I’m a Guy Magnet* *Conditions May Apply

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’m single and have been for years. I’ve never been married. I’ve really only had a couple of relationships that could have been considered serious. But it’s not for lack of attraction.

I attract men. All women are capable of such a thing. It’s just the type of men that I attract that causes me trouble.

Pardon my bluntness, but I’m a fat girl. Maybe not big enough to qualify for Richard Simmons to show up to my house, but I’m still fat. As I like to say, I’ve got curves in all the right places and several of the wrong ones, too.

A certain contigent of men see my rolls and interpret my weight as a sign of desperation. They think I’ll settle for anyone, put up with anything for a little attention and the privilege of saying that I have a man. These are the men that usually have no jobs and more often than not, no teeth either. I don’t know if the two actually go together, but in my experience they have. They hit on me like I should be grateful that a man is paying any mind to me.

These men are quickly shut down and sent grumbling. I actually had one guy offer to take me to McDonald’s for our “date” and then get indignant because I shot him down.

Sorry. I’m worth more than Mickey D’s.

I also have this odd ability to attract older, married men. I don’t know what it is about me that catches their eyes, but it’s a little creepy and I’m not at all in that market.

Then there’s the “only single girl in the room” situation. Maybe some guys don’t mind that I’ve got enough rolls to qualify for a bakery. Maybe they think that I do have a pretty face. Maybe they like my sense of humor and my brains. But, they only have anything to do with me when I’m the only single girl in the room. The minute another girl comes in, someone thinner or prettier or more socially acceptable, someone the guys won’t give him too much shit for kissing, the sweet nothings they whispered in my ear are just that…nothing.

It’s quite possible that these two types of men have conditioned me to not pay any attention to men flirting with me. I’m not very good at reading people. I can’t tell when a guy is hitting on me.

That’s not entirely true. I can’t tell when a potentionally good guy is hitting on me.

It’s enough to drive my friends mad. The good guys are more subtle, I suppose, which is why I have a hard time seeing it. But my friends can see it clearly and it kills them that I don’t. Not only do I not see it, but if my friends are kind enough to point it out to me, I deny it. These aren’t the ususal guys and usual situations. They can’t possibly be hitting on me.

And sometimes the good guys aren’t so subtle. I once had a guy that I had a mad crush on point blank ask me to make out with him. I didn’t because I thought he was joking. I thought it was because I was the only girl in the room. This same guy also picked me over a prettier girl to dance with outside of a restaurant. He looked at me and told me he was going to dance with me outside and he did and I totally missed that he might have actually meant something by that. We did dance outside. It was sweet and I was awkward and it was the closest I ever got to anything with him.

I still kick myself in the ass over missing out on that opportunity. I had my chance and I missed it because I was so deep in denial, so conditioned to think that there was no way a good guy would bother with me. He wasn’t perfect, but he could have been perfect for me. I’ll never know for sure now.

To put this into a common fishing metaphor, I can reel them in even if the bait I’ve got on the hook isn’t the best and not what most fish are looking for. I can still snag a few. Unfortunately, I’m a catch and release girl. I’m not convinced that any of them are keepers and I end up thinking about the ones that got away, the ones I let go.

Someone should have taught me to be a better fisherman.

Happy Vincent Price Day!

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It’s a day filled with hearts and flowers and pink and bitter single people. The one time I had a boyfriend during Valentine’s Day, he thought it was stupid to give me anything and so he didn’t. After being told for years about how great the holiday is when you have a signficant other, I have to say that I wasn’t too impressed.

I fully admit to being one of the bitter single people for a while until I decided to give the finger to making myself miserable and make this holiday my own.

For everyone else, it’s Valentine’s Day. For me, it’s Vincent Price Day.

I wear my Vincent Price shirt (yes, I have one; made it myself), get comfy in bed with some treats, and watch House on Haunted Hill. It’s one of my favorite Vincent Price flicks.

This holiday was a work in progress for several years. I’m not much of a romantic comedies girl. I like horror films. Back in high school, we had a sleep over for the girls who weren’t going to the Sweethearts Dance at school and we watched horror movies to counter the squishy love theme going on at the high school. That ritual kind of stuck. I liked to watch horror films on Valentine’s Day.

A few years ago my horror film of choice to celebrate Valentine’s Day was House on Haunted Hill. It was that viewing that made me realize that Vincent Price was my perfect valentine.

Suave, sophisticated, classy, cruel, and murderous. What more could a girl like me ask for?

Happy Vincent Price Day! I hope yours is a scream.

Writing–Sick Days

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I came home early from work last week due to a blizzard making work in the transportation business slower than Wile E. Coyote stuck in puddle of glue. It was a good thing, too, because it was that day that a cold crushed me like a boulder from a cliff.

For the next two days, I might have gone to my day job, but writing did not get done. I could function and didn’t feel anywhere near as bad as I did the first day, but I still felt pretty yucky. And when it came to writing, I just didn’t have the strength.

