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, ...