Back from the Abyss

Yeah, still alive, even if only barely. I'm going to give a quick sort of update on Things In My Life* and then rant a little bit about writing and then maybe by the end of it I'll know how I'm going to fix it**.

As far as life goes, we're all moved into the new house now and my personal computer is set up and has the interwebs on it and everything is more or less where it needs to be***. I should be going to the gym regularly but dude seriously there are people on the internet who are wrong, I can't just walk away.

My two cousins, heretofore referred to as my little brothers (both nearly ten years younger than I), are moving in here in the next couple of weeks, and my sister's twentieth birthday is tomorrow and I still don't know what I'm getting her. At the moment, I don't have any money, since because of Memorial Day my paycheck is coming a day late (although in all fairness, I will take that paycheck a day late since it's for a good cause, seeing as my fiance is in the military and all of my grand-uncles were in World War II, and I've plenty of relations who were in Vietnam).

Adam and I are trying to put together some things for Gen Con, and as yet I don't even know what the deal is with the Con we're running for the freshman at ISU this fall. Hopefully I'll get caught up with that here soon.

Currently reading Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, Just a Geek by the wonderful Wil Wheaton (alliteration not intended) who might just be my new hero, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith. All of them are wonderful. (I would like to point out right about here, WITHOUT A FOOTNOTE, that Wil Wheaton is pretty much my hero, and I wish I could high-five him.)

Now, the Rant About Writing.

More or less, deAngelis is driving me up the freaking wall, and here's why: I overwrote. There's too much stuff happening. Between Major Plot Point A and Major Plot Point B^, I should have maybe two Minor Plot Points. Guess what? I have six. SIX FREAKING POINTS.

There are two possible solutions for this, both of which are a little daunting. The first option is to omit the scenes that I can (gulp) live without in this novel. That would be the cleanest, and the least time consuming. However, it would require me to also omit at least one major character, possibly two, one of which would definitely be Alexander Hunt, and the second would be a toss-up between Adrian McKinley and River de Luca, neither of which I can really bear to lose.

The second option is to move what I thought was the Point of No Return^^ and admit that it belongs better melded with the climax. Which means that I have to rearrange a bunch of things. The Point of No Return no longer exists, and it has to be there. And I think that I know how to make this work, but the fact of the matter is that this is going to put me even further behind schedule, and I would like to get Steel done during NaNoWriMo^^^ this year. My goal is to have deAngelis finished, final draft, by the time that school begins (I've pushed back the deadline at least a half-dozen times since NaNoWriMo last year), so that I have a couple months to rest and put together notes for Steel in time to start writing it in November (although to be honest, I've started typing a few paragraphs here and there already, which is bad, I know, I have noveling-ADD).

And clearly I'm going to go with the second option, which I thought of AS I WAS WRITING THIS ENTRY, and I think I can just go ahead and finish the draft I'm working on as it is now and then rearrange it later, but last night I thought I was going to have to just scrap a bunch of stuff and I was Not Happy. Luckily, my muse, Jason, woke me up with a text this morning and got me up early enough that I've had time to enjoy some tea and toast and think about it, and I think I've got it figure out how I'm going to fix it.

Also over at my fictionpress page there is some new, bad poetry if you're interested, should hold you over til the next update.

*~*~*~*~*

* Because let's face it sometimes I don't even care.

** Now since I have nothing to do but write and serve ice cream to unhappy people, I'm starting to realize all the things that I screwed up.

*** Except for plot points, but I haven't started the Writing Rant yet gahhh.

^ I will admit that I am using James V. Smith, Jr.'s book The Writer's Little Helper as a source for this, but what I like about the Little Helper is that it is fairly accurate and actually quite helpful, despite the fact that most "this is how you write a book" books really aren't that helpful; people forget that writing is subjective, and it stems from the imagination, and everyone's imagination works differently, despite the similarities in a successful end result. Smith did a good job of remembering the subjectivity of noveling and presents a few helpful tools geared towards noveling and lots of tools and explanations geared toward grammar and style, which is honestly more of what a person needs anyway.

