You may noticed I’ve added a donation button into the sidebar here. I’ve seen it on other blogs and I’ve often wondered about doing it, but held off, but recent events of scrambling to avoid a major overdraft in the bank and things have spurred me. Perhaps there are some generous people out there who actually like what they see and would like to give me just a little something to help keep me a float, that would be nice, and if you are out there I thank you.
I’m figuring to try and expand my money earning horizons, perhaps I can get some work as a ghost writer or an editor. I don’t know, I’m trying to look at my skill sets and it’s tricky because they’re rather random and vary widely. Other than that we’re having to do another long hard look at what we’re spending and where. I keep thinking about looking for a better life insurance rate or just nixing that completely but that scares me, but at the same time tons of people go without life insurance, I’m sure. Other than that I think parts of our cable package will be going soon. It has to be cheaper to have internet alone without everything else, right? No matter what they say.
I’m getting somewhere. If I could just keep myself calm more often that would really help.
The air felt so clear and everything was so bright. She stepped through the room and her arms outstretched as they were couldn’t hope to reach the walls. She could feel more than see that there were thin wisps of curtains whispering in the breeze ahead of her as she walked towards the opening. It was not a window because it seemed to take up almost the whole wall, and she knew if she just stepped through she would be within the rest of the city, among the others.
Just one more step…
and another…
and soon there would be nothing just the freedom of…
She came down with a thud, it had something to do with falling off the bed. Her legs were tangled in Jonas’. She pulled herself free of his almost iron grip, clumsy with the dregs of her take. She scraped her knee on a bent soda can, stick with week-old contents as she did so.
She rubbed her eyes dry for a few moments trying to readjust. Her mouth tasted foul. Everywhere had been so warm, the walls sparkled, the huge windows, the curtains billowing, trying to caress her.
She stood slowly and lurched towards the bathroom, but stopped when she saw the figure in the mirror behind, yet in front of her. Her stomach curled in on itself and dropped towards her toes at the same time her hands clenched up as her nails dug back into her palms.
“Leave me alone! I’m not going!” she picked up something to hurl at the mirror—but it turned out to be a sock and didn’t have much strength behind it anyway.
“Oh, relax. I’m not here for you.”
She whirled around, almost falling over in her haste to look at Jonas. The slight discoloration of the skin. The stains on his clothes from shitting himself. The tightness of his arms and legs from convulsing into the next plane.
“No! No! No!” she screamed resisting the compulsion to drop back to the floor, “Haven’t you done enough?”
“Not nearly.”
I’ve pretty well gotten to the end of that section of Dane things, now I’m just trying to decide where the next few bits will go. If Dane’s piece is the best place to begin things or if I should start with the others, slot Dane in and then continue from the point where she meets with the others again. I’m trying to decide, also, if I should prologue with the events that happened to cause her to leave in the first place, or just show those in flashback throughout the story. Either way I need to write them out. Perhaps I should just keep writing what comes and sort out the order once they’re all out of me.
Work has actually given me some extra shifts this week which is nice, given after the holidays money is tight. However I find myself still thinking I need to find somewhere that’s more reliable and where despite my health I can actually work a full 40 hour work week. It would be nice to have a steady schedule and a reliable amount of money instead of paychecks which vary wildly from $30-120 per week depending, and some place where I made enough money to be able to send the munchkin to daycare to get more socialization and all the rest of it, and I can use lunch breaks to write. That’s actually when I would get a lot of my writing done during the day was when I was working and could just sit and write with no distractions on the 15 minute breaks and the lunch breaks.
I feel discouraged, because it seems as though I never pass any employee screening tests lately, but I suppose when the employers are getting 30-200 applications for each position they can afford to be choosy, and up until I got this part time job I had a huge hole on my resume for the past few years and there seem to be so few places who actually consider raising your child to be a suitable use of your time. I explained that to one person who was interviewing me and he got this disdainful sneer, and then said, “So, why is it suddenly okay now to not raise your child and pawn him off on daycare?”
