Faster Than Kudzu

The Big Crazy Gets Loose

Sara says I SHOULD get a kitten. Right there in the comments. She says I should get a kitten because they are cuddlier than hedgehogs. It’s not a non-sequiter. I have, in Sara’s presence, recently THREATENED to get a hedgehog INSTEAD of a kitten as my cat does not hate hedgehogs with the same fervor that he brings to hating other cats, and ALSO I have a great name for a hedgehog lined up. Are you ready?

Pigling Bland. Isn’t that marvelous? My friend Jill told it to me. A name that good DESERVES a hedgehog to hang it on, I say. But…

Kittens are therapeutic, Sara says.

She recently got two kittens and named one Possum -best kitten name I have heard in ten years. The name POSSUM deserved a kitten just the way Pigling Bland deserves a hedgehog. Karen just got back from a visit to Sara’s, and she walked around DRAPED in kittens, she says, just threw them around her shoulders like they were stoles and soaked up their beneficial mental health rays. Honestly, Karen returned more than she has been in WEEKS.

Meanwhile, I talked to my editor yesterday.
Me: *panicked blabbering*
*pause*
Her: Wow. This is the most mentally unstable you have sounded in months.

So. Hang tight with me and follow my logic, because it FEELS irrefutable, BUT my mental illness number is WAY high. I MIGHT need a reality check. Then again, I might NOT. I might ONLY need a good kitten name…

You might want to put on some sunglasses—I am about to release some BLINDING SYLLOGISM MOJO.

1) People with a high mental illness number need therapy.
2) I am a person with a high mental illness number.
3) Sara says that kittens ARE Therapy.
4) I need a kitten.

The ONLY shaky part is Sara’a assertion that kittens ARE therapy. It sounds like PURE WISDOM to me, but I think we should test her credibility.

So the very next thing Sara said was that I needed to get a FURminator.
Speaking of therapeutic: Basically you can take this tool and peel it over your dog and pull out a WHOLE ANOTHER DOG’S WORTH of hair. The FURminator costs 30 bucks. ZOUNDS!!! That is a LOT for a dog brush. But this is SCIENCE. SO.

IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE I am going to go out this afternoon and GET a FURminator, and IF the FURMINATOR peels a whole another dog’s worth of pelt off my dog, then Sara MUST be accepted as a credible pet witness and kittens therefore ARE therapy and I MUST HAVE ONE.

This is what I want to see when I take my dog and the FURminator to the deck this PM.

Now since my mental illness number IS so high, I feel I can righteously dispense with segues, and just say, SPEAKING of guns, while Karen was lolling around at Sara’s, positively COATED in kittens and getting her sane on by the virtue of their therapeutic value, they got, in the e-mail, the VERY BEST AD ever. It’s SO great it almost makes me sad my spam filter is so ceaselessly vigilant. It said --- I am changing 2 words so as not advertise the actual product --- but it mostly said:

Princesses always whizgiggled at me and even youths did in the civil WC!
Well, now I laugh at them, because I took *SNAKE OIL*
for 3 months and now my penis is terribly largest than world.

TERRIBLY LARGEST THAN WORLD, you say? Eek! Maybe that’s the thing I am seeing on my office TV right this second, looming over earth, and Nicole Kidman is running down the road away from it?
Also, I am now calling the downstairs half bath The Civil WC.
Also, I want to name my kitten Whizgiggle.
Or possibly Pigling Bland.

We will do the FURminator test this PM, results to follow, and in the meantime, I am waiting for one more email from Sara. I hope it tells me I NEED to go eat some southwestern eggrolls, RIGHTNOWNOWNOW, then we won’t need the FURminator test. The need to eat southwestern eggrolls is SO EMPERICALLY true --- I REALLY do --- and Sara’s recognition of this obscure but TRUTHFILLED fact would be the FINAL CONFIRMATION I NEED to decide that Sara is absolutely right about everything eternally and then I will go get a kitten.

What's the best kitten name you have heard in ten years?

Re-Bang

I took both my kids to school today.

Both.

First time in TEN YEARS I have a WHOLE DAY with had no baby/toddler/pre-schooler in the house alternately crying and nursing/trying to eat poison/seeing what happens if you jam a fork in the electrical outlet. I got ten pages drafted and am about to go hit the elliptical for 45 minutes and then clean out my closet and I am so FREE and NOT HAVING TO MULTI TASK and the day stretches before me long and luxurious with HOURS before car pool and so naturally I can’t stop bursting into teeny flurries of weep every fifteen minutes.

I am BEREFT.

Signing up for motherhood is like AGREEING to cheerfully become a complete loon for the rest of your span on earth.

But I am not dwelling. *PAUSES TO SOB INTO HANDS FOR 20 SECONDS* Oh no, not at all.

I think I should get a kitten.

My dad and my brother are taking me to shoot LONG GUNS later in the month, but I have already been out with my brother to shoot pistols. Oh MY. I looked at this big box of assorted pistols Bobby had gathered, and I was kinda…terrified of it.

My brother made me sit down before we began for a safety lesson. We basically had to go to a room, alone, with the box of guns. We sat down and waited until a quiet had settled around us and he could see he had my full attention. He picked up one of the guns.

Bobby: Okay. See this hole? At this end? Don’t ever. Ever. EVER. point this hole at anything you do not want to see utterly destroyed.

I nodded solemnly.
That was the end of the safety lesson.

We took 2 liter bottles full of water out to a field behind a friend’s farm. The field is empty and low, a small valley, so our targets were set up low down by the rise of a hill. Our bullets would go through (or past) the bottles and bury themselves harmlessly in the earth. We put in ear plugs and shot and shot and shot. When I picked up the first gun, I felt like I was holding some sort of awful alive cool reptile thing that might turn and bite me. Then we started. When I set down the last gun, I felt like I was setting this warm alive and mighty creature who did my bidding. I found the hot after-smell very pleasing, tangy and metallic. I liked the ghost of kick I could still feel in my palm.

I want to go shoot MORE things.

First I shot with my brother’s Saturday Night Special, a little .22 which he said is useful only to terrorize clerks at the convenience store you are trying to rob. POP, it said, and it jammed every third bullet. Bobby said it is NOT a good gun for actually killing people--- even IF you managed to hit someone, you would likely just make them angry.

Then we shot an ANCIENT revolver that belonged to my grandfather. It was missing a pin, so the barrel would plop into my palm whenever I released it to reload. No safety. You load the thing and you are ready. I LOVED this gun. LOVED it. My character will have a gun like this. We shot it until the barrel got too hot to reload from all the shooting.

The 2 litre bottles began to have a bad time.

Then we shot my dad’s .45 automatic pistol and HOLY COW but that black beast has a kick. I loved to just point it and go BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM. I did pretty well, though I tended to hit MORE when I actually AIMED. Go figure. One bullet blasted a huge visible crater right through the center of Coca-Cola Classic. Then Bobby shot Fresca in the neck, and his head popped off and sailed away over our heads.

No soda bottles survived to tell the tale.

Here’s a quick weird little thing I noticed – you may draw your own conclusions

The night before my brother took me shooting, Karen and I went to a book event in the middle of Birmingham and then out to have a drink with a buncha folks we like from the Alabama Booksmith. I told several people that I was going shooting the next day. These were all urban folks who live in downtown and midtown.

They all gave me the same quizzical look overlayed by faint shades of either horror or disbelief and asked WHY I was going to go shoot guns.

“Research,” I would say, “for the book I am working on.”
And their faces would clear and they would not, satisfied. It made sense to them, and we clearly had good reason to do this dangerous, slightly distasteful thing.

I went and picked up my brother at his office way out in the green hills of Alabama, far from the city. He works for himself, sculpting, as you may remember, but he rents a small office at his church so he can escape his children/television/phone/neighbors and actually put his head down and WORK. We ambled around the church gathering all the 2 liters we could find in the recycling bins and having coffee and meeting people who worked there or went to church there. Local folks, all.

We would tell them we were leaving to spend the lunch hour shooting things.
They would just nod,as if we had said, “We are going to the mall.” I couldn’t figure it out. Why wouldn’t they ask WHY we were shooting things. WHY would they not ask? Then on the way out, we told the last guy who asked where we were heading and he looked at us wistfully. “Oh. I wish I could go with you. Have fun…”

Holy Crap

Holy Crap

Hi. I have completely lost it.

Last night, a SERIOUSLY DETERMINED EVIL STORM ignored TWO layers of surge protection and a back-up battery designed to allow me to shut down my computer safely should the power cut out.

BOOM.

Hey! You know THE METAL BOX that once contained my calendar of events (Including book club calls and meetings that are NOT on the online calendar and which are marked in paper calendar by BOOK CLUB CALL so I know to look on my computer calendar for helpful little things like a time, a time ZONE, a contact name and a phone-number) a HOST of beloved old short stories and essays, a TON of unanswered e-mail INCLUDING mails from readers that I NEVER fail to answer, a VERITABLE cornucopia of RESEARCH NOTES from a week spent in San Fran that I mailed myself because I did not take the laptop…AND AND AND (this is where I want to burst into noisy sobs and run for the ocean like a lemming)
My brand spankin’ new novel in progress.
Not yet backed up. AT ALL. ANYWHERE. Thanks!

Yeah. THAT BOX…went BOOM.

It has now become a box with a button the front that makes a dispirited and NOT AT ALL ELECTRICAL click noise when I press it.

It is not entirely worthless. I COULD, for example, use the box to store Cheetos and other transfat laden snacks that I could eat while curled up in the fetal position, weeping. But it is pretty much finished with the "electronic device" phase of its career.

I repeat: BOOM.

(Dear FTK Regulars and Best Beloveds,
Please kill and eat the first person in the comments who reminds me I should SAVE EARLY, SAVE OFTEN, and BACK UP RELIGIOUSLY. Also kill and eat the second. And the third. Kill and eat as many as come. THANKS! LOVE YA! KNOW YA GOT MY BACK.
Yers, Joshilyn)

I am distraught.

Scott says he thinks it is possible to recover these things. He is going to spend today taking all the guts out and attempting to fix my life.

MEANWHILE, I have to go to Winder, Georgia today for a library thing that is MERCIFULLY on my online schedule. So I have the ADDRESS AND TIME.
All OTHER info is stuck in the NEW CLICKY BUTTON SNACK BOX,
For example:

A Contact name

A Contact phone number

The Special Secret directions the Librarian sent me because she says MAPQUEST and possibly GPS systems send you to MARS if you believe them….

Oh yeah, and also, MY FREAKIN NOVEL IN PROGRESS.

This would be a good time to pray for Scott to fix it and for it to be fixable and for me to not end up on Mars. Although, to BRIGHT SIDE IT, my mental illness number is already ON MARS, so if my GPS takes me there, at least we can asphixiate in Mars's thin atmosphere TOGETHER....

Damn and Dam: Part the First

Damn is, I realized that I have about 28 days until I get my new color author photo taken by this screaming genius named Gilbert in NYC when I go up there for BEA and the Warner LOOK WE CHANGED OUR NAME TO GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING Party and OH my Best Beloveds….I am not camera ready.

We are not going to discuss the exact NUMBER of pounds I gained during the Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul I had over the last year or so --- a brief recap: TGWSS – an ambitious project to begin with -- was kicking my butt, my gramma died, these things got tied up together in Very Bad ways…Yeah. So. ANYWAY. TGWSS decided to come together in a rather lovely and unexpected fashion, and I am a person of faith so death and the idea of death is not permanently disconcerting. In short, Tea Time ended. I am back in my old clothes thanks to frenetic working out, but just…barely. Yesterday I struggled into my old jeans and sat in church feeling PROUD and PLEASED and like my spleen was being crushed. Before BEA, I want those stinkin’ jeans to be my BAGGY jeans, okay? OKAY! SO!

My friend Lydia has gone and FOOLISHLY befriended a WILD EYED COLON-OBSESSED DIETICIAN who does all these terrible cleansing things to herself involving eating steam and wrapping herself in cultured seaweed paste– wait – maybe I have that backwards, who can tell, it’s all so insane and involves a higher level of admitting one HAS a colon than I care to indulge in. Colons are yucky. They should be neither seen nor heard. BUT this dietician friend prances around eating yeast and with Senna tea and she is slim as a ribbon and has skin that glows with the wattage of one thousand baby butt cheeks. So. There may be something to it, is all I am saying.

I am therefore on The Crazy Hippie TREE-BARK-IS-DELICIOUS Whole Body Cleansing Ritual Tea Fest and Hug-In Life Plan. (Life Plan is a California word that I think means “diet”) Just for the next seven days. To see how it goes. If after seven days my jeans are looser and my skin looks like it has met the word Luminous in passing, I will go another seven.

