1.17.22 -- writing stuff && thoughts

 man, just PEEP that 2013-blog-style of title up there holy shit

Couple of things to go over, actually, and probably the main one is that I did publish a new book this weekend. We ended up having a four-day weekend because ~snowstorm~ because ~the great state of North Dakota is making up for not really having winter last year~, and so I finished LIKE HELL which is a cute lil' novella about REVENGE, FRIENDSHIP, and KILLING YOUR MOM'S BOYFRIEND. It's 100 pages on kindle and I've been playing around with book sizes--if you've got the paperback of CARL & JIMMY, which I KNOW YOU DON'T UNLESS YOU'RE MY LITTLE SISTER, LIKE HELL will be roughly the same height. But yeah. I enjoy LIKE HELL; my pet name for it was 'kind of like the outsiders', which... it kind of is, I guess? It features teenagers who murder and then run away, but it does have a much different ending than The Outsiders. I also tend to loop this one in with my true crime-y ones, which... it isn't based on a real crime, unlike the true crime-y ones (Columbiner, Crucifixion of Craig Knox, Carl & Jimmy), but it's kinda like that. I dunno. I like it. 

I was also on TikTok (which, by the way, I do have now, so follow if you want to watch me attempt to kill the book wall) and saw an author talking about how she made menus for each of her books, and so naturally, I started thinking about that. And so, my mind went really to One More Sad Song, for some reason, and it just... I was just thinking, and...they really just... if I were to make a menu for OMSS, it would be: cherry poptarts, black coffee, macaroni and cheese, concession stand nachos, and slushies. Because while I do tend to take a weird amount of time on food in my books sometimes, it's always processed 2000s fare. Always. And yeah, in One More Sad Song, Zeke Williams is a 17-year-old who eats nothing for three days and then downs a whole box of cherry poptarts. It makes sense for his character to not be eating healthy. He has a stay-at-home mom who cooks every day, but she's a midwestern mom and mostly that's gonna be tater tot hotdish and pot roast, you know? 

On a less writing thing, I did finish the 3-year DND campaign I've been playing in yesterday. We had our final session. Everything got wrapped up. I took off the bandanna of stupidity for the last time, unless we see them again in a oneshot. I am going to miss Kosef so goddam much. 

Kosef is my bard. Bardbarian. 12 levels of bard, 3 of barbarian. Dumb as a box of rocks. And it was such a bittersweet ending. I feel like Kosef always lived more in my head than I was able to portray him, sometimes; he did, however, really live in my head. Got a great playlist for him. But it ended. It ended. And we'll be starting a new one once our DM gets all of that really figured out, but... 

Man.