Bad Words

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Difficult. Paranoid. Frustrating. Spiteful. Ugly. Malicious. Weird. Frightening. Damaged. Aggressive. Hypocritical. Tactless. Uncaring. Insensitive. Selfish. Unaware. Unthinking. Judgmental. Defensive. Unsypmpathetic. Poisonous.

Bad words. That’s what those are. And all of them have been said to me. Not in anger. Not by enemies. They’ve been said with great sincerity by friends and family and co-workers to me.

And every single one is true.

Everybody has their bad words whether they want to admit it or not. I admit mine. It’s not out of pride; it’s out of honesty. I know I’m all of those things. They’re not pleasant things. They’re things that I struggle with and things that I’m working on, things that I’m trying to change.

I admit to my bad words. I’ll be the first to say that they’re true. I can tell you how and why. I can explain them.

And I’d like to explain them. Not excuse them, but explain them. I don’t like excuses. Excuses refuse to take any blame. Explanations are just explanations; blame isn’t part of that game. It is what it is.

I don’t want to explain my bad words to somehow rationalize them or make them acceptible. They’re not. I want to explain them because to explain the absolute worst bits of myself is to tell the ultimate truth. And that’s what this blog is about, right? The original intent of it? To tell the truth.

My friends and family and co-workers, the very people who said those bad words, will somehow still manage to say that I’m a good person. Which is kind of boggling when you look at the list of bad words. It makes me wonder. Do I have more good words than bad words? Or is the quality of my good words better than my bad?

It’s curious. I imagine people would say the quality and quantity of my good words are greater than my bad words, but that’s a natural reaction if you like someone. You want to see all of their good bits. You emphasize them. Partly because you want to think that you associate with good people, but also because you want the people you care about to be the best they can be. You might know about their bad words, might even speak them, but in the end, you minimize them.

I don’t want to minimize my words. I don’t want to magnify them, either. I want to look at them honestly and explain them honestly.

It’s pretty heavy stuff and I don’t want to bring down the tone of the blog. I have trouble keeping a straight face for very long and unfortunately, there’s just too many bad words to give sufficient covereage to them in one post. So for the next several months (seven if I counted my groups right), just once a month, I’m going to talk about and explain my bad words. You’re going to see just what kind of monster I really am.

Welcome to my dark side.

Rerun Junkie

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I am a rerun junkie. I always have been and I feel like I always will be. If a show has been off the air for ten years or more, there’s a good chance I will find it and watch the hell out of it.

The 70’s are my favorite era, I think, particularly 70’s cop shows. Oh! Starsky and Hutch, CHiPs, Hawaii 5-0, Barney Miller, Banacek, Barretta, Charlie’s Angels, Rockford Files, I watched them all. I didn’t miss out on out on other hits, either. I enjoyed many episodes of Sanford and Son, All in the Family, and, of course, M*A*S*H. I can quote so many of those episodes word for word.

The old Nick-at-Nite was a great supply of reruns. Without it, I never would have been able to watch Laugh-In, Lancelot Linc Secret Chimp, Get Smart, or The Monkees. In FX’s infancy, I got to watch a lot of The Incredible Hulk, Batman, Green Hornet, and The Greatest American Hero. WGN was my go to place for The Addam’s Family and The Munsters, while on TBS I started many school mornings with Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley.

I get to continue my rerun junkie ways today as shows I watched first run when I was younger are now old reruns. Murder, She Wrote, In the Heat of the Night, Matlock, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Golden Girls, and Unsolved Mysteries. In the past I’ve got to relive the A-Team, MacGyver, Knight Rider, and Air Wolf.

The biggest bummer about this new day job is that I’m forced to give up three of my current favorite reruns: Perry Mason, Hawaii 5-0, and Unsolved Mysteries. I’ll also be missing some Golden Girls reruns because I won’t be able to stay up as late to watch them.

The best part about reruns is that the older I get, the better they get. I don’t know how it happens, but it does.

I think it has something to do with my sense of humor.

