Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

Below the cut: you can see how I am not cut out for short stories very very clear in this one, because when it's not a full novel, I get bored and cut it off prematurely. If you want to read a novel, Iscariot  is now available. I linked the kindle version because of Amazon de-prioritizing books, but the paperback is available as well. 

This isn't rushed--this is, it took a pandemic and my hours being cut drastically to push me to self-publish the book I've been meaning to self-publish. This isn't me giving up on being traditionally published--I've figured for a while that if this project was ever going to see the light of day it would be self-published, not because it's bad ,  I enjoy it, but because it does seem more suited to self-publishing than anything else. But, anyway, what is this thing? It's young adult, it's about these kids who go to hell accidentally, it's Aurora having a lot of fun shoving characters from a lot of different time periods into the same project. Here's the synopsis on Amazon: It was Jake’s idea to explore the abandoned house a few miles off of the highway. Neither Sam nor Amanda could have predicted that it would send them to Hell. Fortunately, getting out of Hell is possible – and out of the 80 Divisions Hell is made of, the three of them have landed...

I don't put ads on my videos. If there's an ad on any of my videos, it's because it got copyright claimed and they put an ad on it. I don't mind this. For my videos--I mean, I'm small enough that it doesn't really matter, right? So I never bothered with the whole set-up, because it looked like more of a headache than anything else, so I figured--what the hell, I'll just not do this. Because I don't really do this for the money, at all, I do it because I have fun with it. So COVID-19, huh. I'm still going to work. I work at a pizza place. We deliver. I can still go to work. But uh, hours are being cut pretty harshly, because it is goddam slow with no lobby and people freaking out and no cleaning to do every night. And while I do have a decent cushion, that's like, for when my car dies and repaying my student loans and I would not like to dip into that. And while I did move in my boyfriend when the dorms shut down for the semester so he could...

Last night, work was slow. Work has been slow. It's a mix of post-Winter Show, when it normally slows down for a bit anyway, and everything else that's been going on. Drivers had about four tickets each. We had a good amount of pick-ups. Not like, a lot, but compared to everything else it was a decent amount. A couple of dine-in orders. Three or four, maybe, the whole night, including the creepy guy and his Vietnam Vet dad, who come in a lot and I mostly just act incredibly busy when they're there, because while the dad is kind of crazy in an interesting way, the creepy one's mostly just creepy. The whole thing is kind of surreal, mostly because for the most part, things are normal. North Dakota's up to seven cases now, which is a large jump, but there's none in my county yet. Burger King is drive-thru only and Subway and Casey's say 'no refills with the same cup' and, obviously, schools are closed, but it's mostly normal, besides how slow it...

So, it happened--North Dakota's shutting down for the next couple weeks. Just the schools and major events; state colleges are online for two extra weeks after spring break, public schools are taking a week off. Sports are done for the spring season. North Dakota hasn't really gotten hit yet, this is what our infograph looks like, the one on the North Dakota Department of Health Website: So we're doing pretty good, and like, it's probably good that we're taking these preventive measures, though I'm sure that part of the reason it's not spreading is because the only time a large group of people gets together in North Dakota is for high school basketball games and the Winter Show, and the Winter Show's over and basketball's cancelled, so we're probably going to be fine. But another fun thing about this--nobody really knows how long the colleges are going to actually be shut down for. My younger brother goes to my old school, which is a privat...

What's been interesting during this whole Coronavirus thing is the difference I'm seeing between Facebook and Twitter. I'm in North Dakota, which is a state that hasn't really been hit yet (I heard we maybe have one case now? I'm not sure if it's confirmed yet or not) by anything other than everyone buying all the toilet paper. Like I'm talking, one of my coworkers went to Wal-Mart the other day and they were out . They had some at the Family Dollar yesterday, but the lady in front of me had a cart full, so who the hell knows how long that's going to last. But the difference is interesting. On Twitter, where I follow people from various parts of the US/world in general--absolute panic. People who are living in places under quarantine, people going to school in places where their colleges are swapping to online for the rest of the semester (and if it gets to the point that North Dakota colleges start doing this, I get a roommate a couple months earlier ...

I finished War & Peace on Sunday. I'd wanted to finish it before February was over, but March 1st is like, practically as good (plus, bonus, that means I can count it as a 'books read in March' which means I can put it in my weird convoluted book buying restriction/ban/whatever I've got going on), and I'm done. It took me a month to get through. And while that might sound reasonable, considering it's like, 1400 pages long, with tiny print, and Tolstoy just talking and talking like he's Victor Hugo or something, but that's. A whole month  on one book. As someone who has read Stephen King's It in four days, that's a lot. Since finishing War & Peace, though, I've finished two other books. It is amazing how fast you can finish books when they are not 1400 pages long. As I mentioned up there--also going through a book buying ban, slash receiving, because I have found my number of books where I say, "Aurora, this is enough" ...