Author: Kelley

Naked invisible spider pix!

Here are some of the keyword searches that brought people to my site in October and November.

  • The skin-seekers are still with us, and they’re getting more creative: beautiful naked people, beautiful people naked (not necessarily the same thing), my naked parents, naked blue people, naked fairy girl, private naked emo pics (now there’s an image).

    Special mention goes to werewolf transformation naked nude female girl.

  • wil wheaton nude

    I had to call this one out because I enjoy Wil Wheaton’s work (and his blog) and was amused to find someone coming here to look for naked pictures of him.

    Wil, I assure you I would never advertise those pictures, I treasure them too much (big grin).

    It still amazes me that I get the entire naked internet crowd because of one post.

  • if i were invisible, a day invisible, haunting hill house, shirley jackson, whatever walked there walked alone, i’m alive he thought, oh i sure hope they know

    This month every high school in the US is assigning the same essay topics. Invisibility is still the clear winner — there are scads of kids crawling the web looking for essays to steal. Maybe they haven’t figured out yet that on the internet, everyone’s invisible already. Second place is a tie between The Haunting of Hill House and Dandelion Wine.

  • exploding like spiders across the stars
    Another essay topic, I’m guessing. You won’t find a deep analysis here, kids, just the quote because I love it so.

  • rhythmic quotes about spiders
    This is just fantastic. The internet is so full of people.

  • boots sci fi sex
    This actually makes me think about how much of the sex in science fiction isn’t really sexy. This person may be in for a long search…

  • second hand latex clothing
    Okay, ew.

  • girls watch boys kiss
    I just did that last night, we’re watching Queer As Folk (US) again on DVD. Brian broke Justin’s heart, but there was some great kissing.

  • does it hurt to drown
    Yes. It does. In whatever way you do it.

  • another fucking learning experience
    Exactly.

  • I want to be a writer but I have no talent whatsoever.
    Ah, that’s a hard place. You need different talents to be a writer. Observation, imagination, storytelling, the ability to find a center that is different from your own and put words to it. And the talent of the room.

  • too late to become an artist
    Neve, never, never too late.

  • at what age do people bloom
    At every age.

  • reasons for guys to dance
    Because it’s fun, and some of y’all are so pretty when you do it.

  • This month’s WTF award goes to:boy’s and girl’s kissing each other with the butt butt stick together video
    I feel badly that I had so little to offer this charming search. I hope they found their way to a butter place.

  • And let me leave you with this: tips shmips if you got no love
    Because, really, what more is there to say?

If you liked this post, read more keyword search posts.

Enjoy your day.

Song of my Sunday

All the world that I can see from my office is covered in snow, framed by icicles on the overhang outside the window. It’s cold, it’s quiet and still, the sky is half-blue and half-more-snow.

Today I am many things, but mostly I am lucky. I have food in the house and a house to keep the food in. I’m warm in here. I have health insurance that just paid for half the medication I’m taking because I’m still coughing 6 weeks after being sick. I have a new business that I suspect will struggle for a long time before it takes off, but I have (perhaps absurd) faith in the integrity and goodness of it, and I believe that it will reach people and help them. I am worried about finding paid work in the meantime.

There’s a lot going on.

So what am I doing? I am working on my screenplay all day today in a grand gesture of thank you to the beautiful day and fuck you to the people who say that female-driven movies can’t get greenlit, to the search for paid work, and the many frightening things in the wider world. Because writing this movie makes me most happy, and today being most happy is more important than being stressed or realistic or responsible. I am having enormous fun. And I am listening to this.

My advice is to turn it up loud.

Click here if you can’t access the player.

Storm

I have a pile of work to do, and there’s a big storm on the way — the temperature is dropping and the sky is drawing in on us, as if the world were shrinking. And so rather than telling the story of the actor who stabbed himself, or doing my monthly search keyword roundup (both coming soon, I promise), I thought I would just leave you with some music.

When I was younger and even more consciously dramatic than I am now, I once stood on a Florida beach at midnight watching heat lightning twenty miles out to sea, the last shreds of a thunderstorm gang that had come hulking across the area that day. It was a big system: the lightning poured down across half the horizon, and a cool wind blew in and out of the warm night, and the surf was pounding… so you know I had to sing “Riders of the Storm.”

I hope you have had the fun of getting big with the universe sometime.

Writing sex

Thanks to Gwenda for pointing out this post by Marianna Baer about sex scenes in young adult novels. It’s the most thoughtful consideration I’ve seen of writing sex scenes at all, not just in YA fiction (and if anyone knows of other good posts on the topic, please share).

These issues come into play for me particularly when writing the Mars stories, and I’m also thinking about writing sex in screenplays, and when I write my own YA novel there will definitely be sex (because it’s such a force in adolescence whether you’re actually having it or not). I don’t the brain bandwidth to be thoughtful about it myself today, but it’s mulching in my brain along with everything else.

[And with the word “sex” in the title and about ten other times in this post, I’m bound to get a whole new category of search engine hits (grin). The monthly keyword search post for November is coming soon.]

