The best New Year's Kisses

Usually, I get one of those kisses. The ones where you get bent backwards at the waist and a mouth closes over yours and your eyes close and you sigh just a little. Usually that is how I bring in the new year. Usually this happens in a less than sober state as by midnight or shortly thereafter I have had at least a few drinks. Usually. I am very superstitious, so I try to arrange it so that it works out this way.

This year, well, I played it a bit differently.

This year me and the kiddos went to Michelle's and I ate sushi. I did have a drink as the ball dropped. I did get three very lovely kisses. But I had to bend at the waist to collect them. The people I was collecting them are short. I hung out with the kiddos this year for new years. We watched the ball drop and played Poker. I won. All I got for winning was rights to put the game away. Seemed a bit unfair, that, but the other players are all mean old cheater butts anywhoo.

It was a good new year. I had my superstitions in play still. Kids there. Money in pockets. And I wrote (this) but the kiss... yeah, did not go for that. I am going for a man free year.

The chances of that... lol. Well. I have tried many methods to simplify life. No kiss on New Years seems almost too simplistic an answer to simplify all stresses in my life... the chance of that being the key...

Well, a girl has got to try.

;)

A Wordy New Year

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a wordy new year.

That is my new writery greeting for the holidays. Because to run out of words would be the ultimate disaster for me. I always have something to say. It is not always something good or something productive, but it is something. I have three or four WIP at any given moment. I write thousands of words. I talk on the phone all day. Words failing me... utter catastrophe.

So from here on out I have given up on Peace for my new years wish. Peace is not part of my life, apparently. Wealth is too easily spent. Health has been something that is fleeting and fickle. Words... those I have thrived on for years. Those are my heartsblood.

May your words slide off your silver tongue with grace and ease.

May your children actually hear a few of them.

May this snowstorm blow away from my drive to work.

That is my new years request list. Short, for once. But that is what I ask for.

Mystery, Romance and the New Divide...

The lyrics to Linkin Park's New Divide (I know... Transformer's soundtrack. Hello. Two sons. But really, listen to the lyrics...) are as seen at the end of this post. I posted them because it is my theme song of the week.

Things are a flutter in my world. Busy as a bee, as usual. Thoughtful.

Memories, though, are coming back. After the stroke issue, some stuff was left muddled. I can't say as I minded. There are things and times in our lives that if we forget or if time numbs or dulls we don't mind so much.

Some of them hurt.

That is why the mind builds lovely scabs and loss of memory over them I think. To help you heal. Because if you walked around all the time with all of the wounds you had gaping you would bleed out (another really decent song by Linkin Park if you feel the need to look it up...).

Anyway, just wanted to post these lyrics. And to checkmark another little thing off my to do list for the week.

I have joined an accountability group. So far it has driven me to go ahead and finish the dreaded synopsis and edits on Siren's. I am still on 2nd round edits for Odd Stuff and haven't got much written on Odd Fate but otherwise I have hit all of my goals for the week...

Once I post this ;)
New Divide lyrics
Songwriters: Bennington, Chester Charl; Bourdon, Robert; Delson, Brad; Farrell, Dave; Hahn, Joseph; Shinoda, Mike;

I remembered black skies, the lightning all around me
I remembered each flash as time began to blur
Like a startling sign that fate had finally found me
And your voice was all I heard that I get what I deserve

So give me reason to prove me wrong, to wash this memory clean
Let the floods cross the distance in your eyes
Give me reason to fill this hole, connect the space between
Let it be enough to reach the truth that lies across this new divide

There was nothing in sight but memories left abandoned
There was nowhere to hide, the ashes fell like snow
And the ground caved in between where we were standing
And your voice was all I heard that I get what I deserve

So give me reason to prove me wrong, to wash this memory clean
Let the floods cross the distance in your eyes across this new divide

In every loss, in every lie, in every truth that you'd deny
And each regret and each goodbye was a mistake too great to hide
And your voice was all I heard that I get what I deserve

So give me reason to prove me wrong, to wash this memory clean
Let the floods cross the distance in your eyes
Give me reason to fill this hole, connect the space between
Let it be enough to reach the truth that lies across this new divide
Across this new divide, across this new divide


© BIG BAD MR HAHN MUSIC; CHESTERCHAZ PUBLISHING; KENJI KOBAYASHI MUSIC; NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT MUSIC; PANCAKEY CAKES MUSIC; ROB BOURDON MUSIC; UNIVERSAL MUSIC - Z SONGS;

these lyrics are submitted by Linkin Park (Official Lyrics)

Where is my Christmas spirit?

