Tag Archives: battles

April 10, 2013 · 9:56 pm

Rain, rain, rain

Once again, spring has decided to funnel water on the Northwest. Two weekends ago it was lovely- mid seventies weather, with the feeling in the air that winter had indeed ended and better days loomed on the horizon. I had all the cushions out on the back porch and was, briefly, in heaven.

Now, the doom and gloom of the standard Northwest spring has returned, and I find myself suffering from the blahs. I can’t think straight, much less write a coherent sentence. On the positive side, my 2nd oldest granddaughter, Courtney, will be staying with us for a few days, so I will have someone to share the misery with.

The locals joke that if you see someone with an umbrella, they’re from out of town. This is not true, as I have a large collection of umbrellas, many of them unbroken and still useful! Even the cutest umbrellas frequently end up in street-corner trash-bins, ending their days as the tattered and broken relics of impulse purchases.

The winds here in my little valley are known to be death to umbrellas, even expensive ones.

I do confess that I can be seen at large events in the summer with an umbrella keeping the SUN off my lily-white skin!

Despite the carnage, I feel compelled to keep buying umbrellas, feeling somehow as if the next umbrella will be the one–the true umbrella for all seasons, able to withstand 40 mph winds and sideways rain-bullets. I just know that my desire to have some cheery vestige of spring in the form of a floral print over my head will somehow work out and I will manage to remain both dry and stylish.

(snorfle)

The weather here is kryptonite to even a super-umbrella.

Unless….

Wait… is that…

Oh god.

It’s the one personal rain-shelter superhero that can take the hurricane force winds and merrily give Spring a thumbs-up. ( I’m sure that the one-finger gesture was meant to be a thumb…it’s pointing up anyway….)

It’s a Golf umbrella, that ubiquitous bastion of Pacific Northwest Fashion. Conversations between middle-aged sisters in Northwest restaurants tend to run like this:

“Is that my umbrella by your chair?”

“No, its mine. Mine is the blue and white one.”

“MINE is the blue and white one. I’m sure I brought it in with me.”

“Well, this one is mine, see? Here are my initials. I knew this would happen, so I used a sharpie. You didn’t come in here with an umbrella. Did you leave it in the shoe store?”

“No, I’m sure I had it when we went to Costco. That was after the shoe store. Are you sure that umbrella isn’t mine?”

“NO! It’s mine!”

“Next time I’m getting a red and white one, so I can spot it more easily.” (Eyes restaurant full of red and white golf umbrellas.)

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Filed under Adventure, Battles, Humor, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, battles, Brittain, Do you like my Umbrella?, fantasy, fiction, humor, vegan lifestyle, writing

April 8, 2013 · 5:14 pm

I-5 or The Handbasket to Hell

Today I am back home, doing massive amounts of laundry and also doing revisions on Huw the Bard. For the last week I have been trundling up and down the I-5 corridor in Western Washington like an elderly gypsy in a 2009 Subaru Forester. Or, as I like to think of the old family wagon, the Handbasket to Hell.

Anyone who regularly has to drive this particular stretch of highway knows what I am talking about.

The traveling population in Western Washington numbers about 5,229,486 people, and they are ALL eventually funneled onto the 6 to 8 lanes of I-5. Except for I-405, that 30 mile long stretch of misery that bypasses Seattle east of Lake Washington, this is it, folks. Unlike civilized places like the Midwest or Florida, you get only ONE major highway serving five-and-a-quarter million people out here in the urban-wilds.

Basically the legislature in Washington State is too dysfunctional to even begin contemplating fixing a toilet, much less our traffic troubles. The feds also feel that under normal circumstances conestogas and Sasquatches require very little in the way of freeway access, so there you are.

Oh, the Agony.

Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle each have public transportation systems in place, and you can make it on public transport if you work at it, although it becomes a looooooooong journey with many tricky connections. This is the least expensive option and if you have all day and little cash, it’s doable.

There is also the time honored Greyhound Bus for those brave souls who don’t mind the smell of a rolling Porta Potty AND who enjoy the thrill of being stranded in the worst, sleaziest sections of strange cities.

