Breakfast in America

Playing in the background: The smoochie bird. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is - possibly a bluejay - but it has a call that sounds like "smoochie smoochie smoochie smoochie smoochie."

Saturday in Texas. The day dawns wet and cloudy. It's been raining off and on since the middle of the night, as those of us who are easily startled by thunder boomies can attest. I've crawled out of bed, into some clothes, put in the ear drops (I have an ear infection), meditated and fixed the all-American breakfast - bacon and flapjacks. (Eggs would be overkill.) I've had some coffee, Joan is still asleep, when she does get up there's plenty of food, and the house is nice and quiet. Perfect time to get some writing done.

Except.

I don't know what's wrong with me these days. Well, actually I could give you a list, starting just incidentally with being unemployed, but as far as writing goes I don't know what's wrong with me. I haven't been able to string two sentences together in weeks. Which is a pity because if there's ever a perfect time to write, it's during a period of unemployment - long stretches of unstructured time, occasional annoying visits to Monster.com to make sure you haven't missed anything - but otherwise perfect. I'fact last time I was unemployed (and yes, I'm appalled there was even a last time) I wrapped up Book Two and started Book Three. I even remember one particularly nifty three day weekend where I knocked out eighty something pages, which is even better if I don't then delete three-quarters of them the following day, as I sometimes do.

(Course I was also manic as hell, and it finally got a chance to show up because a. I wasn't working ten hour days and then coming home to write, b. I wasn't drinking anymore, either and c. the binge eating was pretty much under control thanks to OA. I'fact if it hadn't been for that particular lapse in workingdom I might have gone on undiagnosed for months or years longer, saving myself thousands in therapy and prescriptions, while the disorder continued to wreak havoc on my life and damaged my brain even more than it probably already is. Oh well. You gots to take der good mit der evil, as Lars von Trier would say.)

But here I am. Sober, binge-free, medicated, ridiculously calm compared to the swooping ups and downs of anxiety I had when I was working, and all set to dive into something big and complex in between looking for work, which, if one is honest, does not really take eight hours a day in spite of what those nice "how to land a job" guides tell you. And I am churning out absolutely nothing. This, for the record, sucks.

I even have a couple of works in progress. There's Book the Third of Mindbender, Soulmender, which is basically done but there's some denouement to wrap up at the end and explain What Happens To All The Major Players (and perhaps more important, who killed the sinister detective, because frankly, I'd like an answer to that one). There's the whole getting Mindbender published thing, which doesn't take concentrated writing but (oddly like looking for a job) does take a willingness to hunt down agents, write letters, follow up and be a pest in a nice way. And finally there's No Accounting for Taste, the sequel to No Accounting For Reality. During the last NaNo-go-round I got about a third of the way into this one; go back to November and check out some of these NaNo posts by way of example. So there's stuff I could be doing. I'm just not doing it.

What happens is this: I sit down at my trusty laptop (I love my laptop, in case I have not said that lately - I don't know what I'd do without my laptop). I open a file. Pick a file, any file. I read through the last little bit of whatever I was working on. I add a sentence. Maybe two. And then I get distracted. The TV is too loud or there's some new game on Facebook I just have to try or maybe instead of doing this I should be knocking out more query letters or more recently, I need to check Monster or Craigslist or Simply Hired, name your favorite, or there's a recruiter to call, a chore to do, a floor to sweep, dusting to accomplish. I go back to the file. I glare at it. Then I get fed up, quit, close the file (sometimes without even saving it) and flop down on the couch, watching whatever happens to be on the Discovery Channel and cursing myself for being a lightweight. Obviously I can't do this. Obviously I was fooling myself all this time. Obviously I've let everyone down again (though, as Dashiell Hammett allegedly said, "It's not like they're gonna miss you, Lily.") I've done this pretty much every day for weeks.

So is this that thing they call writer's block? For years I've been convinced it doesn't exist but I'm starting to believe in it now. Anyway, it's very frustrating. But perhaps there is hope. I did, after all, manage to knock out this entire blog post - and Joan is still asleep.

