On this day of ghost and goblins, trick them into leaving you unharmed by giving them treats.
What I’m saying is, give me candy.
Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween!
Writing–Generating My NaNo Idea
I wrote before how I was stuck on what to write for NaNo this year. I toyed with the idea of being a rebel and writing novellas instead, but even then I wasn’t too moved by the idea. I really wanted to stick to my November guns and go for my usual goal of 60,000 words before Thanksgiving. But I had nothing.
A NaNo buddy of mine whom I also follow on Twitter and also has a pretty rockin’ blog, Trinae Ross, told me that she was stuck for her NaNo idea, too, until she just started writing random words down on a piece of paper and then asking the usual questions of who, what, where, when, and why. It took her about four days for things to start to come together, but she ended up with something of substance that she could get to the point of outlining. She had a story.
At her suggestion, I decided to try it. Sitting and thinking wasn’t helping me any. The blank I was drawing was just getting blanker. So I grabbed one of my plentiful notebooks, flipped to a blank page, took pen in hand, and wrote down the first things that came to my mind.
“Guys like him aren’t very good at staying dead.” The 70’s. Nighttime. A face in a window. A room full of newspaper articles. A missing girl. An attempted abduction. Two teenagers.
And from there I started asking questions. Who is this guy? Why doesn’t he stay dead? Why this decade? Who is this face? Who are these kids? What do the articles say?
The page filled up pretty quickly with my answers and other scribblings. More importantly, I was pretty happy with what I was jotting down. Just like what happened with Trinae, my story started to come together.
Even at the eleventh hour going into NaNo I still have some work to do (I’ll get into the details next week), but I’m feeling so much better about this project than I was a week ago when I didn’t even have a project to work with. At least I have a place to start when the clock strikes midnight.
I am horrible at networking and socializing. I don’t work very hard at including myself in the writing community because there’s a still a chunk of me that doesn’t think I belong because I don’t have enough credits to my name. But through NaNo and through Twitter, I’ve met some pretty cool fellow writers that don’t hold me to the same high standards that I hold myself to when it comes to inclusion and for that I am grateful.
Without Trinae, I’d still be spinning my wheels.
The One and Only
I’ve grown quite accustomed to being just another face in the crowd. There’s part of me that really digs that kind of anonymity. I didn’t try for it; it just came naturally. There’s nothing particularly spectacular about me. I don’t stand out (since I stopped coloring my hair like I belonged in a package of Skittles). I’m not very memorable. In fact, most people don’t even remember or know my name. Around my little town I’m most easily identified as “Haws’s daughter” or “Lindsay’s sister” (the exception being Wal-Mart, where I’m a rock star, but that’s a different blog post).
So it’s really weird for me to think that I’m the only person in the country with my name.
According to How Many of Me, I’m it. Based on their math and taking into account the spelling of my first name and the spelling of my last name, one person or less has my name. As a fat girl, I certainly don’t qualify as less, so I must be the ONE.
What’s funny about this is that it wasn’t what my mother was striving for when she named me. Yes, she didn’t take popularity into account in the sense that she didn’t want me to have the same name as six other girls in my class (sorry, Jennifers). Christin was actually not her first choice; Carrie was. But when her roommate in the hospital named her baby Carrie, Mom went with the Christin. And the spelling wasn’t intentionally unique. Mom just thought that’s how it was supposed to be spelled…Chris-tin. Way to go, Hooked on Phonics. But my mom wasn’t the only one. Over 11,000 people have their name spelled the same way. I’ve met four of them.
And my last name, well…it is what it is. There’s only about 4,000 people with this last name with this spelling in the country, according to the website. I can’t help that.
But it’s the combination of the two is that really puts my name in the unique category. I am it.
WordPress stats are handy because they tell me what searches people do to find my blog. People get here a lot of ways, some of them very strange. But nothing grabs my attention quite like my name popping up in the search terms.
When you Google my name, first it will ask if you meant someone else (Christian or Christine Haws is usually pretty popular). Then the first five entries will be all about me. My Twitter, my blog, an old website, a blog guest post, my Smashwords page. Then the other names start to filter in.
