Insecure, but stubborn

I've heard more than once in the last week how fast February seems to be ticking by. I kept thinking it was just me, but I think there are many of us that feel like time is flying by. Maybe it's because I'm older. Maybe it's because I have a daughter, who is-as of Wednesday night- a senior cheerleader. Maybe it's the fact that on Thursday, my baby girl will be thirteen. Yikes. I'm not sure what's going on, but every one around me seems to be aging.  Why do I still feel the same? In my head  anyway.... I can see my body aging. I'm not that out of touch with reality..which sucks completely, by the way. But I can't stop it, so there's no need to worry about it.

Sometimes I feel like I've mastered a lot of issues I had growing up and even into my early adulthood. And then sometimes... I'm the same insecure girl, whose afraid of change, to try new things or is so paralyzed by not doing something really well, she won't even try it. I thought I'd gotten over all that, but then sometimes, that part of my personality rears it's ugly head again. Just when I think I've finally grown up enough to overcome it, here it comes again...booooooo.

It effects my self-esteem and then I question why in the world I'm even trying to write a novel or fool with a blog. Luckily, I'm just stubborn enough not to let it stop me for long. I do feel like it slows me down some, but it won't stop me....

This is my stubbornness made into a bull. I'm also a Taurus, so it sorta fits me. When I make my mind up about something, no matter what it is, I put my head down and dig in until I've achieved what I set out to do.

 

                                                                

Having Trouble

I remember how fired up I was about writing when January started. Then school started back and my time dwindled down to nothing...again.
It drains the force that drives me to write and then I feel like everything that appears on the computer screen is crap. Just feels like it's all crap.

So....what to do....delete it and start over ....again. It's not the first time and it won't be the last.

I've been SO distracted for the last few weeks. I've been having to teach writing to a 5th grade group of students, which I've NEVER done. With little or no direction, I had to just wing it and get ideas from people that have done it. Thank the Lord for Debra and Maribeth, two of my old teacher buddies.

So now that's over and I can go back to my regular third graders I was working with before. Tomorrow will be the day the 5th graders take their writing prompt. The way the new state teacher evaluations are run, a percentage of our evaluation comes from how well these kids do on their writing prompt. Can I just say that the pressure is on like never before? I had three weeks to help these kids raise their score. Will they remember anything we talked about??? It's completely out of my control now, but it still is disheartening to think, if  a kid has a bad morning or doesn't get to eat breakfast, that they may rush through it or hardly write anything at all because they don't like the prompt.

5th grade boys can be like that...."I had to write about being a raindrop--that's so stupid"...true quote.

I can't do anything else about it now...I just hope I helped a few of them. I'm hoping now that all the writing group stuff is over, maybe my brain will be a little less distracted and my mood will improve too.

Seems like lately I've been battling the yuckiness of depression. Too many clouds and not enough sun, I think has been the culprit.
We'll see how February goes....stay tuned.

Congrats to my friends!

I've talked about these 'writer people' I hang out with on Twitter before on this blog. They are a creative, talented, fun group of writers and I'm so glad to know all of them. I have some congratulations to hand out and a plug for both of their blogs because they are both awesome people and I think you should know them.

The first is Anita Grace Howard. She mainly writes YA and adult fantasy with a romantic slant. That sounds really good because they're her words, not mine...;) I think she's had an agent the whole time I've known her and has been working on her book "Splintered" for awhile. She disappeared off of Twitter for a few months to work on edits to give to her agent and then ....BAM! It happened. She got the 'CALL' a few months ago and 'Splintered' will be on the shelves in Fall of 2012!  She will soon be able to say she has a book on the shelves in bookstores. How cool is that??? Her blog is 'A Still and Quiet Madness' and she Tweets @aghowardwrites. Follow her...she's lovely and wonderful. :)

My other congrats goes to another Twitter writer buddy of mine: Robert K. Lewis. He tweets @robertklewis and writes crime fiction and noir. He got 'The Call', as he wrote on his blog, 'Needle City' today! Coolest thing ever! I think if I keep hanging around all these published authors, it's bound to happen to me sooner or later, right??? He said he's been working for 8+ years on getting published, so to finally hear that it's actually happened is still surreal for him. I think I'd be walking around in shock for a while too, if it were me.
 
I'm so proud of both of my friends and I hope when their books come out, you will buy one or both. Since they're my friends, I'm promising to both of them I'll buy a hardback copy of their books because I love them both as people, but also because I know their stories will be good. Their work will be great because they constantly strive for perfection in their writing.
All their hard work has finally started to pay off and it is SO exciting to me to see my friends succeed!
I'll keep you posted on the dates of when their books come out so you can order them too. :)

Cheers to Anita and Robert! *holds up wine glass full of Beringer to toast with* Well...from this picture, looks like I already drank it..lol
**Clink**  :)

CAPE--Challenged Athletes Playing Equally

My youngest daughter has autism, just in case you're reading this and didn't already know that. Luckily, in our very own town, we have an organization called C.A.P.E. that we are proudly a part of.

