In honor of Prime day (…found out it was Prime day the day of because I’m clearly amazing at being an “influencer”,) and my unending adoration of lists, cats, and run-on sentences, here are some Amazon purchases my fellow captor and I have made for our feline overlords over the years that have made our cohabitation more tolerable.

I should start off by saying that we have Bengal cats. They’re like normal cats, but louder…smarter… and oh so much more demanding.

Also! As a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com,) I receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Let’s get started!  First:

1. The Largest Litter Box You Have Ever Seen in Your Entire Life.

We don’t have tigers I swear. We just have finicky little turd nuggets (both literal and proverbial,) that like to perform acrobatics while defecating, then launch out of the box and sprint away from their own poo as fast as their own now-toxic wind can carry them.

This high-walled masterpiece contains all matter of ill, is easy to clean, and has handy dandy side pockets (further proof pockets make everything better) which helps contain all the other madness I’m about to describe to you.

2. This Litter Made from Bits of Actual Heaven

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. I’ve never seen heaven so I don’t know what it’s comprised of, but this stuff is pretty darn amazing. It blocks smells, clumps like no other, and doesn’t launch a meteor impact cloud of clay dust every time one of our fur babies departs the box like they’re dismounting the uneven parallel bars.

Also, honorable mention / shout out to World’s Best Cat Litter, which lives up to it’s name and we used and loved for YEARS, but the cats decided they didn’t like it anymore and told us in the most imaginative and odorous of ways in which Jackson Pollock would have been proud.

3. This Metal Litter Scoop (if you’re still using plastic I suggest you conduct a ceremonial burning in the yard this instant….maybe not, don’t burn plastic, but you know what I mean! Do SOMETHING dramatic.)

In the immortal words of Will Ferrel’s character in Blades of Glory whose name I can’t remember right now, “I could not love a human baby more than I love this…cat litter scoop.” …Or something like that.

Honestly. Whoever said money couldn’t buy happiness hasn’t been digging cat turds out of a babypool sized litter box using only a spork for the last ten years.

If the Doctor showed up with the Tardis right now, I’d take his hand, tell him “it’s fine I don’t need pants”, remember NOT to blink, and would ask that our first stop be back in time so I could chuck this glorious time-saving contraption at my own head, to knock some sense into it.

4. Kitty Television: This Window Bed + This Suction Cup Bird Feeder (No animals are harmed in the making of this setup)

My cat loves to lounge in the sun, staring at all the birds he’ll never be able to chase, contemplating when the next belly scratches are scheduled to commence.

There is a rather bold squirrel who keeps climbing up into it off and on, and I wouldn’t mind the structural integrity of the suction cup to give way just once to teach him a quick lesson in boundaries.

5. This Water Fountain: Because Splashed Water is Easier to Fix Than Kidney Failure

We love this little fountain, and although at times the cats like to bat at it and splash it about like they’re reenacting the gas station scene from Zoolander, it’s crucial to cats to drink a TON of water to keep their lil internal organs functioning properly. This fountain is easy to clean, refill and is just cute as a button (…I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from. I mean honestly, what does that even mean? Buttons aren’t even cute.)

6. This Weird Magical Hair Removal Paddle

I’m clearly amazing at writing, and descriptions in general. Please buy all my future published works.

Essentially this palm-sized disk goes to town quickly and easily removing cat (or dog…or ferret…or…sasquatch) hair from couches, curtains, and more!

7. This Cat Collar / Leash

Not all cats will be down for this. In our house, we have one cat who’s constantly trying to go outside, and another that turns into the Tasmanian devil the second you set his precious little toe pebble footsies on a dirty surface.

If you’ve been binge-watching My Cat From Hell and want to give it a go, this is the harness for you.

8. This Fish. (Spoiler Alert: My Cats HATE It.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if you spend mad skrilla on a cat toy, your domesticated jaguars will play with the plastic wrap you took off of it instead.

Regardless, this fish is hilarious and you should probably buy it if only to piss off your cats.

