Writing–You Like Me! You Really Like Me!

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Having a story accepted is as rare to me as being asked out on a date, but it’s pretty much a given that I’m more excited to have my story accepted than to be asked out, usually because the person asking me out isn’t someone that I want to date in the first place (but that’s another post for another day).

Toiling away, such that I do, pretty much in isolation because I’m terrible at networking and I’ve only got a few friends that are writers, selling a story becomes the bottom line for validation. Rejection is the rule of the day and I know I’ll see more of it than anything else. But, to open that email (or letter; I still do some snail mail subs that call for SASE) and read the words that I long to read, especially when I’m expecting rejection, is one of the most victorious moments in my short career. We’re talking fist pumping and saying, “Yes!” over and over like I just hit the walkoff home run to win the World Series. It’s the sign that I’m always looking for, the one that says that this isn’t just a hobby, that I’m good at this and I can make money doing this and most importantly, people want to read what I write. It’s that last one that boosts my ego the most.

The best part is that the feeling of jubilation and absolute victory hasn’t changed. Oh, maybe I’m a little more sophisticated in expressing those feelings (read: I don’t yell as loudly as I used to), but that warm, bubbly, my-day-has-been-made feeling is still the same. And I love it. And I can’t wait to put that feeling to the test with more acceptances to see if the feeling will ever fade or if it will only get better.

I look forward to doing this experiment.

Stories by the Numbers

Ready: 3
Submitted: 3
Accepted: 1! “Sentries” will be published in the Library of Horror anthology Fearology 3: Planting the Seeds of Horror

Late Bloomer Blues II

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I wrote my first word at three and my first story at six, but I was twenty-eight before I fully committed myself to being a writer.

Oh, I’d thought about it over the years because I always wrote, stories, plays, and poems. But, I had a bit of ADD when it came to trying to figure out what I was going to spend the rest of my life doing because so many things have caught my interest over the years. Marine biology, meterology, acting, psychology, medicine, sociology. At one point, I considered them all. And I think the thing that frustrated my family the most was that I could have done all of them (though I don’t think I would have been the most successful actress because of my looks, or lack thereof) because I was smart enough to do any of it; I just didn’t have the attention span or the follow through.

My senior year of high school was the first time I actually made an attempt to be serious about my writing in the sense that I took a correspondence course on creative writing. It took a little over a year for me to complete and I got a nice shiny certificate in creative writing from it not long after I got my high school diploma, but I didn’t feel like I learned very much aside from the very important lesson that plot is a good thing and my stories could use it.

My first round of community college, I intended to major in English to work towards a degree in creative writing because that seemed logical. I’m a logical person and I think there must be logical steps to take to achieve goals and if I can find them, I’ll take them. Sometimes I’m terrible at finding them.

Majoring in English lasted one semester because instead of going back to school, I went to work. The next time I went to school, I was intending on majoring in sociology. The last time I went to school, I took every psyhcology course I could find.

It was the psychology courses that reawakened my desire to write (which had been squashed by a battle with depression and was slow to come back as I got my life back on track) because studying about these quirks of humanity made me want to write about them.

I started making time to write, started writing with the purpose to get published, started submitting my stories to contests and to publications. I got my first victory in 2008 when my story placed 10th in its category in a contest. That was the first time I really felt like maybe I had what it took to make a career out of writing.

And ever since then I’ve been kicking myself in the butt for not realizing it sooner. I feel like I’ve wasted time, especially when I see people much younger than I am land publishing deals or hear about some writers who’d been submitting their work since they were in their teens. I feel like starting my career at 28 puts me miles behind everyone else and miles behind where I should be.

Now every rejection feels like a setback that I should have suffered years ago and I’m too old to be dealing with it now. It’s like going through puberty years after all of my classmates. I feel so behind and I can’t catch up because in order for that to happen I’d need a DeLorien and a flux capacitor.

So until Santa brings me those things, I just keep plugging away, hoping to make up for lost time.

The late bloomer blues strike again.