Telling you I am on this diet should in NO WAY be taken as an admission that I care about or wish to discuss my colon. Or yours. Or the concept of the colon in general. I EMPHATICALLY DO NOT. I am not even admitting that I HAVE a colon, got it? I am just cleansing my…inner child. Or something. My friend The Google assures me this is actually a pretty healthy eating plan---the bulk of it being raw fruits and veggies, NO animal fats, but I have a liberal hand with the olive oil and am eating wild caught fish and VERY whole grains. SUPER whole. Raw oats, Spelt bread, whole grain couscous and Crazy Bible Pasta.

Crazy Bible Pasta is a real true product, and I am really for true eating it, too. REALLY. IN MY MOUTH I am eating it. I am supposed to eat a fermented food, like MISO, but you find Miso in rural Georgia. I DARE YOU. Life Plan also suggested YOGURT as a fermented food, which I MUST have, Life Plan says, to replace my… Acidodolphins? Apparently my…inner child needs Acidoldrummy things to thrive, but I would seriously rather take a railroad spike through the eye than eat yogurt. Just the SMELL of it on my children’s breath sometimes makes me gag. So I am taking the acido-si-dos in convenient PILL form.

DIGRESSION: I pointed out to The Google that WINE is a fermented food, and The Google said, “Wine does not have acidungies, and you can’t have any in this Life Plan, so shut it.” Then The Google said, without being asked, “PS, Vodka doesn’t have acido-whoosits EITHER,” so now me and The Google, we are not speaking.

BAH – I have run out of time for DAM I spent so much time on DAMN. BOO! I will Dam you all tomorrow, yes? And the first one who raises the spectre of the PINK SOCKS unto me KNOWING I haven’t had chocolate OR wine in almost 30 hours now will be tied down and forced to eat Crazy Bible Pasta.

I TOLD you it was a really for true product! Skeptical Sally.

The UN-Whelked

Here is the TV interview ---thanks to my pretty friend Mir for the link. I tell ya, I LOVE that Holly Firfer---that’s the name of the cute blonde who is interviewing me, for you non-Atlanta folks who may not remember her from CNN. If you live in Atlanta area and are reading Between, Georgia you can send Holly an e-mail for a chance to be part of the on air discussion on October 25th. We could be on TV together. And I am guaranteed to make weirder facial expressions that you, so there is NO reason not to go for it!

I hate watching myself on TV --- AND this time I forgot to vainly take my glasses off! MAN, I must have been nervous. I didn’t think I was, but I sound REALLY Southern, and when my accent escapes my control, it means I am nerved up. OR I have had a minimum of two beers. Since this was a morning show, let’s assume the former. *grin*

I had some trouble remaining clam yesterday. I was the opposite of Clam. Would that be UNclam? Non-clamular? Centipede-y? I FORGOT my daughter’s ballet class, even. SEE, I finally had COURT, and I was all atwitter to know if I would remain a master criminal or if my wrongful arrest would be rightfully stricken from the record. I put on four inch spike heels (red, thank you) and the kind of MAC lipstick that doesn’t come off (also red, thank VERY much), for confidence. These props failed me on every level. I was a wreck.

I had that bad-dog-in-trouble feeling I haven’t experienced since I was nine and STOLE a Christmas present out from under the Gayfer’s Department Store Christmas tree.
TRUE STORY: The Tree was so MATCHY MATCHY and PROFESSIONAL, like Mrs Claus had decorated it, and the tempty boxes under it were wrapped like TV presents, with hospital corners and ENORMOUS gold ribbons. I STOLE one of the smallest packages and then opened it in secret in a bathroom stall. It was empty, nothing but crumpled ribbon and ruined paper and the little cardboard box.

SO essentially, I stole NOTHING. I stole a box of Gayfer’s Rightful Air… but I felt so HORRID about it I couldn’t breath properly in Cordova Mall for months afterward. It made it worse that there was nothing to return. If only they had wrapped an actual something so I could have taken it BACK and wept and confessed and gotten absolution. Even at NINE I was a sucky master criminal. Almost thirty years later, I have not improved.

I sat in criminal-ish court which, in Austell, I SWEAR TO YOU, is now held in a MALL. Yes. A MALL. No wonder I had Stealing-From-Gayfer’s flashbacks! It is a MALL that never quite made it as a shopping complex---there used to be an awesome Cajun place in it and a dollar store and a Claire’s Earring Boutique and a Clinque Spackle Make-up shop etc etc. All those closed, and now it has….criminals. And a center fountain.

Because I had a lawyer, we didn’t have to go sit for the whole session. We got to go first. WHICH WAS GREAT. Because the guy I walked in with had a MULLET and a police escort and his hands were chained to his waist and he smelled like prison. NEAT. I did not want to, you know, hang out. Make friends. Pick up cool prison lingo. I just wanted to GO HOME.

So …. The clerk comes out and I pleaded guilty to speeding because…I was speeding. As for the BEING A TERRORIST WITH A FALSE IDENTITY WHO IS ALL COVERT AND POSSIBLY EVEN THE DEVIL, my lawyer walked them through my paperwork proving it was a DMV/Social Security Office joint balls-up, and so those were dropped.

BUT! DROPPED IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
I STILL have a freaking ARREST record. Which gives me HIVES.
If ever I get pulled over for, you know, a broken tail light or cutting a yellow light a little too close, it will COME UP on the computer that I have been ARRESTED and they will probably want to feel me up and look in my car for heroin. Cops look at you differently if you have ever been arrested.

SO, getting the charges dismissed was STEP ONE and now we are doing the million and one time consuming and expensive OTHER steps we have to do to get my record expunged. It can’t OF COURSE be as simple as proving empirically that the arrest was wrongful … OH NO! There must be multiple levels of paperwork and filing.

Your tax dollars at work…

All The Reasons I Am Crazy

My mental illness number just exceeded the national debt, so this entry could get long...

1) From being a girl.

Mildly related anecdote: I just got a letter from my friend Matt, who is married to his friend Drea. He and Drea went over to HER mom's house, and her mom had gods in Alabama on the coffee table. She had just finished it and had set it out to give to Drea because she really liked it (PREEN!!!!). The mother in law did not know Matt and I know each other and that he, of course, already had the book. So, anyway.

I get this e-mail from Matt: "Drea really dug Gods. I tried to get her to read it like 239084 times, but all her mom had to do was say 'Hey, you should read this.. It's good' and she started right into it.
You girls are crazy."

My response: I blame the estrogen. It's like a big shot of psychedelic mushroomic mood embellishers hurled right directly into the brain. Want some? The first hit is free.

Of course, on the OTHER hand, boys have to contend with testosterone. At least MY psychedelic mushroomic mood embellisher doesn't make me want to, you know, have a war or watch sports.

2) Deadline.

I am restructuring a HUGE thing and I think it is right but wow, it's big. I prowl around in utterly repulsive sweat pants and attempt to make chapter whatever-I-am-on-that-day work and call everyone I know and snivel when it doesn't and call everyone I know and yell pleased ululations of revolting triumph at them when it does. Either way, it's not attractive.

3) Being (Wrongfully) Arrested.

If I DO leave the house, like, if I am FORCED to be by being out of food or I have an appointment I can't miss, I find I am having mildly crazed FALLOUT. I get weepy and shaky every time I drive through Austell now, which, I admit that's a little like saying DOCTOR, IT HURTS WHEN I DO THIS, and now you say, SO, DON'T DO THAT!

Except Austell lies directly on the path between me and....everything. If I go NOT toward Austell, I generally come to some cotton. To the left of Austell? Some kudzu and also goats. To the right of Austell...Super Walmart, and Dude, I much prefer the cotton/kudzu/goats. The right-of-Austell Super Walmart is where despair goes to die. It smells like the rendered fat of a thousand McDonald's French Fries. Everyone there is either on Lithium or Crystal Meth or both or should be on at least the first one. I think they have a direct portal to Hell in the sporting goods. I am not a big Super Walmart fan, to be honest, but THIS one is beyond regulation horrifying on every possible level.

It is also true that if you go THROUGH the goats and kudzu, you come to Hiram, which has a movie theater and an Italian place with decent stuffed mushrooms and a Tar-jay and a Starbucks, but no bookstore, and none of my close friends live there. So. I have to go through Austell a LOT. It's wearing on me, and I feel, quite frankly STUPID, for having such a boring and predictable weepy-spooked emotional reaction to being arrested. How dull. If only Austell sent me into foaming gibbering psychosis, or filled me with secret sexy I'm-a-dangerous-criminal thrill.

But no, it's pretty much your regulation post-trauma snifflies. I'm tired of it already and bored of it already and yet my body keeps HAVING the reaction as I drive through Austell. I'm rawther disappointed in myself.

ALSO -- it upsets me to say I was arrested, and that I have to insert the word wrongfully, and it REALLY upsets me that people who don't know me and donut follow the link to the whole story and who read this will probably assume I was rightfully arrested because, face it, 99% of people who are arrested claim it was wrongful and 99% of that 99% are big fat liarhead criminals. I SO LIKE BEING BUNCHED WITH THEM! I ALWAYS WANTED TO FIND SOME COMMON GROUND WITH PEOPLE WHO SELL CRACK IN SCHOOL YARDS! AND NOW I DO! FOREVER! Because JUST LIKE THEM, I can now make big mooky sincere eyes and say, "I was wrongfully arrested." NEAT!

Scott took a picture of me on the Church steps, and I feel it captures an essential truth about the state of my internal landscape:

Kinda looks like I want to pull your face off and eat your brains, huh? Yeah.

A Blurb and a Gordito

Whew -- it's four AM. I JUST had a HIDEOUS dream----I saw a towncar outside my house and so I got in and my editor was sitting in it wearing dark glasses, all incognito, and she said, "I AM SO SORRY, I TRIED TO STOP IT!!!!"

She handed me a paperback book called TRAIN GIRL and the cover was VERY pulp fiction-y----half a girl's yelling face and a trainyard and a speedy car behind her. It was cheap looking and awful, the glue already failing along the binding. There was only one blurb on the whole back cover, and it said:

"Yo Quiero Read This Book" ---the Taco Bell Chihuahua
There was a little passport photo of that dog under his quote.

I opened it and it was TGWSS, the book I am working on now, just as it is TODAY, with its guts still hanging out, my edits maybe 25 - 30% done....I woke up in a lather.

I'm going to go edit my book some now....RIGHT now. Happy morning to you.

The End of the Jail Saga....Part 3

I keep getting e-mails asking what parts of the jail blogs actually happened. OH, Best Beloved of All My Many Dudes.....ALL the parts are the parts that actually happened. This is a blog, a web diary, a nattering about what is actually going on. When I make stuff up, I generally say "Okay, I made that part up" immediately after.

Who do you think I am? Although, come to think of it, I have now spent almost as much time in jail as the most famous "went to jail for 6 hours and got an entire book out of it" writer actually did. So. If it wasn't for pesky old journalistic integrity, I could maybe even parlay my afternoon in the poky into a TRILOGY. My years behind bars. Chained Heat. Hanging myself with strappy red sandals. Etc.

If you want to read something I made up, and I quiet frankly love it when you do, then please, allow me to direct your attention this way. Or perhaps this way.

If it's on the blog, it is not fiction. Except MAYBE I didn't make out with Joyce Carol Oates in an airplane lavatory. Maybe. I'm not going to say definitively, so as to retain the air of dark mystery that becoming a master criminal has lent me. You see it, right? My spanking new dark mystery???

I also have gotten several e-mails and a comment (yes, I am looking at YOU, Charity) reminding me gently that, hey, STUPID PERSON, you might not want to drive the sitter home if you don't have a license. Best Beloveds, thanks for your concern, but I am no Johnny Scofflaw. See, remember the whole part on Wednesday when I got arrested for driving without a valid license? WELL SO DO I. VERY CLEARLY. I'm a little scatterbrained, sure, but so far I managed to remember fire is hot, gravity pulls downward, and being arrested is BAD.

Trust me, I did not INTENTIONALLY break the law on Wednesday, and I am not going to start intentionally breaking it 48 hours after I learn the consequences of having it done been broked. Whew----let me pause here to take an ENORMOUS and calming whiff of cocaine while I go cut off the thumbs of some guys who have fallen behind on the vig and deploy my bevvy of street beauties out onto Piedmont to make daddy a little money for a lawyer.* <----See, now, I made that last part up.

BY THE WAY --- and I am kind of sad about this --- There WAS no bench warrant. My terrified brain put that in, sort of like, if you were walking down a dark and spooky lane in the night time and every twig cracking was racheting up your nerves a few more notches, and SUDDENLY! a terrible ax murderer leapt out at you and began to hack you into chunks, your brain might looks at his mouth and see fangs. He wouldn't actually HAVE fangs, mind you, he would be a regular unfanged ax murderer. Not that the chunks of you would care.

The cop said "tougher anti-terrorism laws" the cop said "have to arrest you" the cop said "handcuffs" the cop said "social security office" and "Driver's license" and "canceled." My brain, soaked in YEARS of Law and Order and NYPD Blue, put in "bench warrant" as if it were fangs. ALSO -- it was the DMV's error, not the SS office.

Who is surprised to find the DMV being evil and sloppy?
*crickets*
Right.

