A somewhat cloudy forecast

I haven’t been having a good week. I’m rapid-cycling, which always makes me fun to be around. I’m stalled in the middle of my rewrite, and when I finally sat down to figure out why, it was like, Oh. Duh. I felt like I’d violated a few tenets of Fiction 101 and I was going to have to give back my MFA.

Then there have been a few incidents that normally wouldn’t have bothered me instead have me on the phone to Darin, asking him to pleeeeeeeease come home already. The dark nights of the soul are not supposed to happen during the daytime, when the kids are at preschool and you have a few hours to get cracking.

I’m just glad people I know have had good weeks of late.

The weather hasn’t helped. Hello, it’s May; hello, we live in California. What’s with all the cold temperatures and incessant rain?

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Cute Kid Story Alert: The other day I asked Sophia, “Are you a kid or a kiddie?”

“A kiddie.”

“Are you a cute kiddie or a pretty kiddie?” (Say that five times fast.)

“A fancy kiddie.”

I am so in over my head with her.

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Cute Kid Story Alert #2: Tonight at dinner, Simon took a break from inhaling polenta like we’re about to have a trade war with Italy to listen to the roar of the kitchen fan I’d left on at the stove. He then announced, “I like that sound not.”

Shakespearean? Or yet more promotion for the latest Star Wars nonsense? You be the judge.

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A few years ago in LA, I went to see Author A do a bookstore reading. We went out for beers afterward, and during the rest of our get-together, A gave me gossip gleaned from the author escort who was taking her around town. The escort said Author B, who’d gone through on tour right before A’s visit, was amazingly insecure and needy. B has a blog, one of my secret treasures, and all this week the neediness has been bleeding out, making it one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I’d love to point you to it, but…well, that would just be mean. I’m trying not to be mean. It’s a new thing for me. But I’m still checking in hopes of more freak-outs.

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Recently Author C posted something so vile in their blog that I was flabbergasted. C is having career difficulties, and I kept coming across other blogs supporting C, rapturously describing their work. I was like, Hello? Do you approve of the sorts of things C has said (in the blog, not in the books, although let’s face it—one does influence the other)? I’m glad I didn’t like the one book I’ve read by C (in contrast to the glowing reviews I’ve read, I thought it was all that and a bag of chips). Yes, what you post in your blog can affect what readers think of you. Just so you know. No, I won’t tell you who this is; just the thought of getting out that URL again gives me hives.

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Blacklist, the MT plugin to prevent spam, is failing. I don’t know what’s going on—I’ve had a couple of regular expressions that caught 95% of the cases coming through (URLs containing “poker” or “casino” or “sex”) that were working for…I dunno. A long time. Months.

Suddenly, they’ve disappeared.

Disappeared. As in, no longer show up.

What happened? Did they expire or something? I re-added a whole bunch of them yesterday.

As of today, they aren’t there any more.

I’ve been considering moving to Word Press for a while, and this might just do it. If there’s one thing I hate more than creating a list of keywords of sites to ban, it’s creating it twice.

And frankly, given the way I’ve felt this week, I’m just not in the mood.