Hyperfertility Mystery Solved!!

Playing in the background: The ceiling fan. On second thought let's crank up Pandora, here. Okay, Sea and Silence by Deuter. Liking that.

My rabid fans are no doubt aware that for some time now I've been having these fits of hyperfertility. The most screamingly obvious was back in May, when I camped out in front of my laptop for a solid holiday weekend and wrote something like 80 pages of Soulmender. What is hyperfertility, you ask? Well, that's when I feel like working nonstop for days, hardly bothering with such niceties as food and sleep. Or having nonstop sex, but this being a religious establishment and all that, I don't talk about that part in public. In one of my more infamous episodes, I cranked out the end of Part the Second of the Almighty Trilogy in an eighteen-hour sprawl of wordplay that had me forget to get up and get a bottle of water and then wonder, two hours later, why I was thirsty. I call it hyperfertility because it seems to hit right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant, and because I feel like if a male came within about 100 yards of me, he'd have an excellent chance of knocking me up. Luckily, the only male around is Caesar and he is neutered. (By the way, you can follow Caesar on Twitter: @carpefelem)

Well, after the Soulmender incident, I got to thinking that this maybe wasn't quite normal. I mean, writing is temporary insanity, but, you know, telling myself I'll sleep an extra hour so it's okay to stay up until 11:30 or midnight when I know full well I'm gonna get up at 5 anyway and go to the pool, and then do it again the next night, because the more sleep deprived I am, the longer the hyperfertility lasts, is, you know, probably not all that good for me. The copious amounts of caffeine and sugar that keep it going are also probably not the greatest.

So as one of the hyperfertile fits was winding down, I went to see my doc for my Annual Exam (TM). And she asked me how I was doing and, for some strange reason, I leveled with her. And she asked me how long I'd been having manic episodes. And I said, about a year now but probably longer than that and did you just call them manic episodes? (She had.) Manic as in manic depression? (Yep, only we call it bipolar disorder these days.) Are you serious? (She was.) Well, crap, what does that mean?

Well, it meant that she was gonna port me off to a psychiatrist. And again for some strange reason, I went along with this. What's more, I wrote up a brief history of the Jeniverse, including my previous experiences with psychiatry (which began when I was five) and odd behavior among my family members (most specifically my grandparents, all four of whom, though dearly beloved, were a piece of work.) Being the paralegal that I am, I even faxed it over to the psychiatrist before the appointment. I mean, just in case, you know? It didn't necessarily have to be bipolar disorder. It could just be, you know, genetically enhanced weirdness.

So the psychiatrist, who was very nice, greeted me as, "You're the one who sent the fax, right? Boy, I wish everyone would do that. It sure made my job a lot easier." She then asked me a whole bunch of questions, some of which were bizarre ("Name the last three Presidents." Crap. Okay, there was George W. and was there a world before then?) and some of which were just spooky. "Do you wake up a lot during the night?" "Do you have a history of alcohol abuse or heavy drinking?" "Did you have thoughts of suicide before you turned 13?" How does she know these things? Hmm, she must be psychic. Maybe she's a mindbender. Maybe she's related to Roland and I should get out of here right now because - oh, right. Reality break, Jen. Sorry about that.

Anyway, when the smoke cleared and the dust settled she told me not only did I Have It but that I'd probably Had It my whole life. They know a lot more than they did in the 1970s, when I began my couch trip and when the idea of a bipolar child was unheard of. Now they know that not only can children be bipolar but they're catching them at the ages of three and four. Back then kids were more likely to be diagnosed with ADD, or "hyperactivity" which was what it was called. (Hyperactivity. Hyperfertility. Hmm.) What's more, they know it's genetic for a fact. If you don't have the genetic marker, you can't get it. And since all four of my grandparents had Serious Issues, it's entirely possible I got a quadruple dose. Or at least I got it from both parents, by way of their parents. "If you had children, I'd be telling you to watch your kids like a hawk," she said. (Nope, no kids. Hyperfertility notwithstanding.)

