Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

 

 

 If you're new here: hi, I started teaching English this fall, despite not having a teaching degree, kinda making it up as I go along, but I have enough base knowledge to really fudge some things and now I'm here.  So, pandemic.  Let's get this one thing out of the way: I'm in North Dakota, which is like, one of the bad ones. One quick bing tells me we're number 2 in Worst States to Be In For COVID Right Now , second only to our neighbor to the south, so that's real fun. This is probably because good ole Doug didn't issue a mask mandate until like, last week, so all we could do to make the kids put on their masks was uh.  Tell them. Which didn't always work, because we didn't have any real support. School board says we can't make them. School board says we can only request. Now we've got a mask mandate. Gotta wear it.  So about half of the high school has moved to distance learning. This doesn't sound like it would be super bad, and in fa...

 

    One of my greatest attributes is my time management ability. I've always thought that I was good at just getting stuff done, because, historically, I have been. When I was still in school, I never really had to worry about getting shit done. Now, as a teacher, I'm caught up on grading and I'm still writing and doing creative things on the side. Now I'm getting a little behind on some creative things, but that's because of one thing. One thing that is both my greatest achievement in avoiding burnout and my greatest detriment in timely working.      That thing is the procrastination line.      To explain: I've been doing this since high school. When school started up until this week, pretty much, I only had it running on the weekends, because it takes a long-ass time to get through the procrastination line. What the procrastination line is, essentially, a line of tabs that I check briefly/watch a video/enter GR giveaways/read a chapter of a book...

 

 

  NGL, this one scares me a little Flygirl by Sherri L Smith This is one that I actually read as a kid! I went to this library book club in the summer when I was in middle school and this was one of the books we read. I remember it being pretty good? We'll see! Yours for Eternity by Damien Echols & Lorri Davis Okay, so I said I'd read Damien Echols's grocery lists, I might as well suck it up and read his love letters to his wife when he was on death row, even though the front of this book is like, a little creepily stained. I got it secondhand. Not a fan. The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain because why the fuck not 172 Hours on the Moon by Johann Harstad This is one that I've had for a while, been interested in for longer? IDK, it's always looked pretty vaguely interesting. Supposed to be scary. The Chestnut Man by Scandinavian Author Man I've heard this is supposed to be gory. I'm down for that. Serial killer shit? Hell yeah.  Our Revolution by Bern...

 

 This lull is different--this has nothing to do with sales, though I bet it will translate to that eventually. This lull is more about, 'Aurora ran out of pre-written books to publish, and now she actually has to finish writing them before anything else gets published.' Apart from books two, three, and four of the Pentalogy of Hell , I'm going to be on a much more rational publishing schedule from now on. It's going to be a longer wait between books. The whole reason my first... eight...? Books? How many books did I put out this year? It was like eight, wasn't it? Jesus. Either way, the whole reason my first eight or whatever books came out so fast was that I already had them written. They just needed to be formatted for publication. Now I need to finish rewriting. I have a ton of first drafts, we all know this--both because I've had years like last year, in which I wrote about a million first drafts, but because I've been stockpiling them for nine years. Bu...

 

 

 Let's just say that there's a lot going on right now. Let's start with the obvious. US Election. We're kinda sitting here, staring at Georgia, willing Nevada to just finish it , maybe giving PA a couple of weird side-glances every so often, too, everyone with baited breath. Major news sources cut off Trump's press conference. Anderson Cooper called him an obese turtle? Vivid imagery, man.   In other news, uh, NaNoWriMo. I'm ahead because of who I am as a person, yesterday I wrote shit and today I... might write more? We'll see. Weekend's coming up so I should be able to jump forward there, and-- We're going distance again, for my school... our distance learning plan had, "if it turns orange, go distance" in it, and the county went orange, so we're distance. I don't know how for long--whether they'll change the stipulations of the learning plan, if we'll just do this for the rest of the year... worse for kids' learning; ...

 

 So, my horror movie this past Halloween was The Hills Have Eyes. The remake version--I don't have the original, you know, with the guy who was in that Motley Crue music video in it. I do intend to get my hands on the OG version at some point, but, as of right now--2006 is the only version I've seen. And it was all right! I feel like I should have liked it more. Cannibals are my favorite. Watching it, I knew, logically, that I should have loved it. And I did enjoy. It just wasn't... god damn it, it just wasn't a Texas Chainsaw .  One thing this movie did do for me, though, was reintroduce the song "California Dreamin'" into my life. You know, that one from the sixties by The Mamas & The Papas. The minute that song started playing over them driving through the desert, I was hit with something. It was the feeling I get when I hear something like "Love Shack" by The B-52s, or "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin--this was a childhood song....