Apocalypse- by Cigarettes After Sex
It’s 10:42 AM on a Friday and, as usual, my mind is swimming with one chaotic thought after another. The first fifty-two tabs open in my brain are just labeled BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS. It’s mentally draining. The other three hundred tabs are all carefully dedicated to what I call The List. The List is a never-ending stream of anxiety-fueled promises I’ve made to myself in the spirit of Getting Things Done.
Get the codes read on the Beast so I can figure out if the dealership was actually telling me the truth or if they think I’m stupid because I have a vagina.
Get in contact with the college to figure out why the fuck my money isn’t in my account when classes start on Monday.
cleanthehousecleanthehousecleanthehousecleanthehouse
CLEAN. THE. FUCKING. HOUSE.
Play Minecraft until my eyes bleed. Until I put it down for three months and then play it nonstop for 2 weeks again.
Work on the shit I already have in progress. STOP MAKING NEW BOOK IDEAS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
Get ARC readers for Scars.
Save money to do PR boxes.
Mortgage
Bills
I hate being poor.
How do I market this book when it’s sad and there’s not a whole lot of fucking in it to pull in the Booktok Girlies?
So on and so fucking forth. Wash, rinse, repeat. My life is in shambles, but I don’t think I’ve known a time when it wasn’t. I think I’ve completely misunderstood the point of an author’s blog. I’m supposed to talk about book stuff, right? Well, here we go.
One of my favorite parts about writing is the unhinged shit I Google on a daily basis. I just know that, somewhere out there, my personal FBI handler is staring at my search history with sweat-drenched armpits, nervously sipping a strong black coffee while mumbling “Nita, I can’t defend you this time. Why did you have to look up ‘Thirty Easy Ways To Make Poisons’ or ‘Where should I stab a man in the back to hit his heart’?” Don’t you worry, Mr. Secret Agent Lover Man, it’s all in the name of research. Could be for D&D, or it could be for writing. I don’t have much interest in poisoning people or stabbing people in real life. I don’t look great in orange. Yesterday, I learned about grasses native to Central Texas in the 1800s, including how to plant them, what they felt like, the color of their stalks, and which livestock animals preferred to eat which grass more. This is the beauty of being a writer. I know so much useless information that will never help me in my day to day life, besides boring people with drudgery that I found interesting in a scholastic sense.
My current work in progress is Ghosts, book two of the Hunters Series. Ghosts is Jesse’s story, who she was before she became the much-loved and infamous Wild West Jess- bounty huntress extraordinaire. Jesse Harlow was born in Texas in the 1800s, something I lament with every chapter I write. I’m a very big Red Dead Redemption fan. Those games, the second one especially, have a very special place in my heart. I’ve been in love with Arthur Morgan since the very first moment I played RDR2. When I was younger, I used to sit and watch old Westerns with my Uncle Don. I had zero idea what was going on, but I thought there was always something so captivating and weirdly romantic about the gritty, arid backdrop of the early settlement years of the West. Completely ignore the whole no plumbing, heat combined with unwashed bodies, rampant sickness, lack of dental care aspect of it. The problem with viewing the Wild West through the lens of childhood, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, is, well….the obvious.
Writing Ghosts is proving to be challenging even ten chapters in (ten chapters, woo!). There are so many aspects of the 1850s in the South that I don’t feel I have the right to speak on. Doing research for the book has opened my eyes to a whole lot of injustices that colonizers committed in the name of “Progress”, atrocities that my history classes in school kindly sugar-coated for my young, dumb brain. Being raised in Florida and getting the majority of my education in Florida meant that a lot of the ugly truth of things was carefully sliced and smothered because it’s easier to erase the evil things than it is to explain that the same men that preached freedom from an empire were the same men that created an empire based on the backs of abused and enslaved human beings. The same men that felt like their rights were stolen from them were the same men to steal land and murder indigenous people who had welcomed them in the tentative name of friendship. War. Always war over money, land, power, people. The first half of Ghosts takes place during the last few years of the Mexican-American war, and Jesse lives through the Civil War and all the mess afterwards, so how did I go about picking my way through that in a way that wouldn’t disrespect the people who were affected by those things? I didn’t. I’m a Caucasian woman and I don’t personally feel my skin is the right color to speak on the horrifying reality that was slavery in Texas in the mid-to late 1850s. I refuse to romanticize it with flowery language or even describe how awful it was because I have zero clue. I can make myself aware of it, can read biographies of affected indigenous and black people until I’m a sobbing mess in the floor, but I will still have no idea what it means to suffer in that way.
Onwards to lighter things.
The small town of Greenbriar that Jesse visits in Ghosts is actually modeled somewhat after Valentine in Red Dead Redemption 2. That game has been so incredibly useful for figuring out how things looked and the ability to ride through the towns and take notes on all the things you may see is such a refreshing change from just endless Googling and making shit up off the top of my head. I mean, there’s still a lot of shit I make up (the whole town, for instance), but it’s easier to have something I can walk through.
I used to live on a horse breeding farm for a few years that primarily bred Arabians, but we had an Appaloosa stallion named Choco- short for Chocolate Chip. So far, Choco hasn’t made an appearance, and likely never will, but I’ve put a lot of my love for horses into Ghosts. Jesse’s horse, Champion, is a favorite of mine. I loooove a cute, quirky animal companion in books and suddenly just now realized that every book I write has some sort of animal in it. I think it’s fine. Animals make the world go round and human beings don’t deserve them.
I think that’s enough for today, but I am going to do my best to blog more often so I can give some insights to what I’m working on, and may even do some weekly updates on all the dumb things I’m learning from my Googling sessions. I send all my love and adoration. Stay safe.