On Thursday, Scott took off work to drive me around, collecting documentation from our safety deposit box and the SS office. The dated, notarized paper trail tells a pretty clear tale:

1) In July of 2005, the DMV sent me a letter, telling me I had to go down to social security and fix my name. I had until September 11 to get it done.
2) On August 20th, 2005 I went down to the office and did everything I need to do to get it fixed.
3) On SEPTEMBER 11th, 2005 three weeks AFTER I had complied, the DMV canceled my license anyway. Due to THEIR clerical error.

INSERT: I keep getting emails and comments saying August 20th has not HAPPENED yet, but this was all back in 2005. To clarify:
I was notified in July of 2005.
I FIXED it in August of 2005.
They canceled my licence in SEPTEMBER of 2005.
Yes, I have had no license for a YEAR.

When the cop pulled me over, I was arrested because I was DRIVING. The charge is not "BEING INVALID AND TERRORIST." It is DRIVING with no license. Where anti-terrorism comes in is that it USED to be up to the cop whether or not I would be arrested. Now, because of terrorists, the social security NAME thing is a FLAG, and if you are driving with no license and a FAKE NAME flag from the SS office, it is an immediate and mandatory arrest.

The papers made it SO PLAIN AND CLEAR that this NOT MY FAULT that I managed to have the whole thing CLEARED less than 24 hours after my arrest. I took my NEW license down to Cop Central, and the same officer was there.

Me: Hi, Hot Nice Cop! I need my car please.
Hot Nice Cop: *apologetic tone* I can't do that until you get your license straightened out which may not happen until your court date---
Me: Oh, it's all straightened. Here is my new license, and here are the three notarized dated forms from my records and the SS office showing it was actually the DMV's error. *slaps down papers*
Hot Nice Cop: *boggles*

The SAD thing is, his reaction made it perfectly plain that until I showed up the VERY next day, with ALL the papers and proof, Hot Nice Cop and Regular Nice Cop had pretty much assumed I was a big old Liar Pants. Apparently, EVERYONE who gets arrested has a big woeful tale about how it TRULY is not their fault and they DID NOT KNOW and it must all be a BIG MISTAKE. Stupid Real Criminals --- they ruin it for the rest of us.

ANYWAY, Hot Nice Cop told me that he wasn't sure his Sergeant had actually FILED the charges from he day before yet. He was going to try and get his Sergeant to DROP THEM and NOT EVEN FILE. My lawyer will be calling on Monday and see if charges were already filed. PRAY THEY DID NOT GET FILED. That would be best. Then there would be no need to EXPUNGE...it would truly be as if that bad day never happened...

I am also going to see if we can SUE THE FRICKITTYPOOPOO out of the DMV. Forget pain and suffering. I just want them to pay for my car being towed and any legal fees that will be incurred as I make DARN SURE I don't end up with a police record for THEIR error.

Here is the thing that will LONG continue to upset me. No matter how many times I explain it --- it still LOOKS like I was ... doing crime. I explained the whole thing to my Sunday School teacher, and he said, "SO, what, now you just have to pay a fine?"

UM NO. NO NO NO. I didn't DO ANYTHING WRONG. Because someone at the DMV made a clerical error, I LOOK like I did something that would have made my arrest justified. People think the police overreacted, but that isn't the point. The point is, it was a clerical error. I can prove that. But the fact of my arrest is like this black mark on me, and it looks bad, and I look bad. That can't be fixed. That's there. Forever.

Neat.

The Gas Man Cometh

NOT that I was looking at Amazon's BETWEEN, GEORGIA page or anything because I AM WEANED off Amazon, remember? REMEMBER? Heh. BUT. If I HAD looked at Between's page on Amazon, I might have thought this was amusing:

Customers who viewed this book also viewed

* Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson
* Diana Lively is Falling Down by Sheila Curran
* iRobot Roomba 4100/4300 Intelligent Floorvac Robotic Vacuum, Red Roomba
* The Garden Angel: A Novel by Mindy Friddle
* Maybe Baby (Warner Forever) by Lani Diane Rich

Um, did you note number THREE? Either people are following blog links OR, and I think this is FAR more likely, my book naturally attracts ROBOT LOVERS. I need to talk to someone at Warner about getting the words "FOR ROBOT LOVERS" emblazoned in Roomba Red on the front cover. I need some blurbs, too, in that vein....

"I was so glad I decided to only pet my robot with ONE hand for the time it took to read BETWEEN,GEORGIA. It was a circuit-warming and meticulously timed read, and just as soon as I get me a robot that holds books and turns pages, I am going to buy Ms. Jackson's first novel, too."
Terry, a Robot Lover in Michegan

TWO WEEKS from today, I start taping (or recording, or CDing or however you officially say it) the audio version of Between, and whatever made me think THAT was a good idea? No, really. I asked a guy I know to tell me all about the process to kind fo LIFT my anxiety, and he DID really demystify it and tell me exactly what would happen, but he also told me about how SENSITIVE the microphone was, and how once, during a reading, they picked up his STOMACH GURGLING. I had horrible HORRIBLE dreams about it last night. This should probably be filed under TMI (too much information) but since it's just me and YOU (and your robot, most likely) here, I am going to go ahead and tell you about it.

I dreamed that I was in this tiny, hot, claustrophobic COFFIN of a sound booth, and I had headphones on, and was trying to read Between into a microphone except I had no manuscript, I was supposed to just REMEMBER it, word for EXACT word, and this disembodied voice kept interrupting and correcting my sentences and saying, #&$^@#, YOU #&*(@#^, YOU WROTE THIS HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW IT BETTER THAN THIS? I finally got into a scene where he wasn't BERATING me, and then suddenly he said, "We are getting AMBIENT NOISE! AMBIENT NOISE! JOSHILYN? WHAT IS THAT?"

I had no idea. I was just trying to do a good job and ignore all the shrieking in the headphones. Finally there was a pause and I said three or four more sentences, and then...

Voice in Earphones: Joshilyn? Are you...farting?
Me: UM, NO.
ViE: Well, someone in that booth is.
Me: I AM NOT!
ViE: Look around. Who else is in the booth?
Me: Just me.
ViE: And your GAS.
Me: I AM NOT. And anyway, can't you filter that out somehow? If I was? WHICH I AM NOT.
ViE: No. We will just have to have the the guy at the front who says the Title and your name make a disclaimer and apologize for your inability to stop that noisome flatulance. That sounds professional....he can say it just like that. "We apologize for Ms. Jackson's Noisome Flatulance."
Another Voice, Female: We have those red "WARNING: READER FARTS" stickers left over from when we hired that astonishingly gaseous monster to read IN COLD BLOOD. Remember that?
ViE: HA! Right! I bet that guy is dead of irritable bowel syndrome now.
AV,F: I Hope so.

Long Pause.

Me: I am NOT Farting.
ViE: Keep going, please.

I woke up in a lather of panic and vowed to go buy BEANO and eat it on everything, and I mean everything, even PUDDING, in the week before and during the taping. If I was cocktail recipe, I would be two parts nervous and one part sosososo excited with a cherry garnish. And I would NOT be carbonated. Thanks.

WEEPITTY WEEP WEEP WEEP

Monday is my Hell-Pit day. It goes like this:
Get up at 5:30 and work out. Get Sam to School. Get Maisy to Preschool. Work on book for five hours. Pick up Maisy and change her into to Dance togs. As soon as Sam walks in the door, leave for Dance Class. Change Maisy to Street clothes and get Sam in B-Ball Togs. Make dinner and feed kids. Go to Basketball. Send Sam off to the showers and bathe Maisy. Put kids to bed. Watch Medium. Fall into a coma.

I lather, rinse and repeat this every Monday. It's a MARATHON.

SO, yesterday, I was in the middle of the WORK FIVE HOURS part, and I hit a SNAG in the middle of Chapter 7. I immediately quit trying to pass go, deferred my 200 dollars and went back to the beginning of the book ---It's how I work. I never panic, just rewind and tinker until I figure out what happens next. ( <---OMG what a whopper THAT was. Forgive the digression, But I was just rereading this before posting and came across this FAT AND HAIRY LIE. I can't believe I SAID that. Anyone who knows me is ROLLING on the floor howling. I never panic, my BUTT.)

The truth is I IMMEDIATELY panic and then I march around howling to the gods about injustice and what made me think I could write books, or wait I HAVE written books, but what made me think I could write THIS book when clearly it is beyond me and I am a bad person and my pants are still a little too tight ALL THE WAY FROM CHRISTMAS and what kind of a person still has CHRISTMAS BUTT in the LAST week of JANUARY, I ask you, and the only answer is a BAD ONE who cannot write this book and that is JUST the sort of person who should be FED TO WOLVES, especially given that the Christmas butt ALONE could nourish two good size wolves, SO YES! YES! I MUST BE FED TO WOLVES! ALIVE! WITH NO NOVOCAIN! And as they rend my small intestines I should cry out in grateful gratitude, saying, "THANK YOU! THANK YOU WOLVES! THANK YOU FOR SAVING THE UNIVERSE FROM THIS BOOK I WAS TRYING TO INFLICT UPON IT."

Yeah. That's a little more accurate. After the wolves finish, THEN I calmly rewind and tinker until I figure out what happens next. Lordy. So anyway, back to Monday, after the NOT PANICKING *snort*, I go back and I reread Chapter 1. Out loud. Best way to do it.

DIGRESSION THE SECOND: Chapter 1 is, excuse me, approaching gorgeous. This is the converse and EQUALLY ugly side to the whole EAT ME, OH WOLVES thing. When I am bad, I am very very bad, but when I am pleased with myself, I am downright abhorrent. I reread Chapter 1 out loud and had to stop and pretty much make out with myself every other paragraph. Had the wolves come to eat me then, they would have turned up their noses at the unappetizing over-abundance of SMUG I was emitting from every pore. You would have thought I had just written Genesis. Yish. You know, one thing that IS true is that for good or ill, I am almost never luke warm. Hot? Yes, we have that! Cold? Honey, you can get hypothermia off me some days. But if you want Luke Warm, we sold out of that at.....well. Pretty much, birth.

So after basically having to take a moment to be alone with Chapter 1 and rub its pages lasciviously up and down my thighs, I had to deal with Chapter 2, which is Chapter 1's awkward little sister. 2 is PERHAPS a future beauty, but has braces and a monstrous nose-zit just now. I went to work on it, and it obligingly GREW UP for me quite a bit. Grew LITERALLY, expanding and fleshing itself out until I realized it was splitting like an amoeba. This book is, like gods in Alabama, Southern lit built over the bones of Murder Mystery, so pacing is hugely important. I realized Chapter 2 needed to be two separate entities. SO, I made Chapter 2 be Chapters 2 and 3, and then I had to go RESAVE the whole book, moving the numbers. ( DIGRESSION: Let me pause here and answer the silent questions of the technologically proficient: YES, I do save each chapter in a sepearate file. YES, I do know this is stupid and inefficient.) SO, I had to go save the second half of 2 as 3 and the old 3 as 4 and so on, until 7 had magically become 8. I sat back, pleased with myself, until I suddenly realized....I had just BRILLIANTLY OVERWRITTEN the two of my chapters, namely 4 and 5. ('Nother Silent Question Answer: YES, I do know if I had saved it a whole MS this never would have happened. THANKS.) I realized they were just...gone. WEEKS of work. Gone gone for truly gone. Then the next part of the story is sad:

I cried and cried.
Then I thought, "WAIT! Did I save those chaps to my back-up CD?"
I checked my back-up CD.
No. I had not yet done that. My back up stopped at 3. HEH.
I rebooted my eyeballs and set them on "Cry More."
Then I thought, "WAITWAITWAIT. Did I MAIL those chaps to my CRIT PARTNER and YES I DID so they MUST BE in my SENT FILE!"
So I went and looked and I HAD mailed them....but as FETUSES, when they SUCKED, hours and hours and hours and three possible discarded plot trees worth of work ago.
Then I cried MORE.

When I was so dessicated I could not squeeze out any more cries, I went and hurled myself on the sofa and watched Game Show Network and ate an entire ten ounce bag of raw baby spinach. As I chewed my leafy greens, an idle thought wandered through my brain, something about G-Mail. I turned off PASSWORD PLUS and I thought, "Wait. Did I get a wild hair on Friday and mail ALL the chaps to myself over at my G-Mail Address while I was on the phone with Karen, just randomly, not even really thinking about it? Maybe I did? Just in case I was this stupid, and look, I was?"

SO I went and checked my G-Mail account and THERE THEY WERE.

So. Monday was fun.

7:42 am

They came and put in the carpet. They also broke my house.

By the time they left, I had no working phone, no alarm system, no internet connection, and three televisions that let me hear 4 out of every 5 words the TV people say and let me see bursts of static interrupted by wavy lines. I also, although this cannot in good faith be blamed on the carpet people, have no husband. Scott is out of town, and WHAT ON EARTH possessed me to let these guys come tear around in my floorboards with no Scott here to fix whatever they inevitably destroyed? Either a random techno-deamon or the stupids. Possibly both.