Since the question has begun, "Do you know there is a Santa Claus, Virginia?" followed by the inevitable laughter, I know we are well into the holiday season.

The tree is up. The stockings hung. But I have no desire to light it.

If you know me, I am usually high on holly by now. I am usually the first one to put up no less than seven trees and hang my house in spangles and sparkles and look out into the night with a glitter in my eye and a wondering glow that has some resemblance to that of a child. I usually have shopped until my bills are screaming to be paid and am driving everyone nuts with my Christmas cheer.

This year... I feel...
nothing.

I feel no desire to look at the tree lights glittering. I had no desire to get my trees out of storage, instead borrowing one. I have done that which the kids have asked for Christmas, nothing more.
I have done nothing because I felt driven by the Christmas spirit to do it.

I love Christmas. The wonder of it. The magic of people going out and doing for each other what they do not do any other time of year. For the sake of baby Jesus's birth we remember this one time of year a feeling of brotherhood and helpfulness and charity.

This year I don't see it. I am disenchanted. The economy has tanked and everyone is just... so sad. No one is worrying about helping others this year. They are in a dead panic about how to provide for their kids. Their families.

Which sort of is what is bugging me and sucking all the joy out of my Christmas, I think. And my job. It is sort of a Christmas vacuum. My current employment is a great way to look at human nature at its more primal greedy core and say, hmm. Not terribly kind are you? We, as a public, have far more than any other tanking economy. Our poor kids have toys. They do. Maybe not the newest toys coming onto the shelves but they do not play with dolls made from cornhusks or rocks because they have NOTHING for the most part. They have Barbie. She may be a bedraggled Barbie and (gasp!) be wearing last seasons fashions but she is still in all her plastic glory.

My babies have clothes on their backs. Food in their bellies. Toys in their toyboxes and more in storage. They want more. They want new.

They don't have nothing though.

The constant desire for newer, bigger, better, faster is not what Christmas was supposed to be about and my inner Charlie Brown is screaming and tearing out his three little hairs in frustration.

I want my kids to want to help. I want them to see how lucky we are. We have each other. I would rather have hung a paper tree that we had gotten together to make than light that borrowed tree. It would have meant something because we did it together.

What do we do together as a family during the holidays now? Shop? Cook food? What happened to singing? Raising our voices to the sky in joy and reverence. What happened to talking because we love each other and want to hear what we have to say?

Where is my Christmas?

Where is the joy?

I see want. I see need. I see hurt and anger. Where is the JOY?

I cringe and burrow down into my non-holiday affiliated sweater and look out into the night that is dotted with stars. Faith, a long time ago, led people to follow a star. I look at those stars and wonder what we follow now? What are my children learning in this world? Love? Joy?

Or need and want and a constant drive for instant gratification that can never be filled because nothing is ever good ENOUGH. Something will always be better. Faster. Newer.

I want to cry. My joy has been eaten this year. I hope it comes before Santa does.

If, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa... I hope he brings us Joy.

Life, Sunshine, and the common edit

Having gotten plenty of sleep, if by plenty you mean broken by waking every hour on the hour for more than eight hours, I am cheerily at the computer again for a day of second round edits on Odd Stuff.

*Ahem*

My boys woke up in the middle of the night ill. Projectile ill. Clean my carpets ill. Because why on earth would they have made it to the bathroom ill.

Then at about three am, Justice, in ever infinite wisdom, thought it would be a darn good time to write a letter to Santa. And turn on all the lights. And then tell me about the letter to Santa.

At three am.

I yelled at her to go back to bed and what on earth was she THINKING.

She said she had time to do it.

She also had time to be asleep.

By the time she went back down, another son was waking to make an unsuccessful dash for the bathroom.

I finally gave up on the whole sleep idea at eight and was thrilled that I had already given up my hours at work today due to a childcare conflict. So, I did not have to work or call off work.

Grr.

That was my overwhelming happiness. Can you hear the cheer?

It is not swine flu. No one has fevers. Still dodging that bullet.

Speaking of Bullet, Laurell K. Hamilton has started writing Bullet and Divine Misdemeanors is coming out on the 8th *happy dance* which is also my friend Michelle's birthday. So for her birthday, I am going to buy myself the book. *shrugs* Okay, makes sense to me.

Other author news, Robin McKinley is still working on Pegasus.

I love her. Love. Not like hearts and flowers. Like her writing is beautiful and thought provoking and funny and she just freaking ROCKS. When I grow up I would love to be like Robin. Or like me, but with Robin's attitude. That would work. I would hate the world to miss out on me. I am so darned cool.

