Laura E. Price

shameless self-promotion: FUCKIT #14

New issue of FuckIt with two … things … by me!

Our theme is “We Sell Hope,” and my pieces are …

“Elpis at the Farmer’s Market,” a tale of wrangling a toddler and your own small hopes.

and …

“4am, April 2023,” which is about the place where my heart and hope reside, among other things.

***

Lots of stuff been going on here. Happily, lots of writing the past week. And submissions! Not so happily, one of our cars died and was in the shop for over a week, and the post-Ian tarp gave out so the roof was leaking like a sieve (no, we do not have the roof fixed yet, and that is yet another story, but not one I want to get into on the internet). So, you know, not great. But the car and the tarp are both repaired, now, and I’ve been working on a script for a possible podcast because why not. There’s also a Teachout story stirring in the grey matter, so fingers crossed that one decides to shamble to life because I know what y’all like. :)

Hey, I’m alive!

So a while ago, a friend on Tumblr had this sort of epiphany over Robert Smith, of the Cure. Dude’s pretty iconic if you’re of a certain age and sensibility, and at the age of 64 he is staying pretty true to his aesthetic, and said friend had a whole moment about growing older on your own terms (there’s an essay about this in an issue of FUCKIT), and as I tend to with my friends, I was like, “Awesome. Love the Cure. Love that for you.”

Smash cut to a few weeks ago, when the family settled in to watch the third season of Picard and Vadic showed up.

And I went “Oh. Oh that’s what Karen meant.”

Amanda Plummer, my beloved.

Like, here is this woman looking like she just got out of Crispin Glover’s hair salon, sitting with her feet in her captain’s chair, having the time of her life as she stalks the Titan and just does not deliver lines like she’s on Star Trek, and all I could think was I am at the height of my powers! Like, just how much fun and also how good was she? 66 years old, no vanity, totally weird, completely amazing. Also gorgeous smile.

As a newly-minted Old, she was just the best thing to see. I do feel like I’m at the height of my powers, even if my hair looks terrible at the moment.

What else has been going on? Eh, day job is day jobbing–some upheaval going on there, so I’m now in recovery mode from that. Revisions are being revisioned. Just finished a couple pieces for the next ‘zine. Watched Morbius, which was a mistake on par with watching Spawn, with only the fact that I saw Spawn in the theatre keeping The Morb ahead in the competition.

Is there a fanvid out there that has Matt Smith dancing in his closet to Matt Smith doing “Morning Routine” from the American Psycho musical? Because that should exist.

I’m also attempting to learn Welsh because the eldest BFF is learning three languages like the language nerd he is, and I thought “Surely I can learn one other language!”–conveniently forgetting that I failed Spanish and he’s the one who got me through two years of French. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not doing this for any goal past I loved Wales when I went there, I think the language is cool af, and if I ever get to go again it might be nice to stumble through a basic conversation and possibly order dinner. (Or tell someone how much I like … ironing?) It’s much more fun without the pressure of grades.

(Scott is getting tired of being called bachgen ofnadwy whenever he annoys me, though.)

Oh, and I finally read My Heart Is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper, both of which I highly recommend if you like horror and/or slasher movies. I’ll be honest, I liked both of them, but I liked the second book better–however, if I’d read it by itself, I don’t think it would have worked as well. Looking forward to the third one in the series.

Other stuff I’ve read recently and really liked:

● Dweller On the Threshold by Skyla Dawn Cameron – did not go where I was expecting, at all. Haunted house story, set during early Covid, and seriously, fuck Greg. There were some bits I didn’t think worked or got tied up like they should have, but the main character is awesome; the plot, again, did not go where I thought it was going; and this was exactly the kind of haunted house story I like. I feel like if you like my haunted houses or enjoyed Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home, you’d like this one. And if (like Scott) you wanted to like House of Leaves but just could not with the pretention, give this one a try.

● Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White – so this one, I was like, “Okay, two options here for the ending, badass or Divergent-esque” and it totally went with the badass option. Trans rep, autism rep, but this is a post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario, so bad things happen to basically everyone in the book. Read the foreward.

