Whiplash, Part I

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG BLOG POST.  If you get tired, please move to the rear of the blog, where cake will be served.

People have had occasion to ask me what the hell I’m doing, working at a law firm.  Why aren’t I a great fiction writer or something, swapping yachts with Stephen King for the weekend or partying all night with J.K. Rowling.  Well, firstly, I get seasick.  Secondly, you might not believe this, but it’s actually very hard to get a novel published, especially if you’re not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.  (Who owes me five bucks, now that I think about it.)  I’m speaking as one who has tried.  And one who currently isn’t trying.  I dunno if that means I’m done trying, exactly.  Come back in a year and ask me again.  And yes, I’m Working On Something right now, even if it’s spasmodic weekend work at the local Half Price Books while my idiot neighbor is throwing a birthday party for his twelve-year-old granddaughter and the dance tunes are making my house vibrate.  (My house vibrates all the time.  We have a trainyard nearby.  But still, kinda different when it’s vibrating to Can’t Stop Till You Get Enough.  Michael Jackson, unlike the Burlington Northern, is usually in tune.)

But here’s the thing.  I actually like working at a law firm.  I’m good at it, for one thing.  Litigation is a strange and hairy beast, but I’ve gotten to know it pretty well and at least when I’m around, it only bites occasionally.  There are certain things that need to happen in a certain order and certain problems that are bound to crop up needing to be solved.  I’m good at solving problems, and the larger and more complicated, the better.  I also know a lot of stuff about the law.  Not necessarily the theory of the law or why such and such judge did such and such thing (though I know a little bit about that, too), but other stuff.  Important stuff. Like, for example, if you’re electronically filing a document in the state courts of Texas, you have until midnight to do so, not just ‘til five o’clock.  Like if you need to file anything with the appeals court, you need to send paper copies to the court as well, one for each justice.  Yes, it may sound like useless trivia, but its important stuff, folks.  This is all about getting your case heard or not heard, and if you want your case heard, you need a good paralegal.  I am a good paralegal and I will get your case heard.  And these skills, nifty as they are, just really don’t have a place outside a law firm. 

But that’s not to say I have always worked at a law firm.  Au contraire, I actually worked in a law library for ten years first.  And before that I was in music school (!).  The plan at the time was to become one of the great bassoonists.  (Have you ever met a great bassoonist?  No?  How about you?  No?  You?)  So, okay, great bassoonists don’t exactly set the world on fire. They don’t do solo concertos in front of the orchestra very often and honestly, I don’t think many of them make like Kenny G and record New Age albums. I have never seen one win a Grammy or shake hands with Nelson Mandela or get invited to North Korea to play for the despot-in-charge-at-the-moment. But they do have nifty jobs playing with major orchestras.  Because who wouldn’t want a job playing music all day long?  That would be a great job.

Where you run into trouble here is that there are only about 17 major full-time orchestras in the United States, and each of those probably have three or four bassoonists apiece. There are something like 1,200 other orchestras, which makes up another 4800 jobs, but those jobs are part-time and usually don’t have any benefits. So maybe 4,868 jobs for professional bassoonists of any sort in the United States.  And when you figure that most of those jobs are already occupied to begin with, and there are probably at least another 1,000 brand-new bassoonists graduating from music schools every year, you can see how the math might maybe start to work against you there. In short, if you’re not one of the very, very best, you’re not going to be able to swing it professionally.  And I was not one of the very, very best.  I was good, though.  I won awards and stuff.  And a college scholarship.  Ask anybody.

The reason I bring all this up is that I just saw “Whiplash” with Joan and a couple of friends. As it turned out, three of the four of us had been to music school.  There are two kinds of music students: The very, very best and everybody else.  Everybody else are the ones that eventually get ground down by the machine and pitched out to find other careers as librarians or district managers or, I dunno, paralegals.  This could have led to a fascinating discussion, but all four of us were so stunned by the movie that nobody really talked about it afterward, except for saying how accurate they thought it was to his or her experience of music school. And for the record, I think it’s pretty fucking accurate.  I never had a teacher as bad as Fletcher—nobody ever hit anybody, or threw things at people, as far as I can recall--but I had plenty of instructors who did their share of yelling in people’s faces and hurling insults as fast as they could think them up. And, I mean, I could tell stories all night long.  Here’s two.  There was this one piano teacher that we called the Dragon Lady.  She had this thing about people with long nails—girls, mostly, but I knew my fair share of male guitar players with long nails on their right hands.  Anyway, if she thought your nails were too long to play the piano properly, she would chop them off.  With this pair of industrial-strength sewing scissors she kept in her purse.  I am cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die serious. And the scene where each kid got to play exactly one measure to prove they belonged in the ensemble?  That happened daily.  I saw people sent from first chair to the bottom of the section—or worse, out of the room for all time--because a reed squawked or a string broke or something, and I mean to tell you I saw it more than once. 

So why do it at all, you ask.  Why go to all the trouble and expense and take the abuse and spend four years cutting the throats of your fellow students in any way possible only to get out and start cutting throats all over again to find a job, any job, while trying to keep your own throat in one piece in the process?  I mean why does anyone do it?  Well, I’ll tell you why.  Ask a mountain climber why he climbs mountains.  Ask a paramedic what it’s like to save a life.  Ask a lawyer what it feels like to put the perfect argument to the perfect court on the perfect day and come away from it knowing not only that you won but that everything is going to change now, today and into the future, because of the words you just spoke.  The answer is that you can’t help it.  The answer is that it takes you over.  Because every now and then everything all comes together and everybody spectacularly plays the right note at the right time and the sound just detonates around you like a hydrogen bomb, and you and the group and the audience and the music all turn into one single organism, and people, if you’ve ever been there, you will know what I mean when I tell you that it’s better than drugs, it’s better than sex, it’s better than true love’s first kiss.  And once you’ve had that, all you want is more of it.  And so it’s worth all the abuse and the backstabbing and the constant sniping. 

I regret to inform you that, although I like being a paralegal and what I do is sometimes pretty cool, I have never had a moment like that at a law firm.  Nor do I ever expect to.  The best thing that ever happened to me as a paralegal is when a judge quoted one of my paragraphs from a motion in his ruling.  I had the ruling framed.  But was it the same as being at a Ground Zero detonation of sound and light and the entire meaning of the universe coalescing into one final E-major chord?  No.  It was not.  And while I personally never had a choice between staying in music school and finding something else to do with my life (they really, really don’t like it when you fail piano), I sometimes wonder if I sold out.  Gave up.  Took the easy way out, though it wasn’t easy then and it still isn’t now.  I have a steady job and a regular paycheck, which especially with my Delicate Medical Condition is probably the best possible outcome.

But still.  That whole detonation of sound thing. It’s pretty awesome.

Why Haven't You Heard From Me?

Lily: I'm in trouble with this damn play, and you don't care.
Dash: Lily, it's your first play.  It's not like anybody's gonna miss ya.

