The mystery rash has returned! I had a feeling it was coming back, since my chin started itching again Friday, but I was kind of hoping it was just an itch, you know?
At least the joint pain and constipation are under control. Sigh.
Anyway, I’m almost done with Sade On the Wall. I’m also going to win NaNoWriMo, since I’m only about 3,000 words away from the goal (which is 50,000 words, for those of you new to NNWM). This will be a first for me; the first year I did NNWM, 2005, I finished my novel (The Praying Mantis Experiment), but was about 100 words off from 50k. The novel also sucks, big time. I finished NNWM in 2007 and 2009, but to this day haven’t finished either of those novels (The Cure Program and Secondhand Mom, respectively).
I’m so excited. I have mixed feelings about finishing the novel itself, though; in one way, I can’t wait to get to the end, to say I did it, but I’m also sad because… it’s over. Maybe that’s why I have such a hard time finishing novels — the over part. At least with “Sade” I have a sequel planned. I’m thinking of writing all of her journals throughout high school. I won’t say anymore, because I don’t want to give away the ending — I’ve known for a couple of months how it is going to end — but there will definitely be more.
Besides, I can’t let my awesome readers down! I am truly grateful for everyone who’s been reading. It feels amazing to have a group of people other than me waiting for each chapter, begging me for the next, feeling everything I feel as I write. I guess it’s how Stephen King or Maureen Johnson feel when their books hit the shelves and they start getting feedback from their Constant Readers and jars.
When I look at it that way, this flareup loses, completely.
Alternate title: “What I spent 1,000+ words on, instead of working on my NaNoWriMo novel.”
♦
Somewhere in the last couple of weeks, I’ve developed a mystery allergy. I’m itchy — all over — with no hives, bites, eczema scales, or anything visible. I get so itchy, at times, that I scratch until I bleed. At first, I thought it was dry skin, but I’ve been using lotion and paying attention throughout the last week, and my skin isn’t actually too dry. (The palms of my hands, on the other hand*, are wicked dry. They don’t itch, though.)
Then I thought it might be the laundry detergent we’re using. I put a little bit on my arm, rubbed it in with a Qtip, and went outside for a cigarette. Aside from being very cold because I couldn’t wear a jacket over my detergent-arm, nothing happened.
I got a little worried because a friend of mine has neighbors with a flea/bedbug/cockroach problem, but I don’t have any bites or marks (other than scratches from scratching so much). My friend and her kids are all fine, though, so I don’t think I could have picked any of it up, either.
Tonight, as I was cleaning out my cat’s brush, it hit me: Maybe I have developed an allergy to my cats’ dander. It would make sense. I pinned down that my bathrobe was making me the most itchy. It is 100% polyester, but none of my other polyester or polyester-blend clothing makes me itch. However, my cat slept on it every night for about a week. I’ve since washed it in hot water, and although I haven’t worn it, I’m willing to bet that it won’t make me itchy anymore. I also washed my sheets, comforter, pillow cases, afghan, and fleece blanket — yes, I sleep with a lot of blankets — recently, and the itching got a little less itchy.
I hate to admit that I could be allergic to my furry little child, but it’s kind of looking like it. I’m having visions of having to give Squirt (my baby) and Apollo (my parents’ baby) a dander bath, and of Squirt clawing my face off because she hates water. (The one and only time we had to give her a flea bath — because the people who gave her to me let their cats go in and outside without ever giving them flea treatments — she was pissed. And this was when she was a kitten; I’d hate to see how she’d react now.)
Blaine — thank you, Blaine! — suggested I try an antihistamine. I need to refill my Claritin-D pretty badly, anyway, so hopefully that will do the trick. I cannot believe I may have developed an allergy to my cats, but I feel lucky that I’m not swelling up or anything.
The other alternative is that Mike is right and it’s dust mites, which creeps me out so badly that I’d rather be allergic to my fuzzball.
♦
I’m so ashamed, I’ve been so mean “Simple Kind of Life,” No Doubt
This song is pretty close to summing up the last few days for me. I want to go back to Friday and slam my self-absorbed little head into the wall. Okay, so maybe I don’t want to hurt myself, but I’m pretty ashamed of that girl. That is not me, and I am disgusted at my own behavior. I didn’t mean it, at all, but I’m still ashamed.
♦
I’ve been writing like mad. I fell behind for a little bit, and honestly it was partly because I was too tired to write, and partly because I lost faith in my story. A handful of awesome people — Blaine, Jess, Becky, Sanya, and Veronica, to name a few — have been encouraging me to keep going, and have (just today) made me realize that I need to have faith in my story. I’ll be honest: for a little while there, I thought it sucked and that I should stop and do something else. I was afraid that I’d failed to create the strong characters I wanted to create. They’re still not as strong as I’d like them to be, but when Jess BBMed me tonight and told me how much she loved the story and the characters, how strong they are, I said to myself, “You need to trust your story and your own writing; you are doing better than you thought you were.” (I may have actually said, “I need to trust my story…” but most likely, this conversation took place in the third person. Sigh.)
