That's a lot to deal with in one week!  I'm so sorry. 😢  I wouldn't be able to focus on writing either, but you'll get back to it when life calms down.  I hope the universe will send some good things your way soon!

Thanks! I know I was vague with my dad. I didn't want you to think he just died this past July Fourth. He actually died way back in 1994. Just happened to be on a holiday. My grandfather died on my birthday. It's a whole thing. lol

We do plan on still going to see Macauley tonight as long as the weather agrees with us. Buffalo is so weird. Right now, it's doing nothing here, but I had to get bloodwork done this morning and just the next town over it's snowing pretty heavily and two towns over they have over three feet of snow at the moment! We're just going to play it by ear because I am using my wheelchair and there's no way I will be able to maneuver in the snow. Let's keep our fingers crossed that it won't do much here or downtown. I need to see my stand in emotional support Culkin.

The cost for just a simple cremation package is close to 4,000. Luckily, I have a pretty big credit limit on my card which I rarely if ever use, so we're just going to do that and deal with the payments later. I'm hoping some relatives might be willing to offer first. So far no one has mentioned anything about a church service or proper burial so that's been a good thing. Although as we speak, my sister is on the phone with my mother's best friend. We'll see what happens with that.

I'm the same way with Christmas as the both of you. We don't do the whole church deal, just presents and food. Celebrating each other more so than someone's birth. I never say my thoughts and prayers are with you either. I always opt of the sending you big hugs. Religion is such a weird thing.

My writing has gone completely out the window these last few days. I thought maybe I'd write a bit now, but I am not feeling it. Hopefully that'll come back soon. Maybe after a bit of this stressful stuff wears off. I'm also having my car inspected this morning. My doctor made me go get additional bloodwork today because my results from last week 'alarmed' her, so there's that too. I'm a mess!

I think I'm going to go read for a little bit!

Mare, I saw your FB post before I came here. I'm so sorry for your loss - both losses, actually. I know you had a complicated relationship with your parents and can understand why your emotions would be all over the place, but regardless, I'm sure it's still a very tough time for you and your sister.  Don't be afraid to ask for help, financially or otherwise.  The cost of a traditional funeral and burial is crazy!  Cremation and a celebration of life in the spring sounds like a much better idea.  I'm sure you know your mom's wishes and what you and your sister can afford better than your other relatives, so try not to worry about what they think. 

I know you have a lot going on right now, but I hope you can still take some time to yourself and do the things you were looking forward to doing this weekend to help take your mind off everything else.

Steph, I've become the same way with holidays - I celebrate the secular, gift-giving, family-centered aspects of them rather than the religious parts.

Hi guys! Well Thanksgiving morning at 5:15 my mom passed away. So that's how I spent my holiday. She has been sick for a while and started hospice care a few weeks ago, so it wasn't that big of a surprise. We had a very complex relationship, so the emotions have been all over the place. We decided not to tell anyone until today. The two of us just took the day to process and we had to do all that fun stuff, funeral home etc... I'm probably going to post about it on FB after I finish up here.

That's the stressful part. Letting everyone know. Speaking of religion, mom didn't want a church service or anything like that. No big burial, which honestly is good because this was very expensive. We're not even sure how we're going to pay for this. Mom had no assets. I was paying her bills to begin with. We might do a go fund me although I can't see myself doing that. Anyway, we just are having her cremated and then maybe have a small celebration of life for her in the spring once the weather is a little more manageable. I know some of my relatives and her best friend are going to have a problem with that. They are going to want the whole shabang because they are all still devout Catholics.

So yeah...sorry to put a huge damper on things. I don't know if you knew this, but my father died on the 4th of July. My family tends to die on Holidays.  Very on brand. lol

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, hope you had a good day

I can't believe parents called a Harry Potter themed classroom as a school of witchcraft and took them out of school.  That's just crazy behaviour lol.  Sounds like you were well rid of that kid too.

I'm not religious at all.  I don't believe in it and in my opinion the world would be a better place without it.  I know that may be an unpopular opinion.  I know I celebrate Christmas, but I'm not celebrating the religious part, just the getting together with family and friends and giving/receiving gifts part, and the time off work

Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope you and your sister had a good one.  Mine was good.  My sister and her family drove down from Michigan; I haven't seen them since August, so it's been nice having them here.