^^ Again, still referencing Little Helper. You'd be surprised how accurate and helpful the chart on page six is.

^^^ For anyone who hasn't done NaNo, please give it a thought. It's wonderful, and for people who want to get started noveling but need a little extra oomph to get a rough - and I mean rough - draft out, it's the perfect thing. The community encouragement adds something to an experience that is generally fairly solitary (which is why a lot of writers are so freaking depressed). The years that I've participated, I've never regretted it, and I've won two years in a row now, deAngelis being last year and the reference-purposes-only-sort-of-prequel-to-deAngelis, Ten Thousand Hells, being the year before.

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Thank You, Papa John's

For the $165 pizza.

Long story short, I ordered a pizza from Papa John's on THURSDAY. The order came to something like $15, plus tip. No big deal. I had plenty of money in my account. I put it on my debit card, and everything was happy.

I continue to spend money - gas, food, and a tshirt that I saw on www.shirt.woot.com that was pretty friggin' awesome. Still, I have plenty of money in my account.

Sunday night, I made plans to go to lunch at Ichiban Noodles with some friends the next day. I checked my account balance before I left, at 10am, and I had plenty of money to get food. My sushi came out to $16. I paid, because I had at least $20 in my account.

This morning I get a call that my account is overdrawn and I have $90 in fees, and they're going to hit me with another $75 by the end of the day. Luckily, my wonderful stepmother who deserves the praise of angel choirs wrote me a check for $200 for a little favor I did for her the other day as we're getting ready to move, and that put me in the clear.

What, I wondered, could possibly have gotten me THAT overdrawn?

I went online to check my account statement one more time.

The pizza didn't fucking post til LAST NIGHT.

Seriously, Papa John's. WTF.

Now, yes, I know, I should be able to do math. I know. But a DEBIT CARD PURCHASE should have been rung up THE NIGHT or at the very least the day AFTER I made the purchase. Especially for something as paltry as $15 plus tip.

Summer '10 Begins

Happy Mother's Day!

Part of me felt obligated to say that. Not sure why. To be honest my relationship, if you can even call it that, with my own mother amounts to a pile of baboon poopy, and when I think of mothers my mind actually goes to my dad, who did the job of mom AND dad by himself for several years. I think my paternal grandmother even used to send him Mother's Day Cards for a while.

My stepmom is wonderful. Really, she is. And my grandmothers, all three of them, are fantastic, too. But I can't help but feel a little snarky about Mother's Day in general. Why? Take this, for example: I sat down to lunch with my mom, my maternal gma, and my ridiculously awesome Aunt Beth*. My mother, who has not seen me in months, barely spoke a dozen words to me. Instead, she talked for a good half-hour about a cold she was convinced she was getting**, then another half-hour about getting locked inside her church in Marion***. Then she talked for twenty minutes about all these people who go to her church, none of whom any of us know. THEN she talked for FORTY-FIVE FREAKING MINUTES about her stupid TIRES.

Yes. Her fucking tires.

My aunt, trying to get my mom to stop running her mouth (because my mother talks a lot), asked me about my finals and about the chuckle my grandpa and I'd had earlier that day about Jack Kerouac (whom I loathe with all of my being). She and my grandmother and I talked about school, about profs at ISU whom my aunt had known when she'd gone to school there, about movies that I'd seen that they were thinking about seeing, all that sort of thing. Between the three of us, we maintained an entertaining conversation that was balanced between the three of us, and it lasted a good hour, maybe even an hour and a half.

The second I opened my mouth, my mother pulled out a JCPenney catalog and started ignoring me.
THEN she took a fucking phone call.

Granted, the call was from my sister, who's still at school in Steubenville, OH, and she was just calling to say Happy Mother's Day. I'm down with that. What bugged me is that my mother started recounting to her all of the stupid, boring-ass stories she had just been telling to me and my aunt and gma.

I'm not sure there's even a word for the type of woman that my mother is. I mean, come on, the woman is more than forty years old now. Seriously. I don't even talk on the phone if there are people in the same room as me.

