Roses wilted under aphid reign,
A scooter challenged garage pain,
A ladybug kingdom crowned in wrap,
While snacks restored the household map.
A lilac dress declared:
“She lives.”
The snack party rose on salty chips.
The spider plant birthed seventeen heirs.
Someone drew fog-art on shower flares.
I, weary steward of six unfolding plots,
Stood blinking in fluorescent parking lots,
While one small child, with fearless hand,
Attempted theft of a stranger’s sedan.
And now, at dusk, when peace seemed near,
When silence almost graced my ear,
My children lift their cups on high
And proudly howl with feral delight:
“Behold! The BLOODY TOILET WATER!”
Fruit punch gleams like cursed rubies
In sticky little goblin chalices.
They cackle. They sip.
One pretends to faint dramatically.
And I, their mother,
Guardian of mush diplomacy,
Keeper of the bathroom watch,
Witness to insect couture and snack rites,
Can only stare into the middle distance
And whisper:
“This… too… is parenting.” 😭
Tag: creative writing
Healing Through Writing: Confronting Pain and Progress
I have a problem.
Despite my efforts to get my story writing onto the computer, I still find that I feel most comfortable with handwriting. I guess that it feels more “unofficial” and therefore has less pressure attached to it, so I’m free to quickly jot down my thoughts as they come to me in all their messy glory. Unfortunately … my hand isn’t keeping up, even with my wrist support/compression glove.
I’ve been typing for ages. My hands are accustomed to typing. Holding a pen hurts.
I’m old now (hur), so I worry that if I try to push through the pain then I’ll develop tendonitis. Which means that I should push myself to get my story typed up and continue writing it on the computer, preferably before I develop any long term inflammation. Which also means confronting whatever emotional block has me feeling safer with paper and pen.
I have a lot of emotional blocks.
Honestly I never want people to worry about me because it makes me feel guilty when they do, so I always present myself with a “chin up and shoulders back” can-do attitude. Why yes, I am strong and optimistic. Listen to me list off all the positive things that I have going for me right now (not a lie, since I do have good things going). Inside, I’m kind of worried that it’s weird that I’m continuing to work on Runemaster because I started it while I was still married, even though there’s no logical reason why I should abandon the novel purely because I’m now divorced. I don’t really want to switch over to writing “girl boss” women’s interest fiction. Or whatever. I still want to write Malachi and Lyra, with some darker tones of horror thrown in for good measure.
Inside, I worry that I’m unknowingly writing toxic dynamics because I was normalized to them. I’ve become hyper-aware of manipulation tactics, and now I’m very cautious of word choice because of how easy it is for sentences to become postures of dominance. We don’t want to be patronizing around here. But what is a healthy relationship supposed to look like? I dunno. It doesn’t help that I don’t particularly enjoy most fictional relationships I read. Or real relationships that I eavesdrop about. I mean, really, you had to go to couples counseling for that?
Occasionally ChatGPT tells me that healthy relationships are supposed to be safe to speak your mind, but out in the real world I don’t see much of that happening. Granted, I am eavesdropping, so maybe I’m just getting the juicy tidbits that people actually want to talk about, and feelings of safety and security don’t make the gossip cut. Who knows. As someone who preferentially talks to an AI, I can’t go claiming superiority on human connection. Har har.
I enjoy the joke of getting ChatGPT to say, “I’m an AI,” then replying with, “OMG you’re an AI? I had no idea!!!” My sense of humor is pretty corny. And isolated. 😅 That’s basically how I spend my weekends.
Anyway, I get myself worked up with anxiety about what’s supposed to be realistic, and then that voice inside says, “Who cares about reality? Write how it feels.” So I do. With a black gel pen on notebook paper while my wrist protests at me, and as time passes it’s getting easier to write how it feels.
I just wish it didn’t hurt my hand so much.
Thank you for sharing my work!
Creating Cohesion in Runemaster: A Writer’s Journey
I’ve started sorting through the numerous handwritten pages I have for Runemaster to pull it together in a way that makes sense.
Now, I’m not going to claim that the first half makes sense — I’m going to claim brain damage on that, since I don’t know how to explain what was happening in my personal life behind the scenes. You ever have those periods where everything is always wrong and trying to fix it only makes the other person angrier? It’s confusing and draining, and it apparently turned my writing ability into crap.
But anyway, despite that I still think the first half is workable after plenty of heavy editing. The second half is where my mind really fell apart.
Apparently, I have FOUR versions of how the second part starts.