Here’s the thing. If I’m the only one with my name and the people doing the searching spelled everything right, then that means people who come to my blog searching my name are looking for ME. When you go through life largely ignored, it’s bizarre to think someone Googled you.
Sometimes I think it’s a little creepy, but then I’m also prone to paranoia.
Granted, I imagine most of those hits are people who know me who can’t remember my blog name or haven’t bookmarked it or aren’t following it (that’s right, you feel shame about not bookmarking me). But odds are at least one of those searches was done by a stranger.
It’s a concept that’s kind of difficult for me to grasp.
But then, I’m strange like that.
It comes with being the one and only me.
Halloween Costume Mania!
I dress up for Halloween every year. Usually it’s just to hand out candy, but even if I did nothing, I’d probably still dress up. It’s my thing. As a Halloween purist, I find it to be a fun challenge to attempt to make a costume without spending more than twenty dollars. That means I try to use as much as I already have. I’ve been quite successful at it.
Here are the costumes I put together for the last five years (also photographic evidence of my weight fluctuation over the last five years if you’re into judging me for that sort of thing). Three of them cost me nothing. The other two cost me less than twenty bucks. I’m pretty proud of all of them.
Happy Halloween!
Writing–A Morning Project
Two or three days a week (depending on the week) I get up at 6:30 AM to supervise the neighbor boy before school and then I take him there. From 6:45 to about 8:10 every morning I sit at the table and let the boy know what time it is. Time for your shower. Time for breakfast. Time to go. In between this time monitoring, he plays his DS and I write.
I didn’t plan on writing during these mornings. When I first started the gig, I wasn’t sure exactly how much wrangling would be required. Turns out that there’s usually not much and since it is so early in the morning, Twitter isn’t exactly jumping. Once I’ve caught up on my timeline, taken my turn for SongPop and Words With Friends, and read a few blog or new articles on my phone, I still have quite a bit of time to fill.
So I started bringing a notebook with me so I could “scribble”. I didn’t really have anything in mind to work on that first morning, so to pass the time I decided to write Lucy and Jamie’s backstory. You might remember them from a previous blog entry about characters that pop up without a story. I had a pretty good idea who these to characters were, so I wrote about Lucy meeting Jamie for the first time, which began with Lucy talking to Jamie’s adoptive mother Lindy. It was a fun little thing with no expectations.
And from that bit of scribbling came an actual idea for a story.
That’s what I’ve been working on two or three mornings a week for the past month or so. I managed to get a page or two written while sitting at the table keeping track of the time. It’s a different approach for me, at least in terms of what I’ve been used to doing for the past few years.
First of all, I’m writing long hand, which isn’t that unusual when I’m writing short stories, but I sense that this will be longer (I’m thinking novella range). I usually don’t write longer stories longhand because what I write down, I must type up.
Second of all, when I am working on a project, I adhere to the write every day rule. For me, I feel like it’s important for me to get that first draft out as fast as possible. This first draft is only getting written a couple of pages at a time no more than three days a week.
Lastly, with my longer works I’ve fallen into the need for an outline. I prefer to know where I’m going when I start putting the story on the page. With this project, I’m just going one page at a time and not thinking any farther ahead than necessary. I’m just seeing where this story goes.
I have to admit, this is a fresh approach is rather freeing. It’s not quite so serious business. I’m not putting excessive demands on myself. I’m just supposed to write every morning while I wait for the boy to get ready for school. It’s just a way to pass the time.
It’s going back to a time when writing was just a hobby and not a career-in-the-making.
Call it a change of pace.
A Word About My Politics
I typically don’t talk politics. I find the conversations become unpleasant and anything but enlightening. Truly I think they bring out the stupid and make me change my opinions about people too frequently.
That all being said, I think I should explain a little bit of my political position so at the very least I have something people have a basic understanding of where I stand.
