Category Archives: Writing

New Year’s Post 2020

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I missed my new year’s post last year, and maybe the year before, and I haven’t been as active on here lately. I try not to make a habit of apologizing for that sort of thing, but hopefully I’ll be able to post more regularly. I have a few book reviews I’m behind on, so that’s definitely coming.

Anyway, I’m not going to bother hunting down a several years old new year’s post to review the previous one, because there’s none for last year, I’m just going to forge ahead here, because I ain’t got time for shit.

As usual, I’m not making New Year’s “resolutions” – making New Year’s goals is much more positive. So, onward:

  • Find another flying job. Sadly my position at the place I started at last year ceased to be full time, and I can’t afford to work part time, so I haven’t been flying for a bit, and have been just back dispatching for the medevac op. I haven’t been wanting to start anything new because various stuff – husband’s health is garbage, stress over that, yada yada, ugh – yeah, okay, I’m a procrastinator and I hate change. But I need to get out of my rut and get going with the job hunt.
  • On that note, not die. When I started flying, my husband would tell me every time I headed out to the airport, “don’t die.” So once I get another flying job, as always safety is first. Luckily I’ve never been a big risk taker.
  • Canning: This is new. Actually, I literally just thought of this today, lol. My Grandma used to can soups, and it seems like a great way to prep good, healthy meals when I have time to, and preserve them for when I ain’t got time for shit. With Nathan’s ever fluctuating dietary restrictions (as I said, his health is garbage), it makes it difficult to buy quick, easy meals cheaply and keep them on hand. And if it makes me feel a bit closer to my Grandma, that makes me happy too.
  • Writing: I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. My computer has been down for long periods of time – in fact, I should totally do a post on the most recent keyboard repair, because that was a six hour fuss with a lot of tiny screws, and holy jeeze, I’ve never dismantled my laptop to that extent before. But I need to get the revision of Skybound done. I really love that story and all the characters, and my beta readers have loved what they’ve heard so far too, and that needs to get finished.
  • Critique group – we need to get back to scheduling meetings, damn. Gonna get a hold of the organizer and… oh wait, apparently that’s me.
  • Art: this just in – after like, ten years away from art, I’ve gotten back into it. I started with the adult colouring books, which I puttered away at while I was at work. But the itch started, and I started experimenting with other mediums. Then one day, for no reason I could put my finger on, I pulled out my old watercolours, and realized of all the mediums I’ve tried, I’m a watercolour artist. So art wise, before I get into anything really ambitious (like a webcomic or something crazy like that….) I need to work on my drawing skills. I’m not a bad drawer, I just need more practice so I don’t spend so much time getting the drawing part down. So I’m going to try and do art at least 6 days a week. I’m going to let myself have days off of art, and I’m gonna allow myself to bank art vacation days, but at least six days a week on average, I’m going to work on some kind of art. It doesn’t have to be a finished piece, or be any good, I’ll count it if I’m working on a larger piece, or just a practice study of something. I’ll try to do Inktober again, and I’m toying with doing Mermay, Junicorn. I definitely want to do World Watercolour month.

I think that’s plenty for this year. Maybe I’ll post a bit of art stuff, though I’m not sure if the readers of the blog would be interested. If I end up going the webcomic route, I’ll definitely post that stuff here, because it’s more writing related. But general art, I’m not sure if I should leave that outside the scope of the blog. I don’t want to start a new blog for art – I have one for my african violets already that I don’t update regularly, lol.

What say you all? Should I post art related stuff here? Fair warning, I may have a tendency to talk about really technical art stuff. Like, my husband is getting tired of hearing about pigment numbers.

Short story sold to Engen Books

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

Your truly is being published once again; another feather in my hat, and this one’s the most aviation focused story I’ve sold so far. The anthology is called “Flights from the Rock” and is a Canadian publisher publishing Canadian writers writing stories about flight.

https://engenbooks.com/2019/04/13/award-winning-pilot-lindsay-kitson-to-write-dieselpunk-story-for-flights-from-the-rock/

I had originally written this for another anthology, but hadn’t finished it in time, but when I found this call for submissions, I thought this was the perfect home for it, and it seems the editors did too. Can’t wait for you all to read it!