Tonight — or, okay, this morning, apparently; it’s after midnight now — I plan on breaking 13,000 words, but it’s become less about the word count and more about finishing it** and then editing it, because holy shit, there are actually people reading who expect a new chapter every day. I was, in a daydreaming sort of way, entertaining the idea of self-publishing the edited, complete version, but at the time told myself that that would be putting the cart before the horse… Now, it’s still putting the cart before the horse, but it’s a lot less of a daydream and more of a thought; I’m really thinking about it now.
♦
I may be rich with word count and chapters, but I am broke. I just finished a client’s website and am starting a new one, though, and am expecting payment from another client soon, so hopefully in another week or so I won’t have to worry about my bills. I feel horrible that Mike is the only one putting gas into the car, and that I haven’t given my mom money toward our car insurance, and that two major bills are coming up — one of which I’m not sure I can afford at all; it will all depend on how soon I next get paid.
Honestly, I’m kind of thinking of getting a part-time job somewhere. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, to be honest, but there are a few things that hold me back. I definitely don’t think I could handle two jobs right now. I want to stick this self-employment thing out, really, but the longer I go in this position, the more I miss having that secure weekly or bi-weekly paycheck (among other things). Maybe I should give it until the beginning of the new year, and then decide.
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So what’s new with you?
*No pun intended.
**I especially want to finish this because it will only be the second novel I’ve ever actually finished writing. I still haven’t finished The Cure Program or Secondhand Mom. I really suck at finishing things; it has to be done right away, or it gets harder for me to come back to.
NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month, for those of you who have somehow missed all of my blogs and tweets and Facebook status updates regarding the matter — starts in less than nine hours.
Nine hours, until I can finally start writing the book I’ve been planning for the last two months, until the idea I got over a year ago can finally take shape and grow.
I sat at McDonald’s, waiting for Sandy and my godkids Kaylene and Konner to arrive. I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I missed them so much. I sat waiting among parents with little kids running around, eating dinner, playing in the PlayLand, and suddenly realized that I was probably the only person there without a kid. It felt a little strange, not being in what I call The Mom Club, even though most of my friends have kids. I felt kind of out of place, a lone woman waiting for her group to arrive.
I started to wonder, what would it feel like for a woman to meet her child for the first time in such a situation? I thought about it until Sandy and the kids arrived, and while we ate I scribbled the idea down on a scrap piece of paper.
It sat in my ideas notebook for a long time.
After it’d sat in that notebook for about a year, I pulled it out and expanded the idea on a single sheet of paper. I did a little bit of pre-writing, then lost my steam. I paperclipped the original scrap to that sheet of paper, and it went right back into that idea notebook for another few months.
In September, I started thinking about NaNoWriMo again. The idea I’d forgotten about suddenly demanded to be written. Originally, I’d thought about just writing a short story. I had done a brief character outline of my main character, but nothing else. Now, a different character had taken shape, with a host of supporting characters to guide her through the journey I planned for her.
I spent the last two months breathing life into these characters and preparing an outline. It gave me something else to think about besides the stress of being sick and the stress of school.
Now, hours away, I am still itching to get started. The fire that started within me is still burning brightly. I actually can’t help but wonder if the events of the last couple of years of my life have all led up to this moment. It took me being really sick and going through trying to get diagnosed to get back to my first love: writing. It took me having to drop out of school because I am just too stressed out and my body is suffering because of it. You know how, in a book or movie, big events are the only things that change the main characters? It’s like that in real life, too. For me, being in pain and enduring all these weird ass symptoms — someday I will post an updated list, as they’ve progressed a lot since — was what it took to get me to come back to writing; I haven’t done much writing in over a year.
In coming back to my love, I feel like I’m finding myself again. Maybe I can’t find the pieces of me that this disease has taken away, but I am finding pieces of my old self that I can still have. I can still write. Yes, it may be painful sometimes (I can still remember writing The Cure Program during NaNoWriMo 2007 and all of the pain that brought me), but it’s worth it because it reminds me that I am still here inside of this hurting body.
So although it’s hard to be completely honest about how I feel — how truly depressed I am — I can honestly say that having Secondhand Mom to look forward to has given me purpose again. It’s not the same kind of purpose that school gave me — the doing it just to do it kind. It means more, and it makes me feel like I’m alive. I know that sounds so corny because it’s so goddamn overused, but that’s truly how I feel. As I thought about all of my characters and gave them histories and problems and brought them to life, I think I brought myself back to life. This disease has sucked an awful lot of life out of me, and I know that the people around me will agree with me when I say that.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, writing this book is giving me a reason to keep on fighting for myself. And right now, that’s the closest I can get to describing how I feel.