But there is no light-rail connecting Olympia to Everett. Believe me, if there were I would take it! I could ride Amtrak, but that is $24.00 each way, rather expensive for an underfunded book-monger like myself to consider. And then I’d still have to find a transit bus to Snohomish. I could use my daughter’s car once I got to Snohomish, so it may become an option.

At certain rare, beautiful times (after 8 pm or before 5 am) my journey to Seattle will take 1 hour, exactly as it should. However, most of the time the traffic is such that I allow 2 hours to Seattle and 3 to Snohomish. As I inch along in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, I feel that if the car is rolling forward, even if it is only going 20 mph, I must be making progress!

While I am away from home, every coffee bar or cafeteria where I see the words ‘free wifi’ becomes my office! Grandma pops open the hand-bag, hauls out the little Acer and voila! Grandma is back in business. Not only that, but Grandma can write a book while helping Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader team up with Batman and the Green Lantern for a little kick-ball, pausing only to walk to the Pilchuck Drive In for a snack of those lovely morsels of greasy, salty goodness that we call fries (that’s ‘chips’ to you in the UK.)

Yes, I am that kind of grandma. (Here kid, eat yer spuds. They’ll make ya into a superhero.)

I have begun fleshing out Billy Ninefingers, and holy krraapp, once again I’ve fallen in love with my characters. I just LOVE the Rowdies and the snarky merriment Billy seems to generate.

Irene Luvaul and I have just finished the first draft of ‘Mountains of the Moon’, with me writing and Irene reading and removing ‘thats’ and ‘which'(s) right and left, along with de-comma-tizing frantically, and directing me to “Show not tell!” The woman is a saint, to want to do this on such a raw manuscript. She began work on the beginning chapters before I had even finished the story, but that gave me the impetus to just get it done.

As I mentioned before, Irene and I are embarking on the third edit of Huw the Bard, preparatory to sending him to Carlie Cullen.

By trial and error, I have discovered that I need two sets of editorial eyes on my wretched work – and when Carlie has made her trip though and I have fixed her findings to her satisfaction, my sister, Sherrie DeGraw, and several others will beta-read it, checking to see that it is ready for publication.

All this while, Carlie and Irene are writing their own wonderful works, and Sherrie is painting her little heart out.

When you are an indie author, if you want your work to be enjoyable, you must have a thick hide and the ability to work with others even if they are telling you things you don’t want to hear. Believe me, there is no agony like the agony of a bad review, other than that of having your heart ripped from your chest.

Write the story the way it falls out of your head. Rewrite the story until you are satisfied with it. Find an editor who is HAPPY to work with you, and TAKE THEIR ADVICE by sucking it up and making the revisions they have requested. Go through the MS at least 3 times with them, or even 4. Then find another editor, a ‘Line-editor” and go through the same process. Have the book beta-read by people who read in your genre.

Spend the time that it takes to make your book reader-ready and you will have a product you can be proud of.

Even if you’ve written it while riding in a handbasket to hell.

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Filed under Battles, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, Sasquatch, Why are we in this handbasket and where are we going, writing

April 1, 2013 · 9:40 pm

Prompts, Me, and The Garmin Lady

This week I will be on the road again. It is spring break for the schools there and so I will head north to Snohomish to stay with The Boy for a few days while my daughter, Leah, is working.

I love Snohomish. It’s full of little secondhand shops and antique stores. And just like in Olympia, the vegan can eat really well in that town.

Also, it is paradise for those of us who LOVE small, independently owned bookstores.

Apparently there is a lot of road construction between my house and my destination. But don’t worry! I have our trusty GPS device, complete with The Garmin Lady to guide me around the back-ups and traffic jams.

Yes, The Garmin Lady is better than your mother-in-law at giving orders and (unlike me) she always points the correct direction when she says “Turn Left .”

(Oops! I meant the OTHER left, dear. Sorry.)

Gosh, I’m helpful.

My dear friends Carlie Cullen and Donna L. Sadd are doing another month of blogging to writing prompts and today’s prompt was the arrow you see to right. I’m not good at writing to prompts, but that arrow perfectly defines my poor hubby’s sense of direction, although he would deny it if asked! Therefore, in the interest of not publicly mocking my spouse I will not be blogging on it.

But I did get him the Garmin originally so that he would listen to directions from someone, anyone.

