A door closes, a window opens….

So if the window closes does that mean the door will open again? And what if the window is on the 10th floor? Who thinks of these expressions? LOL

Jokes aside though, life does seem to hand you the means of dealing with an ending by giving you new beginnings, and sometimes, very rarely, it gives you back something you lost.

The problem seems to be recognizing it for the gift it is and accepting it whole heartedly. I’m always sad to see an ending of anything, be it books, music, films or friendships, but I’m learning that there is always another good book, great music and wonderful film to look forward to and sometimes, just sometimes, an oldy comes along and makes everything shine again.

So I guess that’s what the expression means, it’s hope. Even in the darkest of times someone somewhere will shine a flashlight in your face… and mostly when you’re scratching your butt!!

Stop the world I want to get off!!

It’s a boy!!! Adrian Ruck has made his appearance into the world a whole 6 weeks early. He’s in intensive care, but he’s a little fighter and the hospital staff are confident that he’ll soon be a hearty, healthy, monster just like his older brother.

It’s been two weeks of hell for his mother though, she’s had to spend most of it on her back in the hospital being poked and prodded with everything and anything.

I had to cancel my holiday to England, and it’s been a hectic nightmare of running between the hospital and babysitting the slightly traumatized little guy at home. Now that it’s almost over I start to wonder what the next big drama that turns my life upside-down will be?

I’m trying to remember a time when I didn’t have some sort of pressure and stress dragging me down over the last three years, and I’m not coming up with any. It’s been a non stop roller coaster ride for years now and I think I really really want to get off, just for a little while.

On the writing front, I’m doing the best I can, I barely find the time to read, so if and when I do write it’s notes in longhand written on anything I can find. Sadly I seem to have been caught in yet another drama there thanks to which I’m now short another friend. And this time I really have done nothing to deserve being de-friended, and since I did nothing to cause it there is nothing I can do about it either. But it does make me re-think past decisions I made that made me loose friends and wonder if I could have handled things differently back then.

Maybe….

Anyway here is a toast to a new Ruck, may he be as strong as his name and do his forebears proud!!

A Mothers Rage.

Destructive Relationships.

That’s such a mild phrase, when you look at the mess they make of your life. Not just the person in the relationship, but their friends and family.

Sometimes the healing is even harder on the family than it is on the one affected. They have to hold their own feelings under strict control, because the last thing someone coming out of an abusive relationship needs, is to deal with the emotional overload of her family’s reaction.

My Daughter is coming out of a very bad relationship, one that I have had to endure and watch knowing things are not as they should be, and worse, watching how the sunny, wonderfully happy child I raised became a withdrawn, anxious, and broken woman.

I have to keep a civil tongue in my head as more and more horror’s are revealed to me the more she brings herself to talk about it. Two years, that monster had my child at his mercy for two fucking years! And I could do nothing, absolutely nothing… but pray and wait, and hope that one day she will see him for the disgusting beast he is.

He enticed her, turned her head, isolated her from her family, and then systematically destroyed her. This is not a young man, or even a reasonably looking man, he’s 20 years older than her, overweight and ugly.  But he can talk the talk, and he knew exactly what would draw my baby girl to him.

It took something really terrible for her to finally cut him out of her life, but even now I can see hope in her eyes as she opens yet another lies and  promise-filled email. I’m terrified that he will draw her back to him, even now.

How can this happen to us?

I was always under the impression that abused women, ended up in that sort of relationship because they were abused as children and don’t know any other way. But I was stupid, arrogant and so very wrong.

I raised my girls to be feminists, to be proud of being women, and to be strong enough not to need a man to live a full life. And yet she still got caught in this man’s web of lies and obsession, and stayed in it for far too long.

I got my daughter back, broken, shattered and fighting to get off her knees.  But she is fighting and you can be sure I am standing right there at her back, helping her all the way, and with all of my strength. My family have surrounded us and formed a circle of safety, love and understanding. We will protect her.

And if God is kind, that sick swine that brought her to this, will suffer the karma he so richly deserves!

The harsh critique.

I am both a writer and a critique partner.

