Month: April 2024

It’s The Little Things Part 2; Online Launch Party for Charybdis!

The link to the online launch party for Charybdis is at the end of this post, so if you don’t want any humorous content first, you can skip right down to the end, but trust me, you’ll be missing some hilarious sh*t.

Anyway, it’s been another quiet week with a couple of notable exceptions. First…THAT BUG IS BACK. Yes, I woke up on Tuesday morning to another notification that there had been movement detected on my kitchen camera at 2 o’clock in the morning, and yes, it was that same bug. How long do house centipedes LIVE? Is this guy the Methuselah of insects?! And what the hell is he eating?! I looked it up and according to the google, house centipedes eat OTHER ANTHROPODS, which is so cannibalistic and creepy but then again, I’m not surprised that something that looks like the alien in ALIEN eats insect flesh. But then the article I read went on to say that if you have frequent sightings of house centipedes, “this indicates that some prey arthropod is in abundance, and may signify a greater problem than the presence of the centipedes” and OH MY GOD DOES THIS MEAN THERE ARE MORE FREAKY INSECTS IN MY HOUSE?!!  Then again, the sighting hasn’t been “frequent”—it’s only the one leggy dude waving at us like “Hey, just haunting your kitchen AND your dreams” so hopefully he’ll run out of food soon.

But the other thing is that I’ve definitely gone down the rabbit hole of miniatures, because a couple of weeks ago, I was at the antique market and I found a bag of vintage dollhouse furniture and a tiny voice in my head whispered, “Buy it. You know you want it. You can do something cool with it.” So I DID buy it and then it sat on the breakfast room table for 2 weeks until Ken whispered, “I can build you a box to put this doll furniture in” which he did. And suddenly, I became a fanatical miniaturist, and I created an entire “Antique Store Office Sanctuary” which now I want to live in and if I could only shrink myself down to 1/12” size, I would totally do it, just to live in my tiny room. Here it is, and I adore it so much:

The Persian rug is actually a mouse pad and I got all the tiny books from Amazon. I already had the Antique storefront from some wall art that I cut apart, and the wallpaper came from a book that I had bought years ago full of William Morris style wrapping paper that I podged on, and I had the trim and created the ‘paintings’ and HOLY SH*T I’m becoming obsessed and I really want to make more miniature rooms, but we all know what happened with the clock fixation, am I right?

In other news, I’m over 8 chapters into my new book “Nomads of the Modern Wasteland”, which centres on a group of people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic future, woven together by the poetry of TS Eliot. It’s actually going to be a novella, which is a mini book, so that tracks.

Also, the book launch for Charybdis is on May 26th in person, but if you’re a friend of mine who’d like to celebrate with me but you have NO WAY of coming to Ontario, Canada, my publisher has very graciously set up an online celebration for June 1 and you can register here–it’s FREE!: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/charybdis-by-suzanne-craig-whytock-launch-party-tickets-884105522417?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=1

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Well, I guess the most exciting thing that happened last week was the eclipse. And it WAS truly exciting, I have to say. Ken and I drove to my aunt’s boyfriend’s place (it’s always so weird to say ‘boyfriend’ when people are in their late 60s, isn’t it, like he’s not A BOY, he’s a grown-ass man with grandkids, but I digress) and the whole fam had gathered to witness the event. I’d ordered those special glasses from Amazon, and I checked very carefully to make sure that they were legit and not going to render us all blind (as a side note, one of the larger towns near here ordered eclipse glasses also off Amazon and then had to recall them when they found out that they were knock-offs and not approved by NASA or whatnot but mine WERE and it’s been almost a week and I still haven’t gone blind). When we woke up on Monday morning, it was quite cloudy and Ken was being his typical gloom and doom self, going on about ‘cloud cover’ and wind speed and ‘chance of precipitation’ like the Weather Channel was paying him to give me his opinion, but I would not be dissuaded. “It’s going to be perfect,” I said, with all the confidence of a late-middle-aged woman who has never given a sh*t whether or not she was wrong about anything.

