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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The very determined volunteer tomato plant which has been creeping up our deck toward the sliding glass door is now about a foot and a half from being able to knock.

An alarmingly vigorous volunteer tomato plant which has climbed up the stairs of a deck & now is creeping across the slats of the floor. It’s almost touching the corner of a sofa. A blurry black dog is staring at the back yard from the right corner of the deck.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If you see this, post a vampire that isn’t Dracula.

The actor Jacob Batalon as the titular character wearing a grey knit cap and smiling broadly with fangs holding an iced drink with a protruding straw.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Took a photo of the pond in Easthampton, MA & it looks like a reference image for a Richard M Powers sf novel cover. (www.richardmpowers.com)

A weird spoked stem with a small shiny russet colored bulb on each of the 7 spokes. This sits at the bottom of the photo & extends half way up against a dappled, chemical green, algae layer coating a small pond.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Koko has gotten a little stouter, but she is very poodle-y.

A large black curly haired dog sitting upright, hind legs outstretched, on a sofa on a porch.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

she heard you’re thinking about your novel

ominous close up from below of a curly haired black doodle looking down her big snoot at you. One eye is a glossy black. The other is an awful, reflective gold. She is backlit and frowning.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

we hear you’re thinking about your novel

lots of seagulls, some flying, thronging a many limbed dock. Lake is dark blue and a little choopy. Also seagulls don’t care about your novel

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Not a galley brag, I guess, since it’s my own ms, but @gavingrant.bsky.social printed me a reading copy of Unicorn House so I can go through & mark it up for revision. And Paradise Copies is making us more 3 Zombie Stories to carry at Book Moon.

An uncorrected ARE of Unicorn House (cover is a public domain image of a woman with curly flowing hair and a small happy looking unicorn at her feet) & a red chapbook on a tapestry fabric.

The ARE of Unicorn House again beside a red zombie chapbook on the seat of a green leafed tapestry-upholstered couch.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

very dramatic sky on drive back from Amherst this afternoon—and all the trailers going by with the frames of hanging tobacco leaves

a white sun centered in a haze, angled bank & towers of clouds at top and on right. 6 telephone wires stretched like guitar strings across the top.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Saw Gillian Welch on a Friday, Lyle Lovett on a Saturday, bats one night and fireflies the other and life is grand.

An outdoor theater at night. Stage is very far away & lit up. A matchbox against very tall pine thesters and a dark blue sky. Gillian Welch & David Rawlings are on stage. Welch says “the carpet onstage is very nice. But the table is too low”.

Same theater, outdoors, pines towering over. Lyle Lovett has a small large band. Everything is very electric blue.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Daniel Mason? You okay? Oh—you’re writing a novel. 🫡

Closeup of the very concerned brindled terrier’s face. He looks like he has just watched the scene in Hereditary where Charlize Theron skitters across the wall.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Very excited to read this & the cover is great—but also, the expressions on the dogs’ faces as they gaze down at the hole & placement of author’s name very much suggest they are thinking, “Holy shit! Daniel Mason is in here!”

Cover of the forthcoming novel Country Prople by Daniel Mason—detail from a painting in which two terriers of middle size are looking into a small dark
Hole. Their eyes say WTF.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

when i was on writing retreat i sent a selfie home as i got to work—and then a little while later took a pic of an arcade game in the house where i was staying. anyway, only looked at these this morning and

me! close up, wearing headphones, large glasses, and a frown. I look v tired & am frowning bc I don’t get much sleep on retreat

a painted metal head with large eyebrows, heavy lidded eyes, and dots of furious red paint on tip of nose & cheek. Hinged mouth is pursed. The head is trapped inside the Funhouse pinball game. It & I (in the previous pic) are horrifying doppelgängers

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

a slightly better picture of my new boyfriend, Count von Pigeon

a realllllly weird pigeon hanging out on the roof of a plastered house, just above a rainpioe between two humps of terracotta roof tiles, which he chose because they match him perfectly. The sky is a deep blue.The pigeon has a white head, yellow eyes and a tidy yellow beak. He has two outrageous brown upthrust feathered epaulets on either side of his neck because he is fancy. I love him.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

please admire this extremely gothic bird, who resembles a gentleman wearing a frilled cape with a very high collar

The picture is blurry, but this is some sort of weird pigeon on a roof against a very blue cloudless sky. He looks like Dracula in a dark cloak, but with a puffed out Victorian sort of bustle underneath. His face is very white & he has eyebrows

