Carey Burns

I didn't get to wear a tiara Saturday, but I had a candy buffet for my birthday and it was awesome!  Pixy Stix, Snickers, Fireballs, Smarties, Dove eggs, Butterfingers, Whoppers...and that ain't the half of it!  We still have two huge bowls filled with sugary goodness and I hope they never run dry.  Next year, I'm doing it again! It was so hard coming back to work after a week off, but I've been keeping myself busy non-stop so the days go by quicker.  I've been encouraged to write more teasers about our programs and activities and it feels good to be creative at work.  I wish more of my colleagues had the same encouragement.  Imagine what we could accomplish!

I think my 20K challenge for this week was a bit...optimistic.  I neglected to factor in real life, which tends to get in the way of writing a lot.  Anywho, I have made progress by finishing a short story, nearing the end of another, and creating a scene in my vampire novel where my main character meets...wait for it...Vlad Dracula.  The real, historical Dracula, with impalements and all.  I've been doing quite a bit of research on Hungary and Romania and well, it all just seemed to fit.  We'll see how it rolls in the final draft, of course. For a while I've been wanting to make PMC Silver jewelry but lacked a kiln to fire it in.  Since there's no kiln in my future, I enrolled in a continuing education class and made 2 pendants plus a bead.  I get to pick up the fired pieces next Tuesday and brush/polish them.  Once I get them home I will definitely post pictures--even if they look like silver crap. Taking the class has given me a few inspirat...

One day a year I get to be the Queen and that is today.  38 is looking great and there's cake in the fridge.  They call it "Cake for Two" but let's get real.  It is "Cake for Me" and I'm just biding my time until I can snarf it all down. I worked on "Hunting the Boogie Man" all day yesterday and shall get back to it after lunch.  There will also be some action on my caterpillar story and I'm thinking of changing the title.  "Forced Migration" doesn't quite fit now that I know why they were moving.  I've slapped up a couple reviews on Amazon:  one for Hater by David Moody and another for Black Corners of a Blood Red Room by Patrick Rutigliano.  Both great reads--you should give them a try! Now, to enjoy a bottle of Coke and hang out with some vampires.

This is my birthday week and staycation all rolled into one.  My goal for this week is to write at least 20,000 words.  I will work on my NaNo novel "Hunting the Boogie Man" and finish up a few other projects and if I break 20,000 words, I will wear a tiara all day on Saturday.  If not...well, the guilt will be suitable punishment enough. My story "Being Neighborly" has been accepted into the upcoming anthology "Zombies Gone Wild" by Collaboration of the Dead.  I'm particularly jazzed about this because the story was slated to be in a different anthology but was killed.  A zombified story about zombies...rock on. Okay, better boogie if I want that tiara!

I've been sitting here for thirty minutes, touching the keyboard for a few seconds then pulling my fingers away like they're about to be smacked with a ruler, only to put them back again and repeat the process.  This is the hardest entry I've made, deciding whether I want to share with you (if there are any of you) that my father died last Monday.  It has been an exhausting week of reliving my entire 37 years with him in my head and even though I keep telling myself I cannot change the past, the core of me refuses to believe it.  Someone I love said "I wish life could have been different" and I wish it too.  The rational side of me knows it all made me what I am today but I still keep on wishing. Someone I didn't know said he talked about me all the time and I hope I made him proud.  I loved him, for good or bad, and miss him.  My niece said "I can't stop thinking of him" and that's how it should be, no matter how much it hurts because to...

Turns out my "booboo finger" is actually broken and the nail is turning a lovely blackish hue.  I always have loved black... Even with a busted finger I've been trying to keep busy with reading and writing and submitting.  Black Corners of a Blood Red Room by Patrick Rutigliano is well worth the buy and I'll be working on a proper review to post on Amazon soon.  When I'm done with Autumn by David Moody I think I'll skip genres to true crime.  Too much horror makes Carey go something-something...  On the writing front, I sent a flash zombie piece to Pill Hill and it will appear in Daily Frights 2013 .  Now I need to submit just 9 more stories to different places to meet my 2012 goal.  Oh yeah! Lately I've been having more and more Halloween dreams and think my brain is telling me to start making goodies.  The ideas are there, I just can't make anything out of clay or paper pulp until this finger stops hurting.  Ah well.  A...

There is nothing like slamming a door on your own finger to make you appreciate the complex mind-hand connection.  It is like I'm learning to type all over again and it isn't pretty. So it turned out I submitted three stories to different publishers.  That means I'm only 9 away from my yearly goal.  Fancy!  I was going to write the ending to a couple stories tonight, but that was before the whole slamming of the finger, so that will wait until sometime in the future.  If you could see the typos I'm making here you would cringe.  Seriously! Slimming isn't going so well today, but I'm trying.  Somehow I'm pretty sure I may have gained a little weight over the weekend...just a hunch. Okay, gonna quit the blog now because it is taking longer to fix the typos than it is to type the blog.  Bah!