That feeling you get after you’ve been in bed with a terrible headache ALL WEEKEND…and now, it’s your day to go back to work and you SUDDENLY feel better?
That’s been my weekend, folks.
I managed to get the most demonic headache, a combination of sinus, stress, and muscle all rolled up in a ball and tossed at my head. The sinus part was caused by a Calamondin tree that I have in my apartment (or should I say “had”). The Calamondin is a strange mini fruit tree that has a tiny orange fruit that tastes much like a lime. For some reason, despite it being November, this tree has been rapidly blooming and growing more little oranges. Our weather here in Maine has been warmer than it should be and for some reason, this tree is just absolutely loving it. Problem is that the pollen from these little flowers is super potent and my entire apartment smells like them. One day of sitting here breathing it in made my head feel like I was in Willy Wonka’s tunnel of craziness. The tree is now at my parent’s house after my mom gratefully came and picked it up.
The stress bit of the headache is from the usual; work, work, writing, writing…you know. I just recently wrapped up our 4th annual Midcoast Halloween Readings for the month of October. I had organized readings in Portland, Waterville, and Rockland on three separate nights. I dealt with eleven different writers who would be reading on those various nights, three different venues (one of which ended up being a total bust due to a misunderstanding on their end), and lastly, I had to figure out what I was going to read for these events. I tried (and failed) to write a story an hour before my Rockland reading and wasn’t able to read it on account of my printer suddenly and inexplicably developing an error. All in all, the readings went well, everyone had a good time and I can kick back and relax until next year’s readings.
Here is a photo from our Rockland reading courtesy of Shelley Coffill. (From left to right: Peter Dudar, Jen Blood, Katherine Silva, Duane Coffill. Not pictured: John Manderino.)
In other news, the five minute scene for Night Time, Dotted Line is all finished. I attended a showing at Maine Media Workshops earlier in the month and was happy to see the results. There were changes that had to be made in order for the scene to work accordingly. The original scene takes place in the Utah desert and since Maine is a bit short on those, the scene was moved to the woods. It was also filmed in the day time because of restrictions on when it could be filmed. With some after effects, the entire thing looks like it was shot at night and looks great! I’ll be uploading the video to Youtube as a private video this Thursday and providing the link so that it can be seen in full.
(Me with director Jeff Bienkowski on the set.)
Due to being extremely busy with work and the readings, I have been unable to keep up with regular blog posts during October. I’m extremely sad about this because blogging is such a fun creative outlet for me and it has stressed me out to not be able to do it. I’m very, very behind on Inspiration Through Music, Horror-FAIL Friday, and Literary Cooking Adventures. I’ll be hoping to get back into the swing of things during November. Unfortunately, it’ll take me a week in order to get myself back into the swing of things, so the soonest I’ll have new posts up will probably be next week. My apologies for that. October is always a crazy month for me.
In writing projects land, I have been struggling to get work done on the latest draft of my apocalyptic ghost novel, “The Wild Dark” and have been working haphazardly on my short story “The Collection”. I read a portion of “The Collection” at the Halloween Readings and it seems as though it was a hit. I’m hoping to finish it up before the end of the year. Whether I try to get it published traditionally or decide to upload it myself to Kindle is the next question. NaNoWriMo is upon us and I had toyed with the idea of participating. If I were to work on any novel for it, it would probably be the sequel to Night Time, Dotted Line. I haven’t quite decided yet. I should soon as it’s already November and I’m wasting daylight!
That being said, I now have to start getting ready for work. Stay tuned for new posts soon!
~KSilva
The Kat At Night 