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

This is from @elizmccrack.bsky.social’s A Long Game—

IN FICTION THERE ARE NEEDFUL MYSTERIES AND needless mysteries. If the author and characters know a secret and only the reader is left in the dark, that's a needless mystery. If you withhold a fact and think, When I reveal this, it's going to blow the readers mind, nine times out of ten it will only make them think you've been playing cards with an ace up your sleeve. If you trick your readers, in other words, by hiding a pertinent fact, they won't think you're good at writing. At best, they'll think you're good at tricks. Fiction can disorient readers, but if they don't know where they are, if a piece of fiction continually shuts

a reader out of what's happening, who's talking, what year it is, then they will feel as though they're on the other side of the door of an interesting party. Some personality types enjoy this feeling of exclusion. Not many.
Altogether it's easy to overestimate the pleasure readers take in figuring out facts, who is speaking, their relationships to one another, where they are, what time period or geographical location we're in, what level of reality. It's not that everything must be instantly clear, only that if everything is obscure, readers are only looking down at their feet, wondering where they are, not up at the glories of your fictional universe.
Needful mysteries are about the mysteries of life. What can be done and not done, what can be seen and not seen.
Needful mysteries tend to be mysteries to the characters as well.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

attn fans of D&D & fans of Brian Evenson 😮

A hand holding a small hardcover of a book by Brian Evenson titled The Dark Glinting With Metal. The cover illustrations shows a dotted circle bisected by a dotted line. On one side is half a stylized round-eyed skull & on the other side is half of a radiant sunlike spheres with a blurry halo/corona of deeper light.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Been a while since I did this, but some newer releases available at Book Moon! Come & get your reads.

A large stack of Kill All Wizards beside a stack of Ibram X. Kendi’s Chain of Ideas

A large stack of Heather Abel’s The Emilys & a stack of Andrea Hairston’s The Redemption Center Is Closed Sundays

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I have been wanting to get a sequence of NotCaslon fluffing herself out for a while—she does it a lot compared to the others. Harder to capture: she has a particularly gangly way of walking that made her resemble a short, stout egret.

A white chicken on a slate path who has inflated herself so she looks like a bodybuilder striking a pose.

The white chicken is now violently shaking out all her feathers. Now she looks like a plane coming in on landing in a bad storm.

She is continuing to vibrate: now her head is corktwisting. Nothing depends on her but she doesn’t know that.

Now she’s back to extraordinary, Elizabethan levels of flounce & fullness. Her fluffy white breeches are ridiculous.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Clytemnestra hears you’re working on a novel.

Closeup of an ayam cemani hen, beak open because she is complaining. She wants a snack. She looks like a black chess piece. The greenery and paving stones next to her are wet with recent rain.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I once said to a friend that an extraordinarily beautiful actor sometimes looked, instead like a frog, and she told me that beautiful & ugly are, in fact, often closer to each other than beautiful is close to ordinary looking.

a black labradoodle sprawled out on a sofa. She resembles an armless yeti

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

this is her at her most elegant—and, then, in the second, the most normal she’s ever looked

a black dog’s head resting on the arm of a white armchair

a black labradoodle smiling& looking very normal, which she only does when she wants something

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Your poodle looks so much like out labradoodle when she isn’t being a weird cryptid!

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

post the best picture you have ever taken of your pet (if you feel like it)

Must always repost this closeup of our labradoodle, Koko, shaking herself after getting out of a river. Her hindlegs appear to be bent-kneed regular, hairy black legs, while her forelegs are stretched straight out on either side like weird arm poles. They almost look as if they are behind her back legs. The rest of her is a hairy black oval resting like a neckless spider sac directly on top of the four black limbs. The only features discernible are a triangle of nose, and a glint of one eyes looking directly at you. She looks like a nightmarish cryptid—an alien able to skitter at high speeds, emerging from some hell portal. Behold the Babadoodle.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Yesterday a beautiful chicken visited Book Moon & picked out some summer reading for her owner. Sadly I was not there. (Photos by local writer & Book Moon bookseller Beth Filson.)

A motley colored golden hen sits on a bench at Book Moon. She is calmly eyeing the camera lens. There are glass fronted bookshelves to the far left, a display of recent graphic novels just behind her, light streaming in a large window to the right, and Persian carpets on tte floor.

The same chicken stands on the wooden arm of a green-cushioned reading chair, a copy of the Wildwood paperback on the arm to her right. Her beak is open: shhhh! She is expressing an opinion. Behind her is the Science Fiction & Fantasy Section. Perhaps she does not care for our large assortment of Horror, or our equally vast selection of Poetry.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Happy Pride month to all queer goths 🦇🖤🦇

A stack of gradated books, color ranging from grey to black against a wallpaper featuring bats & pallid poppies. Authors are: Michael McDowell, Clive Barker, Nicholas Stuart Gray, Tamsyn Muir, M J Beasi, Geoff Ryman, Frank OHara, Samuel R Delany.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

our cuddliest chicken, Toothless, has injured one leg—which is better than on the verge of death, which is what we first thought! We’re currently handfeeding her, and crating her at night, and she’s able to walk around for a while, now. But tonight she’s back in the crate.

My mother, who is almost 80. She’s a tiny white lady in a white turban, glasses, and a flowered short. She’s holding a large gray chicken nestled on n her lap, her left hand cupping Toothless under the breast, her right hand on Toothless’s back. She’s looking down solemnly at Toothless. Greenery in the background.

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Karen Carpenter’s Halloween @kellylink.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

maybe it’s because I had an edible, but I’ve been contemplating this euphemism for a while now & I still have so many questions

Screencap from an ad for Arm & Hammer litterbox mix. The left side is litter under UV lighting & it’s very disco. It says: Smelly Crumbles. The right side is litter which is whitish grey & says: Fewer Smelly Crumbles

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