My Spidey Sense

The funny thing about this blog is that it doesn't document my burning hatred for winter because I started this one in June and we didn't really have a winter, per se. It got cold, a few times. It snowed, like four times. I only had to shovel once, and only for about a half an hour to dig out my car from when Nick (bless his heart) plowed our driveway.. This winter just didn't have it in her. It didn't bring me down because it didn't bring it's one-two punch. 

Thank Christ for small favors, amiright?

But now we are in that other particular time of year that I hate and have trouble getting used to before I can really embrace summer and all of the things I LOVE about it: It's the bug season. It's started early this year, and it's making me put up quite a fight to keep my sanity.

First it was the ticks. We heard it was going to be a bad year. I pulled the first tick off of Elise in early April and have found six, count 'em SIX more so far! Luckily I was born in good old Salem, Connecticut, which borders all sorts of Lymes. Old Lyme, East Lyme, South Lyme, HADlyme and LYME. So I am very familiar with daily tick-checks and have thusfar avoided Lyme Disease for 29 years. 

Then, god help me, the spiders. 

I see them here and there. Lurking. They slink across the basement walls, and the big ones, I see them saunter through the grass all sure of themselves. Then two days ago I got in my car and left for work and I hadn't gotten a quarter mile down the road when I saw a MONSTER of a spider skipping across my dashboard right fucking in front of me. You know those kinds of spiders that don't so much walk on their nasty little too-many legs as they JUMP UNEXPECTEDLY EVERYWHERE? It was one of those. It was about the size of a quarter (which, to me, is collossal in size) with a thick black body and these yellow stripes on its back. 

(OH DEAR GOD I JUST TRIED GOOGLING AN IMAGE TO SHARE WITH YOU AND THAT LASTED A WHOLE FIVE SECONDS UNTIL MY WHOLE BODY WAS TINGLING AND SHUDDERING)

I have this thing where I am unreasonably terrfied of spiders. They make my body REACT. See all the capital letters I am using here? THAT'S HOW YOU KNOW I'M FREAKING OUT.

I slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road. There were no cars behind me, thank god, because I didn't bother moving over to the shoulder. I pounded my foot on the brake and sat there freaking out, looking in all directions to find something to kill the spider with. I couldn't use my hand, obviously. I considered an old coffee cup but then realized that the bottom was recessed and that would just anger the spider. I picked up from the console the envelope containing my brand new car registration, planning to hand slam/squish with that - but the fucking spider was gone. Somewhere. IN MY FUCKING CAR. 

That was two days ago, and last night the fear of the spider lurking somewhere in my car manifested itself into nightmares of unusually bad proportions. I dreamt there were two spiders in my house and neither of them were ordinary. One was menacing and black, stalking between Elise's room and the living room, disappearing and reappearing as I searched it out to kill it, always avoiding me. And then then there was the gargantuan brown THING that built a web in the corner of our entryway, spinning it's disgusting egg sac, growing bigger and bigger by the minute until finally it's legs looked more like shiny tentacles that were dripping down toward the floor and able to grab me.

I didn't sleep well last night, obviously. And now here I am, one in the morning, writing about spiders and having to stop to itch myself every five seconds because I can feel those imaginary little fuckers crawling all over me.

God, I hate bugs.

Voyeurism is for Facebook.

You know how some people like to say that to write, they need to be depressed, or unhappy, or just generally bent out of shape to be able to do what they have to do? I've heard it a lot and I've never really bought into that. I've been writing more lately than I have in the last few months - nothing I am ready to share with anyone, but still, things are coming along, and on a whim I started a new story that takes on a subject I know practically nothing about - space travel!  

Anyway, that is one thing that is making me happy lately. Just being alone and writing. Lately I've felt pulled in so many different directions, it's nice to be able to shut my door at the end of the day and tune everyone and everything out and just write. Not on the blog obviously, because that's the thing, I guess. Some say they can only write when they are depressed, and maybe I can only blog when I'm really happy, which, all things considered, I haven't been lately.