First of all I identify as an independent since I have no desire to belong to any party. I like the sound of it. In-dee-pen-dent. Free. I’m not bound by the rules of a party. No party lines to follow. I don’t suffer any second hand candidate embarrassment. I’m not compelled to vote for a particular candidate just because they’re on my “team” (a huge fallacy we’ve got going on with voters here; they’ve got government confused with sports). I’ve voted for Democrats and Republicans and Independents and Green Party members. All on the same ballot once. It was glorious. I vote for whoever I want to and for my own reasons. I have a nice, objective view of the races. I like it.
Second of all if anyone asks, I say I’m a moderate. I ride that line. I admit to being more conservative on some issues and more liberal on others, but overall, I’m in the middle. People can get pretty aggravated about that, demanding I pick a side. Sorry, scooter. I found me a really comfortable dip in this fence and that’s where I’m sitting.
Lastly, this isn’t a challenge. I have no desire to convert you to my way of thinking and I’d appreciate the same respect. I’m also not spouting this off to somehow say how much better I am than you because of my politics. Aside from the fact that you don’t really KNOW any of my political beliefs since I haven’t actually articulated much past generalities and labels, my politics are a small part of who I am. And by stating these basic facts about myself I’m not by any means calling you out. This is just for general knowledge purposes.
I’ve found that general knowledge helps prevent unfortunate assumptions. Even the bare basics helps.
Politics fall into the category of my personal beliefs. I don’t feel the need to bray about them and I don’t think that braying about them makes them anymore real. If I’m not in the market to change minds (when it comes to politics, I prefer to point out logic train derailments), then there’s no need for me to be spitting into the wind. I’m not compelled to add to the noise, particularly during this extra loud presidential campaign.
However, if you ask, I’ll probably answer. And if you’re an ass about how and what I answer, then your questioning privileges will be revoked. Probably rudely.
Remember, I’m not bound by niceties either.
Writing–Gone Missing: Another Self-Published Experiment
Gone Missing was a short story that went a longer than a normal short story and ended up becoming a novella. Once I was finished with it and had it revised and all polished up I went…”Okay, now what do I do with this?”
My first thought was to self-publish it as eBook, but then I decided against it. I thought I should at least give traditional publishing a try. So I looked into the possibilities, but couldn’t find anything that said to me it would be a comfortable fit. Remember, I’m that person that doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time so the criteria for a story has to match up damn near perfectly with what I’m trying to sell.
I debated on it for a bit and after an informal poll, I decided to bite the bullet and self-publish again.
My last self-publishing escapade, Rejected, was hardly a smashing success. It took nearly 10 months before I made the minimum through Lulu ($5) to get paid. I also ended up going through two different self-publishers (Lulu and Amazon) so I could get my book done in print and digital (Lulu covered everything but Kindle, which is why I had to go through Amazon). I still don’t think I’ve made $5 through Kindle sales. Self-publishing takes a lot of promotion and word of mouth and I’ll be honest, after about a month of it I felt like I was flogging a dead horse.
The idea of going at this all again was not an enticing one.
However, my ego driven need to be read proved too strong. Even without the informal poll of five people saying they’d read it if I published it, I knew that’s what was going to happen. Like going on the Tilt-A-Whirl after eating too much funnel cake. You know you’re going to puke, but you can’t resist the temptation to spin your car as fast as you can.
This time I chose to go through Smashwords. Several authors I follow on Twitter use it. It’s strictly eBooks and I wouldn’t have to go through more than one place for the novella to be available for different devices (distribution is a little different story). I felt like it would be a good fit.
So, we’ll see how this self-publishing run goes. I’m not expecting to make myself millions by this endeavor, but I’m curious to see if Gone Missing will be read more than Rejected just by going through a different self-publisher.
Don’t worry. Any downloads made after reading this blog entry will not be considered as tampering with the result.
Bi Bi, Baby, Bi Bi
I’m bisexual.
I’ll allow you all a minute to process what that means to you before I get into what it ACTUALLY means.
Being bisexual means that I am sexually and romantically attracted to men and women. I was once challenged in high school that I couldn’t be bisexual because I’d never slept with a woman. If that were how it works, then I couldn’t have been a heterosexual at the time because I’d never had sex with a man at that point either. But that’s not how it works.
Being bisexual brings up some interesting stereotypes.
