Ha ha. You all thought I was dead, didn’t you?  Well, I’m not that easy to get rid of.  Ask my kids.  It is now officially Summer Break and Mean Mommy is in town.  Mean Mommy makes them pick up their toys, and makes them leave the video games and go outside to play.  Which has worked up to this week.  For the past two days we’ve been having serious thunderstorms, flash-flooding, and yes, Dorothy, tornadoes.

But my ruby slippers are just fine, thanks.

Now where else have I been?  I’ve been hiding in my WIP.  I’ve been a Very Good Writer and made sure to plug away at three scenes a week (roughly–some weeks are more productive than others), producing content which does not suck.  Prior to that, I was hanging out in every other temporary location I could get to because my dear Ol’ Sparky croaked on me and I kid you not, it took me damn near a month to get it all sorted out and New Sparky up to speed.

But technical woes aside (and there were some damn awesome moments within the woe.  Imagine my glee when discovering New Sparky arrived just in time for the release of Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (I chose Cutting Edge over Rock Solid because I’m adventurous like that and KDE4 Plasma just rocks my socks right outta the box!), for the most part I’ve been playing Writer and not so much Author.  I’ve been creating, storyboarding, plotting, writing, revising, brainstorming, more revising, re-plotting, still more revising–you get the idea.  Now, I’m ready for a little break and to play Author again.  I’ll be doing it at Lori Foster’s Readers and Writer’s Get Together in West Chester, Ohio this weekend.   I’ll be signing print copies of Alien Communion and generally hanging out with a bunch of other authors and readers enjoying a relaxed, romance-oriented atmosphere.

So if you happen to be going (the six of you who read this blog, LOL), please feel free to stop by and say hi!

That’s the verdict. 4-6 weeks of twice-a-week therapy and adjustments, then PT until I’m no longer bent and I can feel again. Yeesh. All this from having Zoolander Syndrome (I can’t turn left, although it’s actually right, so maybe it’s reverse-Zoolander syndrome). Or maybe Mister Spock and I have some unfinished business.

It’s a pinched nerve, and it’s up near the top of my spine, so my neck and back have twisted in knots, and my vertebrae are out of whack. Long story short, it sucks to be me right now, because I’m doing things with bags of frozen peas that ought to be illegal–and not in a good way.

Now what’s aggravating the condition (which I really didn’t know I had until it started to really friggin’ hurt), or at least, not helping it, is my new toy. Our new family toy, ahem. We prowled and waited and checked prices and got a nice Xbox360 over the holiday. The Spawn drooled so much over Halo 3 that the move came partly to preserve the carpets, and Mr. Xandra found it in himself to embrace the 80’s in a way we never did when they were actually here via Rock Band. Yes, it’s like Guitar Hero only it’s more like…Guitar, Bass, Drums, and Vocals Hero all rolled into one. There is nothing more hysterical than watching your friends, one by one or maybe in twos if you’ve got an extra controller do their impersonations of Axl Rose on nerve stimulants…except gathering around the ol’ green ring to engage in arthritic finger contortions, smash on a practice pad of giant, color-coded circles, and screech into a microphone in a manic breed of mutant karaoke

In addition to the freakin’ cool songs you get to unlock on Easy setting (like Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper, which is made of win and more cowbell!), you get to create your own rawk gawd (or gawdess) and customize your pixelated self-insert into the music scene with hair, eye, and skin color (including all the eye-cramping shades found in the Manic Panic line), styles of head-hair and face-hair for the guys, and you can even pick your rocker’s attitude (I’m a little in love with the “goth” ‘tude because it makes your rocker do funny ‘woo-woo’ things with his or her hands). There’s also a stunning array of ink styles by some pretty big names in the tattoo world, and even face paint, if you don’t want the students at your day job knowing the vice principal rawks out on the weekends with groupies.

So besides the fact that I could get lost in picking out clothes, shoes, hair, and makeup for my rocker (I have a chick with white and blue anime buns for my primary rocker–she’s a cutie), standing hipshot with a guitar controller slung over one shoulder and hunching over it while twisting my fingers into knots is not helping my posture any.

But that’s what the groupies are there for.

Doesn’t everybody have one? The little motivator that prompts people to buy bowflexes and sign up for gym memberships and eat chopped celery for lunch. The same little motivators that tend to have a shelf life that expires anywhere from a week to a month after the champagne taste has washed out of your mouth.

In spite of knowing I’m going to probably drop them, I still make these things anyway. It takes 28 days to make a habit, and most resolutions end about seven days before that–so close to the goal, yet still so far away. I make the resolutions because even if they don’t stick, they still open pathways in my thinking that allow me to be receptive to the changes I hope to make. If I don’t manage to stick with the change, then at least I’m a step further along on the path to eventually doing so.

