…or, “Where the *@%! Has Jean Been?!” November was a heck of a month, y’all. As if NaNoWriMo wasn’t enough to keep me busy, about a week and a half into that my freelance business started to pick back up, and before I knew it I had more clients and Read more…
This is not coming from a survival expert or a seasoned prepper. I myself am barely more than a beginner. Of course, living in Oklahoma, land of tornadoes, wild fires, intense heat and drought, devastating ice storms, large hail and now earthquakes, you generally grow up knowing to be at least somewhat prepared for disaster. But as far as seriously preparing to survive a true, out-of-the-ordinary SHTF scenario, my husband and I are just getting started.
One lesson I’ve learned is how overwhelming it can be, once you’ve made the decision to try to reasonably prepare as much as possible for every disaster, terrorist attack, zombie invasion or breakdown of society imaginable. Suddenly, you find yourself able to imagine a LOT that can go wrong, and it’s easy to become discouraged once you realize it’s simply not possible to prepare for every single possibility that you read about or that crosses your mind. There’s also a tendency to panic, to want to do everything possible to get ready NOW, even if it means running up a lot of debt or spending all of your savings to make sure there’s a year’s worth of food and water in your pantry. Just last week, my husband had to talk me down from wanting to sell our house immediately and move in with my mom out in the country and start a mini farm in her back yard.
Here are some steps I’ve learned to help mitigate the sense of panic and overwhelm.
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The world is a scary place, and so is Oklahoma. Living in Tornado Alley, you learn early on to be ready to take cover at a moment’s notice. Most people around here have their hidey-holes prepped with weather radios, flashlights and batteries and enough food and water and clothes to get them by if their home gets blown away.
Even so, I always took it for granted that if something happened, we’d get by. If I was ready to weather a tornado, then I guess I thought I was ready for anything. Then, in 2007, we had a devastating winter ice storm that blacked out a large portion of the state and left thousands of people stranded with no power, many for as long as several weeks. A lot of people died during that ordeal simply because they weren’t prepared and they turned to unsafe means of trying to stay warm, resulting in fires and carbon monoxide poisoning.
I’m starting out the second week of NaNoWriMo about 3,000 words short of where I should be. I was doing great for the first three days, even had a bit of a word cushion built up, but then I decided to take Friday off from writing, since it was already Read more…
Today was a good day for the novel, y’all. Today I FINALLY got my protags together. Yes, I know I’ve posted smoochie-licious snippets from that book here before, but those were FUTURE smoochies from when I impatiently skipped ahead. You guys have no idea how hard it is for me Read more…
I’ve been having some success lately using the Pomodoro technique to get things done (when I remember to use it, that is). If you don’t know what the Pomodoro technique is, it’s basically just using a kitchen timer to help you stay on task and increase your productivity. Set the Read more…
Today kicks off the awesome insanity known as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short), during which millions of brave souls the world over will attempt to write at least 50,000 words of a novel by month’s end. If you’ve been following along here, then you know I had wanted Read more…
Reminder! Speaking of restless spirits, today is the last chance to snag your FREE copy of my novel, Restless Spirits, on Smashwords. Coupon code FU23M expires at midnight!
For the first two years of our marriage, Matt and I rented out the upstairs of my mom’s house. At the time, my mom basically ran a boarding house. After building her big dream house after my dad passed away, at some point she decided that it was too much house for her alone and started taking in boarders, mostly extended family and people from her church who needed a place to stay and couldn’t afford a lot of rent. During the time of this story, the house’s other residents included my mom’s sister and her grandson, and another guest who will remain nameless.
This last boarder was the sort of person who you never knew what sort of stuff she or her associates might be into. It was during the months that she stayed there that all of this went on.
This week I’m hosting my last IWU blog tour guest until NaNoWriMo is out of the way. As appropriate for Halloween, my guest this week is indie horror novelist Todd Russell, author of Fresh Flesh, the first entry in his Fresh series.
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I was 22 years old and living at home after a stint away at college, and my father had recently passed away. Battling insomnia, I had been lying in bed for hours. As I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, trying to will my mind to settle down and stop thinking long enough to let me fall asleep, I kept imagining weird, creepy faces floating around my room. I told myself that this was the beginning of dreaming and I was FINALLY starting to drift off to sleep, and the dark nature of what I was seeing must be due to stress. But sleep still eluded me, and I was starting to get creeped out, so I decided to get up and read or watch TV or something.
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