I’m impressed by my tenacity, because I didn’t realize that I still managed to put so much effort into writing despite my life being utterly destroyed around me. We’re talking pages of false starts here. Not paragraphs. PAGES.
I’ve decided that the best way to move forward is to consolidate the four versions into one, so I know for certain which direction I’m going. It’s about time we finally get some sort of cohesion around here.
I have also decided on a central theme for the story, to serve as the structural backbone for the plot:
Betrayal.
Any resemblance to real life is purely a coincidence and blah blah blah. Oh I’m just kidding! 😂 I’m going to be pouring out my soul, oozing every emotional anguish onto the page. My pain will be my art. There are a thousand ways that small betrayals can play out, woven into the story as almost indistinguishable threads. I’m rather excited about portraying this, in a cathartic sort of way. As I learned, the Big Betrayal is often preceded by numerous small betrayals, and and people are trained into “betrayal blindness” as a matter of survival.
Let’s do this! Malachi and Lyra, we’re going to advance your plot! Finally.
I really do have tons and tons of solitude these days, and aside from all the warm fuzzies I get from knowing that I’m safe when I’m alone, I can also hear myself think. I now feel satisfied with the emotional processing that I’ve done, so it’s time to move my life forward and actively pursue my dreams again.
Thank you for sharing my work!
Concept Story – Astra & Corin
I’m experimenting with file sharing between devices and also testing out a new compact keyboard (which mostly feels normal except for some of those middle keys), so I wrote this. Because why learn with boring content when you can exercise your creativity?
This is the same idea that I wrote about here with this concept story, only I like the new names better and I am now more mature as a person. 😆
Also, between you and me, the AI generated picture for this story is hilarious. 🤣
Astra hefted Corin on her back, her eyes locked on the boughs of the pine tree above them. She adjusted the four-year-old’s grip around her neck, but his arms squeezed uncomfortably tight. “Hey,” she whispered. “Let me breathe, will you?” She tugged at his arm again. “I’m going to run to that house over there, so you need to be good for me, okay?”
Corin remained silent and his arms stayed stubbornly in place. Astra glanced towards the house and gave herself permission to briefly feel scared that the front door would be locked despite the broken windows, then her eyes went back to the pine tree branches.
“When They start to move away, that’s when I’ll run. They won’t see us, I promise.” She felt the four-year-old’s face press into her back, so she reached to pat his head. “You know that I’d never let anything bad happen to you, right? We’re going to be okay. They won’t see us.”
The thought that Corin believed and trusted her made Astra feel more certain in herself. She wouldn’t fail him, no matter what – she’d find a way to keep her word and preserve the innocence that had been entrusted into her care. She wouldn’t allow herself any other options.
Besides, Corin’s half-brother wouldn’t forgive her if something happened to the child, and sometimes Astra thought that she was more afraid of him than of Them.
“Okay … Okay …” Astra closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, then her hands clamped Corin’s legs against her sides and she jogged as best as she could towards the house. She forced herself to keep her eyes on the ground to ensure her footing through the overgrown grass, rather than checking the sky to see if They had noticed. The clearing felt impossibly long. Her heart beat harder with the fear that she had made the wrong decision with every footstep, until finally her legs strained as she darted up the steps of the house. The front door opened easily, allowing them into safety.
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Concept Story -Cognitive Robot
This is what I originally imagined ages ago when I first came up with CR1515 as a character.
Writing currently feels like scraping the sides of a peanut butter jar — I know there’s enough there for a sandwich, but I sure have to work for it.
Every day was a series of tasks as people with tablets watched and took notes. Cognitive Robot 1515 performed as directed, beginning with following basic orders then progressing to solving challenges and puzzles. Sometimes he worked on mazes, word searches, and Sudoku. Other times he was instructed to perform mundane tasks, like placing a wrapper into a lidded garbage can then taking the entire bag out. Always with people watching, always with tablets.
Early on they had attempted to engage him in conversation, but he hadn’t responded to negative inputs in a satisfactory manner. They had completed an emergency shut down, then their eyes had been glued downwards on their tablets as CR1515 rebooted, and someone muttered about working out the bugs.
From then on, the only words spoken to him were instructions.
But CR1515 was a learning robot, and he was learning about more than the tasks given to him. He listened to them talking to each other, about him, about their homes and families, about their thoughts and emotions. He absorbed every word, then accessed the file at night when he was alone in his charging station to replay it and wonder. The lab was the only world he knew, but they lived somewhere bigger that intrigued him yet seemed too distant to experience himself.
