Feeling Defeated and Done In

"Keith... you're losing it. And when it's lost, all you are is a loser."

-Watts from the movie "Some Kind Of Wonderful"

So with the highs of keeping up with my goals last month, I feel like I'm falling behind this month.

Oh yeah.  Big time.

I have ideas for a few stories.  Right now I'm trying to work on a beginning for another one of my Wheels-O-Wonder stories, but it's just not gelling.  I think I can make it work.  I just need to get back in the zone as well as get out of the house and some place quiet to do some work.

On top of that, I decided to add three of the six stories I had started in Stoically Challenged for fear of them not getting lost in some void.  I mentioned them in my last post , and I think created story blogs for them shortly after (if not the day after) of that post.

So we have Kearie, Kai and Penelope.  (Hello kiddies.  Mommy has missed you.)

The original plan was to do the stories in order like I did last month - oldest to most recent, but I think I'm going to save the three new girls for last this time around.  I need to refresh my memory of where I last left off with them.  Then maybe over time, if I write more for the other girls (Ashlock, Abernathy and Piper), they, too, will get their own story blogs.  We'll see.

As it is, I haven't even thought of a name for the dude I'm writing about now which is odd, but hopefully I'll come up with something tomorrow.  The plan is to hit a cafe or coffee place and just get out for a while.  I've been feeling a little out of it at home and aside from my "powerloss" beating several kinds of poo out of me as it always seems to do when it comes around every month, I haven't been very productive with anything for most of the day.  Thank goodness it's almost over so hopefully that'll work out in my favor and who knows??? - maybe I can crack out fourteen stories and one review by the 29th.

That's right, my lovelies, this year is a LEAP YEAR!

Then again, I've already written one story... well... ten little stories for one of Alithea S's assignments.  I wrote ten drabbles in the Montana-movie-fandom which were loosely based off of the movie-verse and my birthday gift to Alithea S. fanfic-verse (minus the Percy Jackson-Artemis part).

So that's one story down, thirteen and a review to go.

Oh yeah!  I can just taste the failure.  It's just sad with a hint of despair.

A "plus" to my glorious blogging/writing ways, a friend of mine and fellow writer - Kevin Z. - featured me recently in one of his blog posts.  The post itself tickles me beyond belief.  Looking over the post as well as listening to my recording of the post (I come out loudest because 1. my phone was closest to me, and 2. I'm Filipino.) is just delightful!  LOL!

I feel I need to explain the post (and maybe a little bit of the recording, too).

A while ago, Kevin Z. and I chatted about writing, and how his writing sort of fell to the wayside and now he simply blogs.  He had said he never had the time or energy due to working long days, etc, and I said something positive and encouraging like, "If you really want to write, you make the time."  Then I decided to challenge him by giving him a prompt from the Wheels-O-Wonder.

His prompt?

A: an alcoholic
B: that hates kids
C: hunts for lost treasureD: to find a mythical animal

My Facebook messages tell me I gave him this prompt October 9, 2011.

His reply?

That sounds like it will really put me out of my element. Challenge accepted.

After poking him periodically with "How's the writing going?" check-ups, I decided to give him until the end of the year to finish the story.  That would be a few months.  PLENTY of time, right?

About a week ago at a game night at his and his girlfriend Diana M's place, I jokingly checked on him and the story again.  (Diana M. wanted me to give him way more shit than I had been, but she seemed to do that better than I ever could, so I merely just once in a while would ask once and leave it at that.)  He'd occasionally tell me what he'd plotted out in his head but so far nothing had been written/typed out.

At one point during the night, he was sitting at his computer, and I was sitting on the floor with some other friends chatting.  He nudges me to look at his computer, and what do I see?  A word document open with the following...

And the smartass award goes to...

I took a pic of the screen with my phone cuz I thought it was funny and posted it to my Facebook with the message:

Dear Kevin:

I love you. LOL!!!

Have Goodness!
(your Asian Sista from another Mista...)
Rae

He saw that later on which I guess prompted him to blog about it.  Some time later he nudges me again to look at his computer, and that's when I saw him playing around with the pic for the post.

And then The Beast (Rachel's Hair) attacked
Kevin and he was never heard from again. -JF

Originally the pic (taken by Jessie F.) was just of him and me at an outing with friends to the meadery back in April 2011 (which reminds me I haven't been in a while and really should fix that).  I believe I had my hair pulled back earlier in the day but had let it loose later.  There was a comment about The Beast (a loving nickname for my hair) being loose, and Kevin Z. made like he was scared of it (like B-movie horror scared). 

So... I attacked him with it.