This year, my resolution is to not be terrified of losing my faculties. I’m starting to feel my age, and it’s scaring me. Having young kids means that my house gets visited by the germ fairy on a much more frequent basis, and all the little sniffles and coughs and fevers and yucks feel like they’re really taking their toll on my body. Aside from the illnesses, there’s the energy required to keep up with two active and mischievous little kids hell-bent on destruction and world domination (and dangerously close to their goals, I sometimes think).

Those of you out there who are mothers as well will know that Mom just doesn’t get sick, even when she does get sick. And Mom always comes after everyone else has been settled. Which leads into my next resolution–take better care of myself. With the frequency that I have been lately feeling that my mind is going (and a little bit of worrisome family history), I need to stay on top of the game. If my mind really is going, I need to fight that tooth and nail, and if it’s just a sad case of CRS by way of mental laziness, then it’s my job to kick myself in the ass until my brains work their way back up to the proper location.

Although this is my blog, I feel like some of this might be bordering on TMI. I always said I didn’t want my author blog to turn into my personal whine-fest, because it’s the wrong kind of whine with which to woo readers and/or connect with my community. But file this post under accountability, and to avoid breaking my personal taboo, I shall give you something amusing and/or thought-provoking.

Please enjoy my fondest wishes for you all for the New Year via the sentiments delivered at the Surrealist Compliment Generator.

I’m a technerd. I admit it. I don’t have many of the trappings of overt technerdity as one might expect, but rather, I’m more of a ninja technerd type–I prowl and stalk the gadgets until I can no longer resist their siren call…and then I haunt the sales so I can get ‘em cheap. I count on the cost of expensive toys as an effective prophylactic against my need to acquire immediately.
But when it comes to open source…well, let’s just say the condom broke on that one, because OPEN SOURCE IS FREE, BABY! Which is why I’m running a Linux rig all day, all night, and twice on the weekends.

So I finished NaNoWriMo and produced 50,000 words of utter craptasticness that will someday be edited into something fit for human consumption. But to celebrate, I gave myself the gift of Nerd. I finally got Compiz-Fusion up and running on my rig and boy is it sweet like honey and chocolate and oral sex with a coffee chaser. Now for those of you who speak Geek, I’m a recent convert to Ubuntu from Gentoo Linux (oh, so, customizable, but when my laptop had hard-drive death, I did not have three whole days to customizably build it from the screws up…and well, Gutsy Gibbon had just come out and even though Gentoo is a kickass distro when it comes to powerful custom rigs, Gutsy was new and pretty and the Ubuntu forums are a very well-stocked place in the tweaking department and…).

So anyway…enough with the geekspeak…on to the screen shots!

I have the ability to “zoom out” to view all four of my virtual desktops and rearrange my apps between them. I keep email and net stuff on one desktop, Writer’s Cafe on another, graphics stuff on the third, and media on the fourth, so that my desktop at 100% zoom is not cluttered, giving me a lovely working space in which to play.

This is a shot of the desktop cube. Linux has the capability to make your desktop larger than your monitor screen–mine is 2 screens wide and 2 screens high, giving me 4 virtual desktops to spread out all my apps. I switch between the desktops using this awesome cube. The cube exists in a skydome, with graphical caps on the top and bottom surfaces. Freakin’ sweet.

My app switcher isn’t just alt-tabbing–I page through the apps on a desktop in this nifty little ring thingy that cycles them around each other. It’s like having a little circus that features geeks. Well…not real circus geeks, because my laptop apps don’t bite the heads off live chickens. Although I bet I could find a widget that features virtual chickens, with and without heads. I bet I could.

If I don’t feel like paging through my three-ring circus of apps, I can window-switch ‘em if I want using different keys. My apps page through like 3d cards. Much like Windows Vista’s 3d eyecandy rendering. However, of the few people I know who have actually been forced to upgrade upgraded to Vista have turned off their eyecandy because it’s a friggin’ resource hog.

After a month as intense as NaNo,  I take a bit of a well-deserved break due to temporary burn-out, and what better way to rest my brain than tweaking my workspace.  Eye candy, yes.  Brain candy, too.  And all free.

Today, my good friend and critique partner Roxy Harte asked me point-blank, “Who is Xandra and what does she want to write?”

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a big Duh.”  Followed by, “I write…” and then some silence.  Thick silence.  Silence that had been placed on a strict diet of lard, turkey gravy, and cheetos until it was so thick it needed a triple bypass to even exist.

I realized that making a declaration like that was something that shouldn’t be done lightly.  Uniformly, the advice from more experienced writers, industry professionals, and writing career how-to books has been solidly in the “pick a lane and stay in it” camp.  There are reasons ranging from the marketing-oriented to reader expectation which combine to make a great case for finding a tone and (sub)genre to call your own.  Not to mention playing to your strengths.

