Bethanie's Brain

Wow. It’s over. I wrote ‘THE END’ in big capital letters at the bottom of page 169 today. Weird. I think it was both easier and harder than the novel I wrote in March. Easier because I didn’t feel like I was the only crazy idiot doing it. I had the forums. I knew I wasn’t the only one suffering the 25-30K Doldrums. I had people cheering me on when it took me ALL DAMN DAY to write the 700 most miserable words of my life – the 700 words between me and 50K. But it was harder in some ways, too. I actually felt pressured – which is ridiculous – to get to 50K by the 23rd - because that’s how long it took me in March. Stupid. I also felt guilty for being ahead of other people, which was weird. There was also a lot more going on this month: funerals, holidays and, oh yes, let’s not forget the fucking grant deadline that so very conveniently got moved to the middle of the month. I learned an awful lot, though. Here’s a few of the lessons I’m taking away this time: 1) Outlines are useless. Well...

Who knew? Who knew that plot ninjas could sneak up on you 5 days before NaNoWriMo starts and render your original, carefully planned story completely useless in less than 24 hours? Not me. That's who. See, I had the whole thing planned out: I wrote the original outline - in July , fershitsake - and very intentionally did not look at it until this week, because I knew that if I did, it would explode and I'd end up with 1,000 terribly interesting characters and 14 very complicated plot lines and the thing would never get written. But I thought I'd be safe taking a peek this week to re-familiarize myself with the characters and the story. Maybe work out a few plot kinks - what could happen in a week? A lot. That's what. Like 1,000 terribly interesting characters and 14 very complicated plot lines... OK, I'm exagerating, but I did go from 2 characters and 1 plot line to 4 characters and three plot lines (each of the two new characters has their own agenda). It's all...

I did it! I finally, finally did it – I reached ‘The End’. For three months now, I’ve been trying – and failing – to get there. No, I haven’t read the entire Oxford English Dictionary. No! I haven’t finally mastered the art of eating a five-pound cheeseburger in a single two-hour sitting. And, no, of course not! Why would I even want to finish the novel?? Sheesh! I’m talking about short stories. It wasn’t that I didn’t have ideas. I had lots and lots of nice ideas, but none of them was willing to stick to the diet and stay around 5,000 words. See, every one I’ve started since I started ‘trying’ to write a Short Story has turned into a Damn Novel and had to be abandoned when I realized that ‘The End’ was nowhere in sight. And then the vampire showed up. Followed by his girlfriend. And her psychopathic father. OK, yeah, so none of them had any intention of keeping to the program either. As usual, they each in their turn started telling me their entire life history, which I was – natura...

Ah, Fall! The season of seasons! Crisp, cool air; clear, jewel-blue skies; gold, ruby and fire-orange leaves on trees. Where are the hats?! Where are the mittens?! Why am I still wearing SHORTS?!?!?? Welcome to October. October, that is, South of the M-DL: It’s 85 frikkin’ degrees. It’s humid. I still have to use the gorram air-conditioning in the gorram car so I don’t arrive at work smelling like a gorram construction worker who’s been out in gorram sun all gorram day. FUCK. ME. That’s how I fucking feel about that. ‘Cuz, see, it’s exactly THIS that drives me fucking crazy about this place. It’s soft. It’s warm. ALL the fucking time. I CAN’T TAKE IT. Seriously – it gets down to 20 degrees and people Think They’re Going To Die. Shit, it gets down to 50 and they’re breakin’ out the frikkin’ parkas like the goddamn Arctic has Come To Town. It’s fuckin’ ridiculous. I mean, c’MON! When I lived in Wyoming, I once walked the mile to work when it was 27 below. As in, 27 frikkin’ degrees BELOW...

Small Miracle #1: Once again another grant deadline has passed and I have, despite all the odds against it, survived. This one was particularly heinous for a number of reasons. For one thing, one of us helper-types had the audacity to get married right smack dab in the middle of September (how dare she?!), which meant she wasn't there for the flurry of budget-prep and editing that preceeds Submission Day. It also meant that I worked twice as many hours as I actually get paid for for a couple of weeks. That part I don't mind all that much, since I get it back eventually, but for the moment I am Burnt Out. The second thing that made it bad was that NIH - in its infinite frikkin' wisdom - says that if a grant deadline falls on a holiday or weekend, you have until the following business day to postmark your submission. In this case, that meant everybody had an extra weekend to work on their proposal. In my case, it meant another weekend chained to my computer. Joy. Finally, we...