I know this is a petty thing to be upset about. The entire thing is just stupid, I know. But on top of all the BS from the last twenty-some-odd years, it's just more fuel to the fire. My aunt apologized a half-dozen times to me on the way home about my mom barely talking to me while I was there, but to be honest, the less my mom talks to me, the less I have to pretend that I'm listening.

I didn't mean for this to be a whole long rant about how shitty my mom is as a mother (and sometimes as a person). But being all bluh about my mom is a lot of what makes me who I am. My general attitude and personality is a bit more masculine than most girls my age - well, honestly, than most girls period, and I think that's because my mother, who biologically and socially should have been the iconic woman in my life due to some child psychology thing, was so abhorrent to me in so many ways that I decided that I was going to ditch a lot of feminine behaviors and mindsets and start modeling myself more on my dad. Which is fine, I love hanging out with the guys and all and having fun, but it's also part of the reason that I am incredibly lonely at school sometimes; I have such a deep-set issue with women because The First Woman In My Life fucked up really hard and it affects me almost every day.

Luckily, my father understands, to some degree. He's actually made reference to it out loud, and trust me, him coming out and saying that he Understands Something About Me is a big deal^.  But essentially, here's what happened: my sister wanted to go hang out with a guy who was not her boyfriend. It was a platonic friend, one who wasn't particularly "interested" in her, so to speak, or vice versa, but my dad told her no because it was "inappropriate^^". Well, Emm got frustrated with him for this and came back at him with, "Well, Kayla hangs out with all guys all the time and she's only dating one of them!"

My father coolly looked back at her and said, "Emm, Kayla is a tomboy. You  might want to be a tomboy, but you aren't. Kayla doesn't get along with girls, and if I didn't let her hang out with the guys, who see her as one of the guys, then she wouldn't have any friends. Now go call Katelyn and go see a chick flick."

My father also understands that I hate chick flicks, for the most part, and has never raised an eyebrow at my love of action movies and superheros. I would never have said this when I was eighteen, or even when I was nineteen^^^, but my dad is Really Super Freaking Cool^^^^.

Well, I really ought to stop ranting about my parents - because I know nobody cares - and go to bed. Tomorrow Adam and I are going to Ichiban with Brian and Abby for lunch to have Super Special Awesome Bento Boxes, and then we are going to go buy fabric to get started on our Super Special Awesome Steampunk Stuff that I'm going to try and make so that we can go to Gen Con all dressed up Super Special Awesome.


___________________

* - Aunt Beth is my mom's sister (I think younger, but I don't remember), and one of the few people on my mother's side of the family that my dad gets along with. When we first moved to Indiana when I was eleven, Beth watched me and my sister's during the day in the summer time because my dad couldn't afford daycare and my Aunt Sha was busy or something. That summer we spent with Beth was AWESOME and in my mind my real mothers are my Aunt Beth and Aunt Sha, in no order other than alphabetical.

** - She never even considered it might be ALLERGIES. I'll come out and say it right now, my mother is a bona fide hypochondriac. I didn't know what a hypochondriac was until I read "The Sign of Four" (at least, I think it was "The Sign of Four"... my insomniac Holmsian know-it-all friend Jason isn't answering my trivia-question-like text because - wait for it - he's actually asleep for the first time in days).

*** - Also, I'll just come out and say this, I really hate Marion. I'm sorry to anyone who lives there, but if you've grown up in Marion you either agree with me or you already hate me anyway because of the subject matter of my novels (let's just pretend they're actually published by now, or you're reading this several years in the future after I've become stupidly famous and you're going through the archives of my entires). But my point is that every time my mom starts running her mouth about Marion I just want to punch her in the freaking throat****

**** - Although, let's be honest here again, I want to punch my mother in the throat no matter what she's talking about, usually.

^ - My senior year of high school my father and I were screaming at each other over the stupidest shit. It got so bad that I automatically threw up every morning from sheer nerves, and couldn't eat a damn thing until as late as ten o'clock at night (later the doctor said that I have acid reflux disease and that stress makes me overproduce stomach acid, which was why I was throwing up all the time. They prescribed me Prevacid for a while (this was before you could get it over-the-counter), and pretty much I couldn't function without it for four months. Now and then I'll get stressed out enough I start vomiting again, but it has to be some pretty big shit. Like, seriously huge.

