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 |  My latest blogging endeavor to catalog my activities here on WdC |
 ~Myself~ My name is Cat Voleur and, as you've probably guessed, I'm a writer. I worked as a freelancer for a few years, taking several ghostwriting positions before finally deciding to start doing stuff under my own name. I've had a handful of small publications and am working on some bigger stuff now. ~My Blog~ This is my second WdC blog. I'm starting it because I just went through and renovated a lot of the things from my portfolio and I thought it would be a good time to get a fresh start. The book is titled after a song from one of my favorite Coheed and Cambria albums. It's mostly going to be about my and what I'm up to on the site. There will sometimes be other stuff like promotions for cool stuff that I find on other sites that I think you guys might be interested in as well as promos for cool content that I find on here. ~My Other Projects~ If you're interested in checking out some of the other work that I do, feel free to check out some of the following links: In Defense of the Horror ~ My Horror Blog hosted on WordPress https://indefenseofthehorror.wordpress.com/ And there's also a horror tumblr, for those of you who are interested: http://in-defense-of-the-horror.tumblr.com/ Toxic Bubblegum ~ A collaborative project I co-founded that provides free resources to creators. http://www.toxicbubblegum.com/ |
 Intro Leading you into the madness of my blog I'm writing this at 4:00 in the morning. My insomnia has been acting up again. It's not as bad as it was this time last year (not by a long shot) but it is making me almost entirely nocturnal. The only reason I'm sleeping in the dark at all is because sunrise is happening so late these days - and even then I'm lucky to get a full 6 hours. Even though it isn't unusual for me to be awake and online at this hour, I'm surprised to see that it's this late. I just don't know where the time has gone today. Atticus Finch (my cat) must have eaten up more of my day than I thought. (He was sick, and I may have over indulged him in cuddles.) There are still so many things I want to do before I start trying to fall asleep. Luckily (unluckily? Depending on how you look at it?) I'm still wide awake. So for right now I'm just going to try and get my thoughts organized and give some updates before getting back to it.  Personal A little context about my personal life outside of writing My personal life (such as it is) has not been going well. I'm still single, still only working part time, and just generally my mental health isn't great. (This could be because of the insomnia. It might be causing the insomnia. Depression and insomnia sort of feed into each other in a way that's not fun because all I want to do is sleep, and then I can't. Ever.) All of that fun stuff aside, I'm just at a point in my life where I feel sort of alone. It's something I've been writing about a lot (mostly through thinly masked fiction that's too depressing to be marketable) and really analyzing. I'm bad at in-person connections (maybe all connections.) I sort of use media as a crutch to express my feelings sometimes. I didn't know that I did that until I stopped being able to do it effectively. I had sort of a breakthrough, terrible moment where I realized that for the first time in my adult life, I'm the odd one out in every circle that I'm in. That's something I'm used to in some regards (age, profession, gender, sexuality) but not ever in tastes. I don't have anything in common with most of my friends anymore. The realization explained a lot of what I've been going through lately, but it also made me feel incredibly isolated. It's one of those situations where acknowledging the issue has made it a lot worse. Now when I'm at my game night Friday and I don't know the song everyone's singing to, I don't just shrug it off like I used to, I get fixated on why I can't force myself to like it and what's wrong with me that I'd rather listen to aggressively Jewish punk music than anything from any anime soundtrack. (I know it's an unhealthy mindset to be in, but that's where I spent a lot of last week trying to break out of.) It always made me want to give up on a lot of things I'd been trying to do, that maybe weren't as nice as I thought they were. A good example of this is that I'm constantly inviting people to work events. As a horror blogger, I get free movie tickets and screeners all the time, and I get rejected by friends and family pretty much every day. I thought inviting others was an act of kindness (and expected of me - the tickets are free!) but no one I know likes these movies but me. It's sort of that way with everything. No one plays the games I play, or reads the books I do or will study languages with me. I don't have a lot of common denominators with the people I care about, and I guess that's been true since I broke up with my boyfriend last year. I got frustrated sometimes (movie nights, usually) thinking we didn't share similar tastes in a lot of regards. But he was the sort of person who really liked having his tastes challenged, and we found more ground than I'd realized until just now. After we split I just sort of got lost in other things, charity work and work work and books - books more than anything. Trying to reclaim some of my old life, this might be the first I'm really allowing myself to really process the breakup, and it's hard. And lonely. I got off on a tangent there, but it's a good representation of where my personal life is right now.  