But here’s where I came up short.  Alien Communion pretty much wrote itself to a certain extent.  I had so much fun creating the Alcaini and sexually liberating my heroine that the rest just sort of fell into place.  I just finished a draft of a really scorching hot M/M that did the same–I just took dictation from the characters.   And I’m letting my big, sprawling space opera WIP take a breather while I work on something that’s distinctly paranormal in nature.  Not to mention the urban fantasy I have in the archives, or the six romantic comedies I wrote several years back.  Granted, not all of these stories were birthed fully formed from a crack in my head, but they all are representative of me.  Of what makes me a writer.  How do I limit myself to just one aspect of that?

So late on a Saturday night when most people are partying their little bunz off, I’m sitting in bed, blogging and thinking (of course, if I wasn’t blogging and thinking, I’d still be in bed–I have kids and therefore no social life).  I should probably pick a lane, and stay in it…at least long enough to get to the next exit.

Writing careers are for crazy people. My new theory is that when the Reagan administration closed down all the state mental hospitals, it was in response to a dramatic upswing in fiction publishing. The people who should be in mental hospitals would find themselves a nice comfy spot somewhere on the shelves of bookstores across America and all would be well. Yes, there are several (thousand) holes in this theory and what else did you expect from a nutbag?

The other day, I remarked to one of my friends (who is sane enough to choose a career outside the fiction world) that I was “learning it all all over again” when she asked how my writing was going. She looked puzzled, and then there was a loud bang from the toy room and the subject (like so many of our conversations, being two mothers of small children) went into momspace (you know all those sentences your mother couldn’t ever finish from being spitting mad, or all those times she called you by all your siblings’ and two uncles’ names before she hit on yours? They go into momspace, just like all those extra brain-cells during pregnancy). Forgotten by us until later that night (much later), and I thought about why she’d looked so puzzled. Then I realized that from the outside, once you’re published, you’re “there.” It’s a perception that’s very logical–the assumption is that a person in a field trains, tests, and achieves competence in a field. For writers, people naturally assume that publication is the standard by which competence is measured.

To some extent, this is true–you have to demonstrate competence in technical aspects of writing and coherent storytelling to get past an editor at a publishing house, but there is no set point in writing when you can say you’ve “arrived.” Not if you want to keep doing it.

And it can be damn hard to separate the author from the writer, when that well-meaning friend (or not-so-well-meaning voice of self-doubt), “but you’ve already published a novel–don’t you already know how to do it?”

You have to re-learn it every time if you want to be a better writer. Every story is unique. There are shortcuts, and you can develop a writing process that allows you to consistently chart recognizable landmarks during your adventures in storytelling, but it’s a new thing every single time, and it can be scary to stand at that precipice and feel the deja vu yet still be confused about just where the hell you are and which end is up.

Two months ago, I stood at my windows and watched the yard folk seed the mud pit that was the yard surrounding my house.  We had a great time, the sprouts and I, watching the shooting machine chew up and spit out bales of hay in a fine cloud of histamine-inducing grandeur that would hang like a haze three feet above the ground for days to come.  We watched excitedly as the tender shoots of fescue and Kentucky bluegrass poked their little heads above the dirt and protective hay blanket covering the yard.  We watched in joy as the predominantly-yellow color of the yard turned to the green as the grass began to outstrip the hay.  Then we watched in the past two weeks as the green baked out to yellow again in ninety-degree, 10% humidity days of blazing sun.  Ahh, it was a good run, if short.  The crunch-crunch of dead grass under our feet at least was better than the sploot-sploot of mud and dirt clinging to our shoes and through the house with the nice new, pale carpets all over.

But then this week, the summer thunderstorms have begun.  The place heats up, the clouds, haze, and pollution ceiling drops, and the humidity gradually approaches that of a shower cubicle, and it becomes necessary to evolve gills (I’m working on that) in order to get a good breath outside.  Just when the sudafed is about to become a table condiment, right next to the salt, pepper, and ketchup, the clouds get that swollen, scowly feel and the air gets even more still than before, just before the warm, wet wind slaps you like a pair of wet boxer shorts and the thunder rumbles.

The sky opens up and great, huge drops of condensed pollution splat and sizzle on the asphalt.  They bounce off the petrified dirt between the blades of dead grass, sizzling as they touch the dried hay and ooze their way onto the cracked earth.  They hit too fast to soak in, instead bouncing off and flowing into the low parts of the lawn (perhaps still graced with a few green blades courtesy of poor drainage.  The sky dumps a load of water on the ground for about fifteen minutes and the temperature drops ten degrees.  Then balance is restored, and the rain stops, moving on to the east.  The steam begins to rise from the hot asphalt and the undersea-adventure feel of the outside air is right back to that bathtub feel, except there’s a few more puddles, sucked up greedily by the roots of the grasses and weeds.