Saying Goodbye to Ron Santo

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I woke up this morning, turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels like I ususally do after my alarm rudely intrudes on my sleep. I hit the Weather Channel and for some reason, they were talking about Ron Santo. I thought to myself how odd that was, so I turned up the sound.

It wasn’t until the very end when they showed his picture with 1940-2010 underneath it that I realized he had passed away.

The man had diabetes and battled bladder cancer. He wasn’t able to work the radio for several away games this year because of his poor health preventing him from traveling. But, it never crossed my mind that we were so close to losing him or that we’d be losing him anytime soon. It just didn’t seem possible. Ronnie was always there and I just couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t always be there.

Today, I and the rest of the Cubs world are faced with that reality.  Honestly, I’m sadder than I thought I’d be. I haven’t listened to games on the radio for years, but I already feel Ron’s absence. I loved him singing the 7th inning stretch and I loved seeing him in the radio booth during the games. Nobody loved the Cubs more than he did.

My condolences go out to his family and friends.

The game won’t be the same without you, Ron Santo. We’ll miss you.

Writing–A Change in Plans

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Submitting my short stories is always a stressful activity to me. Not so much the actual submitting, but the finding of ezines, magazines, and anthologies to submit to is stressful for me. I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and I have concluded that I’m just terrible at it.

I don’t think I’m a very good judge of my own work in terms of establishing that it’s a good fit for a publication. I typically teeter on the fence of decision for a bit before finally falling to the side of NO. Rarely do I hit on a publication that just screams PERFECT at me so loudly that I cannot deny it (we’ll just never mind the inevitable rejection). It’s when I get to the end of my futile search empty-handed that I start to wonder if the story I’ve written is just impossible to publish because it doesn’t fit anywhere. And then I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels and not getting anywhere in my writing career. This torture has made researching publications my least favorite part of being a writer.

After my latest round of torture, I decided that I needed to change my plan.

My usual tactic was to hit up Duotrope as soon as I had a story (or two or three) ready to submit, paw through the listings looking for a fit, and get incredibly discouraged if I couldn’t find something so I could submit the story that day.

My revised plan will be a little less stressful, a little more laid back, but hopefully (in the long run, at least) be more productive. I’ll keep a list of stories that are ready to go. I’ll hit up Duotrope once a week. If I find something, great. If not, there’s always next week. Meanwhile, I can continue to add to my ready list and not feel entirely like I’m failing.

This less-pressure method might work for me. It might not. But I’ve got to try something new because the old method isn’t working for me. And I’ve got to be more willing to acccept that something isn’t working and come up with a new game plan.

I’m a bit of goat when it comes to insisting on doing things the hard way.

As NaNoWriMo is done for me for yet another year, I propose to introduce a new Writing Wednesday feature to help keep me publicly accountable for my short stories. It will account for the number of stories I have done, the stories I have out, and any acceptances or rejections I get for the week, on the occasion that I get them (those are few and far between most of the time, but rejections are more likely than acceptances).

Stories by the Numbers

Ready: 3
Submitted: 3
Rejections: 3 (no response)

Lost: Adventurous Spirit

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

According to science, your brain finishes developing in your late 20’s. That last little bit deals with rationality and impulse control and anticipating consequences to actions. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

Unfortunately for me, that final development seems to have just killed my spirit of adventure. The iron curtain came down and separated it from the rest of me.

In my early 20’s, when I was friends with people involved in the independent professional wrestling circuit in Chicago, it was nothing for me to get off of work at noon on Saturday (after getting up at five in the morning), drive to the Chicago suburbs for a show and not get home until two in the morning. There a few times when I’d find myself driving home as the sun rose after having spent several hours after the show wandering the streets of Chicago, being up a full twenty-four hours. I don’t recommend doing that.

