Tag: About Me

It’s symbolic, of course.

Sara Mazariegos

There are currently three major news stories in the U.S.: the Epstein client list, the Coldplay cheater cam, and Colbert losing his show because CBS is spineless. I’m so angry on Stephen Colbert’s behalf, as many other people are. Legions of people have come out in support of him, which is nice to see. I hope he finds a better avenue for his show, but it sucks too because a lot of his staff are going to lose their jobs. It’ll be easier for him than for them.

A fourth major news story happened yesterday while I was getting ready to leave work. Ozzy Osbourne died, only a few weeks after his big farewell concert with Black Sabbath. 😢 I wasn’t a huge fan or anything, but I still shed a few tears. Especially when Puddles Pity Party did a tribute when he opened at the concert yesterday. He sang a slow ballad version of “Crazy Train” with a photo of young Ozzy on the screen behind him, and my face was wet.

Puddles Pity Party was otherwise funny, and unique. He opened for Weird Al. We saw Weird Al for the second time! The last time we saw him was 9 years ago. We were so close this time! Center Row F, so maybe 10 rows from the stage. I didn’t need to watch him on the screen this time, which is always awesome. The show was different, but it had many of the same songs and video clips from last time. It’d be difficult not to; as Luis pointed out, it’s not like he’s been in a hundred new TV shows and movies since 2016. He did a big medley of all the classic songs. His costume changes and use of media are impressive. When he did “White & Nerdy” I briefly worried he might Segway off the stage, but he didn’t. He’s a professional.

I went to bed an hour late last night because of Weird Al. I’m groggy, but it was worth it.

On Saturday, Luis and I got food poisoning. Typical me, I then spent the next two days being paranoid about it, but I got over it within 24 hours. We’re going to avoid the place that made us sick, though, just to be safe. The worst thing about it, at least in my case, was that it came out of nowhere. I was fine one minute and then–. Bodies can be the worst sometimes. Then again, bodies are like that in order to keep us alive…

Speaking of being sick*, we saw Eddington, the new movie starring Pedro Pascal, Joaquin Phoenix, and Emma Stone (she’s not in it that much.) It’s… certainly a movie. It’s a very long, confusing movie. I’m not sure what Ari Aster’s message was supposed to be. It felt oddly timed. I prefer Midsommar and Hereditary. The acting and cinematography were good, but the writing was ehh. Disappointing. I thought the promotional campaign with the Tiktok-esque stuff was more interesting.

I’ve read quite a few articles and social media posts about Gen Z not liking sex scenes in novels and movies. It’s a turn-off for them, pun intended. In my opinion, sex scenes are necessary and expected in romance novels, at least the ones that are widely popular. That’s not to say they have to be heavily graphic or anything, but sex is one way of becoming intimately close with a partner, so it’s a way for the romantic leads to bond. It shouldn’t be the only way they bond, but it’s realistic and natural. If done well, sex scenes can even be cute.

I err on the side of cute. I do my best to always make them cute. There are no “throbbing members” to be found in my novels, I promise. And the scenes move the plot forward and matter to the characters, they’re not just in there because romance = sex. That’s such a shallow way of viewing both romance and sex.

Sorry. Rant over. Until next week.

* It makes sense if you see it, but I’ll also just tell you: there’s a lot of Covid stuff in it.

Wish I could fly like Superman.

Sara Mazariegos

Like millions of other people, we saw Superman last weekend. I am a fan of James Gunn, and I really liked what he did with the characters and the world. Leave it to him to pick a few random side characters as the comic relief/help for the main hero. Nicholas Hoult was also really good as Lex Luther. I’ve liked him in everything I’ve seen him in, including when he was elevenish in About A Boy. And let’s not forget about Krypto. He reminded me of our dog Scout. I was tearful when he first appeared, but thankfully I didn’t cry every time I saw him. That would’ve been very dehydrating.

A big aspect of my job is mail handling. There are a lot of folks who don’t seem to understand how mail works. For instance, you have to let people know your address if you want to get mail delivered to it. It doesn’t just magically arrive because you want it to. I’ve gotten pretty good at forwarding people’s mail to them, but the patient FedEx worker alerted me yesterday morning that they don’t deliver to P.O. Boxes. I’d packed up some mail nicely to send to one, but I had to carefully repackage it to go via USPS. Thankfully I didn’t lose much time on it. I’m trying to do better at not checking the tracking or requests when I’m not at work. I become too invested in each delivery and want to make sure they work out well, but I need to stop caring so much. It’s not my problem once things are sent!

