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 |  Now my story begins in nineteen-dickety-two... |
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2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me, Threatening the life it belongs to And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud And I know that you'll use them, however you want to -Breathe(2AM), Anna Nalick ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** For Daddy, the real world gets fainter and fainter every day. -Homer Simpson Homer, Please Don't Hammer 'Em ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only **
If we shadows have offended,/Think but this, and all is mended,/That you have but slumber'd here/While these visions did appear./And this weak and idle theme,/No more yielding but a dream... -William Shakespeare, A Midsummer's Night Dream |
| I'm sure someone has made a list about things you learn from fantasy novels. The number one thing I've learned is to never, ever, ever, ever, ever, let someone put a metal ring around your neck. NEVER! It's never a simple manacle. It always seems to subvert your will in fantasy novels. It's struck such a chord with me that if some one came at with one, I'd probably over react and get very, very violent. It may also explain why I don't often wear necklaces anymore. Why I refuse to wear the lanyard for work. Why I won't wear often wear turtlenecks. I'm saving my neck for a handsome, rich Dracula. Damn it. |
| I don't know why, but at this exact moment, I find this website hilarious. http://averagecats.com/ |
| I don't know why I'm not making as many entries as I used to. I still think about writing various entries throughout the day. This being October, I do have things that I could talk about. I know last year about this time I was going to do entries on some of the landmark days. I already missed one and didn't realize it until it had passed. It has to do with my character Cassandra which I did do a part one entry about that. Never did the part two. I don't particularly want to delve into the past at the moment. She's linked to my friend Gregg who is my husband's best friend. Recently, they've been renewing their friendship. Benn is going to visit him tomorrow and apparently there are some issues going on with Gregg that he wants to talk to Benn about. Things that do remind me of the past. Gregg was an inspiration for a few of my characters. If you're reading Apple, he inspired both Langston and James, if you can imagine that. In Moon, Will is a mixture of Gregg and two other people. Actually, Will has a long history and his name has changed over and over again. In fact, he was created before I even met Gregg. He's just gone through so many incarnations. Maybe that's why I still feel he's sort of two dimensional. He hasn't quite come into his own like my other characters. Even though people inspire some of my characters, that's all they do, inspire. The characters eventually become their own person and I often forget they started out based on someone. Ug, now I kinda know what I want to do an entry about, but I have to go soon and will most likely lose the mojo before I have a chance to do it. |
| Benn has been sick since Thursday night. We finally took him to the employee clinic the university has for us. The nurse practitioner said he had strep throat. She didn't bother to do an actual swab as she's seen a lot of strep throat lately and they're out of swabs. So he has his antibiotics and is hopefully on the way to recovery. He even got a doctor's excuse to not go back to work for two days. I just hope today was soon enough for it. He had today off, but if they don't have a doctor's excuse soon enough, the sick day gets counted against them as if it were an unexcused absence. It's so insane. He's never worked at a place that seems to be very understanding of sick employees. I understand that employers don't want employees taking advantage of the system, but there's ways to do that without being dicks. Anyway, I looked up strep throat to see how long it would take for the disease to affect me if it were going to. That's part of the reason he isn't supposed to go to work. Until he's been on the antibiotics for a couple of days, he's still contagious. It takes 2-5 days for symptoms to appear. Today will be day five since I was first exposed to his disease. But I'm sure that doesn't mean I'm out of the woods yet as I've been constantly exposed to it for the past five days. I really don't want to be sick. I finally get to donate plasma again on Wednesday and I don't want to get screwed out of that again. Apparently, my protein count has been too low for the last couple of months. It just now got back to normal levels. And my boss would be terribly upset because there's a project I've been working on for the last three years that's really close to done. She wants it done before the end of October. I have to wonder if the time I was sick in August was a lighter version of strep throat. It was weird, because I had a slight fever and I would cough so much, I'd vomit. I don't know. I just feel nauseous or tired from time to time and worry that I'm getting sick... or worse, pregnant. There was an incident this month where a pill got lost... *sigh* I don't really think that's an issue, but it's enough for my mind to get hung up on from time to time. You don't get nauseous the first month, do you? I'll know whether to worry or not in the next few days in any case. Blah. This is probably why I'm on anxiety medication.  |
