Idle Thoughts

I know you haven’t been active in a while, but I wanted to mention that there’s a new Ned/Cat author (crldnvrs) who’s been writing some really beautiful work lately, and it just reminded me of how much I’ve missed your voice in the fandom. It made me wonder, do you think you might return to writing at some point? No pressure at all, of course. Just wanted to say your work is still very loved and remembered.

Thank you for your kind words about my fics. When I first made my tumblr, I had a hashtag I liked to use—totbot—which means “too old to be on tumblr”. That’s even more accurate today, LOL, but here I am, responding to you. I have now been married for almost 32 years and my youngest child has been legally able to drink in the USA for 3 years, and my oldest child has made me a grandmother in the past month.

Will you write anything for NedCat week this year?

In the mean time I just reread your stories over and over again because they are wonderful even after many times of rereading. Much love to you wishing you all the best.

This is a very sweet message which has taken me far too long to respond to because of my extremely rare presence on tumblr these days.

I will never lose my love for Ned and Cat. In some ways, real life events in the past couple years have actually made them even dearer to me oddly enough.

I do intend to finish all my unfinished tales. (And my annoying brain keeps dreaming up new ones randomly in spite of my best efforts to tell it to shut up!) I just honestly don’t know when my intentions will become actions.

Thank you.

I do intend to finish them at some point. Life has been rather full of ups and downs since just before the pandemic began, and I fear both the good and not-so-good happenings have conspired to prevent my desired return to writing.

Thank you again for your kind words about my writing. The unfinished snippets of chapters of my long unfinished stories or installments in my various series still sit in my documents, and I think about them fairly often. I truly have no desire to abandon them.

I hope to find the time, energy, and presence of mind to do more than think about them, but each time I’ve made a commitment to write, something happens to cause me to go back on it, so I’ve given up on promising any timelines.

Short answer, yes.

You are so sweet, my friend!! The flooding is truly terrible, and it has hit areas of the state where a lot of the people have very little to begin with. I live several hours away from there and have not been impacted directly by the flooding, but various organizations and churches here are sending water, non-perishable foods, hand sanitizer, sainting wipes, etc.

The death toll stands at 37 and is expected to rise. Over 350 people are living in temporary shelter and over 10,000 people remain without power.

For anyone interested in helping the flood victims, the Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund has been established by our governor, Andy Beshear, and all funds go directly to relief for the people affected by this disaster.

Climate change is real, y’all—historic floods, mammoth wildfires, violent storms, record heat waves. My little corner of the world is just one place suffering the effects. And things will only get worse if nothing changes.

To those of you living here in America, speak up and make it clear to those in power that climate change IS a crisis worth dealing with, and then VOTE for people willing to make the hard choices to meet that crisis.

Y’all living elsewhere should do the same, but as we have the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s greatest carbon emitters, I’m shouting loudest at everybody right here in the USA.

I have all my men under my roof at the same time for the first time in nearly a year, and I’m loving every minute of it! (Even if I did just leave them all downstairs enjoying each other’s company and a bottle of Macallan while I’m heading to sleep because I’m getting up early to cook all day!!

It’s been an eventful year for the DKNC family with a roller coaster of highs and lows and big life events for everyone, but we are all well and together now—looking forward to our feast tomorrow and Son #1’s wedding in just over 3 weeks!

I miss writing. Life has conspired to keep me focused on many other things for a very long time, and given my son and and soon-to-be daughter-in-law’s selection of a mid-December wedding, I’ve no hope of reviving my traditional Christmas fic from years past this year. But I have decided that after a year like this one, I need to get back to doing some of the things I love just for me. So I’m committing to update one of my long dormant works in process at least every two months in 2022. That’s still an abysmally slow writing schedule, but exponentially better than I’ve done in ages—and I’ve gotta start somewhere, right?

In the mean time, I once wrote a Thanksgiving fic and it is the season, so if any of you Ned/Cat folks (or general Stark family fun fans) are interested in an old story set on Turkey Day, here’s the link to “Turkey and Family History.”

My 13 year old tortoiseshell cat Sugar has drunk her water like this she was a kitten, taking her time and savoring every sip.

I am pretty much over the snow. Over a foot deep in our back yard for over a week now. I have to confess I borrowed the Maker’s Mark picture from my uncle’s Facebook. After Covid quarantine and being snowed in for long hours at a time, all bourbon bottles in THIS old Kentucky home are pretty much empty!