Le menage joyeuse avec tous nos esprits

I had vowed some time back to stop mentioning stats because it's too easy to misunderstand it as narcissism in lieu of it being more of an aspie train obsession, which some of you might remember branches out to an avid interest in polychorons and other related hyperdimensional structures (including but not limited to translation to real time charts and graphs), but in a wildly unexpected turn of events, the views on this particular blog have surprisingly jumped 25% over its total history just in the last month.

I could attempt to interpret this and blame it on maybe hitting a lucky combination of Sherlock vids and #MondayBlogs retweets on twitter, but my hottest days seem to happen out of the blue in spite of a serious lack of real time retweets, and I'm pretty sure most of my followers have never seen BBC's version of modern Sherlock and could care less about it since the States have had so little exposure. (omg, I've discovered Sherlock-Khan crossover memes, and the night is good, yea verily.) (You guys need to question the synchronicity of someone playing Sherlock, Khan, and Shere Khan.)

I know I hardly compete or even compare yet with established popular bloggers and authors, but anyone following me around knows I love blogging, and I've gone out of my way to avoid monetizing on purpose, digging into my own pockets and spending horrific swaths of time on saving much of my internet content from vanishing as hosts and their tech upgrades continue to obliterate stone age and even last year retro into code smashes that frustrate all of us attempting to keep our grip on the right to share our journeys without interruptions that euphemistically equivocate to modern day book burnings. (God, I love constructing sentences like that one. #aspienado)

Of course, I could also blow it off as web crawlers and pingbacks, but my ultra conservative statcounter tracker seems to think it has more to do with you guys upgrading your smart phones. I get an actual count on devices, operating systems, and screen resolutions, but the important thing is that nearly half of you are coming in on mobile devices.

I'm not really making a point so much as saying thank you  and I sincerely hope I don't disappoint when the manuscripts go out. Above all, I'm a huge fan of fans and all the creative minds out there who have gotten me through many a sleepless night distracting me from things that go bump. There are better vids with this song, but this is the only full length, so I use it a lot while I'm working. I hope you guys are getting more sleep than I am.

tpyos

And then I spent the rest of yesterday nearly in a coma, blissfully drifting in and out of consciousness. And then I pretty much slept all night. And I'm still so brain wasted that I just now caught that typo from yesterday.

Today's a big day. Much of my adult life seems to have been focused around big days like this, in and out of Schrodinger's cat box, lol.

Me and the medical establishment irl, lol.

because 17 is a prime number, perhaps

I find myself wondering what 50,000 words even means when they've been scoured, turned inside out, eradicated from existence, and recreated in a handful of days. I keep thinking of the typesetters in the Discworld trying to wrap their minds around recycling deleted words, and how even Terry Pratchett's work suffered from from poor proofing. This from a review.

HOWEVER, the state of the proofreading was APPALLING, to the point where I want to return the book. The typos and misplaced words were so frequent that they diminished my enjoyment of the story. If you care about value for your money, buy the paperback. I'm very resentful of having to shell out so much money for a hardcover book, only to see it so poorly put together. Grrrr! BAD Harper Collins!

I've once again been abruptly awakened by something as silly as the erroneous math equation "970 divided by 210 equals 5", aaaaand I just discovered my keyboard seriously lacks a division sign. Anyway, I woke up immediately doth protesting, and then plunged straight into wondering whether Shakespeare found himself awake at godawful hours craving chocolate chips and demanding to know from the universe what is more important, needing more sleep or needing to acknowledge the revelation that one has survived a life in 17 tragedies and can still giggle about ripping an imaginary e out of existence being a conundrum.

Text convo yesterday with my kid, who saw me at my very worst and still says things like "I adore you". Coming from the childhood I did, that alone tears me up every single time.

Ur going to love my book. Full confessions, daring to go over lines. Feels like I'm writing poetry.

I've been anxiously waiting.

I've always known you were pretty bad a**. Have always wondered about the stuff I knew I'd never heard.

It's all coming out.

I'll bet it feels good to air it out.

Oh god yes.

I've always thought of you as one of God's warriors. You've punched evil in the face.

I told my beta reader I want to devastate my readers as gently as possible.
U got it, I'm about to do just that.

That sounds like an oxymoron, but I get it.

It probably lends a bit of depth to know I was a horrible parent, telling her to lie in a ditch if the cops came, raising her on Rocky Horror and David Lee Roth in assless chaps, leaving her behind over and over to find my way out of another set of life's brambles.

