Books for kids, teens, & those who are young at heart

Category: Anecdote (Page 7 of 31)

Why Is It Taking Me So Long To Write The Second Elixir Book?

It’s been over four years since the ebook version of ELIXIR BOUND came out and over three years since the paperback version released (so forever in terms of publishing a companion novel). I’m sad to report that I’m only about 2/3 finished with the draft of the companion novel ELIXIR SAVED. And even once the draft is done, I’ll still need to revise and such. So why exactly is it taking me so long to write the second Elixir book?

Well, it’s complicated (isn’t everything!?). For starters, there are the less-than-stellar sales stats of BOUND. I wasn’t expecting a best-seller or anything, but it’s been hard to press on with a second book when the first has low sales. So, yeah, I’ve worked on other projects in between. And, no, I don’t write for the sales or the money, but the validation of selling books doesn’t suck.

There’s also life. I have kids and do freelance work (and blog). I like reading books and watching TV and getting out every once in awhile to do grown-up things. Writing novels is an important part of my life and I’ve gotten more consistent with actually, ya know, writing, but it doesn’t always take top priority.

Then there’s the fact that I’m not a very fast writer. Even when I’m in a good flow and I’ve been writing consistently, my word counts are just not that high. I’ve done a lot of things with the drafting of SAVED to try and speed up the process. I mapped out all the scenes I still need to write. I’ve set timers in order to write without editing myself for that set amount of time. I did a modified NaNoWriMo in November to try and finish this draft.

And now I’m here on the blog writing about how I’m not writing the book. Blah, blah, blah, wah, wah, wah! I know…but all those reasons I mentioned above are not the main reason why it’s taking me so long to write ELIXIR SAVED.

The real reason why it’s taking me so long to write the second Elixir book is because one of the main characters is based on my sister Kylene, who passed away at the age of 16. My intention when I wrote BOUND was to give Kylene a fantasy adventure of her own. I started the book in her POV (point of view), but it was too damn hard to write, so it ended up in the POV of her sister. It’s been almost 15 years since she passed away and it’s still hard to write this story, her story. It feels so presumptuous and impossible to do her justice in what are ultimately my words. It’s emotionally draining and terrifying.

But it’s a story I know I have to tell…eventually. It would be far worse for me to never tell it than to have a hard time doing it.

So I keep reminding myself that I’m not writing from Kylene’s POV. That’s impossible. Only she could do that. Instead, I’m writing from the POV of a character that’s inspired by Kylene. It may seem like a small distinction, but it makes all the difference in be being able to persist in drafting this novel. Though it doesn’t necessarily make it easier.

It’s a process that refuses to be rushed. I do my best to push myself to continue the task, but I’ve come to realize it’s just gonna take time. I’ll keep slowly working on it (while I also work more efficiently on other novels) and one day it will be done. Well, as done as any book ever is.

Thank you to anyone who’s read ELIXIR BOUND and/or inquired about a follow up book. It coming…one of these years!

An Open Letter To Congress On Family Planning And Healthcare

Dear Congress (and those of you reading my blog),

I have grave concerns about the message you are sending to women about our ability to control our reproductive futures and our capacity for family planning. Each woman has her own reproductive journey, many with far more obstacles than I have had, but I think it’s important for all of us to share what we face when trying to make reproductive choices for ourselves and our families.

My family planning has been very successful to date. When I first started birth control, I went to Planned Parenthood for my ob-gyn services. They provide affordable, convenient healthcare for women, and it was a good option for me. In addition to birth control and preventative care (like yearly pap smears), they provide life-saving services. I had an abnormal pap-smear and had to have a cervical biopsy done (which turns out is way more common than I realized). Luckily, I was given a clean bill of health after the biopsy and only had to follow up with more frequent pap-smears for a few years.

Oral contraceptives worked for me for many years. I had to be on a more expensive, low-hormone version because the higher-hormone ones caused me to pass out. This was before birth control was covered under the ACA. So even though I had decent insurance through my employer, I was paying around $600 out of pocket for birth control each year. Again, I was lucky because I was able to afford that for the 10 or so years I was on it.

Then when I decided to start trying to have children, I went off the pill and used condoms for several months in order to give my system time to regulate itself. After that I got pregnant with my first child pretty quickly. I nursed my oldest child for 20 months, so I opted not to have any hormone-related birth control and relied on condoms. When it was time to try for child number two, once again, I got pregnant pretty much immediately after not using any form of birth control. Similar circumstances of nursing, condoms, and conception occurred for baby number three, who is due to arrive this summer.