I hate complaining on my blog, so I won't, other than to say: Stress sucks. Right?

I wasn't even going to post anything today. I thought about it, I logged in and thought about it.. and then I thought, who cares? No one is really reading anyway, right? So I wandered up to my site statisics and found something frankly distrubing. It looks like in the last week, someone has read my entire blog - including the poetry, including Vampire Zombies From Space. I don't know if this person was just clicking through or not, but dude. DUDE. Whoever you are out there, stop being a creeper and just say hello. Voyeurism is for Facebook. 

***

Oh, and another thing. I've been reading like a fiend and haven't been reviewing a damn thing. I must have read at least ten books since I updated my 52 Books challenge, and not having a list of what I've read is making me twitchy, especially since my friend Chana just started blogging and reviewing books and movies. Perhaps I will get my act together one of these days.. perhaps not.

Shame Has Its Place

 Why is it so hard? Because it's a white piece of paper. ~ Sam Seaborn

For the last month or so, despite what I may have told anyone, I haven't been writing. I haven't written anything since the last part of the Hannah Sketches, and I though I have started and stopped so many times, nothing has happened. Well, I can't even say that I've started and stopped. I've tried to start, and then I stopped trying. Yesterday was the last straw. Seriously, I can't take this crap anymore.

Yesterday I slept in since Elise was at her grandma's and I wasn't picking her up until the late afternoon. In that time, I skimmed through the entire novel that I wrote last year around this time, The Eternals, I've been calling it. It comes it at around 64,000 words (as if I can pretend I don't remember that it's actually 63,396 words and I'm just rounding up to make myself look better), proper novel length. It has a beginning, a middle, and a cliffhanger ending. It has characters that I sort of love, and some characters that I don't know probably as well as I should, but I think they are interesting enough to want to get to know. It has a plot that plods along like an old person on a Sunday morning, lazy and slow, and for a while you can't really tell which direction it's going in.

I wrote The Eternals in 46 days. Wait, you know what? Let me quote from my old writing blog about finishing the Eternals:

Writing a book, the entire act of writing and publishing one, whichever route you may choose, is fucking hard. Excuse my curse words, dear friends, but it's the truth. This is fucking hard, and I have an embarrassing little fact to reveal:

I never thought it would be this hard.

I finished writing the Eternals on May 29th, just ten short days ago, after a whirlwind of 46 days of pounding out the words and trying to make them resemble a book. It took seven days to realize what I had was NOT in fact a book, but just a pile of words printed on 232 pages of pristine white paper - paper that didn't necessarily deserve the punishment or the printing.

So there it is. 46 days to a completed novel. Technically completed. And you know what? It was fucking hard. But it was also exhilarating. I only wrote at night after Elise was in bed, and usually was armed with at least one can of Monster, and I stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning regularly, on purpose. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I had no outline. Just ideas flying around in my brain that came through my fingers and ended up in a document that was eventually printed and left to get dusted up on a shelf. 

After finishing it, I thought that I hated it. I thought it was total crap. I didn't look at it or think about it or touch it until November when I failed at my first NaNoWriMo attempt in three years and I picked up the Eternals where it left off, sort of as a consolation prize to myself, but that didn't work. I wasn't inspired, it fell flat, I didn't know where Leila's story was going. There was a whole bunch of other stuff going on this year - short stories, a couple of which I successfully published and got paid for, my zombie epic which has also gone stagnant, also because I don't know where it's going and I can't outline because outline kills my love of writing nearly instantly, and of course, there's been the Hannah Sketches. But none of it has really felt like enough for me. I'm busy all the time with projects that involve extensive writing, and I've been reading more than ever (and unfortunately not keeping up with my book list) but I haven't had a spark.