^^ - Although, as an aside here, my dad also thinks tank tops, napping while sitting on the couch with a boyfriend, and watching The Untouchables on a Sunday are "inappropriate", too.

^^^ - There was a ten-month period or so when I was definitely Not Living With Them anymore, which was a result of Fighting For Years And Never Resolving Anything mixed with Dad And Kayla Are A Little Too Much Alike, with more than a little bit of Kayla Spent The Weekend At Adam's And Dad Found Out.

^^^^ - Dad's coolness factor became cemented when he emailed me a "yo mamma" joke he found on the internet and told me he couldn't think of anyone else he could share it with... except for me.

My Texting Conversation Between Me and My Sister This Morning

Me: AAAAHHH THE VELOCIRAPTORS ARE GONNA GET MEEEEE
Lauren: Umm. What.
Me: RUUNNN THEY'RE GONNA GET YOU TOOOO
Lauren: I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.
Me: THE VELOCIRAPTOOORRRSSSSSuh
Lauren: I think you had too much caffeine this morning. Or someone poisoned you.
Me: AAAAAAHHHHHH

Clearly...

I am not very good at blogging.

To be fair, though, I've had two relatives die within less than six weeks, I've had short stories due for my fic class, and I've been trying to get to the gym more. I don't even have the energy to blog about what's going on in my life, because it's (a) depressing, (b) boring, or (c) both.

I'm finished with chapter nine of deAngelis... sort of. I decided, after finishing revising the ninth chapter, that this book has got to be written in third person. It just has to. Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison do really well with first-person narratives, but I just haven't figured out how to do it, yet. My main characters are always full of spark and life and personality, but the supporting "cast", if you will, of my novels just isn't doing what I need it to do, and that's because I'm spending more time with my main character than I really need to be. So it's back to chapter one and changing everything to third. This should only put me a couple of weeks behind schedule, although I can tell you right now I'm not going to have the thing done by May 1st.

(Also, speaking of Jim Butcher, for those of you who haven't read Changes yet - don't be afraid! I know you may have heard some bad things, and while it is definitely going to rock you in ways you may not want to be rocked, the fact of the matter is that Jim isn't doing the things he did in Changes just to screw with us. He's a wonderful writer, and whatever you think he's screwed up, trust him - he's going to remedy it in one way or another. I mean, seriously, remember the out-of-the-blue romance with Anastasia Luccio that all of us were kind of like huhwaitwhat about? Yeah. He was doing it on purpose and there was a reason behind it, and we found that out after a while. So yeah. Calm the flip down, haters.)

I seem to have gained a few more pounds since my last post (sitting at 170 now), but I'm fully committing to my new workout regime, and while I'm not watching what I eat, I'm definitely more aware of it. My sister turned me on to this site called www.caloriecount.com, which is helping a lot both with being able to visualize what I'm doing and encouraging me to be more active in my daily life. It's only been one week since I started this new regime, but I'm determined to make this the one that counts. Yes!

Now for some wonderful internet finds!

I've been craving sushi for a loooong time now, and especially cupcakes (since I've cut down on sweets in my diet... but not entirely cut them out!), so these wonderful little things just made me all giggly on the inside. I will definitely have to try these over the summer! I've never worked with fondant before, but it shouldn't be that hard... should it?

This guy kind of rocks out loud. For those of us who can't WAIIIIIT for some of the films-based-on-comics to come out, this guy is friggin' awesome. All of these are "fanedit" trailers, with scenes, soundtracks, and music spliced together from different movies to make a "trailer" for an upcoming film. The guy has talent, and while clearly they are not professionally done, it is difficult not to try and watch them all in one sitting.

Also, I really really really want this lady to make my next birthday cake. I mean seriously. Hmm. I seem to be thinking about sweets a lot more today than usual.

And, for the last Cool Internet Thing of the day, I just have to point out that I must have one of these.

Did I mention that Adam made me the best shirt ever? It says "Team Edward", but has the blood sigil or whatever on it that you see all over the place on Fullmetal Alchemist. So clearly I am referring to Edward Elric.