--Julia

If you've been hanging around here long enough, you've probably wondered why I haven't written a book, or a play, or Something Of Substance.  If you've really been hanging around here long enough, you know that I've actually written three of them, thankewverymuch, and that's not counting one I self-published that sold about twenty copies and another one that I wrote, uh, basically for my mother.  (Everybody writes stuff for their mother.  Just ask Elvis.  Oh, wait, you can't, Never mind.)  Three of them even ganged up on each other and formed a trilogy.  (Ah, trilogies.  The word sounds like a lost Asian nation, doesn't it?  "Hey stlanger, wercome to Trilogy!  You be here long time, yes?"  Oh God, somebody smack me for being a racist.)

Anyway, they're called Mindbender, Spellbinder and Soulmender, and they're still hanging around my house like lazy post-adolescent children, too fond of the free food and the clean laundry to move out and get their own place.  Which is to say, they're not published yet.  I had a literary agent once, but he quit the business to run for Congress and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.  (He didn't win, either.  Actually he didn't have a chance, and the only one who didn't seem to know that was him, but never mind.)  So I've been kind of orphaned ever since.  I'm looking for a new agent, which means I've been writing lots of goddamned earnest letters to total strangers asking them to take me on as a client for their eighty-hour-a-week mostly unpaid job convincing some publishing house that I'll sell like Suzanne Collins when in fact I might sell more like David Moody.  And if you haven't heard of David Moody, well, that kind of makes my point, doesn't it?  (To be honest, I'd love to sell like David Moody.  Hi, David!  How's it going?)

So anyway, I've written all these letters, and I haven't really gotten anywhere, although I have had some responses, so it's apparently not hopeless.  I just need to keep on writing these darn letters until I get a yes.  Considering that I have anxiety the size of a large nervous T-rex when I'm writing one of these things, that is no small feat. (For more information on all the fun I've had writing query letters, click on the label "angsty query letter crap", below.  Yeah, and meet Scaley and Fang, my dinosaurs of anxiety and sudden panic.)

A reasonable person might very well ask why bother, anyway.  Literary agents take on something like .001% of the people who write to them as clients.  By the time I'm in the right place at the right time with the right letter on the right day, I could be a hundred years old (or maybe even dead; by the time I die I'm sure that querytracker.net will  be able to send query letters for you in perpetuity, pursuing the dream of publication beyond the physical realm.) Well, it's like this (and here comes the Buddhism again): Being published, or not being published, isn't anywhere near as important as writing.  Writing is everything.  Publishing is business.  It's a good business if you can get it, but it's still only business.  Sooner or later you have to leave business and go home and eat some fresh butter-flavored tortillas from the Kroger Bakery.  And then you can write something.

Another way of putting this is an old OA saying:  "I'm chairman of the planning committee, not the results committee." I do the right things.  I write a lot. I rewrite a lot.  I read a lot.  I hang around with other writers a lot.  I go to seminars, I show up at open mic events (though I've never actually said much more than "Good evening, and this is so and so."), I've even been to the occasional conference.  In short, I live like a writer's supposed to live, minus the alcohol binges and the frequent trips to rehab (that's the Buddhism again).  The fact that nobody's paying me for it doesn't make it any less important.  The fact that I have a "day job" doesn't make it any less important.  The fact that I"m not where I wanted to be by now doesn't make it any less important.  The only person hovering over me with a stopwatch is, uh, me.

That is to say, I had constructed this whole theoretical timeline, based on nothing more than conjecture, of What I'd Be Doing By The Time I'm Forty-Five.  I got plenty annoyed with myself when I failed to meet just about every conjectural deadline.  Which was ridiculous.  Plenty of people don't produce stunning masterpieces that change the face of fiction for all time by the time they're forty-five, and no harm comes to them.  (And plenty of people who do come to bad ends.  Look what happened to Truman Capote.  And he wasn't even writing fiction.)  The point is, I'm responsible for the process, not the outcome.  I'm not responsible for how long the process takes.  I'm also not responsible for getting paid.  Some of those things we just need to leave up to God.

Yes, I know I don't believe in God.  But I do believe in something.  So sue me.  And if you know a literary agent, send him or her my way, willya?  Thank you.  And have a nice day.  

I Got Nothin'.

Oh, of course I got somethin'.  I always churn out a blog post while I'm sitting here at Afrah, munching on pita bread and drinking lemonade while I type--usually very fast--on my laptop or my Nook. (Tonight: Laptop. And the fingers were happy.)  I just sometimes don't know what I'm going to come up with until I'm already here.  I went looking for an update on the Alicia Beltran case, but I couldn't find anything.  Not sure there's even a hearing set.  Now that the government's reopened, there's no point in airing my plan for all the furloughed employees to march into Washington armed with, I dunno, brooms and mops and stuff and shutter every single restaurant and pizza-delivery location within 10 miles of the Capitol Building.  (That'd be interesting, watching John Boehner chow down on a PBJ he'd made in his kitchen that morning.  Or that his houseboy made for him, more like.)  And I guess I could brag that @rubenagency favorited my tweets about how much it must suck to be a literary agent and have to actually READ all those hundreds of earnest letters that arrive from aspiring authors every day, but since I kind of had him in particular in mind, it's not that far of a stretch.  

Then, on the way here, the DJ on 98.7 gives me an idea: Misquoting Shakespeare.

People, you can take the English major out of Arizona State before she Makes the Big Mistake and goes to grad school, but you can't get the Bard out of her head.  No way.  Nohow.  Never.  It's too late by then.  And the next time I hear somebody say "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" or "Money is the root of all evil," I'll probably blow a blood vessel.  I mean, I get it, okay?  When you make that statement about killing all the lawyers, it sounds really cool, and hip, and, I dunno, reactionary, somehow.  But when you throw in the context and realize that the guy who said it, Dick the Butcher, was saying it to impress the rebel Jack Cade, and that Jack wanted to break down law and order and create chaos where there was once a civilized society so he could crown himself King, well--not as hip, is it?  In fact, killing all the lawyers starts to sound like a bad thing.

And "Money is the root of all evil"--puh-lease.  Numero uno, the quote is "The love of money is the root of all evil,"  which makes a lot more sense in the context of the story that follows.  Numero two-o, that's not even Shakespeare.  It's Chaucer, you illiterate moron.  Chaucer died about 160 years before Shakespeare was even born, and left us with the Canterbury Tales and a lot of other weird stuff that's written in Old English and is harder than hell to understand.  Fun when translated, though.  Also, Chaucer was to literature what Michelangelo was to painting and sculpture.  Chaucer's original plan for the Canterbury Tales assumed he'd live at least ten thousand years and be writing right up through the last day of the last one.  Unfortunately, he died at the age of 46, like a lot of people did in his time.  

