Author: Kat

I have been writing stories since first grade. Speculative genres are my passion, although high fantasy and classic science fiction hold special favor. In my freshman year of college, I was introduced to anime, manga, and cosplay, and enjoy going to geek and anime conventions like (Re)Generation Who and Katsucon. I have a B.A. in English from Penn State and works as a public library assistant and freelance editor. From October 2012 to October 2013, I was a content contributor to Geek La Femme. I've also written several articles for the comic book e-newsletter Scoop. My various amateur talents include sketching, swimming, sword-fighting, and playing the ocarina. I post new entries on The Cat’s Cradle and upload a new chapter of fan fiction on alternating Mondays (unless otherwise stated on Twitter). I currently live and work in Pennsylvania with two brothers and six felines.

I Finally Caught Up!

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Oh, my poor ears.

I think I have squeezed more audio editing into the last few days than I have more months. I was behind by twelve Audio Editions, ranging from 5-10 minutes in length, on average. (Obviously, some are shorter and a few are longer.) I know the finished product looks pretty simplistic, but five minutes of audio takes me about an hour to clean up, edit, convert into a video, and upload to YouTube. So please, have a listen if you haven’t already. All of the links on their respective Cat’s Cradle entries should be updated by the end of today.

Also, I got my first set of feedback from one of my beta readers, R.E. Myles! I was really nervous, but it seems that All’s Fair isn’t as broken as I feared it might be. She was really great about pointing out the story’s strengths and what she liked, along with some good suggestions on how to increase interest and drama. Some of the broader suggestions will be put into play immediately with further refinements as feedback arrives from my other betas. Thank you all so much for your time and attention!

Now… back to work. ^_^;;

UPDATE on 02/29/2016 @ 10:00pm:
Hooray, another beta reader arrived with feedback today! Thank you so much, Foxglove! I really appreciate your time and thoughts on All’s Fair.

Reflections of Contentment

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Lately, I’ve done a lot of complaining about not having enough time, or feeling like my time is not my own. That I am subsumed by other responsibilities and then do not utilize what free time I do have to its fullest capacity. It’s an old song, one that I think every writer or artist sings throughout their lives. It is rare to find an artist who is happy with the amount of time they spend on their art. It always seems to be too much, which leads to burnout, or too little, which leads to intense frustration and despair.

But I’m not going to talk about that today. You already know about that particular current, so let’s appreciate the scenery for a while. Let’s look up and see where the river is flowing. Because despite all of the moaning and groaning about set-backs, I’m surprised to find that, right now, I’m actually pretty happy with myself.

There’s a text I got from my onii-san after I told him that I hadn’t won the Dark Crystal Author Quest contest back in 2013. I hadn’t honestly expected to win, but I didn’t even make it into the top five. It was discouraging to receive no tangible reward after putting in so much intense work for so long. But David reminded me of something important:
Continue reading “Reflections of Contentment” →

Draft Completed!

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Oh my gosh, I am so excited that I don’t know where to begin. I guess the title of this entry says it all: I’ve actually completed a draft of a novel! Yep, All’s Fair (AFiLaW) is the first one. While I’ve spent a lot of time working on Ravens and Roses and have called each stage its own “Draft,” that story is still missing pieces of it and therefore should probably not be titled as such. But that’s just splitting semantic hairs, so moving on!

I hammered out the plot and characters for All’s Fair in October 2015 and started writing on November 1, 2015. As of January 31, 2016, I have a complete story ready for beta reading. Wow. That’s 170 pages written in 92 days. There aren’t any gaping holes that need to be filled in or scenes that haven’t been written. Obviously things may be adjusted, dropped, or added during the editing process, but you can actually read it from beginning to end. I’m still a little stunned at this; the only other complete novel-length stories that I have finished are fan fiction. (Yes, I know, I need to get back to “Nakishojo.”) And those took me years to complete! The fastest I’ve ever written was for the Dark Crystal Author Quest back in 2013, which took three months, but was still not really complete. Not like All’s Fair.