That is a very brief account of 15+ years of active family planning. I could tell you about the time I was on vacation and forgot condoms, and the only ones I could find to purchase were less-than-ideal. Or about the first pregnancy test I took when the line was so faint, I wasn’t sure if it was positive or not and ended rereading the instructions and searching the Internet in order to determine that it was, in fact, a positive result. Or about how my first child was born 17 days early during a hurricane and how my second was born within a few hours of my water breaking and I barely made it to the hospital in time.

I also haven’t mentioned my marital status thus far. I don’t believe it’s Congress’s business what my marital status is. I will tell you that my partner has been an active part of our family planning and has supported my decisions, and that has been very important to me. Nor have I mentioned my education, which should also be irrelevant when talking about adequate healthcare.

While the actual reproduction part of having or not having children has been relatively easy, the childcare part is where things got a little trickier. I worked full-time for a year after my first child was born. I was lucky (again, notice how much I’m using that word) to have a flexible schedule where I could work from home several days a week and I had family to help out with childcare. Then there came a time when that arrangement was not working anymore. The responsibilities of working full-time, doing freelance work, and caring for my child became too hard.

When I looked into daycare, it would have taken somewhere in the range of 70-90% of my income to pay for it, depending on where and how often I sent my child. Though I had never anticipated leaving my full-time job to be full-time caregiver, that was the best option for my family.Living solely on my partner’s income has proven to be challenging both financially (though we’re certainly not destitute) and emotionally. I do not like having to depend on someone else for financial stability, and that feeling has nothing to do with my trust or confidence in my partner. It has to do with being a grown women and not being financially independent. I’ve had a job since I was 9 years old (my first job was delivering newspapers), and while I still do freelance work and write, the tiny amount of money I take in is almost negligible.

Back before the 2016 election (when we decided to try for baby number three), I was hopeful for better and more affordable healthcare coverage for me and my family. I was hopeful for a chance–or at least a discussion–at universal preschool.  I was hopeful about sending my children to college in the future with none of us having to go into huge amounts of debt. I was hopeful for the country.

Throughout my working life, the cost of healthcare–first under my own policy when I worked full-time and now under my partner’s–has continued to rise. The ACA has certainly not been a perfect solution, but we were at least guaranteed no out-of-pocket costs for preventative care (and there are a lot of well-visits the first few years of a child’s life), maternity coverage, birth control (it sure would have saved me a lot of money had this been the case when I was on birth control), and coverage for pre-existing conditions (as pregnancy is considered a pre-existing condition). And there was the hope that the country would continue to move in a direction of more affordable healthcare for all.

Now there’s a new Republican healthcare bill on the table, one that doesn’t guarantee all of what I mentioned above. It’s a step in the opposite direction. It cuts services and raises premiums for those who are the most needy (of which I am not). Some Republicans have made it clear, they don’t think men should have to contribute to prenatal care. Some also think that maternity coverage should not be a given under healthcare. What happens to the women and their unborn children who will no longer be able to afford proper prenatal and delivery services? What about babies that end up in neonatal care? How are families going to pay for that?

All this from a political party that stands on a pro-life platform. A party that has continued to chip away at funding for Planned Parenthood, even though it’s well-established that ZERO federal funding goes toward abortions. And what happens when access to women’s healthcare services provided by places like Planned Parenthood is eliminated? Women die. In Texas, where resources for women’s healthcare have been under attack for years, the maternal death rate has skyrocketed.

The message I am getting from the Republican Congress is that they are pro-birth, but they are against giving women options for family planning and they are leaving families out to dry when it comes to actually having to raise those children. Some of them probably even use religion to justify the belief that it’s not a woman’s right to abstain from having sex with her husband, yet they have no desire to offer birth control options or even care for a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Pro-life is a misnomer.

My partner’s insurance is up for renewal in June, a month before our third child is due to be born. What happens to us if our new insurance doesn’t cover maternity care? Delivering a baby in a hospital is expensive without health insurance (and sometimes not so cheap depending on what kind of insurance you have), expensive enough to put this middle-class family in debt if we have to pay out-of-pocket for it all. I’ve never felt so anxious about the expense of birthing a child, and I didn’t expect this when we planned for this baby.

The message I’m getting from the Republican Congress is that they don’t care about my ability to family plan or to raise my family. They want to make the insurance companies more profitable. They want to control what I do with my body under their terms, but they don’t want to give me the tools to do that in a healthy, affordable way. They want to provide tax assistance for the wealthy to get healthcare, but they don’t care if poor people can afford to be healthy. (And I’m not even getting into other anti-family policies here, like barring same-sex couples from adopting.)

Is that the message they want to send? If it’s not, I hope they get their act together and start sending a better one with their words, actions, and proposed laws. If it is the message they want to send, then I hope we all (women and men both) vote them out of office in the next elections. Because I believe in a country where the health and well-being of women and children are some of the most important values we can support. I think our lawmakers should believe that and make laws accordingly.

