Questions to Ask Adela (a short story)
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a short story published… To be honest, I was second-guessing whether I still remembered how to write a damn short story. 😭 I’m excited to tell you that my story QUESTIONS TO ASK ADELA is now online at Flash Fiction Magazine! 🎉 If you want to jump right to it, here’s the link. 📗 If you want more info about my writing process, read on. ✍️ And if you don’t care about any of this crap 💩, then why did you get this far into the post!?
A steaming pile of new features for Neurotic Stix Pro!
I’m not sure how many of y’all know that I have a mobile app in the iOS App Store, but I do. It’s called Neurotic Stix Pro and it’s even more neurotic now because I added a bunch of features to the latest update. 🎉🎉🎉 The app lets you create quirky, twitchy, digital stickers with your own captions using more than 40 different templates… Now it has more stickers, more colors, more options, and many other neurotic things. It’s free to try, but I charge a few bucks for the full version. It’s mostly a labor of love, though I also wouldn’t complain if I made a bit more money on this laborious love. 👩🎨❤️ Here are the kinds of things you can easily create with the app 👇👇👇
where yuvi talks about the video games he played in 2022
(CONTENT WARNING: This post is about video games. And it also involves a lot of parentheticals!) (Like, A LOT!) 🫠🕹️😵💫
So among other activities this year (like publishing a novel and blogging and YouTube and migraines), this was the year where I went more deeply into video games (and ventured outside of the Nintendo Switch). Specifically, I got an Xbox Series S (i.e. the cheapest of the new generation of consoles) and Xbox Game Pass (i.e. sorta like Netflix for gaming). During nights when I was too angst-ridden to sleep or get stuff done (i.e. A LOT), I played games. When looking at the list, it's a little bit alarming how many games I played! (How the hell did I have time for all these damn games when I didn't have time to clean my room!?) 🕹️
Prompts: A Simple Storytelling Exercise (that I'm giving away for free)
For some context, I need to explain two things. First of all, for my day job (as a technical writer), someone asked me to facilitate an icebreaker exercise for 80 people (both online and onsite). Separate from that, I volunteered to facilitate a creative writing workshop. For both of these exercises, I started gathering all my favorite writing prompts, especially the ones that could also be conversation starters. I decided to create a web page on my site that displayed random prompts to get people telling stories. The exercises worked well enough that I decided to leave this page up for anyone to use.
a few more ways to spot a yuvi in the wild before he goes into hiding in his attic…
If you know me at all, it’s probably obvious at this point that I’m an introvert. Mostly, I prefer to hide in my attic, and only communicate with the world through YouTube, Zoom, or some other well-bounded digital method. But I do have this exhibitionist streak alongside the introvertedness. It’s a complicated cocktail of angst and delight, but I do love to chat with actual humans in actual bookstores about actual books.
How do you promote a thing when the world is collapsing around you?
Oh. I hope you weren't expecting me to answer that question. This isn't one of those "smart advice" or “good insight” blog posts. 💡 This is more of a I-don't-know-the-answer-and-I-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-I’m-doing-and-I'm-trying-to-write-my-way-through-it situations. 😱🤯
On Writing with Chronic Migraines
My essay on chronic pain and creativity is featured in Catapult Magazine this week. 🤕 Here’s an excerpt: “It’s hard to explain chronic pain to someone who doesn’t experience it, the way the physical pain blurs together with the psychological toll it takes. I mean, the actual pain is plenty painful—sometimes so bad that it’s hard to want to live. But a lot of the time it’s more about the accumulation of the pain. It’s like listening to that leaf blower outside that isn’t too annoying for one minute but grows maddening after two hours. It’s hard to imagine that the leaf blower will ever stop. Or when it does stop for a moment, you’re just brooding, worrying, waiting for that asshole to start it up again.” 🤕 To read more about my chronic pain, and my chronic creativity, and my dislike of leaf blowers, click the link in this post.
The Spectrum of Metafiction (Interview in Bomb Magazine)
Wendy J. Fox, author of the fabulous short story collection WHAT IF WE WERE SOMEWHERE ELSE interviewed me for Bomb Magazine. We talked about tech lingo, parenting, metafiction, emoji vs. emoticons, writing about a writer as a way to write, and a bunch of other fun and crooked topics.
some honest and chaotic thoughts about creativity and book launch week (with A LOT of pictures)
So I did a reading at historic Powell's Books on Tuesday — the day of my book launch. But I also decided to use the days leading up to the book launch to push out all kinds of crazy creative things. I’m not positive that I can come to a grand conclusion about what this all means. But I’ll try, and at the very least, I can meander us through a picture-filled story that involves books and apps and social media and videos and music and essays and podcasts, and then I can land us (in the final postscript) inside a messy gazpacho filled with guilt and passion and triumph. Who wouldn’t want to go on that kind of adventure!?!?!? 🎢🛼🚌
Book Launch Day!
🤯😵💫 OK. Holy shit. My book is officially out the door today! I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS with Red Hen Press. I can't believe the day has arrived. I can't tell you how many people I should thank for this. It takes a community to write a book as far as I can tell. Thank you to all the dear people. For more info about the book, check out my book page. (And the latest episode of the Neurotic Tornado 😫🌪 podcast covers stage fright, book launch nerves, and a bizarre peeing nightmare. We also invite Jackie Shannon Hollis to talk about her public speaking experience with her memoir, This Particular Happiness out with Forest Avenue Press.)
