Month: September 2021

“How’s the Writing Going?”

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Let’s be clear: asking me this question even in the best of times is assault. Because we all know that you don’t really care how the writing is going. You’re just being polite. It’s up there with “What are you working on?” You don’t care. It’s just a polite question you ask before launching into a long story about your much more interesting life.

However, in the current bad times, asking me this question is now felony assault. Because it ain’t going great. And I don’t want to talk about that with someone who doesn’t actually care.

I was struggling with my writing before this endless panini, before the routine exasperation of telling people to put their masks on, before the constant stress of being forever understaffed at the library. I’ve been struggling for a while and baby, it ain’t necessarily getting better.

Blogging consistently is a challenge. That I’ve managed to put out two blog posts a week for two different sites for the last couple of months is nothing short of a miracle. Writing 1,000 word flash fiction stories for Patreon has been the extent of my fiction writing outside of NaNo in the past few years. And this year’s NaNo is looming and I’m looking at it with dread because I don’t know if I can do it. I’ve tried everything to get my fiction flow back and the dam is still in place, only letting through a trickle.

I’m still getting ideas, though not at the same pace that I used to. Just the other day I got a random idea for something that would be a fun film script. I jotted it down and I hope that one day I find enough mojo to at least outline it.

I miss fiction writing. I miss that buzz, that sensation of getting lost in my work, surfacing an hour later like I’d been swimming with mermaids and that first gasp of air reminds me that I’m human and I’ve just done something incredible. I’ve had fleeting bits of that, but nothing like it used to be. It makes me sad.

It’s not like I’m not writing at all or that I don’t like the writing that I am doing. I like doing the blog posts. I’m rediscovering my joy in that. I like doing the Rerun Junkie posts over at aka Kiki Writes, even if they can be a bit involved. I’d love to do a pop culture book one day. I really would. And I like running off at the mouth here about whatever. I like doing the scripts for the library’s podcast. Podcasting in general has become a big way I spend my time now. There’s not as much writing involved in Book ’em, Danno, but there is some.

It’s not like I’m not living up to my name. Kiki is still writing. I’m just not writing what I thought I’d be writing. I’m not being KikiWrites the way I thought I’d be. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe this is all part of the evolution of my writing existence and one day I’ll get to come back to fiction writing as my main thing. But for now, it’s not.

So, how’s the writing going?

Not the way I’d planned.

But it’s going okay.

I Regret to Inform You That I Have Become More Visible

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Bi visibility Day is September 23rd, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to inform you all that I’ve become more unapologetically and visibly queer in the past few years. Am I to the point of being in your face and cramming it down your throat yet? No. But I’m working on it.

One thing about my sexuality is that even though I’ve always been very secure in myself, I haven’t always been secure in my place in the queer community. I’ve talked about that before. Being bi has been a very passive thing for me. However, in the past few years, I’ve sort of stepped into being bi as a verb. Claiming that label a little more loudly. Including myself in the conversation about queer people, saying “we” instead of “them” because I’ve felt more comfortable claiming my space in the queer community.

Kids, I even got myself a flag.

I’ve actually had it for a while, but this year, for Pride, I hung it up in my room. I decided it was time.

I always thought of myself as never having really been in the closet, but I’m not so sure that was the case. Maybe the door to my closet was always open. Maybe I just snuck out instead of busted down the door. I know I’ve been very quiet about my sexuality as to not make too many waves with family and friends.

But the older I get, the less fucks I have to give, and my hearing is getting worse, so as a consequence I’m getting louder. Bolder. Harder to ignore. I’m working my way up to ugly Aloha shirt loud.

Even more interesting is that the more I connect with the online queer community, which exposes me to all sorts of new takes on sexuality and gender, the more comfortable I get with my own sexuality and gender and the less I need to hold fast to any strict definitions of the labels. Yes, the labels are important to me, but they’re also malleable.

For example, I’ve always maintained that I’m sexually and romantically attracted to men and women (which includes trans men and trans women), but had yet to be attracted to anyone who identified as agender or gender fluid or non-binary. I didn’t rule it out. It just hadn’t happened to me up.

Well, guess what? It finally happened! I found myself crushing on someone who identified as non-binary. It was a quick thing, but still. Groovy. Maybe that will be the only they/them it ever happens with, but the point is that it happened and it counts and that means it could happen again and that’s fab.

But it also gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate my sexuality. Did this mean I was still bi? Or would pansexual be a better fit for me? I might have only thought about it for five minutes, but it was still a valid question. In the end, I decided that bi was the label for me. It’s the one I’m most comfortable with. I just adjusted the label to better fit myself.

I now say that I’m sexually attracted to myself and others.

I think that covers it.