| I know I did a blog entry entitled Reflections on Turning One about a year ago. I probably should go look at that before writing this, but ah, well. I'm still happy to be a part of this site. I'm now a mod for two review forums and now the leader of our chat reviews. I don't know how that happened.  I no longer worry about having people review my novel. It's gotten to the point that I can't really keep up with the reviews. But that's my fault. I should probably do revisions as I get the reviews, but in some cases I like to have three reviews before revising. By now, I'm certain that some of my chapters have more than three reviews. It's for that reason that I don't do as many reviews anymore. I used to be on the top 100 reviewer list quite regularly. I feel bad about the drop in reviewing because there are new people that come to the forums and they may not get any reviews for awhile. I used to try to review every newbie that came onto to our forums, but now I don't unless they review something of mine. There's also the fact that I used to participate in the Simply Positive thing. So that helped with my numbers. But I don't feel so bad for quitting that. It didn't work as I hoped it would. I don't think anyone noticed I stopped. I never cared about the site recognition much. It's nice, but I found a small group to work with and that's all I really wanted from this site. The sense of community I had on this site has changed. I couldn't tell you exactly how. I don't know if it's better, worse or just different. I certainly consider a number of people I've meant here friends still. That's the important thing. Plus, still getting the feedback I need. I need to get on the ball about revising. I've been doing all right in just the writing department, but even that could be improved upon. I think that's all I have to say about my account turning two. It's still a wonderful experience here. Some of my gumption has diminished over the last year. I wish I knew how and why so I could get it back. I'll still keep plugging away. I don't think I know how to stop at this point. |
| There's an agent that keeps two blogs that I keep tabs on. You'll find one to the left called Query Shark where she critiques query letters and she has another blog about her being an agent. Several times she has mentioned that authors shouldn't try sending out their novels until they write their third one. She says there are some exceptions to that, but not many. Her reasoning is that authors usually don't find their voice until the third novel. I had hoped with all the help that I received here, that maybe I had found my voice by revising Chasing as much as I had. Certainly, it has improved a lot since I first came here. Even if what she said was true, it couldn't hurt to send out query letters anyway. I had fully intended to have query letters sent out by now, but for many reasons, or excuses, this hasn't happened yet. I'm still waiting to do a final edit on it. Which it's probably a good thing I've waited so long, since a lot of advice out there says to put the novel away for a long while before looking at it again to send it out. Currently, I'm trying to work on Moon, which is technically my fourth novel, but given that my third novel was a sequel to Chasing, I can see where it may be considered the first novel still. In general, I can see where Moon is being better received and one of my faithful reviewers even said that Moon was the one to send out. Now, it still has some issues, but it's still a first draft more or less. And it's not finished. I'm still not 100% sure how the ending is going to go. Plus, I'm getting some new reviews for Apple, my second novel, that lead me to believe that my writing has improved since I last revised those chapters. I'm starting to think there maybe something to this third novel thing the agent speaks of. Now, I'm kinda worried about going back to Chasing and realizing it needs a huge overhaul. I'll admit, that notion has been in my head for a long while. I may have to trim some words as the length of it is almost too long. Not quite. It still manages to fit under the maximum that most agents give. I just get so anxious about making the attempt. I've spent so long working on Chasing, it seems like it should be done. It seems like I should be trying to submit things by now. I haven't even failed yet. Which sounds like a weird accomplishment, but I expect rejection letters. At least a rejection letter means I tried. And there are so many story ideas I'm sitting on that want to come out. But the fact that I'm doing this entry is a good sign. I think... |
This whole actually having work to do at work thing kinda sucks.  Work has just been wearing me out for the last couple of weeks or so. I'm sorry for not responding to the comments I've been getting for the last month or so. I probably haven't done as many entries as I have in the past. I've thought about many entries to write. If I had my laptop with me 24/7, I'd probably add a lot more. Especially Saturday night. But I don't feel like going into that now. I just wanted to post something about how exhausting work has been. Our student assistant budget keeps getting cut, so we have less students. Then the students start getting sick and calling in. So that leaves the staff to pick up the slack. And sometimes at night, I don't even get help from the staff. For various reasons. Most of them annoying. I'm about done with the storage book project so I'm getting pushed to get that done. I've been thinking so much about the beach today. It was so nice in Florida. I miss the ocean. |