Cliches aside, What Does All This Mean? Well, firstly it means I've been very lucky. Bipolar disorder usually gets worse, not better over time. I've already been doing a lot of the things they'd tell me to do; exercise frequently, meditate, hot baths (jacuzzi, natch), massage therapy. I've also been self-medicating for years (booze and food, in that order; I quit drinking four years ago and started going to OA two years ago and gee, the symptoms just turned up out of nowhere, didn't they?) Secondly, it means I'll be taking some med or another for a very long time, probably forever, and visiting the doc often to get Checked Up Uponst. I'll need to keep a journal, track my moods, stay away from situations that stress me out. "But really," she said, "it's not that different than monitoring diabetes."

So I've been thinking about that, and I think she's right. In diabetes, your pancreas produces abnormal chemistry. In bipolar, your brain produces abnormal chemistry. With diabetes, you monitor your blood sugar levels,take certain meds, exercise, eat certain meals at certain times, and avoid some foods, including alcohol and excess sugar. With bipolar, you do all of that (monitoring moods instead of blood sugar levels) plus hot baths, massage and plenty of sleep. No more late night writing binges. No more staying up till 11 to watch Surviving Disaster (Dammit!!) I've already got a diabetic in the house, so I'm following most of the rules as it is. And Joan likes massages, too.

Notwithstanding, I'm A LITTLE FREAKED OUT RIGHT NOW, THANKEWVERYMUCH. There's something about going from a diagnosis of major depression, which most people get (everyone feels down once in a while) to bipolar disorder, which most people don't get. I mean, depression's normal. Bipolar - well, that's crazy. Maybe not walking down the street muttering to no one in particular and every once in a while announcing I'm God crazy, but still, crazy. So I'm trying to get over that. And I'm reading lots of books and scanning the Internet and trying to Connect With My Peer Group, which, to be honest, I've always sucked at. And strange as this sounds, I'm kind of mourning my lost hyperfertility. As not-good-for-me as it certainly was, it was a lot of fun.

So How's the Book Coming Along, You Ask.

Playing in the background: Weird hissy growly noise from the closet. Either that's the heater settling into this whole being on thing, or my room is haunted.

Well, you didn't ask, but every now and then I just gotta tell ya anyway. And the answer is, both great and lousy at the same time. I seem to have the Curse of the Interwoven Story Threads. You know the deal - novelist has three different proto-protagonists romping through the fictional landscape, the idea being they all meet up at the end when something Really Spectacular happens that just, you know, pulls it all together. Next time I write something I really gotta lose the interwoven story threads and just plow along with one narrator, however unreliable. Course, then how do you cover the stuff that happens that doesn't happen to your narrator but that nonetheless happens and is like important enough that you have to know about it before your narrator does but she's, you know, not there? Like, for example, the sleazy detective going to visit the psychiatrist at eleven at night and falling victim to an unfortunate accident that takes him out of the picture in a more or less permanent kind of way. Neither the detective nor the psychiatrist are graced with the honor of being narrators, but they have to carry the story line anyway because the disappearance of the detective is like really important and if you don't get to, you know, actually SEE what happens, then you won't have a big aha moment later on when you find out that one of the other minor characters has been Up To Something that's, well, minor, but that has an important effect on how the whole thing comes out and hearing about it second or thirdhand simply won't do.

By the way, I seem to be having my monthly fit of hyperfertility. In case that's not obvious. This morning at work I tried to write a Motion to Compel Order for Summary Judgment and Request for Sanctions on Quantum Meruit Letters Rogatory, which, in case you know nothing about law, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I was practically bouncing up and down at my desk and coming up with way too many excuses to scoot down the hall to the copy room and back at high speed. If I time it just right I can slide into home right outside my office door. And yes, I have had too much coffee, thankewverymuch.