Bending my mind around this song being remade into something so sadly beautiful around an alt world pilot that never aired wrings my soul. I've lain awake so many times in my life contemplating the dreadfulness of existence being meaningless, excepting that every single anguished point of view is a unique story that cannot be told any other way, and that our intersections are what save our souls from true oblivion. For the ability to lie awake with thoughts like these, I would lose a lifetime of sleep and count myself blessed.

my unstrung ukulele

Today's earlier post was a distraction. I nearly bombed you all with a hardcore excerpt and pulled it back. It would've rocked a lot more views than haikus and limericks. I'm trying not to feel impatient. I'm sleeping in 2 and 3 hour jags now, hoping a lot of it is the prednisone taper and that once I'm clear of it I'll be able to blissfully conk a lot longer than that.

amwriting is a horrid affliction, a variation of performance art requiring as much stringency as a street performer pretending to be a dead body on a sidewalk for 3 days, dismissing bodily needs and functions in pursuit of proper expression. My brain feels like it's been through a taffy pulling contest, a spun sugar machine, a drunken tilt-a-whirl, and rolled down a hill inside a rogue tire bouncing across the landscape. M.J. Caan wrote Earth's First, also on kindle.

I keep thinking of Mr. Earbrass working on his own final edit. Click this pic, peruse the bidding prices, and appreciate that I actually have a copy of this book.

I don't care that some of you are sick to death of Sherlock fanvids and spoilers and wondering if I've gone off the deep end abandoning all things Spock and Darth. Regular followers will have realized by now that Sherlock has gripped me as my muse and flung me against every wall in my house several times over this month, and the only help for it now is to just keep ripping, reordering, and rewriting until this is sent off and I collapse on the floor upstairs in an unused room, wondering where I am and what day it is.

"You should write a book," they said. For years I've been hearing that exact sentence out of so many mouths. Here, let me just trot down to hell first and pop up with an armload of abandoned bits and pieces to sort through so this will make sense. If you guys knew the real me, you'd wonder how I get anything done with all the limericks hopping around my head like little frogs while I work on being serious. Help me, Sherlock! preface

flashback of a feeling

An update in haiku and limerick.

April has been surprising
I joined the Sherlocked
And unlocked my mind.


The words washing over my soul Keep pushing me toward a goal Like macrame weaving I keep on believing   In spite of the strain   And continual rain That I will soon become whole

Secrets kept hidden Bursting through my brain While I dance for the public

Hard writing only confirms
That feeling of wrestling worms Into a fake can Marked "Written by Jan"   To spring in surprise   At my poor readers' eyes And splash up their brains with my germs

I also found Benedict Cumberbatch's Sock Fetish on tumblr.

all your kings and queens

I was told once that my pen is bloodier than a sword. As I continue dredging my head putting the torn scraps back together, I'm surprised to see it's still just a pen after all, since it's my own blood I've been using for ink.

There was a time I would not have left a soul standing. I have reached a time where I will not let a single one fall, because I know now it was me all along buried in the pit. Maybe I only dreamed I was walking about, the shadow of my soul on a listless holiday while I waited for me to find myself.

Or maybe I've already killed everybody and just haven't looked up from my writing to notice yet.

when blogging gets real- go hard or go home

A couple of you subbed to my work blog may have accidentally gotten a sneak preview yesterday of a section I was working on before I realized it was no longer a private draft.  Just keeping you on your toes.

I got it pulled back so fast, though, that you might've felt the earth roll back a few seconds and suddenly got deja vu.

You didn't see me like this while I moved space and time.

So heads up, those of you who work on WordPress- draft mode will go live and send out to all your connected network and subs if you're not paying attention to how you update/publish. A nice pop up asking if I really wanted my draft to be published now would have been sweet.

By the way, blogger enthusiasts, got a heads up from my wireless tech support that Google has decided to shut down their Google Apps platform and will do a data purge this summer, plus this quote- "We will also be providing instructions for how to export other data that you may have stored in your Google account (such as calendars, Picasa image albums, documents and YouTube videos)."

Scream sports.

Pinkyoactive

Designed by friends for friends. I made it customizable for people to put onto different clothing or change colors and stuff if they want. Add your own name, whatever. Click to see more.

Still slamming my way through April, which started with a fairly sleepless nearly two-week hypomanic episode. If I were getting the recommended 8 hours of sleep a night this month, I'd have racked up 184 hours by now. If I were at least pulling off a good 6 hours a night all month, I'd have 138 under my belt. But I've been averaging less than 5 hours a day/night total since April 1st, which only gets me up between 92-115, leaving me dangling for 3 1/2 weeks now at only half the sleep I should be getting. I have a 6 month follow up with my psychiatrist next week, and the first words out of his mouth are going to be- Have you been sleeping? You know, like, if he doesn't notice first that I've gone night walker on him.

