the 14 twenty

your fingertips might really start pressing
playing the keys and then you know you’re telling the truth
don’t stop. let it all out. don’t answer your phone

for god’s sake don’t go near social media! keep typing
don’t censor your thoughts no matter how awful they may seem to you
they are only thoughts

the magic dust is the truth you are telling
people will be outraged. people will love you and hate you for it.

don’t stop! keep on. your truth 

is more valuable than 

anything 

else

limit.less

limitless hours over and under ground. writing
and what 4. to sustain the hope that someday
one could craft a transmission
would be well received?

let me get up
drag a comb through the hair
pull on the boots
button up the shirt
draw the belt firm across
the waist

step out on the landing
and live! 4 this is worth
the risk

closer to publication

the way i get closer to publication is by getting closer to my desk and the keys and the screen through my eyeglasses. by getting closer to the endless hours of playful work. mute the environment as much as i can. endless other hours of readying myself spiritually to be up to the process.

restructuring your conditions

I made some changes in my conditions to try and maximize the possibility for continuing to write books. Don't get me wrong, I love my life and my routine. But something was off, and consequentially I've seen a frightening drop in sustained creative output the last couple of months. I can flash here and flash there, keeping up my daily blogging and youtubing, but there is a price to pay for this kinda work. You get used to bouncing around the internet! Which I find not so conducive to the long form, or the conditions necessary for writing books. Many will say (and I have told myself) it's as easy as clicking on the 'do not disturb' protocol (on your devices) and making personal space for yourself. And maybe it is. But bloggers have a responsibility to their audience that the Ralph Waldo Emersons and Henry David Thoreaus of the world have not! Anyway, I decided to make some changes. I stepped away from the internet for several days and stepped outdoors. I drove out of town and did some things differently than usual. This coincides with a vacation from my nine to fiver. I eased up on the coffee. I caught up on my sleep (a real deficit I was running) and reconnected with some people and creatures (mostly cats) I care about, on a deeper level. I stopped reading and listening to the news. I need to make a conscious push towards the lighter things of life, laughter and learning and shared, hopeful perspectives. I tend to let myself go toward darkness, I realize, it's easier to be jaded. Now I am rediscovering how it feels to wake up in the morning, make some coffee, and sit down at my desk in silence and write my book. It was only a few months back when I was doing this, but it coulda been forever ago.

the indie in me. the intimacy. self-publish yourself to death. for life

Cadence in my head, coffee mug in my hand and a laptop fired up. Hair falling about my face, tickling my nose, where oh where did my eyeglasses go? Trying to let my imagination find me, she can have me, oh grand channeler,  saucy bitch, take me, take my arms, wrists up, fists into palms. Here I go again to the graveyard for the pay. The work is good, I like it, keeps me honest, keeps me humble. Not really spending much money, not making much money. If I could I would buy some time, though, forty plus years old and some street life to show for it. Lots of hard lessons I think I finally learned, lots of colorful visions and deep seated incisions. A good dose of radical acceptance in my heart. I will only be a mom to all the motherless children in the world. I am American and all the good and bad that comes with it; I may not be able to find Cameroon on the map, but I can tell you where several authors homes lie and Siberia. I will do my own dishes and raise kittens until the day that I die. Self-promotion is a bitch. Sometimes I gotta open the flat of my hand and slap her aside, get back to the tabula rasa, open my veins to another page, anchor here, deus ex machina there. Inhumed into Book #3: Ame and all her tangy energetics. All that toxic boiling blood has to settle somewhere. I can laugh about what I've made of my life, I keep faith, I can love myself now. Out of the fear and into this great struggle where I found myself belonging all the time, to write, never missing a day, and try and keep up with what may come by the sharing, believers in me, when I have trouble having faith in myself, I like to let them know I'm alive and they touch me. Don't know about you but my indie spirit gets my ass outta bed. That's just the way it is. I am on pace to publish a couple novellas a year, a comparatively slow pace in the self-publishing arena, sometimes I think I oughta write more and faster; but the people who read my stuff tend to calm me down in my temporary crisis of confidence, and tell me its okay, they can wait. Just make sure I keep delivering the goods. Radical acceptance. I can breathe. I'm okay with my pace, coming back from that silly sidetracked sometimes comparison-shopped myself with someone else's success. It's very important that I stop there - it could be envy - and translate that fukker into inspiration. You indie spirits out there, you are my best friends! Always sharing how it feels, how it aches, and the catharsis behind the blood sweat and tears over these years and on your own. And here we are. Never alone. Your goddam life hiding behind a cover for all to know and some chosen few to cherish. Chosen because they chose you. How does it feel? The intimate moment (so far away) at once shared with the one who reads you, the one who gets you, who gets what you're trying to do? Wow! I'm a rooster just before dawn! I'm stretchin into the biggest smile, the exhaust of a yawn when I'm done with the edits and the story's been born. On to createspace, the tweets, goodreads and reddits. Thank you god for showing me the way. So many of us out there, having a blast and working hard. The possibility! Each one of us a star. And nobody needs to know in the end cause it's not an adulation game, it's simply a lifestyle. Hit a hundred thousand keys or more. Suited up on everyone's doorstep. Unraveling it. What you have to say. Your fresh vision. Your bloody mess. The writing life, painful as it can be, is the only life for me.