"They" say that you don't need to be inspired to write. You just do it. And I do, I do it, but I don't love it and I don't cherish it and it's not getting me toward my final destination. Well, everything is I guess, but this is not the time for prolific sentimentality. 

Yesterday, I re-read The Eternals, the whole shebang. And oh, it was crap. But in that pile of crap, I swear to god guys, there were some diamonds. There were bits that just frankly SHINE, and I'm not afraid to say so. Maybe you or you could read The Eternals and just dismiss it as crap, but I know I'm on to something here, I know it, and I'm not ready to give up on it - I'm ready to move on and I finally get why.

When I finished the Eternals last year, I felt like a rock star. Seriously, I felt on top of the world, I felt like I had slayed a motherfucking dragon. And now, almost exactly a year later, my self loathing has reached the tipping point. Funny, no? I finally hate myself enough for not writing to start writing again. I don't really have an excuse or an explanation for it, but it just works. Last night, I SHAMED myself into writing, and what came out of me was sort of miraculous. 

On another note, I haven't blogged much in a month. I suppose that's because I made the crazy decision to share my blog address with the world, which may or may not have been a good idea, but then today, after the blast I had last night, I say, FUCK IT!! I'm signing up for NaBloPoMo again. It can't do anything but good for me. 

Liars, Both of Us

I hated Moe's bar. I hated the way it smelled, like day old spilled beer and sweat, with a token hit of cheap perfume. I hated the dark and the drabness of it, that the floors were black linoleum tile and sticky, that the  booths were poorly lit, and the walls blood red. Dead blood red. You know what I mean.

I went there anyway, right on schedule every Tuesday and Thursday nights, and sometimes even on a Saturday night, late. Past the time a nice woman like me should be in bed with her husband - that is, as long as he wasn't already out with his whore.

The last time I saw her was a Tuesday. The past weekend I had been in the bar, drunk before I even walked through the door on nips of rum and whiskey that I downed with Shannon in the parking lot, like teenagers. The liquor made my throat burn and eyes water, but I loved the confident haze I settled down into whenever I drank to any excess.

That night, I had screamed at a waitress to turn up the music; I danced around the pool table until Shannon led me home.

The last Tuesday wasn't like that, though.

I pushed open the bar door and pushed my glasses up the brim of my nose at the same time, head down as I pretended to struggle with my purse and the laptop I was carrying in my arms.

"Hey there, Hannah," Moe said to me. The bar was empty, and he was sitting perched on the edge of a booth at the back of the bar, playing a game of Solitaire and looking like he didn't want to be bothered. His fly was unzipped, but of course I didn't tell him.

I sat down in my usual booth, the one that gave me a view of the whole bar. I knew she was there if Moe was playing his cards. I was expecting her.

I opened my laptop and started skimming over what I had just written at home, but it was only moments before I heard footsteps coming out from the kitchen, and I looked up to see Amy's stupid face.

She didn't slow her steps. She didn't pause or jerk, her eyes didn't stray from mine once they'd connected. She didn't flinch or falter. But from across the bar, I could hear the sharp intake of breath that my eyes hadn't seen.

It's that moment when your heart contracts suddenly. When the shock of something steals your breath and sets your heart to racing.

I smiled sweetly. "Hello, Amy."

"Oh, hi Mrs. Mulraney."

I narrowed my eyes at her.

"Sorry," Amy stammered. "Hannah, sorry. I always forget."

"Come on, we're like old friends now, we see so much of each other," I said.

"You've been coming in a lot lately."

"I find it a very relaxing place to write in the evenings. Not much business this early."

"Right," Amy said, and blew a big pink bubble with her chewing gum.

Bubble gum. It was so tacky, such a disgusting little habit, to be chewing something constantly and popping it in people's faces. I pictured her suddenly in a cheerleader's uniform, her bare, perfect young ass peeking out from beneath a pleated miniskirt, her hair in pigtails, her mouth stretched wide open and her head bouncing up and down on my husband's cock.