One is that I don’t exist. People who claim to be bisexual are just confused. In a society so obsessed with labels and the concept of either/or, all or nothing, bisexuality is a mind-boggle. I have to be attracted to either men or women. I can’t be attracted to both. And in this world, adherence to convention would be preferred. But if I were a lesbian that would be okay because at least then I would make a COMMITMENT to a choice. For some reason the idea that I could be attracted to both sexes is considered impossible.
Speaking of commitment, therein lies another stereotype. That because I’m bisexual (if you believe in that sort of thing), I can’t be in a committed relationship. I am somehow unsatisfied if I were to pick one partner because I’d always be yearning for the opposite. The problem with this idea is that it has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with monogamy. I know some perfectly straight people and some perfectly gay people who couldn’t be in a committed relationship if you tied them to someone. I’ve personally gotten to the age and experience that commitment to ONE person is my ideal.
You may be wondering why I’ve never brought up my sexuality before. I’ve talked about my dealings with men before, but not women.
Well, first of all, it’s none of your damn business and I’ll mete out information about myself as I see fit. Second of all, my dealings with women have been fewer, but no less confusing, awkward, and difficult than my go-rounds with men. While I’m more trusting of a woman flirting with me than I am a man (in other words, if I realize they’re hitting on me, I don’t automatically chalk it up to them looking for an easy score, they’re joking, or it’s because I’m the only single girl in the room), I’m as clueless as a man when dealing with them in relationships. I’ve also been witness to a few sour women break-ups. That alone has been enough to make me tread extra carefully.
Lastly, I’m not exactly in the closet, but I’m not sure everyone knows. In fact, when I did let my parents in on the fact that I was bisexual, they were actually both shocked that I wasn’t a lesbian. So there ya go. But still, there are certain friends and family members that might not be too thrilled with my sexuality.
Which raises another fun point.
If I date a man, I’m okay. If I date a woman, I’m a lesser human being. Isn’t that strange? Nothing else about me changes. Not my personality, not my weight, not my eye color, not my job. Just my relationship. And that one little thing determines if I can go about life peacefully or if I get people coming up to me in the mall to tell me I’m an abomination (it’s happened!).
Think about that, kids. How would you like the value of your existence, whether or not you’re entitled to the same benefits as everyone else, whether or not your family LOVES you, whether or not your friends will associate with you dependent upon who you’re fucking? Nothing else about you changes. Everything about you is the same. But making that one relationship choice, dating that one person, changes everything about how people feel about your and treat you. Just that one little thing.
Amazingly fucked up, isn’t it? Not very fair, huh?
Welcome to my world.
Pictures: Cubs vs. Astros 10/1/12
Pictures from my last Cubs game of the 2012 season and the Cubs 100th loss. Don’t let the downer qualities of that sentence fool you. I had a good time.
Writing–NaNo?
You may have noticed if you read my October Projects post that NaNoWriMo was left off of my To Do List. There’s a very good reason for that.
I have no idea what I’m going to do.
In past years I’ve gotten my NaNo idea in September, August, July. I once came up with my idea in March and held onto it until November.
But this year I’ve got nothing.
I’ve thought about going rogue this year. Instead of writing a 60K word novel like I usually do, I’d write two 25-30K word novellas. I’ve got a couple of ideas that I could use for it. They’re pretty good, but neither one I think would flesh out to be an entire novel. Doing them both as novellas would satisfy the word count even if it wasn’t exactly a novel.
I’m not completely sold on the idea though. I’m a bit of a traditionalist. Even though I’d really like to do those novellas (as they’d be part of the Outskirts Universe so they’d be useful to have done) and doing both would count, I’d still feel like I was cheating a little bit.
So if I don’t do the novellas, what do I do?
Logic tells me that I should do something in the Outskirts Universe. That’s my “thing”, after all. On the other hand, it might do me some good to break out and do something completely different.
I don’t know.
The good news is I’ve got about three weeks to figure something out and get it outlined. The bad news is I feel like right now, I’ll take all three of those weeks to come up with something and won’t start outlining anything until 10PM on October 31st.
No matter. I’m up for the challenge.
Kiki Writes About... 