Wow! What a (glorious) day!

I have a confession to make.  I stood up a dear friend today.  I didn’t mean to.  I was supposed to go over to his house and hang out with the people in his Changling LARP that is being held at his house (at this minute still at 9:45pm).  Instead, I ended up spending the whole evening writing and posting pages here.

A New Challenge Takes Over

First off, let me say a very warm welcome to everyone who chose to click that little “Follow” button–old friends and new:  Evan at The Better Man Project, Coral Russel at the Alchemy of Scrawl, Elizabeth Anne Mitchell at Leavekeeping, Shan Jeniah Burton,  Janeen at Words By Design, Natasha Guadalupe at My Novel Writing Adventures & Other Words, Miss Elsie at bowerdiaries, and Studio Brow.  Thank you!

Today I’m mostly in the mood to talk about books.   I just started one you see–Knees Up, Mother Earth by Robert Rankin.  I’m not sure why…I think it was because it was the only thing on my immediate shelves that called itself fiction, at least without me having to get out the key for my paperback collection.  (I use and old VHS tape cabinet for most of my paperbacks; CDs go in the doors; it’s an odd system, but it works for me).  I don’t have a lot of fiction anymore.  When we moved to our present house, I weeded down my book collection to my few favorites and the books I assumed I would need for research.  I thought I would use the local library more than I have.  I used University of Albany‘s library and the Albany Public Library regularly when I lived there.  It didn’t work out, and that’s a long story in itself.  Suffice it to say, I understand the passion books can incite in one, but a librarian should be more welcoming of the idea that people may want to actually taken them off your shelves and look at them; and the library should be open more hours than two days a week for three hours in the afternoon (that actually has changed in the ten years we’ve been here, but habits have become what they are, and I tend to get my books from other places now).

Taking on the World; World Scores

I’ve been feeling somewhat overwhelmed of late these past few weeks.  But it’s a good thing actually.

Recently I’ve become more “interactive” rather than “reactive” to the online community. Though it’s at the moment taking up more of my time than I like, I’m sure that with practice and some better tools (after many had suggested it, I did install Tweetdeck the other day, TY Kristen Lamb), with some trimming and pruning, with some creativity and work, not only will this all work, but it will work well.

A New Year, A New Perspective

Or really, a new take on an old one….

Short post here.  Just stopped in to say, that some of the things that were really making it difficult to maintain this blog have been bright back into the light, and in doing so, made me realize how much less they bothered me now.  For example: this post, which was my very first one here, somehow caused a lot of grief and heartache at the time.  I actually hid the post for well over a year, intending to someday go back to it.  Since procrastination didn’t help motivate me, Fate decided to act up and take a hand.

I think when we first start a new process–any new process, be it blogging or parenting or schooling or even collecting cat fur–we are fragile.  We feel the need to assure the world of the wisdom of our choices.  Instead of just living (them) as best we can and letting our success (or failures and experience) speak for us, we speak more adamantly of how right this thing we are doing is for us.  We often point out our early successes to others (those tricky achievements on the learning curve where every single thing seems to just work out right: there are no headaches or car repairs or grumpy tellers at the bank) as the reason that this thing isn’t just right for us… but that “Hey, you should do it too!”

Closing the Ironwork Gate

It took a lot of soul searching and thinking of what I really wanted out of a blog.  And what I want more than a place to enact a prose version of my adventures in Facebook is a place for my world(s) have presence online.  I want a place where I can post pictures and drawings, character sketches and (if people are nice enough) to receive feedback on what works for them and what doesn’t.

I want a place that doesn’t involve “me” so much as them, even if “they” are an extension of me.

So this page is going to close, at least temporarily, maybe forever.  I will be moving my fiction over to my other WordPress blog: Many Worlds From Many Minds.  I will continue to explore the writing process and how it affects me personally on my Blogspot page.

I do hope you will follow me there and that I can offer you an interesting assortment of diversions when you do.

Creating the Perfect Underachiever

What makes someone an underachiever?

It’s not as simple as throwing a few descriptive terms into the pot and stirring; I know that much. In this recipe everyone has his or her own specialty, a seasoning blend that stands out, marking one as a true “master of the craft”.

Problem is…it gives everyone who tries it indigestion.

This is the first in what may be a series of posts on paths: the ones we choose and the ones we end up on despite all our intentions.  Nothing here is meant as a criticism to those who were involved in deciding my own path and/or helped direct me to where I am now.  If anything, it’s a living testimony that the things that often seem so very terrible when they occur are the exact things we need.

The Process of Self-(re)Discovery

My son is home sick today… another night for me of getting up several times to check on him, to soothe tears, and then the (far more annoying) inevitable waking because I didn’t want miss some catastrophe because I’d finally fallen asleep deeply enough to feel rested in the morning.  The end result is that I feel tired and headachey  (disrupted sleep patterns were recognized as one of the two major causes of my migraines; the other was not eating something on a regular schedule).  My son feels pretty good however.