Change in the weather

It’s a heavy-weather time in my life. Not that All is Badness, but rather that I feel the weight of many gathered things, the way a storm front puts pressure on your skin. Even clouds are heavy. Even the smallest things have weight.

Nineteen years ago tomorrow, Nicola moved to Atlanta so we could live together. It’s all romantical and stuff until you consider the enormous pain of leaving one’s family and friends and country; until you consider the state change from complete (some would say ruthless) autonomy to sudden couple-ness with the equally sudden sense of responsibility to not make it any harder on the person who has just left everything she knew. It was a long time ago, but the anniversary still resonates. Even the oldest choices, even the best ones, still have weight.

I’m working on what I believe will be my final major screenplay revision. That’s no featherweight cloud — it’s huge and heavy and often uncooperative, like trying to wrestle a closet’s worth of clothes into a small suitcase. And it’s also so much fun. There have been a lot of setbacks on the movie front, but it’s still alive and inching forward. I don’t know whether to feel lucky or scream. Both, I guess. It gets confusing.

And I’m promoting my new business, looking to teach my program to people, or consult, or find contract work. Or perhaps a j-o-b. I’m excited about getting my ideas out into the world — I think they are needed now more than ever. And I’m deeply ambivalent about searching for work after the gift of this writing life that I’ve had for so many years.

Heavy weather. Lots of pressure, shifting currents, a wild metal taste in the wind.

That’s all. No deep thoughts today, but a lot of deep thinking.

City Life

I’ve been dancing with your spam filter for some unknown reason…hopefully, this will go through, and hopefully you haven’t been copied this five times over. : D

Yours are among my few most beloved, formative books and stories, inspiring in my writing and my life. My experience of Solitaire‘s climaxes is imprinted thoroughly in my mind, and I am so grateful for it.

Is “The Hum of Human Cities” available outside of (the scarce, grr-expensive) Pulphouse 9 / are you planning to republish it? I thought it best to ask you, conveniently giving me an excuse to attack you with fan-mail. : )

Adrian

Hello, Adrian, and thank you for being stubborn with the form. You’re not the first person to have trouble. I have to get a different plug-in. In the meantime, if anyone wants to start a conversation here and has trouble with the form, please feel free to email me at contact at kelleyeskridge dot com (although I don’t know why I bother to stretch the address, the spammers-boils-be-upon-them found me long ago). Please say that you are submitting a “Talk To Me” post if you use email.

Thank you so much for these kind words, I’m honored. It is always my hope as a writer to touch other human beings in some way with my work, to make a connection… it means a lot to me when someone takes the time to tell me that has happened.

“The Hum of Human Cities” is indeed available in my recent collection Dangerous Space, under its original title “City Life.” It was my first sale (wow, what a feeling that was…). Kris Rusch, the editor of Pulphouse (bows in Kris’ direction in gratitude), didn’t like the title. So I found “Hum,” and like it well enough, but I’ve never stopped thinking of the story as “City Life.” I can be pretty stubborn myself sometimes (grin). So I returned to that title for the collection.

I don’t know if you’ve read all my stories: if not, there are three free here on the site: “Strings”, “And Salome Danced“, and “Dangerous Space“.

Fan mail is never an attack. Come back anytime.

Buster, life coach

I flounced over from a link on Booksquare. Had to comment on the cat — with four of my own acting as miscellaneous muses, masters and subjects of devious deeds in fiction and fact — I relate to Buster.

Cheers,

Pat Harrington
http://patriciaharrington.com

Isn’t Buster awesome? Let’s not even bother with a link, let’s just present him again in all his glory:

I discovered Buster when I was first putting together the project management team at Wizards of the Coast. I’d been facilitating for years (I’ve led meetings from 2 people to 250 people), and I was very glad I had those skills. I wasn’t expecting all the negotiating I had to do with other executives, my own team, and other teams that we worked with.

The thing is, all the facilitation skills in the world don’t stop other people from being defensive, uncommunicative, frightened or angered by change, or from hijacking the conversation onto another track. They just give me more tools with which to respond. And so sometimes I felt overwhelmed or stressed. And then I would return to my desk, look at Buster, nod in silent acknowledgment of our common impulse, and then go back out and start trying to hammer out more agreements.

Buster reminds me that good managers don’t eat the mice. And even though I’m not a direct manager in a corporate job right now, the fact is that we all “manage” relationships with each other every day, in large and small ways. So please don’t eat the mice.

Thanks, Pat, for bringing Buster back to the conversation today.

And a note: the Booksquare link Pat is referring to was a Twitter tweet… Yep, I’m on Twitter now. So is Nicola. Come join us in the twitterverse anytime.

And another note: I’m now moved to cross-post a version of this to Humans At Work. Come on over and have a look — there’s also a post about diversity that features a rockin’ Evanescence video, and a look at a recent interview about trust and social connection in every aspect of our lives — family, work, and community. If you enjoy the conversations here, please join me for more at Humans At Work.