Unfortunately, you need to update the maps regularly and while my hubby makes his living as an IT man, he’s not really into it at home, so little things like that tend to languish unless they update automatically.

One of the first things we found out was that if you have the Garmin set on “Pedestrian” mode, it will tell you how far an how fast you have walked. This has been really helpful for my hubby who regularly takes long walks on his lunch break. It’s amazing how far he can walk in an hour.

HOWEVER, there is a down side to this. IF you forget to switch it back to driving mode, and you decide to make a random trip down Interstate 5 from Olympia, Washington to, oh, let’s say McMinnville, Oregon, you may have a random encounter with The Garmin Lady that goes like this:

Garmin Lady: “Exit Freeway at next exit.”

Me and Greg: “What? No way, we aren’t even in Chehalis yet!”

Garmin Lady “Recalculating. Take Next Exit, to the right.”

Me and Greg: “There’s something wrong with this thing. We’re passing Longview. We’re nowhere near McMinnville yet. We’re still in Washington, so what she wants us to do, I can’t imagine.”

Garmin Lady “Recalculating. Make U-Turn at next police turnout and then exit freeway, to the right.”

Us: “What?!? That’s just plain crazy, not to mention illegal! Turn that damned thing off! It’s broken!”

SO, if I am going to rely on this miracle of modern technology to guide me around any traffic jams, this three-hour road trip could really be an adventure. I could end up in Mukilteo, or Woodinville. Heck, I could end up back in Seattle if I really piss The Garmin Lady off!

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Filed under Adventure, Battles, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, Vegan, writer, writing

Tagged as #AprilPrompts, adventure, battles, Blogging Challenge, humor, The Garmin Lady, vegan lifestyle, writing

March 25, 2013 · 7:43 pm

Trains That go Bump in the Night

Life is a rolling train wreck sometimes.

I think I write for the same reasons that I read.

I’m an escape artist.

I have two adult children with epilepsy, and they frequently face challenges that would daunt the average person. They didn’t ask for it–they just have it.

Oddly enough, although the ‘e’ word still rears it’s ugly head and we sometime spend long hours in hospitals, epilepsy is the least of the worries. When you throw into the mix several other loved ones who are dealing with varying stages of meth addiction, your family will occasionally have a train wreck.

When the addict went to jail I felt joy–joy that he was out of the gutter and in a dry place where they feed him and supply him with his insulin, and his violent, hateful self was locked away from me.

I’m a rotten sister.

I’m no longer buying into the insidious guilt trip that the addicts are SO good at pushing on us. I no longer allow him to bleed me dry of money and in November of 2012 I called BS on his protestations of innocence. His attempts to make the rest of us feel guilty because we never devolved into gutter-dwelling crack-hos no longer have the desired effect on me. I told him that I would purchase his insulin, but that was all I would buy. I do love the wonderful boy he used to be before meth destroyed him, and I don’t want him to die. So that day in November, I paid for his insulin at the pharmacy. His nasty attitude was such that I felt he could pick it up himself.

That didn’t play to his plans at all. He couldn’t wheedle cigarettes or any other outlays of cash from me. I was sent a text message that referred to me in the most vile of terms. He hasn’t called me since. According to the local grapevine, he has cut me off–I am no longer a member of his family.

Neither is his son, for the same reasons.

When he was released from jail last week, phone calls from him to others in the family demonstrated that it’s business as usual for him. I feared that the threats and cajolery, lies and promises would begin again, but so far he hasn’t called me. Every member of the family who remains in communication with this creature of the night is poisoned by his touch. You never know what phone call to answer and what to ignore, because once he figures out that you won’t answer when your caller ID says he is calling, he uses other people’s phones.

Let the celebrations begin! Since he cut me off, I have not had to pay for his insulin, which is not cheap. Where he is getting it, I don’t know. He is still alive, and I haven’t bought him any since November.

Thus it is that I immerse myself in fantasy worlds and my husband spends his free time gardening. We are united in our efforts to avoid dealing with the addicts.

Addicts have NO gratitude. Don’t expect it, they don’t have it. All they have is a bottomless need and a burning envy. The addict desires to own your possessions but not to enjoy them the way you enjoy them. They will use them and give them away in exchange for drugs or position within their clan of using ‘friends’. The user feels completely separate from his family. The user will hate you for not being a fellow user, but though they despise you, they will use you until you are an empty husk.

