Category Archives: All about me

Why I Want To Fail Miserably

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I don’t want to believe that there is such a thing as writers block. Like Bob Mayer says in his book, The Novel Writer’s Toolkit, writing is just like brick laying, you build a wall one brick at a time, and you write a novel, one word at a time. No drama. Just work. Get to it. Writer’s block is just laziness. Writer’s block is for suckers, sissies, and pansies.

I’m a pretty pansy. I might have writer’s block. Because of success. I have a book contract with a publisher. I am a finalist in the RMFW Gold Writer’s Contest. My rejections I get from agents are gushing. The words “obvious talent” are used often. I have obvious talent. I wish I had none. I want to be dragged from my house, tied to a tree, and laughed at for thinking I can be a writer. Rotten tomatoes to the face. Have them all go Middle Ages on me.

Because, deep down, at the very guts of who I am, I despise life. I believe the world is an awful place and death a welcome release from all the misery. I’m a dark-hearted pansy.

And the most precious dream I have, is the dream of writing and being good at it. My brother was an athlete who got all the girls. I was a bookish, chubby kid who could write a pretty cool story, and that was about it. For long days at a time, writing was all that kept me alive. My little, fragile dream of writing successfully.

So you see, success at writing means the world is good, that there are bunnies and kitties and happy butterflies flitting about. It means life is good. And I don’t want that. It shatters the dark, cramped dungeon I’ve made for myself, inside myself. And in the end, I don’t want the freedom.

So I’ve stopped writing, critiquing, showing up. But as a friend of mine said, now is not the time to wuss out. Now is the time to screw my courage to the sticking place, whatever the hell that means. It’s time to be a brick layer, laying bricks, one at a time because life is good. There are bunnies and kitties and happy butterflies flitting about. And I am meant for greater things than being imprisoned in doubts I only half believe.

A quick afterword. My writer’s block lasted three days. Because I have tools, and friends, and with help, I can bash right through anything. Thank all that is Divine.

Happy Days Destroyed My Soul

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I watched a buttload of T.V. growing up. Funny, that. Buttload. How much is that anyway? In kilograms? I don’t know. But I would watch around seven hours of T.V. a day growing up. My parents were absentee. I was neglected. Poor me.

A quick google, and it seems people watch around 5 hours of T.V. a day. Ha, I had that beat when I was ten years old and we didn’t have no new-fangled streaming Netflix streaming, or cable, or satellite, or video files on smart phones, none of that. I had four channels. Four. Ha. I dare any of you to watch the same four channels from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. day in, day out, for years on end. And no remote control, so changing channels required a commitment.

So yeah, I’m old.

And my grip on reality? Tentative. I was raised , not by parents, but by situation comedies, and they ruined me forever. Basically, I want my life, every part of my life, to have a nice solid story that takes about 23 minutes to complete and where I always get the girl, figure out the problem, get closure. This, of course, led me to despise the messy, unclosure of real life. I am not the Fonz. Oh, the Fonz, how I long to be the Fonz, in my leather jacket, slicked back hair, tough as nails, easy on the eyes, hard on the ladies.

Alas, I was not the Fonz. When I did venture out into the sunlight of real life, real girls would look right through me. I would snap my fingers. Nothing would happen. Seriously. Nothing. And I would slink back into the basement, turn on the T.V., and get lost in 23 minute chunks of funny dreamland. This lasted through college. Seriously, through college.

Again, googling, how I love to google, in the average 65 year life span, people spend a full nine years of their life watching T.V. Watching things happen to other people. Life lived as a voyeur.
I was not created to be a voyeur. I was created to live, to seize the day, carpe diem, boys, seize the day. But real life is scary, messy; snapping your fingers rarely results in magic. It can be disappointing. On the other hand, the raw realness of it is what makes it so wonderful.

Holding a trembling girl, dancing to music, smelling the trees in the morning, these require a full body, a full reality, to enjoy. And it’s up to me to seek closure, to make sense of the mess, and to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And really, the Fonz lost his cool when Richie Cunningham left. Such is life. Me? Every year, I might lose more hair, but I get a little cooler because the essence of cool is to believe in your own divinity. To live as if at any moment, a finger snap will turn on the juke box, and you’re favorite song will come blasting through, because it does happen. Of course it does.

Blog-o-phobia and Other Stupid Terrors

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I spend most of my days terrified.  Certain things help: ice cream, Grey’s Anatomy, mountain biking, sleeping, more ice cream.  But the terror remains.  At times,  I envy people who have panic attacks.  I would imagine it’s like binging on fear.  You get it all over with at one time, then move on.  I’m more of a maintenance fearer.  A little fear, every day,  a pinch between your cheek and gum.

Let’s get it straight, I don’t know how panic attacks work.  I don’t have that tight of a grip on reality.  I do know that surgeons are probably not talking about sleeping with one another while they are doing a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft.  I know Grey’s Anatomy isn’t reality.  Well, a part of me does.   The other thinks it is the only reality there is.

When fax machines first came out, I was terrified of faxing.  I never knew if you typed in the number first, then scanned thing, or if it was the other way around.   I would ask people to help me.  They would roll their eyes.  People don’t like people who are fearful.  People also don’t like whiners.  I’m afraid.  I whine.  I’m wildly unpopular.

Bookstores also scare me.  Libraries are better, since there’s not that commercial demon sitting on the cash register, licking its talons, but I’m not as comfortable as I once was around bookshelves.  I look at all the books and all I see are competitors, writers who have more talent than I could ever hope to have.  What business do I have adding my voice to the din?

My latest fear is reading other people’s blogs.   I have a blog-o-phobia.  Because I’m always comparing, judging, and assuming I suck.  Who cares what one ant is saying, out in the west, when there are more talented ants that have been blogging longer?  At this stage, me blogging is like standing in a blank room and singing my own praises to four white walls.  Only they aren’t walls, but windows, and everyone is watching me stand in an empty room and sing my own praises.  Pathetic.

However, I can fax now.  I really can.  You type in the number, then scan the document.  Ha.  I’m a frakkin’ genius.  And I’ll blog.  And I’ll go into bookstores.  And I’ll do all the things I’m afraid of doing because what is fear if not a challenge for us to be true to our better selves?