I didn’t say that my adventures were necessarily smart. I once drove through a tornado to go to a bar to watch a group of friends put on a wrestling show that nobody came to see because there was a tornado. To be fair, I didn’t know I was driving through the tornado at the time. I heard the warnings as I was driving, but I wasn’t familiar with the counties in that area of the state, so I wasn’t sure exactly where they were warning. And those cars that pulled over to the side were wimps. Wimps!

Around that time, it was beyond me to drive eight hours to Arkansas to visit a friend for a weekend. Or fly to Philly to visit another friend for a weekend. Or drive to Arkansas, spend the night, drive to Memphis, catch a flight to Philly, spend the night in Delaware, spend another night in New Jersey, fly back to Memphis, drive back to Arkansas, spend the night, and then drive home.

Once, I took the train with one friend to Chicago, met two other friends up there. We spent two nights in a hostel. The bathroom was communal. The showers had curtains, but most of the bathroom stalls didn’t have doors. Our first night there, we spent three hours talking to a guy named Dylan whose entire side of the conversation amounted to a pick-up line. We spent an entire day at Six Flags. We went to Navy Pier. We got lost in Chicago and were mistaken for prostitutes (we weren’t directly solicited, but why else would the same car slowly pass us five times as we stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out how to get back to the hostel?). We missed our train home because we just had to go back to My PI for lunch and we tipped our waiter for being cute.

Did I mention that I did all of this in a three day weekend after working seven days straight, four of those days working twelve hours a day at a store in Indiana, and before going back to work for another ten day stretch?

I was crazy, but I was also fearless. I wouldn’t think twice. I lost quite a bit of that between twenty-five and thirty.

Oh, I’ve had adventures since then. I went to three Chicago Comicons (back in my day they were called Wizard Worlds) and two DragonCons. But those adventures were better planned out in comparison to my earlier trips. They reflected the growing awareness that not everything could be winged and some things were better with a little foresight.

But, I realized this past summer that my adventurous spirit was off in an old folks home somewhere. My mother surprised me with tickets to a Cubs game as an early Christmas present. My first thought after “YAY! CUBS GAME! THANKS, MOM!” was “Wow, I’m going to have to find someone to go with me who will drive because I don’t want to”. Now, I’ve never liked to drive, but ten years ago that wouldn’t have stopped me; I’d have just driven if I couldn’t have found someone else to do it.

I need to get some of that adventurous spirit back. Some of the fearlessness, not necessarily the stupidity. I’ve still got some stupidity to spare.  But, adventures are what make life fun and interesting and I need to get back into the habit of having those.

I need to raise that iron curtain in my brain and let a little of that spirit back out.

And I need to get some money to make having those adventures possible. But that’s a post for another day.

The Late Bloomer Blues

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I can remember going to my mother the eve of my thirteenth birthday quite upset. Tearfully, I told her that I didn’t want to be a teenager. I didn’t want to grow-up.

Needless to say, my mother had no idea what to do with that. What kid doesn’t want to grow up? That’s what every kid wants. They want to big. They want to be older. They want to do whatever the adults are doing because the adults get to do whatever they want!

And I wanted to stay a kid. Baffling to say the least.

The truth is I’m a late bloomer. Intellectually, I was ahead of many of my peers, but emotionally, I was behind. This gap has caused some problems. I’ve lived that line, “Old enough to know better, but still too young to care.” The trouble is that it’s not as fun as it sounds. Well, most of the time. What I mean is that I know where I’m supposed to be emotionally, how I should be behaving and responding to things, but my emotions are too far behind to respond correctly. And by the time I get my emotions to the level they’re supposed to be, my age has moved on to a greater level.

It’s frustrating. It’s one of those things that I can’t so much work on as cope with. I’ve learned to accept that I am just slow on the uptake when it comes to certain aspects of my life. At this point, I figure the emotional maturity gap to be about five to seven years behind my actual age. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the situation.

Now, let’s not confuse this with wisdom. I’ve been told most of my life that I’m wise beyond my years. My friends often come to me with their problems because I’m so good at sorting things out and finding a solution. I’m very good with knowledge and logic. I do so well with them because my emotions aren’t a factor.

