KaytLudi.com

Surprise! After taking most of this year off from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, I’ve decided to tiptoe back in — but with a much clearer purpose than before.  I’m returning to these platforms  only to share the things I genuinely love creating and talking about: planner content, study tips, a little peek into my tutoring life, and updates from my Etsy shop, KaytsPaperTrailPress. That’s it. No doomscrolling, no pressure to “be online,” and definitely no politics. I’ve really missed chatting with people who love planning and learning as much as I do, and social media can be a cozy little corner when you set the boundaries that feel right. So that’s what I’m doing; setting boundaries and showing up with intention. If you’re on any of those platforms and want to follow along, I’d love to see you there. And if not, no worries at all — everything I share will still live here on the blog, right where it’s calm and clutter-free. Here’s to finding healthier ways to connect, cr...

  With the nightmare that is Trump 2.0 I ask myself on a daily basis whether to stay or go.  Honestly, for reasons I've never known, I've just always assumed I would end my life in a different country than the one in which I was born.  Maybe it's a Sagittarius thing.  Maybe it was the faint shadow of fascism on the horizon I detected back in the Dubbya admin.  Maybe it was the fact my mother was in need of a caregiver for the last 25 years of her life and moving to a country where help could be better-afforded looked appealing.  Maybe it was the fact I fell in love with a European.  Maybe it was the fact I love teaching ESL.  Maybe it was all of that. Maybe it was none of it. I don't know. But considering leaving your country, even wanting to leave it, and feeling forced out are very different things.  As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have never (and will never) respond well to being told what to do (particularly by men).  I'm not...

I'm a month into my MA English Lit degree and to let you know how it's going ... I'm already shopping for a different program to start in Fall. Casting no aspersions on the program, the school, the professors, or the other students (all of which/whom I adore) this is very much not for me.  I feel a bit like I'm losing my mind - the stress, the workload, the lack of direction of statements like 'make a substantive post of what you found interesting' when I found it all too tedious to be of interest - is sucking the life out of me. I honestly can't figure out how I'm getting good grades so far - I have no idea what this crap is, what I'm supposed to do with it, or why I'm doing it.  I feel utterly lost, and that every word I write in these courses is BS. This is just too theoretical and I can see clearly that, for me, this is going to kill my love of reading in general and literature specifically. There is, after all, such a thing as picking someth...

After my last post things got even worse in the form of a fire which destroyed the house where my parents were living and killed three of our dogs. Since then I've been back on Zoloft, my mom has been in the hospital (and a nursing home) trying to heal a broken femur, and my dad moved in here. It's been one of those moments when the entire boat of your life capsizes, leaving you treading water and unsure of how you even ended up in that situation.     That's about all I can manage to say about these past four months right now - I'm not a person who processes feelings contemporaneously - I shut down and go into survival mode (resorting to whatever coping mechanism carries the day). This house here has been coming along, slowly but surely, and I started my final undergrad semester last month - it consists of a required public speaking course and the capstone course. The capstone is covering sacred spaces and places of pilgrimage (instructor's choice) so anticipate (or...

Well, that was a way longer hiatus than I ever intended. Things got chaotic at the end of the Fall semester (as usual), but "thanks" to Covid it ended early (before Thanksgiving!). So, I had the entirety of December off from school, and I think I slept, watched TV, and ate for most of the month, lol. But Spring semester started up in January and by Feb I was flattened by a flare up of my probable Rheumatoid Arthritis (didn't make it into a Rheumatologist for the official diagnosis before Covid made that an impossibility - currently waiting for my new referral to come through). I am still in the throws of whatever this is, though it is improving slightly and slowly with the meds I've been on for almost a month now. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels Spring was not kind. It included putting two of our dogs to sleep (old age). Because I was a wreck all the way around, I dropped down from 4 classes to 2 (bumping my graduation from May to Dec in the process), and ...

So, after two back to back 5wk summer courses - which I am thrilled I got to take, despite the workload, because they were fascinating, my one week off before the early start of Fall semester (thanks, Covid) vanished into thin air for personal reasons. Then there were snafus with publishing my novel - I hired someone to do a final proof because it's nearly impossible to catch all your own mistakes when you know what something is supposed to say - even if you are occasionally paid to proofread for others. It just takes fresh eyes to catch everything. Well, not only did the person I hired have an (understandable) emergency which delayed the process, but after I got it back I still found typos we had BOTH missed, ugh! Now, I'm behind in reading for my fall classes, am still trying to cobble together the right poems for a chapbook competition with a deadline of Aug 31st, am being harassed by code enforcement about some weeds at my vacant fixer upper which is frustratingly still n...