Of course, I'm going to bypass the question and blame it on the big load of prednisone I'm on again, right? I'm so screwed right now, tripled up on zyrtec, benadryl round the clock, handfuls of prednisone every day, flying through test strips. Oh, no reason, just tipped the scales for a histamine overload breakout spending a day grocery shopping in the worst tree pollen month of the year and everyone mowing grass everywhere I go.

I'm the kind of person who skips hives and goes straight to swelling mouth and airway out of the blue, and I'm getting so used to it that I just start chunking down whatever backup I've got on me, which is a mini pharmacy because I'm trying to avoid epipen like the plague, while I drop everything and drive to the nearest clinic. I usually get dexa-medrol and benadryl shots plus a phenergan push on top of a handful of pills they hand me, then I have to sit there for a couple of hours making sure the reaction is stopping (many times up to 5-6 hours), then start a week of prednisone from the pharmacy and round the clock super dosing on a variety of histamine blockers. Last time I did this I wound up doing two rescues and 17 days of pred, so you know this time I didn't hesitate to toss all that stuff and some leftover prednisone in my mouth before I ever got to clinic and was on it so fast that I got to skip the shots this time, yay!

But all it took yesterday was one pain pill to release another flood of histamines from my mast cells, and hey, let's rock another big load of everything because there goes my tongue and lip puffing up again, yes, even though I'm already going full med blast trying to control histamine breakout. You know why people wind up getting punctures for airway? Because once your throat closes up they can't get airway in and have to punch a hole just so you can breathe. Yeah, kinda wanna avoid that level of freaking out.

On the other hand, I've managed to get another 8000 words tacked down kind of the way I want them yesterday. Super OCD mode. Plus you know me, cleaning bathrooms and stripping the bed and cooking ahead and freezing back because I'm bouncing around like a cat that got trapped in an espresso machine. Oh, look, it's way before 2 a.m.

There is some really cool evil eye stuff out there.

You can imagine the fun I'm having in my head. It's like the old days all over again. Without the narcotics. Or the muscle relaxers. Or the antidepressants. All with which, including benzos, I slept only 2 hours a night off and on for years.

And such is my Pinky superpower.

Lurker Games

It's a thing we do. A game.

Three different people have told me they keep dossiers on me. None of them were joking.

Sometimes you accidentally cease and desist an amateur you know in real life and then stuff gets awkward.

And sometimes it gets weird.

I wish we could get together in a lurkers club and swap tech advice, but I know that defeats the whole purpose.

So we just quietly watch each other.

I live for the plot twists, like when an ultra dark lurker pings on top of me and someone else lurking each other. I know you know I know you know I know, but now you know.

I'll be dancin'

I'm wondering if I broke a beta reader and whether I should put a warning on my book cover not to read it because it can cause serious psychological harm.

I suppose a wild skew into incongruity is my only hope right now. I once named an ecritter Miss Chatelaine, and the closest thing I've ever found to explain how that fits the image in my mind is Lady Gaga's cheerio ballerina in Marry The Night. The only difference between me and her is that I didn't invent my truth to fill in any holes. That doesn't mean I can't still express myself artistically.

Back to right now- the scraping out of my soul like I'm scraping seeds out of a melon or a squash. Maybe a butternut squash because it's been kind of hard and the seeds are all sticky, and the knife is already gummed up with the waxy stuff they put on the squashes. I imagine when I'm done with this I'll look like something out of a horror film and will need to take a vacation. Or at least a shower. I'm actually trying to get showers, so maybe when I'm done I can put on a big hat and giant sunglasses and sit out on my deck imagining I've flown off to a villa in France. Maybe I'll pretend my chocolate chips are a Madeline truffle while I sip Chateau Margaux out of my Aquafina bottle.

Those of us who know what this means- imagine aspienado coming out of years of full trauma shutdown figuring out how to 'recondition' one's self for not just survival, but winning the game. Like, maybe I reprogrammed the phone.

The Pinky Night Arises

I dreamed that title and abruptly woke up. I'm very clever when I'm asleep. I'd never have thought of that awake. And, of course, I'm up at 2 a.m. again.

Who needs a whole pile of brain cleansers after yesterday?

By the way, since I mentioned yesterday on twitter that I was touched and moved that post hit my top ten in less than 18 hours, I sincerely want to keep thanking you guys for that post moving right up into the top five overnight.

I suppose I should be putting 'spoiler alert' on these.

