Heather Kilbourn

Writing Roundup – 2022

Posted on April 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

I put a bunch of time and energy into my writing and submissions in 2022. I managed 52 submissions of 19 different manuscripts, a high-water mark, completed six new ones, and had my first fiction publications, The Usurious Mechanic and Through the Mirror. For these efforts, I earned a grand total of $318.93.

Based on the amount of time I estimate I spent writing, editing, and submitting, the hourly rate rounds down to about $1.50-$2.00/hour. That includes the time I spent putting words into and editing unfinished manuscripts.

I’m proud of these accomplishments. Of course I would have liked to have had more publications, earned more money, and completed more manuscripts, but given time constraints and life events in the fall and winter, I’m calling 2022 a win.

I had hoped to keep the momentum going in 2023, but I broke a bone in my foot in September and it was very painful and distracting, I was laid off from my job in Mid-December, and somewhere around November I came to see why maybe my other manuscripts weren’t selling and realized they needed rewriting.

Since I spent multiple weeks at the start of 2023 consumed with job searching, I didn’t have much mental bandwidth for writing, so this year is off to a slow start. It’s going to stay slow because of different life stuff and all the rewriting I need to do. I’m okay with that, because 2022 was a milestone year and helped me see where I have to up-level my craft.

I’m also using the slower pace to read more, which is critical to better writing, and to consider rewriting a couple of pieces as screenplays to see if I can get some traction there. When I write, I’m mostly trying to describe the 3D movie I see in my head anyway. Blacklist here I come?

If you haven’t, I’d appreciate it if you’d read my stories and drop me a line if you like them. (Don’t send authors negative reviews; we’re quite good at telling ourselves how bad our work is on our own without your help.) Through the Mirror is also available as a podcast if that’s your jam.

Farewell, Twitter

Posted on March 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

A screenshot of my first tweet on Twitter from my @kilbo account dated April 3, 2009. The text is, "Becoming a twit."

I’m done with Twitter and tweeted my last tweet in January 2023. Though I mourn the voices I’ve left behind, I celebrate the experience. While quitting Twitter cold-turkey has been rough, the time I used to spend on it has shifted to other activities, like reading, and I’m less anxious about world events–both positive outcomes.

With its global reach and endless ways to slice, fork, and forward conversations, Twitter always reminded me of USENET. It also shared a similar community dynamic of direct, unfiltered conversations with world- and lesser-famous experts in their fields while bad actors and idiots derailed things through malice and ignorance.

Twitter at its best kept me connected to friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, delivered nuanced and broad viewpoints on any topic that caught my eye, alerted me to important breaking news, educated me, and provided virtual communities to discuss the topics I was most interested in. At its worst, it was a catalyst to amplify the horrible behavior and voices of fascists, racists, bigots, misogynists, transphobes, and other dregs of humanity.

The good parts enabled me to curate lists of astronomers, astrophysicists, ichthyologists, writers, geologists, and local journalists, all discussing happenings in their fields along with a corresponding steady stream of amazing pictures. Automated Twitter bots delivered me pictures from the edge of the universe, the outer and inner solar system, the tops of mountains and the bottoms of oceans, and forests and deserts. Other bots sent me earthquake alerts and reports, first responder information, weather forecasts and warnings, gentle reminders to take care of myself, and my favorite bots, the just for fun ones like icon aquariums and meadows, hourly photos of lizards, and esoteric art.

The worst parts had me block hundreds of accounts and keywords in order to filter out hate and emotionally insulate myself from seeing endless, echoing reports of singular, tragic events. There were also people who were just fine with insulting or threatening me for daring to share or hold an opinion that was at variance with theirs.

Using filters and lists curated through the wonderful third-party app I used, Tweetbot, I had hammered Twitter into a community and information conduit that was mostly pleasant to interact with and minimized the negative bits. I was never a prolific tweeter, clocking in at over seventeen thousand tweets over almost fourteen years.

But then a billionaire asshole bought Twitter at the end of 2022. That sale prompted me to delete most of my tweets before the deal closed. I set up an auto-delete bot to purge tweets older than a month and I ramped down my tweeting. My intent was to add a minor speedbump to access my account data on the platform by putting the bulk of it into offline backups.

On January 12, 2023, third-party Twitter apps were disabled, which was the only way I interacted with Twitter. I haven’t tweeted since. That the asshole owner continues to exhibit behavior and espouse and amplify opinions from the worst side of Twitter makes them anathema to me and reinforces my decision. I can’t in good conscience provide my content or passive participation for them to monetize. It’s the “no assholes” rule in action.