Sometimes combining the two has been difficult and I have lost friends from the blank honesty of my critiques.

The problem is not that I am rude, or cruel, or even use hard words. I will never slam a work no matter how bad it is, and I will always try and find a helpful suggestion for every crit I make and every point I bring up. I find what is fine and good in the work and mention those parts I like even if sometimes they are few and far between.

So why am I considered harsh?

That is indeed a very good question, one I have only recently managed to figure out myself

The thing of it is, as a writer there are some things we like being critiqued on, some we wince but accept and some that strike us down to the bone with shattering and painful accuracy. And it is the last one, no matter how gently put, or how many good points come before it, that will leave you gasping from the blow.

The first critique is the one on punctuation and grammar. A word too much used here, one left out there and who the hell really knows where to put a damn comma? That kind of crit  you enjoy, because you know the person who sat for hours correcting your million and one misplaced comma splices, has made your work shiny and polished.

Then there is the one that makes you wince, the one that normally starts like this “I like where you are going with this, but this whole paragraph is really not necessary since you have already established……” Or “I don’t understand this, who’s doing what to whom and why?”

The first for me sometimes feels like an amputation. Yes sure I have already explained all that, but the dialog in that paragraph was sooooo cool. The second one is even tougher, because in my mind that bit or section is clear as a bell, and how can it be any clearer?

This kind of crit means a lot more work for the writer because we have to start trying to figure out what works and what does not and then re-write those sections.

Which brings me to the last, and most devastating crit. The one that starts with, “the idea for this story is great but…“  and is usually followed by, “the characters are not working for me”.

OUCH!!! (I’ve actually had that one from an editor. She told me “I don’t feel any connection to your character…” and yes, I can still feel the sting from that one.)

Then there is the even more painful variations “I can’t visualize your story.” Or “The plot is weak, the setting needs work.”

Double OUCH!!

The reason why these critiques hurts so much is that unlike the other two, this one you can’t just fix with a bit of creative writing. This one basically means, strip the story down to the roots, salvage what you can, and then start again.

It’s hard for seasoned writers to recover from that harsh a critique, which is why I hesitate to critique beginners. I am honor bound to be honest, but at the same time I would hate to feel that my crit had made someone loose their love of writing, and the danger of shattering a fragile confidence is much higher in a beginner than in someone who’s had to deal with editors.

Which brings me to the point of this post, if you are going to ask for a critique, be very sure that you can accept the pain that comes with that.

If not, there is no shame in admitting you do not want to know what is wrong with your love child just yet. The best thing you can do is have another child… (no I do not mean this literally.)

Edit your story over and over again, read it, enjoy it, print it out and read it some more. Let your family read it and give you all the loving good feedback that your writer ego needs. Build up your confidence, if you feel there are grammatical problems in your work, get books and read up on how to fix those. Take as much time as you need to do this.

Eventually the muse will be bashing you over the head to write a new story, and that is the very best thing you can do. Join a writing group, find a writing partner, someone who likes your work, works well with you, and whose work you like.

Only when you have managed to re-read your work, and found yourself wincing at those parts that are suddenly not quite as brilliant as you first thought, will you have enough distance from the work to be able to weather a harsh crit.

It will still sting, but the blow will be dulled by the new work and your confidence will not be completely shattered. You will more than likely already have suspected a lot of what is brought up in the crit and other more experienced writers will more often than not be able to help you find a solution.

For those out there who are smarting from a harsh crit, who perhaps got more than they bargained for *hugs* and don’t give up. Every journey starts with one small step.

Just don’t toss the work one side in a fit of rage and self-loathing. Take a deep breath, give yourself time to ride out the pain, and then come back to it. Let your mind absorb what the critique’er suggested… and then decide if you are up to the task of fixing it. If the answer to that is yes, then you have just earned your big girl/boy Writer pants!! But more than that you have learned something, and it will show in every work you produce after that.

I  also highly recommend following this link, for both critique partner and writer. This post was both inspiring and hauntingly real for me. http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com/2010/03/confidence-and-confidants.html

And always always… Happy Writing!!!

Titles are for Wimps and Wusses….