I’m actually very glad I didn’t get a call back for him. I was more than capable of doing my job; but anyone who can’t understand why your child has to be and always will be your first priority is not someone that I want to work for. As rough as my current job is they’re always accommodating if I don’t have a babysitter available, and everything else. So, I guess it’s a case of having to take the licks where they come really.
My sister-in-law was suggesting I look at banks, which is something I have done in the past, but I think they may have been put off by the two year blank space in my resume. I don’t have that now, so I’ll start again.
I haven’t had much chance to work on the story lately because we’ve been spending a lot of time with family who have been down for Yule, so there’s been a lot of time spent with family and friends catching up and re-telling jokes.
Now it comes time to plan some more about the story. I’m at the point where Dane starts her unplanned cross country moving with an angel riding on her shoulder. Meanwhile other events unfold in neighboring towns. I have to sort out what I’m doing with some of the other characters that I have plans for, such as Abigail and Hajime, and if they’re going to remain as they were originally planned or if I’ll need to tweak them a little.
It’s been just over two years since I last worked on the story, so I do need to refresh the plot line and the planning in my mind and see if it still flows the same to me.
I’ve also been having ideas for another story based on a game I ran. They were running through my mind as I went to the grocery store earlier for emergency crescent rolls.
Remember that video review I was just talking about. It’s for complete clean floss by Dentek, and I have to say that the floss is really brilliant.
I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to review this product, as I said, because it’s shown me that there is actually floss that I can use. My dentist has always told me that I really should floss, as everyone should but I never do because it hurts and who wants to keep doing something that hurts? Not me, but with this floss I could easily use it, and it was really easy to also show the munchkin how to use it, which is great because I want to make sure that he has much better oral hygiene habits than I do.
As a side note I’m just glad the video uploaded. The computer was being most uncooperative. I had to port the file to a different computer, convert it’s format and then upload it from that computer. Apparently the new computer does not like uploading videos only recording them, but I’ve got it done, and I’m very happy about that. It’s taught me a lot about what to do with regards to making videos, if I have the opportunity in the future to do so.
But back on topic I’m really happy with the product that I was sent, and also that it’s a fairly inexpensive product so it’ll be pretty easy for me to get more in the future, because I anticipate losing a chunk of it to both the munchkin and hubbie once he works out how good it is too.
I’ve not written anything since the blurb the other day, but that’s because I’ve had a lot of things to focus on at the house, between making jewelry and a calendar to be gifts for family, looking for health insurance leads because my husband’s company are really screwing with the health insurance over this next year, and trying to get over my nerves about making a video for something I’ve been pretty busy.
I’ve had some ideas percolating but I’ve just been jotting down notes here and there to come back to after the holidays, or in a little bit of downtime. I’ve almost got most of the presents made. I just need to take some snap shots of the munchkin for this year’s Yule photo and get them printed, and then write up the explanations of the semi-precious stones I used in the jewelry and get that printed too.
Here’s a snippet from the writing that I did today. There is some course language.
Turner didn’t come in for another two hours, so Dane busied herself stealing a breakfast sandwich and inhaling three coffees with the super-caffinated cream put in them.
Steve whispered jabs about all that being no help at all and she tried to ignore him. At least focussing on that would better enable her to avoid the mounting pull to get into the next person’s car that pulled up and drive it to Florida.
Not going. Not going.
She changed filters and coffee pots while she was over at the station making the various cups of coffee.
“Man,” someone nearby said while he was waiting for the coffee to finish, “I’ve had it with this weather.”
“Hm-mm,” his friend said, “It’s supposed to snow today, what say we move down south it’s much warmer.”
“Yeah, I talked to my sister in Florida yesterday she said that they’re in shorts right now.”
She slammed the coffee pot on the grill slopping scalding coffee up her arm. It took a moment to register both the pain and the shocked faces of the two customers. She narrowly avoided knocking over several other coffee pots as she tried to get away from her own arm. As the pain hit she tried to tear the sweater sleeve off by pulling at the cuff.
“Dude, is she alright?” one of the men asked.
“What do you think?” Steve retorted as he took hold of Dane and started to pull her towards the rest room.
It was this point Turner arrived. As he burst through the door Steve froze halfway through saying, “For Fuck’s sake, calm down.”
