Saturday, August 29, 2009

!@#$!

Man.


I don't even know where to start with this one. I really don't. I waited too long. Maybe I knew this was coming. I couldn't flesh out 'Charlie' the way I wanted, no matter how hard I tried and I've hit a brick wall.

Shit...I don't like her. I just don't fecking like her. At all. She's flat. Uninteresting...I don't like her. I can't feel her.

And she's the center of the story. I don't know how many thousands of words I wrote. But I stopped.

I flat out...stopped. I cannot--I will not waste any more time with this story. I never came up with a title that I liked. I've been writing this story for almost six months (which is way too long) and I'm not in love with it anymore.

I'm not even sad. I actually pissed off. Really, fundamentally pissed off. I'm not saying that I'll never pick this up again. But I'm putting it in the drawer until it wants to cooperate. I'm sick of looking at it. I'm sick of thinking about it. The idea is solid. It's sound, but for some reason it's not just coming together. When I send out the manuscript, I want whoever I send it to, to be floored by it.

But I'm not floored with it. I'm BORED with it.


Now Jane...I like Jane. I love Jane. Jane is fecking fantabulous. Man, I just started writing about this mousey little screw-up of a woman who cannot use a public bathroom when there's other people in there (she'll actually stop in mid-piss when she hears someone comes in), who owns this horrifically ugly pink t-shirt with dancing kittens across the front of it and sits on her computer at home playing nerdy video games.

I fecking (like my new word?) LOVE her. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with her...but it's going to be something.

I don't care about genres or queries or agents or agent blogs or anything. I worried about that shit way too much with this last project and it totally killed me.

Chronicles of Jane. Not changing it. Not fixing it. Not thinking about it. It's there.


I suck. I really REALLY do.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Have you ever...?

Gotten an absolutely brilliant (story) idea while you're still wrestling with your WIP, and then STOP writing it to write the Other Brilliant Idea down?

I did.

I thought it'd be sacriligious to stop writing one thing to jot down something else. But I think you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice if you didn't do it. I can't tell you how many times I've had this really good concept and decided to work it out in my head later only to forget it when the time came.

It's really retarded if you ask me. And I'm speaking from personal experience. I've had a few da-dee-da-dee moments and more than likely I'm going to have quite a few more before this is all said and done with.

My advice is...don't feel guilty. Put it down. Hell, bang out (that sounds dirty) a few paragraphs if it helps. I'm disciplined enough to know that I really can't work on two things at once, no matter how tempted I might be to do so. Besides, who's to say that when I finish this manuscript that super awesome ideas are going to come out of the Realm of Super Awesome Ideas?

In other news, one of my classes here at school is Coder's English and I didn't realize until...oh...let's say Moday, August 17th 2009, how much I have completely fudged up the English language.

I'm probably doing it right now.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

That One Hot Guy

So school...yeah...it's pretty awesome and I'm actually sitting here in class wondering why I didn't pay attention in high school.

Then I'm like 'Oh yeah, boys.'

There's no boys in our class. All women. 25 women.

Most people in this school ARE women actually. But there is this one particular hottie who I can't help but to stare at. And what makes it worse is that he speaks to me and he snuck up behind me earlier this morning and we spoke for a few minutes.

So I've started this little chant "I have a boyfriend. I have a boyfriend." *Lol* Not that serious of course. I wouldn't stray in a million years. Besides, Eric is all kinds of beautiful. But I kind of miss that old feeling of coming to school to see that ONE hot guy. In high school, that guy was Garrett. Hot Guy From High School, maa-an, he was something else. And every girl was in love with him. He was "deep" and he wrote awesome poetry, he could paint beautifully and he played the guitar. Not to mention, he dressed like a Calvin Klein ad. However unlike in high school--Hot Guy From Business School actually knows I exist!



In other news, my writing hasn't suffered terribly. This week I've been really busy and just thrown off of schedule. But since I get out of school at 2pm and my daughter is out of day care at 5:30 pm, I get a chance to grab a late lunch and write for a couple of hours. So instead of writing at night when she's asleep, I write after school and all day on Friday.