"I'll take my usual," I told her, and went back to my writing.

I couldn't concentrate though. How could I? I wasn't really there to write that day, I was there to observe. To intimidate, maybe. To threaten.

I had suspected that Amy and Evan had been sleeping together for a while at that point. It had been three months to be exact, but I had never had any proof. For the longest time it was only speculation I had as to where Evan was going all those nights. Evan said he had joined a bowling league, and for a long time I believed that every Wednesday and Sunday nights he left the house for the lanes just like he said, to drink beers and knock pins with his work buddies. He would come home late smelling of cigarette smoke and have beer on his breath, then that changed.

He started drinking vodka around that time, and the scent of beer had left him. Sometimes he would come home having not drank anything at all, I could tell. Those nights he came home wired, laying in bed awake next to me for hours. I would catch him with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling and smiling. That's when I began to wonder.

Evan kept going to bowling league, but then he started coming home and didn't smell like cigarettes, he smelled like powder. It was only the slightest hint at first, and then since I noticed it I kept on noticing it. Baby powder has such a distinct smell. You think it's subtle, probably, but it isn't. Not when your wife is suspicious.

Finally, I called Jeannie Harper, the wife of one of the men Evan bowled with.

"I'm so sick," I told her. "I just want Evan to pick me up some medicine on his way home but I can't reach him on his cell. Do you mind calling Bill at the lanes so Evan can get it from me?"

She called back ten minutes later. Evan wasn't there. He hadn't been there in three weeks, he hadn't even called to say he was leaving the league.

It was easy, finding out who she was. I just decided to follow Evan out one night, and he had come straight to Moe's. We both acted surprised to see each other, husband and wife meeting as strangers. I told him I just wanted a change of scenery to write, he told me that the guys in the league were taking a night off. Liars, both of us.

And then she walked up to the booth we had sat down at, she had taken that same gasping breath, but that first time she didn't hide it as well. Her face had flushed and she had smiled at me too hard and too often.

Amy walked up to my table holding a tray with a little metal tea pot and a mug. I smiled at her and pulled out my own box of tea bags and set it on the table.

I wonder what she thought of me, then. I wonder if she laughed at me behind my back, knowing that she was fucking my husband and I was a dowdy little housewife whose glasses were always slipping down my nose and who carried around her own bags of tea like a grandmother. That was not who I was. It was just who I wanted her to think I was.

"How's college?" I asked as she poured hot water over my tea.

"Really boring," she said, not looking at my face. "I just have back to back English and history classes this semester. I hate writing."

I stared up at her blankly and caught her eye, then smiled slowly.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't even think."

"Oh, Amy, it's fine. What are you majoring in, again? I keep forgetting."

"Liberal Arts."

"Ah," I said. "That's what my husband, Evan, majored in. It seems to be just the degree for people who can't make their minds up about things. Evan never knows what he wants. He told me the other day that he just wants to take off, leave this town and disappear somewhere. Whisk me away to some tropical island or something, isn't that crazy?"

Amy chewed furiously on her gum. Her eyes were widened and her limbs looked stiff as she stood there holding the tray.

"Sounds pretty great to me, actually."

Was she jealous of me? Was she picturing her lover with his wife on a beach, scantily clad and in love? Was she wishing that it were her instead of me?

"I admit, it would be very romantic," I said. "Not to mention thrilling, to just take off like that, to just disappear. And sexy, those islands. Have you ever been to the Caribbean? Evan and I actually just went this past fall. There's something so... erotic about it."

Amy's cheeks flushed and I could see her working the gum in her mouth, spreading it around over her tongue. She took a deep breath and blew another enormous bubble.

"Our sex life is great anyway, though. Evan just can't seem to get enough of it at home."

The pink bubble burst and splatted back onto her cheeks and hair, and Amy dropped the tray she had been holding.

I covered my mouth with one of my hands and tried to not have an outburst. I wanted desperately to keep my cool.

