kid of the corn

That scarecrow is in a neighbor's garden practically on the street. This is the view I get every time I pop around a curve driving home. The first week was very disturbing, I thought it was a real little girl.

This is after I pass it.

Since my neighborhood has been weirdly and very staunchly anti-Halloween the last few years, I'm pleased to see it getting creepy around here again, even if it's unintentional.

Was also a big summer for butterflies. I've been a very lazy pic taker this year or you'd have known that already.

This is Bunny betending to have a broken foot one day after school. I was very tired and she let me lay around while her cartoons were on. She cracks me up.

Not a good sign when the doctor gets distracted by a TV set.

I like doing 'research' on my phone when we settle into TV, which comes after an exciting hour of running in from school and putting play clothes on and washing our hands and cooking real food for Papa's supper.

I've always harbored a personal distaste for Mickey, and srsly, it's the ear perspective thing, but the rest of them are ok. I'm an avid Darkwing Duck fan, and I'm pretty sure I saw every ep of the original Duck Tales when my kid was up and coming. I'm noticing, though, that Daisy seems especially helpless quite a lot nowadays, and alpha female Minnie has all the answers, and if she fails, Mickey is the ultimate fixer of everything that goes horribly wrong. You wouldn't believe the articles out there that must've taken hours to write up about Mickey, and I think basically the parents go insane from children's programming and have to vent and get their balance back. I'm not doing well at all with Nick Jr. and Disney Jr., it's affecting my IQ, and definitely affecting my work output. Pure mush up here behind my eyeballs.

Actually, my brain is more 'on' than ever, probably thanks to the CPAP and getting my meds figured out, and I've lately gotten into detailing character development in a couple of sideline novels. I've been rotating 5 working titles this summer, 2 of which (as I've mentioned) are already contracted, and I'm finally getting the hang of our latest new routine which allows me about 2 hours a day to work on whatever I please that isn't chores or physical therapy or anything necessary for the smooth running of my household. Sometimes it's less than that, but I think I can usually count on about 2 hours a day.

Today I'm blowing some of it on blogging a little. What's fascinating is looking back and really seeing how far I've come. 5 years ago one blog post had to be meticulously planned out because my memory was so shockingly bad that I could barely carry through paragraph construction over several hours (some posts would take a whole week), and now I slap stuff out so easily that I rarely even rewrite. So, big plus on the ol' brain healing thing.

Still, I'm spacing out quite a lot, and I'm not sure if it's an overload thing (autism) or a necessary halt and let everything catch up thing with real time nutrition and hydration and other needs, and I can definitely tell when I screw that up with the wrong food. I'm so hypersensitive to my blood sugar level now that I can usually tell you the number before I ever do a glucose strip test. My brain fries hard and fast if I go over 140, and it takes very little to do that. Pain meds make it exponentially worse, which is why I got back off them this year. I learned a long time ago how not to self sabotage with food, but this year got pretty challenging with the med fails.

Anyway, me touching base, and I wanna mention that Barry was a fun inspiration this week. I love this. 😁 This clicks back to source.

#amwriting

Spork

Random thoughts from my weekend-

Wouldn't it be cool if we had search engines in our brains? I could type in "How old is my Ghost Hunters shirt" or "when did I buy my Ghost Hunters shirt" and bing, answer right there. I'm trying to remember. It's so old now I only use it to sleep in, looks pretty rough.

In other news, I ran into a barely seen somewhat beautifully done alt Trek pon farr fanvid, and glancing down the list of moar stuffs on the side there was a vid that had both Spirk and Spork in the title, and I'm all like Ok, who the heck else is part of a Spork menage, so I put it into a search bar and dang if I didn't come up with actual Star Trek sporks.

There are even ~get this~ Spork t-shirts. This one is unavailable but clicks to more that you can still get. You're welcome.

And then, of course, doing a 'Spock spork' search was just insane. This one clicks to an ST meme board on pinterest.

I'm still so innocent...

Someone figured out how to move stuff and hide behind furniture with her apples.

Someone else cruisin' for chicks in pre-gamer mode, all tatted up.

Tent happens. It's a thing.

 

Spent part of the weekend attempting to wrap my head around what I've got written so far. Couple of sections will be obliterated/changed, the rest is mostly like jagged leaps from stone to stone across a river. I write like I read, apparently, inside out and backwards. I'm to the point, though, where I can now go back through all the old blogs and spirals and permanently check stuff off as what's left gets transferred. Most of the really raw writing is done, I think. It hit me as I was organizing that I've probably got the hardest part done now. The rest will be more like time consuming refiling. After all the blog salvage I've been through, I can see me being more comfortable with that.

Rachelle Gardner says in her Memoir Guidelines that my autobiography can be as long as it wants but thinks it would be polite of me to stop on the shorter side of 75,000 to 120,000 words. Chuck Sambuchino thinks "Coming in a bit low (70-79K) is not a terrible thing, as it shows you know how to focus on the most interesting parts of your life" but says definitely stop at 99,999. Virginia Lloyd thinks 90,000 is a reasonable limit, but says if one goes over 100,000 it must be compelling material.

