Amy Lane's Blog: Writer's Lane, page 183

zomg zomg zomg

TELL me you see what I'm talking about!

Okay-- for the record--I LOVED the cover to Making Promises... I just couldn't figure out why it looked a little bit familiar. That's okay though--Hercules and Iolus hit my slash button before I knew I had one. It's like kismet or something, right?

Points of Interest

(Forgive the pirated Michael Parkes Print-- I'm a sucker for that faintly sinister blind jester... SO sexual...)

Anyway, some things you may want to know.

* The endless technicolor yawn has ceased, and Squish is feeling much better. The dog, however, is traumatized.

* Big T spent all night typing a paper. At one in the morning, he accidentally flushed the paper down his computer, and was cruelly informed of this fact when he awoke to print it up. The resulting brouhaha put such a weirdo crimp in my morning that I can not even begin to tell you how much I don't know what time it is.

* Chicken is in finals too. Last night, she stayed up until eleven o'clock to watch a movie, and seemed put out when I looked at the clock in horror (my own internal clock is too fucked up right now to even explain) and said, "Tall people! Why is nobody sleeping!" Big T, of course, had an excuse, but she got all persnickety. I was like, HOW CAN I WRITE WITH ALL THIS NOISE!

Of course that wasn't exactly fair, since I was up watching the movie too. *sigh* Being the grown up sucks.

* Zoomboy. Ah, Zoomboy. The voyage of self discovery that is Zoomboy's journey through ADHD diagnosis has been a whole lot of fun--for me mostly. Zoomboy missed it all. I brought him to his appointment today and he was like, "Why are we here? What a nice man--can I play with your Duplos now? Excellent."

The doctor, however, was pretty funny. He told me the following things:

--Kids with ADD often have poor social skills. When you can't control your impulses, you're annoying.

--Everyone has an executive function office in their head, right between the eyes. This office is like a traffic cop in your head, prioritizing stuff and making sure you know what's more important. When you have ADD, your traffic cop is on a permanent donut break. (It figures I hate authority--even my BRAIN CHEMISTRY hates authority--it pretty much fired its executive officer when I was five and has been running the show in complete anarchy ever since.)

--People with ADD tend to forget things because it takes a minute for something in the short term storage to go to long term storage. In the meantime, the traffic cop is on donut break, and the other parts of the brain are going "Oooh! Shiny!" and that thing you were trying to remember goes bye bye. (I told him that I'd had not one but TWO break ups in college, where the guy was breaking up with me while I was doing something else, and when we were done with the conversation, I didn't realize we'd broken up. AWKWARD!)

-- People with ADD often become teachers.

--When that happens, they become the teachers that kids love but administrators hate.

--They're also the teachers that never grade their work, they just give really exciting lectures.

--If they don't become teachers, they do really well when they're self-employed.

--ADD kids can have sort of difficult childhoods and adolescences.

--But if they survive until adulthood to find something they like and are good at, they do GREAT!

*blink* Uhm, yeah. Wow. Who knew--my entire life, I've been suffering from a disability. I just thought I was like that dog in Up--"Squirrel!" Of course, now I can go "Squirrel!" and then smile brightly and say "ADD!" like a big goofy parrot in mismatched knitwear. Same me--more material.

However, Zoomboy has a chance at a normal life (as opposed to his mother) with a little understanding, some medication, and a lot more time with his father.

*happy sigh* Silver linings abound!

Your regular blog post will be interrupted today...

by the following special report...

My four year old threw up on the dog this morning. That sounds really spectacular, but I've got to tell you, she had a lot of practice before she made the award winning shot. If anyone needs me? I'm going to be doing laundry or serving as a barcalounger, or (more importantly) trying to figure out how to see Big T's guitar recital tonight, since Chicken has plans, and we were going to take the short people, and Squish obviously feels like shit!

Your regular blog-blathering will resume tomorrow, where I'll probably talk about wisdom teeth or something equally inspiring, like the logic of getting barf out of a stinky dog bed.

That is all...

Sunday Afternoon Convos

My seventeen year old son, Big T: "Awkward."

Me: "What?"

T: "There was a Facebook poll asking for my favorite female character."

Me: "So?"

T: "I misread it. I thought it said favorite character, period!"

Me: *snicker* "Who'd ya put?"

T: "Data and McCoy."

