Then it hit me. I wasn’t paying for any of it. My hair, the doctor’s visits… since I don’t make any money of my own, it was all provided by TheBoy. Instead of being rational and realizing that I pull my own weight in the family, taking care of the boys around the clock, running all the errands, and keeping track of everyone’s schedule- I felt absolutely useless.

Last night it manifested as a desire to watch TV instead of writing. This morning, well this morning I was in the kitchen and talking with TheBoy and started sobbing. “And now I have hair that’s high maintenance and I contribute nooo….th….iii….nnnnngggg to this fammmmily.”

Earlier in the week I ran into my hair stylist at Target. I was unbelievably awkward (sorry about that if you read this!) but she told me to come by since it was fading and we could hit it with some blue toner. As I was driving today, I was stuck in traffic and realized I was right by the salon. So I stopped in, figuring I’d make an appointment for the toner.

She had time and squeezed me in right then and there, and she didn’t charge me for the toner.

That would have been more than enough kindness to shake off last night’s funk, but while I was at the preschool, one of the moms stopped me to tell me about a deal at Babies R’ Us where you can trade in an old car seat, stroller, travel system, high chair, play yard, bassinet, walker, infant swing, bouncer, entertainer, crib or kid’s bed in exchange for 25% off a new one (and she pointed out that it didn’t have to be from the same category. She turned in a bouncer and got a discount off a booster seat). She’d seen me with the Oldest Kidlet and thought I might have something I needed to upgrade, since I had two kids. I thought it was unbelievably sweet.

Then as icing on the cake, it was Friday, which means the Oldest Kidlet doesn’t have any homework.

I’m sure the Universe will try to right itself again and tomorrow I’ll be sobbing to TheBoy about how lame I am. But for the moment, this day is pretty great.

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As a result, neither of my boys likes to clean up much and I usually have to fight with them to clean up after themselves. We’ll have a couple of good days where they’ll pick up as they play, and then forget the rules and things get messy again.

However, I’ve been trying to get the boys to help more. They’re four and six, and when I was finally able to get the Little Kidlet to join in when I was cleaning I knew that I needed to make them pull their weight a little bit.

So I made a chart. Where I could draw stars on it, and when they got up to 10 stars they could pick a prize from our treasure box. It has Hot Wheels, pencils, stickers. Nothing expensive, but definitely fun.

We weren’t making much headway… but then I got to take Sunday off for my birthday. TheBoy and I went out (more on that another day), but when I came home, I was told that the boys both earned stars for cleaning. Not just their toys, but their bedroom as well.

The next morning, the Oldest Kidlet made his bed. Today, both of them made their bed! Weirdly, they didn’t insist that I immediately give them a star for doing this… I know I make a lot of references to the looking glass, but today I definitely feel like I’ve gone through the Looking Glass.

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I figured I’d try out making vlogs, since I’ve got the Flip and usually a little quiet during the day. True story – every time I started to make this, someone would walk into the room. It took me 6 tries.

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To catch everyone up, over the last year or so I’ve felt pains in my abdomen that come and go, usually after eating. I’ve had mysterious fevers that come and go. The most important issue was my weight loss. I lost some weight, and on my slight frame (I’m only 5’2″), that meant a lot. Then, I was hospitalized in December with severe anemia.

In the latest part of my journey to figure out what the heck is wrong with me, I had a colonoscopy (and endoscopy) on Tuesday. Which basically involves putting cameras inside me through either end of my digestive tract to look for certain kind of damage that comes from certain disorders/diseases. And no, you aren’t conscious for any of it.

Since more people are likely to have a colonoscopy (they’re recommended for anyone over 50) than the endoscopy, this is what to expect. You’ll be put on a clear liquid diet (broth, clear juices like apple or grape, non-red Jello, popcicles that aren’t red, purple or green) for the entire day before. Then, the night before, you’ll have to drink a “prep liquid” which clears out your bowels. Honestly, sitting on the toilet for the bulk of the night wasn’t the problem. It was the hour in which I had to drink 32 oz of a salty liquid that tasted a little orange and metallic.

The next morning, I woke up and had to drink another 32 oz of the liquid. Followed by 16 oz of water, and then nothing for hours before my appointment. At my hospital I went to fill out paperwork and was ushered off to a waiting area where I stripped into a hospital gown and waited on a gurney. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Then, I was finally taken into the procedure room where they positioned my body and started to inject the sedative. It’s done while you’re in a twilight stage so that they can talk to you and do things like ask you to relax. But you don’t remember any of it. The only thing I vaguely remember was the start of the endoscopy- and that was just because they were putting something down my throat, and I only remembered a second of it. Afterwards, I was taken to the recovery room where they waited for me to wake up and gave me juice (this is an assumption of mine based on what I saw happen with other patients). Then they called TheBoy (my ride home) to say I was ready to be picked up, and had me get dressed and wait for him.

