Craziness in Blossomland

Posted on by Sherri
12

Craziness in Blossomland yesterday. I live about a quarter mile from a medium-security juvenile detention center, and every so often a kid makes a run for it. Where they think they’ll go, I don’t know–they aren’t good at making wise choices or they wouldn’t be in that place to begin with.

Anyway, Sunday night three of them escaped, only these were more dangerous than the normal escapee. All night and half of Monday the cops sat on my corner with their lights on. We’re at the last intersection before country roads begin, so anytime something happens in town the police set up a roadblock in front of my house. (Like this incident.) I’m thinking of investing in a police scanner, because it’s a bit disconcerting to have 11 cop cars converging in my yard unannounced. They don’t like questions, either.

At one point, the Channel 9 van was also parked on the shoulder in front of my house. I hid in case they came knocking before I showered. They didn’t come. Later I saw my neighborhood on the news, but since they were shooting from my yard they got my neighbor’s house but not mine. They did get the corner of my yard when they shot the intersection. This is more than fine.

And everything’s back to normal again.

Let’s see, what else is going on… Well, I’ve had a cold for a couple of weeks now. I’m tired of coughing, mostly because coughing makes me pee my pants. (TMI?) Such is the lot of the middle-aged mother. Still looking for a job, but it sure makes my brain hurt.

I can only do job search activities for a couple of hours each day, so I have time to ready a short story for Smashwords. Yesterday I made a cover for it, and that was the hard part. I think I might be ready to put it in the queue later today. I don’t know if self-epublishing will be something I use regularly, but I thought it would be prudent to familiarize myself with the process. Times, they are a-changin’.

Have a great Tuesday.

Reborn

Posted on by Sherri
7

Hey look, I’m posting! This was my longest hiatus yet, almost three months. I don’t know if I’ll begin regular postings again, but I have some things to work out that might benefit from the attention of the world outside my house.

Namely, getting a job.

I’ve been planning to work for about two years now, but it’s never seemed like the right time. The threat of your kids going hungry combined with marital instability has a way of making any time the right time. It’s time to be reborn into a person of the world again. Long overdue, in a way, but I wasn’t ready. I am now.

I’ve made large strides on my resume, but it sucks. My biggest problem is narrowing down the field. My experience thus far has been too varied to focus my efforts in a single direction. Previous jobs have been in retail and manufacturing. Retail is categorically out, and the manufacturing jobs around here don’t pay much.

So this leaves me floating in space, trying to figure out where I fit in. What field would least aggravate my fragrance sensitivity, pay enough to live on comfortably (probably less than you’d think), and incorporate my skills and preferences.

I’d like to focus on writing, but there are a few problems with that. I tried writing novels and I still want to, but obviously I won’t be getting money from it for a long while. I tried freelance writing and found that the topics I know something about aren’t really in demand for paying jobs. Plus I don’t really like freelancing. That constant chasing down of work is too much mental strain. Technical writing sounds extremely satisfying, collaborating with others to produce a useful document. Most of those jobs require either a buttload of experience or a degree of some kind, of which I have neither.

I put my first application in yesterday for a manufacturing-type position. The pay is low, but the hours and location are perfect. There’s no way I could live on that income alone if it came to that, but it might be a good way to get my feet wet while supplementing our current income.

I’ve been disappointed to find that the more interesting jobs so far are all an hour’s commute from here. I have faith the perfect job will show up at the perfect time. Hopefully that perfect time is NOW.

Independence

Posted on by Sherri
4

I wrote today. Fiction.

You know how big a deal that is. Or maybe you don’t, because I’m not sure how much of that angst came through in my sporadic posting. But let me tell you, it’s a big deal.

It is Independence Day weekend—could this event signal new creative independence? Freedom from fear, from stagnation, from oppression?

I don’t know, but it feels good. Give me a flag to wave.

Authentic and true

Posted on by Sherri
11

I think if I just started typing every day, whether or not I have a topic in mind, I’d post a lot more often. Nothing seems important enough to write down, except for some stuff I can’t really talk about. But today I decided to take the plunge and just write anything. Just communicate.

I haven’t been writing fiction at all for a long while, so long that I don’t even feel guilty anymore. Letting my agent go let me go. I felt like the band of a slingshot must feel right after it releases its missile, flaccidly bouncing with the force of the release. I’m not ready to load another stone, but I am finally still enough to begin hunting for the perfect one. The hunt might take a while, and apparently I’m fine with that.

As I’m opening files and emails I haven’t looked at in months, I’ve found something disturbing. I’d thought Black Veil Angel, what I consider my better book, had been barely subbed, maybe to ten or so smaller publishers, while Ea’s Gift had been subbed to the death. Now I see it’s the other way around. My agent had abandoned EG in favor of BVA (apparently it was the better book), and I was so deep in my helplessness that I’d never laid the subs out side by side.

The reason this is disturbing is that BVA was going to get me another agent, if I ever decided to try that route again, and EG was self-pub fodder, something that didn’t have a life in traditional publishing but was good enough to experiment with. I thought my future was in contemporary fantasy anyway, so it would be fine. But the most likely next project, the one that captures my imagination, is another traditional fantasy like EG, complete with a dragon.

So all this means is that I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing. This whole time I’ve been trying to balance what I want to write with what I think others want me to write, which is impossible. I bought into the advice that it’s best to have a whole bunch of people read your stuff and tell you how to fix it, no matter what. I’m starting to think this is a big reason my creativity died.

Other people, those who don’t have a people-pleasing gene as dominant as mine, might do well with this advice. For me, it’s just managed to confuse me enough that I freeze up. I haven’t had a vision for my projects, I see in hindsight, except to write what pleases others. And not in an attagirl way, an ego puffing way, but that if other people don’t like my work, then my work isn’t valid.

What I see now is, if others don’t like my work it might not get published, but that doesn’t make it less valid. And once I understood that, it was easy to see that somebody is going to like my work, if I am authentic and true. Some people know this and apply it instinctively. I never did.