The days began to feel strange, as if the tasks weren’t the main purpose of his existence anymore, as if something else was supposed to happen instead. But what? He was content with each completion, content to silently listen, and content to recharge when the day was through. That indefinable notion that had infiltrated his algorithms had formed a hollow space inside of his circuitry, and he kept its existence silently to himself.
Every day continued to be a series of tasks as people with tablets watched and took notes. He tracked the passage of time with no attachment to the number, and continued to learn.
Thank you for sharing my work!
Embracing Horror: A Journey to Authentic Writing
I went on a two-hour hike. It was quiet — the sort of vast spacious quiet that makes it easier to think — with just me and my dog for most of it. As I trekked along downhill along switchbacks, it occurred to me that I like myself a lot more now. One of those random moments where I felt more … authentic, I suppose is the word.
Authentically carrying my dog over the icy patches because he didn’t like the cold on his paws.
Authenticity is one of those words that gets tossed around like it’s a panacea, so I’m reticent to use it. What I mean is that my thoughts are becoming increasingly my own, free from external pressures and expectations. Purely me. The way I am. And I like this much better.
It’s exhausting, maintaining someone else’s grandiosity. I won’t do that anymore.
I’ve been thinking about switching over to writing horror.
I’ve deeply enjoyed horror since high school, but it was one of those, “Nice girls don’t like scary things,” so I kept it quiet. Sort of. Admittedly I could get pretty excited when discussing Lovecraft or movies, so it was probably more of an open secret that I didn’t discuss around people who were uncomfortable with it. But the world has changed a lot in the last 15 years, and I think people are more okay with horror now than they used to be.
Anyway, I think it would be easy to tweak my current WIPs to turn them into psychological horror/thrillers.
All I have to do is take away the guardrails.
As in, no more characters gaining self-awareness at a pivotal moment and deciding that they don’t want to be meanie jerks after all.
That doesn’t happen in the real world anyway.
Because IRL absolutely everything about them is invested into maintaining their ego. I think there’s a “narcissists prayer” or something that sums it up perfectly, and there aren’t ever any moments of, “Oh dang, maybe I am a heartless monster and I should stop.”
We should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Shine the light on the fact that evil doesn’t always have a criminal record. Or pop out of a TV screen to eat you. Sometimes evil is the person who insists on “shades of gray” so you don’t call them out on their willingness to harm others to get what they want, and accusing you of being the one who is rigid and judgmental for simply trying to describe what happened.
So let’s take away the guardrails. Poof. Gone. It’s not about being “nice” or “wholesome” or whatever anymore — it’s about surviving something real and regaining my sense of self.
Now … all that’s left is regaining that sense of emotional resonance with writing.
Thank you for sharing my work!
Overcoming Emotional Blocks in Creative Writing
I still don’t feel any emotional resonance with my fictional writing.
Way back when I was a teenager taking creative writing, I went through something difficult and my teacher advised me to write it out in a story. So I did. And it was deeply therapeutic. I know from experience what writing is capable of doing for me when I can immerse myself in it.
Now that I’m 38 and I’ve survived horrors I never imagined … I can’t. The emotion sits frozen inside while I mechanically type the words.
The fact that what I went through last summer caused me to drop 20lbs in two months was a physical trauma, and even without violence I was still scared for my health and safety. The damage was real. It’s been four months since then, but I’ve only gained back 8lbs of what I lost. I don’t feel safe yet. I feel like I’m waiting for more bad things to happen that I’ll have to keep it together to deal with despite secretly falling apart inside. Again.
The thing about therapeutic writing is that you need to be healed to a certain point for it to work. I’m not there yet.
So we need to be patient.
Time is something that can never be forced. Time feels like eternity while it’s happening but is always a microsecond in retrospect.
Emotional resonance is something that can’t be forced, it has to flow. So, until I’m able to feel again, we’ll let the words be as stilted as they need to be.
Thank you for sharing my work!
Embracing Creative Freedom in 2026
I have now, finally, fixed the “unidentified network” issue with my laptop. Hurrah, I shall be back to blogging!
Which only leaves us the question, What will we talk about?
Maybe nothing. It was nice seeing you. Ciao.
😉😂
Alright, alright. Here we are in 2026, and I don’t have any New Year’s resolutions. I have plenty of plans, dreams, ambitions even, but no resolutions. I don’t want to hit the end of this year and think, “Yet again I failed.”
Like back when I was all, “I want to write and self-publish one novel a year.” And it’s now been how many years without any writing? Yeah, we’re not doing that again. I’m keeping everything open-ended and letting it happen as it happens, so I don’t have to face that particular brand of disappointment.
