Jaded Jennifer

For the last two days, I’ve been working on my next book. I had to write out my character sketches, and do a quick synopsis, then work on outlining my plot points, all before I could start the actual writing.

I didn’t used to do things this way. I was always the “fly by the seat of your pants” type of writer who just sat down and started writing. But I never finished a book that way. My focus with the story was never clear enough so I’d get half the book written, then give up on it. Now I’ve figured out a system that works well for me, with my 3×5 index cards and my notebooks full of outlines.

But see, this is how I work:

I sit on my bed surrounded by stuff. You know, my laptop, two or three notebooks, five or six ripped out pages of stuff that I need to copy over into a notebook, my pink and white box that holds all of my index cards, and of course, the cards themselves, spread out on the comforter around me.

It took me the last two days to get it all written down. Sadly, it’s not like I wrote a lot. A couple of pages in my notebook and one or two sentence plot points on about 30 index cards. But it took me awhile because I’m pretty easily distracted lately.

And now I’m writing. I moved to my chair to write, where I can put my laptop on my lap (where it’s apparently supposed to be as opposed to on the bed in front of me where I have to lean over it and kill my back), I can put my feet up on the bed, and I have all of my paraphernalia on the little wicker shelf next to me. You know, my writing essentials. My notebook, my index cards, my cell phone, my ashtray, my Mountain Dew and my cigarettes.

So I write about 50 words.

Then I get distracted by Must Love Dogs, which is playing on my DVD player and I spend the next 20 minutes or so watching it. I shake myself and get back to my laptop.

And I write about 25 more words.

Then I click on my Mozilla, which is open (with 9 separate tabs, mind you) and minimized. Up pops Facebook, which I refresh just to see what’s going on with people or if anyone has left me any comments. I spot a status that my niece posted saying she got a new chair for when her baby arrives. So I leave a comment asking her what kind of chair, and then I scroll through and read all of the other status updates since I last checked. Then I minimize my Mozilla again and go back to Word.

And I write another 50 or so words.

Then I’m distracted by Diane Lane having slept with Dermot Mulroney’s character even though he’s clearly a player and she should be with John Cusack’s character, who is a bit kooky but that’s no big deal. Kooky is fun sometimes. The excitement on the screen fades so I turn back to my computer.

And this time I had a writing burst….of 100 words.

Then I check to see if my niece responded to my comment because I’m really curious what kind of chair she got. Is it a rocking chair? Or is it a bouncy chair for the baby? Or maybe it’s some neat, new thing that makes parenting easier. You know, something that they didn’t bother coming out with when my kids were babies because I didn’t deserve to have my job made easier for me. I had to do things like bounce one kid in his bouncy seat with my foot while feeding another in the high chair and balancing the third on my head because he was learning to be an acrobat so he could run off and join the circus. But no, still no comment from my niece. So I quickly check my email (which is empty, by the way), then refresh my MySpace (which is completely dead because, duh, nobody uses MySpace anymore) and finally I go back to Word.

Where I write another 50 words.

But then I start to feel like I need something to munch on, even though I’ve already eaten half a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, two eggs and two pieces of toast, and a slice of banana cream pie with a fresh banana chopped up and sprinkled across it. So I look around and find the box of Fig Newtons that Wren bought for me earlier and I eat a couple of those. Then it’s back to work.

And the food has refreshed me. I manage a whole 200 words.

But then I just have to go back to Facebook and see if my niece has responded yet and oh! Look! There’s one notification. My niece got a glider rocker with an ottoman for a really good price. So I have to leave her a comment warning about fingers or toes near it, which is probably pretty insensitive since she just shut her son’s finger in the door last night and I didn’t think about that when I wrote it so I added that I’m not a fan of rocking chairs or recliners ever since our kitten was killed in one, hoping that by mentioning the tragedy of our cat’s death about four years ago, she’ll disregard the fact that I had in essence pointed out her own guilt in smashing her son’s little finger. Once the comment is posted, I quickly go back to Word before I end up deciding that I should probably go delete it because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

And I write another 25 words.

But really….I should go delete it, right? I love my niece and lord knows, I’ve done enough emotional and physical damage to my kids that I’ve actually felt guilty about. I’d hate somebody callously bringing up those moments and making me feel more guilty. So I go back to Facebook and delete the comment real quick, hoping that neither her or her sister (who had also commented on that post and would be notified of my comment) had read it yet. Breathing a sigh of relief that my stupid comment wasn’t there for the world to read anymore, I go back to Word.