Princess of Quite a Lot by Mary Englebreit

Princess of Quite a Lot by Mary Engelbreit

I am in so many ways a princess of quite a lot, in a completely Mary Engelbreit way! Having a train wreck in the family really helps to underscore what is true and positive, what is real and important. It underscores the love that binds us and also breaks us.

I am grateful for the fact that my home is a calm, pleasant little castle; 1100 square feet of modest suburban serenity. My husband and I worked hard for this tiny bungalow, and we are a bit house-proud in that we maintain it well. I am grateful that my children have good, happy lives. I am grateful for my beautiful grandchildren.

Even when the sound of grinding metal alerts me to the fact that another train has gone bump in the night, I am grateful for the truth of my real treasure–love. Yes, it is a deadly weapon and can be used against me, and it has been used to cut my heart out, but nonetheless I am grateful for it.

I am not alone in living with the wreckage of this devastating, evil drug. Nearly every family in my county has been touched by it. The schools are filled with children whose lives are forever tagged with the label ‘children of meth’. Society looks down on them and turns away, fearing their misery is contagious. At Christmas, polite society buys a teddy bear or a Christmas basket for the annual “Toys for Tots” campaign, but what about the rest of the year? The problem is so huge, so overwhelming that the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services can’t even begin to cope with it.

It falls back on the rest of us to do what we can for the affected children in our own family, and hope for the best when it comes to society at large.

Gratitude is my wealth.

Living in my fantasy world of make-believe is my refuge, and writing about it is my liberation. Real life I take one day at a time, and I remain grateful.

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Filed under Battles, Books, Epilepsy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as battles, family, humor, literature, living with epilepsy, meth addiction, writing

March 22, 2013 · 5:46 pm

Branding yourself day 5 – Goodreads and All Points Beyond

One thing most authors do first is go out to http://www.goodreads.com and make a profile for themselves there, because all the online writing groups say you have to do that. And everyone told you to get a blog, so you did these two things and still, nothing happened. So why did I leave these two important detail to the last day of my series?

Tools. You needed the tools to make these two venues as professional as is possible.

In the course of this week you have gathered together an arsenal of tools with which to make the best Goodreads profile you can. You are tweeting. You have your Author Photo. You have your Author Bio. You have links to your about.me profile, you are LinkedIn and made a book trailer. You opened a Pinterest account and you posted a poem to Wattpad. You just googled yourself, and you are still not on page one . Have patience! This is where we pull all these disparate threads together in ONE important, cohesive place:

Goodreads.

Open your Goodreads author profile. If you haven’t already made one, do it now!

1. Go to your Author Dashboard. If you never took the tutorial on how to effectively use Goodreads, do it now. It’s there for a reason.

2. Now look at your Bio – is it the concise, professional bio that you have used on ALL your other sites? This consistency is very important, although I am not sure why. When it comes to the internet, consistency is magic, and I’ve never really understood magic. It works, so just do it.

3. Does your blog link back to your profile page? I have the RSS feed for my book review blog, Best In Fantasy, link back there because Goodreads is a club for people who are passionate about books. This means my review blog updates there every time I make a new post, and I try to crank out at least one book review a week. The link to the blog you’re reading now, Life in the Realm of Fantasy is in my Bio.

4. Are all the books you have written, or been a contributor to listed correctly?

5. Have you read and reviewed any books on Amazon or Barnes&Noble? Re-post those reviews on Goodreads. Reading and reviewing is what Goodreads is all about, so if you haven’t read anything lately, take the time to write a paragraph about Pride and Prejudice or whatever books you have read in the past that inspired you to write, and post it. Be serious, because these reviews are part of what builds your profile stats.

When you are a member of Goodreads you will be invited to join many reading groups and you can get involved in a lot of discussions. This can be very good, OR it can be very bad. Tread these waters carefully! I have seen several authors raked over the coals in a sort of feeding frenzy when they were frank in their opinion of a poorly written book by a Goodreads author with many loyal friends. This is why I stay out of many discussions. The reviews I post on Goodreads are of the books I reviewed on my book review blog.

