Project Afoot!

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

In my last narrative post I talked about adults wanting stuff for Christmas and having to get it later on. This sort of happened to me, and it became one of those intense symbolic-object issues that disturbs me a little.

When I was small, I had a dollhouse. It was made of painted metal and filled with bland plastic furniture, a different color for each room. Inside and out, the details were all filled in–It was a white brick Colonial, and I think it had painted carpeting and pictures on the walls. It had a family of ivory plastic people on stands like toy soldiers. They couldn’t sit on their plastic chairs and they rolled off their plastic beds. It was the most frustrating, creativity-stifling toy imaginable, and deep down inside I hated it without knowing that I hated it.

(You can Google 60s metal dollhouse images here.) Pretty kitschy, eh? Appealing with their bright colors? Trust me, for my literal little Poindexter brain it just didn’t work. People don’t stand around their dinner table, damn it! The usual happened–over the years, pieces got lost, and I think I dented the roof by using it to stand on. Trying to explain that I wanted the sort of dollhouse I read about (Little Plum! Aieee!!) got me nowhere, because I already had one! Ungrateful little churl.

I knew my dad would never in a billion millennia build me a scale model of a real Japanese house (curse you, Rumer Godden), so I sort of buried the desire. It’s a bright shiny world, after all. Then when I was in my early 20s, I went to the Smithsonian and I saw THE Dolls’ House in the National Museum of American History. My heart broke into a trillion pieces.

I vowed that someday I would have a Real Dollhouse. As wishes go, it’s not all that major. There are crazy miniature people coming out of America’s ears. Every decent hobby shop carries some stuff. Except the miniature replicas of Planned Parenthood brochures and the US Constitution. Not all hobby shops have those. So I told my soul to lay in wait. Even simple Real Dollhouses ain’t chump change.

Then one day my in-laws gave me a substantial cash present. I think to celebrate my college graduation/getting into Harvard grad school. Bless them, they probably expected me to get books or some nice Oxford-stripe shirts or similar appropriate prezzie. But no–I hauled my poor husband off to the humungous hobby store somewhere in Worcester or something–and came home with my very own two-story Victorian, with an extension, no less. It was a pre-built display model and on sale.

This is when I discovered that Real Dollhouses take Real Work. I wanted a Painted Lady, and I chose to cover the meek, drab pink it came in with a pink that had personality, staying power, and its own zipcode. This took two whole little bottles of craft paint, and a lot of time. My husband was used to my ah, er, projects, so he wasn’t too mean about the dollhouse–or surprised that I never quite finished painting the trim. (Peach and violet. Yowsah!)

Wooden dollhouses are fragile (especially pre-built display models of ANYTHING, duh), and I think the door was the first thing to break. (We had cats and two toddlers at the time.) Then a section of the porch. The flowers came out of their drilled holes in the windowboxes. And pretty soon, I had a big pink slum that, wherever we moved, took up too much space. Dollhouse furniture (the non-plastic kind) is pricey–and also fragile. So what few pieces I got from time to time also sort of fell apart.

But I was falling apart too, so I didn’t have the bandwidth to notice.

Stupid Publishing. Feh.

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Sorry, guys.

I’m getting ready to publish my book Max and I’ve now received advice from two separate sources to take down all my fiction from my blog. No more freebies from me. I feel kind of sad about this, especially about my WriMo novella, which I posted as I got it done as an incentive for finishing it. (Which I did.)

If you’re a friend of mine and in the middle of something, PM me and I’ll hook ya up wid a PDF.

Wish me luck!

Living Dolls

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Before my family of origin reached a certain level of no-return disintegration, we had Christmas, and I had birthdays; and I could count on getting presents as naturally as I could yams and can-berry sauce on Thanksgiving. The red bike that Dad had to put together after I was packed off on Christmas Eve. The microscope. The doll (“Beautiful Crissy”) whose hair grew as you yanked it out of her head through a foramen previously unremarked (now in Gray’s as the sulcus crissaeum). The hair was auburn, her eyes were violet, and she succeeded at being almost alive.

Almost.

The sorts of physical things I wanted and did not get were ephemeral child-wishes, unfulfilled because they were just that. I don’t remember any particulars, just that there was a whole layer of the world marked “Baby Stuff,” meaning that they were appropriate enough for my age–but not for Mommy and Daddy’s prodigy, “4 going on 24.” I was taught to scorn and to sneer at other children and their puerile little urges: I was going to Johns Hopkins by way of Barnard, boy howdy!

