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.

It used to be so easy, I never even tried.

This was a very low-key weekend. I had big intentions of finishing my read through The Eternals first draft, and of reviewing two indie books I have read lately (I'll never, EVER insinuate that I think of myself as a good reviewer - sorry!), but instead I read, and I plotted. Sort of.

Yesterday morning I decided that I didn't want to do much of anything besides read. I picked up a book that I bought a while ago and never started reading - Divergent, by Veronica Roth. Well, I read the entire thing cover to cover yesterday and I was blown away by it. I couldn't put the book down, seriously. It was like The Hunger Games, only better, I swear. 

Something about Divergent really got to me, though. In the beginning of the book, Beatrice, (Tris), has to take aptitude tests and go through a Choosing Ceremony to decide which faction she is going to belong to. All I could think about when I sat there rapt, reading it, was The Picking. The Picking - the ceremony that takes place in my book, The Eternals. 

Now, the ceremonies are not alike at all, and neither are the overall concepts of the book. My book is about vampires, after all. It was just the way that Veronica writes and I don't that had me all fershnickered. She shows, doesn't tell. I tell, I don't show enough.

I know that if I pick up my manuscript and read through it with a red pen in my hand, I would cross out more than half of what is written there. I need a read through, I need some notes taken, I need a rewrite.

I can see it plain as day now, what I need to do. 

***

To me, this is the last day of summer.

Elise starts kindergarten tomorrow, so that means it's back to waking up at 7a.m. every morning until June, because if I don't do it every day, I don't do it at all. This means earlier bedtimes for Elise and more writing time for me. This means I go back to pretending that I have two full time jobs - one as a slave to Quickbooks and email and furniture, the other as a novelist. 

And this is the reason that I have never been able to take myself seriously as a writer - I write every day, THEY SAY, because I can't not do it. I've never had that sweet not-problem. 

Here's A GREAT PIECE OF WRITING ADVICE FROM BRIAN K. VAUGHN:

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.

This means one thing to me: saying no more often.

It's the last day of summer. The last day of the time I yearn for (and live for) every year. This usually feels like a time of things dying and ending for me, because winter, so bleak - it is past the end, it is the dark and nothingness of winter. But this year, the last day of summer feels more like the beginning of some other season I am not quite familiar with yet.

But know this: I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year - and I'm going to win it.

I occasionally contemplate my mortality.

Today is the first day of August. This pains me so. 

I love the summertime, for one thing. More than any other season, I am happiest when I'm dripping with sweat and can barely breathe from the weight of this wonderful New England humidity. Some would say I'm a masochist for it, and they may be right. I just LOVE that feeling you get when you sit down in your car after work, the car that has been baking under the blazing sun in the parking lot all day. The heat doesn't hit you so much as it envelopes you, traps you and smothers you, and it seems like you can either close your eyes and wither and die or just breathe through it, feel your heart speed up, and roll on. 

But August, usually the hottest month of the year in these here parts, is bittersweet, because it means summer is almost over. Elise will start school again in four weeks, I will be back to getting up at the crack of dawn, suffering through those winter mornings when it's not only freezing, BUT STILL DARK OUT when I rise. 

My August is jam packed with fun - so many fun things are about to go on in the next few weeks, I can hardly wait for them. But then, September will come. I love the fall too, but part of me will always hate it for taking away my sun and sweat. (Sick, right?) 

And then, my birthday. I will be 29 this year.

Honestly, there are days when I am surprised to realized that I'm not actually nineteen anymore, because that is the way I often feel. I think of my age, I contemplate the length of my life, and I am shocked that I am this old. I don't feel like I've done enough yet, I don't feel like I've seen enough yet, I don't think I've loved enough yet to die.

It's not like I think I'm going to die tomorrow - although I could. And it's not like I'm crazy and vain, obsessing over turning 30 like it's going to be my mid-life and deserves a crisis.. But it could be. It could be my mid-life. And I'm not ready to die yet - there is so much more to be done.

I made a list, just as tons of other people have made this same list, and I'm putting it here for reference. And so it stares me down constantly. So I don't give up.

30 Before 30

1. Get my sixth tattoo
2. Visit Steph
3. Eat at Yummy Noodles in NYC
4. Live alone again
5. Date
6. Try 30 new recipes
7. Take Elise to the zoo
8. Make $100 from something I wrote
9. Throw a party
10. Road trip with Alisha
11. Be a size 12 again (this will be the hardest thing)
12. Sing Karaoke with Brian
13. Read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
14. Go to the drive-in
15. Try a yoga class
16. Get CPR certified
17. Donate blood at least once
18. Teach Elise to swim
19. Find a writing group
20. Meet an online friend
21. Visit the grandparents in Florida
22. Girls Only Bed & Breakfast vacation
23. Blog every day for a month
24. Get a significant raise / Or get a new job
25. Consult a psychic
26. Self-pub that book I wrote in May 2011
27. Sail on a sailboat
28. Go to the dentist
29. Invest in something
30. Forgive myself

The countdown starts today.