On Night Blooming Flowers, old stories refusing to stay dead, and making room for the writer behind the Cryptid

Content Note: This post touches on grief, loss, chronic illness and disability, difficult personal experiences, and the realities of creating while your body doesn’t always cooperate.

Welcome back to the Cryptid’s Writing Lair.

Because you know what?

I think this is one of the things we neglect around here the most.

Not because I don’t love the dogs.

You know I love my dogs.

A lot.

And honestly, I probably love writing about them more than I like writing about anything else.

But sometimes, we need to make a little more time and space for my other love.

Writing.

The thing that has been following me around for most of my life.

The thing that started before The Crippled Cryptid had a name.

The thing that has survived hospital waiting rooms, notebooks, flash drives, abandoned drafts, a shitty Toshiba laptop blowing up and taking my first full-length finished novel with it at 15, plot bunnies, bad ideas, good ideas, terrible handwriting, chronic illness, life changes, and approximately seventeen thousand different versions of “maybe someday.”

So today, we’re making room for it.

Let’s talk about what’s been happening on the Wyrm Workbench.

Including Night Blooming Flowers.

Because let’s face it…

That’s a fucking big one.

✒️ Welcome to the Workbench

This is The Crippled Cryptid reporting from the back table, Bed Jail™, the couch nest, or whichever soft surface has currently been declared headquarters.

Today, it’s the back table with a cup of coffee- naturally.

And around here, writing rarely happens alone.

Luna is usually somewhere nearby, keeping one eye on me and one eye on whatever nonsense is happening in the Den.

Binka is learning that “settling while Mama writes” is a skill, although he remains deeply unconvinced that wrestling with his sister is not technically part of the writing process.

There are dog-safe snacks being negotiated.

There is probably somebody asking what I’m doing.

And somewhere in the background, M&M is inevitably asking the question I’ve learned to expect:

“How’s your writing going?”

Sometimes followed by:

“Do you need anything?”

And then there’s the Yard Yeti.

Years ago, we joked that someday, when I became a famous author, I’d buy him an Impala.

Preferably one that looked suspiciously familiar.

We’re still waiting on the famous-author part.

The Impala remains pending.

But the dream is still sitting at the table with me.

Because that’s the thing about writing.

It isn’t just the words.

It’s the people who ask about the words.

The dogs who supervise them.

The ridiculous jokes that somehow survive for years.

The dreams that started as “wouldn’t it be funny if…” and slowly become something you actually believe might happen.

And then, somehow, I look down and realize: I wrote.

Not blog words.

Not caption words.

Not “please, insurance company, acknowledge that I am a human being” words.

Story words.

The kind that make me want to keep going.

The kind that remind me why I started.

The kind that prove the stories are still in here.

So welcome to the Workbench.

Let’s see what we’re building this week.

📊 The Extremely Scientific Workbench Statistics

Weekly Starting Word Count:
14,738?
∞?
“Which project are we talking about, Sky?”

Current Word Count:
Complicated.

Total Words Written This Week:
Also complicated.

Because apparently I have reached the stage of being a writer where one number is no longer sufficient to describe the situation.

And honestly?

I’m okay with that.

🌙 On Today’s Writing Table: Night Blooming Flowers, Writing Notes & Coffee

This is one of those weeks where I want to tell you that I’ve gotten a lot of writing done.

And maybe, in the long-term scheme of things, I have.

I’ve gotten blog words done.

I’ve gotten editing words done.

I’ve gotten plotting words done.

I’ve killed more plot bunnies than I think I know what to do with.

But when I look at the little place where I normally put our starting word count, current word count, and total words written for the week…

I’m tempted to leave them blank.

Because I want to ask you: Which project are we talking about?

Night Blooming Flowers clocks in at 14,738 words.

And as of right now, that project is officially done.

Not “almost done.”

Not “I’m still working on it.”

Done.

I have submitted Night Blooming Flowers to Kindle Direct Publishing.

It is currently sitting in the PENDING stage of the publishing process, which means the manuscript is out of my hands and into Amazon’s little publishing machinery.

And now?

I wait.

KDP says the process can take up to 72 hours, so I’m currently living in that very strange little space between:

“I finished my book.” And “The world can actually buy my book.”

Which is, frankly, a very weird place to be.

Because I did The Thing™.

I finished the poetry collection.

I dealt with the cover.

I dealt with formatting.

I dealt with the art inside.

I dealt with all of those annoying little details that take so long to trim and fix that eventually you start wondering if you even want to do it anymore.