Writing–Writing with a Day Job

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Last week acquired a day job. I started working on Monday.

While I’m grateful for the regular income soon to be filling my bank account (before I send it right back out to pay bills), this full-time position brings forth a possible complication, namely, time to write. It’s too early now to judge on how big of an impact this job will have on my schedule. I’m still adjusting to the idea of getting up at 6:30 every morning. Also, I’m just working on revisions for The World (Saving) Series and so far none of them have been very extensive. Doing only one chapter a night, they haven’t really been very plentiful either. But I know some big ones are coming, heavy on the rewrites.

Next month I’ll be doing short story revisions/rewrites on top of the novel revisions. The month after that, I’ll be writing a new short story.

It’s going to be interesting, and I imagine frustrating as well, to see how I will be able to manage my time and rearrange my world in order to accommodate 8 1/2, 9 hours of my day now devoted to something other than playing Facebook games, blathering on Twitter, and, oh yeah, maybe getting some actual writing done.

I know that in order for this to work, I’m going to have to treat it like having two jobs. Sure, I can cram a lot of stuff in on the weekend. I’m already doing my blog posts for two blogs then and the weekends are usually when I make my greatest strides in getting writing projects accomplished (I have no idea why that is; you’d think it’d be the other way around, not doing as much writing on the weekends, but there you go). But for five days a week, I’m going to have to really get serious about time management, take no excuses, shun the distractions, and get something done. Progress must be made every day or I’ll be getting nowhere.

I’ve come too far to have everything suddenly come grinding to a halt just because now I’m spending my day earning money in order to support this career that I really want to have and really want to make work, but now I’m too tired to do it and don’t have the time. I definitely cannot succumb to those excuses if I want to be successful.

And I really want to be successful.

It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m going to do it. I really have no other choice.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a social life. It’d suffer terribly because of this.

Obessesions

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I will be the first person to admit that I am given to fixations. I find something that interests me and then I make it my mission to learn as much as I can about it. I get waist deep in the subject. It takes up quite a bit of my time and my mind.

I guess you could say I get temporarily obsessed.

I wouldn’t call it a problem (as denial would be fitting for such things) because it doesn’t interfere with my functioning. In some ways, it actually improves my functioning.

My obsessions become something to look forward to, something to get excited about. They improve my mood. They give me something to focus on and give me a place to go to when I need a break from the world. I need a warm fuzzy or a smile or a bit of comfort, it’s my hut on the beach, my winter cabin in the woods.

Naturally, this sort of behavior can be disconcerting. You get too deep into an obsession and extraction takes professional help at $150 an hour and maybe a backwards fitting jacket, if the obsession consumes enough of you. Luckily enough for me, I get bored before that sort of thing happens.

Okay, it’s true. There are some obsessions that I have carried with me for years, but not at a maintained intensity. I fell in love the The Monkees when I was six and twenty-five years later, that hasn’t changed. The obsession peaked my senior year of high school, the intensity fading within a year of graduating. But I still listen to the music, watch the show, and collect the memorabilia. It’s a designated safe place for me to go when I need a boost.

 I acquire my obessions in various ways. Sometimes I stumble into them. Sometimes they come from friends. Some I’ve had so long that I feel like I’ve been born with them. Often times as the intensity of one obession fades, I’ll acquire a new one or the intensity of an old one will rev up.

I’m sure that there’s no coincidence that the intensity of my obessions goes hand and hand with dreary times in my life. When my Monkees obsession hit its peak, I was in the midst of a depression slide following my parents’ divorce. School was where I went to be a normal teenager and the Monkees were my happy place.

Last summer was a dismal one for me. My laptop crashed, my Internet failed, and it was a nightmare trying to put all of the pieces back together. Considering that at the time the bulk of my money was made via the Internet in some form (either selling stories or selling stuff on eBay), I was feeling the pressure and I was feeling pretty low.