Back to the book though. (This is the worst kind of hyperfertility to have. I want to do everything all at once but I can't focus on any one thing in particular. For the amount of stuff I actually get done I might as well not be hyperfertile at all, and oh look, a cloud.) I have this one thread that's going great guns, featuring my twelve-year-old-just-turned-thirteen, his new girlfriend (he thinks), the Enigmatic But Evidently Not Evil Government Agent and, uh, the bad guys. Fine. Then there's the Bad Guys themselves, who have their own thread and that's, uh, not going so well. And finally there's the Family Members, who also have their own thread that basically has not existed since chapter the first, or maybe second. In order to have the Interwoven Story Threads you must first have actual threads so I think I might be in trouble here. To say nothing of the fact that one of my narrators has been unconscious for about the last six chapters. Approximately. I thought I'd turned the corner on this thing and was about to wrap it up in the next month or so. Now I'm thinking not so much. Unless, of course, I go take the Family Members completely out of the picture and just have them show up for the Big Reunion at the end of the story. See, I told them to stay on the damn cruise ship but did they listen to me? No. Not even the midnight chocolate buffet could do that.

The thing is, I know what they do. I know the officious uncle and the family friend/criminal go case the various haunts of the Bad Guys in hopes of catching them, uh, being bad. But what do they say? Where do they go? Does anyone even care? Or should I pitch them all out and focus on my half-insane art-dealer would-be assassin, who's fascinating and who wears tight tops and short skirts? Or am I, in fact, completely incapable of even seriously considering this dilemma because I am both hyperfertile and COMPLETELY SCATTERBRAINED?! Oh look, a cloud.

Apropos of nothing, Joan and I were watching something on NatGeo about locusts, those creepy grasshopperlike structures that get together in gangs, fly into the sky with the sound of a B-52 engine, blot out the landscape and eat all the crops. Before they're old enough to do that, though, they're these cute little nymphy nymphs and instead of flying they kind of hop and walk along. They really are kind of cute. Anyway, they're hopping and walking along and I started saying, "Boing! Boing BOING boingy boingy BOING walk walk walk BOING" and Joan about fell out of her recliner laughing because, um, I don't often narrate the activities of onscreen insects, I guess. And this somehow became an iconic Jen and Joan moment because, after taking out the trash one evening, Joan said, "I think there are some boings in the garden." So there were. And they were pretty cute. I didn't even know it was boing season.

Having said all that, I think it's high time I took my meds and went to bed, don't you? Because honestly, I'm not even sure I'm qualified to be blogging right now.

BOING!

Friday Frights (on Sunday) and Hyperfertility

Playing in the background: Episode of "House." The guy just never gets old.

For once I got Joan to come with me to a Friday Frights - mainly because I picked a Disney movie, but that's okay, she's good company. We saw Race to Witch Mountain at the dollar theater and it rates an AWESOME. (That's four stars for those of you that count stars - and yes, I've been known to go up to five.) Sarcasm, Star Wars in-jokes, Whitley Streiber appears as himself and, oh yeah, the movie was one long car chase. I'm liking Dewayne Johnson more and more as an actor. And was it a deep, profound, socially significant flick that alters our view of ourselves and our place in the universe? Uh, no. But it was tremendously entertaining. Highly recommended. I'm just sayin'.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it's the New Moon and yours truly has been hit with her monthly attack of hyperfertility. IF YOU ARE MALE AND YOU COME WITHIN 300 YARDS OF ME IN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, THERE'S AN EXCELLENT CHANCE YOU WILL KNOCK ME UP. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Not having a male (besides Caesar the Neutered Cat) within three hundred yards of me, though, I've been writing like crazy. 11,000 words in the last three days. Three complete chapters and parts of a few more.

This is one of the more awesome things that could befall a writer, and it even picked a convenient three-day weekend to happen. (Yes, I've been unemployed for a while now, but I've had a temp gig for the past week and I'm going back on Tuesday.) I don't know if it happens to everybody, but I can pretty much set my watch on it. Stuck on a tough chapter? No problem, call me back in four weeks. And don't ask me to do anything more complex than minor editing two weeks after that.

