Introducing Raiding Party Member — Kate Paulk

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Okay, so most of you know Kate.  She’s the person who shows up when a troll gets really obnoxious.  Usually the first indication I have of this is another of my friends telling me “Kate just vivisected your troll and is now feeding him his entrails.”  This is lots of fun and not a bit terrifying, because Kate is one of the nicest people I know.  (Of course she does write an awful lot of stone-cold bastages.) I met her … 9? (is it only that long) years ago, and she quickly became one of my closest friends, mostly because she’s one of the people I can argue and shout at, and it’s never personal.  (Well, unless she gets into my hairstyle or something, but she never has.)  She’s also my favorite person to brainstorm with — both ways — and to collaborate with.  We do a series of short stories in the Valdemar universe together and they’re a ton of fun, so supposing we stop spinning very fast in opposite directions soon, we’ll write a novel together.  Over these nine years, I’ve seen Kate go from “professional if it gets a good editing” to “Very, very good.”  I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.  I just wish she wouldn’t infect me with her evil villains… but other than that, we’re cool.  So, without further ado, if you don’t know her already, meet Kate Paulk.  (And btw the idea she’s not interesting means she’s responsible for replacing my monitor.  Just get her talking about how many things in OZ can kill you, or interesting historical bad guys, and you’ll see.  (Okay, so once she and my older son made me want to fake death to escape their conversation, but it was quantum mechanics and they were getting ridiculously detailed.) Also, the woman who introduced me to the metaphor for my health as “Being up and down like a whore’s undies” cannot be boring.  Scary yes.  Boring, no.)

And lo! It came to pass that the fearsome Sarah did require of her Hun Kate an introduction, that the Raiding Party members be fully known to all Hoyts Huns. Thus, the Kate did… Oh stop laughing. To say I suck at this kind of thing is to understate to the level of bald-faced lie – and that’s after accounting for the usual issues involved in anything self-promotional.

So yeah, I’m Kate Paulk. I’m a writer. I haven’t written for fun in five minutes, thirty one seconds, and… Oh, sorry. This isn’t Writing Addicts Anonymous (who I really hope don’t exist).

I’ll occasionally throw a guest post or two Sarah’s way, and those of you who follow the Mad Genius Club know I blog there on Thursdays. Don’t bother with my website – it’s horribly out of date and  I really need to clean it up and do things with it, only I find it hard to believe anyone is going to be interested in me talking about things that interest me.

See, I was raised in a family that did the old “don’t big-note yourself” thing, the kind of ethos where it’s unutterably rude to put yourself forward. You don’t “impose” on other people and me being naturally introverted (I max out the introvert scale on every Meyers Briggs I take. Usually the other three letters are kind of flexible depending on my mood, what I’ve been doing a lot of, and so forth. I’ve been known to score 100% introvert and 50/50 on all the others), actually going out and talking to people is a challenge. Talking about myself is a no-no.

Besides, unlike Sarah, and Amanda, and Cedar, Dave Pascoe and… well most of you, I’m just not that interesting. There’s not much outside of “female, forty-plus, need to buy clothing in beached whale sizes although I do try to dress to hide this at cons, couldn’t be more middle-class WASP if I tried”. Well, okay, I was born in Australia and didn’t move to the USA until a little over 10 years ago. And there was the three months I worked as a contract geologist in a remote part of northern Australia – but that was mostly heat and flies, not exciting (the one “exciting” incident wasn’t a particularly good one to have to deal with).

And okay, there was that memorable time I drove from Houston to where I live now about an hour out of Philadelphia with an untreated broken ankle. In my defense, until about the end of the second day’s driving I thought I’d just sprained it. I didn’t know you could walk with a broken ankle, see, and I could – sort of – walk.

I’m not even all that aggressive (hell, I have to work at assertive). I’ve gotten damn good at protective camouflage of the “nothing worth noticing” variety, to the extent that I can and do fade into the background. It’s a way of not getting noticed by bullies – and trust me, girl bullies are way worse than boys. Boys will just hit you. Girls will wait until you’re elsewhere then destroy things you own, in a way that you know who did it but you can’t prove a damn thing.

I can get up a pretty decent kind of rant if something hits me the right – or possibly wrong – way. Sometimes I can manage epic rant, especially if the topic touches on one of my hot buttons. The rants are rarely spoken: I write them. I’m a lot better at picking up nuance from what people write than I am from face-to-face conversation.