Continue reading “Draft Completed!” →

Donating to the Arts

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Greetings everyone! How are those New Year’s resolutions or goals coming along? Yeah, it’s been hit-or-miss with me too. Feels like I am sleeping way too much, which kind of wreaks my morning schedule.

Still, I did manage to finish the first original short story I’ve written in a while: “Handsome and the Hag,” a gender-swapped retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Eventually, I hope to rewrite it and expand into a more detailed short story, but I wanted to have a more traditional fairy-tale feel for the version posted on The Fellowship of the King. Also, I’m almost, almost done the initial draft of All’s Fair; my goal is to have it ready for beta readers by the end of January. Hooray! Aside from that, none of my other writing goals have really gotten underway, especially with the Audio Editions. Gods, I am so behind…

But there is something I wanted to bring up. It’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, so I wanted to share my thoughts on it:
Continue reading “Donating to the Arts” →

Contrivance and Coincidence

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

“But people don’t act like that.” [W. Somerset] Maugham pointed to the grave dangers coiled in that treacherous phrase. Our demand for probability grows more and more stringent. We balk at coincidence and accident. We invariably expect the characters who are presented to act like ourselves. “People don’t act like that?” True enough — MOST people don’t act like that. Your story is not ABOUT most people. The true enemy of your fiction is not improbability but imaginative unbelief.

— Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction, (page 185)

As I’ve been working through my current draft of All’s Fair, there’s a certain element that keeps coming up that I think needs to be addressed: contrivance and coincidence.

We’ve all see or read stories where characters end up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Or they find what they need to beat the bad guy minutes before facing off in the final fight. Or they are about to die and rescue arrives just in the nick of time with no explanation of where they were and how they got there so fast. It’s more blatant in some stories than in others. When done badly, it can destroy the suspension of disbelief necessary to maintain a story. No writer wants that to happen to their story. Events are supposed to be seamless, flawless, inevitable. We want to present them in the most effective, realistic, and logical manner possible. We don’t want anything to seem contrived.

Well, I’ve some bad news for you: all stories are contrived.

Continue reading “Contrivance and Coincidence” →

2015: The Year in Review

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Okay, seriously, who keeps making off with all this time? Feels like the year just got started and we’re already on the cusp of 2016! (And from what I’ve heard, this sense of time distortion only gets worse… ugh.)

I am definitely in a better place at the end of 2015 than I was last year. Many of my 2014 goals have been reached, and it feels like I’ve got a better handle on life in general, which is a massive relief! I want to give a huge thank-you to all of my friends, readers, subscribers, and followers. You make this all worth-while.

Continue reading “2015: The Year in Review” →

Favored Fairytales: Beauty and the Beast

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

This entry is part of an on-going series discussing my favorite fairytales and their multiple modern re-tellings. Any entries relating to this topic will be labeled “Favored Fairytales.”

Have you ever found yourself consuming numerous variations of a single story? I go through different spurts, often tied to genre, but sometimes a particular kind of story grabs me and won’t let go until it’s sated. So I wanted to talk about one of my favorite fairytales, one that is probably familiar to most people.

Like most kids, I was raised on Disney films. Some I always felt lukewarm about, some that used to be favorites no longer appeal to me, even though I can appreciate the talent and artistry that went into making them. I never liked Sleeping Beauty and I was always ambivalent about Snow White and Cinderella. Some, like The Lion King and Mulan, have withstood the test of time and remain favorites. When I was a kid, The Little Mermaid was my favorite, hands down. But now, as an adult, a different film has risen to the top of the list: Beauty and the Beast.

Continue reading “Favored Fairytales: Beauty and the Beast” →

False Dichotomies

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Greetings to everyone from the end of National Novel Writing Month! Wow, it’s really hard to believe that a month has gone by and, for once, I actually have an almost complete rough draft of a novel. It still needs work and some scenes, but I think I’ll be able to progress to the editing stage this December and January. And I’m actually looking forward to it! My creativity has come back, I’m eager to work, and I’ve been writing over 2,000 words a day more often than not. Which, like, never happens. So, I’m really pleased with my progress and hope to have a finished product to show for my effort sooner rather than later. (Then I’ll go back to Ravens and Roses, I promise.)