Sometimes I Forget Myself: Fat Ass Edition

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I spent this past summer with my hair dark pink. I was bored, needed a change, and it had been ages (literally about 20 years) since my hair had been pink. Seemed like a no-brainer to me. And I enjoyed the summer with my dark pink hair.

Here’s the thing.

I often forgot that my hair was pink.

Like, I would just go along, doing the day-to-day things in my life, and not once think about my hair being pink. It just didn’t occur to me. Or it would occur to me later, like when I went to lunch with my great-uncle and cousins and then after I got home realized that I had pink hair the whole time. Nobody said anything, of course. It might have been a couple of decades, but they’d seen me with pink hair before. But still, I didn’t think about it at the time because there I was on a Sunday afternoon, having lunch with some family I hadn’t seen for a while.

The same phenomenon occurs with my fat ass as well.

I often go through my day-to-day life forgetting that I’m fat. This is my body and I inhabit it and I move it around and do the things and it just doesn’t occur to me that I’m fat. I’m just me. Existing. Doing stuff. Being. This is my reality. I often forget how big I am. I’m just living life.

It’s a strange thing when I can pontificate about how society abhors a fatty and logically know that I am judged by my size, but also, I’m so accustomed to living life in this body that the bulk of it doesn’t occur to me. I know how to work all this girth. Do I go jogging? Absolutely not. But do I do HIIT workouts? Yeah. Do I do yoga? Yeah. Do I still belly dance? Sometimes. Am I still flexible? Yeah, though I have my less-than days. Can I work an eight hour shift on my feet, busting a butt cheek to get all of my work done? Absolutely. And I do it all without thinking too much about my size.

Actually, I think more about my persistent patellar tendonitis than I do my weight. Probably because the pain from that affects how I go through my days more than my size does.

And I do a whole lot of other things too without thinking about my fat ass: grocery shopping, hanging out with friends, talking shit with my coworkers, reading a book, playing with the stray cats we’ve adopted, visiting with family, working on podcasts, eating, drinking, breathing….the list is endless. I do all sorts of things without thinking about my double digit pants size.

You’d be surprised how much fat people DON’T think about being fat, how much they don’t think about food or dieting, how much they don’t spending every waking moment pining for a smaller existence to better fit into a thin-obsessed society. Because they’re busy doing other stuff, regular life stuff, and they forget themselves in that.

Look at it this way: Once you get used to driving a land yacht, you don’t think too much about parallel parking that beast.

You know how to drive it.

I Am Not Tolerant

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

You know how that roundabout goes.

You call out some jackass with a bigot complex for their blatant hate-braying and they get cute and say “You’re not being very tolerant.”

Well, joke’s on you, sport. I’m not tolerant.

Tolerance implies putting up with something or someone. But I’m not putting up with a bigot’s shit anymore than I’m putting up with, say, a trans person’s existence. I am not tolerant.

I am accepting.

I accept a trans person’s existence. I accept a non-white person’s reality of dealing with racism. I accept my fellow bisexuals’ experience of bi-erasure. I accept an immigrant’s existence. I accept a non-bianary person’s pronouns. I accept the realities that the poor in this country experience. I accept the need for body autonomy. I accept the existence and experiences of the disabled. I accept the neurodivergent. I accept furries.

I also accept those who choose to be bigoted. I accept those who invoke a religious exemption from kindness. I accept those who deny their privilege while also wielding it in a harmful way. I accept those who prioritize their convenience and comfort over the health and well-being of others.

And I treat them all accordingly.

I accept the reality and truths that are presented to me.

Because I am accepting, not tolerant.

I accept that you want to be a hateful waste of space and I will not allow you in mine. I accept that you had a wide variety of personalities to choose from and you chose to be as unpleasant as possible and that choice is incompatible with my personality. I accept that you chose to be a piece of shit and I will scrape you from my shoe as needed.

Because I am accepting, not tolerant.

I don’t have to put up with your “opposing views”. I don’t have to put up with your wrong-ass opinions. I don’t have to put up with your conspiracy theories and mangled facts and warped religious beliefs and anti-science screeds typed up on a science machine. I don’t have to put up with your hate and violence and general tomfuckery.

I don’t have to put up with any of it.

Because I’m accepting, not tolerant.

Keep that in mind the next time you want to get cute.

How to Library

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A tweet talking about all of the good things that libraries do as a publicly funded entity which is probably why people talk about them being obsolete in an effort to be rid of them (I’m paraphrasing the tweet by a lot, but that was the gist) reminded me that I actually have inside knowledge about this that I could disseminate to the masses. Or the readers of this blog. Whatever.

For those of you just tuning in, my current day job is working as a part-time library clerk at my local small town library. Now, I’m sure you think it’s a great job, especially for a writer, to have because it’s a small town, so it can’t be that busy, right? How much work do you actually do? Especially part-time.

Kids, let me tell you…there is a lot that goes into making a library work.