But mostly, by the weeds.  The grass fights and struggles and gives up the ghost at a hot look.  The weeds, though.  They flourish. They green.  They carpet the ground like lush velvet and creep into my garden and my flower beds.  I have to hand-tend my snapdragons.  I have to talk to the damn things to get them to poke their shy heads up from the ground, and reassure them that yes, they’re Mommy’s tough little guys.  Meanwhile, the wild carrot’s hogging all the playground equipment, stealing my rosebush’s lunch and kicking topsoil in the face of my salvia.  And the morning glory–which died where I wanted it, yet sprang up with vigor all the places I didn’t want–keeps skulking around the edges of the beds, trying to look innocent but obviously up to no good.  Just waiting for the minute I look away, and bullying the little guys to keep quiet with dirty looks and vague threats of being ganged up on later on.

I know we’re not in the right zone for it, but man–it’s a jungle out there.  And by “out there” I mean my front doorstep.

Ran into the neighbors on our daily walk around the neighborhood, and yanno, I think we’re all finally getting comfortable enough to be really friendly.  Now, their kids are grown up, so naturally, they’re a bit older than we are, so it’s not surprising to see them moving around a little slower than usual.  But at least they’re friendly.  They insisted that tonight, they really want to have us for dinner.  What a terrific neighborhood!

So my pal Roxy Harte, who has been a good friend for TEN WHOLE YEARS now (remember that ‘97 conference where we met? How far have we come, girl? And damn, ain’t things the same-old, same-old, too ), has tagged me for the “Eight Random Facts About Me” meme. So here goes:

1.) I’m a belly-dancer. I’ve been trained in Raqs Sharqi, which is “Eastern Dance” and refers to the Egyptian style of belly dance, and is also referred to as “cabaret” because of the majority of venues in which the dance is performed. And yes, I have performed. In fact, I performed while five months pregnant. It’s on tape somewhere, too, recorded for posterity. I own a set of bedlah (the spangly bra-and-belt combo) that I can still sort of fit in, as well as numerous tribal bellydance garb options. While the tribal style of belly dance has the appearance of being the older, more “authentic” style, it is actually a modern fusion dance style. The modern cabaret style, for all its glitz and glitzy terminology, actually predates tribal by over a century. I love to dance, and even though I haven’t been “in the circuit” for several years, I can still shimmy like nobody’s business!

2.) I’m a brown belt in Kenpo karate. I was thisclose to taking my black belt test when I had to suspend my training because it’s really hard to perform “Tiger and Crane” with morning sickness. My lineage is through Tracy’s Karate.

3.) I’m a high priestess in the Cult of the Sacred Brewed Bean. If I don’t get my coffee in the morning, destruction of biblical proportions occurs.

4.) I have HDTV, and one of the HD channels is GameSpot, and I’m not ashamed (okay, I’m sort of blushing a bit) to say that I’ve spent the last few Saturday nights on the edge of my seat, watching the Guild Wars World Championships. Yes. I’m a g33k. I *watch mmorpg gaming on TV.* Since my piddly little guild consists of me and Mr. Xandra, we have no hope of ever competing at the level of the average American college student, much less the pros in Korea (and yes, there are professional gamers out there. Bet you didn’t know that. Bet your world was a much more comforting place before knowing that, and it will now forever be a place of much less innocence for knowing that. Ha ha, I am the destroyer of innocents. ph34r m3!). But it’s still fun to see hawt PvP action.

5.) I costume. I’ve been a purple twi’lek two years in a row, and I’m going for three this year at the Con circuit. I have a closet full of SCA garb, and Hallowe’en is a national holiday at Casa de Xandra. I never grew out of playing dress-up and now I have better stuff than my mom’s old disco threads.

6.) I had a homebirth. With a midwife. Because I didn’t want to have to drive to a hospital while in labor, and because while my house may not be the cleanest place in all the kingdom, no one’s ever gotten flesh-eating bacteria there. Six guys from the city were bush-hogging in the ditch behind my house at the time and waited around to find out what I had. The neighbors called the cops because I yelled so loud and the windows were open. It was all very exciting and I think I freaked the Town’s Finest because when they asked, I said, “yeah, I did this on purpose.”
7.) I watch cartoons. Some of them are the best shows out there (Avatar, I’m looking at you. Now come back already! I need a Zutara fix).

8.) I laughed LOL’d for ten whole minutes at this. I’m still laughing ridin’ the lollercoaster.  Or the ROFLcopter.

I think that soy ginger noodles that come in little plastic, nukable bowls are probably one of the nicer things in life, especially when they come with their own fork.

Sharing them with a half-pint who slurps them up and makes kissy noises at you makes them even better.