● The Curator by Owen King – I honestly did not expect a lot, but this was really cool. It was a little disappointing in its ending–like, there were a lot of avenues that did not get explored that I felt would have been more interesting–but the worldbuilding and the voice were really great. Reminded me a bit of Clive Barker. And there was one bit that made me think there’s some sort of Stephen King gene that Owen and Joe both got, because gross, dude. Just gross.

shameless self-promotion

This month we have a new issue of Fuckit, featuring my story, “And the Forest Sings of Secrets and the Dead.”

This one’s a fun one.

The theme for this issue is “How to Counter a Culture,” and I have always been weirdly fascinated with Puritans. Like many a young American lass, I went through a Salem witch trials phase; The Scarlet Letter was one of the books I read for English class that I actually enjoyed; “Young Goodman Brown” clearly stuck with me, as well. And while I’m not a huge Joyce Carol Oates fan, there’s that direct line from “Young Goodman Brown” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.”

And hey, religious extremists, am I right? Sinners in the hands of an angry god, yo. Name your sins to control them, God loves you so He gives you cash, the Elect: are you really saved or are you screwed?

This story largely came out of a K. Tempest Bradford workshop–I can’t remember if it was the Unwriting workshop or the Revive Your Will to Write?–but we played a writing game, and the bulk of the story came out of that exercise. The title came from me realizing that this is, essentially, your typical 16-year-old Hot Topic goth girl dressed up in Puritan garb and scribbling in her goat-bone-studded journal, devastated to be missing MCR by like 200 years.

I love teenagers. And drama.

So does Mr. Brown.

well that was fast

I’m working on edits for A Thing, so I didn’t think I’d get to blog this morning, but here we are! I have some screwing around to do, but I’d planned that for tomorrow, when I can dig in without getting interrupted by going to work.

That said, I also have no Deep Thoughts today on, like, anything. I have a doctor’s appointment later. I had some naan for breakfast. I have a meeting to go to where we’ll all be bitching about ChatGPT and the Singularity that is no doubt imminent (I joke, but ChatGPT and AI art is pissing me off so much I can’t even coherently write about it. Just–motherfucker, the goddamned gall of people; the disrespect for art and craft from whoever came up with this nonsense; askhgqoeihqoeihgaldkf.)

Here, have a link to Neil Clarke talking about the influx of bot-created fiction subs at Clarkesworld. (I have to say, if you’re looking to make a quick buck using AI, having it write short sff fiction is really not the way to go.)

Anyway, whatever, I saw that Haley Joel Osment movie: this all ends with a robot kid having mommy issues and New York under water; it’s fine.

friendship, friendship, just the perfect blendship

My kid did mic ops for the school musical last weekend, which was Anything Goes, and damn that Cole Porter wrote some catchy songs. I’ve had the soundtrack in my head on repeat for a week.

***

The eldest BFF, with whom I have been friends since the age of ten, lost his mom a week ago. She was in hospice care, so it wasn’t exactly a shock, but it’s always a surprise, I think. The when of it always seems to result in “Wait, now?” and a lot of rushing around. So he was down here, about an hour and a half north of us, paying season rates for a crappy motel room, and when she passed I talked him into coming to our house while he waited on arrangements.

By “talked” I mean I bullied him into it by saying, “For fuck’s sake, just come to my house and let my husband cook for your grieving vegetarian ass, Jesus Christ.” And, knowing how I express my love (via anger and swearing), he agreed and moved into my home office for a week.

(Apparently his wife was also bullying him from the other direction, so T and I did unintentional tag-teaming to get him here, which is awesome.)

It’s got me thinking all week about kindness, though. There’s the kindness of offering to put your BFF up for a week so he can save money and not be alone after he loses his mom, but there is also the kindness of letting your BFF give you a place to stay when you’re dealing with something inevitable and sad that she can’t fix. There’s the kindness of cooking to someone’s dietary restrictions, and the kindness of enjoying that food. I feel weirdly like I did when I was in his wedding: like, I’m grateful to be allowed to be a part of this moment with him. It’s a testament to our friendship, I guess, and a signal that over the past 40 years, I did something right to engender that trust and love.