Amy picked up the tray and straightened back up, pulling strings of bubble gum out of her hair and off of her furiously red face. "I, um.."

"You'd better go take care of yourself, Amy. You're just a mess."

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Carrie challenged me with "The pink bubble burst and splatted back onto her cheeks and hair." and I challenged Kelly Garriott Waite with "There was a dark shadow crouched in the corner of the room. It looked human, but how could I be sure?"

This story is part of The Hannah Sketches.

I Offer Unsolicited Writing Advice!

On Thursday I will be submitting my latest piece to Indie Ink, a website that takes writing submissions based off  writing prompts that are matched with authors. I have submitted to Indie Ink in the past - nearly of my Hannah Sketches are based off of the Indie Ink challenge prompts, and this week I will add another, my first since the end of January.

I'm not sure what it is about writing prompts that make it so much easier for me to write a short story. Though I've been writing for years, what I write tends to swing between short blog posts and 60K+ word novels. I have never considered myself a master at the short story, and I am only starting to believe I have any talent in it at all based on the feedback I've gotten from Indie Ink. Hannah's story has become really important to me, though. I guess I am just musing that perhaps I am creatively blocked lately, and without a little push from a prompt or a friendly suggestion, I may not write anything at all. 

Working for Scope, it seems that it may be the same for a lot of other writers. I've heard a lot in the past few weeks, "I really want to write, but I just don't know what to write about!"  Could it be that we all work better under a little guidance and pressure? Can the expectation of others be what is really driving me to create?

At any rate, I am thrilled with the burst of creativity I've seen among my friends and peers lately. People are starting blogs left and right, submitting to Scope all sorts of great opinion articles, blogs, and amusements.. It feels really great to be at this place I am in right now, surrounded by like minded people who seem to actually get it, you know? 

We aren't all going to be published. We aren't all going to win awards for our writing, or be paid for it, or be recognized outside of our own little community.. but in my opinion, that isn't the point. Well, it's not the most important point. 

To be creating - to be putting oneself out there to be seen through words and pictures and ideas - it's awesome. And we should be proud. Because we are the brave ones. 

Writing, like all forms of artistic creation and expression, takes time, patience, and determination. To those who have tipped their hats to writing, you are my comrades. So, if you are struggling with self-doubt over silly things like talent, I give to you the best piece of writing advice I've ever encountered, from Brian K. Vaughan (who was a writer for LOST!)

WRITE MORE, DO OTHER STUFF LESS

That’s it. Everything else is meaningless. You can take all the classes in the world and read every book on the craft out there, but at the end of the day, writing is sorta like dieting. There are plenty of stupid fads out there and charlatans promising quick fixes, but if you want to lose weight, you have to exercise more and eat less. Period. Every writer has 10,000 pages of shit in them, and the only way your writing is going to be any good at all is to work hard and hit 10,001.

By my estimation, I've only purged about 2,999 pages of shit out of myself. I have a long way to go, but at least now I get to make this page shitting journey with friends.

You're lucky this post isn't made up entirely of pictures of Jason Momoa

I shall, from time to time, be posting links to things I find and enjoy on the internet. I figure today is a good day for that, as the only coherent thoughts I can form in my head right now are:

Omg, thank god it's Friday, and I have a 1 in 176 million chance of not having to go back to work on Monday. 

You can't win if you don't play, and today I'm being a playa. But, let's face it - I have never consider myself a lucky girl, so I find some solace in A Treasury of Terribly Sad Stories of Lotto Winners. One of these guys actually has what seems like a case of the Numbers curse.

In keeping with the talk of millions, the Canadian government is apparently going to be saving 11 of them per year because they are going to stop making and distributing the penny! I'm actually really interested to see how this turns out for them, because for a long time I also thought getting rid of the penny would be a good idea until I started thinking about how businesses will have to entirely change the way they price their products. I guess in a few years we'll see how that works out with our northern neighbors.