Speaking of the love of money, I would love some money.  In fact, if somebody wanted to give me an Ativan, a cup of very strong hot chocolate and, oh, money, that would be awesome.  (I'd settle for the hot chocolate.)  Last year, we were clobbered with a new roof (our share: $3,500.00), new pipes under the house ($3,700.00), a new transmission thingy (I never know the names of these thingies; just how much they cost.  This one was $2,500.00), a washing machine, a stove/range, and I forget what all else but none of it was cheap.  And yeah, we had a savings account, but had. Past tense.  Is gone.  And unfortunately, it's not like life's little disasters stop pouncing on you just because you are broke.  

Take the pipes under the house.  Please.  Seriously; we had a leak in our new pipes, and when the guy came to fix it, he told us that we had a Serious Problem with our sewer line that went out to the city system.  As in, dig it up, yank it out and put in a new one.  Cost:  Around $7k, not counting however much it costs to stay at a hotel for a few days because we don't have water.  Well, that was a fascinating conversation.  Then a few weeks ago we had another leak, another guy came out, and told us we had an equally Serious Problem with the water pipes that came in from the city system.  They, too, need to be dug up and replaced, and the price just went up to $12k (maybe only 11 if we have both that and the sewer line done at the same time).  Apparently the new pipes under the house are having trouble holding on to the old pipes that come and go.  The fault lies in the old pipes, which, let's face it, are pushing 60.  

For the record, we only paid $94k for the whole house.

So I guess I'm, I dunno, getting a Saturday job or something.  Maybe I'll turn tricks on Harry Hines Boulevard.  Maybe I'll use my exacting knowledge of chemistry to make the best crystal meth in the DFW metro area, and it'll quickly become popular and sell well and--

Hey.  That'd make a good TV show.

Talk Thursday: We're Not In Kansas.

The praying hands sculpture
outside Oral Roberts University. Eesh.

And we're not in Dallas, either.  Or we weren't for the weekend, anyway.  I was supposed to go up to Tulsa to be in an outdoor swim race, using the term "race" as loosely a possible.  I mean, you've seen Michael Phelps.  And you've seen me.  And you know I look about as much like Michael Phelps as Paul Ryan looks like Heidi Klum.  So when I say "race," here, I'm talking about "making it to the finish line under my own power," as opposed to, say, "being hauled along by a guy in a canoe while somebody calls 911."  Extra bonus points if I manage not to be last.  But about three days before I was supposed to leave, I realized this whole "race" thing wasn't going to happen.  I was having knee issues and fear-of-sunburn issues and if-I-have-to-swim-this-thing-in-the-burqini-I'm-going-to-be-even-slower-than-the-slowest-one-there.  So I quit.  Bailed on the race.  Said to hell with it and drove up to Tulsa with no intentions whatever of jumping into a lake.

So what did I do instead, you ask.  Well, I had dinner with an old friend.  

If you've been following me around for long enough, you might remember my somewhat ill-fated trip to New Orleans for the Pen to Press Writer's Retreat.  While I was there, I met somebody in one of those I've-known-you-my-whole-life sorts of ways.  His name's Rhett, and he lives in Tulsa with his wife and extended family.  We were going to have dinner anyway, back when I was swimming in the race, but, yeah.  I drove 500 miles round trip to have dinner with Rhett.  And you know what?  I felt a lot better for having done it.  

Let's face it, I haven't been having an easy time of it the last, oh, six or eight months.  It's gotten bad enough that I've had to See Somebody about it, and up until I got back from Tulsa I didn't have much hope of things ever improving.  I feel different now.  Well, kind of like things might improve after all, even if they haven't, yet, exactly.  The most important thing Rhett told me is that I have to keep going.  I can't stop mid-novel and just not pick it up again because it's, you know, gotten all difficult on me.  Nor can I stop pimping the one I've already finished to everyone and God.  I've only sent it out to about 107 people.  That means there's 6,999,999,893 people I haven't sent it to yet.  My God, I really have to get moving.  That's a serious lot of emails.  

Speaking of Seeing Somebody, the New Guy said something to me the other day that just about knocked my socks off.  I was describing my fits of anxiety with writing query letters, which, just incidentally, were bad enough a few years ago (when I still drank) that I had to get drunk to write them.  He said he wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of writers had problems with query letters.  There might be a question of degree, what with needing Scaley and Fang framed in my kitchen and so on, but seriously, what I'm trying to do (he said) is very hard.  Writers are superstitious creatures.  Probably most of them have some sort of query-letter ritual they go through when they send one of those horrible things to somebody who might or might not read more than the first six words.

Again, I had to hold on to my socks.  Seriously?  Not only am I consumed by anxiety, but I'm not even unique?  Holy cats. I don't even know what to do with that.  Except to keep going.  To keep going is easier than stopping.  If you don't know that, you've never driven back from Tulsa to Dallas on a Sunday afternoon in a beat-up '98 Corolla.  

Yep, I came full circle on that one.  Without stopping at the Choctaw casino, even.  

Talk Thursday: Giving Up, Giving In

It is not a gloomy topic.  Well, it can be, but it doesn't have to be.  Giving something up can be great.  I gave up sugar (again) ten days ago and darned if I don't feel pretty good.  Fewer dizzy spells, fewer mood swings, and many fewer hot flashes.  I didn't give up all sugar, of course.  That's practically impossible; there's sugar in everything. But I gave up recreational sugar, the kinds of foods that are supposed to be sweet, like candy and ice cream and Pop-Tarts and most especially, cake.  Cake is like crystal meth to me.  The frosting, in particular.  If it were possible to freebase cake frosting I would have done it by now.  My birthday was two days ago and we had ceremonial cake for me and the two other people in the office that had June birthdays.  I had a moment of total panic when I realized I was somehow going to have to not-eat-cake through this event.  I finally called a friend of mine, who told me that if I were to eat something else, like, say, an apple, nobody would notice.  He was mostly right.  I got through cake time with only one frosty look from the manager.  Not frosting, frosty.

Oh, did I mention it was my birthday two days ago?  It was.  I'm 43.  I had this big birthday blog post planned, full of all the cool stuff that's happened since I was born (The collapse of the Berlin Wall! Men walking on the Moon! The Statue of Liberty!  No, wait a minute--I'm not THAT old.)  But my firm softball team had practice, and by the time I got home I really didn't feel like doing much more than going to bed.  Yes, I said "firm softball team."  I forget how I got talked into this.  Our first game is next Thursday.  I actually did hit the ball a few times, so maybe there's hope.

Here's where I get weird on you guys and start talking about a third-rate horror film called "The Mist." Well, actually it's a pretty decent horror film, for all that it was made on a low budget, and it's based on a Stephen King story.  (Major spoilers ahead.  You have been warned.) If you're still there, what basically happens is that a creepy fog takes over a town and traps a bunch of people in a supermarket.  There are creatures out there in the fog.  Creatures with tentacles and long insecty appendages and big wings.  In short, giant bugs.  We only gradually get to see them, and I'm pretty sure we don't get to see one full-on until about halfway through the movie.  Conditions in the supermarket deteriorate, people start going crazy, one woman starts a psuedo-religious cult and the few that are still sane decide it's time to make a run for it.  They get as far as a car and escape onto a deserted road where they can't see more than ten feet ahead.  Are there giant bugs everywhere?  There are.  Does it seem like all the humans have been killed?  It does.  Has civilization been wiped out?  It looks quite possible.  The people in the car start to bicker, then get into a heated argument, then finally decide if they don't find safety before they run out of gas, they'll commit collective suicide with the one gun they have between them.

