Hi! I'm Kimberly. This website is my online home and commonplace book. A large language model called it "a digital diary that no one asked for." This front page houses a complete stream of all of my short notes, blog posts, and photos.

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Welcome!

Finished reading: Lothaire by Kresley Cole 📚

Of course if you’re reading Immortals After Dark you must read this one. You simply must.

🍿 Watched Yes Day.

This is a super fun family movie! I love it in no small part because of Jennifer Garner and Jenna Ortega but also it’s just super fun.

I’m celebrating (?) the Ides of March a day late with an Italian Night Club sandwich from Jimmy John’s and Roman Raspberry Talenti Sorbetto.

(True facts: the Ides falls on the 15th only in March, May, July, and October. The rest of the year it’s on the 13th.)

📚 Baby’s First Author Event

Let me be clear, when I say “baby,” I mean “big kid.” We took M to his first author event a couple weeks ago. It was awesome. Adam Gidwitz has a new book out. It’s called Max in the House of Spies. It’s about a German Jewish kid whose parents send him to London in 1939 and he falls in with British spies while he’s there. Also a dybbuk lives on one of his shoulders and a kobold lives on the other.

We first encountered Adam Gidwitz because of his amazing podcast, Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest. (M’s favorite episode is Hans, My Hedgehog.) Gidwitz is a former teacher who now works as a storyteller and author. He’s written the A Tale Dark and Grimm series and the book The Inquisitor’s Tale, and he is the co-author of the Unicorn Rescue Society series. In that series, kids travel around the world saving different cryptids. For each book, Gidwitz teams up with an author who is a member of the culture that the kids are visiting. They’re super fun and a great way to learn about folklore around the world.

Gidwitz talked about a family friend who had been one of the children sent away from Germany ahead of World War II and how the story of that friend inspired him to write this book. He said he felt it was an important book to write now because he thinks it’s an important time to look at Germany before the Nazis came to power and ask, what is it that makes the people of a country vote for leadership they know is wrong? What makes them willing to sacrifice justice for the promise of security? I think he’s absolutely right that these are key questions for our time.

Gidwitz shared the story of how he became a writer: he wanted to teach his students about ancient Egypt and couldn’t find a book to go with the lessons, so he started to write one. He’d write a chapter, share it with his students, and then they’d say, “Then what happened?” He’d tell them, “I don’t know!” and go home to write the next chapter. With a lot of positive reinforcement from his students, Gidwitz decided to quit teaching and write full-time. He didn’t get an agent with the Egyptian book. (He called it a “burner book,” explaining that many authors have at least one book they write and learn a lot from but don’t get to publish.) But he did when he started digging into Grimm’s fairytales.

Gidwitz is super entertaining and a great storyteller and doesn’t look anything like I imagined him. (I imagined him looking like Joshua Malina’s character, Jeremy, from Sports Night. I have no idea why.)

After he talked about his books and answered questions for an hour, there was a signing. When we got up there, he told M., “You’re a lot younger than most of the kids here and I wasn’t sure how you would do while I was talking, but you did great.” (M. is average height but tiny with giant eyes so it’s easy to mistake him for younger than he is.)

The image shows author Adam Gidwitz wearing a checkered shirt, sitting at a table and signing a book. There are multiple copies of the same book stacked neatly on the table, with a bottle of water beside them. In front of the individual, there are several spy pens wrapped in plastic packaging. Bookshelves filled with various books are visible in the background.

Finished reading: Preferential Treatment by Heather Guerre 📚

Read this billionaire romance because it’s the next Fated Mates read along. It’s very well done & deflates the billionaire fantasy without taking all of the fun out of it. Definitely check the content warnings before reading.

I know there are things to do in life besides play Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, but I don’t care to do them. 🎮

Finished reading: Dreams of a Dark Warrior by Kresley Cole 📚

This one took me a little while to get into but once I was in, I couldn’t put it down.

To quote @cheribaker@writing.exchange:

Don’t wish us Happy International Women’s Day. Instead, help to vote out the ghouls who deny women’s agency and treat us like walking wombs. Ask your male friends to do the same.