(WARNING: Contains graphic photos of arachnids in ....erm... positions.) I am terrified of spiders - terrified. They make me scream like a girl – which is OK in some ways and not entirely unexpected, since I am a girl. However, it’s not really the thing to do in front of the three-year-old. First of all, it seems to make the three-year-old scream too, and we get plenty of that already. Second of all, she really doesn’t need to be terrified of spiders. Logically, anyway. We are people. People are bigger than spiders. We can easily squish them. They are more scared of us that we are of them. (You know that line – your mother told you that one. I haven’t actually said it to my daughter yet, since I’m not convinced of it myself and I’m a terrible liar). In any case, I don't particularly want to pass this terror – or whatever bit of it isn't genetically programmed - on to the tyke, so I've been working on it. Working on it means that I try to tone the decibels down a notch or...

(WARNING: Contains every word in the book. Feel free to advise me of any I forgot.) People don’t cuss properly in The South. Especially women. Women in The South hardly seem to cuss at all, as a matter of fact, and most of them look at me funny when I do. Which is why I can’t cuss at the office (I work in a hospital, and they sorta frown on that anyway). The husband, on the other hand, gets to swear like a sailor all day. Which isn’t even remotely fair, since most of the guys he works with are pigs and they know some really good ones – in other words, I’m missing out. What it all boils down to is that I have no place to vent my potty-mouth - except here, I guess, which is why I’m just going to let it all out right now and hopefully get it over with. Yeah, so, on to other places I can’t cuss. Having cured myself of road rage (with music and NPR) I don’t cuss when I’m driving much anymore either. I mean, yeah, there’s the occasional jackass trucker who needs me to lay on the horn and ...

I don’t belong here. I don’t fit it. I don’t even WANT to fit it. I’m actually am starting to feel like I did in fucking high school. Because there are a lot of similarities between me in high school and me in exile in The South. High school was all about appearances – who had the best clothes, the best – and highest (hey, it was the 80’s) hair, the best car, the best boyfriend, on and on and fucking on. Ad. Fucking. Nauseum. Well, The South, is just like that. I can’t go to the fucking grocery store in sweat pants anymore, because no one else does and I get fucking stared at if I do. Most women here can’t go out of the house without make up on (thankfully, I’ll never cave to that one, too much fucking trouble). And they’re all so fucking polite – to my face – that it makes me ill. OK, it’s not all bad. We have family here (his, not mine). That’s nice because it means free daycare and the occasional child-free night to ourselves. But his parents are divorced and there are politics an...

I had no idea, of course. No one does. And no one can explain it to you beforehand. No one can warn you. I read a lot of things about becoming a mother before I became one – and there is just one passage that has stuck in my head as the “most true” thing I read, the closest approximation in words of what it’s like to become a mother. I don’t remember who wrote it, but it goes something like this: having a child is signing an agreement to allow your heart to walk around outside your body for the rest of your life. That about sums it up. But it still won’t prepare you. Nothing can – there is just a billion universes of difference between reading something like that, sniffling through the inevitable, empathetic tears and having your heart exit your body from between your legs and handed to you wrapped up in a towel. Having experienced all of the above it’s fairly inexplicable that I didn’t instantly fall in love with my baby like a lot of women say they do. And maybe they do, I’m not doub...

I have written most of a novel. I guess. Let's see, it's 340 pages and 170K+ words (yes, sorry, the boasting and bragging will now ceast and desist...). So, I suppose, technically, that counts. Lengthwise: it's a bonefide, gorram novel. It will never be published. I'm OK with that. Because what I finally figured out, just this past week (I've been working on this frikkin' thing since March, I'm a bit slow sometimes) is that what I've really been doing is two things. One, is world building and the other, is learning to write. Learning to write - more than likely, I will never stop doing that. But the world building thing... another story. Prior to starting this 'project', I spent nine months - nine friggin' months - doing what I thought was world building, in a very classical, orderly sense. I mean, I had categories fercrissake. You know: Geography; Social Structure; Religion; Physical Characteristics; Weather. It was all very, very sterile....

So - this here's serving as my personal web site for the time being. I used to be a whiz at HTML - like ten years ago when I was in college - and while HTML hasn't changed much, well, I have. Don't have the time and/or brain space to worry about the details of things like hand coding tables anymore (and every one of those web-page-creator software packages I ever used pissed me off because they stuck in a bunch of messy junk code), so setting up a "real" web site will have to wait until maybe the 3-yr-old is in school. (Ah, the things pregnancy will do to your brain...) Anyway, I have a feeling I will come here to crank out my "thousand words a day" when I just don't have the courage to face a thousand words of fiction. Fiction hurts - sometimes it hurts good, other times: it just hurts. I just feel like rambling today -- I don't want to have a destination for this. I'm tired of destinations. Well, more accurately, I'm tired of trying to ...