The Atlantic, one of my favorite news magazines, has a great feature called In Focus that I check out every week, and there have been some really cool recent ones. I was terrified on Monday when I saw that spiders fled an Australian flood and took up residence...everywhere but where they are usually living. There is also a great (but sort of sad) collection of photos from NASA taking apart the decommissioned space shuttles and launch pads. 

Years ago, two of my best friends decided to take on couch surfers in their apartment, and they definitely lived to tell the tale, as they had as guests a mother who, as I recall, was escorting her young son to a local chess competition. Here is an article about a man who couch surfed across America.. very cool.

***

So, many months ago I started reading Game of Thrones but didn't really get into it (I'm blaming that now on the fact that I hadn't started playing D&D yet) but then last week I watched the entirety of the HBO series and I have totally fallen in love with the story and I'm hooked. I don't think I am going to be able to watch the new season when it airs, but there happens to be an absence of something that makes me not care so much. I have to ask myself though, how is it possible I went 29 years without Jason Momoa being a part of it?!

He plays Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, and is SMOKING hot. Apparently, he is also far too strong for his own good, because I learned today that he accidentally broke both of GoT's scriptwriter David Benioff's hands during a drinking game... Umm... Whooops?

My god, the things I would do to get this man in my bedroom for an hour.

ALIVE!

I'm not dead. By the lack of posts here in the last week or so, you might think otherwise, but I'm not dead. It does seem that the quest to blog for a year is dead - at least for the moment.

See, what happened was, is I got really busy with Scope Magazine. I mean, REALLY busy. It's like a full time job being a magazine editor, on top of my actual full time job, on top of being a parent and having a life and writing and reading as much as I do. As it happens, the first thing to go is usually the blogging. So a day passed without me posting, and then another, and then another, and now it's been, well, too long, I guess.

I admit, I am disappointed in myself for letting it go so long, especially after months of daily posting, but I am not going to let it get to me too much. Because really, working for Scope is making everything about my life lately just better in general. I've met new people that I really connect with and enjoy spending time with, I've reconnected with an old friend that I never really thought I'd see or talk to again, I'm working on something creative with like-minded individuals, which is something I've been wanting to happen in my life for ages.. And people are proud of me. Or impressed. Or both, as it were. I have people I barely know coming up to me and congratulating me on the job. I have people I don't know AT ALL coming up and introducing themselves to me because they want to connect with the magazine. I've found this new... sense of purpose, I guess. At least I found something to do that really validates ME. Something that I am proud of and happy about, something that I can throw myself into even after spending so much time throwing so many other things and people out of my life.

That, really, is the best thing. It's been months since I've felt like I've been wasting time doing things I want to be doing, and that in itself is an astounding award. Lately, I have been able to do what I wanted: pay attention to the small pleasures. I just finished crocheting Elise's blanket that I've been working on for two years, I've partied til the break of dawn, I screwed the diet and ate peanut butter and fluff sandwiches with glee, and I've been singing Britney Spears songs at the top of my lungs until my throat goes raw. I think I've said "I love you" enough to the right people, and certainly haven't said anything that I didn't mean.

What I've been is startlingly alive in a place that for so long has felt very dead, and what I've done is, I found myself living parallel to the way that my head has been saying it doesn't know how to comprehend, and I'm not sure what things are going to change from this moment on.

All I can say is that I really don't know what to say, because I'm pushing upward while looking downward and it's funny to me that I'm plunging happily through my experiences at the same time that I'm struggling with self-doubt larger than I've dealt with in a long time. I've reached that annoying point where those words ring out so beautifully and I'd love to start a day born without regret, but I'm not stupid enough to think that it's possible anymore.

There is always going to be something that I am doing wrong in someone's eyes, there is always something that I could be doing better - there is always going to be that nagging feeling that whatever it is, it's never enough. I guess I'm tired of this space being one of them.