Well, this being a Stephen King story, the ending's not that simple. (In fact the ending changed slightly from the story to the movie, but I'm not going to tell you how.)  The car comes to a halt, night starts to fall, and the intrepid travelers discover they don't have enough bullets for everyone.  So the brave hero guy offers to kill everybody, including his young son, and take his chances on the road.  He shoots his fellow passengers in the head, saving his son for last, and then gets out of the car, fully expecting to be eaten by a giant bug.  Instead, a cordon of Army troops marches out of the fog and "rescues" him.  And after all the stuff with the mist and the giant bugs and the psuedo-religious cult and How People React In Very Tense Situations, it turns out that what the movie was actually about was giving up.  When do you do it?  Why do you do it?  And how do you live with yourself, if God forbid, you give up ten minutes too soon?

Obviously I'm getting to something here.  I should stop messing around and just address the frick'n point, already.  I'm talking about Mindbender, kids.  I sent query letters No. 106 and 107 this morning.  Is this a big deal? No, not really.  Having apparently worked through most of my query letter anxiety, I think I can keep writing query letters until the cows come home, or until the giant bugs attack, anyway.  But let's consider: I wrote the book in, I think, 2001.  (When did I have my breakdown?  I think it was late 2001.  Didn't everybody have a breakdown in 2001?  It was not a good year.)  So, okay, it might have been 2000.  And then I had the breakdown and did nothing for three years, and in 2004 I started writing the new draft, and then we moved to Dallas, and a bunch of other stuff happened, and I wrote another draft, and then I met Kellum and Sally, and I started writing Spellbinder and Soulmender and then I went to that thing in New Orleans and--okay, I think we're caught up.  If Mindbender were a human being it'd be demanding a Nintendo DX and a new ten-speed.  It would be almost five feet tall.  It would be angsting about starting middle school next year.

You're getting the idea, right?  I'm wondering if I might be Wasting My Time.  Or somebody's time, anyway.  I'm wondering if the Time For Getting Mindbender Published has come and gone.  Or if it never came in the first place.  Look, I string words together pretty well.  I don't doubt I can write a publishable novel.  I just wonder if I've done it, this time.

Or if I should go back to the proverbial drawing board and, you know, give up.

Anybody?  Hello?

(crickets)

At least I hope they're crickets and not, you know, giant bugs.  Like in a Stephen King story.

Talk Thursday: So Here's Where I'm At.

I'm at Afrah.  No, I'm just kidding.  Well, I am at Afrah, but I'm almost always at Afrah when I'm writing these things.  Something about Mediterranean food is conducive to column-writing.  To say nothing of free wi-fi.  Currently snarfing down an akkawi pie with fried kibbe and wondering how life could get any better.  Well, I mean apart from everything I'm about to tell you, which is kind of sucky.  Into every life some suckiness must fall.  Some things are just more sucky than others.

To begin with, I crossed over onto page 101 this morning in my slow-but-steady work-in-progress.  This is a milestone, to be sure.  Your Average Novel turns out to be between 400 and 500 typed pages, so 100 pages is one-quarter of the way there.  Or one-fifth.  If I like actually took more time to work on it, I'm sure it'd be moving along faster.  Right now it's getting squeezed in between getting up in the morning and hitting the pool, which is not a lot of time.  But it is moving.  It still hasn't told me what in hell it wants to be about, which I'd really liked to have figured out by now, but maybe it'll get to that before page 200.

(I might also add, I got stuck for a few days.  My protagonist was attending a funeral and as he was sneaking out the back--since he wasn't supposed to be there in the first place--somebody put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Your Honor." [My protagonist is a judge.]  I was three days figuring out whose hand it was.  I think I pulled it off, but, you know, time went by.)

So there's that, and then there's query letters.  I've also passed 100 query letters for Mindbender, which, to quote Wayne from Wayne's World, "is both bogus and sad."  Now this was interesting: No. 100 was actually a lot harder than 101, 102, 103 and the happy-go-lucky ones that followed.  Something about the symbology of those double zeroes.  100 pages, 100 letters.  It's annoyingly close to looking for a job when you don't have one.

Okay, nobody said this was going to be easy.  And Stephen King wrote six thousand query letters while he and his wife lived in an unheated trailer in Edinburgh in the winter and he wrote the first six Harry Potter books on scraps of construction paper he got from his job at an industrial laundry or something like that. But still.  At some point you start asking yourself if you've written something that's basically unpublishable.  Should you give up and write something else?  Or would that be quitting?

I'm not gonna answer that, mainly because I have no idea.  It probably wouldn't hurt to be pushing two, maybe three projects at a time.  Let's hear it for tracking software, otherwise I don't know how I'd do it.  I'm not sure how I do it even with tracking software.  I can say, though, that since that drawing came into my house, Scaley and Fang are doing a great job of not bothering me.  I attribute part of that to my big cat, Caesar, also.  His job around the house is to keep dinosaurs out of the kitchen.  He's very good at it.  Even when he's napping on the job, you won't see a dinosaur for miles.

Luckily, I have a Team.  Well, more of a Committee.  That's the gang of folks that makes your life easier, whether they know it or not.  Head of the Committee is Joan, of course.  Rhett, my friend from the writer's workshop in New Orleans, is a close second; he sent me the nicest email when I started complaining about Query Letter 100, and then told me to shut up and get back to work.  Then there's Tammy and Tracy and perpetual dinners out, wherever they may be, and everybody at my office who makes the rest of my day halfway normal.  (I need halfway normal.  I am never, ever going to quit my day job to write full time.  It is just never going to happen.  I need the normalness of an office.  It's like heroin.  I also need health insurance.)  And then there's my writer's group.  That chummy bunch of like minded folks who--

--uh, haven't met in three months.  In fact, it may have been longer than that.  According to my BlackBerry calendar, it might have been as long ago as January.

Scheduling conflicts.  Big church holidays.  Work getting in the way.  You know how it is.

So here's what I did.

I cheated on my writer's group.

Yep.  I went and hung out with a bunch of other writers.  And amongst the group I met one guy that would be awesome to have in a writer's group.  I emailed him and told him I was interested.  He hasn't written me back yet.  Don't know if he will or not.  But really, that would be awesome.

Anyway, that's where I'm at.  Smacking up against 100, committing literary adultery with a bunch of total strangers, and not so incidentally about to turn 43 in a couple weeks.  Oh, and at Afrah.  And since this was not an Official Talk Thursday Topic, I'll probably be cranking out another column here in the next couple of days.  Maybe I'll tell you all about the new roof, water heater, plastering work and paint in our library.  I hope so, anyway.  Because I've been waiting a long bloody time for items two through four, and really, I'm ready to have them installed any day now.