Luis and I went out for a fancy dinner on the 14th, at a place really close to my office. Unfortunately, it decided to storm and he forgot his umbrella, but it was okay. It calmed down right as he arrived at my building to cross the street. Next month, we’re planning to go to another place near my office. One of the perks of my job is that there are fun places around. There’s also a big park full of squirrels, pigeons, and ducks.

I feel like a broken record about this, but writing 500 words each day works so well for me. It allows me to immerse myself in the scenes and think about them when I’m not pressured to write things down. For instance, I wrote 500 words today and now I’m planning what comes next before writing it. In the past, I used to crank out 2,000 words a day and I think a lot of it was with the “gotta fill this quota” mentality I no longer have. I’m enjoying my story more as I work on it, and I think it will help when it comes time to edit things, too because my writing sessions are more focused on the plot and moving things forward. I used to digress and meander in my writing a lot more, largely because I thought, “That’ll get more words!”

This really has become an adventure in learning how to write better. I know a lot of people have this issue with their writing. They get burnt out thinking they’ve got to write as much as Stephen King each day. They think too much in terms of the word count needed to make a novel and not the words needed to make a good one.

I’m going to write 500 more words later, and I know more or less what they will be.

Drunk on wine, I’m amazing.

Sara Mazariegos

One of the bad things about holiday vacations is coming back to work on the Monday afterward. Luis and I had a nice time last weekend, spending time together and with family. We saw This is Spinal Tap in theaters for the first time, for the 41st anniversary. It’s totally because they’re coming out with a sequel soon. At the end of the showing, they included a brief preview of the sequel and the audience laughed just at the sight of the way they look now, which is kind of mean but also fair. They reminded me of The Beatles during the “When I’m Sixty-Four” scene in Yellow Submarine.

Then, on Sunday, we went to the mall and bought the Nintendo Switch 2 for Luis’s early birthday present! It doesn’t seem that different from the original Switch to me, but it has a few improvements. And who knows? I might become amazing at Mario Kart by the time we get another game. I just hope it stops hurting my hand. I think I steer too intensely.

Now that the 4th of July is over, I’m not going to have a weekday off from work until Labor Day at the beginning of September. We have a few fun things planned before then, but there’s something to be said for having time off when I’d normally have to wake up early and commute. We’re seeing Weird Al on a Tuesday night, and I’m hoping I won’t be very tired during it and very tired the next day.

There was a Valley Girl on my train this morning. She was talking on her phone and she kept saying “For sure” and “Totally” and I was doing my best not to crack up the entire time she stood in front of me. At one point, she described her whole outfit and said something about needing to go shopping with her mom. “With the train, it takes me, like, fifteen minutes to walk. If I had to walk to work, it would take me, like, four hours. My coworker walks, like, half an hour to work each day. You know that’s not me.”

I did not expect to hear that accent in the D.C. area.

While working on a scene in my novel involving the DC Book Festival, I learned John Green is coming to the DC Book Festival this year, in September! So art is imitating life again. I’ll have to make mental notes of details I can include in the edits. The last time Luis and I saw him at the Book Fest, it was summer of 2012. It’s going to be inside the convention center this time, so it’ll be much cooler than doing it on the Mall like they used to. I hope I can meet him again! I can never meet John Green too many times. ✨

It’s confusing these days.

Sara Mazariegos

Last weekend was really fun. The party for Luis’s mom was great, and he made an awesome video with a bunch of his family members wishing his mom a happy birthday. Then he made a speech and it was so cute. I may be biased, but my husband is amazing. 🥰  Then the next day, we went to the Air & Space Museum and spent a few hours looking at the updated exhibits. I had a margarita in a can! I did not expect anything like that to be available in their cafe. Next month, more new exhibits are opening, including one that features Amelia Earhart. Just more reasons to go back again. We still need to visit the one in Virginia, too. That’s where they’re keeping Enola Gay these days.

Luis bought me a copy of the library book I was reading, so for a brief period I had two nearly identical copies of The Ex Talk. I’m reading my own copy now. My used copy is a retired library book, so I went from reading one library book to another. This one’s cover is laminated! I love owning old library books. They tell stories of their own.

He also got me a copy of Ashley Poston’s new novel, Sounds Like Love. I love her covers. Whoever designs them deserves extra points. I’m planning to read her other gorgeous novel, A Novel Love Story next.