Me: "zomg... I don't know if even *I* could slash that!"

T: "Oh God, Mommmmm!"

Me: "Mmm... Karl Urban... Mmmm..."



And obviously, I"m having a Moody Blues moment...



Which is okay, really, because I'm going to meet a friend to see Season of the Witch (SEE, Saren-- I told you I'd see it!)

Anyway, it's all quiet here, really. Just vague, funny things happening, like Squish coming in with the squat and lovely dragon totem that was a gift from Mary Calmes. I had it next to my computer, and she just took off with it.

"What are you doing?"

"i just wanted to touch it mama. I'll leave it over here so I can touch it."

"Okay. Why do you want to touch it?"

"It's all smooth..."

I'm thinking that kid can feel power when she sees it!

(Said kid is sitting on my lap right now. She just gave a big twitch, let off a left-cheek-sneak, and went back to doodling on my calendar. Uhm.... yeah. *shakes head* I think going to the movies without a little person is probably a good idea--we're VERY comfortable with each other.)

Oh yeah-- and the top image? A rejected photo for the cover of Rampant. I'm going to finish one more chapter of Living Promises before I start editing the Marcus and Phillip story for real. W
anted to get in the mood!

OKay--don't know why it's not working...

But once again I had two other blog posts at www.writerslane.blogspot.com, and they're not feeding. It would be AWESOME if they fed--I don't know why they're not feeding, but they're not. *grrr* Hopefully, this will jumpstart it, but in the meantime, check out the actual blog-- it's not literature, but at least it's current!

All Free--but not all me!

Okay--I've mentioned this before, but I didn't realize then that the e-book for Wishing on a Blue Star would be TOTALLY free! Again, if you just want to read my story, it's right there on my website, but if you want a free e-book, with lots of great writers, and a really strong message about strength and joy, well, yanno... free?

And this was a surprise--this is an impromptu Christmas anthology calledStuff My Stocking. Now see, this was sort of a Christmas game on goodreads.com, in the m/m romance forum. The Moderatrix had people find pictures, and they put them out on the forum, with an invitation to the authors on the forum (you'll see there are a number of us) to choose a picture and write a short bit of fiction to it. I wrote in the Green's Hill world, and you'll se an uncomfortably pregnant Cory there, but mostly, it's all written to a picture of a handcuffed elf. Well, I had to set that little guy free, and then Green had to heal his wounds, and... well, we all know how Green heals.

Oh yeah--and don't forget the VERY short Deacon/Crick interlude added the free stories on Goodreads.com on my author page.

Anyway, yesterday's blogpost is NOT translating to goodreads.com-- I don't know why that is, but this sort of thing sort of ticks me off. For one thing, I can't figure out how to reboot that whole idea. For another, I saved that picture of Spongebob special!

And I will leave you with this--Chicken came home upset because she had to pick a song for the character George Wilson from the Great Gatsby. I gave her three choices--the River or Atlantic City, both by Bruce Springsteen, or this song:



She chose Mumford & Sons--but we need to find a clean version on iTunes, because she doesn't think the teacher's going to buy that she didn't know 'fook' was Aussie for 'fuck'. Either way, she makes me proud--and we both REALLY love that band now!

Help! I'm Running Low on Clipart!

LOL-- seriously! I love me a good picture on the top of the blog... I've been having fun doing that for the last few months, but, well... I've only got so many pictures of the kids (and I do need more, I admit) and the knitting, while being accomplished, doesn't really get the ol' juices flowin' like some nice, professional, erm, FREE clipart, yannowhatImean? Anyway, if anyone's got some good pages of clipart that you don't need a computer degree to save to your hard drive, I'm all thumbs. Erm... Ears. Yanno... whatever... Hey-- I still have lots of files of sleeping animals to put up, right? And the creepy little sleeping hamster doesn't look dead AT ALL, I swear!

I've got another ADD class for Zoomboy tonight-- hey, let's see if I can pay attention long enough to actually start applying this to Zoomboy instead of my own manky-arsed self. Still, it is sort of amusing to look at all the symptoms and think "A-ha! I'm not weird, I'm learning disabled!" And, let's face it, saying, "Do you mind if I knit? It helps me control my ADD," sounds a LOT more grown up than "Do you mind if I knit? I'm pretty sure this is going to be as boring as hell and I don't want to doze off." Anyway, I've got my knitting packed and good to go, and I'm thinking I might get a goodly bit of a scarf done this go-round. Let's hear it for health improvement classes--now, if only we got units for them!!!