As might have been predicted, this attitude and the fact that my Stanford-Binet IQ of Far-Too-High might as well have been tattooed on my forehead made me unpopular. So the thing I wanted more than anything else was a sibling, so that I’d have somebody to play with.

But my mother’s uterus was tilted, so none were forthcoming. I grew up alone and lonely–no living dolls to help diaper and love, to boss around, to bring into my complicated universe of talking animals and superheroes.

It worked out in the end, I guess. I had imaginary friends instead, which became the bedrock of my growing up to be a writer. (So much for med school–as it turned out it was Harvard (English) by way of the University of Wisconsin (Art)–I really do wonder if my father, had he lived to be in the audience in Harvard Yard, would have thought the PhD to be as satisfying as an MD. Probably not.)

As a matter of course, my daughter had to have a sibling, so my own far superior uterus plopped forth a little brother for her. And she hated him on sight, and has more or less hated him for the 23 years since. Very little playing together; and her deep mournful desire was to be an only child. I’m told that that’s the way it goes: When dolls become really and truly alive, they bring a world of complications.

As for me, some things never change, and the thing I wanted for Christmas this year was that rubber-band loom I kept seeing in the toy and craft stores. Baby Stuff; I think it’s marketed for the 8-12-year-old market. Instead, I got a superabundance of very nice soap and a beautiful candle holder shaped like a lotus. (My daughter has bad taste in perfectly lovely little boys, but excellent taste in tchachkes.) And thus adulthood–one is very clean and has pretty things, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Especially when one has a little slab of plastic all one’s own, and can (feeling naughty) go to the store and get it for oneself. So there, Mom and Dad.

Powered by Plinky

In the Hospital: Tiny Blessings

09 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

So there I was, having what might most delicately be called Pee Issues. Cranberry juice didn’t help, and I was starting to feel really run down. I figured the latter to be a) lingering depression over Not Moving, and/or b) fatigue from Finally Moving last weekend, both exacerbated by the stress of having Comcast screw up transferring my Internet service for over a week. But they turned it on at last, and I still felt every bit as crappy, and besides . . . Pee Issues . . . so I did what my urology team told me to do like a good girl and popped into the ER yesterday.

My expectation was to be seen promptly and sent home with a prescription for some Macrobid for a run-of-the-mill bladder infection. One out of two ain’t bad–I have a groovy ER and my butt didn’t even touch a waiting room seat. But part of the grooviness included a conscientious doctor who had recently seen somebody with my exact presentation (urine clean, but a stone is [painlessly] blocking my right kidney somewhat) take a turn for the worse and get very, very sick. And the worst part is that I myself have been very, very sick. Twice. (I’m a kidney stone gravel pit. Had ’em for my entire adult life, although for years they masqueraded as Mysterious Female Problems, as “women don’t get kidney stones” was long the prevailing belief–until only a decade or so ago, in fact.)

Goethe’s wife died of pyelo, I hear, and he had to spend three days in the kitchen listening to her scream. And in my own experience it does count as “no sheep, really sheeping sick.” So I didn’t really want to argue with her, and here I am in the hospital. And although I know the symptoms of pyelo and they would have scared me into making a beeline back here, maybe it’s just as well.

They gave me a bolus of a strong IV antibiotic, and I swear I’m feeling better already, despite a special hospital Night in Hell: At around 11p, they admitted a 97-year-old lady with mild dementia and apparently no bladder control over even more pee than I make. They spent all night changing her bed, trying to get her on the bedpan, and cleaning her up (which made her screech like a parrot). And by all night I mean about hourly.

So this morning I am counting my blessings, which I habitually do in the hospital:

Yeah, I make many little trips, but making them hooked up to an IV pump and fitting it into a bathroom the size of an average stall added to the challenge of the night. I’m currently not hooked up, and going on such a plebian trip solo is a big treat.

So is finally being put in the johnnies (one front, one back) meant for BIG people,  so I don’t feel strait-jacketed. I guess I’m fatter than I look or something; don’t know why they didn’t start me in ’em. But I yowled a bit about it when made to take the hospital’s extremely hot shower, and now I am steam-cleaned with full shoulder movement. Bliss!

My hospital has wifi, and my very nice daughter schlepped in my laptop so I can blog to you, watch Netflix, and maybe even work a little.

And blessing the greatest: They’re letting me go home today (albeit with prescriptions and the usual command to drink tons of water) And I have a home to go to. This has been made particularly meaningful after yesterday in the ER, watching an endless stream of street people being carried in with hypothermia. We have adequate emergency shelter in Cambridge/Boston, so most of these folks are the hardcore who are on the street by choice. Chronics make me sad–I spend much of my life invested in my own mental health and that of others; I have to believe that they can recover too, but they have to make the choice themselves.

