Hats, Boots, & Chocolate

    I've always hated Hallmark movies.  Not all of them, to be fair; there are a few legitimately good stories among the lot. But 99% of the time, Hallmark movies are a collection of the same four or five plots, retold in about a thousand barely-different ways. Their one redeeming quality is that, for people like my mom who can't handle much suspense in a movie, they are excellent because once you've watched one, you've basically watched them all, so you know exactly how it ends.      Add to that the fact that, over the years, I've seen far too many Hallmark movies for my own good as a result of my parents' movie-watching preferences (which, due to the reason stated above, are usually dictated by my mom), and so can walk into the room in the middle of any Hallmark movie, watch for approximately 30 seconds, and tell you who each character is and the role they fill in the story, and it's little wonder that I hate them. After all, I have ADHD, and I need some ...

Read Part One here , Part Two here , and Part Three here!     Before I get started, please keep in mind that all the tips and tricks I share here are things that have worked for my brain. They may or may not work for yours, and I'm not claiming to have found some kind of Universal Truth for working with neurodivergent brains. I'm also very well aware that some of these tips and tricks may be imperfect methods, and I plan to continue exploring and experimenting with my brain to find more effective ways to work with my neurotype. This advice is specific to my brain; feel free to adapt it how you need. Part One: The ADHD     At the moment, my top tip for working with the ADHD part of my brain is this: Weaponize Distraction.     Recently, my parents alerted me to the fact that they'd like to see me helping out around the house more. The fact that I tend to hang out in my room doing nothing productive has apparently been growing rather wearing on them. So, I sta...

You can read Part One here and Part Two here!     The diagnosis is in hand--well, saved onto my computer, but you get my meaning. As of a week ago, I have been diagnosed with Level One autism (no intellectual or language impairments, yay me!), moderate ADHD, and high intelligence--and yes, I count the high intelligence as a diagnosis, because it comes with benefits and problems of its own. We'll get there. :)     I guess by this point, it might be reasonable to wonder why I would share all this rather personal information about the last year of my life. Why does all this matter?     Honestly, I have dreamed for a really long time about having the ability to help people. I've spent the last almost-nineteen years of my life living and functioning with undiagnosed ADHD and autism, and while I think I've received a lot of gifts and advantages because of this experience, it is really hard to be different from all the people around you and not know why. I have o...

Read Part One here!     The thing was, I now had  proof  that there was something going on in my brain. All my cousins have dyslexia, and they've all struggled with Irish dance as a result of the unique way their brains work. The advantage they have is that there are six or seven of them dancing at the school, and so all the ones in lower classes have a more experienced sibling who can teach them. I didn't have that kind of support; I didn't see them often enough for that at the time.     At some point along the way, I remembered my sister-in-law's comment about me having Asperger's. One Google search later, and I fell down a rabbit hole researching autism. I don't know how many videos I watched from I'm Autistic--Now What?, Auticate with Chris and Debby, and How to ADHD (I'd been working at Thanksgiving Point for a year at that point, and both my manager and some family members had mentioned that I might have ADHD). I told my mom, and we discovered that...

    Hey there! It's good to see you again; come have a seat by the fire and let's have a little chat.     No, don't worry, Hats, Boots, and Chocolate  isn't going anywhere. :) I may not update the blogs as often as I used to, but I promise we're still around!     Today, I really want to talk about some of the experiences I've been having the last year or so.     Some time ago that was more than a year ago (it's really nonspecific, I know, and I'm sorry about that), my mom was talking with my sister-in-law, and my sister-in-law mentioned that she thought I might have Asperger's syndrome. I didn't know about this at the time, and didn't find out about the conversation until a little while later, when I was talking with my mom on the way to Irish dance class--this is the reason I'm unsure on the time frame, because I quit Irish dance a year ago (for reasons I'll get into eventually), but for a solid year before that, I was driving myself...

    It has come to my attention that there are many in the writing community who haven't the faintest clue what passive voice is. In this blog post, I will clear up what passive voice is, what it is not, and when and how to use it, based on the information I have gotten from the book "Writing Tools" by Roy Peter Clark.     Note also that there is a difference between passive voice  and passive verbs , but that is a discourse that I will leave to Mr. Clark, as he has more experience and more eloquence than I do. But do recognize that, while I'll give a basic overview of passive voice, if you really want an understanding of all the parts that go into it, you'd be best served reading Mr. Clark's book.     So, what is passive voice? To put it as simply as possible, the difference between active and passive voice is whether or not the subject of a given clause is acting or being acted upon--and because it's based on clauses, a sentence can contain both acti...

     I tried/have been trying an experiment lately where I used ChatGPT during my brainstorming process for a completely new project, just to see how well it would do. It's terrible for coming up with a coherent plot--it forgets a lot of the things it just wrote out and starts to contradict itself--but for the story seed I used, it was perfect, because I've been doing research on that idea to figure out how it might work in a story for years, and never found anything that gave me a decent starting point for it. (It's a music-based magic system, but every previous attempt at designing it I'd tried, it became far too complex for me to write into a story, at least with my abilities as a novelist. ChatGPT gave me the best idea of what something like that could look like without being too complex for me to write, which was a perfect jumping-off point for me to then have the AI take me through a couple possible plot-threads, which I then unraveled and wove into my own plot-st...

    About a month ago, I adopted a goldfish from the preschool where I've been student teaching. His water was pretty scummy and he wasn't really eating, and the regular teachers at the site didn't have the time to take care of him as well as they wanted, and my head teacher mentioned that she'd been thinking about flushing him.     I, however, am a wee bit of an animal-lover, and while I'd never had a fish before, I couldn't bear the thought of flushing the poor little guy--he'd done nothing to earn that treatment. So I offered to take him home--a process that involved dumping him into the preschool sink by accident, then hurriedly scooping him into a plastic bag full of water and putting him in a little paper cup to give his water some structure so he'd have a bit of space to swim in. Then he got to hang out in the car and slosh around for thirty minutes while I drove home, and after that he had to survive living in a quart jar for a week while I order...

    I mostly wrote this to help myself figure out what the best principle for writing is for myself, but I decided that there was some value in this spiel that others might appreciate. Enjoy!      The most important part of a story, in my opinion, is the characters—the characters, their arcs, their relationships, their interactions within those relationships, their traumas, their challenges, their dilemmas, their choices, the consequences of their actions, their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, their conflicts, their hopes and dreams, their fears, their doubts, their worries, the lies they tell themselves, the truths they have to teach their writers and their readers. Everything else in a story—the plot, the setting, the action, the prose—all of it is supplemental, and exists solely to support the characters' growth, arcs, and journeys.     Some characters, like Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings, have to go on fourteen-month journeys to find ou...