#️⃣🔢 In the meantime, here are some crazy statistics about writing I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS for you to ponder:
Publishing Purgatory & Pants
I've lost my focus. I have a book coming out in two months and I have no idea where to put my attention. It feels like I'm doing nothing and everything at once. I’m working on too many things but don’t know which things are the most important.
So let me list out the pieces of my messy month and see if I can come out the other side with some insight that could be useful for anyone, regardless of what kind of month you've had…
miscellaneous thoughts about my insecurities with publishing things
A few months ago, I posted about how I missed blogging. I wrote it as if blogging was dead, as if I wasn't writing those words on MY OWN BLOG... It wasn't until I got some feedback (thank you, Betsy! 😜) along the lines of, "so... why not keep blogging!?" that I realized there's nothing stopping me from posting things in just the way I once loved to do.... Nothing stopping me, except for me. But ME is a pretty difficult force to overcome. I’m so nervous about saying something the wrong way, or someone reading it the wrong way, or regretting something I say… 😱 To the point where I freeze up at the keyboard when I’m writing something specifically meant for a blog or for social media. It all feels a lot scarier and more complicated these days…
the blog experience
I've been thinking about blogging. Not about blogging today, but just what it felt like to blog a bloggy blog post fifteen years ago. Until 2009, I had a blog on blogger.com and it was magical, just how easy it was to put words down in a post. Not quite a journal entry, and not quite journalism, but just this informal way to tell your story. Putting out these breadcrumbs for people to follow, to learn more about you, and whatever you were obsessed with that week. And then, the next week (or the next day, or the next month), you could continue along that trail with another post. You didn't have to think about any fancy website stuff or submitting your crazy consciousness for publication on some magazine's website. It felt so fresh and free.
Y'all know by now that I don't blog regularly anymore. I average about one post every two months, and typically I'm just using the post to point to some other video or project. I don't know when or why those chatty blog posts stopped for me. And in the meantime, blogging has become a less cool thing to do. Maybe because social media has filled that need. But I never got comfortable posting the same kind of content on social media. Social media feels so chaotic and noisy — and everybody's voices are all smashed together. The blog was my own stage to tell my own story in my own way. And then I could happily go visit your blog and listen to your unique voice on your unique stage.
I miss the blog experience.
the blog post that is boringly about this blog
If you're not reading this blog post right now then my migration from WordPress to Squarespace has failed. Oh, wait, I think I'm doing this backwards. I should've warned you earlier. Oh, wait, I actually shouldn't have warned you at all, because I know for a fact that you're reading this right now. What I should have done was warn the people who were left behind! …I'm clearly not doing this blog thing right.
a note about anti-racism
I don't usually talk about current events in this venue, but I've woken up to this need to get more educated and engaged when it comes to dealing with racism…
a story about mistakenly writing (and publishing) a novel as a way to take a break from writing another novel
I recently got news that my book (my second novel!) is going to be published by Red Hen Press. I’m totally excited to work with such a great press—I've been following them for a long time, and most recently I loved reading Sugar Land by Tammy Lynne Stoner. But this isn't about me awkwardly showing off about my book and this press, at least not yet. Today I want to look at the process of actually writing a book in the middle of a busy life with family, a day job, side projects, whining, and chronic pain. When a book goes out in the world and you're holding it (or its digital equivalent) in your hands, it's easy to think that writing the book was just this one coherent thing the author had to do, but writing a book is chaotic and confusing and has to somehow fit inside a busy, messy life. And I enjoy (for some reason) analyzing how to jam a writing process into this life. I don't have a magic formula, but I have a process (sorta), and thought it would be fun(ish) to talk about it.
Announcing Neurotic Stix Pro
...Today (or maybe yesterday) I'm releasing Neurotic Stix Pro, which is a fully-fleshed-out app that lets you write your own captions on animated stickers. You just don't know what it's like to apologize to someone properly until you've tried to apologize with a poorly-drawn-poorly-animated sticker using your own pathetic words! You can send them from the included Messages sticker pack, or even share them from the app to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email or however you prefer to apologize to people. The neurotic possibilities are endless! 😱🌪
Darth Vader and the Lemon
A short story of mine (Darth Vader and the Lemon) was just published in Carve Magazine. It’s a story about the complexities of step-parenting, and it’s full of bad metaphors about Star Wars. The oldest draft of this story that I can find on my computer goes all the way back to May of 2009. That’s more than 10 years ago! In those first few years...
Say the Thing: A pretty dumb text-to-speech app
Hi! I mistakenly made an app amidst all my problems. It's free. If you use an iPad or iPhone for writing and you like having the computer read what you write, then grab this app. Learn more about my app and my problems with this blog post...
Get your free neurotic stickers while supplies last!
OK. That part about the limited supply is a lie. But the free part is true. For now. Let me sum up: I just released an app called Neurotic Stix for iPhones and iPads. This app contains over 25 twitchy, animated, neurotic stickers to express how you feel when you're not feeling so good about yourself. Right now, they're free! Click "Read on" to find out more... at least you'll stop thinking about the dumpster fire of this US election cycle for five seconds.