Today is the funeral, then tomorrow he heads back north to his wife and daughter (and menagerie). I’ll miss him sitting across the table, eating oatmeal for breakfast while I write, but I know his family needs him. And I know he’s okay.

***

Still can’t figure out the horizontal line! Old school text breaks!

***

What else? I dunno, I’ve been doing pretty well on Wordle this week. Did some agent and publisher research. Sent some queries. I finished two stories in January, and now I move into revisions for the rest of this month. Things are moving slowly, but they are moving.

I’m still singing Cole Porter, though. Lahdle ahdle ahdle, quack quack quack.

… wait … things look different …

So I have created an author website out of the blog and the links and all the other stuff I had laying around here, and now I wait to see if what I have created is so abhorrent that I flee in fear like a Victorian scientist who really shouldn’t have been grave robbing if he had such delicate sensibilities, Victor; seriously you hubristic dumbass–

Anyway. Here it is, lauraeprice.com, a centralized location for all my writing stuff. I think it looks okay. Not sure if all the links work, but I’ll prod at them over the next few days and find out.

(Oh dear lord, where is my horizontal line button in block composing???)

***

(Sure, try and mess with me; we’ll go old school for section breaks.)

It looks like I managed to post here a grand total of four times last year. Yeah, 2022 was not a great year:

My father’s cancer came back, so he had chemo and radiation for the first part of the year.
The husband and kid caught Covid.
Hurricane Ian made landfall not too far from our house–we spent something like 15 hours in the eyewall of a Cat 5 hurricane, do not recommend.
We had to put the dog to sleep (she had cancer).
My mother, aunt, and cousin all caught Covid.
Also, have you looked around at the world? Florida, particularly, right now? Yeah.
Various other stressful things for people I love, not mentioned here.

So that was a lot. In the end, everyone is fine. Dad’s treatment was successful; all the Covid was mild and ended fairly quickly; we had roof damage and were without power for a full week, but no flooding and no injuries. Pup had a long and pretty good life, and we got a few good weeks with her at the end. But, as my therapist reminds me, trauma is trauma and fear is fear, and just because the outcomes were good doesn’t mean that the stress didn’t happen or have repercussions that need to be processed.

And that’s where I am, now: processing. I didn’t even realize I was shoving everything not immediately important off my plate until sometime in late December, but that’s what I started doing shortly after we got our power back on. I’ve spent the past three months writing, paying bills, and taking care of the stuff the kid needs, and that’s about it. (Oh, also beating Elden Ring. Murder in the Lands Between kept me sane this year.) I’ve spent the past month just … being quiet, writing, and thinking about what’s important in my life.

I did write in 2022. (Perhaps not surprisingly, I wrote a lot of ghost stories.) Fuckit has been a godsend for keeping me producing words for a while now, but I also wrote stories and started a novella. I even sold one of those stories (more details on that later this year!). I queried, I submitted, I did so many revisions, I went to an online conference, I journaled …

… I just didn’t do much posting here.

But here we are with the fancy new website, and I have a dedicated hour before work every day for writing (it is absolutely amazing how much progress you can make with a dedicated hour every day for writing), so we shall see if I get back into the blogging groove. It’s not my first priority (sorry, y’all, but new stories take precedence over ye olde blogge), but there are always days like this one, where there’s a lull in the task list.

So, yeah. Hi again.

Updates!

Karen recently moved FUCKIT from Etsy to Ko-Fi due to some Etsy fuckery, so all of the links in my bibliography and the promo posts are now updated. Or they should be–WP is really annoying to edit, so if you notice a broken link please feel free to let me know.
Issue 11 of FUCKIT, “Crave,” came out a while ago, and I forgot to promo it! That would be because half my family came down with Covid and then we had a hurricane. Ian, maybe you heard about it? Yeah. I got a little distracted for a few months.
Also Twitter appears to be in imminent danger of collapse, so I’m also over at Mastodon as @seldnei if you’re into that. As of this writing, I have exactly one (1) post there. I imagine I’ll be as active on Mastodon as I am on Twitter, which is to say sporadically.