Offsite Some information about writing that I'm doing off of Writing.Com In terms of working on things offsite, I haven't.  That's not entirely true, but I haven't been meeting a lot of my writing goals. The activities on here have been keeping me pretty busy as I'm sure you'll see. I've been journaling and brainstorming and editing a bit, but the manuscript I swore I'd finish before NaNoWriMo hasn't been touched in over three weeks. I do have one cool thing to report, however, I wrote my first True Crime Article. It has not been published yet, but pending approval it will be. It's called American Horror History: The Black Dahlia. It talks about how Elizabeth Short has been portrayed in American Horror Story and what the real life inspiration for her character was. With any luck it will be the first in a series covering true crimes across all seasons of the show. If my editor clears it I will share the link here, and hopefully I will get to do more of them because I loved digging into the research aspect of an article.  Writing.com Updates about cool things I'm doing right here Alright, now for the part of my blog that people actually read My first exciting WdC news is that I won the following Merit Badge: ![Merit Badge in Good Deeds
[Click For More Info]
Congratulations, you won 1st Place in the September 2019 round of [Link To Item #gooddeeds] !](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/WDC-Good_Deeds.gif) This was awarded for coming in 1st in the "Good Deeds Get CASH!"  .Last time I won this contest I went wild and treated myself and entered a bunch of raffles and sponsored a ton of contests and stuff on here. This time I wanted to do something a little bigger (and I hope that you'll forgive my digression here, because this is technically all work I did off WdC.) In order to put that money back into the Writing Community I took the cash prize and I spent it all on things that support writers. $35 of it went to an Apex Publishing project where they're selling mystery boxes to raise money for their goal of taking on new writers. The rest of it (plus some of my own funds) went to buying indie books that were needing reviews. I got 7 books in total (and did one pre-order.) It's going to be a lot of work to get done (especially with my TBR shelf full and NaNo coming up) but I'm going to try to get them all read, reviewed and promoted before the end of the year. I've seen so many people lately advertising their books, and I have to respect that hustle. If I ever win that contest again (or if I can scrape up enough money to treat myself to another big shopping spree like this) I intend to do a Writing.Com exclusive edition where I buy as many books as I can from the talented writers here who have been published. Other than that, my biggest news is that I signed up for the "NaNoWriMo Write-A-Thon" again this year!(I was actually the first one to sign up this year, which I thought was fun  )I am doing OctoPrep but I am not 100% sure that I'll be working on the novel I was originally going to work on. I guess we're just going to have to see about that. Regardless, I will be looking for sponsors over the next couple of weeks and more information will come along soon about what my project will be (for anyone afraid to sponsor me because of the one year I wrote 100,000+ words.) If anyone knows where I can find some sponsors, I would be grateful if you could point me in that direction. (And it's a small incentive, but I do give all of my sponsors Thank You badges at the end of November.)  Reviews A place for me to share reviews I've done and received My review requests are still open, and will be for another 2 weeks. I'm looking for spooky stories in particular, but am happy to review anything. (I'm also starting to get together some choices for what I'll be nominating for The Quills Award this year ~ although my final choices will mostly be made in December.) This last week I've done the following 4 Reviews: Review of "Bo Dockett"  Review of "The Girl (Never Little)" Review of "Solstice At Avebury" Review of "Goodbye Junk Food, Hello Health!" Check out the reviews, and absolutely be sure to check out the items. They were all wonderful. Conclusion Wrapping up my ramblings That is about it. This entry ran way longer than I meant for it to, but I'm working through some things (and am clearly very excited about some other things.) My schedule is going to be pretty busy up through the end of the year, but I feel like it's always good to have extra reasons to get out of bed in these cold months where I really get tempted not to do anything at all. Thank you guys as always for reading! - Cat |