With a sudden influx of time on my hands, I turned to watching the Cubs play to stop from chewing myself up. I’ve been a Cubs fan since I was a kid, watching the games and checking the standings. But last summer, it became my obsession. My scheduled revolved around the games. Instead of waiting and stressing about getting a new computer and getting the Internet issue resolved and how I was going to make up for lost time, I transferred that emotion and devotion to my Cubs. It became a safe emotional outlet. And despite the miserable season, it became my happy place.

It’s still my happy place, even in the off-season. There’s still news to be kept up with and there’ll be more than just warm weather to look forward to.

Now I imagine the intensity of this obsession, as with the others, will fade, but my love of baseball and the Cubs will remain. In turn, something else will take its place, a new bit of happy to warm the cockles of my cold, black heart and be my new refuge from the harshness of reality and life.

It might drive my friends and family crazy sometimes, but it sure beats drinking.

Writing–Kiki and the Idea Notebook

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

If I were a more popular writer, I’m sure more people would ask me where I get my ideas from. And I would tell them that I get my ideas from my notebook.

Shall I clarify? I suppose I’d better. Don’t want to be thought of as any more of a loon than I already am.

I get my ideas from my idea notebook. Of course, I have to put the ideas into my idea notebook, too. A lot of those ideas have been in that idea notebook for so long that I don’t remember where they’ve come from, though. Some of the ideas I don’t even remember having them, can’t remember writing them down. Those are the best. They’re so fresh and new. It’s like they were put there by an idea fairy.

As for the rest, I had to get those ideas the old-fashioned, hard way. I kept my eyes and ears open and asked “what if” a lot.

To me, ideas and inspiration can strike anywhere. I get hit with it a lot either in the shower or doing laundry. I don’t know why, but those two activities tend to bring out the best ideas in me. I can almost understand it with the laundry. I write a lot of horror, my washer is in the basement, and my basement can be a creepy place to be. I guess when I’m showering, I’m just looking for a way to keep myself entertained while I go through my daily cleansing ritual without much thought.

My ideas are all different. Sometimes it’s just a scene. Other times it’s a character. There are times when I’ve read an article in the paper or saw a segment on the news or some other program and just kept asking “what if” until I had something I liked. No matter what, almost all of them go into the notebook.

Few ideas come to me fully formed and ready to write at that moment. Even fewer insist on being written that second (if I really like those ideas, I will rearrange my schedule to accomodate them so I don’t lose their urgency and thrill). The fully formed ideas are harder to put into the notebook. They seem to go stale quicker than the fragments, suggestions, images, and dialogue.

I like to flip through my idea notebook at least once a month to refresh my memory on what goodies are lurking in there. Sometimes an old idea jumps out at me like a new frog fresh out of the pond. Sometimes I wonder what the hell what I was thinking when I wrote this bit down. But I don’t get rid of it.

The idea notebook is sacred like that. It’s where my ideas come from. 

Stories By the Numbers

Sent Out: 3
Ready: 3
Rejections: A story I called rejected last week due to no response last week got an official rejection this week (with a personal invitation to submit again because they liked my story, but didn’t think it worked with what they were doing for that project).

Journal Crazy

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My mother gave me a journal as part of the now defunct “Aunt Kiki” holiday. Pretty and purple, the script on the cover says “Me, Myself, and I: An Instrospective Collection of My Innermost Thougths and Feelings” and the design features three faces in a knotwork ontop of a silver diamond, and it sat for a month before I wrote in it.

In that first journal I admitted that part of my hestance wasn’t just marring a pristine page; I was afraid to remove my innermost thoughts from the safety of my brain. Out of my head, they could be exposed to prying eyes with no respect for privacy and judged harshly. Worse, out of my head, they could be real.

The reluctance is evident in that first journal. First of all, I didn’t use it much. The entries begin July of 2003 and end January 2008. Nearly five years. Secondly, there’s a sense of holding back in some of the earlier entries. I was too scared to put down everything into words, all the thoughts, all the emotions, all the crazy bouncing around in my head.

You can see me get more comfortable with opening up over the course of the entries in that first journal. I got better at it and I did it more frequently.