Baby News: Meet The Gentleman!

One can hardly compete with Beyonce’s Instagram announcement that set the Internet on fire earlier this month, so it is with much humbler origins that I announce my own baby news! Baby boy #3 is on the way, expected delivery in July, though my boys never seem to arrive as expected (see The Boy’s hurricane birth story and The Prince’s precipitous one).

We haven’t decided on a name yet (The Boy has made many suggestions thus far), and we generally don’t share the kiddos’ actual names here, but we do have an Internet nickname: The Gentleman.

So far this pregnancy has consisted of too many days of colds (whose idea was it to get pregnant when your oldest is in kindergarten and being exposed to all those wonderful germs?) and lots of morning sickness. But *knocks on wood* I think we’re finally past the morning sickness at least, and despite the illnesses, everything seems to be going well.

I will definitely not be sharing any bump pictures online, and all those sonogram pretty much look the same. So I’ll leave you with a recent pic of the boys and a teaser that I will be sharing some book news here on the blog next week!

The Highly Charged Political Environment We Are In

I know I’ve been quiet on the blog lately. In part because I’ve been making it a priority to be noisy in real life and the blog has taken a backseat to that. But it’s not just that.

This blog–my Observation Desk–has always served as a safe space for me to share my thoughts. I’ve pointedly strayed away from highly charged political and controversial topics. Not necessarily censoring myself, but being careful in order to keep this a safe space…for myself and for those of you who actively participate here (and I’m incredibly thankful for all of you who take time out of your day to read my posts). It’s always served as one of my favorite creative spaces, and I’ve protected it to keep it positive because that’s what I’ve needed from it. I’ve needed to feel safe here in order to create.

I’ve seen how people (particularly woman and POC) can be harassed and attacked on the Internet for their thoughts and beliefs. In the past, I’ve protected myself and this space from that. I’ve had that privilege when others haven’t. I recognize that.

But right now, in the U.S.’s current political climate, everything has become political. Literature and art have always been political, but now the very places we shop, the causes we choose to support and donate to, whether or not we speak up..it’s all political. This is new to me, though I know this idea of life in general not being political is not new to others.

So I’m confronting my own decision to keep this a “safe” space. I’m confronting and recognizing my own privilege in ways I never have before. I’m listening and learning from people who do not have the luxury of having a privilege like mine, and I’m believing what they say. I’m challenging the lawmakers from my state and beyond to stand up for what is right by making phone calls, writing emails, standing with others, and voicing my beliefs in a way I never have before.

My perspective has shifted so much in the last year. I see the world in a different, often scarier, light than I used to. But this world that feels so new to me is an old world for many who have been fighting oppression and racism for their whole lives. I don’t always know the best way to act or react, and I have to fight my default to stay quiet and think that this isn’t my fight and to wonder what my voice can possibly bring to the table. I’m not always successful in my attempts, but I’m learning and listening, always listening.

I’m not saying any of this because I’m turning this blog into something new or different. Having a creative space and keeping my sanity enough to be able to create stories for kids is important. It’s always been a political act (as I said earlier, I believe all literature is), and the urgency of its importance is even more evident to me now.

The Observation Desk will still be a place to share creative thoughts and works, but I couldn’t ignore this part of me that was staying quiet here (I get a lot more political on Twitter @KatieLCarroll if you’re interested in checking that out). It felt dishonest, like I was keeping a secret, even though I wasn’t necessarily keeping it a secret (if you know me in real life, my political thoughts are certainly not a secret). So I may delve into that part of myself here more often.

With all that is going on in this country and around the world, it’s still going to be a big year for me personally and as an author. I’ll be sharing more about both of those aspects of my life here on this blog. I’ll continue to bring you guest posts, lots more #InkRipples each month, and pictures of the boys. This blog will continue to focus on creativity and books, no doubt about that. But now you know there’s been a lot more on my mind lately, and I’m happy to share that part of me with you (even though it feels like a messy, unfinished part of myself).

So stay tuned to learn more about my creative works-in-progress and the work-in-progress that is Katie as well!

Merry Christmas and a Trip to the Mall Santa

The boys have never had much interest in sitting on Santa’s lap. In fact, The Boy had absolutely no desire to meet Santa for the first few years of his life. The Prince has been pretty indifferent to the whole situation. Up until this year!

The other day we were at the mall (really just at Target–which is mostly the only reason we go to the mall–and then we decided to get a hot pretzel). We could see down into the spot where Santa was all set up. The boys were like, “Let’s go see Santa!” There was no one else there, so I was like, “Sure.”

Of course I ended (over)paying for the photo, but I think it came out quite nice…shark hoodie and all. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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