What else? Politically I’m closest to small-l libertarian with odd quirks. On social matters I tend to figure that everyone gets to go to the hell of their choice so long as they don’t take anyone with them who hasn’t agreed to the journey. On economic matters, I dislike debt, I dislike deficit spending, and I lean to the view that if you can’t afford it you don’t do it. On defense, I figure it’s better not to go starting anything – but if someone else starts it you damn well make sure you finish it because if you don’t they will. Take that any way you choose – I don’t much care. I guarantee I could manage to offend every reader here at some point, and if I do it won’t be deliberate (I’m really good at accidentally stepping on people’s hot buttons), and any reaction I get won’t be my problem.

My problems are a bit too bloody all-consuming to worry about what people think of me. They start with the defective model body I got handed when I was born, with its weakness for auto-immune disorders. That turned into narcolepsy when I was 15 or so, and because of that I’ve spent the last 30-ish years living with chronic sleep deprivation and all the joyous medical things that flow on from that including depression. I don’t need recreational pharmaceuticals to get loopy. I just need to be a little bit overtired.

That means that for the most part my life consists of work, eat, sleep, and squeeze whatever writing I can into the corners. Exciting, no?

Other than that, I live with three cats and one husband, I have no children partly because the chemical cocktail I need to function has never been tested on pregnant anything, partly because I’d be a horrible parent (I spoil the cats shamefully when I’m not so wrapped up in book I’m not forgetting they exist), and partly because there’s way too much chance of any kid I have catching the genetic bombs in my family line – and that’s without considering the equally nasty collection my husband’s family is prone to.

See? Boring. I’ll try to rant properly the next time I show up here.

110 thoughts on “Introducing Raiding Party Member — Kate Paulk”

  1. Welcome, and a fine introduction Miss Kate. You’re in good company here with the rest of us boring, ranting, very humanly flawed folks. *grin*

    Of course, you already knew that, but now it’s official.

    Like

    1. Thank you for the welcome! You guys are so much more interesting than I am, or at least that’s how it seems from this side of the monitor.

      Like

      1. Intersting: much like adventure, I’ve come to think it usually happens to someone else, far away. Someone (usually sore and tired), somewhere (usually smelly and filthy), doing something (strenuous and complicated) “fun” (often dangerous and/or crazy-foolish).

        I prefer to be simply uninteresting and colorlessly bland, thank you. No interesting things here. Nope. *cue hobbity music*

        Like

        1. You can guess why this reminds me of the following line from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

          “It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. But a moment’s thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it in generally some one else’s disease. A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane. To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true.

          ;)

          Like

  2. Oh MY _GAWD_

    Sarah brought up Kate’s mystical magical troll busting powers (or maybe it’s just a really sharp tongue, I get confused sometimes) and now I’m gonna be walking around for the rest of the day like..

    Downt, downt, downt
    Another troll bites the dust
    Baaa downt downt downt
    Another troll bites the dust
    And another one’s wrong and another ones wrong and another troll bites the dust

    Interspersed with

    There’s somethin’ strange in the diner hood
    When there’s somethin’ weird and it don’t look good
    Just gimme Kate Paulk
    Troll Buster!

    *SIGH* Thanks Sarah!

    But on a different note:

    Welcome Kate! It’s good to see you! Is it too soon to bug you about the next Con book?

    Like

    1. Welcome Kate! It’s good to see you! Is it too soon to bug you about the next Con book?

      Oh, good. Someone else went there, and I don’t have to worry about irritating her myself… :-)

      Like

    3. Hehehehe… It’s mostly a mix of a sharp tongue, sarcastic sense of humor, and thinking the poor ickle darlings are just too funny for words. If you’re not actually offended by the little dears, you can have SO much fun with them!

      I’m kind of hoping the next Con book will be able to get back on track after I get the piece I snippeted the other week at MGC out of the way. It jumped up and took over, and won’t let anything else share brain-space.

      On the plus side I’m on that infamous last 20k words (you know, the one that stretches a lot longer than that, or seems to)

      Like

      1. Ever hear the “joke” about the programming team working on a “big project” who were for weeks telling people “it’s 90% done, we almost have it licked”? [Evil Grin]

        Like

          3. The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time.

            Like

              1. It is always easier to do something 90%-assed than to do it properly. That last 10% is what distinguishes the pros from the amateurs.