There will be people who tell you that Goodreads is a waste of time, haunted by professional trolls and wannabes. There is some truth to this assertion, but it is true only BECAUSE so many people use it. My Goodreads profile is the first thing that comes up when my name is Googled, so I can assure you I am very careful about what discussions I get involved with there.

I believe you do yourself a great disservice if you fall into the habit of harshly criticizing others in public forums. Ask yourself what you want agents and editors to see when they Google your author name, and make sure your behavior in public reflects that.

As a reader, I go to Goodreads to find great books written by indie authors, and I am rarely disappointed.

As you can see, my rating is quite average, and not really outstanding, but it is the FIRST link that appears on the Google search. This is where people will click first to see who I am when I submit a query to agent. This is why you must make sure it is as professional as you can make it.

>>><<<

NOW–you noticed that number three on the above list mentions BLOGs. In fact, every venue for you to publicize your author name offers you the opportunity to POST THE LINKS TO YOUR BLOG(S). If no one knows your blog is out there, how can they find it to read it? Flog your blog all over the internet through the free, easy to use venues we have discussed this week! (This is not Spank the Monkey. That is something entirely different!)

If you have wondered why the blog that you never wanted but were pushed into starting has never done well, it may be that you haven’t promoted it. Every venue that we have discussed this week gives you an opportunity to show the world that you take your craft as an author seriously.

You do this by writing.

Update your blog once a week, three times a week, or daily–it’s up to you, but be disciplined and somewhat regular. Normally I update this blog every other day, although this week I updated every day. I spend about twenty minutes to half an hour writing it. It is usually stream of consciousness, unless I have some particular topic that I want to speak on.

Your blog is the place where you showcase your published work and offer buy links in the sidebars. You can discuss the weather, the cat (I love indie author J.D.Hughes‘ posts on William the Cat.)

It’s through making use of the most cost-effective venues out there —>Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, LinkedIn, About.me, Goodreads and your personal blog that you build your brand, your author name. It did involve some effort on my part for the first week or so when I was getting these venues up and running, but now they really maintain themselves. All I do is write, blog and periodically check twitter. I am not even a fanatic about twitter–I use a free program called Hootsuite to schedule tweets for the week ahead, spending maybe 10 minutes on Sunday morning, and then I simply respond to tweets that interest me or thank people when they mention me.

I can’t say that I have made huge sales or become a best seller, because that hasn’t happened. I’ve only been officially doing this for 2 years, and I’ve made all sorts of newbie mistakes in the process. But the point is, I keep at it, and I keep my professional profile updated. If you want an agent or publisher to take you seriously in this new world you must take your own career seriously by presenting your name and your work in the best light possible.

In the new world of publishing, the internet (Google and other search engines) is your ‘Store Window.’ Your books are your ‘display’ in that store. Your name is the ‘brand’ that prospective searchers see. Am I branded like ‘Nike’ yet? No, but the late Robert Jordan is, and he mastered the internet thing in the mid 1990’s when his Wheel of Time series first went viral. By using the tools that are available to us we can achieve the best results possible.

One never knows what will convince a prospective reader to try your book, so offer them every opportunity that you can.

Thank you for sticking with me through this whole week of my take on marketing your name. Now go out there and build your brand, one brick at a time.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as battles, fiction, Flogging your blog, Goodreads, humor, literature, magic, Nike, twitter, writing

March 12, 2013 · 3:35 am

Body and Mind

Art Glenberg, physicist speaks on Smart Planet about how the body affects the mind and the way we view the world around us.

“Over the last decade researchers have produced striking evidence that the body, and its relationship to the environment, is completely intertwined in the thinking process. For instance, simply sitting in a wobbly chair makes us judge others’ relationships to be unstable. Wearing a white lab coat, thought to be a doctor’s coat, helps our concentration and focus. Literally washing our hands rids us of guilty feelings.

So seemingly inconsequential events have a huge influence over our emotions, thoughts, and decisions. And this, scientists say, is because our abstract knowledge comes not from some disembodied reasoning within the brain but rather from our concrete experiences interacting with the world from the moment we are born. The very structure of reason itself comes from our visual and motor systems.”