And, I think I've figured out the secret to keeping mama happy--it involves enough sleep and time in my own head. Seriously--if I don't get time in my own head, to read, to write, to create to just BE, I turn into a really grumpy bitch. Just do. Being alone--go figure, it CAN be a mood enhancer! Yesterday I met a friend for coffee, and to go shopping at a yarn store (I told her next time we meet, we should meet at my regular yarn store because Babetta SERVES coffee in the store) and even though I forgot Squish's coloring books (BAD MOMMY--Squish would have had SUCH a better time if I'd remembered!) it was lovely to talk to an adult. The only problem was, I also talked to Zoomboy's best friends' mom (one of THE loveliest people on the planet--I am firmly convinced. I don't care what faith you walk, some people are destined to be angels, and this woman is one of them. Pure goodness. I adore her,) and that was great, but I came home and my crazy friend Wendy called, and then the kids all seemed to think I'd want to talk to them (go figure) and, well...

By eight o'clock, I didn't want to talk to another living soul, and I made sure the feeling was mutual. Funny, how you think you're a social person and then you realize that it's all a sham. I love being social--but it needs to be followed by intense periods of being curled up in my own shell. I know that now. I'll be careful whom I inflict my nasty ol' self onto in the future.

Anyway, writing continues apace. I finished another Gambling Men short mostly because my editors like them, and not really to publish. Although we all see the stories being published in the future in some way or another-a collection, a novella, something--what they really boil down to is being fun to write and getting me in the headspace for something a little more difficult and a little more serious.

"I Love You Asshole"--the Marcus and Phillip novella-- is finished, and has been accepted (YAY!) and will probably be out around March, but it has a LOT of tightening needed before I send it to Jennifer (for whom it was written) and let it be edited for publishing. I'm going to give it a couple of days before I start the editing... I'm on a roll on Living Promises, and don't want to break that again so soon. It took me a while to get my head back into that one, since I let it sit for two months to work on other projects, and I want that puppy to start rolling like a moss-covered rock!

And to that end-- Littlewitch DEMANDED more Deacon, and we've already sort of determined that sometimes, I'm just her fast-typing bitch, so I wrote thiswhich does contain a plot spoiler, but which is also a quiet, Deacon/Crick moment. No sex, but some sadness, so beware.

And, well, that's 'bout all! The post-Christmas quiet (sort of) continues, and it's already been a productive new year!

The genes of Sherlock Holmes

Okay-- yeah. Since the last blogpost led with a current photo of her, I thought I'd try for an old one on this post, so we could all go "Awwww..." at how much she's grown. Mind blowing, isn't it? Dickens said it best... "The years performed their terrible dance..." Fortunately Squish has a number of dances to go before she's grown, but she really is amazingly big right now, isn't she?

Mate and I went to a 'class' last night on ADD/ADHD. One of the things that the guy said was that ADD was genetic, and that usually when he was treating children with ADD/ADHD, he would look out at an audience and see PARENTS with ADD/ADHD. I pulled out my knitting, started doing character profiles of the people I saw around the room, checked to see if Mate was paying attention, flirted with the new baby the row in front of me, wondered what the woman behind me was knitting when she changed projects and then I wondered what she was crocheting instead, and wondered who on earth this guy could be talking about.

Later, I semi-facetiously asked Mate if he figured out who he thought gave Zoomboy the ADD gene, and he said, (also semi-facetiously) "Yeah. Your father."

And I said, "What about my mom's side of the family? They're all brilliant and they all hated school!"

Well, basically, you know which side of the family can remember what they're doing when they go from one room in the house to the other, don't you?

Yeah. His. Poor guy--I'm sure he must have imagined, at some point in our lives together, that he'd signed on for 'normal'.

Anyway, the little seminar was interesting--I thought it highly amusing when the nice p-sychiatrist pointed out that the deal with ADD/ADHD is that neurology hinders the 'Executive functions' of the brain. I'm like, "Great--even my brain chemistry hates authority. That's refreshing to know!" He said that about 1/3 of all kids with an attention deficit would be simply ADD-- attention deficit, no hyperactivity. Mate thought this could be Zoomboy, but I don't now--Zoomboy doesn't run until he drops, but he IS sort of a little twitch. I'm sure we'll see, right?