The kicker is that they probably explained the pictures taken during my procedure. But I don’t remember a thing. I remember an orderly (who TheBoy confirmed as the orderly who’d been telling me about his brother living with ulcerative colitis) wheeling me outside towards the car, and TheBoy standing there in his Pac Man shirt, looking as adorable as ever. I remember a moment in the car ride home where TheBoy told me that the Oldest Kidlet had gotten in trouble at school for pushing a boy. Then the next thing I remember, I woke up in my bed probably about 3 hours later. My day was a bit fuzzy around the edges. I can’t really explain it, but it’s not that my vision was literally fuzzy. It’s that my brain function was a little hazy. I could almost put together complex thoughts. There was a lot of me standing around trying to remember what I was doing.

But I wasn’t in any pain from the colonoscopy- in fact, the only pain I had was the endoscopy. My poor tender esophagus.

I’m fine now, and in a week I’ll be talking to my doctor about the results. Here’s to hoping that I finally get some answers.

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I’ve been using LK’s quiet nature to help keep secrets and to save time during my day. After I picking up LK from preschool, if I’m too tired to make lunch I’ll go ahead and pick up fries for him and a burger for me. I know that he won’t tell his brother (getting what happened at school out from him takes some interrogation), so I don’t have to worry about one brother freaking out because the other brother got something else.

Well, up until yesterday, that was the case.

Yesterday, I picked up fries for the Little Kidlet and a soda for me. We drove home, he ate his fries and life was great.

Then we went to pick up his brother. I was worried the car might smell like fries, but I didn’t think so, and off we went to collect the Oldest Kidlet.

Nothing was said about the smell of fries, and we pulled into our driveway. As I put the car in park, the Little Kidlet said, “I had some fries today.”

The Oldest Kidlet looked at me. “I knew the car smelled like something delicious. You didn’t get me fries? This isn’t faaaaiiiiiiiir.”

“No,” I deadpanned. “He said we have a surprise for you today.” He didn’t buy it- he speaks LK better than anyone in this house.

Needless to say, I’m not going to be picking up lunch for the two of us anymore. I’m fairly certain that the days of the Little Kidlet keeping quiet are over, and I doubt it’ll be any time soon that the Oldest Kidlet will realize that he has it a lot easier than his brother. Oh well.

Why yes. I do like my weekly burger.

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Writing is writing, no matter where you start.

Things posted by a teenager just embarking on their writing career will usually be riddled with spelling errors, unrealistic characters, and have no understanding about what an adult life actually is. If the teenage author happens to write RPF (real-person fiction, a subset of fan fiction involving the actors themselves), somehow there will be many pregnancies that occur. You get a baby! You get a baby! Everyone gets a baby!

I left an online forum when it seemed as though one actor was single handledly fathering the next generation of children with under-aged mothers. While I get the appeal of the particular actor, but it was a more than a little disturbing. And no matter what the older forum members said, these young teens all insisted that sex + love = baby. (I really hope these girls changed their minds by the time they actually started having sex)

The teenage writer’s stories usually feature Mary Sues. My definition:

A Mary Sue is a female character (though male versions do exist) added to a fanfic that is of the author’s creation. Not all original characters are Mary Sues. A Mary Sue is unique in that she usually has a name worthy of a Harlequin novel, eyes of an unusual hue (violet, white, or any color described as “unlike anything ever seen before”). She manages to become central to the plot, and possesses skills that would rival everyone from the original movie/book.

In a Harry Potter story, she is smarter than Hermoine, and also possibly be the Chosen One. Or if this is a Slytherin centric story, some family with closer ties to Voldemort than Draco’s family. Also, she’s likely an American girl. Just to make her stand out more at Hogwarts.

In Pirates, she would be more of a budding feminist than Elizabeth (who let’s admit, is a bit of a canon* Sue), better at swordfighting than Will and better in bed than Jack Sparrow, even though she’s just young and was probably a virgin when the story began.

No matter what the fandom, everyone can’t help but fall in love with her.

Lest anyone think I’m being unfair, I wrote a horrible novel with an “original plot” when I was 12 or 13. I lifted ideas from just about everything I’d read up until that point, so it’s hard for me to actually use the term original. It was set in some vague point in history that wasn’t Medieval, but wasn’t Renaissance either. Oh, I don’t know… the Disney Days of Yore, where it’s sort of Dark Ages, but nobody is dying of the plague. It was set in France, but I knew nothing about France, so it was more like what I knew from German Fairy Tales. I believe there were twins girls separated at birth- one who was rich and one who was poor. The poor girl was even the rich girl’s handmaiden and nobody noticed that they were identical. Worse yet, I gave everyone ridiculous names that I thought were clever. There was a Frenchman named Monsieur Anly. So when you wrote it out, it was M. Anly. No, no copies of this exist.

