Once upon a time, a girl. . .

Sometimes you see something at just the right time.

Inexplicable.

Philippa Gregory says she has to fall in love with her characters. The book about Margaret Beaufort was not easy to read. She pissed you off most of the time. But she willed stuff to happen and at, what I consider, great personal sacrifice. "What I did for love" etc. She could love and did love but had this other agenda. Couldn't do it. I'd carry the growler to the bar to get a refill for grampa. So she admitted she found it hard to love her and you knew it when you read the book THE RED QUEEN. It was one of her least enjoyable works.

So this last book I wrote, I couldn't fall in love. There really was not a character for that. But now I am finished and I am in love with them and don't want to put it up, want to keep living their lives for them, controlling the weather and what color to paint the porch.

Amazon goofed up the listing and the royalties and Smashwords has yet to cough up a cent. And the promoting is so whorish. Either you like it or you don't but why the fuck don't they even want to look? I spend hours every day just reading blurbs cuz I am so afraid I am going to miss something. And my Kindle has at least twenty books I am dying to get to. So I sit and play Spider Solitaire on the iPhone. I am so sick of it. I don't think I am going to do it anymore. I just read this John Steinbeck quote where he says you have to not stop and think and plan otherwise you lose your association with the words that are making these people live and that is in direct opposition to all this MFA stuff and outlining and little index cards with plot points. And how I write. Just sit down and wish the fucking crippled fingers would not keep hitting the wrong keys I want to go so fast.

And I am half in tears over it. Like they said my baby was funny looking and kind of dumb, and that is when I get these ridiculous blog spikes and I do not even now where they came from. Some one read a post from about six years ago. It tells you that, so I looked at it and I was talking to Louie about it being when Lisa had that little house and Billy lived with her and it was like a lull in our lives. So strange. Why did someone go and read that out of a clear blue sky? And what could it mean to them? What do anyone else's words mean to someone else? I don't know, but sometimes I am crying over it and laughing and hoping for a certain thing to happen to imaginary people. Cuz I couldn't make it happen for my real people. I guess.

Tomorrow: back to the big white Welbies, for sure.

Today's CTA: Do you put stuff in your fiction that you really wish did happen to you? Or do you want it nothing like your real life?

words

My brother took a course at Marquette that was etymology, or related to etymology. I loved it. It made me buy a book by some guy named Hayakawa. I don't know if it was the senator, but it was about words. I keep saying I love to fool around with the letters, but it is the words. They get me in so much trouble but I love to mess with them--manipulate them. I can define myself three different ways to three different people just by letting them look at my words. Actually I think I can even do that to myself. Here is a cutie for today. From Futility Closet.


anserine
adj. of or resembling a goose

Irony

I feel so bad that my attempts at irony are misconstrued or missed altogether. I fear I have taken subtlety too far. Yet, that cannot be possible. Otherwise, why would all this flak be flying past my ears?

Let it go? Never. I shake a thing, with my teeth in its neck, until it is dead.

CONTRAST

I have the bitterest taste in my mouth.

I need some sugar.

Fuck It

Funny how you make a very brief personal observation about how something painful once happened to you and it now tends to distort your perceptions of certain things, things which people may find great joy in, God having given them the grace to feel such enjoyment, and a pack of vicious animals starts chewing on your ass like you are literally dogmeat. And the remark can be about a very small and painful moment in your life, but they have to construe that only a drunk would spew such shit. To concisely paraphrase if such a thing is possible. And the remark can have been made to reflect upon why you are unable to share everyone's joy at the moment, actually a remark that certainly didn't need to be made at all, but since I have started messing around with the alphabet I get myself in more and more trouble.

Almost reminds me of that cabal that gets all undone when you mention that fifteen year olds entertain sexual thoughts.

I fucking give up.

And, then, they flock to the fucking blogsite like flies to the corpse. What the fuck is this all about?

"You can't please them all. There's always somebody calling you down. I do my best..."

MY FUCKING BEST. Not good enough for you, you unknown. THEN DON'T READ MY WORDS.

Buzz the fuck off. That's what flies do.

Over the Pipe

Mood. What a silly word. Silly sounding. Something a cow did. Must look up the etymology. Starting to think Wikipedia is more useful than google. Reminds me of a joke.

That was cheap of me. Cute tho, no?

I am in the slough of despond, I think. I am in an adolescent place. For sure. I did one of those Kindle Select promotions, and it was so important to me that I forgot to start promo til half way through the first day. So it pretty much tanked. I felt so desolate. For a couple of minutes. Whatever I didn't do to enhance that promo, my blog stats again went through the roof. Then I got some kind words about my "craft" from another source. So if my life is a see saw, I am standing on the board in that middle place where you could make it rock back and forth. You know exactly what I mean. In our playground it was over the pipe. Which sounds much cooler than 'mood'.

Then we had a recent family event where an aunt by marriage died and all the other strings tied to that part of my life are already gone. I hold grudges till like eternity, and found less and less reason to deal with those people, but the aunt was always nice to me. She kind of treated me, when I was little, like she knew I needed someone to be nice to me. My brother did some really mean stuff to me, like the story about the swimming pool and the watch, Bobby. And auntie Edie was kind. Maybe she was kind to everyone, or maybe I noticed it cuz she was the only one kind to me at that time, but when I went up to the casket, I was thinking, Auntie Edie, this does not look like you AT ALL, but where ever you are you are fine now, and thank you for teaching me the easy way to learn to swim.