Considering I have enough trouble getting any writing done on a good day because I’m such an ace procrastinator, getting sick put a major cramp in my style. The dribble of productivity I’ve experienced since getting employed dried up to a desert and then the tumble weeds of guilt started to blow in.

I’ve got a lot to do this month. I can see it written out on my Whiteboard of To Do. There’s some serious work in there. And I took three days off for illness. There’s some conflict there. On the one hand, I was well enough to go to one job, so I should have been able to go to the other, so to speak. On the other hand, it was the going to the first job that wore me out for the second job. It’s important to rest when you’re sick and with a 6:15am wake-up call, my head was hitting the pillow really early.

It doesn’t matter. I feel like a slacker. If I take a day off from writing that’s not scheduled (oh yes, I schedule my days off), then it causes me guilt and pain. Even if the excuse is a good one, like I’m so sick I can’t think, I still feel guilty. And the unscheduled break throws me off my game.

Now I’m faced with playing catch up and considering I started the month unsure of what to work on first (aside from The World (Saving) Series revisions), I’m even more lost and therefore, feel like I’m even farther behind.

I’m in desperate need of a game plan.

And some cough drops.

Personal Beliefs

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

It’s possible that I take the “personal” part of personal beliefs a little too seriously. As in they’re my beliefs and they’re none of your business.

Seriously. This blog post isn’t about what I believe but why I keep my beliefs to myself.

I was raised by two atheists. Please note that sentence. I was raised BY two atheists; I wasn’t raised TO BE atheist. I was raised to believe whatever I wanted to believe.

As a kid, I decided to explore the possibility of God and religion. Over the years I went to a few different churches. It might be hard to believe, but at one point I was a very good Bible quizzer. I can still quote bits of Luke.

My parents were cool with it. They never told me I couldn’t go to church, never told me I was wrong, never told me I was stupid. They respected my choice and let me find my own way. They never once pushed their beliefs on me.

My parents set a pretty good example for me in that respect. The word “God” wasn’t an assault on what they believed; it was just another word. They didn’t care that it was in the Pledge of Allegiance or written on money. It had nothing to do with what they believed at the time and as far as they were concerned, in those contexts, it wasn’t infringing on their beliefs and trying to make them change their mind.

It was quite liberating to be brought up in a household like that. I was never made to feel threatened or forced to get defensive about what I believed and I learned to return in kind.

I also learned to keep it to myself.

Without being expressly told, I learned that personal beliefs were just that. Personal. They’re mine, all mine. No one can give them to me, no one can take them away, and I can’t force them on anyone else. I have to admit that due to my years of spiritual exploration my beliefs are pretty customized. It wouldn’t be easy to preach my gospel.

And I wouldn’t want to. Oh, I will discuss it when asked about it provided that I feel the conversation is safe for expression. When I talk about my beliefs, it’s not an invitation for conversion. I’m not trying to convert you, don’t bother trying to convert me. Don’t worry about saving my soul or convincing me with science. I’m good where I’m at, thanks, and I wouldn’t be so disrespectful to you.

It really boggles me when people express their personal beliefs like they are the statement of utter right. What ego must go into that. What disrespect for anyone who doesn’t think the same. What blindness to think that your beliefs won’t be criticized when you put them on display like that.

There’s another thing. It’s hard to insult me about what I believe when you don’t know what I believe. Oh, I’ve had my feathers ruffled before by people saying things, but the insults weren’t direct because there was no way the offending person could know any differently. I could have, of course, pointed it out, but there’s no satisfaction in the correction when the person just says, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about YOU”.

Instead, I comfort myself in the thought that the person running their mouth is really telling more about themselves than the group they’re insulting. And, yes, I’ve been equally offended by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, and everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m human. I think some things that some people believe are absolutely ridiculous and can’t even begin to understand it. But I try to keep as much of that to myself as I can. If I don’t like people offending me, then I need to work hard to be the bigger person and not offend them. It’s hard and I fail, but I keep trying.

Why?

It’s one of my personal beliefs.

And, yeah, for the most part, I keep it to myself.

Writing–February Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

New month, new schedule. It’s going to be a hectic one.

Revisions on The World (Saving) Series will be ongoing. I’ll be rewriting “The Guinea Pig” in anticipation of a deadline. I’ll also be revising “Another Deadly Weapon” and “Play Chicken” for deadlines and “Phobias Are How Rumors Get Started” for the blog (only a couple of more weeks to enjoy “An Old Fashioned Vacation”!). And finally, I’ll review “Summer Rot” for possible submission.

I have no idea how I’m going to do all of that with a day job and blogging and all of the other bits and bobs in my life, but I’m going to try. I’ve got to make good on my committment not to slack.

Stories By the Numbers

Sent Out: 3
Ready: 3
Accepted/Rejected: 0

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).