And then you do it anyway.

Because it’s something you love.

Because it’s the poetry collection you want to share with the world.

So yes.

Night Blooming Flowers has been submitted.

It is officially in the publishing pipeline.

Now we’re just waiting for that little PENDING label to turn into something much more exciting.

And when it does?

You will absolutely hear about it.

I don’t care what day of the week it is.

I don’t care whether it happens on a Tuesday at 2:17 in the afternoon or Saturday at three in the morning.

There will be a celebration.

There will be a post.

There will probably be excessive exclamation points.

And once the book is officially live, I’ll come back here and update this post with the cover and the link to the published collection, too.

Because Night Blooming Flowers deserves its own damn celebration.

And yes.

There will be another post dedicated entirely to it.

Because let’s be honest…

I wrote a fucking book.

I’m allowed to celebrate that.

And because this particular collection means something to me.

It feels like a bridge between my life before, my life now, and the life I’m trying to build.

There’s a lot of different styles in it, too.

The style I first started writing in.

Free-form poetry.

What I consider haiku.

Classic stanza poetry.

What many people might consider ballads.

And there are a lot of emotions in those poems.

Some of them are difficult.

Some of them would have hurt people I loved if they’d been alive to read them.

And that’s part of why I never published some of those poems before.

But I’ve reached a point where I’m not writing for approval anymore.

That’s the difference.

When I released things like “Devil in the Wishing Well,” “Bloom,” and “Casting Shadows,” there was still a part of me asking:

Do you like this?

Do you like me?

Did I do this right?

I’m not asking that anymore.

Now I’m trying to show you who I am.

Why I write.

What I’ve lived through.

What I’ve survived.

What I’ve healed from.

What broke me again.

The good.

The bad.

The ugly.

The beautiful.

All of it.

I went through things.

I healed.

I broke again.

And I’m still here.

I’m still here because of the people who love me.

The people who lift me up.

The people who refuse to let me give up on myself.

The people who refused to let me disappear into that dark hole.

So, will Night Blooming Flowers make you feel things?

I guaran-fucking-tee it.

But more than that, I hope someone reads it and thinks:

“You know what? That’s my fucking girl.”

And honestly?

That’s enough for me.

🐾 Plot Bunnies, Tiny Readers & Two Very Real Dogs

What else have I been up to?

Because saying I’ve just been working on Night Blooming Flowers feels a little anticlimactic.

Those of you who know me well…

Well.

You already called it.

I think my dad was probably the first one to clock it, honestly.

Maybe the Luna Takeovers where I keep talking about her Main Character Energy gave it away.

Because yes.

I’m working on a children’s book.

About the one and only Luna Bean and her little brother Blitzy Bug.

They’re fun, silly little stories for the days when the words don’t come easily, but I still want to work on my writing.

They’re nothing major.

At least not yet.

But I think it would be really cool for the little ones in my life, like M&M’s nephew, to someday have stories about service dogs and what they do.

Except the service dog is Luna.

A real dog.

With real-life adventures…

Sort of.

There might be car rides.

There might be grocery trips.

There might be Luna helping her mom face the world.

Or helping her mom remember that she never has to face it completely alone.

And there’s something else I really like about the idea.

Sometimes kids don’t know what a service dog actually is.

They just know that some dogs wear vests.

They see those dogs in places like grocery stores.

And naturally, they wonder:

“Why can’t my dog come to the store?”

That’s a perfectly reasonable question when you’re little.

And maybe a silly little story about Luna can help answer it.

Not with a lecture.

Not with a textbook.

Just with a story.

📓 The Story Bible Graveyard

I’m also reworking my handwritten notes.

Because yes, I have a MacBook.

Yes, I have an iPad.

And yes, I still like writing things down with an actual pen.

Sometimes I like breaking everything back down to basics.

One of my favorite ways to do that is with handwritten story bibles.

Except…

I’ve skinned the plot bunnies.

The lore has changed.

The characters have changed.

The stories have changed.

And apparently the story bibles did not receive the memo.

So now I’m redoing them.

Which is both a very good thing and a very annoying thing.

It’s good because rewriting those notes gets the new information ingrained in my brain.

It forces me to learn it.

Relearn it.

Remember it.

And, perhaps most importantly, stop carrying the old lore around in my head as if it’s still canon.

But it’s annoying because sometimes my hands get tired.

That’s one of those places where chronic illness manages to wander into something that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with being a person trying to make something.

And yes.

Sometimes that sucks.

But there’s another way to look at it, too.

