Katie Runyon

I want to let anyone who’s interested know that I’ve added a few chapters up on FictionPress. Chapter one on this site is slightly outdated because I haven’t been able to connect to the site and update it. For right now, it’s the first 6 chapters. I don’t know if that number will change, but you’re welcome to check them out while they’re still there. Here’s the link: .

I’ve been going through and editing the chapters, so they are cleaned up before my beta readers get a chance to go through them. It’s been a while since I wrote them and thankfully I’ve at least grown a little as a writer. When I open one up and start reading, the first thing I think is “oh my god, I suck!” But after I go through and fix some of the not-so-strong points, I feel almost proud. Of course I like feeling proud of it, but in the end, I want anyone who reads it to come away saying “that was a good book. I can’t wait for the next one.” Going through my work, I always second guess myself. I wonder if it would be better if I had this little tidbit be known, instead of kept secret. Or if I should have made this scene happen a little differently. Of course I’m too close to see it from a readers Point of View instead. That is why I’m excited and nervous to hear back from my beta readers. Since they are writers and readers, and not as close to the work as I am, they should be able to give me a little bit of both.

Fantasy is of course riddled with cliques, but I hope to keep mine down to a minimum, or am able to put my own spin on the usual. While I’ve read a lot of fantasy books, most are from the same writer. I don’t know if my slight lack in fantasy knowledge will help me steer away from the cliqued or lead me right into them. I guess only time will tell.

A lot and nothing has happened since my last post. First, I was plagued by a cold and that was fun. Then a week or two later, I got the stomach flu and that was even more fun. That was actually the part I was luckiest with, because it didn’t last as long as it could and usually does. Then a few days ago, not even a week after the stomach flu incident, my brother dropped my nice laptop from Christmas onto my foot. After a few minutes, the initial extreme pain subsided and I assessed the damage to my laptop. It seemed to be fine, everything was working. My foot had saved the day. My foot on the other hand didn’t feel so lucky. Immediately after, my foot showed little purple dots. I’m guessing it was the impression from the dots from the speakers on my laptop. Within a few hours, a large section of my foot turned purple. I had to hobble around the whole day, making sure that any weight I placed on the foot was on the other side from where it was injured.

Later that night, I closed my laptop for a minute and came back to find my it was not so great after all. When I opened the lid, the screen was all distorted and closing/opening my lid did nothing. I restarted it a few times, but that didn’t help either. I plugged it into an external monitor and that seemed to strangely fix the problem, but within a few minutes it was right back to being distorted. Plugging it into the external monitor did nothing to fix it this time. So not only did I have a painful foot, now my laptop was broken. Of course, in the end, one of the worst things that could be wrong with my laptop was the problem. The heatsink from the video card was knocked loose and throughout the day, the video card slowly fried itself. Of course it’s not like I could just buy a new video card, but now I need to find a new motherboard because the video card is integrated with the motherboard. My mother said she’d be nice enough to pay for it since the only money I have is in my change jar. The bigger problem will be actually finding it anywhere.

So I’ve been without a laptop for the last few days and was reduced to fixing my desktop computer. Of course my luck was its usual crapness when it came to that too. I tried to repair the file that was corrupt, but it couldn’t, so I had to do a fresh windows installation. With no disks to backup my writing, I quickly emailed my chapters to myself, which was hard since the screen on my laptop was all messed up. Now, my internet won’t stay connected and this desktop computer keeps freezing. As I’ve told my mother before: I may be Irish, but I surely don’t have the luck of the Irish.