When it comes to acting and reacting, to coping and dealing with my own feeling and my own heart, I’m a sloppy mess of a person because I know what I should do and how it should go, and yet, it doesn’t. I should be beyond certain reactions. I’m still waiting for those knee-jerk reactions and flashes of anger and giddy butterflies to mature. In the meantime, I struggle to make them behave beyond their years. It doesn’t always work.

I hope one day things even out and my emotions catch up to the rest of me, but until then, I’ll deal.

At least I stopped pushing the boys I liked into mud puddles.

Three years ago.

A Mess of My Own Making

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I have no problem admitting that the mess I currently find myself in is all my own fault. Of course it’s my fault.  To say otherwise would be to say that other people have been controlling me and that’s the last thing I’ll admit.

Okay, so it’s entirely possible that other people may have influenced the decisions that I made that led me to be in this mess. I know that I don’t operate in a vacuum. I know that I affect other people and they affect me. But the idea of blaming my life on my parents, or my family, or my friends, or the cruel, cruel Universe doesn’t appeal to me. I prefer to take the blame and the responsibility for my actions.

Ah, responsibility. For some people, money is the root of their problems (to be fair, money is a big part of mine right now, but that’s another post); for me it’s responsibility. It’s the root of my mess. Not that I don’t take responsibility for myself, but because I end up taking responsibilites that aren’t mine. Astrologers say that’s the lot of a Capricorn’s life. Well, it’s the bog of mine.

When my parents split when I was fifteen, I became responsible for myself in an adult sense for the first time in my life, which I admit was a rough transition for a late bloomer like me that had been somewhat sheltered from the grown-up world. I went from kid to adult in less than a month. What’s worse was that I found myself been put in the middle of my parents’ divorce as an adult, being made privvy to their bile and venom for each other like I was a friend to vent to and not the result of their combined DNA. It was also the beginning of my unpaid career as a messenger.

When my sister got pregnant the first time, it became my responsibility to see that my niece made it to family functions on my father’s side. My grandpa never emailed or tried to get a hold of my sister; he always got a hold of me and told me to bring the baby down. This doubled with the birth of my second niece and tripled with the birth of my third. Never once was it laid on my sister’s head to ferry her children down to see the family; it was me. And when my mom adopted the girls, I was held even more responsible for them in that way because my sister was off the hook. She removed herself from the responsibility pond entirely when she moved to Texas. 

My sister never had to hear about it from my father or his side of the family for her mistakes. I heard it all. My mother is spared the rants I have to endure from my father when it comes to the girls. I’m the one who bears the brunt of the disappointment from my grandfather when my nieces can’t make it to a family get together for whatever reason.

Honestly, all of THIS responsibility put me off of taking any grown-up responsibility for myself. I still live with my dad (and now a roommate) because the idea of moving out and trapping myself in a job that I hate just to make ends meet just so I could say that I was out on my own didn’t flip my skirt. Why would I want to take on all of THAT when I was already dealing with all of THIS? Then I quit my job and decided to become a writer and now I can’t move out even though now I want to because I’m flat broke because the only part of the starving artist stereotype I’ve mastered is the starving part (my bank account is definitely starving). So, once again I’m looking at taking a crap job to make money, which will require me adjusting my writing schedule to accomidate it and I’ll still end up stuck in this house and the only headway I’ll make is the satisfaction in not having to ask my dad for money.

That’s if I can get hired somewhere. The job hunt has not been positive up to this point.

So I’m broke, living at home, and struggling to turn an unsuccessful writing career into a successful one.

I take responsibility for that. I take credit for it. I had choices to make, I made them, and it led me to this point.

Now I have new choices to make. And I only hope I can make the right ones that get me out of this mess.

I’m ready to take responsibility for some victories now.

Suffering Seasons

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

The Cubs had a disappointing 2010 season and so did I. It has nothing to do with being a Cubs fan. It just so happens that we both had a similarly crappy year.