Most folks with this disorder have both, but a small percentage are just hyperactive. "This," said the nice shrink, "is the REALLY dangerous kid. This kid is really bright, has horrible impulse control, and he pays attention to EVERYTHING!"

Mate turned to me and said, "Oh God--that kid would be Sherlock Holmes!" I thought that was an absolutely perfect observation-- Conan-Doyle would be proud, seriously! (I mean, Mr. Holmes DID try to self-medicate, right?)

About the only thing I DIDN'T agree with was the idea that back in the cave man days, the ADD/ADHD people would have been the hunters, while everyone else would have been the gatherers. "You've seen our kid on the soccer field!" I complained to Mate. "If that ball was some sort of animal he was supposed to hunt, he would have been dinner!"

"Well, yeah," Mate pointed out, trying to be reasonable, "but that's because he was never squatting in the dirt, watching daddy hunt!"

Well, yeah. But Daddy would have been a gatherer, and mommy would have been put to death as some sort of witch, so, basically, even though ADD/ADHD kids are 5-7% of the population our little Zoomboy would still have been the precious little anomaly that he is.

No matter how you slice it, though, the one thing we walked away from the evening with was, "Well, thank God for medication!" That and, for me anyway, "Thank God for knitting!" which apparently works just as well, right? I suppose we'll find out--if there's one thing we've learned from eighteen years bringing T to adulthood (or close-- the 'grown-up fairy' did not jus wave her wand and Shazzaam! Big T into productive adulthood, declaring our jobs completely over, and our lives without him complete. For one thing, he's gonna be living here until he's thirty!) it's that this sort of thing doesn't really end. You just teach your kid how to cope productively with it until it's his problem--and solution--and not yours.

So, enough of that.

Mate showed me this next thing last night. I wish I could get all righteous and give a dedication for this one--you know, send it out to everyone who has ever cut me off in traffic or sabotaged my life or kicked me in my shins or something--but I can't. This is not sent out as a curse, if anyone out there is reading that into it, but as a blessing, because it is by far one of the frickin' funniest things I've seen. Ever. I mean that.

Goddess love William Shatner--man, if we could all laugh at ourselves like this, the world would be a MUCH happier place:



And on that note, I'll leave you all to send that out to your friends--I hope you thought it was as funny as I did!

Feels Like Sunday Morning

Ulg. Boy, am I a grumpy bitch.

I woke up this morning to write, got some work done and thought, "Hey--I never go back to bed and sleep in. I'm gonna do that--it's everybody's last morning before vacation ends, I'm gonna enjoy sleeping in."

Oh yeah. That'll work. Mate? Yeah. Mate can sleep in. Me? I'm asleep, Mate's in the front room, and guess who comes to ask me for cereal? And milk. And to find the remote. So I get up and pour everybody cereal and stumble in to the computer, just wanting to be left alone and...

Well... they're cute. It's probably why they lived.

Anyway--I have FINISHED the Marcus and Phillip thing, and while I'm not sure if it will mean ANYTHING to anyone who is NOT a fan of the LG, I have it out to someone who's never read the LG, and we'll se if we can bang it into shape with some rubber mallets or something. Of course, the one thing I need to do now is go back in time and find the e-mail of the person who requested Marcus and Phillip in the first place, so I can print out her copy and send it to her! (Not as easy as it sounds. I'm on all these yahoo chat groups, and I delete around 100 emails a day.)

Anyway, if you're out there, hon, buzz me. I gotsa present for you!

And other than that? It's going to be a tough sell, convincing everybody that yes, there really IS school and work tomorrow. We have grand plans for watching True Blood today, and I'm down with that--I've got some post Christmas knitting to do!

Seriously--when my life is a little less hectic, that's when I knit more, and I've got this scarf working for Littlewitch that is... mmmmm.... she requested blood red, I used a double strand of merino for a garter cable and some thick black muppet to trim the ends... it's looking REALLY lush, although my hands are winter-dry and I have to keep asking Mate and the kids to fondle the wool to tell me if it's soft or not.