My second journal I believe Carrie bought me as a birthday present. It’s rainbow colored, cheerful and simple, and I’d say it has about as many pages as my first one. The entries in it cover from January of 2008 until December of 2009.

Yeah, I got a lot better at writing in it more often. I started using it more as it was intended. Instead of being afraid of putting my thoughts down on paper, it became THE place to put my thoughts to get them out of my head. It became the refuge of my frustrations, mostly. It let me get the things off of my chest that other people wouldn’t, mostly because the ensuing arguement would be pointless and solve nothing.

It also became the locked box for the mushiest part of my heart, allowing me to explore those sweet, vulnerable feelings I don’t like to admit I have. There are some romantic ideas in those pages. Ideas that would absolutely shock the people who know me as the horror loving hard-ass that make men cry for their mothers and make women try to befriend me so I won’t eat them.

My last journal was red. That’s it. Just red. The entries cover from December of 2009 to January of this year. This is the journal I got truly comfortable in. This is the journal I put my craziest thoughts in. I gave myself permission to be absolutely ambitious and hopeful and unrealistic and unrestrained. There is some serious, wild insanity on those pages and to date, if there were any journals I’d burn before my death, that would be the first one on the fire.

Since that first journal, I’ve moved from being reluctant to dependent. I did my last entry in my red journal on my birthday with no new journal waiting for me. I’m slowly moving into frantic mode. I have things to write down, thougths that need ink! I’ve gone from not even shrugging at the idea of missing a couple of months to feeling guilty if I only have two entries for a given month.

Right now, I’m thinking about all of the things, good, bad, and crazy, I want to put in my new journal as soon as I get it. I fantasize about marring those clean pages with the inner workings of my mind. It’s going to feel so good to get all of that out.

And with any luck at all, in thirty years I’ll be able to read back over those stored thoughts and marvel at how I functioned, coped, struggled, and felt during those important years, some of which may be lost to the sands of time by then.

More likely, though, I’ll just shake my head and laugh and think, “Wow. You were really kinda nuts back then, weren’t you?” before putting down my old journal and picking up a new journal to scribble once again.

Recipe: Pickle Wraps

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

When I announced on Twitter that I was making pickle wraps for my New Year’s Eve celebration, I got quite a few comments asking what they were and a couple of requests for the recipe. I decided posting the recipe would make for a good Friday Funtimes post.

And since I do like to cook, I figured that posting my recipes from time to time would be a good go-to for the Fridays that I’m not feeling particularly fun.

Food is fun.

Pickle Wraps

Ingredients
1 jar of small, whole dill pickles
2 90 calorie packages of Budding’s Beef (any deli thin sliced corned beef will do, really)
1 8oz container of cream cheese (I like the low fat kind)

Use a paper towel to dry off the pickles. Spread a thin layer of the cream cheese on one slice of the beef. Set the pickle on the edge of the cream cheesed beef and roll it up. Slice up the pickle into rounds no more than quarter of an inch thick. Serves several people at once or one person over several days (at least that’s my experience).

One word of caution: This recipe is not for everyone. I know it sounds terrible and even some pickle lovers have a hard time trying it. Rarely does it work out well for someone not fond of pickles. In fact, my roommate Carrie swears it’s the most vile thing she’s ever put in her mouth.

I’m going to take her word for that.

Enjoy!

What Do You Do When Thousands of People Die On Your Birthday?

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A year ago today I turned 30 years old. While I did that hundreds of thousands of people died in a devestating earthquake in Haiti.

Unlike most other people, particularly the people around my age, I actually had been looking forward to turning 30 and deep down I wished I could have been able to do something really spectacular to celebrate. I wanted my 30th to be memorable.

I should have been more specific.

No matter what I do on my birthday, it’s my special day. I’ve been sick on my birthday (more than is fair, in my opinion). I’ve worked on my birthday. I’ve had parties. I’ve spent it alone. But no matter how I spend the day, in my head it’s always special because it’s mine.