Aside from the Damar series, consisting so far of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword (to which my first book crushes as a kid probably really evolved. I mean, I really liked Colin from Secret Garden... but that was puppy love. My first real literary crush was Luthe. Then I met Corlath. I discovered I could love two men. Ah.) she also wrote Outlaws of Sherwood. This retelling of the Robin Hood story not only won me the Kent State Impromptu Writing Contest (I wrote about Cecily and Big John as I had the biggest crush on Big John... not Robin. I know. Secondary character... but I identified with Cecily not Marian. *shrugs* I am not Lady... I am Lady who runs away, hacks off her hair and pretends to be a boy. That was way more where I was at the time.) and won her a boat load of awards, it also cemented my childhood and adulthood love of McKinley.

I then, as a grown up who can pick and choose what she reads and has this handy piece of plastic that allows me to buy books that aren't at my library, searched out the remaining works of McKinley and found she had never written a dull word in her life. She retold Beauty and the Beast twice in two very different ways. I must say, I prefer Spindles End. Then again, still the tomboy, not the lady.

As time went by, I had read them all. And it seemed that she wasn't writing.

Then one day, in a bookstore I looked for her as I always did. There, amongst the McCafferty, was McKinley.

And there was a title I had never seen. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. Mind you, it was already a given I would buy the book. When I flipped the jacket in trembling eagerness to see what she had written about and found vampires...

*Giddy dance*

Robin spun vamps in a way that I had not read yet. Of course! Constantine, her name for her vampire, was nothing like Lestat, Jean Claude, Tristan... he was not like Nosferatu. He was a McKinley version. I mean, he drank blood but from there she took it a new direction.

And again, I fell madly in love with a McKinley character. That is her gift. Other authors give grand details. The slide of flesh on flesh. The scent of a body moving against you. The taste of salt on your lovers lips. Mind you... not opposed to this as I am a huge fan of those books as well.

The true gift of McKinley, in this reader/authors opinion, is the ability to make you shiver by what she does NOT say. The line, "Then you can look forward to no sleep whatsoever," from Hero and the Crown, made me sigh for years. That was it. And the soup spoon dropped.

She never said more.

She didn't have to.

I love that. I love that somehow, it is enough.

Other author news... Still waiting impatiently for Kim Harrison to move on with the Hallows and 2010 seems like it will be another book. Charlaine Harris is going to give us another tale of Sookie and Eric in 2010. As a reader, this is going to be the best year EVER.

I also am super excited for this new author I found, Saranna DeWylde that I read on this site :

http://www.textnovel.com/stories_list_detail.php?story_id=950

She has a book coming out with SBP and I am excited to read it since reading How to Lose a Demon in Ten Days. Okay, should have been editing. Busman's holiday...

Other than that, just excited about my own series really. What are you reading?

I'm a WINNER and Ashtons EYE!!!

Okay, since everyone is probably very sick of hearing about it... I finished NaNoWriMo *YEAH* The crowd goes wild!!! 50,000 words later... and Odd Fate is not done as it is plotted to be 90,000 words and nano is only 50k. Well. Um. Okay. But I finished 50K in a month!! Okay. Well. Erm. Okay. So, you say I wrote Odd Stuff in a month and it was 90K so not impressed? Well, shuddup. That is darned impressive! There are tons of people impressed by that word count. Okay. So I am a blabbermouth. And I probably SAY about that many words in a day. To type them is an entirely different thing and to do so with things like sentence structure and spelling and plot and research... okay, these things take mad skills. MAD skills. Get jiggy with me here. I am a cool writer girl this month and this is a big deal.

*blows party favor*

Okay, that said and much work left ahead of me, tonight, the night I had allotted for some mad (yes, mad is the word of the day as I feel a bit like the Mad Hatter... or a Mad Scientist... or at some random points, simply mad today) editing and writing and yes, the posting of my nano numbers so I could validate and get my nifty nano winner pic seen here. However, single mom, three kids.

And Ash has inherited my grace. I say mine due to the fact Ray seems to be one of those people who can make puking look somehow graceful. The man can flip a pizza behind his back and catch it. And look hot doin it. He is that darned cool. I am not. So it has to be my genetics that cause the poor boy to spend so much time in the ER. I will take full cred for it. ALL ME. That said, after the 'broken finger in gym because he was running too fast and crawling and managed to bend them backwards incident' we have evolved to todays fun.

Today, whilst I was off working and staring at the tan walls of my cubicle and trading banter with Noah, Ash was playing with the kids. It was something about throwing him onto a couch and him laughing uproariously. His arms, apparently, were flailing about madly (see? mad again.) which isn't altogether unusual for Ash. He is almost always yelling or flailing. They are two of his trademark moves. That and picking his nose with his tongue. But I digress.