                Like

        3. (Raises hand) Last year, one of my coworkers and I were guilty of this. In our defense, we didn’t think we were lying. We were planning together, and he was coding (I’m not close to his level of coding), and one of the changes required a refactoring that changed or added 45% of the code. We did NOT expect that.

          Like

  3. Kate – I have read your Con stories so often (they help me when I am flat on my back and need something to make me laugh) that I feel I know you. I didn’t know that I had the genes for auto-immune diseases until I turned 40 and got the big fat one. You have my full sympathies for your health issues. Plus I also max on the I for all meyer-brigg tests that I have taken. (One for the Navy and one for the college). The other letters seemed to change a bit except for T, depending on my mood. I think I might have the potential for a few more personalities than the one I use here. ;-)

    Like

    1. I’m nearly in the middle for ALL of the indicators on the Meyer’s/Briggs’ test, including Introvert/Extrovert. I just had a thought (after a pop-up memory of part of Stasheff’s Witch Doctor came to mind – Saul has been taken to the place Maxwell’s Demon lives, and observes this very average guy, and when he says, “That’s The norm” I thought he wasn’t real,” whereupon the guy fades out.) : Maybe I’m The Norm… :-)

      That would be a truly scary thought.

      Like

      2. That sounds SO Stasheff… And if you really are The Norm, could you please change a few things because I’ve got no hope of getting anywhere near The Norm without that.

        Like

          1. Which is in line with the Department of Redundancy Department’s official guidelines, so there’s that.

            Like

    3. I’m glad you like them – that and the “You bastard! You kept me up all night reading!” are among the highest compliments a writer can get.

      I sympathize with you on your health problems, too… It really stinks when your own body turns into your worst enemy.

      Like

  4. I guess this means I need to finish Impaler, as well as ConSensual. It’s just that I’ve been saving them, and, well, I do not want to try and explain to my students if I start laughing like a hyena like I did while reading ConVent.

    Oh and for anyone interested in the ePub version of Elizabeth of Starland, it is now up on Kobo (at last!) I’d love a Kate-rant about various e-publishing platforms, although I suspect I have nothing on some of the early Smashwords “meatgrinder” users.

    Like

    1. You’re not likely to laugh like a hyena over Impaler although you may get a few grins out of it. I’m told ConSensual has some spray warning moments, though.

      And if I ever find the time to self-pub as opposed to going through NRP, I will no doubt have reason to rant – particularly since I test software for a living.

      (Side note: if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to turn someone into a fan of small government it’s testing the software of a payroll processing company. Ye GODS the tax rules… and what the software has to do to make sure everything calculates right…)

      Like

      1. No, I’m 20% of the way into Impaler and grim smiles, yes. Laughter, no. ConSensual was what I was thinking of.

        I spend my time on the receiving end of various academic software packages muttering “simple and easy compared to what?” Especially when they come back with “start over, you missed the step behind the asterisk on the fifth page that you can’t get to until you upload the form that no other publication uses but our software protocols absolutely require.” And then you get to the very end and it says, “Oh, yeah, sorry, we don’t take Word, only LaTex.”

        Like

        1. Yeah, that’s about right for Impaler. It’s not a laugh out loud kind of book. ConSensual is.

          Oh, I feel your pain. In my case it’s “Nobody sane would do this, but this is what the tax laws say, so this is what it’s got to be.”

          Like

  5. I will look forward to more of your interesting rants – already read everything at Mad Genius. A certain amount of words are necessary every day to keep the pipes flowing – I get my kibble where I find the good stuff.

    Like

    1. Oh lord… You don’t want my pipes flowing too much. Not everything that comes out of there is gold, you know. Some of it’s rather more base. And smelly.

      Like

  6. “Usually the first indication I have of this is another of my friends telling me “Kate just vivisected your troll and is now feeding him his entrails.”

    Since I’m fond of my ample viscera, I’m just going to hide in the corner.

    Like

      1. Well, no, he’s an undead feline manifestation of a long dead Roman dude. Way more dangerous than a dirty troll….

        Like

              1. Dessicated corpses are also much less smelly. Also, he comes partially pre-disassembled: ask about the jars.

                Like

          1. POLONIUS
            My lord, I will use them according to their desert
            HAMLET
            God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?

            Like

                1. I can never remember the right words, but I always remember the sense of that passage. Every time someone goes ranting about wanting justice, I think that. Mercy. It’s far better than justice.

                  Like

                  1. Whenever I hear that mercy is preferable to justice I’m reminded of Blackstone’s “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”, but then I think of what those ten guilty will do after they’ve escaped justice, and how many more (than one) innocents they’ll cause to suffer.