Alright! You’ve made it this far! I’m super proud of you. What? You don’t own a cat? Well, this is embarrassing…

via GIPHY

What did I miss? Cat got your tongue?!  (I regret nothing…) Have an epic pet item that made your life easier? Drop it in the comments below!

Check out my complete list in my storefront here.

My head is buzzing today. Like a hive of angry bees swarming around their queen, I can’t figure out which way to go to accomplish the extensive to-do list before me. And when there is SO much to do, I find myself opting to do none of it.

Instead, I read a book (which, I usually don’t see as a waste of time, but is an avoidance when there are more pressing activities to be done) watch TV, or scroll on social media until the END OF TIME.

At one point today I closed the Twitter tab on my browser, picked up my phone to clear notifications and when I went to open the file I needed to edit, muscle memory had me opening a tab for Twitter all over again!

When I post something on one platform, I end up posting it to the rest, in hopes of maintaining and growing the community of followers that somehow have found me in the vast expanse of online entertainment, and in doing so, I lose just a smidge more energy to devote to other efforts.

The amusement I funnel into tweets, and posts, and witty responses siphon off the shallow wellspring of snark otherwise allocated towards the fictional characters patiently awaiting my return in the various poorly named word docs squirreled away in the underbelly of my computer.

I need a social media cleanse.

But why is it so much easier said than done?

Probably because the Twitter community has become my primary means of social interaction over the last year, and I enjoy talking with everyone. But as an introvert, my proverbial batteries deplete from constant stimuli and communication. So while I enjoy chatting, and interacting, and building up this community, it’s wearing me down or distracting me in the process.

I’m not going to declare in 250 or so characters to the world that I’m taking a break, because I know myself, and I will still be online constantly.

But I am going to make an effort to shut it all down multiple times a day for writing, meditation, and personal reflection to try to restore some balance to the force of nature I need at my disposal to distill into my books.

Once I have an agent and have been published I can put down my proverbial pen, pull out a bottomless box of bonbons that would make Mary Poppin’s purse envious, and spend all my time finding out what people are canceling or what David Tennant and Michael Sheen are up to these days.

…and maybe then, when that is all that is expected of me, the intense pressure to create, write, and do so with an air of grace and poise will be gone, and the roaring of angsty bees will subside.

Here are my notes / main takeaways from today’s Comic-con at home panel about “the best advice I ever got” with host Tricia Narwani, and panelists / authors: Sarah Kuhn, Micaiah Johnson, Alexist Henderson, Josh Malerman, and Kevin Hearne:

Advice they’ve received:

• Try not to write the parts that you yourself want to skip. This will help with the rhythm and pace of the story. (Kevin)
• Take any advice that works for you, and scrap the rest
• Ignore grand proclamations such as “if you don’t write every day, you’re not a writer.” (Kevin)
• How you get it done does not matter, getting it done matters.
• Consider the source giving you the advice before taking it. (Sarah)
• Have trusted people in your life that you can rely on for advice
  • Kevin – would submit his paragraphs for alpha reading to his friend who thinks completely differently than him to get a new perspective.
  • Micaiah – some of the best people to rely on are not writing the same stuff as you. Different fields and sophistications provide different perspective.
  • Sarah – Varies from project to project, but writing groups containing different types of writers can be helpful to get different perspectives. Not specifically for critique, but for support, beta readers, or helping “break” a story to make it better. Seek out individuals within the genre that you are writing to and talk to them and get advice to make the characters more real.
  • Alexis – Find someone who is a straight shooter, that is kind and encouraging, but not afraid to tell you the truth, to push you to make your work the best it can be.
• What advice would veterans give debut authors
  • Josh – Be patient on the business/editing / release side of things. A book that is written today may not come out for two years. Start writing another book while you wait, it is okay for your releases to be different than they once were.
  • Sarah – enjoy as much of the process as you can. You are not defined by your first book, but your debut novel is special. “Appreciate the moments you can stop and remember that you did a thing that you wanted to do, that other people maybe thought you couldn’t do.”
  • Kevin – Every high you get to experience in publishing, savor the heck out of it because they arrive sporadically. Record it for yourself so you can remember them because not every day will be a super high.
• Advice for writers getting started, or looking to publish
  • Micaiah – No one’s vision for success has to be the same as yours.
  • Alexis – Create a space in your life for the writing – literal or physical. In college she pulled out the desk she homeschooled in for her whole life, and painted it, and everything changed for her and that is where she wrote her debut book.
• Which rules do you like to break:
  • Never use adverbs, or overuse dialogue tags
  • Kevin – Take what you need that works for you and leave the rest. Ignore blanket generalizations, there are always exceptions to the rule.
  • Josh – Tries to break the rule that each chapter should ramp up each time. Sometimes a quiet portion in a horror novel can be the scariest, and also break the escalation rule. Escalation doesn’t just mean madness, franticness, violence, it can be the MC alone in the quiet.
  • Alexis – Likes to be eased into a story, doesn’t necessarily have to start with a bang.
  • Josh / Alexis – Reading a horror story, you know you are reading horror and it is a character in itself. The longer the horror is off camera, or off stage, it builds anticipation. The slower beginning is possible because the reader has the dread and knows the horror is on its way.
  • Micaiah – Never start a sentence with a conjunction – She’s never met a sentence she didn’t want to start with “And.” Always breaks the rule ‘You don’t need an epilogue or a prologue” – Fruitful exercises that come from rule-breaking and transgressions of the literary.
  • Sarah – loves adverbs, prologues, slow horror beginnings. “Show don’t tell,” messed her up when she tried to write her first draft, there are differences that need to be explained that is not of this world. She got stuck in the chapter because she was trying to show and not tell but broke out of it because she was reading urban fantasy, etc. which do a wonderful job of telling things creatively. A world-building juxtaposition in a creative way.
    • Josh – Joseph Conrad novels with allowing characters to tell the story and he loves that
  • Authors they read:
    • MK Johnson – Per Alexis: M K plays with language and story, never seen someone do what she does with words. Breaks rules, experiments with the conventions of genre.
    • Helen Hoang – kiss quotient – Sarah can feel on the page how much empathy she feels for the characters. The author gets you to a place of understanding why.
    • Victoria Dahl – romance writer who Kevin greatly admires and has learned about the building of inner conflict and drama inside people’s heads.
    • Tony Morrison – Makes the reader comfortable with floundering that they don’t know, but know eventually they will understand eventually.
    • Virgina Wolfe – Josh was able to see the gloom that he is attracted to in literature that still had an engine behind it. Wolfe showed in practice that although there are bleak themes and this gloom, there was an optimism/intention that propelled it. Melville, Poe – taught don’t be afraid to be enthusiastic, don’t try to be cool, be frantic, feel it.

This has been such an important time for reflection.

So many people have been enlightened lately.

I’ve been enlightened to my level of ignorance and naivete, and am hopeful that these revelations continue, and spread like a new pandemic of equality.

Someone reminded me recently to use “I” and “me” less in any posts because this isn’t about me. This is an important reminder, and although I think it is important to acknowledge your ignorance and announce your intentions to do better, it is important to not make this about ourselves and our experiences if we are not impacted by the movement first hand.

Now is the time to witness the movement, hear what the black community has to say and help amplify their voices, and in doing so, say less ourselves.

Listen, Hear, Absorb, Change.

Be a part of the change. Be on the right side of history.

Some people have no yet been enlightened. They cling to their perspectives, and their beliefs, seeing this movement as an attack on America, but America was born of movements. Protests. Riots. Although rioting is never ideal, neither is inaction and continued inequality.

If you “lose” friends or family along the way, know that it is not their time to be enlightened. Their hearts and ears are closed. They are working through their own crap, and aren’t capable yet of understanding and seeing past their own lives.

Hopefully, they can catch up with us later.

Have you guys been more or less creative in captivity?

Although my work schedule is mostly unchanged, my habits were altered dramatically.

I spend less time writing, and less time reading, feeling as though the extra time should be spent doing something “more important.” …and I hate that feeling.

Do you ever feel the same?

How do you fight the feeling?