ACTUALLY, I DO know. I DID NOT, is the answer. I scheduled them for yesterday morning WEEKS AGO, when Scott was NOT scheduled to leave town until Saturday. His schedule changed. As soon as I was told he had to leave late yesterday afternoon. I KNEW they would break something, IN MY HEART, I knew it. I knew! I KNEW! There are two truthy truisms that are never not true:

1) No man is an island, and
2) No house emerges from recarpetting unscathed.

And by "No man is an island" I mean "There is always at least one other man, and then he comes and breaks your cable." When Scott's schedule changed. I called my contractor twice to make sure the carpet-ers could come in the MORNING, and he in turn called them twice, and they agreed YES YES THAT MORNING CERTAINLY, and I thought to myself, "AH WONDERFUL, Scott can fix whatever they break before he leaves," and then the carpet people interpreted "morning" to mean, "About 4 PM, or as soon as Scott leaves the State."

Aside: WHEN THEY SHOWED UP AT FOUR, THEY HAD THE CHUTZPAH TO COMPLAIN THAT THERE WAS NO ONE AT THE HOUSE TO LET THEM IN.

I have no printable response to this.

My contractor, meanwhile, had to go to JURY DUTY. And when the carpet people did not show up, I realized his BUSINESS CELL PHONE NUMBER was on my...computer. Which was in pieces, stacked in my dining room. I called his HOUSE, but he was of course in Jury Duty and did not get the home message until the State of Georgia released him. He had checked his BUSINESS messages throughout the day, but the carpet people felt there was no compelling reason to call him and mention that they might be a little (say SIX FREAKIN HOURS) late, and *I* had not called him, so he had no idea they had not showed.

When he finished that day's Jury Duty and went home and caught on to what was happening, he drove over to my place and let them in (I was at ballet) and then he sat with me until 10 PM. He was pretty mad, too, and I think someone needs to bake him a REALLY GOOD PIE because he STAYED for HOURS while they put in the carpets and broke the house because Scott was not home and it was dark and late and later and then obscenely late and my house was full of men I didn't know from Adam's off-ox who all spoke only Russian and he didn't want to leave me by myself with them. AND when it became apparent that they had jiggled or jerked or split or destroyed some vital little bit of connective cable-y something somewhere, he crawled around outside clutching one of my children's Mickey Mouse flashlights (the only flashlight I could find) and jiggling splitters and routers to see if the TV responded and following the cable lines all through the ceiling and etc. It was black as pitch and that flashlight emitted about as much useable light as one of the REALLY far stars overhead. I'm surprised he didn't break his neck. (DIGRESSION: If you can find a contractor who will do these sorts of things, you should marry him immediately. You can't have this one though, sorry. He is already married to my friend Jane.)

I sat in my broken house, becoming distraughter and distraughter, because while I love my TV and I love my internets, MY MAIN ISSUE last night was being in a house sans Scott with two little children, no working alarm system, and no phone. My contractor tried valiently, but he couldn't fix it. I couldn't fix it. We agreed between us eventually that it would take one of those rare unicorn-like creatures---a genuine cable repairman ---- to fix it.

My mission became to FIND one of these mythological beings, and after the contractor left, I unpacked my wedding dress and put it on in an ill-conceived plan to look virginal. Then I wandered into the woods behind my house, waving ham and spicy mustard sandwiches (the favored food of the cable repairman) and singing madrigals. This proved ineffective. In retrospect, however, I should have kept at it, because I am now convinced that waving sandwiches in the woods is, long term, a MORE effective way to attract a cable repairman that the second plan I had, which was to call Comcast Customer Service.

You know the word COMCASTIC? If you live anywhere within the range of of Comcasts ubiquitous WE HATE THE DISH commercials, then you do, you DO know this word, "COMCASTIC." To quote Mandy Patinkin in the Princess Bride, "This word, I do not think it means, what you think it means..."

DIGRESSION: Here I COULD tell you about how the chain of ENDLESS menu options I selected led to the ROBOT OPERATOR refusing to recognize my phone number, saying I was not a customer, not giving me an option to return to any previous menus, and then hanging up on me. After I realized the system would not recognize my phone number because I was callign from a CELL PHONE and not that phone, which, Hello! Can you say, "CATCH 22" because how can one POSSIBLY call on the phone that is not working to say THIS PHONE IS NOT WORKING? Obviously, you cannot, but if you call from a DIFFERENT PHONE it hangs up on you for not calling from the right number---SEE HOW THAT WORKS??? I bet that realy cuts down on the number of service calls they have to take! ANYWAY! I chose a different menu option, and the 'bot intoned a 1 800 GET CABLE NOW number at me in its enragingly sympathetic contralto and hung up on me. THE THIRD TIME I CALLED I simple refused to press any buttons at all, even the SPANISH OR ENGLISH one, and eventually the menu switched me to hold, and the first service rep I talked to tried to transfer me to the correct department and HUNG UP ON ME, and then I repeated the process, and the SECOND service rep told me a technition would come on THURSDAY and when I began to explain how I would have headed to a mini mall with an ouzi before then she tried to put me on hold to see if she could get me priority service and she ALSO hung up on me, and the THIRD time I called----and what with the no button pressing this third WAIT OUT brought my ON HOLD time to WAY OVER 90 minutes so that it was getting on close to midnight---- BUT! I shall not tell you all these things in any detail because if you have ever called the cable company EVEN ONCE, ANY cable company, then you have had this exact experience, this exact number of disconnects, this exact CATCH 22, and you KNOW you were on hold for a minimum of an hour and a maximum of you-called-three-days-ago-and-are-reading-this-blog-entry-to-pass-the-time-while-you-STILL-hold. SO. I won't go int all that. I will just say that when I called the cable company....

I was at some length connected with a service rep named Beautiful Beautiful Gilbert, who, if a truck hits him, will go directly to heaven immediately without even passing GO or collecting 200 bucks while the truck driver is sentenced irrevocably to be poinked in the buttocks with tridents by the really BURNY demons in deepest hell. I poured out my tale of woe unto Beautiful Beautiful Heavenbound Gilbert, and when he said there was no service rep available until Thursday I just sat there and wept, wept unil I was gagging with it, wept until my eyes felt like they they were made of grit, wept and wept and wept, and he put me on hold ---and this part is key his double Beautifulness and Heavenboundedability -- put me on hold WITHOUT HANGING UP ON ME and THEN, after a brief hold music pause which I assume he used to feed 10 or 12 thousand people with a single special order of fillet of fish happy meal while moonwalking along the surface of the Chattahoochee River, BBH GILBERT came BACK on the line and said he had found me a repairman who will be here today between the hours of 8 am and 8 pm, which is kind of a LONG service window, but ask me if I am complaining. OH NO I am not. I will sit here from 8 until 8 and I will not even BATHE lest I miss the repairman's radient arrival and I will sing the praises of Beautiful Beautiful Heavenbound Gilbert and all his sons, yea, down until the seventh generation, because I CANNOT spend another night alone with no alarm or phone which ups my anxiety which activates my insomnia which can generally be treated and overcome with TELEVISION of which I have none. If you follow me.

BECAUSE LAST NIGHT after I hung up with BBHG, I lay awake wondering if my eyes were melting and if that was a squirrel or a killermans scrabbling around in the attic and counting the number of manical grinning clown faces that are hidden in the patterns on my plaster ceiling (27) and engaging in suchlike other activities until about three AM, and then was up at 6 am to get my son off to school.

Did I mention I got about 3 hours of sleep the night before last, too? Did I mention the part where half of my eye-parts are melted and all the other parts are made out of grit? Just checking.

I finally fell asleep last night in the children's playroom where the TV had the best sound-like eminations and where I could faintly make out the shapes of people (or possibly Yeti) moving about behind the snow and wavy lines. After I got Sam off to school, Maisy was still asleep, so I thought I would go back to sleep too, but I was worried about missing the REPAIRMAN who would no doubt sense I was sleeping and creep past my door on little cat feet at 7:59 and then bound away, never to be seen again, so I tried to set the alarm clock for 7:30 and SOMEHOW I hit this SECRET BUTTON that apparently alarm clocks have that makes them explode into noise. I do NOT know what that button was...it was like I had poked a jumpy cat in his Spook Spot. Ever done that? The cat leaps straight into the air and all his fur poofs out as if he's hitched a ride on some lightning. Well it was like that, only it was an alarm clock and it exploded into UNTURNOFFABLE racket which woke Maisy.

SO. Here I sit, writing a blog entry I can't post anyway and feeling DEEPLY sorry for myself.

JUST TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY: I was 'SPOSED to take Maisy into town today to have lunch with my friends Karen and Maureen and go buy myself ANY CHAIR I WANT (Scott said) at the new Atlanta IKEA. Then this afternoon, I had a playdate with my friend Julie and her kids at Wild Horse Park because we have this weird unseasonably warm gorgeousness fo weather. Instead, I will sit here and wait from 8 to 8 for the service rep and thank BB H Gilbert for the privilege with NO IRONY because I seriously cannot survive another night like last night. Seriously. Can. Not.

LET'S PLAY A FUN GAME. WITH PRIZES! Based on the time at which this automatically POSTS ITSELF (and therefore I demonstrably have working cable) GUESS my mental illness number. Let's cap it at 100, where 1 means you are SO sane that you would never never even THINK of running for a political office and 100 means you are paddling about happily in the blood of the neighbor you just ate. It is as I write this January Tenth at 7:42 AM, and my MI# is currently holding steady at about 22. I am relying on the hope I have gleaned from BBHG. Now look at the time (and DATE) when this posted and GUESS what my mental illness number was AT THAT TIME. You can leave your guess in the comments. I will WRITE DOWN what my mentasl illness # was in the MINUTE before the cable repaiman came (so there is no tricksiness where the answer is ONE because NOW the cable works) The two people who come CLOSEST WITHOUT GOING OVER (like on Price Is Right) will win a small piece of super secret BETWEEN, GEORGIA swag. No, not galleys, sorry --- I do not have two extra copies of the Galleys---I am down to ONE copy and I am keeping it. I had to send my two extras to an author I hope will blurb it and the other is going to the HKNC. So. But this is a cool little thingy. You will like it.

On the bright side? The carpet? Looks FANTASTIC.

Double Plus Ungood

HI! MY MENTAL ILLNESS NUMBER JUST GOT CUBED.

So you know I have this little page where I say where I am going to be when and suchlike (and it is currently SHAMEFULLY OUTDATED *glances with sad, uncomprehending eyes at Scott*) but I have all my upcoming stuff in a FILE on my computer, right? SO that one day it all WILL be updated, and such, RIGHT?

Well, in THEORY yes. Except that file became so dense with information that it contracted like a neutron star and became a black hole of nothingness.Or, to say again in English: That file, she is no good. That file, she is not openable. That file, in fact, insists it never existed. The only thing that exists is a SHORT CUT to that file, a shortcut that opens to where-the-world-ends, and if you click that you go plummeting off the edge with all the hapless fishes, and if you are quick you can give Atlas a wave as you hurtle past him to your....well, not DOOM, because there's nothing to smack into, so I guess you can can wave at Atlas as you plummet past on your way to do a lot more plummeting.

WELL! LUCKILY! I have all that stuff also copied onto my PAPER CALENDAR, right? Well, In theory, yes. In fact, the PAPER CALENDAR is the sacred thing. If it makes it to the paper calendar, I show up for it. If it is NOT in the paper calendar, I WILL without a doubt flake.

SO today, my mother and I were co-ordinating our January calendars and she said, "And then I will be over to your house on on January 24th so you can go to Augusta.

Um...what?

I was holding the sacred calendar. It was open to January. No Augusta. The date in question was as dewy and virgin-white as any spring-time lambkin. I tried to open my online calendar file thing, and everything I had inputted in 2005 was NOT THERE. I think it has something to do with it being 2006 now, and I have a vague memory of a pop up box with some annoying question about SAVE or something popping up, and me stabbing at the little X to close it. But I am sure that was not IMPORTANT. Perhaps it auto-eradicated the old year when I used it to begin plotting 2006? I didn't panic, because SURELY the Augusta thing would be written in the SPILL OVER JANUARY of my 2005 sacred paper calendar. And you know what? I think it WAS. I also think I had the stupid idea to make CLEAN OUT OFFICE my resolution. So. That old sacred calender, she sleeps among the fishes.

Now I am panicking. DEAPBREATH DEEPBREATH. I say to myself, SELF I say, I can find this out, I bet. There's really only a few things I could be doing in Augusta...Library date, bookstore event, Literary conference or workshop. I went to Google.

Google sent me to the Augusta Friends of the Library website. Their January speaker is Paul Hemphill. (Good choice, but he is NOT me. I can tell by the Y chromosome and the being not named Joshilyn.)