I chose. Blessing!

 

And That’s a Wrap!

29 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

I hope you’ve enjoyed Eureka as much as I have. I didn’t want it to be over! Thanks for each like and follow–every one has made me go “Oh goody!” (Comments, though. Those would also make me happy. Just a hint, if you have the time.)

I am a NaNoWriMo 2013 WINNER!!! 51,743 is their count. I wasn’t at all sure I could do it, but I took a writing weekend in New Hampshire, where there was a hot tub (no, we didn’t bathe in it) and lots of quiet and a writing friend to nag. This made up for a work week during which I did next to nothing. I know it’s probably silly, but I have a real sense of accomplishment.

This taught me a lot about the writing process: First, of course, is that I could have theoretically written Max‘s 100K first draft in two months, instead of oh, a year and a halfish! Ouch! And Dark Crimson Corners could have been pounded out in six months instead of five years–and I really had a sense that I was writing hard for that one. (That said, both of those were almost entirely first-drafted in longhand, instead of Eureka, which was almost entirely composed at the keyboard.) Second, that I write a bit over a thousand words an hour. Thus, if I make myself actually sit down and write for a measly hour in the morning, instead of, say, just faffing around playing World of Warcraft, I can get an amazing amount of stuff done. I guess the trick is remembering that I’m a writer first.

But I’m a lot of things second and one of them is being the webmaster! I am being paid this week to revamp the site and do a brochure. And a lot of things have gotten in the way of that. Ouch! again. I’m way behind.

The biggest thing getting in the way is that we are moving this week, God help us. Still haven’t signed up the actual muscle, so wish me well.

After move and work are caught up, I’ll go through and give a lightning second draft to Eureka, with the goal of having her put up as an .epub on Amazon by Christmas. Just to see what happens. Thoughts?

NaNoWriMo Progress

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Glad some of you are enjoying Eureka! I am, more than I expected to. Anybody got any plot requests?

The NaNoWriMo schtick of churning it out continually against a ticking clock is proving to be more effective than I would have thought. I’m behind, but I’m away on what I like to think of as a writing retreat, so I should catch up. Gonna win this thing!

“Win,” for those who don’t know, just means that I’ll get my 50k done by November 30. There are various little prizes–mainly discounts on writing software and self-publishing packages. Since I’m happy enough with good ol’ Pages and intend to self-publish with Calibre, these don’t hold a lot of temptation–but I am once again getting a strange pleasure from doing the thing itself. And that’s never a bad thing.

What’s been invaluable about this project is that it’s distracted me from a horrible piece of life stress: we may be moving this coming weekend. Or we may not be. It all depends on whether or not the person holding our Section 8 lives in her hands decides to draw up our lease next week. My son is living on the couch, and has been doing so since his arrival in June, so we’re all trying not to go mad. This is the 5th month in a row where we’ve been all geared up to move. Wish us luck–I have become so pessimistic that I am envisioning my son sleeping right under the Christmas tree as a possible good thing–guarding it from the kitten and all. Ah, First Christmases . . .

My center will be closed for the holiday week (and again for Christmas/New Year’s) but this will give me time to catch up as the new webmaster/print media person. (Always learn HTML; always put it on your resume. Trust me.) So between that, packing, and Eureka, it’s as well that I’ve fled to New Hampshire for the weekend, staying with a writer friend and her hot tub.

Yeah, you. You know you’re jealous.

NaNo, NaNo!

04 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Blog, Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

My son talked me into NaNoWriMo, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is this psychopathic idea of writing a (short–50k) novel in one month. Max Draconum (my current effort) is lagging, so maybe this will pep me up.

Sorry not to have dragged out and re-written more Damascus; I need to go into Dark Crimson Corners (the trilogy) and chop the protagonist’s autobiography out first. Also, my beta-reader has almost convinced me to re-write Max‘s ending. I’m putting it all in the dryer while I pound out Eureka this month.

I’ll be posting the chapters here–I’m averaging one short one a day so far, but there will be three at once to start with–and if I actually finish it, will probably wrap it up in my epub software and stick it up on Amazon just for funsies.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I also have a bit of blogging catchup, so stay tuned!

Unmoved

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

I’m caught at work with nothing to do. Well, comparatively. I could be researching new groups; I could be working on my quilt block; I could even slip back to my office where I can do my tiny data-crunch of the people who visited the center in September. But I can’t concentrate on the first two and the third is awkward: I’m sort of invisibly babysitting a recovery group from the receptionist’s area.