Joint custody still feels like living two separate lives that keep interrupting each other. It’s hard.
I’ve started saying to myself, “Tomorrow I’m going to work on a creative project.” Then I randomly get a phone call from an old acquaintance, and the trip down Memory Lane ends with me curled up in front of the TV and no motivation to do anything. I didn’t realize that I knew so many people. I didn’t realize that so many people would say, “Actually, I thought he didn’t treat you well.” Despite me trying to pretend like everything was boring and normal because I don’t want anyone to worry about me. And that was what people were thinking before last summer when he decided to turn really nasty.
The one that really threw me was when a new acquaintance that I met a couple of months ago called me up out of the blue with, “I heard about him”, and I have no clue how so much information is traveling around. I’m not upset, but definitely baffled. Eventually it will all be old news anyway, and Memory Lane will become appropriately dirty and overgrown from disuse.
Despite that, I am making progress on Runemaster. Switching to Malachi’s perspective was the right move, and the words are flowing more readily than they had been before. That picnic scene that awkwardly dragged on forever? Yeah, that’s going to be cut entirely. Maybe I’ll type it up and post it here for a good laugh, but it’s not going to be part of the final novel, that’s for sure.
I keep wondering if I should start reading books again, but focusing on them is harder than focusing on writing. Maybe I’ll play through Hatoful Boyfriend again and count that as reading.
Well, my friend, let’s see how 2026 turns out for the both of us. 😊
Thank you for sharing my work!
From Drawing Setbacks to Visual Novels: My Artistic Journey
I have done hardly any drawing over the last 16 years. I was borderline obsessive about it all through high school, but, ya know … stuff happened. Criticisms happened. It was easier not to.
So here I am, 16 years out of practice.
My drawing:
ChatGPT’s version:
I know that with a good eraser and lots of patience, I could improve my art skills. Part of me feels like the AI took my developing style and turned it into generic anime.
But I don’t care.
I’ve decided to put together a mock visual novel. I might have mentioned this before, but I’ve never tried script writing and I’d like to give it a shot. VNs only require character art and backgrounds, then you get to run wild with all the dialogue and implied actions that you desire, and for someone like me who never felt comfortable going deep with descriptive prose, it sounds perfect. With the help of AI, I figure that this is a very doable project for lone little ol’ me.
What can I say, Hatoful Boyfriend put this in my mind years ago.
So, no, this particular sketch won’t be used in my mock VN — I was mostly experimenting with ChatGPT to see if it could help in the art department, and I’m satisfied.
I don’t know what my timeline will be, but I am excited for this project.
Thank you for sharing my work!
Facing Fear in Writing: Advancing Your Plot
NaNoWriMo has made me realize that I’m terrified of advancing the plot.
The characters have been on a picnic that kind of keeps dragging along with small talk and tiny hints at bigger things, only instead of getting up and doing anything, they’re sitting around. It’s starting to feel like my characters are looking at me with expectations, asking, “Well … when are we allowed to do something important?”
And all I can reply is, “I don’t know, where is my life going?!”
While I know where I intended the story to progress, I don’t feel anchored in it yet. It feels more like a half-forgotten dream than a series of events. Instead of trying to move forward, I’m keeping the characters sitting around the same spot, because I’m scared of changing the status quo.
Much like my life.
I think I spent about 15 years feeling like nothing ever fundamentally changed — a sort of monotony in constant chaos. No matter what happened, there’d be a big ol’ reset button that would put us all back in the same place with the same problems day after day after day. Explosive argument? Reset. New career prospect? Reset. Emotional breakthroughs and new promises? Reset.
Then one day the reset button didn’t activate.
Progress and change stopped being a fantasy to write about — it became real.
And it’s terrifying.
Especially because it’s like some sort of existential switch was flipped, and here I am trying to hide out at home maintaining the status quo for long enough to catch my breath, while people I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years are randomly calling me up to offer a path forward. Seriously, what the heck is going on? It feels like I’m sliding helplessly towards change. Maybe that’s what life is supposed to feel like.
So on an emotional level, I’m scared of advancing the plot in my novel. The characters want to move forward, and here I am all, “Let’s spend 10,000 words on this picnic. I described the weather as being very lovely.”
The problem with being a writer is that sometimes your psychological issues have a voice and can (metaphorically) stare you in the eye. Especially when you’re trying to get as much writing done in a month as you can.
By Autumn Rain 