I’m a rockstar at this blogging thing, I know. You don’t have to tell me how great I am at posting every day, and you definitely don’t have to tell me that I post way too much.
Ahem.
These last few weeks have been insane! I wish that I could remember everything but, sadly, my brain is wiped clean. I have enough trouble talking and putting words together into coherent sentences, never mind trying to remember everything that’s been going on. I now know how Ozzy feels.
I’m not even sure where to begin, as I can’t remember what I last wrote about and am way too lazy to actually go hunting through the two or so posts I’ve written in the last couple of months, so let’s just cut to the chase: car (Lisa Mazda) is dead, all I’ve been doing is working, my story “Anonymiss” won second place in this year’s Fresh Ink contest over at Naugatuck Valley, and I can meow.
The 2009 Writers’ Conference was Wednesday, and the guest speaker was Everett Hoagland, a poet from Massachusetts. His poems were really, really good. I literally fell into a sort of trance as I listened to him read. They were filled with a rhythm that I swear only African-American poets have. Even this guy’s presence was amazing; he was just so composed and peaceful.
I read my winning story from last year’s Fresh Ink, “Moon Prayer,” just before the awards for this year’s contest were presented, and after I read Everett pulled me aside and asked me how long I’ve been writing. I told him since about third grade, and remembered the story about dalmatians I wrote with my classmate Sherry-Lee. (I don’t remember what that story was about, only that it was about dalmatians and that we wrote and illustrated it on darker fuchsia construction paper.)
“I can tell you take this seriously,” he told me. “For you to write such detail, to know so much about someone who is so different from you, is amazing.”
I could barely speak, I was so astonished that this amazing man loved my story.
“You are already an accomplished writer. We’re going to be hearing about you,” he said. He said that to me several times throughout the day.
I don’t think I’m a bad writer. I mean, I know I’ve got a little talent, I guess. Several teachers, family, friends, and Professor Harding have told me over and over that I have talent. I guess I always just thought they were biased, because most of these people really liked me to begin with. For this guy, someone who did not know me at all, to hear one story and say those amazing things to me… Well, it meant a lot. He was so, so inspiring.
I felt really good about the whole day, actually. I got to connect with a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while, and Professor Harding and I went over a little of The Cure Program. To make things even better, Mike spent the whole day with me because I don’t have a car and had no other way of getting there. He said he had a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed having him there. We had a blast during the writers’ workshop that Professor Harding did.
As strange as it sounds, I really miss NVCC. I’ve never missed an old school before. I’ve never really felt like I belonged anywhere. But I truly did fit in at that community college, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel that “snug” anywhere else. I think that’s as good as it gets for me.
I had a lot more I wanted to write about, but I want to get to bed. Maybe I’ll update again before July. (;
Almost forgot that I promised pics. Got my toes done, but need to get them done again now.
I look so freaking tired here. I got my hair cut last weekend, and dyed again, thanks to my cousin Alicia.
This turned out to be a longer post than I intended. It’s (most) of my woes, so if you want to skip it and read something more cheery, I recommend the Fun stuff category. Otherwise, leave a comment and tell me about your woes. It’s not all about me here, anyway.
This morning on my way to work, I passed a Sunoco and glanced at the price. It was $1.99 a gallon (cash). While most of us rejoice at this lower, Walmart-style price, there’s that nagging feeling in the back of my head that says, “this is bad.” I am only vaguely aware that the reason for the lower gas prices is the declining stock market. The people around me who know about these things — like KJ at work — tell me that the price of gas is going to keep going down, since the stock market won’t be going up anytime soon.
It’s a Catch 22, just like my own financial situation. I ranted a little about this on Scars Can Speak (the Letters of Love blog), and I’ve been writing in my own journal every day about different ways to tackle this problem. Either way, I lose on something. If, for example, I get a second job, I’ll be doing even more running from place to place and who knows how I’ll get my school work done for the rest of the semester. If I get more hours or can go full-time at my current job, I’ll only be able to take two classes next semester rather than getting a full head start on my BA. If I can’t get more hours at my current job and can’t get a second job, I’ll have to leave my current job (which I really like) for a full-time corporate job. Yes, I’d be making more money, but I wouldn’t be able to go back to school full-time for a while. I’d have to be a part-time student. It would take forever. I am so career-oriented and want everything done yesterday that it would drive me nuts. Continue reading →
— starts in less than nine hours.