That would make me a happy international woman indeed. 😎

Finished reading: Demon From the Dark by Kresley Cole 📚

I really enjoyed this one and tore through it. Give me a sad, traumatized couple of people who find a new family in each other and I’m happy. 😍

New glasses, same as the old glasses except they actually fit.

A white woman with dark hair wears black half-time glasses.

Finished reading: Pleasure of a Dark Prince by Kresley Cole 📚

I really liked, maybe even loved this one. The back half is all adventure, super cinematic.

🔖 Read The “Disney adult” industrial complex by Amelia Tait (The New Statesman via The Rec Center)

The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan.

I’m a second-generation Disney adult deliberately mixing other culture into my kid’s life. I appreciate this critique written by a fellow Disney adult.

Finished reading: “Untouchable” in Deep Kiss of Winter by Kresley Cole 📚

📚 Why am I obsessed with romance fiction right now?

Last May, I read Mr. and Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond, and it made me so happy that I decided to try exclusively reading romance for a while. From May to October, I read 16 romance novels. In October I took a break to read some gothic but quickly came back to romance, finishing out the year having read 22 romance novels and one romance anthology. This year, I continued the pattern. So far, I’ve read 17 romance novels this year. I talk about romance and think about romance a lot of the time. So why?

First, social factors:

Last June, The Good Trade published an article called What Romance Novels Taught Me About Taking Pleasure More Seriously and then in December a follow-up, How to Get Started Reading Romance Novels. This led me to the podcast Fated Mates and I joined their Patreon and Discord because I needed people to talk to about romance besides two of my friends and W.

But that was after I’d already started to read romance more heavily. So why? Why romance?

The obvious reason is that it’s an optimistic genre. Even in dark romance, the author or publisher has, by virtue of calling the book or story romance, promised that the characters who fall in love will end the book either living happily ever after or happy for now. Any problems on the horizon at the end are problems you know they will solve together. (And if you read something that the author or publisher has called romance that doesn’t have this feature, please let everyone know, so they won’t pick that book up expecting a HEA or HFN.) The world is big and scary and full of bad, and it can be comforting to know that you are going into a story where the people will end up with someone(s) who will support them.

Another reason is that romance contains an immense variety of subgenres, which means if you’re a mood reader that you can probably find something you’re in the mood for. You’ve got contemporary, paranormal, historical (with its own subsubgenres based on period and geography), dark romance, fantasy romance, sci-fi romance, romantic suspense, romantic mystery, and many more. Likewise, romance is full of tropes that give books a flavor that make it easy to know if you’re likely to find it interesting: friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, billionaire, forced proximity, sibling’s best friend or best friend’s sibling, second chance, fated mates, fake dating, and again, many more.

It’s also because, like sci-fi and fantasy, romance lets you tackle difficult topics in a way where you know that characters will be supported in working through these. Here is an incomplete list of difficult topics the romance I’ve read since last year has touched on:

  • anxiety
  • depression
  • gang conflict
  • family illness
  • chronic illness
  • homophobia
  • truly awful parenting
  • arranged marriage
  • transphobia
  • top surgery (difficult because of medical processes described in detail)
  • war
  • anti-Muslim harassment
  • well-meaning people being casually super prejudiced
  • the cost of a bad reputation

And I tend to read stuff on the lighter side.

And then there are things that are unique about romance: its focus on interiority and emotion, on women’s and non-binary people’s pleasure, the way it places relationships at the heart of stories.

I’m sure there are more reasons, too. Do you read romance? Why?

🔖 Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories

I love this. I often feel that blogging is the most natural medium for my writing, which makes sense as I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. Maybe this incompleteness is part of why.

🗒️ Month Notes, February 2024

Lars-Christian noted that month notes work better than week notes for him due to the cadence of his life, and I think this will be true for me, too. So! I’ll be trying month notes for a little while and reevaluate if they start to feel off.

Early this month was rough, as both M and W had pinkeye. I had respiratory symptoms and felt quite miserable but managed to dodge the accompanying eye infection.

We booked a beach condo for a week vacation this year. For almost 20 years, W and I, and then M when he came along, have spent a week at a beach condo owned by W’s bonus mom Cindy and her sister. When Cindy died, W’s dad inherited her part of the condo. But he hates the beach and Cindy’s sister didn’t go down there much, and the property taxes, bills, and maintenance for the space were very expensive. So they decided to sell it, which meant we needed to find a new place to stay for our beach week.