I did it, I finally settled on a cover design for the first novel in the K at Steals Life series; Kathy Shearer's Second Act. I spent months going back and forth between two, unable to decide. But just like in most areas of life, if something doesn't jump out at you immediately, it's probably not right for you. The moment I saw this one I knew this was it. Now that this is settled, I'm fairly certain I can publish next month. And just because I like the look of the repetition in 8/8/2020, that's the date for which I am now aiming. Hope I can finish the edits/proofing in time! EDIT: REVISED RELEASE DATE NOW 8/18/2020! The Kat Steals Life series is about a woman turning 40 - divorced, no kids, no family besides her cat, and in a dead-end job that sucks the life out of her daily. She's always loved crime/heist/police procedural books and shows, so in the midst of this slight midlife crisis she works up the nerve to see if she can pull off a heist herself. The an...

Not only is the reference to herding cats accurate in the sense that my characters (or more precisely my MC) where being unruly, but I also find it a slightly funny (though completely inside) joke since my MC is called Kat. But I decided to suck it up and put on my big girl pants and let her do what she wants. In the process of letting go of who or what I thought my MC should be the strangest thing happened. I am not only probably just one more editorial pass away from publishing book one in the series, I got about 1300 words into book two in about an hour and have sketched out the general path of a 5 book series in the little notebook I call my brain. I say sketched out because I am not by any stretch of the imagination a person who likes or ever uses the word outline.  So I am calling my quickly scribbled notes anything but an outline. They are just brief paragraphs of things I don't want to forget to include in each book. Please don't be pedantic (aka accurate) and insist I ...

I've heard other writers talk about projects that refused to go in the direction they intended/wanted, and obviously I've had ideas morph from one thing to something slightly different. However, I never really thought I'd become a victim of this particular phenomenon since I'm a dyed-in-the-wool "pantser." I have never outlined anything I've written except when forced to do so in school (and even then I always wrote the paper and then back engineered the outline). I suspect it is a combination of however my brain is wired, and the fact that, to me, outlining spoils the fun. Why would I want to bother to write something when I already know what happens? Don't get me wrong, I have written things with a vague idea of what happens, or else there was some sort of guiding principle keeping the thing on the rails. An example would be a short story cycle in which each section occurred on a day of the week and each had an overriding theme (love, loss, betrayal,...

Sometimes saying yes to drugs is the right answer.  So, where the hell have I been (you would be entitled to ask)?  1) In July 2018 the monsoon that tears through Arizona every year, literally ripped the roof off my condo in Phoenix. The roof was pealed back like the lid of a sardine can. The event  itself sounded like a freight train, then there were a few days of leaking and battling my irresponsible HOA, then there was the 8am Sunday morning collapse of a huge chunk of my bedroom ceiling - good times. That day my dad drove the three hours from where my parents live, helped me load up my dogs and crucial belongings, and I was out of there! It took until the end of October for repairs on the condo to finish, then I sold it to my lovely neighbors (whose roof had also been destroyed) in November - deciding I never again wanted to own anything where the maintenance was at the mercy of an HOA I paid every month but which failed to actually maintain the property responsibly....

Ok, since I've been kind of neglecting my blog lately (Bad blogger!), I've decided to try something new here. Last semester I included book reviews and commentary for what I was reading in some of my classes. Since I'm taking a film class this semester, I've decided to share the commentary I'm writing for that class on here as well. Why not? They're all stories I'm experiencing in some fashion. They're all reactions and thoughts I'm having as a result. Who says I can review or comment on a book, but not a film? Not me ;-)

So this summer has gone to hell in a handbasket. I  had planned to get my "novella" (in quotes because of its awkward length), Fall On Landing out in June, but tomorrow starts Aug and it's not up yet. Part of the reason is because I tried to hire someone off Fiverr to do the cover, and it didn't work out. I had an idea, expressed in both writing and a sketch, but didn't trust my skills to do it myself. After that fail, I decided, despite not having done much painting since I was a teenager, to give it a go. What I created isn't quite the Old Masters epically nuanced version I had in my head, but I like it enough to use it. So, a couple weeks ago I finished it and ran it through the Canva site to make a cover. Now, I'm just trying to decide between two covers I made.  Anyone up for a poll? I feel one coming on 😉 I've decided to start two different series, and I had planned to get book one in each series at least written this summer. Now, I'm hoping...