At 16, I wrote a spy short story that was not as bad, but certainly was cringe-worthy now. Being a spy story, the plot was fairly cookie cutter, but most in the genre are. Mostly it suffered from a lot of “telling” and not much “showing.” However, a teacher of mind raid the spy story and told me that I would never be a writer. Which actually led to me not wanting to pick up a pen and write for years. I told myself that I didn’t have it in me and focused on other things. (That would be when I started playing role-playing games, yes the kind with dice, and ran a game with a colossal world. I was writing, but I didn’t realize it at the time)

I’m sharing all of this, including my own horrible stories because part of writing is being able to draw from your own observations about human nature. The more you experience and the older you get, the more you have to draw from. And no, you don’t have to experience it all personally.

I knew a girl from the fanfic community who had a novel published by a real publisher by the age of 18. I was 24 and as jealous as I could possibly be about this girl’s talent. Looking back on it now, I realize that she’d spent the two years I’d known her devouring other people’s fiction- the writing of older women who understood real heartbreak. She had to have spent at least an hour a day reading other people’s work and personal journals and learning from those who were older than her. I know she spent at least five or six hours a day writing her own work. She always asked for critiques (most people posting didn’t want criticism at all) and found “beta” readers (aka editors) whose work she admired, and who she thought had points of view that could help her learn more. She wound up where she was because she worked to get there, and worked hard. She had to have spent at least 4,000 years in the time that I knew her writing- and she’d already been writing regularly for years before. I remember all of us being surprised that she was only 16 when she joined the group.

So, write and read. As much as you possibly can. The more you write, the better you’ll get. I only wish that I hadn’t listened to that horrible teacher of mine and lost years to my own insecurity.

If you want your own community to join in, there are lots of writer’s communities springing up on the internet. You can find self published writers on Twitter and Google+, and I’ve seen a lot of the same love that I found back in my fandom days. It’s all there. But most importantly, write!

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*Canon – Canon refers to the original material in a book, comic, television show or movie. It’s what is explicitly said. In Star Wars, it’s canon that Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star.

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Yes, I wrote fanfiction. You can shake your head all you like- just stop if your brain starts to rattle around. After Pirates of the Caribbean came out, I had an idea for a spinoff adventure and started writing it. In doing so, I got involved in fandom and learned a lot about writing. I had access to people (mostly women) who wrote all sorts of things, used fanfiction to experiment in styles… it was pretty great. (It wasn’t all great, but that’s a post for another day)

After awhile, I no longer felt the siren’s call of fanfic, and had a lot of projects of my own that I felt brave enough to tackle. I slowly left the communities, though I do keep in touch with some of the writers I was close to.

Here’s the list of the fandoms I played around in. I wrote some things in Pirates, King Arthur, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Kill Bill. And Supernatural (the television series). Nearly forgot about that one. I didn’t write a huge volume of fanfiction, either in frequency or length. I knew women who wrote epics every single week- I preferred to write the occasional “ficlet.” I also didn’t finish a lot of what I wrote, as the folder of WIPs (works in progress) I found on an old computer backup can attest to. That is still a bad habit of mine.

As proof of my past, I offer two short bits from two different fandoms. Both were written in 2004, though the first I edited a bit today. There was one sentence that had always bothered me, and I realized why this morning.

First, from King Arthur, a “missing scene” from the movie. Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t a great movie, but partly that’s what attracted me to fandoms. Give me a gorgeous cast, some action and free me from the confines of history? I’m there.

Note: This isn’t my usual style, but it’s King Arthur.

The words she spoke in the caravan still echoed in his ears. “Your own father married a Briton. Even he must have found something to his liking.” There had been an unspoken question in them, asking if he could find nothing himself. He had thought the answer she sought to be solely Guinevere, but that proved to be wrong. In tasting the salt of her skin, feeling the warmth of her body wrapped against him, he had realized that she wanted him to know that to want her was to want Britain.

The woman curled up beside him was living proof that she, though of flesh and blood, was Britain. The curve of her breasts echoed the slope of the hillsides giving way to flat plains. The sharp outline of her hips served as a reminder of jagged mountains, not unlike the pass where they had faced Cenric, side by side.

She stirred, brown eyes alert even as she woke. Guinevere said nothing as he traced imaginary markings on her skin where the woad would soon stain. A brief smile passed over her lips, recognition lighting her eyes. Her eyes turned towards the open window, towards the inky night sky. “I must go to my people.” Lips pursed softly, she quickly corrected herself, “Our people.”

“Our people.” The weight of the words hung in the air, heavy with uncertainty. With a crooked smile he drew her towards him, lips trailing down her throat. “They will stand by me come dawn?”

“By dawn they shall.” She pulled free, slipping into the borrowed gown. There was no uncertainly in her voice, no question that Merlin’s people would follow. “And I,” she paused in the doorway, eyes afire. “I will stand by you come sundown.”