In fact, my only real complaint with this hyperfertility thing is that I get high. What's wrong with getting high, you ask. Well, nothing, except that I like it, and I want to keep it going as long as possible. When it starts to ebb, I don't want to eat (except sugar) or sleep (except naps) because being speedy and sleep-deprived lets me hang onto it a little bit longer. Keep doing this long enough and you will eventually die. It's like, say, powering a laptop with lightning bolts. Fun while it lasts, but then you need a new laptop and I've only got the one.

Anyway, I've been knee-deep in Soulmender (Mindbender Part Three) most of the weekend which was why Joan suggested the movie. I think she was afraid I'd forget the rest of the world existed. So naturally we went to see a movie about two kids in trouble, running from law enforcement and a scary assassin. I mean, you gotta appreciate the irony.

BTW, like how I came full circle on that one?

It Knows What Scares You

Meters swum today: 1900 (go me!)
Playing in the background: The soft sounds of evening (and the occasional train horn)

I've managed to scare the sheep out of myself. This should not come as a big surprise to those of you who know of my penchant for horror movies, fast driving, loose women and roller coasters. Well, just horror movies and roller coasters. Okay, honestly, just horror movies. (And the latest recommendation in that pantheon is: The Uninvited, marketed as a supernatural horror flick but really a twisty suspense/murder mystery/thriller with a BIG SECRET at the end that explodes like a --no, I better not say anything else. Go rent it, it's awesome.)

What happened is that I wrote something that scared me. Not only scared me but physically repulsed me to the point where I want to climb into my brain, find whatever hole it crawled out of, nail that sucker shut and tape it up with that red duct tape that kept the ghosts out in Kairo. This is all Roland's fault (I like to blame things on Roland; he is, after all, the bad guy. Or is he? Hm.) When I wrote Mindbender I included something called the Infamous Cigarette Scene (and if I ever get this silly thing published, you'll get to read it, so hey, send your literary agent friends my way, willya?).

I remember the exact day, the exact hour and even what I was wearing when I wrote the Infamous Cigarette Scene. I was doing laundry in a seedy apartment building in San Diego. I remember that because I had to walk out of my apartment and down to the laundry room to swap stuff in and out of the washer/dryer, and so one minute I'd be writing this thing (darkness, gloom, horror, whatever) and the next minute I'd be outside (sunlight, birds singing, frisbees flying through the air in the nearby park, whatever). And I was horrified and disgusted and so on, and wondered what the hell kind of person could even come up with this sort of stuff and so on, and was I that kind of person and so on, but I got over it. Kind of.

Then I had to go and write two sequels to the silly thing. Which pretty much guaranteed that Roland would have to, sooner or later, come up with something to equal or surpass the Infamous Cigarette Scene. Boy, does he ever. And once again I'm wondering what the hell kind of person could even come up with this stuff and so on, and once again, I'm gonna find that hole in my brain and...

The truth is, I write about things that scare me quite a bit. Politicians scare me. Religious fanatics (of any religion) scare me. Tornado sirens scare me. "Y'all're gonna need to replace that there engine, honey" scares me. But they don't really scare me, if you get my meaning. They're all scary to one respect or another but I didn't actually create them, did I? Set them loose in the world and all that? No. To write about something is, on some level, to make it possible. Even if we're talking fictional characters in a fictional country (filling in for El Salvador, in this case), we're still talking about something I came up with. That means I'm capable of coming up with something like this and why in hell is that?

I'm a nice person. I'm a Buddhist, fer cryin' out loud. I grew up in a nice middle class home with nice parents and I have a nice sweetie and a nice career (when I'm not unemployed, that is.) Apart from a brief period in my life when I was, oh, thirteen or fourteen, and some later karate lessons, I've never been in a fight. So what went so horribly wrong with the growth of my cerebral cortex, that I can write stuff like this? And why do I know so much about stuff like this? Not so much all the horrible things that people can do to each other but the way they're thinking while they're at it, what they're feeling, and more important, how they can convince themselves (usually without a lot of trouble) that this is the right thing to do. Was it all those "Gilligan's Island" reruns? Cyclamates? Stephen King novels? Too many horror movies when I was a kid? Nah. No such thing as too many horror movies.