Then I called the Augusta Library directly. I adopted a fake, deep voice and identified myself to the Information Desk Librarian as "The Papparazzi." I asked if I was going to be there. She said, "Hrm well no, Joshilyn Jackson is not mentioned in this month's library news, and even if she was, Mr. The Papparazzi, shouldn't you go stalk someone who is more likely to be topless on a beach in Monoco?" No dice there.

Then I went to the BOOK SENSE website and put in Augusta's zip code. No Augusta indies. I checked the Augusta BAM, the Augusta B&N, Waldenbooks, Borders and out of sheer desperation, somethign called Spotted Cow Textbooks. No, no, no, no, and HUH? WHO IS THIS?

The only writers workshops/conferences Shawguides lists Augusta are Sandhills in March and 21st Century in April, and a google search of ME + Augusta = 500 book review sites that talked about both gods and any of the many fine books by Augusta Trobaugh.

SO. I guess on the appointed date I will drive to Augusta and start rummaging around looking for flyers tellign me where I am appearing...I do not know what else to do. IF YOU KNOW WHAT I AM DOING THERE, CAN YOU PLEASE MERCIFULLY WRITE AND TELL ME?

Frolics with Sigmund

The number, she is a-rising again...I had a hideous dream about BETWEEN, GEORGIA last night, not least among the horrid events in this dream: Warner changed my beautiful Anne Twomey cover to this three dimensional thing with half a Barbie coming out of the front, on a SPRING, so she BOBBLED around. And she had blackened eyes, like Beaten-Up Barbie, and snarly ratted hair and streaks of filth on her cheeks and was wearing nothing but one long spangly earring and a tube top.

I saw the cover when I went into a bookshop that is actually in Seattle and that I have never been to, but in the dream it was in California. And Fran, a bookseller I know was there. I realized I was only wearing one shoe and had my hair done like a Cupie Doll's with two shaved bald patches on either side and one long CURL on the forehead....LIKE THIS:

I felt, truly, that I MIGHT NOT look my best. So I just POPPED IN to say a quick HI to Fran and she said, "Oh no you have to meet these three women, they HATE your book. They are camped out in front of where we shelved it, and they scream like banshees and pelt anyone who tries to buy the book with their shoes and oh -- maybe if you came and met them they might be nicer? Be nice, okay?"

SO I sit down with them and one looks at my hair and says, YOU LOOK EXACTLY LIKE I THOUGHT YOU WOULD SNICKER SNICKER.
Me: "HI, why do you hate my book so?
One of 'em: Dunno. Just do.
Me: Well -- is it not what you expected?
Another of 'em: We expected it not to SUCK, so. You could say that.
Me: Oh, um, is it just that it is different from my first book? Like, you liked gods in Alabama and you---
Third one: Oh no. We hated THAT book too.

I think I don't need Freud to figure out what this means...Anxious much? Why, yes. Because in my secret pink heart I love this book and am almost nauseatingly proud of it. So trhis has to be anxiety. And if Freud was here, I think he would take careful note of the fact that there are THREE women. That means something, probably something mythological, like furies or fates or a penis.

Freud would also know WHY I had the dream: We are at the point with BETWEEN where we are looking for BLURBS. Warner and I are asking a buncha folks I admire and who do not know me from Adam's housecat to please read my book, and what if they HATE AND REVILE ME, and you just want your heroes to like you back, you know? So. I am going to sit here and think good thoughts about NOT THROWING UP.

You, meanwhile, need to concentrate on getting your B4B entries up. THE DEADLINE APPROACHETH! Or, if, say, Barbara Kingsolver happens to be your sister, you could busy yourself asking her to consider reading my book. Hey, whatever keeps you out of bars.

Rate the Crazy

I am on day 4 of NO SCOTTness, and yes, the numbers are fast rising, folks. I have alwasy been a world champ fret-monkey, but I think I am about to go for the fretting Olympics and take the gold. Let's play, HOW CRAZY IS THIS, on a scale of mildy to OH DEAR LORD, HELP HER:

The contract for the new book I am working on now originally came in with a "first 50 pages" kind of clause where I needed to turn in the first 50 pages as soon as they were finished, like, long before the book was done. And I PANICKED because...oh my. That made me want to boil myself and feed me to wolves. I could not imagine showing my editor 50 pages until the whole book was done because EVEN THOUGH I revise about 1,000 times as I go, once I get to the end I usually realize the whole book is wrong, especially the beginning, and I then do several MASSIVE rewrites and so with my process being like that....GAH GAH having her look at 50 pages of an unfinished MS makes me QUAIL IN HORROR. I would feel like I had just thunked a sloshy jar with a fetal pig in it down on her desk.

So my agent went back to Warner and said, "I'm sorry, this clause has my cliet under the bed, sucking the ear of a stuffed rabbit -- what about this instead?" And he handed over a pretty detailed summary I had written for him, all about what this book would be about (ish) and what it would (probably) be called and what the tone and feel would (most likely) be and I also added a section stating very definitively what the book was NOT about, which seemed needed and certainly the thing I could be most absolute about given that I am an organic writer and things change and shift as I go, and they know this SO. Long story truncated: They accepted the detailed-ish proposal in lieu of the first fifty.

I am actually supposed to be NOT WORKING and resting my brain until January, but I can't stop writing this book. I REALLY like this book in a shameless way. I'm not ready to marry it, but I would sure as HECK make out with it at this point. Me and this book, we are getting there.

BUT! I have two new people critting it who are really stinkin' SAVVY and big SMARTIES and they are reading THE WHOLE THING as I go, and I am not used to that. I am used to having my regular writing group spot check troubled areas as I go along, so no one there really has a feel for the WHOLE content. They help me get voice right and individual scenes paced correctly and such. When I have a WHOLE draft, I have a whole book reader who is both a genius and honest about where I have dropped the ball, and then the massive rewrites begin. NOW I have these two new readers, and yesterday, as I got five hours of working time, I re-read my first fifty pages and was shocked to realized they did not smell like the back end of a cat who is too fat to bathe properly. They were...not shameful. They were...well...they were, excuse me, pretty dern NON-fetal-piggish. I would absolutely have been ready to show these pages to my editor, and relatively soon.

SO, then there was much rejoicing, right?

AH HAHAHAHA. No. Of COURSE not, Silly Pants.

Last night I was completely unable to sleep. I lay staring up at the ceiling fretting because the pages were NOT BAD ENOUGH. Every other novel I have written, I fretted to myself, has SUCKED at this point. The pages SHOULD rightfully be much much WORSE. SO maybe, I fretted to myself, by writing BETTER this EARLY I was destroying my PROCESS and would ruin the whole book...maybe I was blocking myself in by being so polished and early, and the book would wither! and Die! And...hey is it 1 am???

Um. Yeah. At that point, I took a big step backwards and got clear of my own navel long enough to realize that I was being completely REPULSIVE. It's like, why not lie there and fret that the heaviness of my fantastic diamond jewelry is going to cause carpal tunnel asince I spend so much time with my bejeweled hands curled around glasses of champagne. I wasn't just looking a gift horse in the mouth, I was freaking French kissing it and then complaining about horse breath.

I need to be spanked.
I need to get over myself.
Or, maybe I just need a hobby; I think the hobby should be "eating Lithium."

10 Ways The World Could Be Improved

1) If my husband wasn't out of town for nine days. Because, let's play a fun game of MENTAL ILLNESS NUMBER. Mine rises with his absence, exponentially, based on BOTH time and distance. By the time the man gets home, I will be prancing about the yard wearing nothing but a plaster made of mud and fruitcake and cheerfully pickling the remains of my neighbors in brine.

2) If the grocery store gossip rags would stop trying to make the first names of celebrity couples into one name. The hideous implications of BENNIFER made me puke, even more so now that the Ben- part has SWITCHED -nifers and the relationship is being treated like a B MOVIE SEQUEL: Return of Bennifer, Bigger, Badder, Pregnanter. And there is no excuse that will keep whoever perpetrated TomKat out of hell. I am waiting for (or perhaps have mercifully missed) the inevitable appearence of the term Bra-Gelina, which sounds like a Mormon church supper dessert made of foundation garments and Kool Whip.

3) If doctors weren't so freakin' prescription happy. I can't go in for a check up and say I feel COLD without walking away with fifteen prescriptions. The closest I come to an MD is an A in high school biology, but I suspect it might be the Paper Gown and the refrigerated stehoscope...

4) If I had a PARROT with a big ruffly topnot so that he looked like an inquisitive Hessian Soldier.

5) If EVERYONE I met for the first time would send a follow-up e-mail like the one I got this morning that says, "I forgot to mention that you are thin! (You write in your blog like you are not, but you are.)" In fact, even if you have not met me, you should probably send me a similar e-mail sometime this week, because... here I simply refer you to number 1.

6) If Independent Bookstores would all STAY, FOREVER. I know of three separate stores that I LOVED that are respectively closed and closing and hurricaned away. That's three in my little circle of known stores, GONE, and that is JUST THIS YEAR and I can hardly bear it. Nothing against the Big Boys---Lordy, BAM has been so good to me I could die of it and I like a huge selection and discounts as much as the next book junky --- but there has to be room in the world for small stock and specialization and handselling TOO. There HAS to be, or debut books like mine can so easily slip off the radar and be gone and lost. Right now, eight months after release, if you aren't LOOKING for gods in B and N, you will never find it. But if you walk into Northside in Vermont or Sundog books in Florida or Davis-Kidd in Nashville or Alabama Booksmith in ...guess, and Chapter 11 right here AND ON AND ON, someone will put it right into your hands.

7) If pets would habitually tattle on cheaters.

8) If EVERYTHING could be organized into lists. And then checked off!

9) If more people would spontaneously mail me delightful presents (and if you are wondering why I think I should just get hosts of delightful presents streaming over me, SEE NUMBER ONE AGAIN). I say this because I met author Frank Turner Hollon (no D) at an event recently, and his book Life is a Strange Place caught my eye. I don't know why....maybe it was the Giant Cow Testicle on the front cover? (WHICH LET ME PRE-EMPTIVELY SAY : Yes. I know COWS do not have testicles, and the majority of BULLS do not have ONE, but the first time I peeped the the cover I said to a friend standing by me, "Holy cats...is that a cow testicle?" and some exacting boogerhead on my other side looked at me like I was a bug and said, "Akshully, that is a BULL's TesticleSSSSS," and there was a silent and parenthetical "You Moron" the size of FRANCE hanging off that long chain of obnoxious testicle-multiplying esses. At which point I smiled and said "Literalist, huh?" <--- Lie. At which point I slunk away feeling like a dork for talking like I talk (i.e. highly innaccurately and hyperbolic-ly) and you know what, it's a cow testicle forever now, in absolute rebellion against drive-by belittlers. SO THERE.)

I bought it and had him sign it, and my big regret of the day was that I was already WAY over book budget and he had this other book out I REALLY wanted called The God File, which looked SO up my alley. But Mr. Strained Book Budget said I could only have one, and my feeling is, if you are getting it SIGNED, you go for the hardback first edition (especially if it has a cow testicle on it.) THEN I was standing by him in the car line all on accident and he saw that I was already about 25% of the way into the book of his I HAD bought and it was VERY funny and black and obscene (in a good way) and I told him so and told him I would be reading more of him, starting with The God File because I had wanted that one but budget and signed first ed and BLAH BLAH then his car came, and then Friday, all UNPROVOKED, he SENT me a copy. SIGNED. Which. Yish. How lovely. I set the book I was reading aside because I had to immediately read it. Couldn't help it. Finished it last night. And yeah. It's good. It's beyond good. It's not a "pretty" book, but it has got grace notes that brought me to my knees.

10) If I had On Star.

High Math

The following blog entry is based on an algebraic formula where A) = Things I Am Giving Up / Losing, and B) = What I Am Replacing The Thing With, with an optional section C) where C) = an explanation of why or how and possibly a report on how it's working so far, and an even more optional section D, where D = any vital digressions.

A) Wine
B) La Croix Sparkling Orange Water
C) Calories. Wine has, in industry terms, "a buttload." And La Croix water has NONE and also no artificial sweeteners. See, I have a SECRET WEIGHT---no I won't tell you the number. I doubt I would tell it under torture. In math terms, the number can be symbolized by X, where X = "the most I can weigh and not die." I have been ONE to FOUR pounds OVER X ever since the CRUISE. I am currently 3 pounds OVER X, and therefore clinically dead, if not of distress, then of "being unable to breath once my jeans are zipped." AND SO. Even though I have publicly on this blog set out to be virtuous ONE HUNDRED MILLION TIMES since the cruise was over, and have succeeded only in losing and gaining the same 3 pounds over and over so that I NEVER get under X and have to pretend to forget I already BLOGGED how I was instituting VIRTUE and institute it all OVER again like you have just FORGOTTEN I already did that a week ago and have since eaten my secret body weight in candy corns. NO MORE entries called "____ Days of Virtue." NOW, I am going to try making a few KEY replacements in what I ingest, and otherwise eating what I like. So, G'bye wine. How is it working so far, you ask? Well. I LOVE La Croix Sparkling Orange Water, and so FAR I am sticking to it, but I have to say, as a replacement for wine, La Croix kinda SUCKS. Would it ruin the whole POINT if I mixed the LaCroix with a great big bunch of vodka?