Talk Thursday: How To Avoid Doing Laundry

You know, sometimes I get tired. (Imagine. Six and a half hours of sleep on an average night and sometimes she gets tired.) Seriously, I haul myself up to the keyboard every morning--well, most mornings--and I try to at least churn out a paragraph or two of whatever the fuck I'm working on--and don't ask me what that is, it changes frequently. I also try to crank out at least one query letter, if only to prove to Scaley and Fang that all their freaking out at the drop of a hat, or a sock, has been so much wasted energy and I have no intention of giving up. Then I get up, go to work, and ponder on the drive there why I'm trying to impress cartoon dinosaurs and whether or not I should give up.

Look, I'm not going into a full-on whine here, but this isn't easy, what I'm doing. Try it sometime and you'll see. It's kind of like looking for a job when you're unemployed, with the added bonus that it won't pay anything. Well, not for a long time, anyway. I have to admit that so far everybody's been very nice. I keep waiting for that reply that says quit wasting my time, you illiterate moron, but it hasn't shown up yet. Instead they typically say, I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on this project, but thank you for thinking of me, which, I guess, is supposed to make me feel better. Um, it doesn't. Just in case you were wondering.

Anyway, when query letters get old, there's always laundry. Today's Talk Thursday topic is about laundry, which is pretty funny if you know the division of labor in our household. It's very simple: I do laundry, Joan does grocery shopping. Reason: I cannot stand grocery shopping. When Joan had a hysterectomy and couldn't leave the house for six weeks, we almost starved to death (or maybe cholesteraled ourselves to death; there were a lot of pizzas ordered) because I didn't want to do grocery shopping. I finally dragged myself to the grocery store that we referred to as the Dysfunctional Ralph's, where I promptly had a meltdown in the pasta aisle because there were too many different kinds of rotini. Seriously, there were about 47 different kinds. Who needs that many different kinds of rotini? The manager had to come over and talk to me. It was a little embarrassing.

By contrast, laundry: Sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. Simple. I'd much rather do laundry than grocery shopping. So the best way to avoid doing laundry is to marry me, but unfortunately you're too late there. I'm a wild'n'crazy kinda gal, but a polygamist I'm not.

Technically speaking, I should be throwing in a load of laundry every night after work, so that when the weekend rolls around, there's only sheets and towels to take care of. In real life it rarely goes that well. Half the time I'm lucky to remember to clean the cat boxes (which are in the laundry room), never mind do the laundry. I guess you could say I'm avoiding the laundry, but at least in part I'm shying away from baby-sitting the washing machine. Its automatic balancer went on the fritz about a year ago, and ever since then it sometimes gets off balance during the spin cycle and goes whappita whappita whappita at top volume until somebody runs downstairs and fixes it. This is supremely annoying, especially when all you have to do to balance the silly thing is like move a sock or something about three inches. Eesh.

When it's sunny out, and not too cold, I like to hang sheets outside. Joan says it makes them smell like sunshine. It also saves dryer electricity. I'm not kidding, when I started hanging laundry outside our summer electric bill dropped by about half. Not only are you saving the electricity that runs the dryer, you're also saving the air conditioner from having to cool the house back down after the dryer's been running. Plus, I think hanging clothes outside annoys my idiot neighbor. Added side bonus. (Says the Buddhist.)

So that doesn't really tell you anything at all about avoiding laundry. It does, however, tell you how to avoid query letters. Laundry, after all, has to be done at certain times. (Emergency panty loads come to mind.) Query letters, on the other hand, can be put off indefinitely. Or at least until you start feeling guilty about not writing them, which for me never takes very long.

Mini-Post: It's Scaley and Fang!

Check it out!! Brilliant artist Suzy--here's a link to her CafePress site--has embodied Scaley, the T-Rex of Anxiety, and Fang, the Velociraptor of Sudden Panic, into this nifty drawing! S&F have been following me around for years, most particularly when I'm writing, and even more particularly when I'm writing query letters. (No, I have no idea why.) Usually Caesar the Cat keeps dinosaurs out of the kitchen, but from now on he can concentrate on keeping Scaley and Fang in their drawing and off my case. Thanks, Suzy!!

Talk Thursday: Frustration

I have to be honest with you: I laughed out loud when that topic rolled out of the Talk Thursday topic-o-meter. Because frustration doesn't even begin to cover it. Pounding my head against the nearest available brick wall is more like it. People, you don't know frustration until you've been me. (Once again: Grandiosity -- common symptom of bipolar disorder.) But, yeah. Frustration? Let's talk about that.

Remember the unnamed literary agent who requested the fifty pages? And then the hundred and fifty more pages? Well--that's where the story ends. It Didn't Work Out, as they say. Which, really, is not something to lose any sleep over; most of these relationships don't work out, which is why it's so worth celebrating when they do. All, the same, this is a lot like being out on a date, parking somewhere, getting to second base, starting to wonder if you might need a condom, hoping you in fact have a condom someplace, trying to discreetly check purse pockets without interrupting the main event, and then suddenly the other person says, "I just remembered I have to be someplace. Sorry, it was nice meeting you," and gets up and leaves. No matter what you do next, you feel about an inch high and covered in mud. And--oh hey, you did have a condom, right here next to that couple of useless pens that always make their way to the bottom of your purse. Too bad you don't need it anymore.

Seriously: The whole getting-an-agent thing is exactly, exactly like the more perverse parts of dating. Both ways. It starts out with letters, like love notes back and forth. Then, if you get past that phase (and I did once! I did, although it was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away), you start exchanging presents. Then phone calls, and sooner or later you have to sign the pre-nup. (That's the contract of representation, in case this analogy's breaking down.) Having signed that, everything's grand, right? Wrong. You're just getting started. There's still the taking-on of the various monsters of relationship hell (this would be the editors at the publishing houses of choice, ha-ha), more presents, more phone calls, and, if you are incredibly lucky, you sell a book to somebody. That's the saying I-do part. Now you're joined at the hip by money, a far stronger force than love if ever there was one. Now you've managed to get each other into bed. (Yes, you waited for marriage--not out of morality but just because that's how this analogy rolls, kids. You don't like my analogy, write your own.) Hope you like each other, because it's just going to get more interesting from here. Sometimes it all works out. Sometimes your agent dumps you (and his entire client list) to run for Congress. And sometimes it all fizzles out at second base, leaving you frustrated as hell and looking for a brick wall against which to pound your head.

So what do I do now? Well--so far I'm doing what I was doing before. Writing query letters, dodging Scaley and Fang,* and hoping to get another hot date again soon. As a dear friend of mine pointed out this very afternoon, there has to be something there, because someone saw it, and if there's something there, than someone else will see it too. It's just a question of who, and when, and so I'm not supposed to stop submitting places until I've submitted to everyone in the world. Tall order, considering we hit seven billion humans yesterday, but I figure I can probably scale it down to the ones who speak and read English, just for, you know, simplicity.