I wish I could reprogram my mind to acknowledge that writing is my art and that it is just as important as the household to-do list.

Granted, I did also finish the last read-through on my manuscript, and sent it off to my editor, and started a new project, I still need to find a way to prioritize my writing as high if not higher than the broken sprinkler head.

Things on the horizon: working on gathering a mailing list for a newsletter, creating a Facebook author page, working on the cover art for my second manuscript, toying with the idea of resuscitating my first project and cleaning off the two years of electronic dust that has accumulated atop it, and am working on an overhaul on the blog site.

Today was an overly exciting day at the office.

It started out normal enough; early morning wake up and shake fist at alarm clock, brush teeth, locate and don real pants, drive 45 minutes to the office listening to an audiobook about how to live a more creative life, etc. etc.

I logged in, plugged in headphones to listen to electro-swing music to dance embarrassingly in my clandestine cubicle with no visible neighbors. Steaming cup of paris tea in hand, I began trudging through emails, firing off questions, troubleshooting problems for about an hour or so.

Then I noticed sort of a weird smell. It was like someone had left a curling iron on.

No, that wasn’t it. It was more like, someone had left a curling iron on top of their hairbrush, slowly melting it into a pool of molten sludge.

Weird.

While I sat contemplating the exact aromas I was experiencing, I also, like any sane self-preservation motivated human being, …kept working? Yes. Like a complete square, I kept typing, and chatting with co-workers online, commenting on how the floor of my building “sure did smell weird.”

After an amount of time I choose to not admit to you, one of the engineers stood up and said “OK, that’s it. Everyone out!”

I stood up and saw the plume of smoke that had started creeping down the hallway towards my corner cubicle, and started shoving my stuff into my backpack (also not protocol for an evac.) I then followed the other lemmings down the stairwell and out into the parking lot, with the others shooting me death stares that I’d had time to pack up my stuff for a swift departure, as opposed to standing in the parking lot for an indiscriminate amount of time waiting for the fire trucks to arrive.

On the way out of the building, I heard others saying that the fire alarm hadn’t been pulled…because no one knew where it was. Bonkers! Who’s going to save me when I have electro-swing blaring in my ears and I’m too emotionally invested in my olfactory experiences than the cause of them?!

What caused the smoke you ask? I still have no idea. One woman said something was burning in the first-floor kitchen and it filled the whole building (what?), another person said there was a short circuit on a ballast….which is used in roofs, or is some sort of gravel…or is on a ship.

So I have no idea.

All in all, it was an ideal experience for capturing lessons learned. Lesson one, if you smell something burning, make sure your third-floor office building isn’t slowly burning to the ground around you while you send off superfluous email correspondence – your life is more important.

Lesson two – maybe take note of where the fire alarm is, in the event lesson one is required.

Lesson three – …maybe just work from home from now on. It’s very peopley outside and it smells like burned plastic.

This was my first year participating in NaNoWriMo. I was pretty excited about it. I explained to everyone who would listen to what it was, the rules, why I was doing it, “Of course I’ll finish it,” “Yes, I can write 50k words in a month,” “No, I won’t be quitting my day job.”

I talked my best friend into doing it with me, and away we went. The first day, the words flew from my fingers faster than lightening out of Palpatine’s pinkie. I cranked out over 7 thousand words and was convinced I’d hit 50k in no time. My friend called me a robot, we laughed, everything was peachy.

As the month went on, the inspiration left. It was more like a chore than an art. I had to hit a certain word count. I had to update the website to get “credit” for my words. I felt almost like the words weren’t as meaningful as the number, and at the end of the month, I’d hit 50,011 words and didn’t write another one for over a month.

I’m not saying that I’m against NaNoWriMo. Far from it, I love that it exists, and I’m excited to learn about more events like it, but I need to approach these types of things more carefully in the future. I know my tendencies, I know that I am overly competitive, with myself most of all and that at the end of the day these sorts of events can detract from the end goal.

Which is what, exactly?

I guess That is the first step. Figuring out what the end goal is. Is it to write a book? Finish a book? Publish a book? Or just write. Create. Grow.