I’m not part of the group officially for two reasons. For the first, it’s 90 minutes long, and that’s too long, even with coloring. (A perk of being a peer specialist is that people understand my need to focus on doing something like abstract artwork during meetings to hold down the wiggles and help me pay attention.) For the second, I’m not the official facilitator, but being Frau Direktor, it can sometimes be funky with group dynamics, and this group is new and a little wobbly.

But I’m here because earlier it looked like a peer would be present who’s been having a hard time recently. Last week, she threw a tantrum during a group–and that one was being run by an honest-to-john psychiatrist–and stormed out. The facilitator made it clear that it needed to be Handled somehow, if at all possible. So when I popped my head into the program to see how it was running and saw her here today mumbling to herself . . . uh-oh. So basically I stayed behind this afternoon in the role of possible official bouncer–but she’s not here after all. Just as well.

You may be thinking that it’s politically incorrect of us to have standards of behavior–after all, we’re all mad here–but I assure you, it’s necessary: People acting out can be frightening and triggering to other peers as well. Getting screamed at was one of the things they left off my job description during the hire (possibly because it was also done by the guy hiring me, who is thankfully no longer with the firm) but it is my job. As is calling security. Sigh. But not today. Today I try not to eavesdrop and sit here blogging to you. (Not a total loss. I’m able to touch base with building maintenance about the rock somebody threw through our window this morning. Sigh again.)

Meanwhile, back at my life: We still haven’t moved–but November 1 is now the ticket. It’s reached a level of unreality by now–the stress coating my soul has coagulated like the cheesy mold that coats a long-forgotten cup of coffee. I know on a purely intellectual level that it will be violently dug into by the cleaning brush of packing in two weeks, because by then I’ll be attending two 40-hour weeks of intensive training. In other words, I’ll be exhausted and cranky. I still haven’t finished the prop paintings I’m doing. Moving then would be a cruel joke, but we know the universe loves to laugh.

I’ve decided to participate in the zaniness of NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, which will force some sort of writing out of my head. I’ll link some bits here. And I haven’t forgotten about Damascus! m’ not dead yet! I’m getting better! I feel happy!

That Kind of Face

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

I have that kind of face. The one where people love to startle or appall me because my eyes get huge. I am making capital of it currently for a project. (Well, not literal clinky capital. It’s a freebie.) I have to do three large paintings for a play about bullying; the paintings are supposed to be by a talented eighth-grader, so I’m on my A-game, or feeling that I have to be, being insecure and all. But the first one is of his favorite teacher, and I thought, “Hey, swell! I can do a portrait of my daughter and maybe get some actual life practice in!” But no.

The teacher is explicitly described as having that kind of face. He has apparently not only caught her with her eyes bugging out, but in the middle of being about to laugh. The princess’ eyes do not bug, so it’s self-portrait time. She took an uproarious and unflattering photo of me, and I’ve sketched it in. God, but I have a fat head.

I used to think I was really unattractive because most photos of me do this. It’s hard to have strong self-esteem when you apparently look like your own caricature. Then when I was in my forties I woke up and realized that I was quite pretty; in fact my face matches the Golden Mean triangle thingy (which I am not a fine enough person to find and link for you) pretty well: Math says I’m lovely, so it must be so.

But that’s only when my face is behaving and holding still for a special event, instead of doing its usual squirmy bit. If I am writing fiction (or thinking about doing it) it twitches and wriggles and grimaces as if there were something more wrong with me than there really is. So I generally look like “benignly goofy fat lady who might give you spare change.” (I’m assuming, because beggars seem surprised and disappointed when I sail on past without remunerating them.)

But I don’t get any rewards for being pretty per se, no more than having passed it on to a pretty daughter. No, what people care about is that I make The Face in all of its myriad shades of meaning. And they love it. They burst out grinning and practically jiggle up and down. They’re not laughing at me (much), but just plain old enjoying creation: I have a gift.

I’d rather have emotional privacy; be able to tell a lie if I had to. To be thought of as that stately, attractive beauty who is aging so well. But I’m betting that the world would run smoother if we all just shut up and appreciated what our friends do about us, without wishing for somebody else’s imagined something-or-other.

It has taken me fifty years to realize that the very best thing about my face is that I am looking out of it, and as I do so with some transparency and it’s well-received, I should take that as a fine compliment indeed.

Although perhaps not, as the complimented face is one of the scrunchier squintier ones. Sigh.