We’re getting together with my family on the 4th of July. We always go see them and have food and watch the DC fireworks celebration, and then we set off a few small fireworks in the street outside the house. It’s always been about spending time with family for me, more than patriotism, really. It’s especially like that now.

I’m just grateful for a day off.

My writing is progressing well. I’m writing a little over a chapter a week, so I can really feel it coming along. I’ve also started thinking ahead and putting fun ideas in my outline, so I remember to actually use them. I’ve definitely thought of things to do and then forgotten about them, in the past. The first time I wrote this story, back in 2020, I didn’t even have an outline. It’s come a long way.

I was reading The Ex Talk last night and bits of it were aligning well with my story’s themes. I thought, “Yes! This really is a perfect comp.” It’s relatable to my life, too. I found this book just by searching for romance novels with workplace conflicts. I’m so glad I found it.

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now.

Sara Mazariegos

There’s a horrible heatwave in a lot of the US right now. It’s fine if you can be inside, in the air conditioning, but whenever I walk to/from the Metro and bus, it’s so sticky. I wore a dress to work today in order to stay cool. I’m not a fan of wearing dresses, especially because the AC can make me cold and my legs aren’t covered. But it’s been warm enough inside so it’s okay.

I doubt I’ll wear a dress again tomorrow, though. I need to get some fashionable, work appropriate shorts or maybe some loose linen pants. I told myself I’d go shopping for new work clothes and then I learned I could wear jeans and t-shirts so I haven’t bothered.

On Sunday, Luis and I are finally going to the Air & Space Museum. I got timed passes and everything, like a real tourist. (You have to get timed passes to enter.) Not too much later than the 14th. It’s an important place to us, and it’s mentioned in my novel, so it’s part research but mostly just a nice place for us to return to every once in a while. We’re going to check out the food court. When we first met, it was upstairs and completely McDonald’s. A lot has changed in thirteen years.

I have a unique addiction that thankfully doesn’t happen all the time. I think I may have mentioned it before. I’ve gotten in the strange habit of getting a library book, deciding I want to keep it, and either buying it or asking my husband to buy it for me. It’s happened at least four times that I can remember: Georgie, All Along, Very Sincerely Yours, The Good Part, and now The Ex Talk. All of them have been used as comp titles. I love all of them. So there.

So far, I’ve purchased way fewer books this year than the past few years. I’ve only bought like three, and it’s June. I’m doing well. I need to keep reading the ones I already own, though. The little free libraries in my neighborhood are dangerous for my bookshelf.

Using my calendar for scheduling writing has been going well. I write about 1,000 words a day, broken up into 500 at the office and 500 in the evening when I’m home. It helps to break it up like that so I don’t ever feel stuck. It gives me time to think about things and plan it out, instead of feeling like I need to get it right then and there. I breeze through 500 words easily, and I calculated things out — if I keep writing at my current pace, I should be finished with this draft at the end of September. Just have to avoid skipping writing time because I feel tired and would rather watch TV.

TV can always wait.

She’s got wonderful eyes and a risqué mouth.

Sara Mazariegos

Tomorrow is Juneteenth. I’m off for it for the first time since it was added as a Federal holiday. I’m excited to be off, but I also feel guilty about it. I suppose that’s the general idea. We’re meant to reflect on what this country did and continues to do to Black people. I’m going to spend the day reading and writing, and Luis and I will go have a nice dinner at a nearby Tex Mex place. I think more businesses need to give it as a holiday so it receives its full respect. I’ve noticed it’s optional a lot of the time, hence this being my first year having it off. If Luis didn’t have to work, I would’ve suggested going to a local Black-owned business for dinner, but he has to work.

The Metro has been a nightmare this week. Every day has had some kind of signal problem, some kind of track work. This morning, I was half an hour late to work because there was a track issue two stops away from the office. They made everyone get out of my train and wait for the next one. Thankfully, my coworkers were nice about it. But I was so frustrated and worried about how long it was going to take, because it was stop-and-go all morning.

It’s been pretty calm at work, though. Which isn’t the norm for Wednesday, so something crazy is probably going to happen.

Next weekend, we’re going to celebrate Luis’s mom’s birthday with yet another party. (She’s had like three parties now.) We’re going to a brewery that, for once!, has coffee and pizza instead of just having beer. I’m excited about that. Also, my parents are going to be there, which I didn’t know about until they told us on Father’s Day. We’ll see them again on the 4th of July and then again on the 22nd when we go to see Weird Al. July is going to be pretty packed.