And I write another 50 words.

But then I get distracted by Diane Lane finally realizing that John Cusack was the right man for her as they awkwardly kiss in the grocery store. And I wonder what kind of face cream Diane Lane uses because she really looks so good for her age. I mean, seriously, she doesn’t look a day over 25 if you disregard the slight bags under her eyes but those could just be because she was up all night sweating with some 18 year old hard body and had to be on the set bright and early in the morning.  Hmmmm…..maybe that’s what keeps her looking so young, huh? But yes, back to my book.

Another 50 words pop up on the page.

But then I realize the movie is over and it’s awful quiet in my bedroom and I just can’t write in a silent room, it’s too distracting so I have to get up and find another movie to put in, which could take me quite awhile except I had the foresight to bring TWO movies up to my bedroom when I got ready to start writing. So I throw Because I Said So in the DVD player and settle back in my chair for some Mandy Moore and Diane Keaton goodness and I smile at the slight coincidence of me choosing two movies that star ladies named Diane, before turning back to Word.

And I write another 75 words.

But the previews on the DVD are showing the movie Knocked Up and I remember that we had that movie at some point because I remember watching it, but I don’t remember seeing it since then and I don’t know what could have happened to it so I send Wren a quick text asking him and, of course, he has no idea but I’m thinking maybe it went to the pawn shop at some point and we never bothered to get it out and I should buy it sometime because it was really a pretty good movie. But, back to writing.

Another 25 words done.

But then the previews are over and I have to find the DVD remote to hit play on the movie and, you know, while I’m already distracted, I should quickly check my Facebook again and just make sure neither of my nieces read my comment before I deleted it, and I’m relieved to see that they didn’t unless their lack of responses is just because they both read it and they’re so appalled that I would say something so mean and they’re currently on the phone with each other wondering why they even bother calling me family since technically I haven’t been with their uncle in over 7 years now.

I shrug off the worry and check my empty email box again and then, while I’m already distracted from writing, I figure I should write a new blog all about my writing process so maybe other people who want to be authors can learn from my super-organized skills and I realize that in the last 2 hours I’ve managed to write about 700 words of my book but in the last 20 minutes I must have written about 1500 words on my blog and why is it so much easier to write a blog than work on  my book?

Hmmm…..you know, maybe none of you should try to learn from my writing techniques actually. Go buy a book about writing or something. Because that way at least you know the person you’re learning from managed to finish and publish at least one book, right?

I have too much I want to blog about this morning. Sometimes, when I have so many things I want to talk about, they all get jumbled in my head and I can’t figure out how to yank those pieces out and put them back together. So here are a couple of things I managed to salvage out of the wreckage.

Life magazine did a wonderful piece on famous literary drunks and addicts that you should check out. That’s a link, by the way. Click on it. I promise it won’t bite.

It got me thinking….is it just normal for creative people to become addicted to things? I’ve always said that I have an addictive personality. Which, to me, means that I become addicted to things WAY too easily. It’s not just my cigarettes and Mountain Dew, really. I become addicted to foods all the time. Wren makes biscuits and gravy and suddenly I’m addicted, so that all I want to eat for the next two weeks is biscuits and gravy and so what if he’s sick of it after two days, I’M ADDICTED ASSHOLE SO GO MAKE ME MORE!!!! Phew, sorry. Lost it there for a moment. It’s not just foods either. I become addicted to everything. Like drawing, for example. I start drawing and I just can’t stop. I’ll draw constantly for weeks, and then suddenly I’m sick of it and I move onto another addiction.

Really, I sometimes feel like my life is just one addiction after another. What I eat, what I drink, what I do each day is all determined by what I happen to be addicted to at that moment. It’s really not fun. But maybe, just maybe, it’s normal, huh? Go check out that Life article and see how many of those photographs have somebody smoking in them.

Oh, and another thing I salvaged from my messy brain is this:

I completed one of my bucket list items last weekend, just like I said I was going to. I wanted to add some photos but for some reason WordPress hates me today and won’t let me add photos or properly edit any of my pages. So I guess that will have to wait. Seriously, the internet really is trying to ruin my life.

