AngelaYSmith.com

I’m throwing in the towel for this year and putting myself on vacation until the new year. I’ve overestimated my abilities to keep to my daily blogging schedule while moving five apartments into one house with no car (still totaled) and no computer (still getting fixed).

We are in the thick of moving and I am more tired than I ever imagined was possible. A nasty cold bug is running through our tribe on top of everything else. ‘Tis the season for coughs and sneezin’…

I’m taking the rest of the year off from blogging to finish moving in, build a fence, install a dog door, fix my car, fix my computer, unpack and put together my office under the stairs. I’ll be back in 2019 with more exquisite corpses, fiction, reviews and excellent interviews.

I have one waiting now with the horrifically charismatic “Terrible Tim” from Drive-In Movie Maniacs, an award winning, nationally syndicated T.V. show that I will be excited to share in the new year. Read more about them here.

I wish everyone a wonderful holiday however you celebrate (or don’t celebrate). See you in 2019!

The last week and a half reads like fiction with all the catastrophes that popped up, but we are not only still standing, but pressing on in spite of it all. Tonight we find ourselves not quite at the end of the tunnel, but at least seeing the light.

We closed on our house at the end of November. We have the perfect house for us—a 123 year old house that’s been completely remodeled across the street from a park, a two minute walk from a large library and a short stroll from the historic square of Independence. It has a full size basement lined with antique brick. We are thrilled!

The next morning, the crazy started. First, my computer wouldn’t start. My CPU fan had gone out. Then my phone charge port decided to malfunction and I could barely keep it charged. It was the day after a blizzard, but progress must go on, right? I rented a van so I could pick up a stove. The sellers gave me the wrong address and at the end of the day I wound up at the bottom of a frozen hill in a moving van with a dead phone in the middle of the woods.

I managed to get a ride out to civilization, and the next day it took one of my sons and I two hours to break the ice enough to rescue the van. Once we did, I stubbornly tried to go after the cursed stove. Two more missed connections and another wrong address later, I finally got to see it. It was rusted. So much for being brand new. I left it and returned the van still stove-less.

We moved one of my sons in the new house so there would be someone on premises while we sorted things and moved ourselves. I dropped him off with supplies for a few days to find that the furnace wasn’t blowing heat. The furnace was the one thing we couldn’t inspect due to the gas not being on, but we were assured it was fine. It’s new, so we accepted that.

I did wind up smoking a pack of cigarettes at this point. I haven’t smoked since.

It wasn’t fine. A clogged exhaust, a bad pressure switch and a faulty thermostat meant $600 and two chilly nights for my son. Then the basement drain clogged. Once I got the furnace working I had to plunger the basement. I did get the drain cleared, and the water turned out to be from under the garage door due to extra heavy snow melt. I was glad to know it wasn’t anything busted.

Meanwhile, I managed to borrow a back up computer from my daughter so I could still get online and found that if I worked the cord just right I could still charge my phone. We had heat and online capabilities. Things were looking up.

That night I went to pick the other son up at work, and a teenage girl failed to stop in the parking lot and totaled my Civic. We were all very lucky she had hit the front of my car, causing it to spin. If she’d hit my passenger door straight on, she would have been seriously hurt. Lucky for me, I had no passengers yet.

A coworker boasted I finally had a “grown up girl car” when I pulled up in this car. Does this mean I no longer have to ‘grown up?’

That night I added up our situation. I was out a computer, a phone and now a car. The new house had no stove, fridge or washer and dryer and my budget for appliances at the moment had just gone on a furnace.

This is life, I decided. We had some huge blessings… a beautiful house, a family to fill it with and none of us had been hurt in the accident. I decided we were doing okay.

Since then, we’ve had some major blessings and things are back on track. I find myself grateful for little things, like the fact that my daughter had an old thrift store computer in her closet I can use while mine is being fixed. Every time I walk in the new house and feel heat, I smile. I probably would have never noticed it before. Now it’s a pleasure.