Just incidentally, my love for horror films does not include slasher flicks like "My Bloody Valentine" and movies that focus on interesting ways to dissect a living human, like "Saw." Not only is that kind of stuff just gross, it's not scary. It's gotta be supernatural to scare me. Or it's gotta be Roland. Roland scares me plenty. What really scares me about the guy, though, is that he's me. At least on some level.

Maybe I'm working out a past life issue here. Maybe I used to be the Blood Countess or Caligula or something. Knowing me, though, it's more likely I was a fluffy bunny, a conscientious objector or an obedient housewife. I'm still more or less convinced I was a crafty trilobyte during the Pleistocine. If I ever do find that hole in my brain, though, I won't really be able to nail it shut. If I nail it shut, all the words will disappear. The good things and the scary things and the scarily good things and the things I don't even know are good or bad, they all crawl out of the same damn hole.

Hey, in case you want your inanity 24/7 in sound bites of 160 characters at a time instead of however often I update this thing, I'm on Twitter now. You can follow me here.

Wet Wet Wet

Meters swum today: None. 1700 yesterday.
Playing in the background: Uh, nothing, at the moment. Just the fan.

The winter rains have pounced on Dallas. It's been raining on and off for a week and raining steadily for the last two days (though it seems to have stopped for the time being). What a great week for my parents to visit, they'll be here today at two. Oh well. In this pause between the deep freeze and the blast furnace that the naive among us call "spring", we gotta be grateful for what we get, even if, all together now, "it doesn't make a dent in our current drought," as the weather guy says over and over and over and over and over. Why does he say that? He always does. Maybe there's this pathological terror that if he doesn't say it, everybody in town will walk out into the middle of the rainstorm and, I dunno, turn the sprinklers on full blast or something.

It's been fabulous for my garden, though. Yes, I've made an attempt at a garden. We have peas, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onions, cilantro - an entire salad, really, all going great guns. Except the celery. Haven't heard anything from the celery. I'll post a picture as soon as I figure out how to work Joan's cell phone camera.

Oh, and I have good news on the unemployment front. Despite certain shortsighted gubernatorial posturing, I am indeed eligible for the COBRA reduction in premium thanks to Pres. Obama. This means my COBRA payments are about $150 a month, which beats hell out of four hundred and something. Hey, Tracy, this means you too are eligible. Remind me to show you my documentation so you can show up at the office, present it to you-know-who and demand equity.

The other good news is that the logjam in my brain has finally given way and some chapters of Soulmender are getting written. I dunno if I've been filling you guys in on this, but with the first two it was like I couldn't stop writing and this time it's like I can't get started. Sally (Hi, Sally!) suggested it had something to do with this being the Last One, the long story about to get wrapped up and all that, and me not wanting to go there just yet. Which may be. For some reason, though, I got this idea that Roland, my bad guy, liked classical music, which led to this bizarre mental image of Roland listening to Handel's Hallelujah Chorus in an underground bunker during a remodel.

Don't ask me where that came from, but if I had to guess, I'd say it probably has something to do with this video, sent to me by Uncle Bob, and my recent experiences with power tools. Well, whatever, it broke the logjam and things are rolling again. I have lots of free time at the moment, might as well get some writing done. Yes, there you have it folks. The next time Stephen King asks you over to dinner and you ask him where he gets his ideas and he says something sarcastic like "Utica," know that he's fooling you. The truth is that he gets his ideas from viral videos and power tool accidents. Or at least I do.

Okay, I'll go look for work now. King of Kings! And Lord Of Lords! Hallelujah, Amen!

Part the Third

Playing in the background: Still nothing.
Meters swum today: None.

Well, gang, with Spellbinder wrapped up there's only one thing to do: Start part three. Oh, and find a publisher for Part One. Did I mention I don't have a publisher yet? I don't have a publisher yet. Working on it though.

So here's what I'm calling part three: Soulmender.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know.