Celebration Time- Come On!

I’m celebrating today.  It’s the one week anniversary of me finishing something.  And that in itself is an accomplishment.

Today I can say “yes” I actually made my word count for National Novel Writing Month and also still managed some random journal entries, note taking, even reading and life.   In fact, life found many ways of distracting me from the 50,000 word goal, and without an insane push, I wouldn’t have made it (though now, I am ready for that 30,000 word weekend that Dee posted on Facebook last year since I manged 12,000 last Tuesday to make my NaNoWriMo goal).  But the pressure was good for me because it finally forced my internal editor to take a (mini-)vacation.  This is something I’d never quite achieved with things such as  my handwritten work or  my 750words.com writings.  I did let go more or less with 750 Words (though in a different manner, since they were most often me ranting into the keyboard –not all that useful for my novel writing), but it wasn’t the same.

Exploring the Content of Associated Content

Disclaimer: I have not spent days looking about Associated Content and reading reviews and pages they host.  I am simply noting my initial reactions to the site based on the fact that I saw it listed among some of the better online sites to write for.
I’ve been tossing around the idea of actually trying to write for pay for quite a while.  Scary thought, I know.  I barely keep a consistent blog.  Whatever would I do with an editor waiting for my next clip?

I actually work better with a sense of a deadline.  From what I’ve read, a lot of people work well this way (these nifty writing sites use the technique:  NaNo, ScriptFrenzy) .  Deadlines and expectations add to one’s priorities (and allow one to learn what really matters to him/her).  A deadline also give a sense of completion, whereas a project such as a novel can seem ongoing with its many revisions and submissions.

But take an article or an assignment and go past the deadline?  For good or ill, the deadline is gone.  (Yes, I know that deadlines aren’t always craved into the bedrock of the earth for all time.)  Yes, there might be a sense of success or failure for making the date or for missing it, but there is always another assignment out there.  And someone out there is probably doing work on the same topic you are….  So you miss a by-line.  Someone else gets one.  And the world moves on.

So I haven’t been moving too fast on the idea of writing clip-sized pieces.  While I do read a lot of articles and snapshots, I read them with the goal of learning that little extra that will add some depth to the characters, worlds, and scenes in my fiction.  Alien worlds are both becoming more, and less, alien from our own.  Often I find it easier to suspend my own disbelief in a story the bigger the “bug” eyes that are in it.

(The newest version of Battlestar Galactica with its reworking of the Cylons plays on this well.  And it’s cool to see stories that are getting into my head finally in the same way that Dr. Who always did by having aliens who are human…and not.  I want to write the types of fiction I enjoy watching and reading.  Doesn’t everyone?)

So last night and this morning I took a stroll around the web after one of those ever present Examiner.com advertisements showed up on my Facebook screen.  I tend to not click the “Like” button or the little X in the corner of the advertisement without at least Googling it.  Some sites I’ve been pleasantly surprised by, and it costs me very little save a few moments of time to make a more informed decision.

As some have already written, using Examiner.com is little better than blogging.  There might be some money involved, but as you are also giving up your rights to to your work, it didn’t seem to be much to recommend it to me.  Not for the momentary glory of saying I’d gotten a by-line.

However, in reading some of these reviews, I found a few bloggers posting their own suggestions of sites they liked.  Associated Content was discussed several times (including this lovely note here by Anne Wayman which she also follows up on through her blogs).  I was intrigued enough to at least peek at the site.  Figuring that one’s blog is hardly a private project (though WordPress has some lovely privacy features built in that I have been using for some time), I started to reconsider my view on the issue.  Why not be paid to write things like this?

Well, it all comes down to Rights:

1. In Associated Content’s Master License Agreement read section 2a. Exclusive License
2. Read the Terms of Use (carefully), particularly section 4. Rights You Grant to AC

Still not completely discouraged, as many said AC paid well enough for their articles and knowing that some articles aren’t worth saving for another day, I decided to at least sign up.  If I never made a dime or even glanced at the assignments page, signing up at least game me comment rights to other people’s articles.  Since this really wasn’t about the money (yet), I chose “to learn something” as my reason for signing up.

It took me to the assignments page immediately.

The assignment list was short: 13 possible pieces, with several based on last week’s episode of American Idol performances and two on Steampunk designing

Since podcasts and videos would require more equipment than I have at the moment, I was able to eliminate five potential pieces immediately.  Then, as I haven’t actually seen a single episode of American Couch Potato, I was able to eliminate six more.  The other two pieces on Steampunk certainly had my interest, but as I’m just a Steampunk voyeur, I had to just sigh and close the page wistfully.

I did however take a moment to peek at one of the American Idol performer via Youtube.  Mr. Michael Lynche during a March performance

Not too bad, but really, not my thing.