I'm currently at 84,000. There are two sections that might get chopped out and replaced, and I'm pretty sure I'll be adding at least another 20,000. My contract (seriously, guys) says I can go to 300,000, but even I can't imagine going there with an autobiography, even though I never shut up on blogs.

I'm dealing with such layered material that it's been a challenge to actually write it coherently in a somewhat organized fashion. None of it can be stated simply- my parents believed in 'breaking' a child to learn obedience without question, and since I 1- have Aspergers and 2- went on to get a sociology/anthropology degree, I can speak for both inside experience as a child and outside experience as a mother that this doesn't work. Unless you're into actual programming. Which isn't that far of a reach, I'm finding out. Throw in some other crazy stuff and yeah, I've got material that'll curl some hair.

I know thangs.

In the meantime, not sure if leaping from obsessing over Sherlock to obsessing over Khan is a healthy direction, but it's certainly inspiring for world domination. I'm in a pretty twisted place right now. Time to GET TO WORK!!! >=l

walking in the wet wild wood by my wild lone

I feel like my week would be well represented with a stick figure dragging itself across a highway like a turtle. A search for an appropriate stick figure unwittingly leads me into a tantalizing foray into greater minds, and as I watch them whizzing past my head in their limoblogs, still dazed in a backlash of recent pain shock and another plunge into the inevitable spelunking of life's ridiculous overwhelming interruptions, I have to remind myself I can do this, I have awesome stuff, it's worth the effort, and more than anything, it's important.

I've gotta recluse, I'm sorry. I'll try to pop out on twitter, and who knows, maybe I'll feel differently tomorrow or next week, but I've gotta go deep if I'm going to get some of this done. For people unfamiliar with Asperger's, this has nothing to do with rabbit hole slang around sex, drugs, or web surfing, but I definitely go down a rabbit hole. I've been leaving a trail of crumbs ever since April Fool's Day, and it terrorizes me that I'm really going there.

It's Bluejacky's turn to write.

keep your sox on

Ok, this slamming 11,000 words out in 3 days and weeping into my coffee before 6 a.m. thing is probably why it's taken me 3 years to get this finished. Soul scraping is not for the fainthearted. I may hafta wrap my beta reader up with athletic tape before the plunge into this part. Wo, I just learned cool stuff. Click the pic if you're curious.

I was hoping to get the fun stuff done this week, *nope*, bandaids ripping off right and left, here's my heart, my liver, my intestinal fortitude... I feel like a literary forensic toxicologist. This came from a really cool site.

I have nothing else right now. Just stand back while I wretch my brains out. #aspienado

you're under arrest for blogging before coffee

One of those rare slept all night things, got up just before @bonenado left for work and made him listen to yesterday's video and laughed so hard I set off a bit of coughing. Gonna be a good day.

Today is a mailing a box kind of day. Batman turns two in a few days, and I'm not going to see him this time because we rearranged everything around just in cases that thankfully never happened.

So instead we've got a box full of awesome little boy stuff (special thanx to Bunny Mama!) like glow sticks to play with in the tub. There's more, you can't see the wrapped stuff.

Been pouring myself so hard into stuff I can't share yet that blogging kinda feels a little bland now. Stuff I've never even told my own family, stuff my psychologist could never pull out of me over a span of years. All the secrets. It has occurred to me that I could get arrested for something in particular and spent about five frozen minutes staring bug eyed at a wall wondering if that could really happen, then threw all caution out the window and wrote it anyway. What the hell. Now I'm giggling over a pun about my thoughts arresting over being arrested. I really shouldn't be allowed to blog before coffee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

#TBT & the cleansing of the soul, or at least the freshening

Wed. 10pm

My fave ever tweet because Sean Carroll retweeted it. Click it.

I'm laboriously dredging through research looking for a couple of dates about when something happened. I was sleeping, and I'd still rather be asleep, except I keep surging awake every 5-10 minutes mid-dream and everything because allergies, so whatever.

Trewth. This was also the very day I set up my book contract, clicks to original date. Really hope I'm done before *this* August... #facepalm

Gonna try the sleep thing again. 11:15pm

Thurs 1am
Ok, what else can I get into...

 lol, my first twitter avi, everyone thought I was a guy.

Before my current Sherlock obsession, there was Merlin. Before Merlin, there was Willy Wonka...




And before that was Tim Curry.


Couple of you out there are going Hey, what about Jack Sparrow? You're right, apologies. Hang on.




Toss a little Fear and Loathing in there...



Yeah, the good old days. Y'all thought I was all Lexx. I have so much stuff.



This is my favorite. I took the pic in Galveston.



My fave 'dolly' that a friend made a long, long time ago.



 My photobucket is ten years old and has nearly 10,000 files in it. It would've had over 6000 more, but I'm an idiot.

I really should try laying down again.



amwriting