*For those of you who haven't been introduced, Scaley is the T. Rex of Anxiety, and Fang is the Velociraptor of Sudden Panic. They live in my kitchen and love to hang around when I'm writing query letters. Why query letters are of any interest to a dinosaur, I have no idea, but all I have to do is type the word "query" and there they are. If anybody wants them, they're for sale. Cheap. Free, even. Call me.

Talk Thursday: Rewards

As I hump my way through this obstacle course called life, or rather, this one called my life, I frequently call to mind the Big Question. No, not the one about whether or not there's a God (no) or what is our purpose in life (to be servants and built-in heated mattresses to house cats). I'm talking about the other Big Question, the one that occurs to me when I'm about to snarf down a piece of extremely decadent dark chocolate cake (thereby giving my psychiatrist apoplexy; large quantities of sugar and Topamax should never be combined in one's bloodstream) or after I've spent the hour from three a.m. to four a.m. sorting the screws in the junk drawer because the fact that they're all different sizes bothers me. This is the ultimate Big Question, the one I never seem to answer to anyone's satisfaction, least of all mine: Why Am I Doing This, Anyway?

The Big Question arises in all kinds of contexts. At five a.m. when I crawl out of bed to make my way to the Baylor Tom Landry Pool (and I try very hard not to think about it very much, because if I thought about it I'd never do it). At four o'clock on a Friday when I'm sorting all the junk I've been dealing with during the week for the purpose of, eventually, filing it. When I'm churning out query e-mails (queermails?) to agents, a lone snowflake in the blizzard being swept across the Internet in hopes I won't melt before I land in the right agent's snow shovel. Well, there must be a good reason. I must, on some level, expect some kind of reward. The answer, then, is what kind.

At this point I could sniff somewhat self-righteously and announce that virtue is its own reward, but my bullshit detector is way too sensitive to put up with this for even two seconds. In the case of getting up before dawn to get mostly naked and throw myself into cold water, it's pretty much gotten to the point where I can't not do it, at least for very long. Two or three days away from the pool and I start getting all twitchy. I seem to have a minimum chlorine requirement. I suppose there's that whole post-exercise glow and that warm satisfaction of knowing I've done something good for my body, too, but for sheer unadulterated rewards it's hard to beat the jaccuzi and the heated towels afterward.

In the case of filing stuff, I get the reward of a clean desk, at least for a few nanoseconds. We office workers take our moments of clean deskitude where we can get them. Currently I have at least five different piles of papers, in priority order, taking up space on my admittedly huge desk. Just seeing formica once in a while is its own little miracle.

And in the case of the query emails--well, here the analogy just falls apart like a badly strung necklace.

Okay, I admit it: It's been over a month since I sent any out. I don't know why I stopped and I don't know how to get started again. It just started seeming like a complete waste of time all of a sudden. I usually didn't get a response, or if I did it was one of those "Sorry, but buzz off" replies. No "Sure, kid, send me a couple of chapters" or "Hey, can't use it, but nice use of the word 'the' in the second paragraph." In short, no reward. If there's no reward, is there any point in doing it?

Yes, I know; I'm never going to get the silly thing published unless I write a lot more letters. I haven't written nearly enough to give up or even slow down. The Help was rejected by over sixty agents -- over sixty! Be impressed immediately!--before it was accepted and became a runaway best-seller (that I still, for the record, have no desire to read). Wait, hold it, let me channel Linus of Peanuts here: "Just think, Charlie Brown, (Mrs. Tolstoy) wrote ('War and Peace') seven times with a dip pen! And you're telling me you can't read it once?"

Still, same problem. No reward. No pats on the head for getting query letters out. No one says "Good job!" or gives me an extra smooch. I'm just supposed to keep plodding along, churning them out like a highly sophisticated riveting machine on an automobile assembly line someplace. But honestly, most of the time I feel more like Mrs. Tolstoy with a dip pen.

Talk Thursday: Drought

Yes, I know we're in a drought. It's about the only thing they talk about on KEOM radio's Texas State Network News, after they get finished talking about Governor Goodhair running for President. (About which I know very little because I refuse to listen. The reporter gets as far as, "Governor Per--." and I've changed the station to the 24-hour classical channel.) I don't exactly need reminding. My entire backyard is dead, even the very stubborn asparagus. I'm doing what I can to keep the trees alive, and the front yard still has a little green here and there, but pretty much this is the year that lawn care became moot. A neighbor of ours is losing his magnolia tree. It's falling down, limb by limb, in a spectacle that's both ghastly and heartbreaking. And us North Texans are really getting off easy compared to the rest of the state. Lots of farmers have lost their entire crop, cattle are dying all over the place and there are wildfires - of course there are wildfires - chomping through all the dead vegetation, taking out homes and businesses and just in general destroying things.

So it seems kind of ridiculous to use up my allotment of cubic Internet inches whining about a drought of the mind, but that's just what I'm gonna do. You see, while y'all weren't looking, I went and wrote another book. Okay, some of you were looking. That's okay, I forgive you. That makes a total of five (count them! Five!) since I started this blog. This last one is called Taken by Storm, and it was all about the daughter of the heroine in one of the earlier books realizing she has some of the same problems Mom has, as well as some new and different crises that Mom never got around to. This one was remarkably short (72k words), definitely YA, and kind of a departure from my usual stuff. What's more, my mother liked it. No, she really did. And I started writing query letters and I started getting the usual rejection slips and then--

Nothing. I dried up. It was like somebody pulled the plug, and all the good words went straight down the drain.

When you're used to writing for about an hour a day, every day, at home or at a Starbucks or at Afrah or maybe the back room of Half Price Books, and you're used to churning out a page or two at least, and you're used to having two or three projects going at once, all in different stages of done-ness, and everything just comes to a screeching halt one day, it tends to throw you off your stride a little bit. The first thing I did, after a few days had gone by and the words still weren't coming, was panic. Oh dear God that I don't even believe in, what if this was forever? What if I'd said everything I had to say, and told the tales I had to tell, and the rest was just silence? What would I do for the rest of my life? Where would I go when my brain needed a vacation? Would I have to start doing drugs? Play video games? Find a real-life version of being wired, like in Strange Days?

Well, that's why I write. I dunno why anybody else does.

As the days trickled by and the words still didn't come back, I got depressed. Easy to do if you're bipolar - in fact it happens on a regular basis, like day follows night - but it's easy to forget that, too, when you're in the middle of it. So I moped around and spent ridiculous amounts of time trolling the CNN chat boards - yes, I know I'm not supposed to do that - and just in general felt sorry for myself. Washed up at the age of 42. Done in by a drought of the mind and left to wander the earth as one of the walking dead. Well, only about 40 more years and I can die for real, I guess. Obviously I'm not gonna have anything to show for having been around, so I might as well just be quiet and not upset anybody. I started to avoid the computer during my regular writing time. I started eating sugar again (yes, I know, don't lecture me -- I'm getting back off it; my psychiatrist was livid) and just in general did everything I wasn't supposed to do. Except swimming. I kept swimming.