“Obviously you’re not the pilot”

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

So I was at Costco to stock up on things. I grabbed a hot dog on my way out because I was rushed and hadn’t eaten. Went over to the tables, and all the tables were full.

But a lady saw me looking for someplace to sit, and invited me to sit with her. I was feeling pretty awesome, new job and all, so I sat down and introduced myself. I told her how I was starting a new job, and stocking up on things for my new job, since I was going to be working for a small charter/air taxi operation and based at the airport 5 days a week.

And she said “Oh, that sounds exciting! What are you going to be doing for them? Obviously you’re not the pilot.”

*sigh*

I wasn’t nasty about it, I let it just be a learning experience for her; she backpedaled pretty fast when I told her I was in fact the pilot. Tried to say she’d said it because I looked too young, but you just know, the real reason was because I was a woman. But it was innocent; obviously she wasn’t trying to be sexist; it was an unconscious bias; I bet she didn’t think through what she said at all.

Or possibly even, she didn’t want me to feel like I was disappointing her if I wasn’t the pilot, unfortunate as the phrasing she chose was. I mean, when people hear someone’s a pilot, usually the first question is “Oh? What airline do you fly for?” And then the poor private pilot has to explain that they don’t have a commercial licence, they just fly for fun, etc. (And I’m not gonna lie, being able to reply to that question with the name of my current employer feels so frickin’ good, lol.)

But whatever the reason, it’s what comes when people don’t stop and be self-critical about the assumptions we make about people. And it’s why young women don’t look at jobs like commercial piloting, construction, electrician, things like that, as things they might be good at and enjoy as professions. Because, obviously that’s not the sort of job for them.

Obviously.

A co-worker back at the call centre told me one day about talking to her daughter about women pilots. Her daughter was convinced that being a pilot was a boy thing, and girls could not be pilots, and her mother had a hard time convincing her otherwise. She was four.

And it’s a prejudice that comes from outside the aviation industry almost exclusively in my experience. So far, I don’t have any story of sexism that I’ve experienced that has come from anyone involved in aviation. The only examples I have are from people who know nothing about it. We’re getting to a point where lots of male pilots have flown with women and they’ve mostly gotten past the oh-god-how-do-I-handle-this stage to just treating other crew members as crew members. My new boss seemed to care far more about my farm background than my gender. The one other pilot working for him at the moment is also another woman, and as far as his assumptions about my ability suitability for the job, the fact that I’m a farm girl seemed to trump all else.

In conclusion – yes, there’s progress been made. Yes, women pilots still deal with sexist attitudes. No, it’s not just the older generation, nor is it only men who share those attitudes. Because there are lots of old guys who are 100% supportive of women in aviation and think the idea that women can’t be pilots is absurd. So let’s move forward and celebrate our victories and successes, and let change come, until it’s obvious to everyone that women belong wherever their hearts are.

New Year’s Post 2019

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

So in 2018, I never even got to writing a New Year’s post. Before 2018 was halfway over, we’d brought 4 cats to our vet and not all of them came home. I was kind of emotionally beat up, and 2018 didn’t start out great. For this year, better late than never, I guess.

The cat situation has settled down now and we have a healthy new kitten who’s quickly outgrowing his eleven year old Siamese house buddy. I like big cats and I cannot lie.

This Christmas we had no sick cats, and I was even mostly over my cold.

When I started flying, my vacation time was dedicated to flying, and once I finished, I left one job before my vacation was scheduled, and then the job after that before I got a chance to schedule more than a few random days here and there. This year, the new boss decided to just shut down over Christmas and I got the first real vacation I’ve had in five years.