You go to these things to offer condolence and to say good by and "pay respects". Because you are supposed to. They had this slide show thing about her with many wonderful pictures of her and her family and these certain friends of theirs. One of the sons said, "You are in there a couple of times." No. I wasn't. Nor my brothers. Nor my grandma who was her mother in law, one glimpse of my mom who was Edie's husband's sister, that I got ticked off about at his wake cuz my mom, his sister, was left standing in the rain, and one glimpse of my dad. This family was so close to mine when I was small. I would take the bus to go stay over at their house. My cousin, the godmother of my first child, used to ask me everything about the facts of life. And at that wake, I realized, we were nothing to them. Not even a memory. And all my instincts to draw away from them over the latest years have been correct. When my mom was dying, they did a couple of things that displeased me, but I chalked it up to them trying to be nice and it being an awkward time, and most of them are kind of slow, but now I don't think I am going to have anything to do with them if I can possible avoid it. My circle of friends and relatives is growing smaller and smaller. It seems convenient to me. There are so many things in life you can't control--that you have to put up with, and up to this point I thought I was growing more mellow and tolerant, and making peace with some of the crap that is my life, but I'm not. In my head I am more angry than ever, and at the same time, I feel so good about so many things. One thing I would love to tell younger people is that they need to be more selfish, but I can't because I don't know how to tell them how to do that with out hurting anyone's feelings. That has been the consistent thread running through my life. I was always teased about having hurt feelings, (which I always had)and I always worry about hurting people's feelings. This from the person who has said, "I hope a truck runs over you on your way home." Yeah, I apologized.

"The problem is all inside your head", she said to me.

The gospels should be Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and Art.

FREE

Two free days for the MAZE in the Amazon KDP Select program, Saturday and Sunday, March 3 and 4.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0061SB3TC

It Is Just Me. . .It Always Is

"Women are more likely than men to have rapid cycling and mixed episodes (both depression and hypomania occurring at the same time.)"



My current doctor is very casual about my condition. It is a good way for her to be because sometimes she is in a friendly chatty mood and sometimes she is in a hurry and somewhat brusque and skeptical in dealing with me. And the fact that she has written in rather too large letters at the top of my file BIPOLAR DISORDER absolves her from having to pay too much attention to how I might react because she figures she never knows what she is going to be dealing with from visit to visit. And she is pretty good about the drugs, listens and explains, but that is because she knows I usually come in well-armed for that battle.

But I opened with this quote for another reason. I was first told when I was about thirty and a raving 104 pound lunatic that I was probably a "manic depressive" but he wanted to use lithium and I fail the kidney test. (It is a heavy metal) so I blithely went on with my life, forging tranquilizer scrips and altering dates on the bottles for refills from the elderly pharm that was a good friend of my dads. Yeah, one of my more reprehensible moments, I agree. And buying quaaludes and valium from a girl I worked with who knew a nurse who was a thief. I also spent a year or two in Rum therapy. Oh, and smoked a barrel of dope. But pregnancies and other life crises brought me relatively unscathed (at least visibly)to the present day. Not speaking for those surrounding me who still look a little shell-shocked. And I have resources available and kind, educated people to keep me on an even keel. Pretty fucking boring sometimes.

BUT

I had a discussion with someone some years ago whose adult child had committed violence against his mother and had to be hospitalized, etc. ultimately being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which, the story went, he had been self treating with alcohol. (A common manifestation) The person went into some detail about the current treatment of the adult child and discussed the classes they took to familiarize themselves with the disorder. (Never heard of them) and when I mentioned that I was a rapid cycler he showed utter disdain and dismissiveness indicating verbally that that WAS not a component of the illness and the cycles were usually months long. I had always had respect for that person, and what he said did shake me up a bit, but he wasn't a doctor or even working in social services, so I didn't let it change my life patterns. And now I kind of think of that person, who is a pretty nice guy, as one of those people that think they know it all. Which he really kind of isn't, generally. But reading this in someone's blog today validated me, in a kind of over due back in the shadows of my mind way.

It is true that people with this disorder tend to make light of it, and sometimes, oh,no, use it as an excuse for some outrageous behavior, but, to some one who was always the grade skipping high IQ star of the academic scene, to be dismissed so lightly, and for my knowledge to be ignored (pooh-poohed) certainly left a much bigger mark on my ego than I realized. As I did today when reading the quote.

I don't need to grasp at straws. I am doing quite well, and I like me just fine, you may have noticed me saying. But, it is another case of someone thinking knowledge you pay someone for is better knowledge than the stuff you live and learn on your own. Actually, I look back and try to think of other times I was treated so dismissively, and, at this moment cannot call one to mind. (Except for the regular day-to-day junk I get from the spouse which rolls off my back.) I'm not so sure of what the point is I am trying to make here, but I do want you to know that the 'know it all' types, (there is currently one ranting on the Linked-In author's group about grammar. He would stroke if he read my books. Grammer, schmammer) (Cuz I wanna--that's why.) really get my goat. So if you want to question my knowledge, come to the table well-armed. When I make stuff up, I am very careful to tell that to everyone, and it usually becomes truth in a week or two anyway. Yeah. I do have those credentials handy. Here. . .