Then, a couple of days ago, something happened. I dunno why, but I sat down at the computer and wrote a couple of pages. This morning I did it again, though it was only about half as much. Who knows if this is the rain returning after La Nina or just a rogue low-pressure zone; the result is the same--productivity. And perhaps the first little glimmer of hope that things might possibly get better.

(Attention literary agents: This would be the perfect time to throw me a bone. I'm soft-spoken, housebroken, won't bite and have had all my shots.)

So we'll see what happens. If things keep getting better, great. If they don't--well, let's just not go there. Meantime I hope it keeps raining in North Texas. I hope we have a hurricane, in point of fact, and a wall of water floats away a DART transit bus, just like last time.

Especially if I lay off the sugar.

Talk Thursday: Growing Up

Well, I could waste this whole post on fond memories of North Dakota or truly horrible memories of Utah, but I thought I'd skip it. I thought instead I'd let y'all know that I don't seem to be done yet.

Growing up, I mean. Because I spent about three hours today completely incapable of opening an email.

Lemme back up a sec. Y'all will no doubt recall that I went to the Pen to Press Writers Retreat in New Orleans at the end of May. I met three agents there and one editor who wanted to see my stuff, so I've been sending out these submission packages. Three down, one to go (the hardest and most complicated, so it's been taking me a lot longer to put it together - but it WILL leave the laptop before the end of August. I repeat, it WILL leave the laptop before the end of August.) Having temporarily conquered Scaley, the T-Rex of Anxiety, I completely forgot he had an evil twin. Maybe we can call this one Fang, the Velociraptor of Paralysis or something. He lurks unseen on the clifftops, not nearly as big and imposing as his brother, but prone to swooping down on you when you least expect it and locking you up at your keyboard like a goldfish in an ice cube.

I got a response from one of the agents, see. And I completely freaked. I think, on some level, I had forgotten that sooner or later, they were, you know, supposed to respond.

I immediately tried to think of alternatives to opening this email. Let's see, I could forward it to Joan. No, impossible to do in Gmail without opening it first. I could call Joan at work, give her my password over the phone and ask her to hack my account. Then she could open the email, read it, and tell me what it said. Or hey, I could delete it unread. Then I'd never know, would I? Well, thank God I didn't go that route. I've at least made it past that developmental phase of "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist." That makes me what, about four?

Finally, I emailed Joan and asked her to tell me to open the email. This is very silly, but it usually works. Hey, I grew up in Utah, remember? Given a direct command by someone in authority (wear a sweater, say your prayers, stop pouting, spread your legs) I tend not to argue. I've been known to call my OA sponsor and tell her to tell me not to eat something. That works too. Still, you'd think by the age of fortysomething I'd be perfectly capable of telling myself what to do.

Anyway, Joan emailed me back and told me to open the damn email. Which I did. And it said:

Dear Jennifer,

Thank you for letting me consider your writing sample. I didn’t make the connection with your story that I would need to request more, but please keep in mind that another agent may feel differently. I wish you the best of luck in placing your work.

Sincerely,

Okay.

Seriously, what was the big deal? Did I expect there to be, I dunno, a long rant about how I clearly don't know what I'm doing and should consider selling used cars or maybe working for a law firm? I doubt very many literary agents have that kind of time. And I was a little bit snarky about the fact that I got a form rejection when I distinctly remember we chatted about jewelry and body art before we got down to business, but I got over it.

So why, then, all this wasted energy? Seriously, am I age-frozen at about seven? Little kids freeze when they think they're in trouble. Little kids and some cats I've known.

The other day it occurred to me that I'm late all the time. Well, that's occurred to me before (and doubtless many people who know me), but for the first time I wondered what, exactly, I'm getting out of being late all the time. Clearly if it were all negative I'd have stopped a long time ago. So there must be a positive. And I think it's the adrenaline rush. It's much more exciting to be trying to get somewhere before the clock strikes or the gate falls or whatever bad's going to happen starts to happen than it is to just leave ten minutes early so I'll be sure to get there on time. Negative attention being better than positive attention? That might make me about ten.

Oops, make that twelve and a half. An attractive coed just walked by and I looked up for half a second. Okay, back to preadolescence. Besides, I'm late.

And Now For Something Really Scary

I have to admit I haven't seen a lot of scary movies lately. This is unusual, because I love scary movies. I think I've been too scared in real life to bother with scary movies. Why buy fear prepackaged at the theater when you can get it for free just by waking up in the morning, is what I'm thinking.

You see, I'm having this little problem with anxiety. Well, make that a great big problem with sharp pointy teeth. Remember Scaley, my nervous wreck of a T-rex that shows up whenever I'm trying to write query letters and howls about the impending apocalypse? Well, he has an older brother, and this guy is sweating everything from getting fired to not getting fired to imminent death to the horrors of living to be 97 to buying a new car to never being able to afford a new car and on and on and on. Set this guy off and he won't shut up without the use of prescription medication. And unfortunately I don't know what sets him off. Sometimes I wake up and he's right there in bed with me. Sometimes I go days without seeing him. I don't even know what to call him, though if I did it wouldn't be something as cute as Scaley. He Who Shall Not Be Named, perhaps.

The weird thing is, when I'm crawling with anxiety (or rather, when it's crawling all over me, like, I dunno, angry red ants or something) it's impossible to imagine that there's ever been a time I haven't been crawling with anxiety. When I'm not in that mode, having ever been in that mode seems completely ridiculous. I mean, of course anything can happen at any moment but I really don't THINK I'm about to get fired, die, not die, or need a new car. And even if I did, would it be the end of the world? No. But all logic flies out the window when this is going on. It's just Imminent Doom and to hell with anything you say to the contrary.

Well, you would say something to the contrary, except that you don't know this is going on. I don't bother to tell you. On the outside I probably appear Quite Normal, or as normal as a fat lesbian Buddhist Democrat in Dallas ever manages to look. If you could look inside my brain, though, you'd probably need to sit down for a minute. And through it all I keep going to work, swimming, doing what I need to do. I'm not sure how some days, but I do it.

It's called the "kindling effect". See, bipolar disorder is a lot like epilepsy (!), which is why a lot of the drugs they use to treat it are epilepsy drugs. If you have an epileptic seizure, that somehow lays the foundation in your brain to have more seizures, so the more you have, the more you're likely to have. At first something sets them off, like flashing lights (though that may be a myth) or being startled. If you have enough of them, though, they can start happening all by themselves. For no reason. Purely at random. Which is why epilepsy is such a hard disease to treat and why they'll do crazy things like cut your brain in half at the corpus callosum to stop the seizures. I mean, really, that's pretty radical.

Anyway, I think this may be what's happening to me. I think maybe the anxiety has started to happen all by itself, at random. And this is bad, because--well, hell, it's bad for all kinds of reasons. The good news is that the aforementioned prescription meds definitely do help. The bad news is, when I don't take them, or it's a weekend and there's less structure around to steer me from point A to point B, it gets lots worse. It gets to where I need to make myself lists on a Saturday just so I won't wander around bumping into things and wondering what in hell I'm supposed to do now. Ain't mental illness grand?