 Here's to some of the funnier crazier stuff I've got to final edit now.

p.s. I never got caught.

not quite there yet

The weekend was crazy fun, wasn't it? The twitters were rowdy, the movie chats were even rowdier, my gangs are awesome, and I love all the people.

Twenty days into the Lexxplosion, eight days past the hypomanic-induced epiphany, and now comes the metaphorical final rending of the heart, because the rest cannot be written without metaphorical blood. I'm intentionally avoiding being all-out dramatic because I know some of you have triggers. I do, too. I have been plowing through and dealing with an astonishing amount of continual triggers that have me wondering how I've made it this far in my life without completely self destructing. Not for the lack of trying, please understand, but for the ignorance of myself being a sort of morbid bliss that allowed the time needed for ripened aging. Metaphorically. But please don't crack an oak barrel joke. I have an oak tree just off my front deck that is in full orgasmic surge and my eyeballs are oozing down my face, which is making a mockery of my melodrama.

In all the 2 million words I've collected across public and mostly private blogs, I have never yet written down a particular thing in a public way beyond mentioning in passing and burying under piles of other stuff, mostly because 1- I haven't been able to bring myself to do it, and 2- the last thing I want is a blog post drawing heavy comments, which it certainly would. I have met a lot of people saying a lot of sad and horrific things. I've been through sad and horrific things. But I have never run into another person who knows what to say to this sad and horrific thing, or has any way of identifying with it. It's a rather unique kind of experience, and you can tell I'm screwing up my nerve to get it written out now, can't you?

The challenge is writing sad and horrific without toxicity overload, without veering off into directions opposite of my goals, without creating a reader stain that becomes its own selling point or some kind of statement that skews expectations of why I'm writing. I daresay blogging one's innermost darknesses are becoming somewhat of a fashion trend for those whipping up content creation to further their own representative presence (blogging circles are the new Maury Povich/Oprah/TheView internetainment), and while I don't mean that unkindly at all and wholeheartedly agree it's important to share our experiences and truths, what I do mean is that mine wins and this isn't a competition. Mine can't go on a blog without being curated through a publisher first, before reaction and response turns it into something else.

The real truth, behind all the other truths, is known only to one beta reader and my family right now. Soon we'll see why it's important for me to asplode the whole world in the most cunning evil villain way possible. I checkmate, or I go home.

Google will eventually own our coffee, too

In the event I ever appear stuck-up, I have saved this convo for posterity. Campy is unaware I've been following her around social media for years and will probably remain unaware of the mention here, the irony of which amuses me. I am a lurker deluxe. If you don't care, don't click it. Unless you're a Lexx fan. This is one of the most unusual Lexx actor updates I've ever seen or even been part of.

In this week's Fun With Phones, my Droid threw a fit and ate Google Play Services like the Smoke Monster in Lost, so no more youtube on my phone. I get to revert back to sliding little cards in and out of my phone and laptop to get home vids loaded up, whee. Since I'm seeing other users freaking out in comments as reinstalls keep epic failing (as is mine), I assume this is another push for us lazy penny pinchers to UPGRADE OUR PHONES! >=l All they hafta do is strangle our old phones out, and I'm nearly there. My plan was up six months ago, and I've slowly been losing app capabilities (capp-abilities?) and suffering the indignation of outright noncompliance from a phone that used to let me rule the world. I'm this close to holding it over a toilet and threatening it with cruel dismemberment if it doesn't straighten up.

Me vs my phone irl.



OH, here we go, THIS.


:edit: During #LateNightMovie in chat I got bored and dinked around and accidentally reset to factory default, my youtube is back, yay!!!! I need celebratory muzak, hang on. (I've never ever used factory default, this is kind of amusing.)


:edit again: Had. A. Blast. in #LateNightMovie, bad carrot jokes all over the place, it was awesome. You had to be there, and it helped to be a Lexx fan. Click for convo thread, no answer yet but it was worth a shot.

Aaaaaand then back to a brain cleanser. I'm sorry, I'm just really needing it tonight, going a little OCD over the whole phone thing.

I'll make you believe

The only way to understand this is to click into the convo.

But it boiled down to an #ironchefspooge showdown. I may hafta make this a thing.

I was probably a fool for staying up this late, but #FridayNightFlix at SyfyDesigns is too fun to pass up.

Wound up with a sweet memory over it, Pinky actually goes way back.

It's anyone's guess if I'll sleep tonight now since I've been bouncing up like a Tigger around 2 a.m. for days, and we'll have a Bunny around 6 again just like we did this morning.

This whole month has been amazing. I won't bore you with details, just feel awesome with me. You know you want to.