Kitten Carnival was born in early 2022 as a file in my Google Drive named Pensieri (it's Italian for "thoughts"). It had a subtitle, Fifty Words a Day That Nobody Else Will Read, which was also its guiding principle. I'd always vaguely felt that I ought to try writing more, and in order to be a writer you actually have to find a time to hunker down and write. Fifty words a day seemed reasonable. Also, I found I had to free myself of the expectation that the writing had to be, well, good. So I resolved that no one would ever read it. This did the trick. I had a private space for me to spill raw verbiage onto a screen. A diary, so to speak, without the restraint that the entries needed to have anything to do with my life.
I highly recommend it, by the way, if the thought I should try writing more has ever crossed your mind too.
Eventually I began to feel that some of the entries were, well, halfway decent, and probably worth sharing. Or at least, it would be a shame to keep them locked away for eternity. So, very occasionally, I violated the second clause and shared a few selections privately with friends. Now, here you go.
(By the time I stopped writing Pensieri, it had blossomed into a 500-page behemoth. Kitten Carnival contains roughly half of that, the entries I've deemed fit to share. I've cleaned up a bit of the prose and added some commentary and content warnings as appropriate.)
Where does the name Kitten Carnival come from?
Nowhere in particular. Just two words which I thought might go together nicely. Also, the kittencarnival.com domain name was available, whereas pensieri.com was not.
Who are all these characters who keep popping up in your work?
They're all fictional. Rest assured that none of them are real people. Public figures and celebrities excepted.
Why does it kinda trail off in early 2023?
At that point in my life, swing dancing took over all my free time. You oughta try it.