The thing I like about this pic is that you can see my ass which, in recent years, I have come to embrace and not think to be this hideous mass behind me.

The thing I do NOT like about this pic is, even though I love that shirt (hella comfy yo'!), in the pic it balloons forth as The Beast goes after its latest victim, leaving me to look large... like an expanding marshmallow in a microwave.

After seeing the pic - resized to fit his blog - I had suggested in jest that since you can't see my face that he should do a little bubble to the side showing what I actually look like.

Hence the second photo.

True friends hold your head up when you
no longer can. -JF

The other pic cropped and used in his blog shot (also taken by Jessie F.) was taken at a recent Girl's Night (January 2012) whilst playing a game of Trivial Pursuit.  (We were drinking so we used to the kids cards.)  In the original pic was me and my friend Dawn S. 

From my vantage point, her head was tilted at an awkward angle and looked like it hurt and could potentially cause damage... so I thought I'd help her out.

Now if you listen to the audioboo clip (yeah, ya heard me right... audioboo!), you'll hear me gripe about how he covered up my booty with... well... my face, but left the big parachutey shirt billowing before me as if to hide my cow stomachs.

Moo, mother fuckers!  Moo!

But the two Photoshop gurus ignored me and continued on talking shop about the photo.

Cutest anime eyes EVAAAAR! -JF

(Note: Disregard the comment in the recording about "Carlanka" unless Kevin Z. wants to explain it.  Besides it's about a friend of his that I don't know, so he knows the story better than I do.)

Since they were playing around with the picture, I had suggested (again as a joke) if they could give me "anime" eyes.  In a picture from Dawn's birthday back in 2010, there's a pic of me and Wes M. that Jessie F. took, and I have no idea what happened - if it was the flash or the angle or what - but I ended up having adorable anime eyes... and being Asian, I found that quite amusing.

Since I more often than not DO NOT like the way I look in pics, I kept making jokes about myself, and Jessie F. offered to fix the picture

Last year in May was Makers Faire, and she and Wes M. showed up a little later and met up with me and the rest of the people I arrived with.  Later when I saw the pics Jessie F. posted of the event, I actually liked how I looked in some of them... and of course had to joke about it even then.

Whud up. -JF

One pic she took of me (as shown here to the right) was a pic that didn't make my stomach turn.  My comment on her Facebook?  

Like this pic. I don't look fat in it. Wait... did you Photoshop this?I think I had made that comment a couple times before on other pictures, and of course like with all my friends... you make a joke like that, there's a good chance someone is going to take it and run with it.

So guess what happened?

You caught me, Rach. I've been photoshopping pictures of you
to make you cuter for daaaaaaaaaays. Here is a completely
un-photoshopped picture of you. *eyeroll* ♥ -JF

Jessie F. Photoshop'd me up REAL good.

When I saw the new pic, I think I laughed so hard, I almost pissed myself.

Me: Lol! It's like a Willy Wonka acid trip!
Jessie F: Enjoy your Justin Bieber hairs!

Man, I love my friends.

So yeah, Jessie F. offered to doctor up the pic to make me look amazing, but then Kevin Z. said he wouldn't use it sooooo...

In the end, I shut up and told him it was his blog, and he could do whatever he wanted.  And like I said, I was going to mention his post/blog in my next post proud that I got an "honorable mention".

Hey, it's the little things, ya know?

In the end, as far as pics go, like with my writing, I don't think all of them are that bad and will share them with the world.  Only the truly hideous ones (again, decided by ME) will never see the light of day... and I think those are few and far between.

And would you look at that.  I have managed to bring it back around to writing.  I had veered off track somewhat and am now back to me and my stories.  (Ugh!) 

Oh!!!  I almost forgot!  I recently hung out with a couple friends of mine (Chris M. and Renee M.) who I hadn't seen in FOREVER, and Chris M. asked me to write him a three page story that he could make into a short film.  So that story is running through my head as well as the Wheels-O-Wonder one.  I have an idea for it, but I have no idea how to go about it.  Okay, that's a lie.  I do... but I have to think it through some more.  I think I can make it work.  The idea I have is based, as is all of my writing, my life and experiences.  I just hope I can make it good enough for him.

All right.  I think I should try and get some sleep.  As it is, I'm amazed I've blogged so much.  Well, you could have spent all that writing time actually working on a story.  Yeah yeah yeah... leave me alone annoying inner-voice. 

I'm planning to leave this Thursday for a family visit (fiending for some niece time) as well as maybe... if I can... donate platelets this Tuesday.  I kind of want to do it this week... but we'll see how it goes.