| Intro Leading you into the madness of my blog I have been back online over a week and it seems like my connection might be alright *fingers crossed*. So one of the things that I'd like to do is try to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly, right before I break that habit for NaNoWriMo .That being said, I'm excited about my NaNo project this year (just picked it out today) and as always, projects on this site as well  Personal A little context about my personal life outside of writing There isn't a lot of new stuff going on in my personal life. I got an offer for a job that I'd be starting next spring. It's for a family company (which makes it hard to refuse, because it's hard for me to say no to anything where filling the position would also be helping out my family - especially my Aunt because I know she has her hands full.) It would require me to move, which has both pros and cons. I have plenty of time to make a decision about that, though. It's just a cool thing that I'm turning over. Another fun thing I guess is Fathom Events. I've gone to a couple over the summer for work, and a couple just for fun, but the last few have been pretty inspirational experiences for me. I don't know. There's just something magical about going into a theater to watch a movie you thought you'd missed forever on the big screen. Last weekend I got to watch The Shawshank Redemption, which was just so wonderful to see. Tomorrow I'm going in to see a few episodes of Friends - which I'm just really excited about. I don't think it will be quite the critically acclaimed, emotional experience that Shawshank was. But it's hard to deny that Friends was a big influence for me, growing up. That's weird, considering how much horror I do now, but when I was ghostwriting romance, a lot of what I knew about building romantic tension came from what I'd seen on sitcoms growing up. More currently, I think it shows a lot in my more humorous writing that I was a big fan of Chandler. Anyway, that was a lot of babbling. I'm just excited, and very grateful to have these sorts of opportunities. I think they've been really good for me, in a creative sense. Offsite Some information about writing that I'm doing off of Writing.Com Mostly all the work I've been doing for Writing.Com has been for my horror-blogging job. (This is the part where I would normally link to the horror blog I work for, but they're switching domain names at the moment, so just pretend that I was a good employee and plugged the company here.) This next week I get to start working on my new series of articles (entitled American Horror History) that cover the true inspirations behind American Horror Story episodes. It's something I've been wanting to write about literally for years (I almost did it as my NaNo book one year, actually) and now someone is going to pay me to do it! I'm so happy about that! Writing.com Updates about cool things I'm doing right here Some exciting things going on here, as well: First off, I wrote a couple entries for "SCREAMS!!!" One was a dark fantasy piece inspired by one of my tabletop characters (I know! I'm a giant nerd!) You can check that weirdness out here: "Invalid Entry" The other was a flash fiction piece inspired (very loosely, mind you) by true adventures in my babysitting career. "Invalid Entry" And this one was actually the daily winner!  In some other event news, the Monthly SCREAMS!!! contest has started. You guys can check that out here:
Every year I say I'm going to enter, and then I forget, but, I do intend to enter this year. I also just signed up for this awesome event here: "October Novel Prep Challenge" I signed up super late, but I do have time to participate in every single day of the OctoPrep, which is my goal this month! Reviews A place for me to share reviews I've done and received Since I know I won't be getting many reviews done next month (let's be realistic, guys) I am trying to fit a few extra in. I'm also planning on giving a horror MB to whoever spooks me most with a story this month - so if you have any scary stories you want to send me for review... this might be a good time to do it!  Conclusion Wrapping up my ramblings I know that was a lot of things, but I think I'm finally done. I've still got some writing and prepping and general nonsense to do before I go to bed, but thank you guys as always for reading! Hopefully I'll be seeing you all around a little more!  ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
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There is a constant stream of stray cats in our area. I said three was my limit with also having our big dog to care for, too, but now my limit is four! 
This is a great review and it's good to have you back Kat. Also, thank you for reviewing my poem, I will catch you up on that as I am a bit behind with myself and work. Loves Ya. 