And that, I think, is all I have for now! I hope you’re all doing well.

Shameless Self-Promotion!

Fuckit #10 (The Burnout is Real) is out and includes a short story by me, called “Two Old Ladies In a School Gym Lockup,” which title made the lovely husband look at me with That Look and say, “You’re pretty proud of that one, aren’t you?”

Indeed, I am.

Featuring a Glee reference and cameo appearances by my child and one of his pals, I would consider “Two Old Ladies” a future investment in your Laura E. Price collection!

This is a story where I’m sort of writing my way into the larger world of it. Sometimes you can fill a notebook with worldbuilding and character background before you get started; sometimes you have to write your way into it, poke around, feel it out. The very first Teachout story (unpublished and self-jossed at this point) was like that, which bodes well for Caro and V. In this case, I wanted to write something short and direct, just letting the characters out to play a bit, see how they sounded.

There will probably be more of these two old chicks in the future. I’m researching cunning folk, thinking about the concept of a “cozy post-apocalypse,” mulling over kindness and care as themes. I know V.’s backstory, though not much about Caro’s. I even know the next story plot!

So, if you buy this issue and read this story, you’re getting in on the ground floor. I don’t know how much will change from this early experiment to the final installment, or even in what guise or shape those things that stay will be in, but it’ll be fun finding out.

Shameless self-promotion!

Fuckit vol 9, “Actual Fucking Things” is out, and for this one I made some visual art.

I do not know why this one felt like the end of something, but it did.

(It’s not; I have made a promise to myself to submit to this ‘zine every issue unless something catastrophic happens, and since I literally sent a piece in while watching the news on Jan. 6, 2021, it’s clearly gonna have to be super fucking catastrophic to stop me.)

(That is not a dare, Universe. Just let me do my thing over here, okay?)

So, anyway, because of that ending feeling, I made some art out of my art. Also a bit of the husband’s art (he made the bottle caps). And the art we created jointly but that is now their own ongoing project (with permission from said Zweeble).

So, end of Part 1. On to Part 2. For me, anyway. Dunno about the others involved in this experiment.

What Laura’s Reading Lately: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

So earlier this week, I read this post by Seanan McGuire and picked up Tam Lin by Pamela Dean. (They knew what they were doing when they made it possible to just buy books on an iPad, man. This is a dangerous future I live in.)

I quite enjoyed it! It’s one of those books I think of as “magic around the edges.” Among Others by Jo Walton is another of those, where the magic is important but it’s not central to the story. Janet is a mix of very practical while also being … not, and I enjoyed that. She’s also a bit of a bitch, which I would guess you’d have to be to survive a Scottish Ballad in college. It probably helped that while I’m familiar with the story of Tam Lin, I’m not so familiar with it that I could figure out how the plot was going to get where I knew it was going.

There is a lot of poetry and Shakespeare quoting going on in this book; I found myself wondering if college kids would really be able to recite that much Keats, then remembered how many people I know can recite The Princess Bride. Hell, the husband and I can and have had entire conversations made up of song lyrics. I loved that, though–I miss that feeling of being immersed in literature and art, though I would rather immerse myself in something other than The Classics at this point in my life. It prompted me to watch Macbeth Friday night (also really cool, though Macbeth is my least favorite Shakespeare play). It came along at a good point in my current thinking about the kind of commonplace book I’ve got going in my planner, where I’m collecting things. Notebooks, notebooks, notebooks. I’m not going to write a sonnet every day to keep my hand in, but there are other things I want to do to feed my brain and maybe my soul.

I will say that the ebook I got needed a good copyedit. Lots of missing periods, half-sets of quotation marks, and some really obvious typos. That was seriously annoying. If you’re interested in the book, I recommend getting the physical copy.

And one thought that involves a spoiler (kind of) …