I hope the snow stays south of you, so you can go see A Real Pain and the Home Alone event with Macaulay.  It has gotten cold here but no real snow yet.  I don't mind it around Christmas, but I'm not quite ready for the winter weather yet.

I was nervous about having my principal's kid, but it wasn't bad at all!  First of all, his daughter is a model student - smart, inquisitive, hard-working, well-behaved, and kind.  I never had to reach out to him or his wife about any issues with her, which helped.  But he was a lot more "hands off" than I expected him to be and didn't hover around my classroom or ask me challenging questions at parent-teacher conferences or anything like that.  I've had worse experiences having other teachers' kids, so that was a relief!  It's hard having colleagues' kids, especially when they have behavior problems.

My worst experience was having the kid of a teacher in the same hall as me whom I considered a friend.  He had ADHD, which is fine, but his impulsivity led to him making a lot of poor choices that he never seemed to learn from.  He was allowed to use a fidget in class, but he was constantly bringing in little toys (Lego minifigures, action figures, and that sort of thing) and playing with them during lessons.  After he'd been warned several times, I started confiscating them and keeping them in a Ziploc bag to give back to his mom.  Well, one day, he decided to sneak into my desk during inside recess when I wasn't in the room and take his bag of toys back.  I found out and went down to his mom's room at the end of the day to talk to both him and her about it together.  She initially seemed supportive of me and agreed that it was inappropriate for him to get into my desk, etc., but the very next day, her son was caught shoplifting from our book fair.  We had another conversation, and he missed out on the school-wide monthly reward we had to celebrate all the students who made good behavior choices during the month.  I'm sure she was embarrassed that her kid didn't get to participate, but our relationship was never quite the same after that.  She started making excuses for him anytime he got in trouble, blaming it on his ADHD and acting like I was expecting too much out of him or not being understanding enough of his disability by holding him accountable for following the same rules as everyone else.  Ever since then, I've been wary of having friends' kids because it made things super awkward between us.  As teachers, we've all dealt with those parents who believe their child can do no wrong, so it's crazy when teachers are those kind of parents themselves.  I'm sure that was frustrating for you, dealing with that 7th grade teacher's kids.

That is exactly how I feel about religion.  I'm not an atheist either; I would describe myself as more agnostic or spiritual.  I believe in something, but I don't take the Bible literally and or think any religion got everything "right."  I'm sure that did make it difficult to teach in a Catholic school.  I could never do it.  I wish people would focus more on the commonalities between most of the major religions instead of the differences.  Organized religion has been the root of so many problems between groups of people throughout history.  Why can't we just let people believe what they want to believe and leave each other alone?

I'm fine with writing another sequel if that's what my characters want.  I always worry I'm going to start one and then run out of steam because that's what used to happen to me with most sequels in my early days of writing.  But after over a thousand days of writing about these characters, I feel like I could continue indefinitely as long as I have ideas, which I have plenty of.  My only other concern is that I'm completely alienating the readers who know me for my Nick stories and don't want to read longfics about Kevin.  But what I want to write isn't always what's popular, and I have to be okay with that.

I'm not sure if the differences you're describing with readers have to do with the fandom or the platform (AO3).  I think with AO3 being so much bigger than AC and not having a community feature like this forum, people are a lot less likely to form relationships with each other.  Instead of loyally following authors whose writing they like, they use the tags to filter the kind of stories they want to read, regardless of who wrote them.  And that's fine, but it's definitely a different vibe than we had here, where the regulars got to know each other and often read and interacted with each other's work.  I miss that.  I have like three regular readers for my current story, and two of the three came from here.  The other one interacts with me on Twitter as well as AO3, so I'm not sure where she first started following me.  Sometimes I'll get kudos on several stories from the same user, but I don't feel like I really have faithful readers that found me through AO3 first.

That definitely seems like one downside of writing for a fictional fandom instead of about real people, that the fandom dies down once the media is no longer being made and loses popularity.  But there will always be those people who are loyal to it, like you, and if you keep writing for that fandom while others move on, it will make your work even more valuable to people who want to read Succession fics.  The fanfic corner of the BSB fandom has shrunk significantly over the last ten years or so, but I figure as long as there's still someone who wants to read what I write, it's worth posting.