Interview with Jaideep @ 'Pebble In The Still Waters'

Pebble In The Still Waters: Katya Mills - Urban Fantasy Series :

Published Author Interview with Katya Mills
by blogger and author Jaideep Khanduja

Journal # curiosity, torque and the WIP

The fireworks began just before the fourth of July, and continued on in my imagination, working off a basic outline with some central tensions, rounding out the love story, letting myself drift into the unknown, for what is compelling is not often on the map, but rather a billowed sail out to where you were told to believe the world would fall off. You had to have the courage to go there, yes, and even before the courage, the critical questions and the curiosity.

I must confess I cannot always break through the finite limits I have placed upon myself. Forty years of acculturation and shaping as an American in a society of human beings and animals of course has done some domesticating, as it always will. But I have had my years upon years of rebellion against the status quo, which ultimately left me alienated and alone. I was missing something essential. I had lost myself somewhere in the neurosis. That little tumbleweed had grown so large in traveling across my life, it was all i could see anymore.

The love for self and the spirit of exploration has slowly come back to me, but there will always be the root acculturation that is like hardware and very difficult to change or recreate. The foundation of my self in society. I am not trying to uproot all that, I can work off of my hardware because it's a great foundation actually, lots of Latin and a strong work ethic, and a loving nuclear family. I am one of the lucky ones.

So now I am creating from there. And just trying to get more and more involved in my own creative process, because I know the feeling: attractive, magnetic. But the feeling is hard to reach for me. It requires sustained force in one direction for a long time. Perhaps a month of daily ritual immmersed in the WIP, with a singular devotion, takes me into that particular effort zone where it is pulling and not pushing off. Because it is difficult is why it pushes off. Even now, maybe halfway through Book Two (the finished product), I am still finding more pushing away than pulling toward.

And it drives me crazy, to sit down and get involved, and an hour into it feel like I have to walk away! I only know from experience the tables will turn, the tectonic plates will come together just right, if  I keep at it, sustained force in one direction, physics, torque, and KABLAM! Suddenly fall into orbit around the central planet of tension! The atmosphere is so fine.

Journal #07.15.15

Yesterday I had a consciousness - ZAP!

I restructured an additional 10,000 words into MAZE (Book Two). So now the first 20,000 words are positioned pretty well to tell the story. I'm gonna need to retool it all very carefully, but these past two weeks have been fantastic thanks to my lame situation: I cannot type too well because - as some of you know - I had surgery on my finger. Which shifted my focus from freewrite to structuring - exactly what needed to happen!

I removed the bandage and rewrapped it neatly and thinner. I saw the incision, it was a lot longer across than I thought, about two inches, wow, I guess my hand modeling days are finished. I am thinking about good stories I might tell, how it happened...

One of my miniature tigers was playing and slashed me.
I was in such a zone I was typing furiously and the keys melted below me and my finger split open.
I had to have surgery so they could fine tune the microchip that controls me.

I got sliced by a butterfly wing.
- KatYa

Journal # 07.11 - the writing life

I may some day write a longer work, one greater than say, a couple hundred pages, but for now I am content practicing the art of novella. I am devoted to these puppies, shy of a hundred pages. The difficulty I create for myself - with the market - is that fantasy genre works are typically 3-4 times the size! So these monsters are overshadowing my lil kittens. No matter, though, because I follow my intuition which is very clear right now like bluish spring water captured at the source. Almost surprisingly clear, like 'perfection' became part of my vocabulary again. As the series will progress (and you can count on that!) I believe I will become more prolific, for I am getting deeply involved with my characters and I am already intimately connected (via past experience) with the setting (Oakland, California). And I fell in love with the process, particularly the finishing flourish I experienced - in fifth gear killing it! - back in February in Palm Springs when I published Book One. The 2 polliwogs I am releasing this year -Grand Theft Life - and - Maze - I believe will blossom into 3 more flowers in 2016. If I can reach and sustain the pace of 3 yearlings a year, clocking in at 25,000 words each (about 75 pages) - one book continuing where the previous left off - I will be a Buddha zen hen laying speckled eggs!