A) Chocolate
B) Viactive Chocolate Calcium Chews and Viactive Milk Chocolate Chewable Vitamins.
C) See above. Viactive Chocolate calcium chews taste just like chocolate caramels. BIG THUMBS UP. Viative Chocolate Vitamin chews taste JUST LIKE chocolate caramels if you hid a ball of candle tallow and a Flinstones Children's Chewable in the middle. Still, any chocolate port in a storm. What's a little tallow between me and getting some sugar?
D) Viactive also makes TROPICAL FRUIT CHEW vitamins which taste JUST LIKE a starburst with ball of candle tallow and a Flinstone's Children Chewable hidden in the middle. It is a BAD idea. I will ignore tallow for chocolate. Nothing else.

A) Candy
B) Tums (Tropical Fruit Flavor, especially coconut and banana!)
C) See Above.
D) I like the whole idea of replacing CANDY with SWEET medicines I don't actually need. If I get desperate, I can walk around sniffling theatrically until someone says it sounds like I am getting a cold, and then I can go suck on a frozen Dimatapp spoon.

A) Poetry Refrigerator Magnets
B) Diagnostic Refrigerator Magnets
D) I don't like much poetry (rest assured, Dearest Emily, there ARE exceptions. O! How there are exceptions, my lovely yet hideously disturbing Sheep Child!) magnetic or otherwise, and people who (unlike me) DRINK CALORIE LADEN ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES keep coming over and making my fridge say dirty things, no matter HOW MANY suspect words I remove from the set.

A) Normal Human Relationships
B) Playing Online Games Until 2 AM
C) I am not fit to be around people now that I am mentally ill AND sober AND off chocolate and candy. I think it is entirely possible that if I saw someone with a Halloween Mini-Twix, I would kill them and take it. ALSO, an old friend is step-by-step ruthlessly and obliviously sabotaging every facet of her life while blaming God and every other person around her and pets and aliens and the twitchy, infected mucus membranes of the three fates and ill winds and coincidence. It's like watching someone STAMP on a posy and then they look mildly surprised and hurt and say, "Oh, why did that posy get under my shoe?" And when you say, "Um, Posies can't GET UNDER things. Posies have NO FEET," they say, "Oh hrm you are right. It was MY SHOE! OH my shoe is terrible! As soon as I get home I am burning up this shoe!" Only it isn't a posy, it's her whole life. HEY. I HAVE BEEN THERE. I spent half my twenties deliberately stamping my own posy into JAM, and no one could stop me. And I hate feeling powerless, so my best solution is to take a stuffed bear and some diet soda under the sofa and not come out to answer the phone for six months. If I also ignore the doorbnell and order my groceries in, I can avoid all my local friends, and indeed, my family can't even fit under the sofa with me, not while I am 3 pounds over the most I can weigh and not die, anyway. The total lack of human interaction will be phase two in getting my fridge to not have dirty poems on it, and with the help of the magnet substitution above, this will allow my fridge to evolve into a tool that could lead to a clean bill of mental health. Or help me develop a working vocabulary for my impending Munchausens!

A) My Sanity
B) Algebraic Formulas

In Which I Fool Myself Into Thinking My Life Is Organized By Making Everything Into A List

Things I need to do TODAY

1) Find all the lost keys. I suspect a CITY of of lost keys is forming itself somewhere in my house, maybe under the sofa, no doubt setting up a shiny key-centric form of evil government that oppresses the dust camels for not being metal and toothy, and this must be STOPPED. Also, my keys are on a kilt pen that my friend Angie gave me sophomore year of high school, and I want my kilt pen back. I am not terribly sentimental about items, but I have had that thing for YEARS and I miss it, in the same way you might miss somethign vestigial, but still a piece of you. Like an appendix. EVEN THOUGH the kilt pen is LONG and so when I drive my car, sometimes my dangling keys BRUSH my thigh in a syncophantic and repulsive way that doesn't bother me AT ALL when my mental illness number is under 70, but, my mental illness number hasn;t seen the underside of 70 in SO long, I doubt it would recognize 70 if 70 came up and BIT my mental illness number, which, actually, it's more likely to be my mental illness number doing the biting because it is highhighhighhighhigh, so anyway, it is INSANE to want the keys back on that kilt pen when the kilt pen thigh brushing is probably enough to send me marching into the sea like a whole herd of mentally ill lemmings who have gone off their meds.

2) Get a working Chapter 2.
What I have: 8,500 words. Some in first person. Some in third. Some in present tense. Some in past. Some that presuppose one chapter end. Some that presuppose an entirely different end for the chapter, and indeed for a huge portion of the whole book.
What I need: 3500 words all in the same tense, person, and gee, VOICE, that all is workiing toward the SAME end because--and this is just a GUESS HERE--- I don't think my editor is looking for a grown-up Choose Your Own Adventure Book. ALSO? It would be a BIG BONUS if the Chapter was actually, you know, GOOD, but, hey it's early. I don't require that TODAY. But moving TOWARD good, that's what we want.

3) All the usual. Lose five pounds. Be a better person. (which is almost the same thing, REALLY) Get mentally healthy. Make good choices. Save the rain forests. Clean the kitchen.

Things I Said Yesterday that I Wish I Could Take Back

1) What's that little metal piece sticking off there? It looks dangerous jutting out like that. I don't think it's supposed to do that. I'm going to pull that off... *crash*

Conversations About What We Will All Die Of That I have Had in The Last Three Days.

1) Me: Are we all going to die of bird flu?
Him: No.
Me: They said on the TV that there is going to be a bird flu pandemic and we will all die. 89% of healthy children die when they get bird flu. Are my children going to get bird flu and die?
Him: No.
Me: BUT THEY SAID ON TV.
Him: Scientists can posit that there will a pandemic, but there is no telling if it will be bird flu or some other flu.
Me: SO...basically you are saying that we ARE all going to die, just of maybe cow flu or some another flu we don't yet or MAYBE bird flu, but probably not bird flu. Just some flu down the line in a few years BOOM, and we all die.
Him: Right. But there's no way that they can predict it will be BIRD flu.
Me: I feel SO much better.

2) Me: OMG LOOK RIGHT HERE AT THIS LINK---IN THIS NEWS STORY THIS WHOLE FAMILY GOT BIRD FLUE AND DIED! ALL OF THEM! 100% FATAL!
Her: You are not going to get bird flu.
Me: Yes I am. And you are too. We are going to die of freaking bird flu and I will never get this book done to deadline if I am DEAD OF BIRD FLU.
Her: How did the family get it?
Me: Let me look...Oh. Says from eating Raw Duck Blood Pudding.
Her: And how much Raw Duck Blood Pudding are YOU serving this evening?
Me: Just a little. As a SIDE dish, you understand. We're all just going to have a TASTE.
Her: Well, see, you will probably be fine then.
Me: I feel SO much better.
Her: Which means you have to go get the book done.
Me: Shut. Up.

3) Me: Is a catcgory 7 hurricane going to come kill us all?
Him: No. And there is no such thing as a cat 7.
Me: I SAW IT ON TV.
Him: That is made up. A Movie of the week.
Me: BUT IT COULD HAPPEN, I mean, if storms got so big they were BEYOND 5, like TWO beyond 5, then it would be a cat 7.
Him: Oooooooookay.
Me: And look at this storm season! We are into the GREEK ALPHABET because we had TOO MANY HURRICANES for the regular letters to HANDLE! We are all going to die of a catagory 7 AREN'T WE!!!!
Him: We will have been dead of bird flu for YEARS before THAT happens.
Me: I feel SO much better.

The Fast Train to Crazy Town

There was that weird dream and the resulting belly-button gazing, and then, just when I was becoming unendurably self-involved and repulsive, it got worse. My mental illness number had ALREADY left the building, but this morning it attached a jet pack to its butt and blasted out of the stratosphere. It zoomed so fast away from dead-level zero that it PROVED Einstein's special theory of relativity as it applies to speed and time and by 7 AM, I busy was being crazy in the NINETEEN FORTIES.

Not.
Good.

I spent the period usually devoted to breakfast trying to drive every fool who has bothered to love me either away or equally insane by weeping and handwringing and threatening to fall down dead of despair and total brain failure. WHICH I STILL COULD, by the way.

If the blogging is slow for the next week or two, assume that I am SPARING you the crazy. And it is BIG HATEFUL BORING CRAZY. You might want to send me thank you notes. And chocolate.

SAMPLE OF HOW BIG THE CRAZY IS HERE: I lost my keys, which are actually the SPARE keys because lost my ACTUAL keys for the 300th time last week, so now with the spares gone I have NO keys, and I took Maisy to my room, put on Dora very loud and waited until her brain had been entirely sucked into Nick Jr Land, and went down the stairs, where I worried she would still hear me, so I went down MORE stairs into the cesspit that is currently our unfinished basement and there I lay in the sawdust and old bug parts and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and WEPT over these keys. I called Scott and got his machine and wept into his machine. I called Lily and got Lily and wept into her ear. I called upon God to infest my skin with boils as punishment for being such a repugant human smudge of key-losing worthlessness. I wept and wept and wept until I was so snot-choked and hopeless and unable to breathe that I had to go up a flight and puke.

AND THEN I LAY ON THE FLOOR AND SNIVELLED.

AND the worst part was that it was not until that point, the snivel point, that I began to suspect the keys weren't the real problem...

Lily just then called me back.

Her: Better?
Me: Well. I am no longer asking God to smite me to spare the Earth my stupidity. So. *snivel*
Her: You know none of this is true, right?
Me: *snivel snivel* It FEELS true.
Her: You called me this morning weeping and screaming, and I hadn't listened for 4 seconds before I thought, "Did she start drafting a book recently? Oh right, she did." And then I starting buffing my nails until you wound down. You always do this.
Me: I do?
Her: Oh Lord, yes. Always.
Me: No but, I do? You aren;t saying that to make me feel better?
Her: LORD yes, this is just, like, imagine the book is a little tiny baby growing deep inside you and---
Me: If you do a birthing metaphor, I will be forced to hire thugs to kill you
Her: And when the baby is ready to come out, you must have a terrible gush of liquid ruin your sofa---
Me: I sent the thugs my Amex number.
Her: In this case, puke and snot from crying so hard. And then you have to be in in screaming, contracting agony and holler and carry on---
Me: The thugs are coming.
Her: so loud it irritates the neighbors. And me. And Scott. As soon as you PUSH THE NOVEL OUT you will ---

At that point thugs burst in and garroted her. It was a swift and merciful slaying, but only because she refrained from using the word "muse."

I got off the floor and hosed all the tearstains and snot off the carpet and retrieved the oblivious Maisy and gave her yogurt. Scott came home with new keys he had made from his set. I dragged him out of the kitchen into my office, leaving Maisy behind to ply her spoon.

Me: Do you think this is about the book?
Him: Um....duh.
Me: Really?
Him Honey. You always do this.
Me: I DO?
Him: LORD, yes.
Me: *sniveling* How do you put up with me?
Him: *brightly* Look I got you NEW KEYS! Aren't they SHINY!

Then he took Maisy to pre-school and I sat down at my computer and all of a sudden Chapter 1 of the new book, which had up until now been a hodgepodge of repulsive jokey one-liners and meandering action, snapped into focus, and I found a VOICE and a NARRATIVE DRIVE and a DAMN good Jesus Bug Metaphor, and realized I had enough words to stop DRAFTING and begin REVISING and I here four hours later I own a working draft of a Chapter 1 that I kinda want to make out with.

HERE IS WHAT I DO NOT UNDERSTAND: If I do this every time, to the point that my loved ones EXPECT it, why don't I remember this and PREP for it? How do I get blindsided like this? My Mental Illness is apparently the Old Faithful of Yellowstone Naitonal Crazy Park----So if you KNOW it is going to blow at fifteen seconds after high noon, then what kind of lobotomized monkey-child runs and sticks her face over the hole the second the clock chimes twelve? Shouldn't I, here on book the fifth, be able to find a way to BRACE for it and get to the part where the book gets drafted WITHOUT the "snivelling key losing weep-til-you-puke with no idea that this is about the book" part? A stitch in time and an ounce of prevention and all that...and yet. Every single time.

Pass the Halloween mini-Twixes please, and if you could sprinkle some grains of Prozac on top like it was rainbow Jimmies, that might be good, too.

5 Things that Seem True Today, But Are probably Not True (alternate title: Mental Illness # Goes Through Roof. Film at 11.)

1) I want to legally change my name to chicken child. Yes, with no capitol C's.