The only positive, if it can be said to be positive, is that Scaley seems to have gone into remission. Or rather, there's so much anxiety in the house that what little gets generated by writing query letters gets lost in the flood. So I've knocked a lot of them out lately. I dunno how many, I'm not really counting, but I think I have at least seven or eight of them out there being ripe at the moment. So hey, literary agent checking out my blog, how you doin', request a few sample chapters and throw me a bone, okay? Rather, throw Scaley the bone. I'll send the sample chapters.

One of the most valuable things I learned from Buddhism is that you can't trust your brain. It will lie to you. Mine is lying to me so much that I have to tune it out completely to get anything at all done. So, again trying to stay positive here, maybe I'll reach enlightenment sooner. I mean, if you can't trust your brain, what can you trust? Maybe the ultimate reality of all things isn't ultimate, or even real. Certainly nothing setting off the anxiety is real or I'd be dead, undead, fired, not fired and have a new car all at the same time.

Barring that, though, I think I'll go in my room and lie down.

Jen The Walking Pharmacy

Playing in the background: A D&D game. I'm just watchin'.

So how goes this living with bipolar disorder, you ask. Well, let me tell you. You'd think, having had this my whole life, I'd be used to it by now, but since I've only Officially Had It for a few months, it's a whole new deal. Evidently what happens when you have this is, they port you off to a psychiatrist and said professional tinkers with whatever meds you've been taking (providing you've been taking some) or gives you some to take (provided you haven't been taking some). If you're very lucky, you start feeling better immediately, stop crashing up and down on the ol' mood roller coaster and everything's grand from then on. If you're not so lucky, it takes ages to sort out what you should and shouldn't be taking, and in the meantime you muddle along with weird moods and moments of panic as best you can.

I mean, I could be wrong here, but I think the whole medication parade is trial and error. In my case, it's a trial. I came into this mess on 150 mg of Zoloft, ostensibly for depression. Unfortunately, it was at least partially causing my fits of hyperfertility, ie, mania. So they started reducing that. Immediately I crashed out of my mania and started getting depressed, so they threw Abilify into the pharmaceutical cocktail and slowly increased the dose. I was in a real funk for about a month, until the dose of Abilify started to make a difference. But I began having an Issue with anxiety, as in, having great big whooping panic attacks, usually at work, usually accompanied by a stomach ache. So now I'm on a medication for anxiety. Which is definitely working but I've somehow ended up kind of blah, uninterested in most everything beyond an initial (and generally forced) five or six minutes of enthusiasm. We'll be addressing that on Tuesday.

What's my biggest complaint? The medication for anxiety. And which one do I probably need most of all? The medication for anxiety. Here there be dragons.

Mind you, I have no problem taking the Zoloft. Taken it for years, and okay, it's a lower dose, but it does its job and I can sleep at night (yay!) Abilify, fine, no issue there, even if it's classed as an "atypical antipsychotic". And all this time I thought I was rather a typical psychotic. I'm okay with the cold meds I've taken for like years, literally. No problem with the iron supplements either. But this anti-anxiety medication. I'm really having an Issue with having to take the stuff.

I have always, always, always had Issues with anxiety. My mom remembers when I was a small kid I would have panic attacks about whether or not we'd run out of gas before we got where we were going. (Ah, but she thought I meant the car. I actually meant the whole planet. I was just ahead of my environmentalist time, is all.) And witness my adventures with query letters. I can very easily work myself up into any kind of imminent end of the world type fears about practically anything with very little provocation. But I'm still very annoyed that I have to take an anti-anxiety medication. Somebody look up "irrational reactions to needing to take medication" and see if my picture's there anyplace.

Yes, I'm taking my meds. Why everyone feels it necessary to ask me that, I dunno, but in case anybody was wondering, the answer is yes. Even the anti-anxiety one. Which I hate having to take.

So anyway, that's how it's going. Maybe things will iron out after the holidays.

Jenz Eighth NaNo Post

Having broken rocks on the freeway for most of the evening - er, that is, written query letters most of the evening - I felt like editing something that did not require any thought whatsoever. So here 'tis. We left off with Annie and co. going to check out the bouncing penises of Dallas on the front lawn of City Hall:

Loki sighed and slid off Cheryl’s office chair. Cheryl’s eyes widened when she saw the size of his cock, and his downy coat of fur. “Um, he should put some pants on,” she said, a little embarrassed at the impropriety.

“I doubt too many other people are going to notice him,” I sighed.

“No, she’s right,” Loki said. “This is City Hall, after all. It’s a masterpiece of chaos. I’ll just meet you out there.” He disappeared.

Cheryl gasped. “Where did he go?”

“Downstairs,” I said. “By the express elevator. Look, I’m sorry. I’ll get your chair cleaned.”

“No, that’s okay.” Cheryl put her hand on the back of the chair as though it might bite her. “Does, um, does he drop by often? Because I’ve never seen him before.”

“God, I hope not,” I said, sincerely. “In a nutshell, the world’s probably in great danger and I’m probably going to have to do something heroic now. Or maybe Loki is. I’m not sure. Last time I didn’t know what was going on either, and–”

“This has happened before?”

“I told you it was complicated. Let me go down there and see if I can sort it out.”

“I’m coming with you,” Cheryl announced.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I do. I’m coming with you.” She pulled her chair back into the hallway. “I’m your secretary, and if the world’s going to need saving, you’ll need me to take notes.”

“You’re not my secretary, you’re the department receptionist,” I said. “In fact, last time I checked you were an admin assist II.”

“Oh, are we comparing government service points now? I’ll pass the secretary’s exam someday, you just wait.” She stalked past me to the elevator.

Great. Now I’d hurt her feelings. I ran after her. “Cheryl, wait a second.”

“Forget it. An AAII can take notes just as well as a secretary.” She had a notebook in her hand, and a small pen. “Just pardon me if my shorthand squiggles aren’t quite what they should be just yet, okay?”

“People use shorthand anymore?” I followed her into the elevator.

“Yes, and if you were paying any attention to the numerous emails and the reams of continuing-ed sheets I’ve been sending you, you’d know that.”

I’d definitely hurt her feelings. Well, there was nothing like dragging her into some weird multidimensional adventure to make up for it. “Look, I’m sorry. I can explain.”

Cheryl was in no mood to be mollified. “You already did. You said Loki is the Norse god of chaos and he’s here because the statues are coming to life and something about saving the world.”

I was a bit taken aback. “I thought you didn’t believe me about the statues.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe you? I have eyes, don’t I?” Cheryl sounded like she was about to cry. “It doesn’t take an AAIII or higher to have eyes, you know.”

“Cheryl, I’m sorry,” I said for what felt like the third or fourth time but was probably only the second. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings–”

Then the elevator door opened and I was face to face with the Stemmons witches. And for a while I forgot all about apologizing.