We are still in the thick of things… we have three apartments to break down and move into the house. The internet couldn’t be hooked up yet because of a rotted telephone pole, so that’s delayed, and we are still working out details like dog runs, dog doors and address changes.

My future writing space.

But the important details have been decided. I have my writing space claimed. There is an old cupboard under the stairs in the heart of the house that will make the perfect writing office for me. I can’t wait to get in there to push the spiders over, set up a desk and get back to writing.

So, a busy and adventurous week and a half for us, and more adventures ahead. I hope to get back on track with my work. I owe a finished exquisite corpse and prize. I plan to post that tomorrow, barring unforeseen incidents.

I’ll be offering Bitter Suites for free on Kindle next Friday. I was interviewed by the Horror Tree and that interview goes up this weekend I think… and I have an exciting announcement I hope to share at some point this week.

For now, I’m sitting back and being grateful I’m still standing.

Yesterday I had my own real life horror story.

We just bought a house so I have a lot of details to manage—utilities, mail forwards, insurance, purchasing appliances…

My computer fan died so I can’t turn it on. My phone also decided not to charge. At the tail end of a major blizzard, there was ice everywhere. But progress doesn’t stop, right?

I had to rent a van to move things. The day went great until the last stop. Google maps took us out in the middle of nowhere. We wound up stuck in the dark, freezing woods with flat cell phones. No one knew where we were.

As soon as I stopped swearing at the van and spinning the tires, my son mentions “This is how a lot of horror movies start…”

This morning is off to a better start. I borrowed a back up computer from my daughter. I figured out how to charge my phone with some precarious balancing of weights on the cord jack. The weather promises a thaw so we can retrieve the van and get on with things.

So, excuse my absence… I am back where I love to be (in front of my computer) rather then as a frozen corpse in the deep, dark woods. I like to write horror stories, not be in them!

Today I was talking to someone about what it’s like to be a writer and she asked my advice on how to find a good editor.

“How many edits are you in?” I asked.

“What do you mean…how many?” she asked.

“I mean what edit are you on?” I asked.

“Um… I guess the first one. I wrote it, so now I need an editor,” she said.

“So, you wrote it and now you want an editor to polish it up,” I said.

“Um…yea,” she said. She rolled her eyes when she didn’t think I was watching. I was.

“You don’t need an editor. You have to have a book first,” I told her. “Right now you have a first draft.” She wasn’t too happy to hear she wasn’t to the fun parts of publishing—pick a cover, hit publish and roll in the royalties…? 

She’s not alone to think that she can throw some money at her first draft and walk away with a best seller. I did the same thing with my first book. I wanted my raw genius to shine on the paper. The thing that shone was what a noob I was/am. The more experienced I become, the less of a genius I remain.

Writing is hard, hard work. It’s much more than tossing some pretty prose down on paper. Then there is the editing yourself and letting other people edit you… repeatedly. Kill some prose, add some prose. You can’t read it over once, pat yourself on the back and pass it on. If you want excellent work, edit that thing like a hobbit eats. You need first edits, second edits, elevenses edits…

“I actually have a really good editor,” she told me. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

I think that’s fabulous, but she just told me how she had dedicated a year of her life to writing this book. An entire year working hard to walk away with a book that’s fine? There are amazing editors that can work magic with raw sewage… but why make them?

Each book we write is our masterpiece. What would we think if Michelangelo had smacked a hunk of marble with a hammer one night and sent it on to the statue polisher? Sure, the guy can coat the rough marble with enough wax to make it shiny but it will never be the masterpiece it was meant to be.

But I get it. That first book wants to be published so badly it burns like fire in your dreams and dances in your peripheral vision when your are awake. You convince yourself it’s fine and it’s good enough. I’ve been there. Oftentimes, I’m still there. This is a reminder from me, to me.

Edit. Rinse. Repeat. Chop your babies, murder your prose and ax your unnecessary pages without shedding a tear. What survives will be your best work, worthy of bearing your name and signature. Why settle for less?