Aliens woke me up this morning. I’m not kidding. Or it could have been a ghost. I really wasn’t sure. I passed out down in the living room on the love seat last night around 10pm, which is WAY early for me. At 5:50 this morning, I was jarred from my peaceful slumber by a jingle and a woman’s voice. I was disoriented (from being downstairs and it being so dark, not to mention the music coming from Wren’s laptop when I always sleep to the television) but I KNEW the voice came from behind my head. I sat up quickly and kept looking around, trying to find this person who talked. There was nobody there. I contemplated the idea that we may have a ghost in our apartment, then I finally decided to get up and pee…ummmm….I mean, use the restroom, and as I was walking in there, I heard a very distinctive beep from the living room. I didn’t turn around and look because I was sure it was an alien spaceship about to beam me up and I figured it would be better if I emptied my bladder first.

I guess emptying the bladder also allowed my brain to start working because when I went and sat back down on the love seat, I realized that Wren’s phone was plugged in and sitting on the window right above my head. I reached for it and, sure enough, he had a new text message. So that explained the beeping. It was some stupid thing from MySpace, which I replied “STOP” to so that they’d quit sending it. I set the phone back on the windowsill and then JUMPED when that stupid voice said “new message” or some crap like that.

So now apparently cell phones are trying to ruin my life too. I should have gone back to bed when I had the chance.

It’s been a long day. We walked about 5 miles all total, but I got my check cashed, cell phone back on, got my Mountain Dew and tomorrow is cigarettes day.

So on our walk we went down this alley and passed a car with a bunch of bumper stickers on it. Ok, maybe not a bunch but there were 5 or 6 of them. They were all about tolerance and being understanding of people’s religion, stuff like that.

Except for these two:

Now, I am in no way a feminist. But I AM a woman and I AM a person. So I admit I was quite offended by that first one. But then I read the second one and I decided that they were right, we should hunt each other, starting with whoever actually spent the money to buy that bumper sticker that says women aren’t people. Because, you know, I really think I could get away with killing the person in that car and my whole defense would consist of bringing these two bumper stickers in to court and showing them to the jury. I think the idiot is pretty much asking to get shot, don’t you?

So who wants to defend me?

I’m going to give the best advice that you will EVER get in your life. Ever. You got that? So I want you to listen to this advice closely and remember it:

Don’t EVER, EVER, EVER get addicted to anything.

See what great advice that was? If it weren’t for my caffeine and nicotine addictions, life wouldn’t be so terribly bad right now. It wouldn’t be great, of course, but it wouldn’t be bad. Today was one of those days where everything kind of closed in on me at once.

Sitting in my room all day by myself, with nobody to talk to, was getting to me. Then the whole not having a vehicle to even go anywhere, having my phone shut off last week and my cable and internet shut off this week, not having enough money to buy cigarettes, which I’m out of so I’m smoking Wren’s and those make me feel like absolute crap, and not even having the money to go buy a Mountain Dew…it was a bit overwhelming. Seriously, I can deal with not having a vehicle. That’s what buses are for, right? I can live without cable. I have DVD players and every season of Friends, plus Charmed, Medium, Roseanne and Law and Order: SVU. I can’t really live without internet but luckily I’m in an apartment complex and I have neighbors who haven’t figured out how to secure their network. And the phone? Well, yeah, that sucks but honestly, I don’t use it too much. It’s really just a text messenger to me. But I do kind of need it. Wren couldn’t even go look for a job this week like he had planned since he didn’t have a phone number to put down on applications. Check didn’t come today, even though it was sent last Friday. With any luck it will be here tomorrow and since I don’t have a vehicle or money for the bus, I will be walking the 2.34 miles to the bank, then to Cricket to get my cell phone back on because I simply can’t be without a phone. But, see, I could have dealt with all of this today if it weren’t for those damn addictions. To many people, cigarettes and Mountain Dew are just a luxury, one they think I could and should live without. Honestly, those are the people who AREN’T addicted to them, don’t have problems with addiction, and don’t understand how stressful addictions can actually be. And even though I had half a bottle of Mountain Dew left, the fact that my mini-fridge in my bedroom was devoid of little green bottles was starting to make me antsy.