2) I have nothing to blog about. Some days, I can easily let flow 1,000 words on a single butt hair left by a plain brown dog on a beige rug. Today? The whole dog could come in and sit at my desk smoking Pall Malls and making prank phone calls to dead celebrities, and I would slump here in my chair saying, "DOG! CAN YOU HANG UP PLEASE? I AM TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO BLOG ABOUT AND YOUR INCESSANT BARKBARKBARK-ING IS GETTING ON MY NERVES. ALSO? I CAN TELL YOU FROM HERE THAT NO, ELVIS'S REFRIGERATOR IS NOT RUNNING, AND JIM MORRISON DOES NOT HAVE PRINCE ALBERT IN A CAN. OKAY? OKAY???

3) The only thing worth eating in all of life is grits and cheese and tomato pie. Nothing else tastes good, nothing else ever has, nothing else ever will.

(It should here be noted that I have a single serving of grits/cheese/tomato pie, but it is QUESTIONABLE. I do not remember WHEN I made it. I do not, in point of fact, remember making it all, which makes me suspect that I made it QUITE some time ago. On the other hand, there is no visible mold and it smells innocuous. On a third [somewhat creepy] hand [because most things have either two or four, so third hand is a little....ugh, anyway,] on this rather creepy third hand, it has EGGS in it. It seems to me that if I do not eat it, I will die of starvation because nothing else in all the universe is remotely nice, and that if I do eat it, it will surely cause my internal organs to liquify and run out through my pores, which will hurt and also probably make me not smell good. So clearly I cannot choose the cup in front of YOU, etc etc.)

4) I want to be named Cornelia Read. Because THEN my name would be CORNELIA READ, which is so AUTHORIAL and UNUSUAL and yet is pronounced just as it is spelled. If I decide NOT to go with chicken child, Cornelia Read would be a good second choice. I say WOULD BE because it is NOT actually a good choice as it is already taken by a VERY fine writer named....yes, Cornelia Read, as the budding detectives among you may have already deduced using your innate detective deductivism. ANYWAY, I just finished the galleys for her debut novel last night and I say unto thee, REMEMBER the name Cornelia Read because 1) her work is funny and smart and dark and amazing and intense and 2) because it may be my name later if I don't pick chicken child and you will need to know it to find me. Or her.

***We interrupt these five things that seem true today but are probably not true to tell you one thing that seems true today and will actually remain true through all forseeable tomorrows: Cornelia Read's debut, FIELD OF DARKNESS, is hands down the best mystery/thriller I have read this year, or the year before, or really since Dennis LeHanes last Patrick and Angela novel. Yes. She's that good. I'll give you a heads up when it comes out. Now, back to it.***

5) I do not want a brand new hairdo, I don't care if my eyelashes curl, I am so far from floating on air I might as well call all walking I cannot avoid today "bitter mud-slogging" and I DO NOT ENJOY BEING A GIRL.

Nuff said.

In Which We Discover That I am NOT All That Mentally Ill After All, But Rather, a Dumb-*ss.

I have to say, Mental Illness and I have always had a good relationship. It's like an arranged marriage, where maybe you didn't pick the guy, but you are bound and determined to make the best of it, and the guy is too.

My brain and Mental Illness share a skull, and they each keep to their own side and try not to bother each other in significant ways. OH sure, Mental Illness is not a GREAT roommate...I mean, there was that year I didn't leave the house or answer phone calls or e-mails, ha ha ha! That was a fun year! And I am a veteran insomniac---I do not sleep well, period. On vacation I still popped up awake and on full-worry-alert at 6 am, every morning. Mental Illness is a wonderful alarm clock. And I am overly suspicious. And Hypersensitive. And there is all the weird stuff with food... (I just ate SPELT! ON PURPOSE!! And I do not even know what spelt IS!!!) And I firmly believe it is Mental Illness who gave me my fervent belief that if I could wear size six pants, I would be a more valuable as a human being, coupled with a fingers-in-ears-la-la-la refusal to understand that tall, busty girls like me can't fit their Hip Bones and Upper Curved Parts into a size six, much less if they want to bring along any internal organs.

Brain knows that when I am fit and toned, I am an 8, pretty much your regulation medium. Mental Illness does not want to hear it. Brain values OTHER people for their minds or senses of humor or their kindness, and Mental Illness thinks those are fine standards, BUT points out that for me personally, value is solely determined by the not-being-a-size-six. Meanwhile Brain has a complete intellectual understanding that if I had MONUMENTAL plastic surgeries and shaved my hipbones down and removed my shoulders and my mighty rack, and I struggled my scarred and whittled body INTO a size six, Mental Illness would then suddenly realize that what REALLY makes a person valuable is being a size two. Brain knows this like it knows the multiplication tables, but Mental Illness gets half the house, and it knows what it knows too.

Oh sure, I have to load up on Ativan to sit in a dentist's chair unless I want Mental Illness to take over and hyperventilate and projectile vomit and send me leaping across the room to bang my head into a wall 'til I pass out, but that's a predictable event. Mental Illness could have picked, say, red sports cars, or TREES, or SUNLIGHT, so that every drive to Kroger was fraught with unspeakable horror. I know when my dentist's appointments are, and I pre-medicate Mental Illness, and all is well. Dentist's chairs are only ever in Dentist's offices. You don't find them lurking in parks, waiting to spring out at you and grab you with long tentacle straps and grow arms and come at your mouth The Poinking Tool while a Fanged, Flaming Dentist apparates before you and screeches TIME FOR YOUR CLEANING.

And I have to say, MY Mental Illness has it's good points. Sometimes I am a completely unreasonable human being, and later, I can blame Mental Illness, who is ALWAYS ready to step up and take responsibility for the times when I act, well, mentally ill. And Mental Illness keeps the writing parts of Brain well-lubricated with horrific visions that Brain uses as plot twists. I appreciate that. AND Mental Illness has never been so feisty and unreasonable that Brain couldn't RECOGNIZE whatever was going on as some project or another of Mental Illness'. My Mental Illness is OVERT and PALPABLE, and it doesn't pretend it isn't there and ask me to wear tinfoil hat and live in a dumpster, as other people's Mental Illnesses have required. I try to always buy people whose brains have genuinely awful skull-mates like that sandwiches, because there but by the grace of God go I, there but by the grace of God go we all...

So you can imagine my consternation when the Panic Attacks started. The first one happened during a medical emergency with my daughter, so, okay, look, that's forgivable. OF COURSE Mental Illness goes on high alert when your child is threatened. I thought it was a heart attack, actually, but was too busy helping Maisy to die of it, and later I did some reading and realized my symptoms were more in keeping with a panic attack than a HEART one. SO! Okay. Maisy is in mortal peril, a panic attack seemed like a reasonable response, so I shrugged it off. BUT THEN! I had another. While I was sitting quietly working at my computer after a CHARMING lunch with friends and feeling, I THOUGHT, pretty relaxed and happy. I walked around the house with my heart threatening to burst in my chest, trying to remember anything I'd ever read about Yoga and becoming one with Zen and stress relieving mantras. In a few minutes it subsided. I was TICKED. THIS was not part of the deal. Mental Illness was not only taking Brain's Milk out the fridge, but drinking it directly from the carton and then peeing in it. NOT. ACCEPTABLE.

Then a week or so later, just as I am supposed to be leaving on vacation---ANOTHER ONE. I stomped around the house while my chest squeezed itself shut, but my yoga breathing sounded suspiciously like the blowing of an enraged bull, and I was chanting I AM RELAXED AND HAPPY AND CALM DAMMIT, AND I WILL KILL ANYONE WHO SAYS DIFFERENT. Then I chanted some A Very Bad Words Indeed about Mental Illness.

I realized it was time to take Mental Illness to the doctor and get it tinkered with or even REMOVED because it was SERIOUSLY breaking the covenant.

Yeah. Well. Hrm.

Turns out it was not a heart attack. Heart is fine, thanks.
Turns out it was not a panic attack. Mental Illness remains at acceptable levels.
It is this weird problem you can get where your esophagus clenches, and it MIMICS a heart attack. It's pretty much irritating and painful, but at the level I have it, untreatable and mostly harmless....

I am thinking I might need to send Mental Illness some flowers or something. Yish.

Hello From Way Up Here at the Peak of Mount Mental Illness Number

I have decided to have panic attacks. I've been talking to a friend of mine who gets them, and it seems like a good idea. This is how I hear these things work: You are sitting there FRETTING (I have this part DOWN already!) and all of a sudden, your bra feels like something made out of whalebone and thorns and the ghostly hand of Scarlet O'Hara grabs the laces and YANKS while shrieking "19 INCH WAIST" and it compresses all your air out, and pain radiates from your squeezebox of a chest up into your jaw and down both arms, and you think you are having a heart attack, and you go to the emergency room with your life flashing before your eyes.

The people at the hospital say, NO NO YOU ARE NOT HAVING A HEART ATTACK. YOU ARE JUST CRAZY!
And you say, OH! GOOD! MAY I PLEASE HAVE SOME ATIVAN?
And they say, YES! YES YOU CAN! YOU BIG HEAD CASE!

Works for me.

Actually, I think I had a small one the other night. Maisy decided to wake up and do that NOT BREATHING thing again. Remember that?

Yeah. Well. She has another little summer cold and her response was to wake up weeping, over and over, and then make that MY AIRWAY IS CONSTRICTING AND I AM NOT LONG FOR THE EARTH noise. This time it was much less severe and she didn't ever roll her eyes up and turn blue, so instead of having a fun ambulance ride, Scott and I sat up with her all night. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I had a minor chest-squeezing-closed episode, and I thought, "If only my child was breathing properly I could really GO with this and get me my OWN ambulance ride and maybe be defibrillated, but I just do not have TIME to indulge in a heart attack right now because my kid is sick."

I ignored the heart attack symptoms until they got bored and left, at which point I thought, OH! So it probably wasn't a heart attack then, since I have noticeably NOT keeled over dead...it must be.... OH! Maybe that was a PANIC ATTACK! NEAT! I am TRULY MENTALLY ILL! JUST AS I ALWAYS SUSPECTED! I should have gone to the hospital after all because I bet they would have given me some MONSTROUSLY DELIGHTFUL AND HIGHLY ADDICTIVE PHARMACEUTICALS!

And then Scott and I sat on the coach holding the baby in the way that helps the baby breathe, because that's we like: Babies who inhale and exhale and process all their little air molecules in an orderly fashion. The next day I was on the phone at 9 AM arranging a play date for her and her pediatrician ASAP. I got there 10 minutes early as requested, and then I waited an hour and 15 minutes to have 4 minutes with the doctor, and we had the following conversation:

Me: Maisy had trouble breathing again last night.
Him: *Examine examine, thunk, heart listen, ear look* Ah. Okay. Well. I would say that Maisy experienced Strider.
Me: Oh. What is Strider?
Him: It means she had trouble breathing.
Me: THANKS! Got any Ativan samples?
Him: Don't forget to hand in your twenty dollar co-pay on the way out.

So basically, it's that same, THIS IS A HEALTHY LITTLE GIRL WITH NO SIGNS OF ASTHMA OR BRONCHITIS OR CARNIVOROUS LEPROTIC BRAIN WORMS. THAT'S WEIRD THAT SHE DOESN'T BREATHE SOMETIMES routine. And of course we have been loaded up with many nutritious drugs (for HER, not ME, dernit) and an inhaler and a plan to pump her full of albuterol and then STEAM the baby like a clam should she stop breathing again any time soon. Which she better freaking not.

I have decided to GO with the whole panic attack thing, but I am SO busy that I really need to schedule my next one pretty rigidly so that I have TIME for an emergency room visit and heart attack tests and the four hour wait for results and the overnight stay JUST TO BE SURE and then the grand finale--- the ritual bestowing of the Ativan scrip at dawn. Sadly, the soonest I can reasonably around to this sort of time commitment is late October of this year, so if you want to mail me any Ativan in the interim period, my mailing address (according to Mir's PEOPLE ARE STUPID Automated Mailing Address Generator) is:

Joshilyn Jackson
Mental Illness Number 2485729855
Near the newt pond
Atlanta, GA 12345
Albania

Men.Tal.Ly. Ill.

Joshilyn can't come to the phone right now. She is having some extreme mental illness. She is SO mentally ill that she is referring to herself in the third person, an affectation that drives her UNIVERSALLY BATCRAP when anyone ELSE does it, so she is going to stop now.

DIGRESSION: I have some grammar ticks. I am NOT a stickler. In fact, there is a copy editor in NYC who sacrifices a blameless white dove to the heavens every time she hears I am writing another book, because it gives her such a peaceful sense of complete job security. I like, for example, to put commas where I hear a PAUSE, which is not necessarily the same thing as putting commas where they actually BELONG. And while I don't randomly put in ALL CAPS screams in my fiction, I DO like to Make Things That Seem Thematically Important Into Proper Nouns. SO. I admit I am the POT, but there are some kettles that get on my LAST nerve.

LIKE: I can't stand for actual people who are not the Queen of England to use the royal WE. And as irritated as I get with PEOPLE who use the royal we and/or refer to themselves in the third person, it is a mild, gentle wave of yick-feelings compared to how VIOLENTLY I hate animated characters who do it. Anything animated that refers to itself in the third person should be put on a planet along with all of its tie-in marketing materials, yea down to the very last Burger King cup, and then we should go into orbit and nuke the whole planet from space. It's the only way to be sure.