So while flailing, he caught his own eye with his own finger and scratched the corner.

And began to scream. He screamed that it hurt and it burned and he was dying.

As Ash is a dramatic child, no one was sure if he was hurt or not. He had a tiny red mark next to his eye. When the eye was inspected, nada. However the howling began around noon. When I rescued the sitter at 4pm, it was still going on. He, at this point, was puffy.

She was looking a bit tired, drawn and her eyes were crossed.

I took my youngest to the ER to see if it was drama or trauma causing the bellowing.

After some eye drops (which is a tale too dark and twisted to be related... anyone who has tried to get eyedrops into a pained childs eyes knows the severity of this situation. If you haven't, pray you never have to.) that turned his eye an awesome glow in the dark green under ultraviolet light, a large spot was found on his cornea.

By large, I mean uber huge.

He had caught the cornea and scraped it off at the center. A chunk about the size of his pinky nail.

According to the friendly nurses (one was wearing the cutest lab coat... hunter green with a little black helicopter on the back...) a 55yr old man had been in earlier with a SMALLER hole in his cornea and had cried like a baby. They are excruciating. My son, apparently, was a tough cookie and was feeling like someone was shoving a knife in his eyeball. A burning knife. And he was valid with the screaming. So I get to give him eyedrops every 4hrs and he SOOO got China Buffet for dinner.

Poor dude. Just now he is crashed out and looking pathetic. He insists he is blind. He passed the vision screening and light hurts. He is clinging to me. I must admit, having Mr Independant clinging is nice. Wish it wasn't under such horrible circumstances. Wish I could make it not hurt. Wish I could make it all go away. Best I can do is wake him every 4hrs and torture him so he does not go blind....

Not really the most fun job. Not really fun for either of us. Less fun for Ash.

So, Nano done, son blind. Eyes tired. Butt sore. Oops. Forgot that one. Wiped out yesterday on Michelle's front steps and landed butt first on slate. So sitting hurts.

But not so bad as Ash who just woke screaming. Again.

*sigh*

Well.
Okay,he is asleep again.
Anyway, that's my day in a nutshell... or nut house.
Take your pick.

Driven

Eyeballs burning.

Brain leaking in a gelatinous ooze out my ears.

Fingers itching to tap on the keyboard but the tips are slightly numb.

Ah. The smell of procrastination mixed with National Novel Writing Month. Yes, this year I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo for the first time and it has been fun. Although I know I blast out a very nice number of words in a day when I sit down to write and although I know I can write a book in a short period of time, I had never sat down and tried to see how many precisely I write or could I write a given number if there was a goal looming over my head.

And I think it felt like homework.

I remember homework. It was that stuff I stalled doing until the deadline because-- pshaw-- I could blast through it in no time so why bother stressing over it now? I could do it later... and later.

And NaNoWriMo became that for me. If I missed one day, no big. I could write 2k tomorrow and play catch up. A couple days... yeah, well one 7k day and I am back, baby.

The flaw was that if you spend big portions of the month skipping around like that, you inevitably get behind. And now deadline looms. And I feel dumb. I look at my bar graph on the Nano site and wonder why there are so many days that flatline. It wasn't like I couldn't have written SOMETHING those days. Normally I would have had to write. Actually, I did write most of those days...

On non NaNo work so that it did not 'count' because I am only counting my words written on Odd Fate. Procrastination. I procrastinated and wrote other things so that the deadline would loom closer.

So tonight I was left blasting out a monumental... how many did I write?

Hang on.

7108words.

And that was a mix of a half an hour today and from 5pm on tonight.

Brain in a puddle. Probably all crap. Will have to reread tomorrow to see what I did because if I do tonight I will trim the good with the fat.

And then tomorrow after I clean that I need to blast out one final day of at least 3042 words to get my 50k for nano.

*rubs hand over face*

So if I can do that, why on earth am I doing it now rather than spreading it over a month?

Masochism. Sheer masochism. I am a sick, sick puppy.

And the worst part? Odd Fate is a 90k book or thereabouts. Once I finish Nano... so not done with the book... Nano will end with me mid climax.

And I can't not write once I am mid climax. Musey will allow some slacking. She will let me take days off if I allow her days where I sit and do nothing but blast out story. But once I get to climax the story rides me and I just hang on and try to tug the bit every now and again if the story gets too out of line.

I no longer will have the reins. So I will be thinking and dreaming and eating Odd Fate by the time this week is over....

Wait? It is Friday?

Something about shopping?

Huh.

Hey... yeah. I should put up a tree, too. *scratches head* Can't we just pencil one into Chapter seventeen????