It Came From Outer Space…

So here I am writing a little blurb again. This one is about the twins that I’m thinking of doing some work with for a while as a sort of ‘Too Deep’ detox. I decided to go on with suntan as a theme given we had a nice day yesterday and I needed something to focus around.

“What are you doing fruit loop?” I ask, coming down the stairs. She’s frantically leafing through the mail, “trying to hide love notes from the psycho?”
She slaps the mail on the counter in the front hallway and rounds on me, “If you must know,” she says, “we were planning to take Amy to the tanning salon for her birthday and I was looking for the brochure they were supposed to send. You know how Mom feels about that kind of thing.”
I’m not convinced, but I don’t want to push, “Make sure to stock up on tretinoin,” I tell her before going into the kitchen to snag a bagel before school.
As I’m throwing away the wrapper from the bagel bag I see several bottles of wine poorly disguised in the trash can, which can only mean that Dad actually made it back from his trip last night.
This should mean though that he’ll be asleep until well into the afternoon so I’m not going to have to deal with any drama until then.

I’ve realized I need some kind of home budget software for my time at home. I’ve had ideas before about doing a sort of daily schedule but that sort of thing never winds up working out.

It’s hard to have scheduled activities when you have an active toddler and a chronic health condition; but I figure that if I work things out properly I should be able to come up with a kind of floating schedule so that I can move things around as I need to, allot a couple of hours per day for free writing, a couple of hours per day for blogging and work-related activities, a few hours for chores and playing, and teaching the munchkin; that sort of thing, and it can be flipped around and things can be switched out and rotated depending on what’s going on at the house or with my health.

In keeping with trying to work on the new branch of stories for a little while. I now find myself wending comparisons between twins, male and female, who would ordinarily be considered fraternal but considering the way that they are formed they’re actually not.

However, they’re still male and female, similar and yet different. They have a strong twin bond, however the girl, perhaps somewhat stereotypically would be more concerned with how to treat acne than the latest video games; but they can both be somewhat shallow at times. They come from a wealthy family and go to private school, they live in a closed in neighborhood.

However they’re drawn into family drama in a rather interesting fashion, and as I’ve said before the story would give me the opportunity to analyze different relationships and how they work or don’t and how those that seem to work on the surface can actually be very broken underneath.

I know I’ve said many times that I’m not really a romantic type of author. There’s romance in some of my stories, but it’s generally not the focus, usually some big alien or supernatural bad is the focus, and the characters’ quest to destroy or ally with said bad, and all the horrific things that center around that are.

In keeping with the trying to get away from living in the stories things something else came up as a sort of colon cleanse for my brain, which was to try my hand at a romantic comedy sort of story. I’m still not sure if I’m up to that but it has sparked a few interesting thoughts about the ‘Too Deep’ universe, not necessarily that story but about other stories I have which hook into it, and whether or not I can work on one of those instead and hopefully remain more detached or whether I should shelve the whole universe for the time being and instead write something else, such as the weird and whacky version of “Rapunzel” that had been in my head for a while.

So this is my quandry for now, do I write up the McCahill end of the ‘Too Deep’ universe which involves several comparisons of romance from arranged marriage, stalkers, first loves and a ‘business arrangement’ which is more based on love than many of the other supposed romances in the story, or the story of Eryssa’s quest to rescue her older sister from the clutches of an ‘evil’ wizard so she can be back with her true love the captain of the city guard while Eryssa hopefully finds a way to get her own magic to work properly in the mean time…

Munchkin learned his first joke today. He had sort of learned it before but kept messing up and saying the punchline in with the question. Today he learned how to say it properly. So far I’ve heard it about six times, he’s told his Dad three times, Kore about the same and is now trying to track down the cats to tell them.

It’s a shame they don’t sell incontinence products for the mouth. I don’t want to gag him, but at the moment I’d love it if there was some little pill that would stop the verbal flow for just a half hour, that’s all I’m asking.

I don’t want to hear about the palm tree ANY MORE!