A Quick Catchup and Mumbling About Things Bought Over the Internet

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yarrgghhh. Where did that stressball summer go?

Let’s see:

My son is still on the couch and we are still waiting to move. What had been conceptualized as a July 1 move to a three-bedroom apartment has been beaten down by the realities of market demand and people dallying about actually moving when they tell their landlords they are. We are now looking at a damn-near-sure-thing on October 1, which would have thrown us all into hysterics had we known at the outset of this adventure. The new apartment is supposed to be bigger than this (other than just adding a bedroom, smarty-pants) and we are crossing our fingers.

But it almost definitely lacks a ferret room, which is to say a chamber which is far too small to be a bedroom by modern building code standards (else it would be marked as one and we would be charged accordingly). So in preparation, we got a new ferret cage, which has about a 3′ square footprint instead of the 10′ square they’d been in for the past several years. Nobody has come right out and said it, but this has been an epic disaster; an unheralded mustelidean misery which we are now stuck with. I’ll just leave you with the phrase, “Oh come on, they’ll figure the slide out!” and we’ll move on. (We ended up making them little fake staircases out of unloved textbooks.) But it looked GREAT online!

To add to the furry fun, the cats have fleas. So after the flea bath was the usual waste of time, my daughter ordered them flea collars, as for some reason our local pet store is in denial about cats in fact suffering from fleas just like dogs. The picture on Amazon said “flea collar.” What came yesterday was a calming collar, all covered in copious powder smelling like everything but the lavender it claimed it was. I wish they’d invented these back when I had the cat who chewed all of his own fur off because he needed to be an only kitty–but I really wish they’d just sent us the flea collar they charged us for.

My daughter’s laptop is dying and she is now sharing mine pending the probably dim hope that the guy in Dudley Square will fix it, unlike Microcenter, which smugly told us that they were only told to put in the part–diagnostics as to whether they put the part in correctly would have cost extra. (Really. Literally. I am not making that up. Never go there.) I am spending big wisdom points on not going all banshee on they ass.

Stress, stress, stress. On top of everything else, we had a personnel shakeup at work and I ended up being the only person on the team with Web skills. Such as they are. True, I was out carving out niches in HTML back when pappy was a brat, but over the last ten years, we’ve moved to the CSS Internet. So I went out and got a book which spoonfed it to me, and everything was fine, until the site which looked awesome on the Mac was broken on the PC, meaning that once again I had to break out tabling and faking a lot. But in the end my new site looks one hell of a lot better than the old one, which was put together by a committee of mentally ill people–and looked like it. (I’m mentally ill. I can say this stuff. Sort of like the N word.)

I offered to do a similar redesign for somebody else on the team, but communications broke down because I wouldn’t let her hang on the phone with me while she supervised me making her changes live. This woman, known henceforth as The Client because she flashed me back to my early agency days, is unclear on what the big megilla is making PDFs so different from Word documents and was miffy because I couldn’t edit one of her pre-existing PDF bits. (They wouldn’t spring for the $30 CSS book [“We thought you already knew all that!”]; there’s no way they’re getting me Acrobat–I’m just glad that the Mac does basic PDFs natively.)

She also put up a downloadable document in Word. And I used my nice words and everything, but no dice. Webmonkeys are webflunkies, and as soon as she realized she couldn’t micromanage the entire rebuild, she faded off to a corner. This is swell with me, as Clients get charged Real Money, instead of the we’ll-pay-you-for-a-sick-day method we use around here, and I already have *ahem* a job. THAT at least has been going smoothly, which of course now has my paranoia radar blinking.

So there have been days I’ve been holding onto my recovery with all my fingernails, and I won’t deny that there has been crying. (Crying’s OK. It’s when I start walking around randomly singing all the time that it’s time for the men with the net.)

Writing: Well, you’ve already noticed the lack of blogging. But I did *drumroll* finish the epsilon draft of Max, meaning that as soon as the beta team does this one last crawl, it’s time to figure out what to do next. I was planning on sending it out the old-school way, but I have to talk to an expert on disability before I do that–heaven forbid it actually sell for too much money and I end up shot in the foot. I might end up self-publishing after all, who knows?

Meanwhile, I’ve been plodding along on Max Draconum and lazily wondering what to feed you nice people next. I think I might just rewrite the rest of the Damascus thread after all, seeing as I’ve decided to simplify the book it used to live in and focus instead on another of its plots.  We shall see, we shall see.

But for now I wanted to pop on, tell y’all I haven’t gone back to the hospital yet, and now consider myself poked about the blog thang. Peace, y’all!