Dane was shouting, “I don’t care! I’m not going back!”
Turner pushed Steve back towards the counter to check out the observant customers and then he drug Dane back to the restroom.
“You swore to me you were clean! Don’t even try. I know what you’re like. I know cops, okay? They warned me! But you’d promised me you were clean and now I look like a fucking idiot. What the Hell were you trying to do?”
It was a bit of a ‘duh’ figuring out that the character of Dane would work at a gas station. I’ve heard from my boss and co-workers issues they’ve had in the past with people of similar background coming to work for them. In fact while I was on hiatus due to health someone else was let go for using drugs while at work, while it wasn’t such a violent an interaction as Dane has with her boss, Turner. It was still rough on both parties.
Dane just isn’t the sort of person though who could work in data center services, or at a school. She’s very dark emo sort of person, and is on the run from a lot of things in particular herself, and the main point of the first part of the book is that all her avenues are being whittled down until her only option is to go back to Florida and meet up with those she’s left behind. She wouldn’t even look for a job somewhere that’s not a good temporary place in case she has to start running again.
I’ve been feeling a lot better lately, which I’ve found is showing itself in story inspiration. I had something happen at work today which hasn’t happened in a while, which was that I started having scenes of part of a story run through my head and I couldn’t get rid of it until I found a notepad and started writing it down. Thankfully the manager on duty was understanding about this, which was probably because it was a slow Sunday and I would write a paragraph and then go switch out the coffee and stock things and come back while the coffee was running and write a bit more, unless a customer came in and then, of course, I would deal with them.
I’d been planning on writing on the story that I have on the go which so far I’ve called ‘Ledger’ as that’s the name of one of the main characters. However this scene was part of a story called ‘Sanctity’ apparently the being and working in a gas station just clicked with a missing part of the story, and I wrote a scene where one of the main characters gets accused of drug abuse and fired from their job at a gas station due to being tormented by an angelic spirit trying to get her to go somewhere she’s Supposed To Be.
I’m very excited. I wrote just over 1500 words today and hope that I can continue on with this. I have a few drafts on different parts of this story and a lot of background information because I had been working on this story for NaNoWriMo in 2007, but then on the 11th of January we found out we had to be out of our apartment by the 31st of December so I stopped working on NaNo to focus on finding a house.
There’s been a lot made lately in our community about medical coding training courses, one of my friends is actually taking some right now with the hopes that once she’s completed them she’ll be better qualified, having never worked because she’s spent the past six years raising her children she hasn’t any work experience and so isn’t appealing to potential employers, which is a huge problem especially with the way the economy is right now.
I’ve thought about going back to school several times but my problem as is often the case is trying to narrow down exactly what to do with myself. There are many different things that I’m interested in but a lot of them aren’t worth the expenditure for the end result, as was the case when I tried to do Graduate Studies in Information Services.
I’m trying to focus on things which would be easier to improve and can be done from home, working on each of the blogs in turn and changing things around so that they’re working at their peak and then also working slowly on bettering my actual writing techniques, which was meant to be the purpose of this particular blog in the first place.
I’m sorry to see that I’ve lost a lot of readers and subscribers over the past few days. My sites have been up and down for a little while but that should be over now as I’ve been able to get things sorted again, for the most part.
I’m still fixing the widgets and things, but I’d rather get all the sites back up that I can and then get the widgets sorted than play around with that right now, the feed subscription is back up and that’s the main thing as far as I’m concerned.
What happened is that on Friday a person in Sheffield initiated a scam of PayPal and to do so had hacked into one of my other domains using my password which they had somehow phished. My host is incredibly wonderful and incredibly on the ball (seriously you guys should ALL host with drak.net and tell them I sent you!) and had everything locked down within a few minutes, but that’s still meant that they had to lock all my sites down in case the person had been messing around in all of them and also that once they got me fixed I decided to take everything down and put it back up in pieces anyway because I’m paranoid like that and thought it would be a good time to weed out anything that was up on the server that probably shouldn’t have been because it was old, stale, and not being used (like my old Joomla installation).
Anyway I hope that I can regain my readership and breathe new life into everything like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of this disaster.