I find his observations to be so true! When I am in my office I get more actual writing done than if I am on the sofa with my laptop, with the same music and the same quiet.

I am a physical creature, formed by my environment.

I also follow TED . One of the most moving TED talks I’ve watched recently was by Shane Koyczan on being bullied, and how the opinion of other people shapes a person’s view of self. He also affirms the right of every person to be who they are and to be proud of being that person, no matter how different they are. I highly recommend you watch this talk–you will shed tears and be proud of who you are.

I am an emotional creature, formed by the casual taunts and the negative opinions of family and, sometimes, friends.

Through these two different venues, a vision of myself forms. There is the view of myself – the young adult in a shaky chair, seeing the world as being unsteady. Is it me, or is it the world? Hiding in books, finding secret refuge in filling notebook after notebook with writing fantasy tales but too embarrassed to tell anyone, because there was no way I could ever be a writer. Girls in the data entry pool should stick to what they know–key those numbers girl, they pay your rent.

Also there is the view of myself through the eyes of my parents–a too big, rather clumsy girl who spent twelve years in the public school system staring out the window, avoiding conflict and flying under the radar.

A girl who didn’t know who she was, or what she wanted to be. The girl who never quite measured up.

And yet, 59 years on, I am a different person. When the ground shifts today, I know that either the chair is wobbly or we are having another earthquake. I am comfortable with either event and will work around it.

I am still lacking in grace, but now I know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m doing it and I’m taking no prisoners. Sure, I get knocked down once in while, by a sucky review or by the sheer amount of work that one must do get your work out there when you’re an indie writer.

But now when those things loom large I pick myself off the floor and ask, “Was that another earthquake, or is my chair just shaky?”

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Filed under Adventure, Battles, Books, Fantasy, Literature, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as adventure, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, writing

March 7, 2013 · 2:14 am

Sitting in a Starbucks

Today I am in Seattle, sitting in a busy Starbucks, working on my book. It ‘s kind of cool, blogging and working on my book on the ground floor of an office building that houses Amazon.

There is something about this rainy city that I love. It fires up my creative mind. Plus, I lived in Seattle until I was 9, and to me it has always been home.

The book is rolling along well–so well that I begrudge the time it takes to blog! The characters are occupying most of the space in my mind–to the point that I can hardly carry on a conversation without sounding like an idiot.

Designing melèes with strange creatures and putting my characters through hell and yet still finding something humorous in their situations–I’ve never had a job more rewarding. (Although, I admit it’s financially rather UNrewarding.) Still, maybe the next book will be the one!

I’m sitting here in a Starbucks, in Seattle, watching the rain and the people and loving my job. I don’t care if I’m not a bestseller and I don’t really care if I ever am. I’ve finished writing four (count them –> FOUR!) books and can all those nay-sayers say they have done that? So I’m not published by one of the Big Six. And so my books aren’t on the hot one hundred yet! I’m an indie and I do the best I can, which is all one can ask of themselves.

I am sitting in a Starbucks living my dream, writing a book. It doesn’t get much better than that!

My advice is this–do what you love, and do it to the best of your ability. Life is too short to spend most of it waiting for the right time to happen, or for someone to give you permission to live.

Find your “Starbucks” and make your life happen!

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Filed under Battles, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, magic, vegan lifestyle, writing

February 28, 2013 · 10:12 pm

The ‘e’ word, part 2

MSClipArt MP900390083.JPG RF PD Epilepsy.

My oldest daughter had a grand mal seizure when she was 26 years old, and has not had any issues since. She also deals with obsessive compulsive disorder, and is doing well because she is on a good treatment regimen for her conditions. she is a beautiful, happy woman of 39, with a 6-year old child (The Boy who frequently appears in this column.) Early on, Daughter 1 decided to face her problem and deal with it appropriately. The Boy will be her only child, as she had to go off her meds for that year in order to have a healthy child, and she isn’t going to chance that again.

Adult Onset of Epilepsy with no discernible physical cause is more common than I once thought, though it is still rather rare. It is hard to find information on it. Many adult seizures are caused by tumors, alcohol and drug abuse, or aneurysms, and frequently these can be cured.

However, many times there is NO PHYSICAL CAUSE that is discernible via MRI or EEG. This is the case in two of my children.