Then there’s nothing on the schedule for August. We need to make August plans STAT. Luis’s birthday is in August, so that’ll of course be something. But a few years ago we literally went to Paris and London. This year, ehh…. we can’t do that. But I’m sure it’ll still be nice.

I’ve been doing a lot of beta reading. I currently have three I’m getting through. Some writers are definitely more patient than others. I’m a slow reader, but I also give the stories more attention than I bet a lot of other readers do. Case in point, I got some early feedback on my novel from one of them that was like, “I like the corporate rivalry.” I feel like you can say that without even reading my story; it’s in the brief description. But I don’t want to be mean. Some people are more comfortable giving feedback than others, and some people don’t want to be negative or whatever. It’s fine. I do my best to read like I’m helping the writer, because I am. I’ve volunteered my time to help them make their story better.

With that in mind, I better go keep reading.

We talk about this whole stupid world and still come out laughing (Ha!)

Sara Mazariegos

The 14th is this Saturday. Luis and I always do something a little special since we first started dating—and got married—on a 14th. I wanted to come to D.C. this time and explore the redesigned Air & Space Museum. But the Mall is going to be full of people and all kinds of militaristic stuff I don’t want to be around. 😞 So we’ll save that for another time (possibly another 14th) and go get pizza and books instead.

We went with his family to another fun escape room in D.C. last weekend. My main mode when I do those things is finding all of the useful parts and giving them to others to actually solve, haha. When a room is open, I look all around for puzzle pieces, flashlights, etc that will aid in getting out of the room. I’m pretty good at doing it quickly. The other day, I opened a combination on a door flap. That felt special.

Luis and I are working on designing a Haunted Mansion escape room in our house. I’m so excited, because—as you know by now, I’m sure—The Haunted Mansion is my favorite Disney anything. He’s been asking for my input and we’ve been using a lot of our stuff to create a fun story. Last year’s Batman escape room was a real hit, so hopefully this one will be, too. Luis even creates videos for them! One of our friends asked who made the Batman one and was amazed that he did. We could start a small business, performing home escape rooms, but it would be complicated because we’d have to go to people’s houses, like birthday clowns or magicians or something. I wonder if that’s already a thing.

Since I’m working on retooling my Nerdfighter novel, I’ve been paying more attention to similar books again. One tough thing in the whole query-writing saga is finding good comp titles. They’re supposed to not be too old or too famous, and they don’t have to be extremely similar to your plot or your characters. They’re mainly meant to have some similar themes or even just evoke similar feelings when you read them, so they give literary agents some good examples of how your book would do in the market.

I read the other day that a comp title can be older than five years as long as the author is still releasing books. I think I’m going to hold the internet to that, because I found a great comp that’s from 2021 and the author has released several books since then. The story in this one just happens to fit my novel the best.

Luis and I will be looking at books on Saturday, though, so who knows? I may come home with a brand new perfect comp title instead.

I had never seen a set of eyes more hazelerer.

Sara Mazariegos

I was going to write about not giving up on story even when it starts to bore me or when I’d rather write something else. But then I got bit by the inspiration bug and spent the whole weekend awash in plotting and outlining my ideas for my retooling of my Nerdfighters-inspired novel. So my other novel is going on the back-burner. It helps that it has a strong outline. I won’t forget to finish it.

Luis is meanwhile enjoying coming up with great ideas for our next escape room at our house this Halloween. I told him I wanted to do a Haunted Mansion one, and he’s been on a roll. I’m so excited to see what he creates. We help each other with our different, but similar, creative projects. I love it. 💖

On Sunday, I sent in my It’s A Wonderful Life novel’s query letter for The Shit No One Tells You About Writing to critique. We’ll see if it catches their attention. If they don’t select it for their podcast, maybe that means it’s already good enough. I’m trying to be positive. I’m not going to rush out the queries like I did in the past. Especially because I’m still having a few beta readers look it over.

So far, a beta reader is enjoying my novel. She said it’s polished. I hope it doesn’t nosedive as she gets further into it. I feel better about that story. I think taking time with it has served me well. Hopefully I can keep bringing that energy and that attitude to my novels going forward.

I can feel the improvement, which is a reward in and of itself.

In other news, I’m still impressed by season two of The Rehearsal. I told my dad to check it out, since he’s an airplane enthusiast. He told me he watched Nathan Fielder on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and I thought, “Nooo!” 🤣 Because it was pretty spoilery. I was surprised by how much. Anyway, that season is really good. I liked it more than the first season, and I liked the first season quite a bit too.

