mean, rent, okay, it's good. But also like, now I have to like. Go to a workplace and while my extroverted nature is really really happy at not having to keep myself company all day every day (it is a struggle to go to bed after getting home from work, because I mean, I've worked close the two days I've been working which ends at like 10:30, and I'm just H Y P E D), I just. The thing is, while I've been ~ technically unemployed ~ I've been keeping myself busy. I have my to-do list, I have all my writing, and all that other shit I do. Guitar, videos, French, three and a half hours' worth of wandering around town. And like, while I'm cutting the walking for days that I work, I'm still working my way through as much of my to-do list as I can. So I'm working at a local pizza p...

I write. We know this. I'm writing right now. I've been writing for as long as I can remember--longer than I can remember, because once, I remember, we were cleaning out some shit back at my parent's house and they found what was basically Junie B Jones fanfiction that I had apparently written at the age of five or six. So writing, as a whole, is something I love and have loved for forever, but it's not exactly... I mean, I try hard. I work hard at it. I spend a lot of time. I write and I rewrite and I revise, but it's something I know how to do, you know? I know how to write. And if I need validation, I know I can just slam out a quick fanfic, post it on AO3, and bam, there you go, look at all those hits, nobody can ever know I write this. I've got friends I made through my writing that I've had for longer than I had friends in my real life (okay, one, but hi, Emma), and I can always send her stuff I'm excited about. And I do love writing. So I pi...

I think I've mentioned it a couple of times on a couple of different platforms, probably here at least in passing as a joke, but I'm, uh, ~ technically unemployed, currently ~. I've started calling myself a freelancer because like, technically I've got a check coming for something I wrote and that makes me less sad even though I have been applying to all the gas stations in my local area for a fucking job, obviously. The reason I'm not more freaked out about this is because I do have a good chunk of savings. All hail college Aurora for somehow having the foresight to save most of her library paychecks, because goddam. I've got enough in savings to, if I was smart, make it through winter without any other income (which I obviously don't want to have to do), and if I'm realistic , and know myself and my eBaying habits , take me through the next couple of months pretty easy. Obviously yes, I am looking for a job.  I've been ~technically--er, a ~free...

Okay, so we all know that Metallica and Guns'n'Roses are my favorite bands, like it's 1993 and I'm a 14 year old boy or something, but after them, you know, it's the general, Megadeth , Quiet Riot , and... W.A.S.P.?   I wasn't expecting W.A.S.P. to become one of my favorite bands. I mean, I liked "I Wanna Be Somebody" enough to decide that I needed to buy up some tapes off of eBay, and like, the ReIdolized shit is so good that if I start the album from the beginning I have to listen to the whole thing, straight through, no shuffles no skips, if one of the songs comes up out of the blue I can just listen to that one, like, I've got "Miss You" on a couple of playlists and-- Oh fuck W.A.S.P. is one of my favorite bands? It makes me sad, honestly, that my Walkman broke before I got a chance to listen to any of those new W.A.S.P. tapes. I didn't even get around to the one with "I Wanna Be Somebody" on it; I was too enamore...

I hate crickets. I'm actually pretty OK with most bugs. Flies, mosquitoes, even spiders are like--they'll surprise me, like, holy fuck, you weren't here ten seconds ago, but also I have considered getting a tarantula so like--the smaller they are the less I like them, you know. Moths are an entirely different story and deserve to be sent back to hell. But crickets. It's September, it's rainy, and the bugs are starting to try and move inside. And while I've seen none of the nice ones (I actually genuinely like box elder bugs , they're sweethearts and I have a lot of memories of, before my family become heathens, catching them in church and naming them all Bob and it was a good time, man, I dig box elder bugs), there have been crickets. Not too many. I've seen two total in my apartment, in like the past couple of weeks. But this morning I went downstairs to do some laundry and I heard one. I think he was hiding behind a washing machine or something...

So, my brother is way into fitness. At least he was the last time I talked to him. He talks a lot about protein and he lifts a lot and everything like that. And like, I like going for walks and I'm not overweight? But I abuse caffeine like a motherfucker and mostly live off of TV dinners. Recently I've started like, doing pushups and situps in-between each thing on my to-do list. I also take really long walks after each meal because, you know, unemployed, gotta spend the time somehow and also I want to take advantage of the weather before it turns to shit. And I've built myself up to 7-pushups-in-a-row ( real pushups, probably with the worst form imaginable), 25-situps, also a couple of other things like I'm trying to learn how to do a handstand? Apologies to the people who live underneath me. But the thing is--just with this , which, granted, can add up, I did like 70 pushups yesterday and 200 situps, so like, that adds up, I've got... I'm... I have muscle?...

Literally everyone I ever talk to saying "Oh, I've seen you walking around town.", from my parent's coworkers who work in town to people I used to work with to an old lady who lives in my apartment building to the girl I gave a ride home from Leever's to-- A little boy who lives in a house on one of my ways back up to my apartment building who now runs to the glass door and waves at me when I walk past.  Several dogs who bark when I walk past, two who don't.  One dog who just crashed into me and said hi when I was busy listening to Ozzy Osbourne and didn't realize he was there instead he was standing with his paws on my hips licking my hand. I hope he lived around where he crashed into me, but he had a collar and tag on some hopefully he found his way home. An alarming number of geese. A lot of construction workers.  Two cats who live on the same street who are both brown tabbies, one of whom is all ragged and wise to the ways of the world and won...

I'm gonna get this straight--I don't have a third tattoo ( yet) , but I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and it doesn't help that a tattoo shop about half an hour away on the Interstate is having a fun Friday the 13th thing next week, and I'm having to fight myself back from that, but-- So I'm thinking October. I'm not one hundred per cent sure if I'm going for no. 3 in October, even though I do have an idea (though October's just long enough away that said idea could change, the only reason I went with my plan on no. 2 was because I got it, you know, two weeks after no. 1), because, uh, technically I am currently unemployed and, you know, rent . Also I need a new pair of Docs because mine are literally falling apart, God, it's almost like shoes weren't made to be worn for twenty-five fucking years . But there's something in me that like--you hear about how tattoos can be addictive. I've heard that. I had a coworker tha...

So, I write more first drafts than is probably good or necessary, we all know this, "Aurora" is synonymous with "definitely wrote fourteen first drafts already this year". And one thing is, if I know something's going to be a series, I like to have the whole series wrote out as fast as possible, because I am a pantser to the nth degree, you know. So a couple days ago I finished the last first draft of this one series. And this is the series I've been vlogging my writing of; those vlogs'll still happen whenever I work on rewrites, because I am working on rewriting book one right now, but as far as the story goes? I know how it ends and it is done. And that's like--that's hard, man, and weird. I've only been working on this series since like, March, that's when I'm pretty sure I wrote the first draft for the first book, but I fell so hard for it. It doesn't help also that it is one of, if not the, most self-indulgent thing I'v...

I went on an eBay binge last night, again. It was semi-scheduled; I actually wasn't going to do it until tomorrow night or Saturday night, but since I work this weekend and an eBay binge is best done last at night while you sit hunched with your knees pulled to your chest as you scroll through sketchy-looking Guns'n'Roses Live at the Ritz DVDs from Brazil, I decided to push it back a few days so that I could do it late at night. It didn't feel like an eBay binge, though, until I thought I was done, closed out of eBay and started balancing my checkbook (because I've got bids out, sure--but there were, uh, enough buy-it-nows) and then remembered that there were a couple other things I like, really wanted and had been gearing up for, so then I went back and bid on a fuckton of other things . Now it's a true eBay binge. This did help me, by the way, because Amazon sent me some honestly really fucking good book suggestions to buy and it wasn't the 911 unread ...

When I was a freshman in college, I did the same thing that so many young people did before me. I discovered Nirvana. Like, to the point where someone gave me a framed picture of Kurt Cobain for Christmas. I had dozens of Nirvana t-shirts. Dozens. And, naturally, I got wrapped up in the GNR/Nirvana feud of the early 90s. I refused to like anything that had to do with Guns'n'Roses. It doesn't help that my mother (who graduated high school in 1996 and is the reason I have my Docs [because she bought them in 92] and my denim vest [cut up from the denim jacket she bought at kmart in 92]) also hated Guns'n'Roses. I knew nothing about Guns'n'Roses except the chorus of "Welcome to the Jungle." Sorry, freshman year of college Aurora, you have Appetite for Destruction on cassette... and... the special fancy 30-year-edition-special vinyl. You have two little posters liberated from lyric sheets on your bedroom wall. Steven Adler circa 1988 is ...

The other day I was on Twitter, as you do, and the question got brought up on one of my writer friends ( SH Marr , if you're wondering) thinking about authors, and how they tend to gravitate towards ideas. Whether it happens to be age range, or genre, or whatever. And I thought about it for a second. I didn't respond to the tweet because I didn't really have an answer. I write a lot of male POVs, that's a definite similarity between a helluva lot of my projects. I also tend to set my works very solidly in a recent-past kind of situation; think sixties through early aughts, though that's more of a recent thing. My current first draft is set in like, 1983. My rewrites are 1991, 2011, 1982. And I let you fuckin know.  I guess I also do gravitate towards horror, but I don't write only horror, you know? The project that I'm currently querying is a YA contemporary. Set in 2004, of course, but it's not a horror novel. Does have a male protagonist, though. A...

I feel like everything is currently falling apart right now, in terms of my portable music. See, it was so good for so long. There's an obvious risk when you buy random guy's Walkmans (Walkmen?) off of eBay, because you don't know if they've taken care of them, these things are older than you, and then you work them to death because you want to be listening to tapes for like ten hours a day, right. So you go through quite a few of them, you know, but it's not 1985 anymore and they're not really all that expensive and especially now you have a ridiculous amount of disposable income-- But you get this one, and for months, for like five six months  this thing works like a dream. You're listening to your tapes twenty-four-seven, you're having a great time. And so when it stops working there's no real hard feelings except that it's Friday and so even if you find one with Fast&Free shipping you won't get it until Tuesday, because you've...