| I've been considering getting my hair trimmed forever. I don't do the every six weeks or so you're supposed to. In fact, it's been more than a year since I got my hair cut. And before then it was going on something like 3 to 4 years that I hadn't had a hair trim. Maybe longer. There are several reasons for this from money to wanting long hair. But I've recently had to come to the conclusion that since my hair is curly, it just doesn't get as long as I want it because the curls make it look shorter. In fact, I can change how long or short I want my hair to look if I put my mind to it. Anyway, from time to time I'll look on the web for hairstyles I want and I was just doing so. What ticks me off about looking for curly hairstyles is that I wouldn't consider about a third of them curly. Wavy, yes. Curly, no. There are times I do wish my curls were bigger and edged more towards wavy, but aw, well. Another thing that ticks me off about hairstyle pictures is that they often use celebrity pictures. Most of those pictures are from special events that the celebrities attend so it isn't an everyday style. Not to mention they have stylists that can afford to pay to do their hair. A couple of nights ago, a student came in and checked out some DVDs and I liked her hair cut. It was a bit shorter than I usually like, but I thought it might work out well for me. I think I would know what to tell the stylist to do to achieve this style, but I'd rather have a picture. I suppose I could try to look up the student's name and try to find her picture on Facebook or something. That seems kinda weird. And that assumes she has a picture of her with that haircut on the web somewhere. Thus far, I can't even find an example of it on the web. I've also considered dying my hair recently. I've always wanted strawberry blonde hair. Then I just thought about going to a lighter shade of blonde or adding lighter blonde highlights. Long ago, Benn threatened to leave me if I dyed my hair, but a few years ago he said he didn't care anymore. I don't think he was ever serious about it though. If he was... well, things may have turned out differently. I know my parents and grandmother got upset when I went through this hair dying phase in college. It was nothing drastic. I used that stuff that only lasts a week. I'm not even sure they make it anymore. They don't seem to care when my sister dyes her hair. Her hair is darker than mine. I don't see what's so great about my shade of blonde. I used to think it was on the lighter side, and maybe it was when I was younger, but now it's on the darker side of blonde. To me, it's just not that special. No one has ever complimented me on the color of my hair. The curls on the other hand, people have talked about my whole life. Then there's the deciding who to go to. My cousin's wife has a hair salon in the next town, but I'm still not sure about it. She's the last person who trimmed my hair and she didn't mess it up or anything, but I'm still a little uneasy about it. It might be because I'm considering getting more hacked off than I usually do. Thank you for reading another thrilling entry... |
| If I'm helping somebody that's annoying the crap outta me, I often imagine banging their head against the counter. Repeatedly. This ensures that I keep a big smile on my face through the whole interaction. |
| I woke up and was in weird mood or frame of mind. It's hard to describe. I wasn't unhappy. I wasn't happy I wasn't tired. I didn't feel sick. I may have just been extremely lazy. But I did my walking workout thing so, yay! I think I found a way to motivate me to do a workout. I didn't start doing it intentionally, it just happened to work this way for a few days and I kept it up. I was taking showers before I went to bed. Lately, I've been waiting until I finish working out in the morning. The shower feels better that way and I know I have to get ready for work and I can't go to work without taking a shower. Some how, this makes me work out. I think. For now. Anyway, I get to work and we had a good number of student assistants call in. One has mono. Because of lack of help, I'm running around a lot helping patrons and so forth. Then I had a training workshop that lasted two hours. I thought it'd be nice and boring and I could recoup, but no, we had to do activities. I really hate the activities they make you do at training sessions for work. There has to be a special hell for those that run such things. The instructor was generally nice, though. Just thought some of the activities weren't necessary. Now, I'm exhausted. I just want to go home. I haven't had much to eat today, but oddly, I haven't been that hungry either. That may change by the time I get home. I decided what I had wanted to do all day. I just wanted to sit and watch music videos. Sometimes, I just get into that mood. It usually happens really late at night, but I guess for some people, this would be late night. To think I had contemplated calling in today... Cats can be quite persuasive on this issue. They need my precious body heat and occasional chin scratches. |
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