Until next time,

Just grab him in the biscuits.

Sara Mazariegos

Luis and I watched Pee-Wee As Himself last weekend. It turned Memorial Day weekend into a Pee-Wee fest, which was fun. It’s a cute and funny documentary, but it’s also sad. He didn’t deserve all the bad crap he was given.

One thing I noted early on is that Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee) and Shock G (Humpty Hump from Digital Underground) had a few things in common, most important of all that they were known primarily as their joke personas. I like them both a lot. I’m still sad about both of them.

It’s always nice to have a three-day weekend, but then the rest of the week ends up feeling a little weird. Yesterday was the Mondayiest Tuesday ever. A lot of it is because people come back to work and lose their minds a little bit, because they weren’t handling things on Monday so they feel behind. But thankfully it wasn’t too bad for me, and people have chilled out more now.

I’m still working my way through Judy Blume’s Fudge series of books. The first one, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, is such a bizarre book. It’s essentially a bunch of short, semi-connected stories, and the ending completely threw me. Now I’m reading Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, which is the only one I’d actually heard of before. I didn’t know it was connected to Fudge and his family. I like Sheila, though she’s kinda bitchy. Maybe that’s why I like her. 🤔

We started playing this tarot mystery game called The Light in the Mist. It’s one of the nerdiest games I’ve ever played. It’s creative and cool, though. I do love a good mystery. It reminds me of this super geeky game I got when I was about ten years old. It had all of these plastic gems and you were supposed to find them around your house, and it was a lot of roleplaying, imagination stuff. I remember my friends and I looking at each other and being like, “…This is boring.”

The tarot game isn’t boring, though! It just reminded me of that game because it’s also very fanciful and relies on a significant amount of thinking outside of the box. It has a plot and things to follow, though. It’s not just a bunch of plastic and you’re on your own.

Speaking of plot and imagination, my writing is going well. I’m doing a good job of thinking about the next story I want to work on without disrupting the one I’m currently working on. I like both of them, and they both tell a story I’m interested in telling. I also finished editing my It’s A Wonderful Life story according to Luis’s notes, so after I read it through to make sure things make sense, I’m going to share it with some beta readers, who hopefully won’t rip it to shreds.

Until next time,

Oh, Superman, where are you now when everything’s gone wrong somehow?

Sara Mazariegos

It may just be because I’ve been thrown a few curveballs lately, but time has been going by weirdly for me this year. I both can’t believe we’re already in the middle of May, and I’m also surprised the year is going slowly. It feels like we went to Disneyland last year, but it was only three months ago! Hopefully things will feel more normal soon, now that things have settled. *knocks on wood*

All of the movie remakes annoy me, generally, but I feel like the only person who’s not awed by the new-old Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. The animation of Stitch and Toothless is cute, but that’s because they’re just CGI versions of the already cute, animated originals. Why bother making these remakes? The originals are better. Just show your kids the originals.

Also, they did Pleakley dirty.

It amuses me that Google red-underlines Pleakley and I get shocked by it. It’s a made up name, self.

“That’s not a real name… in Iceland. But here it’s a good name!”

Sometimes I think about how many franchises there are. There are too many for any one person to be interested in all of them. But at the same time, there are quite a few I’m not into and it feels like everyone else is. Like Bridgerton. Or The Fast & The Furious. I have no problem with people liking them, but I have zero interest. It feels, to me, a little bit like how everyone has their own lives and you don’t really see how they are or what they’re doing, but you know they’re out there living them anyway.

There are exceptions. Obviously I’m not interested in Harry Potter anymore, and it gives me the ick when I see people who are. I was also never one of those people who made HP my life, though. But that’s a different issue. Vin Diesel’s not a transphobe, that I know of. He just makes movies I don’t care about.

My writing is going well, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I realized I’ve been setting a lot of self-imposed deadlines which made things more stressful than they need to be, especially since I don’t have an agent or a publisher waiting for a draft or anything like that (yet.) I edit one novel about half an hour each day, and I write another novel for a half hour each day while I’m at work. It allows me to devote some time to each of them every day without feeling pressure to write for hours and have it done by a specific time. My goal is to get my It’s A Wonderful Life-inspired novel ready for beta readers by next month. But we’ll see. I’m going easy on myself.

I started getting some further inspiration for another rewrite project, so I’m planning to work on the plot development for that as well. I’ll probably actually start writing that new draft the beginning of next year.

Loosey-goosey is my new mantra.