J.R. is the only one in this house with a phone, but he was at his girlfriend’s house, where he went after school without even checking with us, and we needed his phone to call and see how much money Wren had left on his Visa so we could go get me some Mountain Dew. So, I jumped onto my computer, with the internet that I’m pirating from a neighbor that is getting a CRAPPY signal, and I went to mycricket.com to send J.R. a text message and tell him he needed to come home.

And here it is. Proof that everybody is out to get me, even the internet:

What the hell? Seriously? Do you see any triangles up there? It took me 3 times refreshing the damn page before the picture even showed up and then I get this crap. Come on, Cricket. How am I supposed to click on all of the triangles when there aren’t any there???

P.S. You’ll be happy to know that I got my Mountain Dew. Still smoking Wren’s cigarettes for now and I think they’re killing me much quicker than my normal menthol light 100s. His full flavor kings make me feel like I’ve got black lung or something.

P.P.S. I will be quitting smoking soon. Hopefully before summer. I’ve been smoking for over 20 years now, though, so it won’t be fun or pleasant, as I’m sure will be chronicled in this blog.

Recently Pepsi decided to release “throwbacks”. I guess they’re supposed to be the old versions of our favorite soft drinks. All I know is, one day I found myself driving around town without my standard Mountain Dew bottle beside me. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t go anywhere without my best friend, dressed in all of its green glory. But see, I had driven my car to the car lot so they could replace the O2 censor and I left my pop in there while we ran around town in the van.

So I stopped at a gas station and sent Wren in to grab me a Dew. He carried it out and I quickly opened it and guzzled, sure I was dying of thirst since it had been a whole 20 minutes since I last tasted that citrusy yumminess. It was cold. It was wet. And it was all fine. Until I swallowed. Then I frantically searched the floor of the van for something sharp I could use to scrape the taste buds off of my tongue.

If you haven’t tasted Pepsi’s new Mountain Dew “throwback”, don’t. Just don’t. It’s disgusting. They say it’s made with natural sugars. Tastes like Splenda to me, and let me tell you there is NOTHING natural about sugar-free sugar. That’s like chocolate-free chocolate or a blue orange. Or like Carrot Top dying his hair black. Come on. That’s just plain unnatural.

Seriously. If you ever find yourself with a “throwback”, do what the bottle suggests. And if Wren ever buys me another one (because he’s bought me at least 4 of them in the last week) (because he’s a guy and doesn’t look at the bottle) (”it’s green” he says “that’s all I noticed”), then he may find HIMSELF being thrown back. And if Pepsi continues producing this disgusting product and trying to disguise it as a “return to your youth” I may just have to track down the genuises who came up with this marketing scheme and forcefeed them sugar-free sugar, chocolate-free chocolate, blue oranges, AND Carrot Top.

Ok, I think I’m done bitching now.

About 8 years ago, my house got hit by a car.Yes, you heard me. My house got hit by a car. It wasn’t just your normal vehicular assault either. It was a hit and run. Some drunk slid on a patch of ice, slammed into the back of our house, then took off before we could recover from the shock and realize what had happened. If it had happened a half hour later, my boys would have been covered in glass. As it was, their bunk bed was broken and it took quite a bit to repair the damage.

Honestly, it turned out to be a not so bad thing. Our insurance company cut us a check for the estimated repairs and, since we had built the house ourselves, we fixed it ourselves and got the supplies at wholesale. I think we came out about $1000 ahead.

Plus, we get the privilege of telling people that our house got hit by a car, which is pretty fun to say.

I wonder sometimes about the idiot who hit it. Does he (I assume it was a man, and I’d rather not explain why) walk around telling people “I hit a house with my car once. I thought it would be a fair fight. Turns out, the house was much tougher than it looked.”

On another note, I’ve decided it’s time for me to resort to throwing fits. My four year old does it. Why can’t I?

So next time Wren won’t go in and make me mashed potatoes with cheese, or tells me that I HAVE to wake up because I’m sleeping all day, I’m just going to throw myself down on the floor, kick my feet, and start screaming and crying. I really think it will work. I think he’ll be so shocked and confused, that he’ll give me what I want. Hell, with how loud I can scream, he’ll probably promise to erect a statue in my honor out on the front lawn just to stop the madness.

Yep. It’s the Terrible Thirty-Threes for me.