My 30th was no different. I went to the DMV to renew my license. It’s never much of a hassle in a town of 7,000, but that day it was almost enjoyable. My new picture is the first ID picture I’ve taken in my life that didn’t look like a mugshot following a night of booze and a misused pool cue. Lunch was just a trip through the McDonald’s drive-thru, but that was one delicious chicken sandwich. It was all due to the charm of my birthday and the glow of turning 30.

And then there was an earthquake.

I saw it first on Twitter. Initially, it was just another earthquake in a country I never planned to visit. Earthquake reports come across my Twitter feed all the time about other countries, one tweet maybe retweetted by two or three different people, and that’d be the end of the earth-shaking news.

But Haiti didn’t disappear.

More and more news came over my wire, mixing the birthday wishes with death toll numbers. The shine of my birthday had no affect on that kind of devestation. Turning 30 couldn’t compete iwth the destruction of pretty much an entire country.

So I didn’t try. I didn’t speak Haiti’s name all day and though I was aware of the news and kept up to date on the rising numbers and mounting wreckage, I kept it in my peripheral view.

Because it was my birthday, dammit! My day! And the Earth had no right to go heaving up and crushing people on my birthday. Really, it shouldn’t be doing it on any day, but this day in particular. I felt bad enough when Maurice Gibb died on my birthday. But a huge percentage of a country’s population? That’s a black cloud that lingers. Even if  I wasn’t do very much to celebrate it, my 30th birthday was now tainted, haunted, by the deaths of thousands.

I ignored that fact. I really did.

In a move that was purely and unabashedly selfish, I stuck my fingers in my ears and LALA’d in the face of a natural disaster and the dead people it brough with it. I averted my gaze from teh tragedy and focused my eyes on the glory that was the anniversary of my birth.

The rest of the day proceeded as planned. I made shrimp pasta for dinner. I wallowed in the birthday wishes from friends and family. I got a few presents. I ate cupcakes that my mother had gotten for me. My friend and roommate, Carrie, took pictures of me while I ate one, goofy, smiling pictures that belied the bizarre kind of survivor’s guilt that I felt.

Here I was celebrating a day that was seen by the rest of the world as a tragedy. And I was going to celebrate that day in teh years to come as a day of birth while everyone else would see it as an anniversary of death.

Against my will, I find myself a member of a very unique club. It’s a club of people who share their birthdays with 9/11, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Columbine shootings, the Christmas Day tsunami, Pearl Harbor, and other notorious days known better for death than life. I’m not sure how to deal with that.

It’s a silly thing, I know. It’s a selfish thing, I know. But it’s my first birthday since this huge tragedy, so I’m still working out how to share my birthday with death.

I admit that last year I hid my head in the sand and really indulged in my selfishness, but I think I redeemed myself a little bit at the end of the day.

My birthday money went to Haiti.

Writing–Social Anxiety Network

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A big part of a writing career these days is networking. Getting to know fellow writers, making connections with them that could lead to making connections with other people in the business, other writers, agents, publishers, editors.

Networking is also how writers today build a fanbase and attract attention. Through Twitter and Facebook and other fabulous internet socializing tools, writers can sell themselves and their work to the readers they’re hoping to attract.

This is all well and good. It’s a great way to connect with readers and it’s a great way to connect with others in the writing business. It brings down walls and makes the writing feel less lonely. Many writers, even the most shy ones, thrive doing this sort of thing.

However, I am not one of these people.

As ridiculous as it sounds (particularly if you follow me on Twitter), I have social anxiety on the Internet. For most people, the anonymity of the Internet allows them to be more outspoken, more bold. While that does apply to me in certain situations (again, Twitter), that anonymity doesn’t cover them all.

For example, other blogs. I read other blogs, but unless I know the person, I rarely comment. Even if I do know the person, that doesn’t mean I’ll comment. Sometimes I have nothing to say and I really don’t want to force something just for the sake of conversation. Most of the time, I don’t feel comfortable with commenting. I don’t feel smart enough, established enough, or legit enough to share my two cents. I feel awkward coming out of lurkerdom to comment as there is no established rapport. I’m just a stranger stopping by and saying a few words without introduction.