                    Mercy has its place, but if I have to choose, I’ll choose Justice.

                    Like

                    2. Ah, well that’s different. Though I’m never certain what people *mean* when they say “social justice”. It usually seems to mean…well, whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

                      Like

    1. Her MGC stuff is good. You should try her fiction too. It’s available at http://www.nakedreader.com. Some of Sarah’s stuff is available there too. I’m not sure why Kate didn’t mention that. After all, the first two words of _any_ writer’s mission statement should be GET PAID, right?

      Like

      1. After all, the first two words of _any_ writer’s mission statement should be GET PAID, right?

        Oh yeah, that is imperative.

        Like

      3. Um. I didn’t mention that because I’m the worst self-promoter in the known universe and a number of unknown ones (and one or two abolished ones, too).

        Seriously, it never occurred to me to mention it…

        Like

        1. …And I did this big Kate-promotion linkfest post pointing to your Amazon offerings but it’s stuck in moderation because of all the links.

          Like

  8. Good to have you here. Only quibble is that there isn’t a part of the North Australia that isn’t remote. I say that being a former resident of Alice Springs an eon ago.

    Like

    1. This is mostly true – a lot of folk wouldn’t consider Cairns remote. Of course where I was was a good 5 hours drive out of Mount Isa, so people in remote places called it remote.

      Like

    2. I’ve never been (more’s the pity), but I suspect it depends on your definitions. If you’re looking at proximity to humans, then it’s pretty remote. If, on the other hand, you look at thinks trying to kill you, then it becomes downright cosmopolitan.

      Like

  9. Ah, official raiding party, rather than itinerant troll hunter. Pay’s better, right?

    Welcome to this place you’ve been in longer than me! So glad you’re still here!

    Like

    1. Ah, official raiding party, rather than itinerant troll hunter. Pay’s better, right?

      I think it means she’s now on retainer, but she still gets paid per troll-head, or troll-entrails-set, as applies.

      Like

        1. Not just that, a lot of these trolls are severely deficient in guts, so it’s a real problem getting a full set even if you’ve got several trolls to work with.

          Like

          1. Yeah, but sometimes bits go rolling off under the bushes or off a cliff, and there you are, wanting to get paid yet having no head to hand.

            In that instance, it takes real guts to collect.

            Like

        1. Dangit the fine print is stored in the fifth sub-basement of hell, and there’s that restraining order Satan has against me…

          Like

          1. But who would be able to enforce such a restraining order? Besides God and surely He’d not do any favors for Satan. [Wink]

            Like

            2. Of course, in one of Robert’s stories, what Satan is really afraid of is nine year old girls, since the last one got in and decorated hell in pink and made all the demons into My Little Pony.

              Like

            1. It ought be confessed that for most of us, troll viscera make an enchanting room decorating scheme. From troll leg umbrella stands to troll foot andirons to troll head footstools to wallpaper flecked with troll ichor, nothing says a blogger has “made it” like trollian decor.

              Like

      3. Paid compliments? Paid attention? Paid to stop so a body can breathe? (Laughter sucks oxygen. Guffaws suck lung space.)

        Like

      4. In my undying gratitude. You know, if I ever make enough money — before you make enough money — you’ll be my kept writer. I’ll send you money to stay at your desk and write con books… :-P

        Like

        1. Please define this concept of “enough money” – Larry Correia money? Oh-John-Ringo-No money? David Weber money? J.K.Rowling money?

          Enough that the house servants have servants? Enough that your new beach estate Oahu has a new Ferrari, and in spite of Higgins’ objections, you’re allowing that rascal Thomas Magnum to live in the guest house? Enough that the production company for “Downton Abbey” calls up and want to use your house to shoot the next season?

          Just trying to figure out where that “enough” threshold is…

          Like

          1. I always thought that “enough money” was always defined as “just a little bit more”.

            On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 10:37 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

            > FlyingMike commented: “Please define this concept of “enough money” – > Larry Correia money? Oh-John-Ringo-No money? David Weber money? J.K.Rowling > money? Enough that the house servants have servants? Enough that your new > beach estate Oahu has a new Ferrari, and in spite of Hi” >

            Like

            1. I consider enough money to be that amount needed to generate sufficient interest to allow me to modestly enhance my current lifestyle.

              AKA, Scrooge McDuck money.

              Like

Comments are closed.