That is so great that you have a principal who is willing to be on your side at all times. It makes a difference. How was it having his kid in your class? Did you feel like you were being observed 24/7? I have had quite a few students of the faculty as well as the principal's kids and all but one of them were discipline problems. Luckily my last principal was very aware of her son's behavior and was constantly working with him. He was a compulsive liar amongst other things. But I had two terrible kids whose mom was one of the 7th grade teachers (who wasn't that great with disciplining her own classes) who refused to believe her boys did anything wrong. She also let them call her mom during the school day and when one of them just wouldn't show up for my class and I called up to see where he was, he almost always had just stopped by his mom's classroom because he needed something. When he was in middle school and actually had her as his teacher, he was horrendous during her classes to the point that she'd cry. But she still didn't think he did anything wrong in our classes lol

I am just like your friend! I grew up in a very catholic family, but an unhealthy catholic family where they spoke tongues and all that other looney stuff. And I HATED CCD and decided to leave the religion before I was confirmed. I'm not an atheist but I am not a fan of organized religion at all. I believe there is something out there somewhere, but I don't think Jesus was anything more than a really great guy. Hard to teach in a catholic school when you think like that.

Sometimes your characters let you know they want a series, and you have very little say in the matter. As far as commenting. It's funny because from the very beginning there was barely any interaction except for that one person I was telling you about. Occasionally I got someone else that said something here or there, but as long as I heard from at least that one person I wasn't that upset with the lack of feedback. I wasn't ever really that proud of this story either, so I wasn't as annoyed as I usually I am. I felt like for that whole thing I was flying by the seat of my pants. This fandom is very different from my experience in the BSB one where I had faithful readers who read pretty much everything I wrote. This one, it's not quite like that so I found that the people reading one of my stories wasn't interested in reading any of the others. I'm still trying to figure this fandom out. It is waning. I guess that's another difference between real people and characters. When the show is over a lot of people move on. But then again, a lot of my readers of my most popular story and now this sequel weren't really in the fandom to begin with so again I'm just confused and trying to figure things out. 

We are expecting over a foot of snow this weekend but mainly to the south of us, but with lake effect, you never know so I'm just going to hope that it misses us, and he doesn't freak out when he hears about it and decides to cancel. I mean, if that happens, I won't be devastated, it's not the entirely correct Culkin anyway, but still.

Have a great Thanksgiving. I had covid last year, so I didn't cook anything. This year, I'm back to making it all, even though it'll just be the two of us. I was hoping to get my sister to go see A Real Pain in theaters this Friday but now with the snow I doubt that'll happen. I kind of want to see Wicked too, but I feel like I'll be cheating if I don't see A Real Pain first. Even though I've already seen it three times in January.

Here's the funniest part of that story, which I forgot to include:  I also had my principal's daughter in my class last year!  So at the end of Meet the Teacher night, I went down to the office to tell him what happened and find out if the mom had complained (she had not), and he just shrugged and basically said, "I'm not worried about it, and you shouldn't be either.  If she calls, I'm going to tell her that I trust you as a teacher enough to put my child in your class, which happens to have a theme based around a well-respected piece of children's literature.  If she has a problem with that, that's her problem."  Thank goodness for supportive administrators!  My principal is pretty laidback about stuff like that and usually has our backs when it comes to crazy parents.

I'm glad your principal had your back with the musical, too.  It sounds like a really fun musical!  Why does religion have to be humorless and boring?  I never enjoyed going to Sunday school or confirmation class for that very reason.  But one summer I went to vacation Bible school with my best friend and his church, and it was way more fun than anything I'd ever done at my church.  I can't help but wonder if I would have grown up more religious if I'd gone to a fun church and had a more positive experience with it.  My Methodist church wasn't "bad," just boring.  I went because I was forced to but never really bought into it.  My brother-in-law says he became an atheist because of Catholic school LOL.

LOL at "going all Wicked."  That's basically what I've already decided to do!  The story's already a sequel, but my original plan for it included even more than what I'm planning now.  If I'm still into it when I finish this one, I'll write a third story.  I have plenty of material for it!  Never thought I'd attempt another series of longfics, but here we are.

That's so frustrating that no one commented!  I guess that means they didn't mind, but it would have been nice to know what they thought one way or the other.  I totally understand your resistance to writing slash about characters who aren't obviously gay in canon.  It gets easier the more you write it, but I still find all sex scenes fairly awkward to write, whether they're gay or straight.  Most of my het sex scenes are just as cringey as the slash ones I've written, if not more so. LOL  You're wise to stay in your lane and write what you do best - obsessive psychos are much more your forte!