My son, who shares the same father with Daughter 1, always showed the same intensity of thought and purpose, combined with obsessing that his father and his sister had. He recognized early on that his OCD was crippling him, and sought treatment for it.

He will be 35 in a month, and has only had his seizure disorder for 18 months. He had trouble accepting it, refusing to believe it could occur again, since his sister had only had the one seizure that we knew of. Then, when he was forced to see that he had “a problem with seizures” he believed he could cure it with the proper diet, and exercise. When that notion was proven wrong, he at last went on the meds that his doctors prescribed, and he went 10 months with no seizures.

Because he is an analytical man, he wanted to see if the meds were working, and went off them for 5 days, and had 3 grand mal seizures and at least 1 minor seizure in 2 days. Fortunately, he was in the hospital, and they were able to get him on a good regimen for his meds.

Now he has faced the reality that he has epilepsy for no apparent reason, and there is no way to cure it. To my everlasting relief, he is making good decisions and going forward with life, instead of letting his epilepsy rule him.

On occasion, a physical cause can be found for the random seizures that characterize this disorder, but frequently no cause can be found. In my children’s case, no root cause can be found, but their father’s side of the family has had some history with random aneurysms and other odd occurrences, such as clinical Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Medication treats the symptoms, but also frequently has other effect that are not so desirable.

Thus, the dilemma that all people who must take these medicines face.

As an author, I have the perfect positive escape for the stressful things in my life. I write, I play games, I read books, and I reorganize my spoon collection–I stay busy. My chosen career is one I can carry with me, so when a family member is having a crisis, I can pack up the laptop and go to the rescue for however long it takes to help them work through the problem.

For a Vegan, this is an adventure, indeed! I have found ways to travel and dine on the road without having to go hungry.

My advice to those living with epilepsy still stands. Take the poison, and live the life you are given to its fullest. Deal with the problems when they arise and put them behind you. Happiness is a state of mind that must be cultivated.

Many people spend hours thinking about where they went wrong, and reinforcing the negative thoughts. This makes them negative, unhappy people!

To be happy, one must deliberately cultivate the positive things that are ALSO happening in their life, and give them more importance than the negative. Make your face smile, even when you aren’t being watched and you might be surprised at how much better you feel!

We all have random bad things that pop in and out of our lives. We live in a sometimes hard world, but we have this wonderful, glorious opportunity to see the real beauty of the world around us.

Grab it, and don’t let go!

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Filed under Battles, Epilepsy, Humor, Literature, Vegan, writing

Tagged as battles, fiction, humor, living with epilepsy, vegan lifestyle, writing

February 24, 2013 · 10:29 am

The ‘e’ word

Letting go is never easy.

You are grown up now, you’re a big boy. You make your decisions, right or wrong.

You’re thirty-five years old.

You have a seizure disorder. It’s okay to call it epilepsy. It’s okay to say the ‘e’ word. It’s not like we are naming Voldemort. Nothing caused it. Nothing will cure it. It will come and go, and yes it’s a bastard to deal with, but we deal with it. When you take your medicine, the symptoms are controlled. When you don’t, they are not.

You have this epilepsy thing and you have trouble accepting it, but I believe in you. Nothing has changed, except you have this problem sometimes.

Don’t choose to live your life looking at what you don’t have–so caught up in where things went wrong that you can’t see where they went right.

Life is so beautiful.

Your life is out there, waiting for you to claim it, waiting for you to wrap your arms around it and embrace it.

Life is good. Don’t become a small, angry person just because things aren’t perfect. Don’t build walls around the you that I love so much. Don’t hide behind stubborn anger, because life doesn’t care if you’re mad or not. Life goes on, and the only way to live, REALLY live is to grab it, and learn to love the life that exists despite the ugly bits.

It’s the contrast of the good and the bad that makes the good in life so beautiful.

Embrace every minute and see the beauty around you. Live in the moment, because you only get one moment, ever–and that moment is now.

Don’t let the ‘e’ word steal your “now.”

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Filed under Battles, Literature, writing

Tagged as Art, battles, dragons, literature, living with epilepsy, vegan lifestyle, writing

February 15, 2013 · 11:18 pm

The Sedative Box

Alas, I find that the week spent with my grandson didn’t advance my manuscript any further. I didn’t even get any book reviews done this week, although I did find Nemo.