Oh yeah...

wow...I totally just turned 29 on Saturday! Is it indicative of senility that I can't remember turning 29?


...the hot guy totally wants me (in my head at least)


Talk about random blogging today.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Back to school...

After ten years...

Yeah, I graduated in June of 1999 and I just started school again...yesterday actually. I'm taking a course to become a Health Claims Specialist. Because I am my mother's daughter, I always have to have a back up plan.

I like it so far...I get to wear scrubs! I love those things! It was strange being back in the classroom again...along with 25 other women.

It oddly enough, hasn't effected my writing either, not in the way I thought it would.

Sorry for the long pause in between posts. But you guys should know how I am already.
*lol*

Who knows, by this time next year I may actually be able to afford to go to a writer's conference.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Temper Tantrums




Man, this doesn't really have too much to do with writing. I think I had a 'bad mom' moment. I'm not sure yet. Maybe some of you other parents out there can tell me.

Israel started preschool about two weeks ago now. The first day she was great--paid me no mind whatsoever when I left. For the past week or so now, she's been screaming when I leave, not to mention, her teacher told me she bit someone and that she kind of bullies the other kids and she's always taking someone's cup or bottle. I'm trying to work with her on that--slowly.

But that doesn't begin to touch on what she did yesterday. So I pick her up a little early from school and she was fine. They said she was pretty good save for playing a little rough (I swear she's a boy sometimes).

We get outside, and I'm walking with my friend Anna (she works at the day care as well) and I give Israel her sippy cup which she calls 'cuppie' and suddenly, out of the blue, she flings it and begans shrieking like a banshee! I'm just like 'Holy crap girl, wth?' It was so random that I'm still reeling from it! So Anna tries to give her a lollipop and she throws it. She throws the cup, she kicks off her shoes...she's just SCREAMING and leaning out of her stroller and you'd think that someone was torturing her. People are staring at us and I can just hear them thinking 'Get that brat under control.' But like...I couldn't. She complete lost her mind. Anna and I get to the bus stop and I take her out of her stroller and she's twisting and arching and throwing herself back. She's flinging her arms and she scratched me dangerously close to my eye.

And seriously--I wanted to hand her off to someone and walk away for a moment. I don't remember being so frusterated, embarassed and angry with my daughter. It was so bad that I was nearly in tears. She was like this on the bus..just screaming and I still have no idea what the hell happened.

She calmed down once we got in the house and I was so angry with her that I just took off her clothes, wiped her down, gave her some cold water and put her in her high chair. I didn't want to look at her, speak to her, hold her...NOTHING. I couldn't believe she did that to me. She's supposed to be my best friend and I never imagined that my kid would be THAT kid. I'm sitting here wondering if anything is wrong with her. Most of the time she's a good girl. A little hard-headed and willful and she's always getting into things... but this whole..biting, and hitting is just...wow.

I'm thinking this HAS to be her dad's side of the family because most of them are freaking psychotic. I started noticing a pattern in her behavior when she spent time with them, so I took her away, hoping that Eric and myself and MY family would be a better influence.



I was so drained yesterday that I couldn't write and I got a headache from hell.

It wasn't her first tantrum, but it was her first public one. I don't think a could survive a secound round.



P.S.

I even emailed my mom like "Mom...she's horrible...what do I do!!"

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

'Murder Your Darlings'


This post isn't going to be long because I'm annoyed and the more I think about it, the more annoyed I get.

I just tore out 30 pages of work because...well...I had to. It was painful. Not in a melodramatic sense, but more like "Goddamnit!!!! !@#!@#!@@#$!@#$%$#^%" But I did it because if I didn't, then the story would have gone in a direction completely unfamiliar.

I'm glad I did it, I just hate that I had to destroy all that work. Though in all honesty, I really didn't lose that much work or time.

There is a quote in my writer's 'Bible' On Writing by Mr. King in which he mentions 'murder your darlings' a term coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch I believe. William Faulkner also said something along those lines as well.

And I slayed them last night.
It was a bloody...bloody scene. There's yellow crime tape wrapped around my notebook and they took my pen in for questioning.

That's a complete lie of course. But it was almost true.