I hope you can make it to the Home Alone event!  Fingers crossed!

A witchcraft classroom? LMAO Ugh that's annoying! I'm glad you never heard from them again and it wasn't one of those things that involved someone telling you to change your set up. At my school that would've completely happened. That person would have then complained to anyone who would listen and next thing you know, it would've come down. One year, for my Christmas show, we did an all-school musical very similar to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego but with a Jesus, Christmas theme. We bought it from a Christian store for a lot of money! Because it wasn't meant for the entire school, I spent hours working on it and making it something the whole school could be a part of. I worked my ass off on that thing and everyone loved it. We got a standing ovation for both performances. The very next day, I'm called into the principal's office. A parent complained that they thought it wasn't religious enough. There were too many 'jokes' and too much laughter. LOL Luckily the principal was rolling her eyes as well, but she still had to let me know officially.

Yay to random kudos! Maybe you can go all wicked and split your story up into parts one and two.

I have no idea if they cared or not that I changed the direction of the story because no one commented. There was one person who loyally commented the whole way through, and she didn't mind, so I'll just assume no one else did as well. It is almost at 3000 hits, so people read it and it did get a fair amount of kudos.  Yeah, I just can't do slash. Maybe it would be different if the person or character was without a doubt gay, but otherwise I can't do it. It feels too awkward. So, instead I turned him into a psycho obsessed with Roman. lol

Keep your fingers crossed for me because they are predicting a pretty big snowstorm for us this weekend and Saturday is my Q and A with Macauley and the Home Alone watch. Because it's a seasonal thing, I can't see him rescheduling if he has to cancel for the weather.

Yikes... I'm sure that was hard to be encouraged to promote something that went against your beliefs.  Makes me appreciate public school.  Between the civics unit we did leading up to election day and now learning about the Pilgrims before Thanksgiving, we've been talking a lot about the importance of freedom of religion in my class lately LOL.  I teach in a very Christian area, but I want my students to understand that not everyone is Christian and that it's okay to have different beliefs or no religious beliefs at all.

I can't remember if I told this story here last year or not, but because I do teach in a more conservative area, I used to be wary about promoting Harry Potter in school.  When I started teaching, I wanted to decorate my classroom with a Harry Potter theme because I already had a giant cardboard cutout of Hagrid that I won from a display at K-Mart, but I didn't do it because I was worried about getting complaints.  But then, a few years in, I started using the first HP book as one of my read alouds, and no one ever complained.  So about eight years ago, I decided to completely redecorate my classroom and went with a Harry Potter theme.  And for seven years, I got a ton of compliments on it and not a single complaint.  Then, last year at Meet the Teacher night, it finally happened:  this mom showed up with her kid, took one look inside my classroom, and loudly proclaimed, "Oh. So this is a witchcraft classroom!"  I barely had time to respond before she grabbed her child and husband and said, "We're NOT doing this," and they marched out.  He never came back, and I never heard anything more from any of them, but apparently they unenrolled him to homeschool.  I've never driven a family to homeschooling within five seconds before - that's a new record for me! LOL  Anyway, I dodged a bullet because, from the information I had on the boy, he was going to be one of my most challenging students, and I ended up having one of the best classes and school years I've ever had!  All this to say I have also experienced that type of parent.

Thanks!  That chapter ended up being about 20 pages long (single spaced, Georgia size 12 font).  Length-wise, I could have broken it up into two or even three normal-sized chapters, but it all took place over the course of 24 hours, so it worked to keep it all together as one.  I'm conscious of the fact that I'm already approaching 70 chapters and still have a lot left to write in this story, and I'm trying to avoid another 150+ chapter epic, even though it's already got Broken beat in terms of word count.

4 novels, wow!  That's a lot in a short amount of time!  Congrats!  Were your readers disappointed that it didn't end up being a slash?  While it would have been interesting to see you write a slash for real, I respect the decision to not go that route.  Not everything has to be romantic; I love platonic relationships.  I have nothing against slash or romance, but I hate how obsessed the larger fanfic community is with shipping.

I got two more kudos today, one for TWWBW and one for one of my random old 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter deaths.  I'm still annoyed by the kudos bot the screwed up my stats by dumping a bunch of fake kudos on 00Carter, so it's always nice to get real ones!