I’m not writing for you. I’m not writing for that guy over there with the fedora or the woman crossing the street holding the freshly baked baguette.

Am I in France? No. I’m in my living room pretending I’m in France, don’t distract me.

My goal is to write.

Although I make lists and have sticky notes and overzealous expectations of myself, I need to remember that the goal at the end of the day is to just write something.

It’s ok to be ambitious, it’s not ok to shit on your self-esteem when you haven’t become the greatest at everything you ever try to do in the first week.

I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m going to blog constantly, or keep a writing journal, or make any other promises that I’m inevitably going to break and mentally berate myself for – But I’m going to write. I’m telling the universe, myself, and you if you happen to be reading this for some reason – I’m going to keep writing.

Whether it’s a piece of nerdy poetry to my husband, a short story about a dinosaur who got lost on the subway or an intricate three-part novel about a young woman with fiery red hair in a Russian school who can absorb and expel bad guys from her body in the form of tattoos (yes, that one is in the works), as long as the keyboard is clicking, I’m ahead of the game.

I was never that into online shopping. The idea of putting my financial information online, somewhere hackable, still gives me the heebie-geebies.

No. I don’t want to scan my credit card.

I don’t want the website to “remember my data.”

I want to live off the “grid,” in a cabin with non-traceable wifi in the middle of the woods.

…

But I also really like shoes.

And books… and random kitchen gadgetry.

So when Amazon became popular and trustworthy, I entered my credit card information. I stored it for later use.

The purchases started off small… household needs, toiletries, music, gifts for loved ones. I signed up for Kindle, Audible, and eventually bought an Amazon dot, so Alexa could serenade me whenever I asked.

Slowly I started getting advertisements on Facebook aligned with my quirky purchases and interests. I’d succumb to the click bait of “20 most popular quirky things on Amazon,” and end up buying at least one.

My husband and I would step over the ever-increasing stack of boxes on our doorstep, and our drawers and cupboards slowly filled up to maximum capacity (click here for how I purged the clutter from our lives.) All the while, my husband was nice enough not to say anything while his own store was slowly being pushed out of existence by the online monstrosity.

Things really changed when I wrote a paper for my Master’s program about Amazon, and how the e-commerce market has impacted the brick and mortar establishments. My findings, and learning real-life examples of how Amazon is changing everything, made me less eager to complete my order…

The next budgetary epiphany happened when a co-worker reminded me of Mint, the software I signed up for 100 years ago, (I remember because it was very difficult to enter my information there as well,) and haven’t looked at since. She told me how she and her fiance were really getting strict on spending, and prioritizing all disposable income on their home improvements and upcoming wedding.

So that night I went home, cracked open a beer, and dove headfirst into the analytics of my spending patterns. The app lets you apply different filters to analyze trends over time. Mint tries to determine the type of purchase you are making, and once you categorize all the miscellaneous activities, you have a complete picture of your financial health. So I filtered on all purchases made to Amazon, over the last year and hit enter.

I was flabbergasted.

And a bit embarrassed.

I’m not going to tell you how much money I’ve spent on inconsequential Amazon purchases. I’m not sure I want to admit it out loud (or write it down), but at that moment, I cut my Amazon practices cold turkey.

I deleted the app from my cell phone and tablet, so it was more difficult to complete any transactions. I started utilizing the notepad feature in my cell to track purchases that I absolutely needed, and would search all available sites for the best price. I was surprised that although Amazon Prime has free shipping, it doesn’t always have the lowest price.

Since the Amazon break-up, my monthly credit card bills have been substantially lower. Our house is less cluttered and there has been no impact on the functionality and efficiency of our kitchen. In short, life does go on after Amazon.

There are other easy ways to budget smarter and do your part to reduce waste: pack a lunch, make your own fancy-schmancy coffee, resell clothing and products on sites before buying new stuff, and research all options before you buy anything from travel, to TVs.

I’ll keep posting other budget and planning ideas moving forward, but it’s important to periodically dig into your financials and determine your priorities,  whether you emphasize travel, concerts or the highest rated egg timer in the world.