I’ve looked at Mastodon as a replacement and I’m not convinced it’s a step forward instead of a step sideways and back so I’m holding off for now. Its architecture is similar to USENET with its distributed servers, each with separate content policies and admins. I was uneasy with the situation back then and it wasn’t until I set up my own server with my own domain and policies that I felt more secure in my participation. Mastodon falls into the same bucket for me and I have no desire to be a server admin again.

I remain hopeful Twitter crashes financially and is sold in a fire sale to better owners who will restore third-party API access with a subscription fee. I’d pay for that. I’m not holding my breath.

Farewell, my Tweeps, farewell.

Farewell Pierre Ketteridge, Prophet of the Great God Glub

Posted on February 9, 2023 | 2 comments

Pierre was what any generation would call a Character and a world-class raconteur. He was what my grandfather’s generation would have called a pen pal and mine calls an Internet friend–someone I knew semi-intimately through their writing first on USENET and then later, on a private mailing list. I knew him for close to thirty years but only met him one time on a group video call.

The first adventure of his I recall reading about was his participation in a North African car rally. My faulty memory wants to believe it was the Dakar Rally and that he was engaged as a photographer, which was another one of his creative outlets. His dispatches then and until the end of his life had a Hunter S. Thompson-esque flavor and I recall his hilarious narration of mechanical breakdowns and the trials and tribulations of journeying in a desert where you don’t speak the language.

At one point he included a selfie shot of him and the driver in the desert. His thin frame looked dusty and dirty. His curly hair was an unruly windswept nest atop his head. Underneath his bushy moustache was the smile of a person who looked like they were having the time of their life. I’m certain he was.

Pierre lived in the UK and was a keen observer of regional and cultural dialects and class distinctions as he travelled across the country for work. He had a knack for meeting or observing interesting people and I always envied his characterizations and ability to transcribe their patois. His missives through the years were a delight to read. A more memorable story of his from a 1994 trip to Brighton recounted witnessing some London businessmen out to dinner with sex workers:

They were loud, and brash, and drunk, and they were loaded – and wanted everyone to know it. … Sleazebag was trying very hard to look like John Travolta in his cream linen suit and dark open-necked shirt. His gleaming pate and greased-back remains of dandruff-encrusted hair spoilt the effect a bit, though. Both were dripping with ugly, chunky jewelry. … My main course, and a carafe of wine, arrived, and I got stuck in. I could still hear them though, singing and shouting and giving the restaurant staff hell. “Oy, Angelo! Gessanuvva bottla wine! An’ none of that fuckin’ Shyanti crap like before. Gessa bottla Valpollywotsit, pronto!”

The story unfolds in a way that would make Guy Ritchie blush and concludes with his vicious hangover the next morning.

Many of his stories orbited around alcohol-fueled behavior, either his own or others’. His last home was in a live-aboard in a marina surrounded by a cast of other characters who lived there and in the local pub. He recounted plumbing problems, bodies alive or otherwise in the water, motorcycle crashes, dating adventures, mentally ill neighbors, and the drama that would spill from the pub and end up on his boat and vice versa.

There’s no sugarcoating that his final years were rough, physically and mentally. It was distressing to watch from afar. He lost his high-tech career and worked a variety of odd jobs. He suffered from a number of physical ailments that caused him great pain at times and limited his mobility. The UK’s medical system has been trending towards the US’s for over a decade, and he was chronically under-treated.

His stories, which used to be torrents with hundreds or thousands of words, shrunk to a few sentences of tantalizing vignettes or cryptic hints of more to come that never came. When he was finally diagnosed with cancer and ended up in hospital, that trickle of words turned to drops until his tap ran dry.

One happy constant in his restless and unpredictable life was his love for his boys. He was very proud of the men they had become and it came through whenever he wrote about them. I send my heartfelt condolences to them.

Pierre’s is a peculiar grief to me. I have lost a favorite author and I grieve not only the loss of his life but the loss of his words. As much as watching him from afar could be maddening when he made sub-optimal decisions, I will miss the unbridled joy and piercing insight about people he shared through his stories, like when he was hired to photograph Grace Jones at a club and described her and her entourage in devastating detail or detailed the eccentricities and travails of local village inhabitants.

Farewell, Prophet, you mad motherfucker. Send a letter from the beyond, willya?