Writing by hand gets me up and moving.

It gives my hands something to practice.

It makes me work on a skill that I don’t want to lose simply because screens are easier.

So, I keep doing it.

Writing by hand.

Reading paper books.

Doing little things that keep those skills alive.

Not because I want every post to become an accessibility post.

This isn’t one.

But accessibility still exists in the background of my life, even when it’s not the subject of the conversation.

And right now?

I’m actually really excited about these notes.

Because I’m really happy with where the lore is going.

🕯️ The Story That Wouldn’t Leave Me Alone

And if you know me, you know there is one project sitting particularly close to my heart.

Addie Unwritten.

I love this story.

I love it in the slightly ridiculous way you love a project that has been following you around for more than half your life.

I started writing it when I was fourteen or fifteen.

I was sitting in the lobby of Milwaukee Children’s Hospital on the Froedtert campus, waiting for my Xolair drug trial.

And somewhere in that waiting room, I started writing a story.

It was one of those stories that simply refused to leave me alone.

Eventually, I put it away in the back of a notebook.

I thought nobody would ever want to read it.

Years passed.

Then, a couple of years ago, I found the notes again.

I also found information and one of the first drafts on a flash drive.

And part of me looked at all of it and thought:

What if?

Addie had a different name then.

But the storyline?

The heart of it?

That was still there.

And now that I’m older, and hopefully a little wiser, I finally feel ready to give this story the life it deserves.

I’m hoping that by October 2027, the world will get to meet Addie.

But that doesn’t mean you’re going to have to wait until then to hear about her.

There will be snippets.

Little updates.

Pieces of the process.

Probably several dramatic declarations about characters who are making terrible decisions.

That’s part of the fun.

💾 The Slight Problem of Having Too Many Stories

And Addie isn’t even the whole Workbench.

I have an entire 2TB flash drive full of projects.

Plus another 2TB of iCloud storage full of ideas.

Some have been worked on.

Some are still prompts.

Some are probably sitting there waiting for me to remember that I wrote them down.

And that doesn’t even include the handwritten stuff in my notebooks.

When I tell you there is more ink in my veins…

I’m not fucking lying.

Sometimes people tell you exactly who they are.

I think you should probably believe them.

And if I’ve spent most of my life writing stories, poems, notes, characters, lore, worlds, fragments, scenes, ideas, and things that probably made sense at three in the morning…

Maybe the writing isn’t something I do.

Maybe it’s part of who I am.

✨ That’s It For Now

And that’s what’s currently sitting on the Wyrm Workbench.

Some weeks, there are thousands of words.

Some weeks, there are revisions, research rabbit holes, stubborn characters, questionable plot decisions, and approximately seventeen tabs open that I swear are all important.

Some weeks, the biggest victory is simply opening the document.

It all counts.

Because I’m learning that a writing life doesn’t have to look like the writing life I imagined when I was younger.

Sometimes it happens at a back table while a puppy learns how to settle.

Sometimes Luna is keeping watch.

Sometimes M&M asks how the writing is going before I even realize I needed someone to ask.

Sometimes the Yard Yeti is still waiting on that future Impala.

And sometimes I’m just sitting here, writing anyway.

That’s the work.

Not always glamorous.

Not always productive.

Not always easy.

But still mine.

So, if you’re creating something while your life looks nothing like the picture you once had in your head, I hope you remember this:

You don’t have to build it perfectly for it to be real.

A sentence counts.

A paragraph counts.

A terrible first draft counts.

Opening the document counts.

Starting again counts.

And sometimes, after everything your body, your brain, or the world has thrown at you, getting to say: “I wrote today.” is its own kind of magic.

Thank you for sitting with me at the Workbench.

Now go make something weird.

I’ll see you next week.

Love you. Now say it back.

–Sky ©The Crippled Cryptid

Still writing. Still weird.
Still supervised.

🌙 Luna Note

Luna would like the official record to show that absolutely none of this writing would happen without her highly specialized supervision.

She has been monitoring the Workbench.

She has been monitoring Mama.

She has been monitoring the Den.

She has been monitoring the snacks.

This is a demanding position.

She takes it very seriously.

🐾 Writing supervised by Luna, Medical Alert Service Dog & Full-Time Cryptid Perimeter Security

🐄 Additional supervision provided by Binka, Professional Puppy Distraction & Snack Negotiator

🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa

No pressure to donate.

Reading, sharing, and existing alongside me is already enough.

If you want to support the long, unglamorous work of survival, mobility, and making things anyway:

💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility