Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

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...

So, I'm not especially tall--I'm pretty tall for a girl, I'm 5'8, but I'm not like, a giant or anything. I mean, I know plenty of girls as tall or taller than me. I'm also not ultra-skinny, but I am relatively thin, and basically, moral of the story is, women's jeans hate me, because I'm 5'8 and 140-145lb and they want me to have hips that I do not have. They also want me to have a purse that I do not carry, because obviously I must carry a purse, so I don't need these fuckin pockets.  I know that pockets are what every women complains about on jeans. I know this. But you would not believe the actual fucking wonder I felt when I put my hand into the pocket of a pair of men's jeans I had on and my hand just. Kept going. It kept going like, an inch past my wrist, and I just stared down in wonder, like, holy shit, I could put practically anything in there. Even my nice pairs of women's jeans, a 'good pocket' on those is, I might be...

I've recently come to the realization that I'm... not a huge chocolate fan. I mean, I like chocolate. It's fine. I like dark chocolate especially. But I've found that whenever I buy candy for myself, it's never chocolate. It's Mike'n'Ikes or Cherry Sours or Bottlecaps or gummy fruit or whatever. It's not chocolate, it's actually fruity sweet disgusting sometimes kind of sour (or Hot Tamales, don't talk to me about Hot Tamales, which I'm putting as entirely responsible for my freshman fifteen) that I gravitate toward. And it's interesting, man. Also, candy that other people tend to see as gross. I don't know if this is my intense desire to separate myself from the herd exposing itself in my taste buds, but fuckin' bottle caps and Cherry Sours are the big examples of this. Also Circus Peanuts, black jelly beans (though that's a family thing), chalky Sweethearts, candy corn. I'm not like, super picky when it comes to ...

So I buy a lot of cassette tapes off of ebay. This is not news. We know this. We know that 'Aurora' is synonymous with 'buys a lot of cassette tapes off of eBay.' And like, I recently went on a tape-buying binge that was pretty huge (and all but TWO of my packages came on the same day so now I've got like five packages sitting on my floor waiting for those last two so I can do an unboxing and it is ROUGH), and the thing is--mostly, this time, I bought single tapes and small lots, which is not my usual prerogative. One of the reasons why my tape collection is so goddam huge is that when I first started buying tapes, I would buy lots that had at least a dozen or so. I think the biggest lot I ever bought had around forty tapes in it. And these lots--I'd buy them because they had a handful I really really wanted. And then I'd find new bands! Heathen I found in a lot! Loudness! Those are some of my favorites, now, and I never woulda learned about them if I ha...

So, for the past three months or so, I haven't bought any books. I've received books. Sometimes that shit just happens ,you know; I've won some Goodreads giveaways, and even though I don't work at the library anymore, I still play D&D with some people who do work there, and sometimes, you know, they'll weed a book that they think I might like and they hand it over (which is always fun because in-game, my character is illiterate and refuses to learn how to read out of principle), but I haven't bought any. Until July 31st. So here's the thing. I didn't really have a book buying ban , per se; I had this weird system that wasn't really all that well put together and 870+ (well, okay, as of right now, 872) books in a book wall to read. And so I wasn't buying books because I kept receiving books, and as that happened, the little sticky tabs of books I wanted that I have on the side of my computer kept growing and growing and growing. And I had ...

So, I'm in a state of a perpetual first draft. I started doing this because like, for my job, there are these long stretches of downtime and I don't really have a laptop anymore so I'd just bring a notebook for a first draft and scrawl away. Lately, though I haven't been bringing the notebook--I'll bring a book to read, and once or twice I even wrote some on my rewrite of the WM3 project, and so my current first draft, which I do really have fun with, has been taking a while to write. I'm putting pages on it. I'm at about 14k right now, and I'm slowly fumbling my way through finding a plot. This was, like most of my first drafts, born out of a concept. And, also like most of my recent projects, there is a heavy musical, mostly heavy metal, influence, because I am currently incapable of writing anything without mentioning the bands I like, I guess. But this concept is just now sort of building up to a plot, and I still don't really know what's g...