But it might be just right for Marcus…..

Mommy Dearest Too

A small note to a friend of mine inspired this…  She and I haven’t been that close of late, but today, for all the distance or time, miles, and disagreements, I feel so much closer to her than I have for a long time.

It comes down to trusting instincts.  It’s harder than it should be.  To trust comes hard enough for me.  I have trouble trusting myself, let alone most others.  The world seems so very big to me; I seem so very small…  It’s silly really.  I am really that small.  The world doesn’t care one toot about me.  Hooray for me!

I’m starting to see this as a good thing.

Bear with me.  My joy probably seems strange, but it’s real.

It comes from accepting that no one really should care about me either.  Nor should I care about them.  I can choose to care.  Others can choose to care.  Making such a choice gives me something, fulfilling me and my needs, gratifying my own self-interests.  Enlightened self-interest makes the world go around, so to speak.

What does this have to do with trust, or my friend’s note?

Well, I was considering why I keep trying to stay in touch with this friend of mine, even though we are so often at odds.  And the only answer that ever really comes to mind is that I really trust her.  She may piss me off, she may bore me, she may be off on another planet somewhere (figurative speaking — sort of), but barring some stupid crap in high school that all kids try to pull, she’s always done her best to keep her word.  And since I’m a stickler for justified faith ;-D , I like that in a person.

So, when my friend was having troubles with someone in her family — someone that she should be able to trust and feel secure around — because of her choices as a mother,  it brought to mind some similar issue I am having with my own mother.  And how I feel about my own mother….  (this is where instinct come in).

I don’t really like my mother.  My mom is a very standoff-ish type, with strong views on things that she isn’t afraid to forcefeed to you (for your own good of course) if she feels the situation deserves it, but mostly she would rather make faces and scoffing and grunting noises (somehow that just feels so much better to write than “shows her disdain“).  But she is my mother.  And despite the unease she inspires in me, years of reinforcement makes me continue to try to build our relationship.

I say “try” here.  Truth is–I have to try to do it.  Otherwise, I tend to just forget she’s still alive.

I don’t forget my father.  For all my father’s flaws, I knew what to expect from him.  He terrified me, but if I ever needed help from him, he was right there fumbling alongside me (or at least offering advice over the phone).  With my father, I always had a sense that he wanted to do the right thing and the best thing, even if he didn’t know often what it was.  And oddly enough, I always knew I mattered to my father.  Or maybe it isn’t all that odd.  All the pictures of my childhood show Dad carrying me on his shoulders.

Or it could be that I’m a mother myself now and I see things in my own mother’s behavior that I’m afraid of in mine.

This is, after all the woman that chase away the horrid “lactation consultant” that I was given at the hospital, when both my son and I were so very frustrated by the “expert’s” poking and prodding and hovering.  My mom was at that point in time my greatest savior, and I was amazed by how she stepped forward and protected us.  Both Dan and I were too tired and emotionally battered by the whole experience (I swear, four full runs of Pitocin should earn a woman an Olympic medal, and her partner a bronze).  Nothing had gone the way we’d wanted, except that we had this beautiful little boy to care for, and this so called expert who had never nursed (let alone have a child) was giving me a guilt trip because she’d never dealt with size J-cups before….

For a time Mom and I were close, but….  maybe there was more unease there than I knew?  maybe because my son hadn’t had the emotional flash of joy and relief that I had he was better able to sense what I’d always felt before about Mom?  Whatever the cause, Marcus was never comfortable around my mother.  Yet, I still felt I should make sure they spent time together.  I tried to bring him to meet with her–he cried a lot whenever she was around.  I tried to let her touch him–he cried more, and I felt queasy.

Only a few months later…  my three month old son, my little snuggle boy….  At one of those little lunch meetings that were usually the only place I felt comfortable meeting Mom with Marcus, we were saying good-bye’s in the parking lot.  I was just getting ready to put Marcus in his car seat, and my mom asked if she could hold him for a moment.  He didn’t want to go and squawked to high heaven.  And after a few seconds, only a few seconds, of “oh, come now, let Grandma hug you” and “Shush“, she slapped him.  I was staggered.  I was horrified.

And worse yet, I knew in my gut that this was wrong, and all I was able to do was take him from her and set him in his carseat….  Heck, I didn’t even cuddle him, stunned little thing.  All I could think of was that I needed to get away from her, and the fastest way to do that was get him buckled in and say “Good-bye.”  I don’t remember exactly what I said.  I know it was along the lines of “I’ve really got to go.  I’ll talk to you later.”  No scolds, no accusations…  I didn’t really know what to say.

So, instincts….  I should learn to trust them more.  But even more than that, I want to write this because there is a woman who I’ve never doubted was a safe person to leave my son with, who in some ways, I trust even more than myself at times with him…

I wanted to write it for a friend.