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Noveling! ...without pants.

Well, Spring Break is over and I am cured of my particularly vindictive sinus infection, so now it is back to the daily grind of being an English major and aspiring author. At just-past two in the morning, I did in fact manage to finish writing chapter four of deAngelis, so that's always news of the good sort. My goal is still May 1st, to have the entire thing in its final draft. Still not entirely sure how likely that is, given the way that I've spent the last six weeks struggling through the first four chapters; the last three were spent on the fourth chapter alone.

I intentionally left my computers in my room when I went home for vacation, knowing that the best way for me to get past a rut in a scene or a chapter is to just walk away from it for a while - I've never been one of those people who can just "skip it" and then go back to it later; I always feel as if I'm trying to pretend the entire scene or chapter just didn't happen.

Here's my Spring Break, in a nutshell: working at Dairy Queen for a little over fifteen hours, getting foot rubs from Adam, going to see Shutter Island with Adam (which, long story short, we decided to give 4/5, Leonardo diCaprio has really improved since being king of the dorks), watching cartoon with Alek, and sitting around the new condo crocheting granny squares in psychedelic colors. The only words that I wrote the entire time were in my personal journal, which I'm not sharing here. Also I went to see my mom and that wasn't really that exciting, but all things considered it definitely could have been worse, given that the woman is batshit insane.

At any rate, more work on deAngelis tomorrow after class and gym and hot tub.

Anyone have a good cure for chronic heartburn?

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Having Withstood the Plague...

I now seem to be suffering from some variant of the black lung, meaning that I'm more or less barely surviving these lovely little coughing fits that probably ought to be breaking me in half but for whatever reason aren't. They do, however, sufficiently unsettle everyone around me. Since being out of my room for any extended length of time left me feeling faint and especially unwell, I didn't attend any of my classes on Monday. I fully intended to go today, but apparently my body had other ideas - almost immediately after breakfast I passed out again for four hours and slept through my two classes for the day. One can only hope that I am sufficiently recovered by now.

Apparently the runt of the Guild took off an older vampire's hand at the Requiem event that I was talking about last time (and actually did manage to go to, although staying in bed probably would have been the better idea, physically). I'm not sure if I want to giggle over this or facepalm.

Didn't go to Geekercise today because of aforementioned black lung. Apparently without me to lead them, nobody else went either. Which tells you exactly who the Guild mom is. :-P

I did stumble across some fairly amusing things over the interwebs while I was incarcerated in my room with a fever that eventually spiked to 101.6 (finally, I'm back at my normal 96.5). I'm still trying to convince Adam that under no circumstances will we ever dress our future daughter up like this, but the fact of the matter is that even though I staunchly refuse, I can't help but want to high-five her mom (or her dad, I guess).

Anyone whose had a conversation with me for longer than ever would probably never hear me mention steampunk. Most people don't even really know that I kind of drool over steampunk fasion in a moderate sort of way, and the only indication that I even know what it is happens to be a necklace I got off Etsy (right) that I rarely wear because, let's face it, steampunk doesn't go well with Iron Man t-shirts. However, try not to be too surprised when I say that I would kill for a pair of these. I mean seriously. Here's hoping they're still available over the summer when I actually have a decent amount of cash to throw away on stupid crap things that are awesome.

As for cool things that have nothing to do with steampunk, I have actually discovered a few. There's a stop-motion video that I came across while screwing around on the internet, and it's pretty clever - actually made me smile. Also, cookies. Who couldn't love that? So here's a link to that.

Jason has a new video, which I'm just going to go ahead and embed because he's awesome and I like to show off that I actually know how to use a computer. As I understand it, it's something he did for one of his classes or summat. Reminds me a bit of Robert Osborne, which I guess would make sense. So here's that.

Go ahead and leave a comment or six on it if you feel so inclined; I know that it just absolutely makes the guy's day when someone expresses appreciation for his work. When I have less of a headache I'll go ahead and embed the posh video that he's got as well.

That's all I got for tonight. Midterms tomorrow. Have fun, kiddies.

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