That came just in time to have my mom come stay with me for a week and a half. She lives in Australia now, and I haven’t seen her since my wedding ten years ago. It’s been a wonderful visit.

2019 is starting off really great for me. I have a new job, a new cat, a new decade of marriage to kick off. Because holy fuck, I’ve been married for ten years. Sometimes it feels like it can’t have been that long, and sometimes it feels like it’s been forever. In all the good ways.

So – like many others, the New Year’s resolution thing tends to be really negative, so I set goals instead. Here’s what I want to get done in 2019:

  • Stay married.
  • Become the most confident, competent, safe bush pilot I can be.
  • Finish all the missing scenes in Skybound so a proper edit can begin.
  • Write at least one short story.
  • Get the apartment organized.
  • Hobby goal: get to an F2 generation in my hybrids – I’ve got an F1 generation maturing and blooming and I’ve attempted pollination with a couple plants so I hopefully have seed pods coming along on a back cross. I’m just getting started with the hybridizing thing, but I’m enjoying it immensely.
  • Take some first steps in buying a first house.

So I hope 2019 is great for everyone reading this, and I for one will be trying my best to make the most of all of it.

Ten Years

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

Today my husband and I celebrate our ten year anniversary.

New Years is coming up, and that’s always a time that I reflect on where I’ve gotten from one year to the next, but of course this is a huge landmark, and makes me think back much farther, and about how far both my husband and I have come in our lives. 

Our accomplishments are not the traditional accomplishments. If I were more inclined to be a slave to societal expectations, I might feel like a failure for not having children and owning a house at this stage in my life, like my husband’s brother and his wife. Not that those aren’t fantastic accomplishments; that just wasn’t our path. 

When I think about who I was ten years ago, it blows my mind what a different place I was in in my life. I was passionate about my writing, working in a call centre. But I was still putting myself back together after gaining some independence and getting myself into a healthier living situation. My husband recently described my state back then as “held together with tape and glue.”

Anyway, that’s where I was when I got married, but I was just reaching a point where I was gaining confidence and blossoming as a person. I managed to organize my own wedding. 

And friends who knew me best told me of all the people they’d seen get married, they believed my marriage would be successful, and that we were getting married for the right reasons. We didn’t just love one another, we were supportive of one another, not just in our shared interests, but we encourage one another to pursue our interests that the other doesn’t share. We both want the other to be happy, but we also don’t want a relationship where one of us is making all the sacrifices for the sake of the other, and breeding resentment. 

And I don’t think I can describe to you how good being married to this man has been for me. I’m not even sure how much of the confidence I have now is just from him believing in me. I feel like it’s the reverse of the old adage “Behind every good man, is a great woman.” If I didn’t have him, would I have had the courage to learn to fly? He says I would – I’m not sure. Maybe I would and it would just have taken longer. 

And you have to remember, he didn’t marry a pilot. He didn’t sign on for this ten years ago when we stood in front of family and friends and the officiant tied our hands together with ribbon. He’ll say he realized that it would have been worse for our marriage for him to hold me back than to get on board, but he’s playing his role down. Not only did he not stand in my way, he gave me a large sum of money that was by all rights his, to get me started on flight training, and said go be everything you can be. You don’t get much more supportive than that, and that money was basically everything we had – he had that much faith in me that I could do it. 

Well, whether I would have become a pilot without him or not, we are both of us more and stronger than we would be alone, and I can’t imagine my life without him. 

Love you Nathan ❤

NaNoWriMo 2018

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I join Nano every year, even if I know I’m not going to have a chance to write enough to win. This year I hoped to do a bit better, possibly even win. It didn’t happen, but I’m still happy with what I got done. 

I haven’t talked much about what I’m working on at the moment. Redwing is at a stage where I’ve mostly got it as good as I can get it, and while I have ideas for a sequel, I decided a few years ago to dive into something different. Well, ok, it still has aeroplanes and all the characters are pilots. But it’s completely different I swear. 