When I'm done with that, I'm crocheting a shawl from my favorite pattern which worked out pretty well, and then I'm making some fingerless mitts. Yeah, I know--this whole spiel would be better with pictures. I'm going to start taking more of them--I swear. The camera we have is not working well, and my phone camera... well, I've taken better pictures with a shoe box and a pinhole. But I hate not having a daily record of the kids, or of what I make, because I produced some items for the Chaney bag-o-knitwear that I was pretty proud of, and it would have been nice to have pictures.

(Oh... I forgot...A Christmas story pending: On Christmas day, I was telling my aunt about how some of my worst moments this last year have come because I'm not great with authority. I interrupted myself to say, "Hey--here's my bag of knitwear for the year!"

"Jesus, Amy! No wonder you have problems with authority--you don't even understand when we tell you NO GROWN UP PRESENTS!"

"These are backlog birthday presents," I sniffed. "They don't fall under the purview of the Christmas present clause."

"I still say this explains a lot about your life," Teresa said (with humor.)

"Yeah, well, why follow a rule when common sense tells you to go another way?"

All she did was shake her head. I'm starting to think I'm sorta kinda doomed.)

Anyway. Pictures coming. I suck with authority. I'm still knitting. The new year has begun.

Should old acquaintance be forgot...

Naw. Not a chance.

Mate did something HUGE last night and cleaned the garage--and now it's cleaner than anywhere else in the house, which is pretty damned cool. He had help--Big T mostly, with some help from Chicken, and I ran errands, taking donated stuff (like crap yarn to the retirement home and clothes to goodwill) to it's intended destination, and I finished up by going to buy 42 lb. of cat litter so Mate could change the boxes in the crap-weasel quarter of the garage and have some to spare, and that's when I picked up one of those cat-scratching things that are supposed to solve all your 'dammit, get-away-from-that' problems!

Uhm, mostly what it did was get my cats stoned.

"Chicken?"

"Yeah?"

"Come get your cat."

"What's he doing?"

"Making sweet lurv to this piece of paper on top of the table."

"So?"

"It's making me uncomfortable."

"Mom! Do you know what you write?"

"Hey--my vampires are having sex in a ROOM!"

The cats are all currently drooling on things they don't normally sleep on, but that seemed especially soft and comfy in the afterglow of last night!

And Squish has made an observation regarding the changing of the seasons. We were driving to pick her sister up from her friend's house, and we stopped at an intersection that we've been through about a thousand times before in this year.

"Mama?"

"Yeah?"

"What HAPPENED to this place?"

"What do you mean?"

"Something bad happened here! What happened?"

"Nothing bad happened here--what are you talking about?"

"What HAPPENED here?"

(Now, remember, I write about the supernatural all the time, so I'm starting to think maybe my kid is that chick from Medium, and wouldn't THAT suck because I've WATCHED that show, and those people do NOT have easy lives!

"Honey, what makes you think that something bad happened here?"

"Mama, all the trees are naked!"

And, sure enough, fall may have been late in arriving this year, but the latest series of storms have stripped the trees, and it's now officially winter. The corner, which is usually shaded and green, was now starkly surrounded by tree skeletons, and something, indeed, had 'happened'. Observant little Squish, ain't she? (She's also been irritating as hell lately... fortunately, she spent some time away from her brother yesterday, and maybe they can stop making us bugnuts for an hour.)

And it's the time for top ten lists this year--I've been surprised to find myself on a few. This one was an honor, these were a very flattering surprise and this review was so gorgeously written, I could only hope the story lives up to it. All in all, very very nice.

Now I know it's the New Year, and I'm supposed to come up with some intensely deep, long-winded thing to say about wrapping up the old year and saying hello to good things to come--but I can't. Too much of my life is behind the curtain right now, too much of it is in flux.

I can tell you this: I am content. If the year has taught me very little else, it is that sometimes bad crap is very random but the good shit? That has to be earned. My husband, my children, my writing--I have worked very hard to see that those relationships are solid, that those things in my life will pay off. I am happy with all of them, and I am proud of all of them, and I will not take for granted that they will continue to be okay through the new year--you don't slack off on the shit that's important, New Year or no. I chose the picture above because that story is so rife with hope for the future--but the future for the boys in the picture required hard work, and heartbreak, and it's an important reminder that I try to write what's real, even if I'm dealing with shapechanging bears and magic cottages. May you have a good year full of hard work and just rewards.

Happy New Year to all of you--we will be watching old movies until mom falls asleep over her knitting. May you all spend your New Year's Eve in the way that makes you happiest as well:-)