Oh, and no, I won’t be doing videos of me throwing fits. I’d hate to tarnish my image.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a famous author. I’d start writing a book, get a couple of chapters written, and then never go back and finish it. One of my life goals was to actually finish writing a book. Another life goal of mine was to get a book published.In 2007, these goals hit me hard. On April 8, 2007 my brother, at the age of 35, died of a heart attack. He was a great painter, especially when you consider he had very little formal training. He never did anything with it, though. He painted and painted but never sold anything until shortly before he died when he started making 3D wood sculptures and selling them to people. I felt like he didn’t take any real chances to achieve his goals.Then, on November 13, 2007 my dad died of lung cancer. My dad…..where do I even begin to talk about him? We had a terrible relationship when I was growing up. We butted heads all the time. He was an alcoholic and took a lot out on me. But in so many ways, I was more like him than any of the other kids. My dad was a writer. He wrote poetry more than anything else, but he always wanted to be a published author. This may be where I got my own goal from but since I can’t remember when my desire to write started, I couldn’t really say. As an adult, our relationship totally changed and he became by biggest supporter and fan. I loved showing him things I had done because I could always see how proud he was of me.When my dad died, he wasn’t a well-known author like he wanted to be. In fact, other than posting on some ezines and in a few literary magazines that nobody had really ever heard of, he wasn’t published at all. I found a folder full of his writing in his file cabinet. It was line after line of beautiful, melodic prose that, rather than making me feel good, actually caused me to feel desperate. My dad wasn’t just a good writer, he was a great writer. Yet he went nowhere with his writing because he didn’t take chances. Or if he did take them, I certainly never knew about them.

Last April, 1 year after my brother died and 5 months after my dad died, I decided I needed to push myself to achieve my goals. I have so many story ideas inside of me that it’s almost painful. I sat at my computer and, in 11 days, I wrote a 107,000 word book. I thought that I’d feel this great sense of accomplishment when I finished it, but instead I almost felt depressed. It was sad to me not being able to run to my dad and show him what I had done. I think the let-down was magnified by the fact that it was all so anti-climactic. I was happy with the book. Sure, there were some areas where I thought it could use work. What piece of writing can’t use work? But overall, I was happy with it.

Sometimes, achieving a life-long goal isn’t as exciting as you expect it to be.

And maybe part of it was the fact that there was a whole other step to this goal that seemed insurmountable. The publishing part.

I spent the spring putting off writing a query. Once I had finally exhausted all of my excuses, I wrote the letter. It wasn’t good. Really, it sucked. But it was finished. So I sent it off to 10 agents. I knew my summary paragraph wasn’t good enough for them to ask to see more. I knew what their responses would be. But I sent it off anyway, just so I would feel like I was taking chances. But I stopped after those 10 because I knew if I really wanted to get anywhere, I needed to change that summary.

And now, here it is March. I haven’t rewritten the summary or attempted to contact any other agents. There’s always something that keeps me from doing it. Right now, it’s a new book. At the end of last summer I had an idea for a new book and started writing it. I got halfway through the first chapter, and did a basic outline, but then never went back to it. I’m finally forcing myself to write this one because I think it will be better than my first one, especially now that I have a better idea of what it takes to fill a 107,000 word book.

There’s something I realized last night. I used to constantly hear authors say that when they’re writing a book, they become obsessed with the characters. They can’t talk about anything else or think about anything else and even have dreams about them. The characters become like real people to them. I never completely understood this until I wrote that book last year. But last night I realized that, for me at least, they had it all backwards.

It’s not a matter of “once I start writing a book, I become obsessed with the characters.” For me, I can’t begin to write the book until I become obsessed with the characters. Once I’ve talked about them, and outlined them enough to make them real, I have no choice but to get their story down on paper….or laptop. Whatever.

So right now I’m lost in a world of my own creation. It’s an interesting world. Unfortunately, it’s almost like being God and knowing exactly what’s going to happen to all of the people in your world. Luckily, also like being God, you can’t completely control the characters in your book. Not if you’ve done a good job making them become real. You’ll be typing and they’ll say something or do something that surprises you. Something you didn’t see coming.

Or, you know, maybe it’s just me.

*Disclaimer: Since I really am the Queen of Procrastination, I should tell you that everything you read above was really just my way of putting off writing chapter 2. What? Did you think there was actually a point to all of this rambling?