The world idea was only a small fraction of the population is Skybound and can withstand altitudes of more than 2000 feet above sea level without suffering from skysickness – a made up illness in this world, with similarities to hypoxia. Skybound people are invited to join an organization called One Sky, kind of a combination of the EU, Red Cross, and NATO. They have aeroplanes. 

It’s YA this time, and I’m bringing scenes to my critique group every month, where it seems well received. It’s still early drafts, though, and in the first draft, another Nano project, I had left numerous scenes missing as I moved on to the easier scenes. This year I was filling in those missing scenes through Nano, which is much harder – it slows you down. I might have got far more than the 8700 words I managed if I had been writing something completely new. 

But – I’m almost finished plugging in the missing scenes, at which point I can start going back and reconstructing an outline and assessing story arcs, and properly beginning the editing process. 

And currently, with nearly all the missing bits added, it’s sitting at about 83k words. When I edit, I tend to add more words than I remove, so that makes it look like it’s going to settle into a nice 100k words, or thereabouts when I’m done. I just seem to have a natural tendency towards that length, which is awesome, because that’s nicely in the range of not too long and not too short for the genre, as far as sale-ability. 

I’m excited about this one because it’s a lot more what I think is the definition of “high concept” – that it’s easy to describe what the premise is and what’s interesting about the world and story. My critique group is taking sides with regards to the two male supporting characters – apparently I have a team Zach and team Toby already, though there’s really very little on the romance front. The story’s mainly about the main character learning to fly, at the same time as she learns that One Sky is not the bastion of fairness and acceptance that it presents itself as. 

I think it’s got a good shot at finding an agent when it’s ready.

Back To Flying

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I know I haven’t posted about flying for a bit, and it’s mainly because I’ve been taking kind of a break. While I was doing my multi-instrument rating, a lot of stuff was happening in my personal life causing stress – my Grandma’s death was only the most acute, obvious one.

When I was done that, I quit the call centre, and I was pretty badly burnt out at that point. I sent out a few resumes but when it comes to the smaller places that hire low time pilots, it’s hard to know when they’re hiring. They often don’t advertise positions. It seems most people get their first job by getting a reference from one of their instructors, but my main instructor was a career instructor, and I had decided not to go for the instructor rating because there was only one job it would qualify me for. A few people tipped me off on places, and one of them even was willing to hire me. But it turned out to be kind of sketchy, and the more I learned about the operation, the more it felt wrong. I walked away from it.

Then last winter was kind of a rough one again – with the husband in and out of the emergency room, multiple sick and dying cats, etc.

And on top of various stress, I’m just one of those people who, once I’ve lost momentum on something, I have a really hard time getting going again. I felt like I was making excuses, but my closest friends told me not to be so hard on myself. I’m pretty self critical, sometimes I need people to tell me to give myself a break.

Anyway, things seemed to be finally taking a turn for the better. I was starting to think I should start getting serious again about the job hunt, and getting current again.

They say when it rains, it falls – stressful stuff happens all at once and piles up.- Well, sometimes things can fall into place just as fast.

The job tip came from my float instructor from a few years ago, and it was finally one that wasn’t one of those long shots that they were likely to have plenty of pilots applying that had way more time than me. This was more of a typical first job for a pilot.

Day VFR, bush pilot job flying passengers and freight around lake Winnipeg. The sort of job that would take me out to those rural sort of places I loved as a child, and an owner that appreciated pilots with farm backgrounds for the resourcefulness and work ethic that tended to come with it. It wasn’t one of those places people had warned me had poor safety records or management that pressured pilots into pushing their limits. The pay was industry standard, and given the choice, I opted for salary. Plus, there’s something romantic about the whole idea of bush flying. As wrong as that one job I walked away from last year, this one feels equally right.

Wish me good flying weather 🙂

Parallel Prairies

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

So, I’ve been busy lately. I happened to have a bunch of posts queued around when my cat died, so I didn’t have to worry about it for a while, but then there were no more queued posts, and my husband had an event, and we both got sick after, and we got a new kitten, and our other cat got sick,* and it’s been a rough April/May.