We had hoped to go with another family and get a big house but that didn’t work out, so we found a condo at a beach a little closer to our home than the old one and have a contract to rent it for a week in June. We’ll see how it goes.

I started doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book course. (If you buy the course through that link, I will receive a commission.) I’m writing a little booklet about how to be a better player in tabletop role-playing games, because there’s a lot of advice out there for game masters but only a little for players. I set a target of 10,000 words total. This means I have a very manageable daily goal of 250 words, which so far I’ve been able to for 20 days. When I hit 5000 words early, I worried I didn’t have anything left to say on the topic. I decided to just freewrite the other 5000 words and try to make it all make sense when I’m done. I can write 250 words in 5 or 10 minutes, so this is a really doable practice that I hope to keep up even after the 40 days are over.

On Valentine’s Day, W and I had an early dinner and coffee together. We began answering The Good Trade’s 99 Questions To Ask Your Partner To Get To Know Them Better. The questions are clearly written for young couples who haven’t been together very long, not couples who have been married for 15 years and together for 25. But they were still fun to answer.

One of M’s school mates from kindergarten and preschool had a maritime-themed birthday party at a local park and that was super fun as well as being an opportunity to catch up with some of those kids' parents whom I haven’t seen in a while.

W and I saw Fat Ham at Playmakers Repertory Company. It was super fun with a stellar cast. We also went to Clue the Movie at the [Retro Film Series[(https://carolinatheatre.org/series/retro-film-series/), which is always a delight.

I had an eye exam. I learned that my eyesight has only gotten a little worse over the past year. I ordered new glasses that look almost exactly like my old ones except they have a narrower frame width so they should fit better, plus some fun prescription sunglasses.

I played Super Mario Bros 1 through 3 and started Ocarina of Time. W and I have been watching Home Economics and it’s a delight, but it makes me wonder how much TV writers know about how publishing works. I’ve been tearing my way through the Immortals After Dark series at a pace of two books a week and listening to the accompanying episodes of the [Fated Mates[(https://fatedmates.net/) podcast, plus hanging out in the Fated Mates Discord a lot.

I’m almost done organizing our pantry. I’m planning to eat down what we’ve got in the pantry, fridge, and freezer, and then try eating from the Real Easy Weekdays plan.

I think that’s about it for me for February. What have you been up to?

Finished reading: You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi 📚

This was a re-read. A bit of a time capsule from the web of 2005-2007, a web I greatly miss.

🎮 Okay people of the Internet. I’m about to start Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. See you in a couple hundred hours.

🔖 Read The Memex Method

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is [BS]…

Cory Doctorow on the value of a blog as a commonplace book.

🎮 Finished Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3. Classics all, only accessible for me due to the rewind feature in Nintendo Switch Online’s NES software. With my limited hand-eye coordination, age, and time constraints, this is the only way I was ever going to play these.

“Books always heal the hands they come through.” Leonie Dawson, 40 Days to a Finished Book (If you purchase the course through this link, I will receive a commission.)

📝 I’m doing a writing project currently and I set a goal of 10000 words but ran out of planned stuff to say at 5000, so today I added this to the document:

Because I’m not sure how to get the next 5000 words of this book out of me and because I don’t want to read anything I’ve written until I hit my 10000 words, my goal now is to just freewrite 250 words about [the project’s topic] every day. Then maybe in that 5000 words there will be something that fits with the other 5000 words that I can use when all 10000 words are outside of me and I’ve stepped away for a bit and can come back with an editor’s eye.

🔖 Read What Is Mental Load? (And Why Is It Important?) by Randi Donahue (The Good Trade).

It feels a propos that I read this sitting in the dentist’s office a couple yards away from where my kid is getting sealant on his 6-year molars.

I’m lucky to have a partner who carries a lot of this load, but list-making and note-taking also help me immensely.

📝 I wanted to respond to Lars-Christian’s post asking what the point of daily writing is. Here’s what I said:

I wanted to let you know you’re not alone. With big creative projects, so many of us hit a point where it stops feeling worthwhile.

As Austin Kleon says, problems of output are problems of input. If you feel stuck, maybe reading something new would help.

Finished reading: Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole 📚