Obviously, there’s checking out items, checking in items, and shelving them. I do a lot of that. It’s a basic of the job. And here’s some real insider knowledge: we all sing the alphabet when we’re shelving stuff. Always. Everyone. My boss is a librarian, master’s degree and all, and she still has to run through the alphabet while shelving. Think you know the alphabet? Work in a library. I guarantee you don’t. It’s amazing.

Other things we have to do every shift include getting the books out of the book drops outside (I curse the people who return half the children’s floor that way) and we get items on the pull list, which are items requested either by our patrons or patrons from other libraries in our system. Yes. You can order books from other libraries if your library doesn’t have it. Pretty neat.

But in order to have access those items they first of all have to be bought and then catalogued and then processed because yeah, this shit just doesn’t come in ready to go.

Cataloging involves putting each item in the system and then barcoding it. After that’s done, it has to be processed. What’s processing? Well, every library has their own way, but this is how we do it.. First of all, everything has to have the appropriate labels; spine labels, obviously, but also series labels on books and audiobooks; DVD’s, Blu-rays, and CDs have to have the appropriate color coded stickers for genre, as well as other relevant stickers; everything gets stamped or stickered as the library’s property; and then the books get covered. Which means laminating them. Paperbacks get hard laminate, which has to be measured, cut, and stuck on by hand. Hardbacks get soft laminate, which means the dust jackets are put through the laminator, cut, taped, creased, put back on the book, and taped down. Does this sound like a lot? Well, yeah, it kinda is. But we’re not done! Because after all that (or at some point during the process; depends on who’s doing it), everything has to be RFID’d. What’s that? That’s the system we use to check things in and out. So everything gets a special sticker and it’s encoded with that item’s information.

As an aside, we switched over to this system during the early months of the pandemic. I, along with three other of my coworkers, tagged every single item in the whole library. It took us about three months.

Anyway. That’s just a small portion of what my coworkers and I do on any given day, and that’s just the “books ‘n’ stuff” work. Because even my small town library provides the community with a lot of resources and services.

Like…

We’ve got an outreach program so people who are homebound or at the nursing home can get items. We’ve got three different book clubs. Do you like ebooks? Audiobooks? Movies? Music? We’ve got apps for that. Yeah, you can borrow items from our digital collection, too. It was a big hit when were shut down in March/April/May of 2020. Also, remember how I said you can order books from other libraries. You can do that online, too.

We’ve got free programs and workshops. From teaching kids how to make hovercrafts to teaching adults how to effectively compost. We made pillows for the local nursing home, painted bottles, made tiny art, made Mother’s Day and Father’s Day presents, made friendship bracelets, taught people how to make pollinator gardens, and had kids do their own Coke and Mentos rockets. There’s crafts and skills and lectures and all sorts of things we provide for patrons and members of the community to do and learn.

Speaking of programs, do you need space for yours? How about a party or gathering? Or just a quiet room to study in? Yeah, we’ve got all of those available for reservation. And again, you don’t have to have a library card to use them, but a few of our rooms do come with a fee.

We provide free computer access and free WiFi. You don’t have to have a library card to use it. You can get copies done on the cheap and you can send a fax for a dollar a page (it’s going back to 1994 after all). We provide free notary services as well. Do you need something laminated? We can do it for a reasonable price.

We can help you find whatever information you’re looking for. We’ve got a list of e-resources for patrons who are looking for work or housing or legal help, etc. We can also help you check your email, print things, use Google, and other basic computer/internet tasks. We can also probably point you in the right direction if we don’t know the answer to your question. And we rec books, movies, music, and TV shows just for the hell of it.

My library has the Library of Things, which allows you to check out things like Rokus, WiFi hotspots, an Amazon Fire Stick, and even ukuleles. We also have a seed library where you can “check out” seeds.

We also have an extensive archive collection relating to the library, the city, and the surrounding areas and people can actually request items to look at in person. They’re also frequently put out on display and my boss talks about them in a video series she does on Facebook and YouTube.

Oh, yeah. We’re on the socials. During the lockdown, we did a major pivot to video for the kiddie story times, which are now happening in person again. We’ve also got a website that’s positively loaded with info and reference links. And we’ve got a podcast that you should totally listen to. Not just because I run it (which is a good enough reason), but because it provides a lot of insight into what the library has and what it does. Also, I’ve done some cool local history episodes that are quite murder-y.

In fact, I just completed a series of episodes in which my coworkers tell you a little more about what they do at the library and how that translates to benefits to our patrons and our community.

And that’s just my little library. There are other libraries all over the place doing similar or bigger and better things.

So check them out! And support them! Libraries are good!

And return your shit on time.

***

If you’d like to listen to my library’s podcast, you can find it on Anchor as well as bunch of other platforms. Check the links there to find the one you like best.