And through that whole period, I’ve been getting notifications of new subscribers. Mostly email ones too, so not just porn-bots trying to get me to click on their profiles! Like, there’s been a lot of them lately, to the point where I wonder if they’re all real except for the whole lack of porn thing, or trying to sell me anything at all. I think maybe one of my pages or posts got shared on a site or something.

So welcome to all my new followers!

And I have news!

I’ve got the clear to announce that my short story “Cod Liver Oil” will appear in the anthology Parallel Prairies, out next fall! It’s a horror anthology full of stories set in or inspired by my home province of Manitoba.

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I’m super chuffed to be published alongside awesome authors like Chadwick Ginther, Patrick Johanneson, Craig Russell, Samantha Beiko and lots more.

My contribution is a story set shortly after the railroad comes through, bringing all sorts to town, including peddlers selling all sorts of concoctions. It’s inspired by the traditional maritime song of the same name about a man who’s sickly wife persuades him to buy her a bottle of cod liver oil from Doctor John, and comes to regret it.

I had a lot of fun writing this one. Sometimes you get into writing a character that’s so different from yourself that it’s freeing to just write what they would think and imagine your readers cringing. The most delicious feedback I got on it was one beta reader telling me that it made him feel uncomfortable to be a man.

I really had a lot of fun writing this one….

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it!

Pre-order here!!!!

*He lived tho! It was just a flu. Like, seriously, we were like, really worried, he started puking, wouldn’t eat, same main symptoms of the cat that had cancer, but the vet was like, nah, he’s got a temperature, just a flu, we fix him up, and he did. Apollo is fine.

Cat Post

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

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It’s my blog, I don’t have to stay on topic. I can write about my cat if I want.

But it’s also a journal of sorts, so important things are going in here.

Pooka was the best cat I ever had, most cuddly cat most of my friends had ever met. Super outgoing. He played fetch, which baffled visitors who had never seen a cat promptly return and drop the toy they were chasing on their owner’s lap.IMAG0269

He was a Manx, with just a short tail, and even though he was born a barn cat, he took to the litter box the day we got him like it was the best thing in the world. We only ever had trouble with him if we changed the kind of litter we used. He wasn’t from the most reputable breeder perhaps, though, and he had some food allergies that would give him digestive issues if we fed him the wrong thing. But his personality made up for it.

When he was younger, before he gave up and got used to me leaving for work, he would try and stop me from leaving. He got to know the signs that I was going out, and chase me down the hallway towards the door, hooking his paw around my ankle, trying to hold me back.

He would be on my lap just all the time – I was so used to it, I wouldn’t even notice he was there. He met me at the door when I came home, and would come to snuggle in bed when I called him at night. As a kitten, he tried to sleep on my head. Toward the end, he would snuggle next to me with his head on my shoulder and one paw wrapped around my arm.

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In addition to playing fetch, he was known as the infamous water thief, and would drink out of any water glass left undefended. We tried to use a spraybottle for discipline, but discovered he liked it, and we have video of him drinking water as we sprayed it into his mouth.

He chased a laser pointer once. We had him running in a circle for at least a half an hour before he collapsed panting, mouth open, on the floor and couldn’t get up. He wasn’t a stupid cat. He would never chase a laser pointer again after that.

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He never jumped on the counter, didn’t dig in the garbage, didn’t unravel the toilet paper, was good about having his claws trimmed, and only liked scratching things I gave home to scratch. He had a thing for sisal cord scratching posts.

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And he had the sweetest meows. Trilling and chirping mostly, but then their was the longer play-with-me meow when he was in the mood. At some point in his life we started hearing a very strange meow that we only heard when he was in another room. At first we though something was wrong, it was kind of a yowling, insistent meow, but when we came to check on him he was fine, just fondling his catnip pillow. Finally we figured out what it was when he prowled into the room still doing it. It was just his play-with-me meow, only he was doing it while carrying his toy around in his mouth.