The only thing worse than third person referring animated WE sayers is animated characters who say ME when they mean "I." There was an INTERMINABLE series of cartoon dinosaur movies for kids, and one of the little ENRAGINGLY PERKY little fat, gamboling lizardy things was always saying, "Me hungry!' and "Oh no, Me is scared." I was regularly babysitting some kids who ADORED those movies so I got to see them MORE THAN ONCE... I would sit there grinding my teeth and thinking, "Me needs to be thrown into a tar pit," and "Me needs to be vivisected by time traveling paleontologists," every time the little wretch SPOKE or looked like he might be thinking of speaking or listened when another little fat, gamboling lizard thing spoke or I looked at the box.

Why is this dinosaur suddenly bothering me?
Say it with me: Mentally. Ill.

Worst part is? I DO NOT KNOW WHY YET. I can't peg it. I am just having Nameless Dread and wandering around my house hand wringing and not doing the dishes and then looking at the dishes and realizing they aren't done and wandering the house some more. AND MAY I JUST SAY----I am completely uninterested in being mentally ill right now. I do not have TIME to be mentally ill. I am BORED of it already and I only just started YESTERDAY. Now what? Do I have to go be all INTROSPECTIVE and droop around THINKING and gazing deepdeepdeep into the depths of my navel until I realize what ectoplasmic existential gut-knob is incorrectly twisted in my meaty inner workings and process it and deal and have feelings? Because 1) I don't have time, and 2) OH LORD, but it sounds dreary. I'd druther go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith, quite frankly.

High mental illness numbers are time consuming. I HAVE A HUGE TO DO LIST. I have HOUSE GUESTS COMING and NO CLEAN FORKS. I have LINE EDITS. I have little CHILDREN who need to be dropped off at Spanish Camp and picked up at Singing, and I FREAKING HAVE HUNGRY NEWTS IN A DIRTY TANK, OKAY? But I am wandering the house and hand wringing, paralyzed by mental illness, so I am going to HAVE to figure out what is bothering me so I can quit sitting here obsessing about an animated dinosaur I have NOT SEEN FOR OVER TEN YEARS.

Okay -- I'm off. I need to go get my mental illness number down under 57 by 11 AM so I can take up my megaladon of a to-do list and begin to SMITE down thing after thing on it with righteousness and check marks.

With a Quivering Pink Nose

Scott starts his new job tomorrow. I'm SO proud of him and happy and thrilled and, because I am me, I am also just a leetle freaked out.

On the one hand I am pleased because he is SO excited and this job looks very challenging and fulfilling to him. So, that's good. And I am the most security minded person on the planet, so Scott having a job with stuff like health insurance and paid vacation and a vision plan and a 401K makes me feel as warm and pleased as a little pork-frank plumping happily in a puff pastry blanket. On the other hand, I keep counting the jobs that we have now in this house, and when we add in Scott's NEW one, I see FOUR. Four FULL TIME jobs.
1) Going to his office and being busy and important and having incomprehensible paperwork and a desk (his)
2) Raising kids and running a household (ours)
3) Writing novels (mine)
4) Promoting novels (also mine)

Ever since we had Sam, we have ALWAYS had THREE full time jobs. Scott made the money, I wrote the novels, and together we raised babies and ran a household. We just ADDED promoting novels to the list when gods in Alabama got close to it's publication date, and SIMULTANEOUSLY Scott's old company closed its Atlanta office, so we SUBTRACTED his job, holding us steadily at three. But this is FOUR NOW. Whole new ballgame. And 2.5 of them are MINE. Everything I need to do THIS WEEK, THIS MONTH, THIS YEAR is rising up in front of me like a tidal wave, and I am scared I will begin to drop vital balls and become a miserable failure who writes half-realized novels and half-assedly promotes them while halfway-raising crack-addled shoplifters who both hate me and demand I pay for therapy. I'm scared. I want to QUIT all 2.5 of my jobs, stop writing, cancel all of my interviews and bookstore visits, and sell the children to friendly gypsies who will raise them up to be tanned, barefoot, well-adjusted, pony-thieving acrobats. Then Scott could have his new job and I could start a totally different new career. As an advertising executive.

I THINK I WOULD BE VERY GREAT. After all, as a veteran insomniac, I watch a lot of TV! I KNOW commercials.
I can see which ones are UNBEARABLY stupid (The pepto-bismol dancers)

I can see which ones are actively going to harm the product (Fetal Rat Demons who look like they are so SOAKED in disease that they are practically DRIPPING bubonic plague, standing NEAR your sandwiches and singing WE LOVE THE SUBS!!! LET'S LICK DISEASE ALL OVER THE SUBS! WITH OUR PINK, FETAL DISEASE-SODDEN TONGUES! WE LOVE THE SUBS!)

I can see which ones are very very good (VONAGE! Hoo hoo! Woo Hoo hoo! Hoo hoo! Woo Hoo Hoo!)

And I can see which ones ought to be ILLEGAL to the point that MAKING ONE is a capital offense (all prescription drug commercials, but especially ones about herpes or erections, all feminine hygiene product commercials, but ESPECIALLY ones that involves someone pouring blue liquid onto a sanitary pad, sneaking up behind a woman in a white T-shirt, and WIPING her with it, and while we have the chair warmed up ANYWAY, let's execute whoever dreamed up the animated foot fungus guys leaping under toenails. Because, ew.)

Oh but maybe not. That's scary too. I have been out of corporate America for quite a LONG time long. So so so long, in fact that one might say I was never IN IT. That is a TRUE STORY! I have never had a real, grown-up CAREER type job. I dropped out of college to be a professional artsy-fartsy playwriting tequila-hoover who made money acting and cooking and mixing tequila for others, then went back to college, stayed in the warm wombly haven of academia for grad school, did a little sporadic teaching as an adjunct, and then became a professional mother and wrote novels... Hmmm. It may take me a little to become aclimatized.

I suspect my MOM-ism might have RUINED me. I mean, I have more PETS than I have power suits. And maybe my commercials would be all TAINTED by crazed domesticity. Like, this morning I was sitting downstairs moisterizing my heels and staring at The Little Pets as they toodled about in their aquarium. I LOVE the lotion I was using (Formula 308's Le Couvent des Mihimes Verbena and Lemon) and I was thinking up slogans for it, a product I GENUINELY feel is superior, and here is what I came up with:

Formula 308: Be as Moist as a Newt!

Yeah. Kinda makes the fetal rat demons look appealing, huh? I ran it past my son, and he improved it:

Formula 308: You'll be as moist as a newt, but you'll smell better."

See, I think a TRULY successful ad executive would have a natural propensity to associate things with BOOBS, not NEWTS. I would probably be a great big failure. *sigh* SO I better keep the kids. I've grown fond of my ratfinks over the years, and anyway, Sam and Maisy wouldn't have fetched much; they are skinny little things, and I hear gypsies pay by the pound. Also, I can't stop writing. I seem to be compulsive about it. SO I'd still have that job ANYWAY. And I am learning that I enjoy the heck out of touring and meeting bookly folks and yacketing about writing and reading, so why give up something that is essentially pleasurable...

In all seriousness---these 2.5 jobs I have are the best jobs in the world. The very best. And I just want to do them well, you know? All of them. And not screw up. It's so SCARY. I HATE failing. I hate being a failure. I hate it to the point that sometimes it hampers me --- I get too seized up imagining the ugly possibilities to even TRY to do what I want so badly to do. I go THARN, staring into the headlights of my life like Fiver in Watership Down, miserable and shaking and immobilized.

I'm not THERE right now. I'm okay, my mental illness number is UP but hasn't broken free of earth's atmosphere and reached ORBIT yet, but...my good right hand has a brand new job of his own, and I'm spooked. Scott says it will be fine though. And he is usually right about these things. So. It will be fine. Right? Right.

Right?

Virtue Report: Mostly Virtuous and somewhat less drunk.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I limit the time I can play at silly bloggers, so I am having a REAL PROBLEM deciding WHAT to blog.

1) I'm having an embarrassing surfeit of WONDERFUL things happening for gods in Alabama. Sample: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY LIKES THE BOOK! WAAHHHHHHHHH! And they ran a picture of me with the 'scrutiatingly charming review which is freaking me right out the door and into the street to do the Macarena in traffic because I am JUST. THAT. COOL. I mean, COME ON! A good review and picture in EW? I MUST be cool enough to do the Macarena on a public street. With no music. And no irony. Right??? RIGHT???

*crickets*

FINE. I will go back inside. I am STILL doing the Macarena quietly here in my office, even the butt-waggle part, and NO ONE CAN STOP ME. And also apparently Glamour Magazine said something REALLY nice about the book! Although I have not been able to get my hands on a hard copy so I do not know if it is a review or a mention in an article or if the book's GORGEOUS COVER is shown. I DO feel quite certain that GLAMOUR is not running MY picture, unless it is perhaps buried in a WHEN PEDICURES ATTACK article, way way over on the BIG TOE DON'TS side.

But I hope they showed the cover...that cover is JUST as sexy as any supermodel, AND I just found out that Anne Twomey (The woman who designed it whose photo SHOULD be in Glamour and IS on the wall above my black altar where I MUST have slaughtered an unblemished, virgin Goatess in order to GET that cover in the first place) IS WORKING ON THE COVER FOR MY NEXT BOOK. HUZZAH! AND I keep getting e-mails (and even notes in the comments section, HEY THERE, ROBERT GRAY) from book sellers telling me that my book has arrived AND THEY ARE SELLING IT TO PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT RELATED TO ME BY BIRTH OR MARRIAGE, and from friends who have walked into book stores and seen gods right up front, often on special BOOK SENSE display tables or BUY THIS FOR MOTHER'S DAY tables or NEW AND HOT tables and in FOUR DAYS it will be in pretty much every bookstore in the country and the newspaper and other reviews are coming in so far ranging from good to glowing and SEVERAL TOTAL STRANGERS have FOUND the book, read it, and liked enough to go write AWESOME AMAZON and B and N.com REVIEWS and....holy crap. I mean....HOLY, HOLY CRAP, right?

2) I am having EXTRAORDINARY LEAPS upward and equally swift plummets-to-normalcy in the mental illness department. I can go from zero to screamin' crazy in .7 seconds. People who have sedated me recently say it's quite something to watch. This may be normal...or atleast predictable to those who know me. I got a MENTAL ILLNESS PRE-EMPT letter from psychic-slash-novelist Katie Willard that said...well, no, this is not a quote, but the letter basically meant, "Just because things are going well doesn't mean that you are going to be hit by a truck and killed (assuming you stop doing the macarena in the street). I KNOW you are thinking that the only way to PAY for all this joy is to have radioactive spiders come eat your face off, but REALLY life does not work like that. SO STOP IT. JUST ENJOY YOUR GOOD DAY."

Sane Person Reaction: HOW DID SHE KNOW I WAS THINKING THIS! MAYBE SHE IS REALLY SMART AND I SHOULD LISTEN TO HER AND RELAX AND BASK IN THIS THIS NEVER-TO-REPEATED WEEK LA LA LA!

Crazy Person Reaction: Spiders??? Did she say SPIDERS??? I bet WHOLE CROWDS of carniverous spiders are behind me RIGHT NOW, glowing green and whispering and nudging each other and fighting over who gets the tender earlobes!!!!

Unable to choose which response was proper, I decided to have both, simultaneously. AND then I decided to have a great big cocktail which I think was probably the wisest reaction of all.

3) I am having watershed, never-to-be repeated moments all over the place... like walking into a bookstore and seeing my book for the first time and bursting into tears like a GREAT. BIG. DORK. Or my first speaking engagement THAT I GOT PAID FOR! PAID! PAID FOR TALKING ABOUT MY BOOK! which, um, is RIDICULOUS. I am being paid to do things that give me SUCH extreme double-dip chocolate ice-cream scoops of pleasure...What can the world possibly PAY me for next? Its like being handed twenty bucks and told to go kiss my cute husband on the lips or go get on the kind of rollercoaster that has loop-de-loops. It seems JUST AS LIKELY and fair that someone will walk up and say, "Here's fifty bucks, please go lay out on the beach and try to drink up this banana daquiri and eat BAGS AND BAGS of our new calorie-free Cheetos while you read a brand new Haven Kimmel novel and Taye Diggs gives you a foot rub."

OH SPIDERS, LEAVE ME BE. At least until Taye finishes up.

Insomnia

I woke up at about two am and lay staring up at the ceiling until four, when I gave up and went to go play computer games. I came back to bed at six and managed to fall back asleep.

I had the most lucid dream then...I didn't realize I was dreaming at all because the dream took place in my exact real family room, and Scott was there wearing khaki pants and this button-down shirt I bought for him recently.
Me: I can't sleep. I need to be s