I found myself very drained by some of the things that I’ve been writing about in ‘Too Deep’. There are a great many emotional events in the story, which bring about feelings of fear, not being safe, grief, sadness and turmoil.

I’ve found myself experiencing nightmares, watching the events of the story unfold, and I’ve been tired, stressed and overall drained and no fun to be around.

It got so bad recently that my husband suggested that I give up writing all together, which brought about more upset because writing is one of the few things that I’ve wanted to do in my life ever, and the only one that I haven’t given up on. My dreams of being an astronaut went goodbye because of my health. My desire to be a vet wavered after I worked at a Humane Society and realized I just wouldn’t be able to do it. My dream of owning a New Age store, is still on the burner, but the fire is going out the more our finances go into hock.

Writing is my passion. When the depression and ill health got so bad that I had no inspiration and couldn’t write I felt crippled and diminished. The joy I’ve felt as I’ve been able to put pen to paper and hand to keyboard once more is insurmountable. I do not wish to give it up. I feel that will be worse than anything I could do for myself.

However, the stress, turmoil and grief, those are things which I know have to stop. I have to find a way to be able to convey my stories without living or re-living them so completely that I become overwhelmed. There has to be some way that I can write and enable my readers to experience these things without destroying myself; because that is not a good thing for anyone particularly me.

I’ve been doing a lot of handwriting the past few weeks. I found it incredibly strange to realize that I am indeed capable of writing stories without the aid of a computer.

It’s a sad reflection. I used to while away many an hour curled up in a chair or in a recliner out on the deck at our first American house writing and writing until I could barely hold a pen any longer, and I haven’t done that in years now I realize. I wound up handwriting almost 19 pages of things for “Too Deep” and some of it was hard going because my hands would complain and ache, and other times it was hard going because things I were writing brought about such a strong emotional response…but more on my thoughts on living your stories in another post.

I really, really want to be able to finish this story despite everything but I wonder some times if I have it in me. It’s annoying on that front too because I’m still not able to get my social security disability and further on that front because it’s causing tension in the household because of the lack of funds and the inability to work, and the days where I can create and do things which are followed by the frustrating days, and the “discussions” because we’re not sure at this point what we can do.

I hear hopeful things about certain places, like Allsup, which I mentioned. I’ve had a bit of information from them which sounds really neat especially that they’ve helped so many people receive the benefits that they need and their 98% success rate. I’m not even sure what my lawyer said his success rate was; how fast they are, and how they only charge if they get you what you’re supposed to get.

However, we’re with our lawyer now, and I’m not sure what else we can do to speed things along. The hang-up seems to be my psychiatrists office and details to do with receiving medical records and the like. Apparently it’s not that simple that I can just go down there and get the records myself and then mail them to SSDI. Something I hadn’t realized; but then there are many things I’m unaware of because the way things work wind up being strange and alien.

I suppose that’s why I relate to aliens and writing things from the perspective of an outsider to whom everything is completely foreign. It’s always been easy for me to step into other people’s shoes, and on some level that is good and then when I find myself grieving so much for things that I write and go through because I’ve experienced them in other life times or can feel what’s happening on the page so viscerally. I wonder will it evoke the same in someone reading it? Is this a good thing? Right now I’m not so sure.

For a few days I will be without a computer. I’m able to use my room mate’s computer for a few days and then she goes on vacation, and right about then is also when Toshiba should send the box to take the laptop to their repair center. Except it’s really at the point where I can’t use it at all, the near constant scrolling is just crazy-making.

I was talking to an associate who said that he might be able to fix the desktop, and spoke about the possibility of connecting it to a Samsung HDTV, but the monitor itself and all the peripherals work fine, it’s just the desktop which is dead. I have some prospects which are very heartening, that I will write more about when I’m not sneaking time on Kore’s computer, but if my various blogs are rather quiet right now, that is why; but it’s giving me a nice break from the hussle of the internet and really helping me kick the Facebook app addiction, so that’s a good thing to come out of this. I think.

Also I have 19 hand-written pages of the story I’ve been working on and more knocking their way around my brain, so that’s good too. I’ll have a ton to write up once I have a functioning keyboard again.