Now, on to a topic that has been percolating in the back of my mind for some time: false dichotomies.

Continue reading “False Dichotomies” →

Checking In

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Greetings to you all from the beginning of Week 3 in NaNoWriMo! I have to say, this month’s writing has gone a lot better than it has for quite a while. You may have noticed that my last few entries (although few and far between) contained a note of despondency. Or maybe a healthy dose of it. Or perhaps entire buckets of the stuff. At any rate, I’d essentially stalled out on Ravens and Roses, which I’ve been working on pretty much non-stop for longer than I care to remember. I know that I swore (again) that I’d have a finished draft at the end of this year (sound familiar?) and I still might. It just may not be the project I was expecting it to be.

My 2015 NaNo project, “code-named” AFiLaW (pronounced A-F-I-Law), also referred to as All’s Fair, has gained a lot of momentum, despite containing two genres that I’ve never worked with before: Romance and Steampunk. I’ll admit that at this point the prose is a little light on both; I keep forgetting to add steampunk descriptive details and I haven’t touched the sex scenes. In fact, I may decide not to write any of the latter at all. Scenes with that particular kind of intimacy are alien to me, and every piece of advice I can find about writing in the romance genre says: “If you are uncomfortable writing sex scenes, then don’t write them because your discomfort will show through.” So we’ll see. Still, even with those quibbles, I’ve been writing at least 1,000 words each day and often pass the 1,500- and 2,000-word marks. That’s practically unheard of for me; I don’t recall doing that well even when I began Ravens and Roses in earnest back in 2010 for my first NaNo.

I think the reason I’ve been doing so well lately is threefold:

Continue reading “Checking In” →

Happy Halloween!

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

When I was a kid, I liked Halloween. I enjoyed acquiring bags of candy and my mom always made us kick-ass costumes, but Christmas was better because presents. Now that I’m an adult, Halloween has replaced Christmas for two reasons:

1) Any gifts acquired during Halloween are edible and therefore do not take up any real space in my house.

2) Costumes.

Since getting into anime and cosplay, Halloween has become the best non-convention excuse to showcase some of the awesome costumes that I’ve put together over the last five years. On Wednesday this week I wore a dark blue yukata decorated with white butterflies I bought at Katsucon, complete with a very simple white obi, tabi socks, and black wig. On Friday I wore my latest iteration of steampunk. (Yes, I skipped Thursday because I didn’t have anything else prepped. My closet is in a state of disarray.) And today I wore a lovely green and white vintage medieval-style dress that my friend Storm Elf bought for me years ago, but I’d never worn it before because it’s too fragile to survive the Renaissance Faire.

Damn, it’s fun to play dress-up. Not only is it fun to see the expressions on people’s faces and receive compliments, but it also helps one’s writing. Getting into clothing you normally don’t wear helps improve descriptions and enter a different head-space, even if you don’t really act like a different character. And every visit to a thrift store because a treasure hunt of possibilities. Part of me wishes I had more time, energy, money, and talent to create and wear better costumes more often. Alas, it can be both expensive an exhausting after a while, so I don’t do it very often. I’m starting to value quality over quantity.

Even though Halloween has history and traditions far older than the current (sometimes chintzy) version, for me the main draw is being able to transform into something different. Something new. I’m hoping that sense of excitement and adventure carries over into November as NaNoWriMo begins.

Enjoy your All Hallow’s Eve! I’ve included a list of awesome Halloween-esque songs with links to their respective youtube videos. Enjoy!

~ * ~

Awesome Halloween-esque Songs:

“Moonlight Shadow” by Mike Oldfield (Remix by Blue UltrasGE)

“All Souls’ Night” by Loreena McKennitt

“Shadow of the Moon” by Blackmore’s Night

“FullMoon” by Sonata Arctica

“Mitternacht” by E. Nomine

“Ghost Love Score” by Nightwish

“Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo

~ * ~
Continue reading “Happy Halloween!” →