And Waldo.

And the last shred of patience I ever had.

The Boy is six, and is off-the-chart-smart, requiring no entertaining on my part what-so-ever. He is a real firecracker, and just listening to him as he is playing is a hoot. Batman and Darth Vader teamed up with The Green Lantern to kill Smeagol, thus saving Bilbo from a dreadful death.

I’ve mentioned before that The Boy is a sponge and literally soaks up everything he sees and hears. This child repeats EVERYTHING he hears or even thinks he has heard. He is VERY verbal with a huge vocabulary (of which he knows the meaning and proper use of every word), extremely sassy, and regularly loses his precious, carefully monitored television privileges, which he is deeply remorseful for, but not enough to remember to curb his lip when talking back to Mama (She Who Controls The TV.) Curbing his commentary is both time-consuming and all-important, as it has led to some trouble in social situations.

For the most part, Grandma’s role when babysitting is to gently but firmly remind The Boy that we show respect to everyone when we speak to them, and when he responds with verbal abuse, I respond by parking him in the corner for some quiet time. Grandma sets the timer on the stove for five minutes and we both rest our ears. When the timer goes off, we hug and make up our quarrel, OR he goes back to the corner to reflect on where he miscalculated and went wrong for just a while longer.

Oddly enough, The Boy doesn’t like tofu in his stirfry. Go Figure! And Grandma doesn’t do mac and cheese–what a tragedy! We did find something he would eat, and we agreed to disagree.

I have ten grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The Boy is the only one of my grandchildren that requires special handling, although the others are just as talented and amazing as he is. Unlike the others, this child can’t be left to his own devices, or mayhem WILL ensue. Because he requires more intense handling, I’ve had a lot of individual time with him that I’ve not had with the others.

I can honestly say he is not my favorite grandchild, because they are ALL so awesome and so individual that I could never have a favorite. They range in age from 23 years on down to to 5 months and fall into 3 batches. The great-granddaughter is 4 years old and is amazing to me–we’ve developed a special friendship bonding in Grandma’s kitchen.

In the first batch, the oldest is attending college full-time and raising her child as a single mother and doing exceedingly well at both jobs. She inspires me to do better at my own work. The next oldest is my ‘Fairy Goth-Daughter’, an artist and musician, who hooked me up with Rammstein and Appocalyptica. The third oldest is 20, an actress, and has found work in HBO documentaries and even a straight-to-video movie. She is also managing a fast-food restaurant to pay her bills, since acting pays as well as authoring does! (insert ‘lol’ here.)

The next age group ranges from 14 to 6 and their interests are still varying. Two want to write, one loves to draw and he is awesome at drawing any sort of car you would want. The other three don’t have any particular area of focus yet, but I see glimmers of artistic and musical ability in them all.

The littlest, at 5 months, is really into the cat and his dog. He tries to sing when you sing with him, which I find quite entertaining–it keeps grandma busy and out of trouble for hours.

But what I love about The Boy is his imagination. He let’s his imagination fly freely, and I can see the seeds that, with good direction, will grow into a filmmaker or author or scientist there. The Boy thinks WAY outside the box because it hasn’t occurred to him yet that there is a box!

It ‘s my job, as The Grandma, to see that they ALL realize there are NO BOUNDARIES to what they can do or be. Success isn’t measured in how many toys and possessions you gain. It’s measured in your happiness quotient.

Are you happy? When you get home from earning your daily bread do you look forward to a chance to spend an hour or two at your real work? My happiness quotient is very high, and always has been, even when I was working as a hotel maid. Happiness is a state of mind you must deliberately cultivate.

When you get home, why not simply forget to turn on the TV? (Or as I like to think of it, the sedative-box.) What has it ever done for you besides offering mindnumbingly similar programs interspersed with commercials designed to make you feel you aren’t complete without the product they are hawking. Bored and discontent is not how I want to live, so I find myself reading and pursuing other hobbies in the evening.

Today, I am also looking up. Two asteroids, one imploding over Russia and one doing a close fly-by is quite enough entertainment for one day! For all my friends in Russia, I hope you were not affected by the event this morning!