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Since I’ve written openly about my return to graduate school, I want to take a moment to share an update and acknowledge a change in direction. I’m not in graduate school anymore, for now. This wasn’t a decision I made lightly, and it wasn’t about a lack of interest or commitment. If anything, the desire to keep learning is still very much there. What changed were the logistics — specifically around student loans — and they ultimately made continuing right now impossible. The first issue was available financial aid. I knew I didn’t have enough to realistically cover the program, but updated figures — especially once interest was factored in — meant I wouldn’t even have half. I could have borrowed a small amount, but that leads to the second and much bigger problem: borrowing even a minimal amount would have reactivated my previously discharged student loan debt — over $130,000. That debt was discharged due to disability. To take out new federal student loans now, I would be require...

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...

    My word for 2025 is: Connect.  In the last couple years I've let all my human connections wither, and I should really change that!

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...

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash   I saw a tweet the other day that said: Ask 10 writers how to write, and you’ll get 13 different answers. As much as that did produce a chuckle from me, it’s also the truth. In fact, that might be an understatement. The amount of writing produced about writing is almost insane. Write every day, inspiration is for amateurs. Have a set word-count goal. Treat it like a 9–5 job. Churn out content like a machine. You can’t edit a blank page. Plot every syllable. Go with the flow, follow your muse. Pantsing is just as valid as plotting. It’s OK to write one great novel and then retire. Take 15 years to write a pamphlet, slow and steady wins the race. You do you. Be a reclusive artiste . Get out there in the real world. Write what you know. Don’t write about your real life, be creative. This famous writer wrote first thing in the morning on a laptop, with a huge amount of caffeine at hand. That famous writer wrote in the middle of the night by ...

Lately, very lately, I have taken to creating blackout poems. I was first introduced to this concept in a university Creative Writing course I took a few years back. Then I was reminded of it by reading Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist (which, for all I know, is where my instructor encountered it in the first place ... who knows, stranger things have happened). For years I've been writing a poem a day based on five to six random words. I'm such a weirdo I find this sort of thing fun. But, in doing the blackout poetry I am discovering something else - a way to process the news (aka reality) which borders on the therapeutic. I normally get something out of writing a poem - obviously - if that weren't the case I wouldn't do it. But what I normally get is something akin to a purge. Taking a news article and covering things up in order to uncover a way to make it about something else, is completely different somehow. Rather than purging something, it's more like ...

I'm now through the first three chapters of this fantastic book, and thought I would go ahead and share parts of my recent discussion post from the related class I'm taking (The Life and Death of Languages): I grew up in Southern California – the home of the no-accent accent. My maternal grandmother, who did most of my childcare, had a Massachusetts accent. I remember being sent for speech analysis in school one day, and while I was let loose once they determined I had simply picked up my grandma’s accent, it made me highly self-conscious of the way I spoke. I went on a mission afterward, to try to speak 'perfectly.' The focus, initially, was on the accent, but eventually my quest encompassed all aspects of grammar and vocabulary. I didn’t want anyone to ever again think there might be something 'wrong' with me for the way I spoke. Somewhere along the line, that desire to master all the 'rules' turned me into something of a grammar cop. I think I...

I'm something of a compartmentalizer. I had a personal blog and a writing blog. I had a website to advertise my freelance writing and other marketable skills, and a separate site to talk about my fiction writing saga. I have a personal twitter and a writing twitter. I didn't want to "bother" people from one area of my life with stuff from another. Didn't want to bore personal friends with talk of writing, or posted poetry. Didn't want to offend fellow word-lovers with my politics, or bore them with monotonous check-ins to the same handful of places (I'd be depressingly easy to stalk if anyone were so inclined, lol). But I'm done with that. Maybe it's the New Year, or my new word. Maybe it's just my age showing - I am in my fuck-it-forties, after all. Maybe it was an article I read which said that having a website under a cutesy online pseudonym (like my qwertyKayt) is best if your 'brand' is talking about writing, while having a...

I don't know what rock I've been living under, but this concept of having a guiding word for the year is brand new to me. I only know about it because of a vlogger I watch regularly: She's in Her Apron . But the idea is SO up my alley. I've never been a resolution-maker, but a word? I love words, obviously. I live for them, by them, and though them. To use one to define all my many intentions and goals for the year is one of those ideas where I'm mystified that I never thought of it! My word for 2018 is: RELEASE

When December started I was riding a wave of perceived accomplishment. And I imagined / assumed it would continue to flow. I had huge plans for the month. I was going to put the 40,000 words I managed for NaNoWriMo on the back burner for the month and write the first draft of a second, unrelated, novel. But something drowned my plans (ok, done with the water metaphor, I swear). It's happened the last few years, and it has been getting worse, but somehow the pattern escaped me. It's not the depression I'm familiar with - the one that arrives for no reason, at no particular time, and leaves only when the drugs drag it out the door kicking and screaming. It's not a weather-related case of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). First of all, I live in Arizona, our weather is only slightly more existent than my native California. We have only: lightweight sweater weather, 3 days of pleasant perfection, hot, hotter, and 'the armpit of hell' hot. Those of us who aren't...

I had signed up for NaNoWriMo eons ago, and by eons I mean over a decade. And yet, despite the initial, and recurrent, desire to take part, I never did. First and foremost, it's taken me years to come to terms with the idea of sharing the odd goings on which call my head their home. Secondly, there has always seemed to be some perfectly convenient excuse, as there always is, for why it's not convenient to do it now . But despite the eternal headaches of holidays, schoolwork - and this year, actual final exams - coinciding with NaNoWriMo, I decided to shut up and just try it this year. Something about feeling that I had such lovely, and valid,  excuses built in for any possible failures, made it seem somehow less frightening to think of doing so. So what if I only hit 20,000 words, I thought, that's way more than I had, and I can always blame it on school. In the interest of honesty, I must admit, I started with about 4,000 words I'd previously written. But since I am a ...