And who knows?  I might actually get some writing done at my mother's house.  It's been known to happen.  Not a great amount, but some?

And donating platelets... perhaps after a giant steak, I'll feel awesome!  We shall see.

Ack!  It's 5:30am.  Frak!  Maybe I'll just stay up until tonight to try and get my sleep schedule back to normal.  Then again, I tried that the other night and look how well it's been working out for me.  (sigh)

Later my lovelies!

Have Goodness!
Rae

Dear Insomnia: I Hate You! No Love, Me.

"Normal is not something to aspire to.  It's something to get away from."

-Jodie Foster

I've been suffering with a sinus headache for the past couple of days.  Thankfully the discomfort hasn't been consistent, but it's hindered any writing progress I may have made in that time.  I was playing clean-up with some blog tags, etc.  I tried working through the pain, and I succeeded for a while, but then eventually I couldn't keep my head up (even with meds), so I put the minibook away and laid down.

Part of my clean up was re-posting some old stories from one site to my new one.

So long before I started heavily posting my stories and poems here, I posted them elsewhere.  Not to the extent I have on these pages, but I shared them just the same.  I started posting to the other site back in 2005 and created this story blog and started posting on it around 2007.  At the time I posted more on the other page than this one so I made the effort to post on both whenever I wrote something.  Over time, things flipped where I was posting more here and neglecting the other site.

Recently I decided to update the older site with things that I've created on my pages here, but then I started looking through my old work and realized there were some poems and stories that I didn't post here.  Waxing nostalgic on the old site, I went ahead and added them to The Curly Muse page. 

I also wrote a couple new things for Everything At Least Once.  Even though I said I'd hold off until the new month kicked in, I couldn't help it.

And now on to my dilemma. 

See, I remember having this conversation with someone have it be my brother or a friend who read my writing, etc.  It was in regards to how many blogger pages I actually had.  Also there was the comment "You don't have to make a blogger page for everything you write," and I don't, but I always said that if I ended up writing more and more of a story, that I would create a new page just for that story.

I recently went through all my story blogs and made notes in one of my blank journals to try and keep up with what I was doing.  It was when I went through the story blog Stoically Challenged that I noticed I had a few story lines that had a number of posts for them.  They had started off being stories for assignments given by Alithea S., but then there were some story bits I wrote without a homework assignment but posted in the story blog since they started with a homework assignment from that story blog.

Now I'm thinking of giving them their own pages.  What do you think?

From the various stories posted on Stoically Challenged, here are my "repeat offenders" (aka stories/characters I kept going back to):

• "Kearie": currently at seven story postings (two of which were homework assignments)
• "Penelope": currently at seven story postings (three of which were homework assignments)
• "Kai": currently at nine story postings (one of which was a homework assignment)
• "Abernathy": currently at two story postings (both of which were homework assignments)
• "Ashlock": currently at two story postings (both of which were homework assignments)
• "Piper": currently at two story postings (both of which were homework assignments)

Now the only ones I'm really looking at (for now anyway) are "Kearie", "Penelope" and "Kai" since they have the most written for each other whereas the other three storylines only have a couple installments.

If I made three more story blog pages, then that would just be more story blogs for me to update on (at least) a monthly basis.  I did it in January.  I'm hopeful that I can do it for February.  I'm just afraid that since they're hidden within the other stories on that story blog, they'll just go ignored and eventually forgotten.

That's just sad, right?

I think what I'll do for now is take notes on the three storylines I mentioned and work on them in addition to the story blogs I already have on my docket.  It wasn't until today that I realized it was already a new month and that I needed to start updating/writing again.

I tried my hand at writing in a coffee shop (like ya do!), and I found it difficult to write in a place that was solely a coffee shop due to the noise.

If I'm in the zone, no noise can stop me, but it's getting there that's the challenge.

I was at a Barnes and Noble cafe with a friend seated at the brink of the cafe near the fiction/genre fiction section where there's a considerable amount of traffic.  Hell, there were even a group of older gentlemen playing backgammon a couple tables away, and I STILL wrote better there than I did at the coffee place I was at recently.  I sat a table by myself, and the chatter around me was mind boggling.  I could even hear it over my earbuds when I tried to lose myself into my music.

Maybe it was just that day or something.  I don't know.  I just find it odd that one place was noisier than the other... and I used to work at a bookstore and know how frakkin noisy and distracting it can get.

Maybe I'll just back to that Barnes and Noble.  One of these days...

Okay, I think I'll call it a night now... even though it's after 5am.  LOL!

Later my lovelies!

Have Goodness!
Rae