Yeah yeah. Eyes afire, recognition “lighting” her eyes? I giggle too. Moving on.

Next up is something from Once Upon a Time in Mexico. I loved writing OUATIM. It was a way of exorcising that dark part of me that wanted to shoot everything and make anything an insult. Yes, even Little Miss Sunshine has a dark side. Also, I really hated my job at this point in time. Lots of frustration there.

Here’s something very short, and definitely NSFW as far as language goes. Though if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that this is not out of line for Sands. Set post-movie.

Sands watched I Love Lucy as a kid, his mind coloring the shades of grey. Years later he’d gone to a fucking theme park of all places, where they had an exhibit of her clothes. What he’d thought green was a garish red. The truth was far uglier than anything he’d imagined.

Being blind was a lot like that. Suddenly he saw- heard- Mexico for what she was. A cocksucking whore thriving on blood sacrifice.

Lucy hadn’t lived up to the memories left from his childhood, and the bitter taste of disappointment had lingered in his mouth for a while. Mexico? He could still taste her in his mouth. She’d fucked him raw, and left him for dead. Turned his whole goddamn world upside down, and all he knew was that he wanted more.

So there you have it. Part of my “secret” past. Fanfiction can be a great way for a writer just starting out to gain confidence- you don’t have to worry about creating your own characters, you can focus on telling the story.

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OK is a perfectionist. When he sets out to do something, he wants to get it right. Every new batch of words, he expects to know them all. This wasn’t a problem when the words were short. He flew through those. But now we have longer words (this week’s batch included because, there, their and words with lots of silent letters. Like know), and it’s difficult to get through them all. Which usually leads into a full on meltdown.

This week he made it through half of them. The timer went off and he looked at me, smiling. Smiling!

“That’s pretty good, if you ask me.” Then he picked up his pencil. “And I didn’t even cry.”

Of course, that feeling of pride didn’t last too long. No long after, he and his brother were trading blows over a booklet from a LEGO set that he had stolen from his little brother. You can’t win them all.

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That’s right, when most kids are excited about that hour less of school, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. It took a lot of coaxing and an extra hour for us to get through our homework. Just in case you think it was because we just got back to school, we did the same amount of work the day before in half the time.

As if that wasn’t enough to make my day rough, I spent yesterday reading links on building successful social media brands and mostly I walked away feeling like I’m failing in who I am.

I’m one person. I’m a mom, a geek and a writer. Is it weird that I try to be all these things in one blog, or is it just too scattered to keep interest? Every single story I read said that it’s just too much for one site.

I keep trying to tell myself that this is just my own anxiety at work, which is a problem I have. So realistically, I can be me. It’s my blog after all. I am who I am, and I need to accept it.

I’ve never been a person with one main interest. In high school I either wanted to be an actress or a coroner. In college, it shifted to computer programming or theater- though theater dropped away when I realized every theater degree needed me to spend all my free time crewing shows instead of working at my job.

Yes, I’m a mom. But I’m a writer and a social media junkie. I cook, too, and all that’s here. I’m also dealing with social anxiety, but that’s all here too as well. So tell me… who else here has a hard time picking one thing to be when they grow up?

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Busy getting the kidlets ready to go back to school. The Oldest Kidlet was so excited to go back to school yesterday that he jumped for joy Sunday night and did a happy dance today. I joined in both times. As excited as he was to get back to normal and seeing his friends, I was thrilled that I wouldn’t have him around 24/7. Don’t get me wrong, I love him so much that words can’t describe it. But he’d gotten an idea that I lead an exciting life when he wasn’t around.

Every day he expected to run new errands, and did his best to try to get special perks for being my assistant. He tried to get us to go to Starbucks every day, and didn’t quite understand when I explained about Starbucks being a sometimes thing. I lost all my daily writing time. He spent the rest of it asking me 5,000 questions, which I can’t be upset about. I know I did the same thing to my mom.

He stopped calling me Mommy. I’m now just Mom. I’m torn between being happy that Mom sounds hipper than Mommy, or sad that my son is growing up. Worse yet, when I told him not to call me Mom, he said, “Should I call you Whitney instead?”

I’ve been busy with lots of other things, too. Doing some research on a project I’m involved with… secretsecretsecret stuff for now. It’s not writing related, but definitely in line with things I’m good at.

And I’ve been working on my WIP. Not the novel, but the WIP that constantly distracts me, with the character that seems to invade my head more often than not. I admit, I’m working on the novel too- but mostly in planning phases and not text yet. To steal film jargon, it’s in pre-production. Still, always, forever. (Just kidding. That first draft will get done by the end of the year)

If nothing, 2012 has started off looking like a great year. Lots of opportunities and I just have to keep myself going.

Next time, things I’ve realized now that I’m turning 32.

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