Which is just silly because I don’t feel that way about people who comment on my blog (or reply or retweet me on Twitter). Once I get over the shock that people are actually reading and not everything I babble just disappears into a void, I’m cool with it. I don’t know why I’d feel differently with the roles switched.

It takes me a while to warm up, I suppose.

I’m focusing on blogs because I’m a little more vocal on Twitter, but there’s still a certain amount of anxiety and awkwardness in following people and responding to certain people’s tweets. As much as I’d like to be one of the cool kids, I never have been, never will be, and I still get nervous, even on the Internet, when it comes to talking to them.

It’s a silly little thing, but it’s one that’s holding me back and is going to continue holding me back unless I overcome it. Naturally, that’s what I intend to do.

I prefer to have making an ass of myself on Twitter be my biggest social problem.

Stories By The Numbers

Stories Submitted: 3
Stories Ready: 3
Acceptances/Rejections: 0

Plans for 31

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

On Wednesday, I’ll be turning 31 (or as I prefer to say, 30 bonus year because it sounds less dull). I don’t have big plans to celebrate my birthday. First of all, it’s on a Wednesday and Wednesdays are rarely good for rockin’ parties. Secondly, by this point after the holidays, people are tired of celebrating.

Lastly, it’s supposed to be really cold this week. Nothing kills a partying mood like the potential for sub-zero windchills and frostbite just going out for dinner.

Even though I don’t have grand plans for my birthday, I do have plans for being 31. I had plans for being 30 and I admit, most of them fell through. I had really high hopes for being 30, too. I’d been looking forward to it for years. Yet, despite all the high hopes and goals and plans and trying, being 30 wasn’t as great as it should have been. Actually, it was pretty disappointing.

But, with my birthday looming, the disappoints of being 30 fade in the light of the freshness of turning 31. I’ve got new plans, new hopes, and an unblemished optimism.

31 is going to be great like 30 wasn’t.

I plan on selling a few more stories this year. I plan on getting a novel ready to submit. I plan on fixing my finances. I plan on getting out and socializing more. I plan to continue to work on getting healthy. I plan on having a good time. I plan on improving my existence.

These plans actually don’t vary much from the ones I had for 30. They’re also not all of the plans I have for 31. As open as I’d like to be with this blog, some things are just too personal to mention. But even so, they could easily fall into the categories of either having a good time and/or improving my existence.

At the very least, I hit the high points.

Okay, so most people wouldn’t think my plans are very big. I’m not trying to run fifty marathons in fifty states or visit every baseball park in a season. Hell, I’m not even trying to skydive, rock climb, or go to Vegas. And I’m sure a few people would think there are some plans missing from my 31 To Do List. You know, like find a man or a “real” job or lose all the weight that offends other people’s delicate sensibilities.

In my defense, the plans don’t have to be big for me to be happy. So long as those plans are in line with what I really want and I make them happen, then that’s what counts. Maybe one year I’ll make an attempt to visit all of the ballparks in a single season, but this year is not the year.

This year can’t even be the year to think about it.

This year is the the year to get my house in order so next year I can think about those things.

As for the standard plans that most people make in high school and achieve in their twenties that I haven’t gotten around to yet, this year isn’t going to be the year I get around to those either. That’s not to say I’m not open to meeting someone or losing a few pounds while I work on being healthy. I plan on getting a “real” job just to help my financial situation, but I already have a real job, writing. But to be honest, I’ve just never been good at the traditional plans. If I were, then I’d already have the college degree, the career, the husband, the 2.5 kids, the house, the debt, and judging by the other people I know my age, a pending divorce, if not a finalized one.

I do better with the less-than-traditional plans and to a certain extent, I’m stellar without a plan at all.

My plans for 31 have been made and like with the plans I made for 30, I’m going to try to follow through with them.

Unlike 30, though, I’m going to put a lot more effort into 31.