Almost eleven years old, he started losing weight over the course of a few months, and when he stopped eating altogether one day two months ago, we got him to the vet. Vet did some tests, and while he was negative for the nasty FIV and feline leukemia, there was no easy way to rule out cancer. We crossed our fingers and gave him the antibiotics and steroids the vet prescribed and hoped it turned out to be just an infection or autoimmune disease.

He bounced back through Christmas. Nathan calls it our little Christmas miracle that we got him back healthy and happy through the holidays. We made the most of it, feeding him whatever he wanted since the vet was hopeful but never made us any promises.

After the holidays were over, he crashed again. We made another vet appointment.

The night before, I managed to get him to eat some baked chicken. He didn’t really want to, but he kept looking back at me like he knew I wanted him to eat, and he was only doing it for me.

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Later I was petting him, and I felt his tummy. I could feel something. Lumps; masses. The vet confirmed it the next morning. Liver cancer. Nothing anyone could have done. On the vet’s recommendation, we had him put down.

It’s been a month, and at night in the dark, I’m still stepping cautiously around the spots he used to sleep so I don’t trip over him before I remember he’s gone. Every year, my mother-in-law buys our cats cat toys for christmas, and this year Nathan had forgot them in the bag brought home after family gatherings. We didn’t remember it until after, and now we have this little red stuffed dragonfly that was for him, and we never got to give it to him. And the other cat – Apollo cries at night, and wanders the apartment looking for his friend.

I never had any pet as long as I had him, and was never as close to one. My cats growing up, the first my mom sent away to a farm after a year, maybe, the second wandered off to live at the neighbors who were feeding her so that she was getting balloonishly fat, and the third I only had for a year or so before having to give him away. I never had to have one put down. The dog we had for a lot of years, but he belonged to my brother, my grandpa and my dad, so it was them that had that closeness with the dog.

None of them were animals that I shared the kind of relationship I had with Pooka. Pooka, I’m not even sure I know how to describe how in sync the two of us were. I think the best I can do is say, in the dark, at night, I could put my hand out and call him, and in a few moments, his head would be pressed under my hand.

The new kitten will have big paw prints to fill when it comes home.

“99% of Readers Won’t Know Better”

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I was reading a story someone had posted online for feedback once, and pointed out to the author that Pawnees and Shawnees are already names of existing aircraft, and they are not the aircraft that he was describing in his story. The author, responded by telling me his audience wasn’t going to know better.

To an extent, he may be right about the majority of his audience.

But think about it. How many times have you heard horse lovers rant about how horse books and horse shows get horses all wrong? Or doctors face-palming when they see doctors on TV pull out the defibrillators.

And then think about your potential audience. Do you really think that if you’re writing a book with aeroplanes in it, where the main character is a pilot, that a reader who’s a pilot isn’t going to be the number one most likely person to zero in on the aeroplane on the cover of your book and yank that puppy off the shelf? That reader is also the number one most likely person to return for more and become a devoted reader because they love the thing you’re writing about, and there aren’t that many people writing about their specific interest.

I’ve read from some successful writers, the key to making a living as a writer is to develop a dedicated following of faithful readers who will buy everything you write, not to rely on the random whims of readers browsing shelves. That if you can get a few thousand dedicated readers, your income can be stable, and your sales numbers predictable, rather than all over the place.

Do you want that reader to be the one who’s most disappointed by your lack of research The one who’s most likely to be forgiving of other flaws in your book because it contains their particular brand of crack? Do you want the reader who’s most passionate about the topic you’re writing about to be the one who throws your book against the wall because you mixed up an engine stall with an aerodynamic stall?

I’m speaking more as a reader, here, than as a writer when I say for the love of whatever god you worship, have respect for your readers and don’t assume they’re ignorant.