Like the Cubs going into Spring Training, I came into 30 so full of hope and ambition and promise. This was supposed to be my year, THE year, and I was going to make my waves and get things done and 30 was going to be a success. And like the Cubs getting hammered in their Opening Day game in Atlanta, it was very quickly apparent that was not going to be the case for me or them.

Very early on this year I realized that one of my worst fears had come true and that I had gained back most, if not all, of the weight I’d spent four years losing. I took a moment to berate myself and then I got myself a new exercise schedule, getting back into the moving groove that I had gotten out of the year before. It worked before; I was confident it would work again. Only it didn’t. Like Derrick Lee and Aramis Ramirez hitting 3rd and 4th in the line-up, my go to guys just weren’t producing. It wasn’t until August until I started seeing a change in my body and very tentitively thought that maybe I might have lost a few pounds, but because it took this long to lose so little, I’m not really encouraged about the long-term. I’d really rather not spend the next few years losing only ten pounds in 12 months. I need better production than that and it bugs me that I’m not getting it from my established methods.

The Cubs went into the season with four rookies, three of them in the bullpen and one of them on the bench. And they just kept adding them as the year dragged on.  I started off with a few rookies of my own; new short stories that I would send out. Success for all of us was pretty limited. “Land of the Voting Dead” was my Starlin Castro (it was the only story I sold); “Such a Pretty Face” is my Justin Berg (it had a little bit of success placing in a contest, but continues to struggle in getting properly published). But, I know that like rookies, you just keep sending them out there because they will benefit from the experience.  Meanwhile, I agonize for them and over them.

In July, Carlos Zambrano had a meltdown and ended up on the restricted list. My laptop beat him to the punch by a couple of weeks and my Internet beat him a few days. While Zambrano was off getting anger management therapy, I spent a month negotiating Christmas/birthday presents to get a new laptop, waiting on a hand-me-down desktop from my mother, and trying to wrangle an Internet service. After two false starts and nearly three weeks, we got it all straightened out. Unfortunately, as a result, I missed a couple of submission deadlines. The lack of computer also through a serious wrench in my writing mojo (though I did get caught up on my reading) that took me two months to reestablish. Zambrano made a much better comeback than I did.

Missing out on the deadlines hurt the worst because it meant I was missing out on potentially making some money. Like the Cubs with their expensive contracts, I got myself into my own monetary mess but not having a regular income since February of ’08. I know and accept that and I’m trying to work with what I have. The Cubs shed salary by trading Derrick Lee, Ryan Theriot, Mike Fontenot, and Ted Lilly (of all of these trades, losing Lilly broke my heart the most, even if we did get Blake DeWitt out of it). I ended up selling my action figures to make a buck, but still ended up borrowing money off of my dad more times than I’d like to make ends meet.

Without a doubt, the year has been rough and disappointing, but there were some bright spots. Where the Cubs had some promising rookies like Castro, Tyler Colvin, Andrew Cashner, Casey Coleman, and James Russell, surprisingly good returns from Carlos Silva and Marlon Byrd, and a strong finish to the season under Mike Quade, I got to meet up with family that I haven’t seen for a long time, spend lots of time with my young nieces, and cash in an early Christmas present from my mom: a trip to Wrigley to see the Cubs play.

Naturally, they lost 1-0 to the Giants.

But, that’s okay. It just further adds to my argument of how sympatico I was with my team. We suffered in different ways, but we suffered together. The 2010 Cubs will always have a special place in my heart because of that. Because of them, I didn’t have to suffer alone.

I appreciate that.

NaNoWriMo Update:

Total Word Count: 22,063

Chapter 1 Word Count: 2,239
Chapter 2 Word Count: 2,084
Chapter 3 Word Count: 2,163
Chapter 4 Word Count: 2,108
Chapter 5 Word Count: 2,100
Chapter 6 Word Count: 2,083
Chapter 7 Word Count: 2,032
Chapter 8 Word Count: 2,041
Chapter 9 Word Count: 2,342
Chapter 10 Word Count: 2,870