We left shortly after lunch to drive down to the lake, and on the way, there was blue sky on the horizon. “See,” I said. “It will be FINE.” I said this with all the confidence of a late-middle-aged woman who recently ran outside and across her front lawn in the pouring rain in her stocking feet and screamed “Get the f*ck of my street!” to an asshole in a pick-up truck who was trying to deface our Pride crosswalk by doing a burn-out on it. I got photographs of the truck AND his license plate—the jury is still out on whether or not the cops will do anything about it. Also, we had to leave Atlas behind, and a friend was going to give him lunch and let him out, but I had to message her and remind her not to let him out between 2:30 and 3:30 because he’s such a dope that he’d probably stare at it barking until his retinas burned out. She responded by sending us this picture of him on the couch, safely relaxing in the house:

At any rate, the closer we got to the lake, the more sporadic the cloud cover was, which filled me with incredible optimism. We arrived and hugged the family—Mom and Dad were there, along with my other aunt, and a couple of friends. We had snacks and wine, because what the hell is the point of watching a phenomenon of nature without ‘nature’s more fun grape juice’, and then sat on the deck. Waiting. It was still cloudy. The eclipse was supposed to start around 2:30 pm and right around then, the wind picked up and the clouds began to move. By 3 pm, the skies were blue and clear. We all had our glasses on, breathless with anticipation and freaking out that the clouds would return—but THEY DIDN’T, KEN, JUST LIKE I SAID.

It was an awe-inspiring moment. I’ve never in my lifetime seen a total solar eclipse and holy sh*t, let me tell you, it was worth the wait. And the best part was that Ken had his really good camera, and he got some amazing shots:

Don’t Blink Or You’ll Miss It

Last weekend, the local Lions Club had a charity auction. It was pretty good as auctions go, especially since a lot of area businesses donated brand new items. I bid on a few things, like some Lego for Kate and a bunch of old spindles that I told Ken he could use for outdoor woodcrafts. Then the auctioneer put up a new Blink home security system. We already have a Blink camera in the kitchen that I use when Ken’s away overnight. It’s hidden inside something (I refuse to be more specific, but I promise we never use it when we’re home with other people and I can assure you that I have never forgotten to turn it off and then been mortified at a notification featuring a clip of me dancing around the kitchen island while I cook), and unless the lights are on at night, it won’t pick up any movement that triggers the camera.

Anyway, I bid on the security system and got it for a really good price. So on Thursday night, after researching and reading the instructions and getting the exterior cameras set up, Ken mounted them outside the house on either side of our porch. That’s when I realized that when I armed them, it would also turn on the kitchen camera. But that’s okay, I thought, since there’s nothing in our kitchen at night. And then I woke up on Friday morning to TWO notifications that the kitchen camera had been triggered around 3 am and there were video clips and OH MY GOD, YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT I SAW WHEN I REPLAYED THEM.

And if you know me at all, you’re most likely thinking that it was a ghost. And you would be wrong. IF ONLY it was a ghost, because it was not.

Take a second and try to guess what it could have possibly been. I’ll wait...

Here is what I saw on the screen of my phone, and I really hope you can watch it:

sheer-terrorDownload

H. R. Giger has nothing on this thing and all I know is that it’s still in my kitchen somewhere and I will never be able to dance there again…

In other news, my new novel Charybdis is getting excellent reviews–here’s one by the Founding Editor of a prominent Canadian review site, The Miramichi Reader. Being compared to Edgar Allen Poe made me scream almost as much as when I saw what was on my kitchen camera:

Charybdis Getting Featured!

Smorgasbord New Book Spotlight – #Mystery #Historical Charybdis by Suzanne Craig-Whytock

Thank you so much to the lovely Sally Cronin of Smorgasbord Blog Magazine for featuring my new novel Charybdis in her Smorgasbord New Book Spotlight–you can read it by clicking on the link above. I really appreciate her kindness and that she took the time to craft such a wonderful promotion.

And if that wasn’t awesome enough, the amazing Susan Richardson of Stories From The Edge of Blindness featured Charybdis today on her phenomenal literary podcast A Thousand Shades of Green. Listening to her beautiful voice reading my work is always an incredible treat and you can hear her by clicking on the podcast link.

And of course, you can buy Charybdis in paperback and Kindle version worldwide by clicking here!