(And that’s only because I can’t think of one today )

As you can see I’ve learnt a little something playing with the different theme’s. CSS looks complicated at first glance but as long as I only have to tweak bits here and there it’s not too intimidating. I’m still not happy with that big red border bit. (No idea what it’s called) but it seems to fit in with everything else.

D has promised to work on a custom website for me next week, if her little ones and the Uni course’ lets her. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with!

Not a whole bunch going on at the writing front, and since I am back at work tomorrow, I’m thinking not much is going to be happening there for a while.

I’m not stressed about it. I write for pleasure and it’s time I remember that. Starting with the “if I don’t want to, then I don’t have to” mind-set. (That’ll save me loads of midnight guilt and self-loathing).

I’ll be posting excerpts form my work as soon as I figure out how to post to a page….. And I have found a domain that I sort of like, but I’m waiting to see if I stay interested in this or if it will fall the way of my LJ, unfed and unwanted in some deep dungeon.

Now to go see if I spelt wuss right.

Don’t diss the Disco.

Especially not to someone who probably lived the most exciting part of their lives in the seventies.

Yes I spent my teens and twenties dancing to Abba, the Bee Gee’s,  and a lot of other names I can’t think of right now.

It was our hip hop, our grunge, our blues and our rock. It got everyone on the dance floor and some really cool moves came to the beat of “Burn Baby Burn”.

Ok I admit the hair… Oh man! What were we thinking? And some of the clothes *shudders*…

….but those young ‘uns out there snickering at the old days are going to be in their forties soon enough (way too soon enough) and just how embarrassed are they going to be about some of the music and musicians of today?

I would know. I’ve been subjected to some whoppers, (Teenagers were invented to punish you for all the things you did to your parents.) and what is Lady Gaga anyway, my daughter says male, my son says female, and I watch it bounce on the screen and think someone electrocuted Barbie’s albino twin.

Give me the Bee Gee’s any day, at least their pants were tight enough that you had no doubt what gender they were.

Learn something new every day.

That sounds an awful lot like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”, which of course we have now disputed to be total bunk.

But in my case those old sayings are so deeply drummed into my head it’s like gospel. Which brings me where I now am, confronted with pages and pages of the gibberish that is html. I am sure many people will look at it and see sense, I however only see greater than a href equals more gibberish.

On the less dull side, I now know how to make italics, bold, underline and strike-through without clicking on the very handy little buttons at the top of this page….. go me!

Now on to learning how to change my header… joy, cheer, zzzzzzzz.

I don’t see the logic, Captain.

Day two of the great web/blog/site (whatever the hell this thing is) travesty.

I used to consider myself a fairly intelligent person, and a firm believer that nothing harmful can ever come from learning something new.

I was wrong!! Horribly delusional! And really really full of crapola! Seriously????

In the last 24 to 32 hours I’ve spent a good 2/3 rds of that time reading, and occasionally watching, a never ending parade of experts — none of whom is over 12 years old — explaining how to build a web site.

And now after fighting my way through the migraine inducing registration on a domain, which I might add is only interested in getting me to spend more money than their “special offer” prices. (Don’t you hate it when you fill in the whole page of your personal data only to have it poof and disappear?) I am still no closer to understanding or having an actual web/site/blog whatever!

I don’t think I can do it Captain!!

Hello Starshine

It is amazing how much trouble one innocent little question can get you into.

It all started with a chat conversation.

“What’s your site addy so I can add you to mine.”
“My what?”
“Your site, website, blog…?”

The conversation went onward and I eventually found my interest peaked. The words “Oh it’s easy, and comes with idiot proof instructions,” are even now ringing in my ears… along with a lot of very foul words hissed out in frustration over the last two hours.

I must have been having an episode of alternate-reality-mind-mulch when I thought that just because I can read, I’d be able to understand these idiot proof instructions.

Anyway, here I now sit at 2am, four lost posts of brilliant writing (and at this point my opinion is the only one that counts on that) later. I still have not figured out how to pretty this up, or even how to not send my post into the nether after, never to be seen again.

On the bright side at least I know what a site is now.