CAPE stands for Challenged Athletes Playing Equally. This organization is non-profit and is the brain-child of Rick Ryan. He was an accountant that coached baseball for 20 years in our county. Over his years of coaching, he noticed special needs kids, usually a brother or sister of one of his players, that would stand at the chain link fence and watch. They never got the chance to play and he thought that was a terrible waste. After years of that fact bothering him, he decided he wanted to do something about it and CAPE was born.

Through CAPE, my daughter has found friends she can play sports with in an understanding and modified environment. They play basketball, soccer, baseball, bowling, and hockey and just LOVE it. It has brought her more confidence and gives her some much needed exercise once a week.  
Here is my daughter playing basketball a two seasons ago. She's learned to dribble, pass and shoot. She makes baskets a lot of the time too. :)

They have a short documentary on their website www.capetn.org. I'm excited about it because my daughter and I were interviewed along with some of our great CAPE friends.

The only downside is listening to me talk...I hate that...;)

New Year, New Focus!

So here we are...2012.
All the 'end of the world movies' have been playing a lot lately. The end of the world was supposed to be in 1999, if anybody remembers that New Year's Eve...it was a big one. We all thought the world would crash and blow up when the calendar flipped over to 2000.

And look at us...we survived.

I'm not saying it's not coming...we'll blow up eventually....or freeze or something. Probably warm up too much the way Global warming is, but for today, since that's all we have anyway, I'm going to work on my book(s)

I have a serious writer friend @JWDreamkeeper critiquing my manuscript, so my focus has sharpened. When I say 'serious' writer friend, I mean, she actually knows what she's doing and is giving me some freakishly awesome advice. Her eyes can pick out mistakes a mile away, and believe me-there are plenty. So I have a fire lit under me again. Editing is SOOOOOO hard. I get bored looking at the same chapters over and over, but it has to be done.
Right now, she's actually getting my first draft of everything, because I had to start over... again. But lucky for me writing is a skill and the more I do it the better I'll get.

So this post is to tell everybody I'm fired up again about writing. I never completely lost my writing spark, but I felt like I was treading water instead of moving forward. I feel like I'm moving again and it feels FANTASTIC!

So I wanted to give a shoutout to @JWDreamkeeper for offering to help me. She's doing this out of the goodness of her heart, which I SO appreciate. She has NO idea how much she's helped me so far. So, this is her plug.

You need to click on her Twitter name and check out her blog. I've linked her blog on here twice, just in case you missed it the first time.
If you're on Twitter and you like writers or just really great people, you need to follow her. She is awesome...:)

Happy 2012!

Just one more thing....my 7x7 blog award and Beautiful Blogger Award

I thought my last post would be my LAST post before the end of the year, but then I was reminded by a friend of mine on her blog that I had some awards I haven't had time to acknowledge. I want to take care of that before next year or I'll lose all my blogger buddies and all their cool awards they pass out!

This first award is from @AMsupinger at Inner Owlet. She's one of my bestest buddies on Twitter and the best looking 98 year old I've ever known..lol. She reads my stuff and I read hers and we always give each other our first impressions, which is the most important thing, I think. I value her opinion and I trust her implicitely. She writes short stories on her blog which are always enjoyable, so you definitely need to go check out her blog. Remember that name. You'll see it on the binding of a book someday...just remember who told you first. :) Thanks for my 'One Lovely Blog' award Mrs. A.M! Love you girl!

So this next one is also from one of my bestest buddies on Twitter and facebook and in my writing/blogging life. @writercherie  of 'Ready.Write.Go' is a great writer, mom and friend. You can check out her blog and see that for yourself. Her talent as a writer goes on and on and I'm sure she will be published several times over because she is so creative. She could illustrate too if she wanted. She's that good of an artist. Love this girl as well! :) She bestowed the 7x7 award on me and I haven't had a chance to do anything about it until now. Thank you Cher-Bear for my award! :)

So the rules are: Go through all your posts on your blog and figure out which of them fit the 7 categories in the award. I know why it's taken me so long to acknowledge this award. This will take some time to do, and I knew it would. That time hasn't been available to me until now, so here goes....

1. Most Beautiful Post: I'm already weirded out by this because I don't think any of my posts qualify as 'beautiful'...so I'll have to go back and look at some of your comments to see what you readers who are smarter than me said.
After looking through some of my posts, I had more than one person tell me that this post was beautifully done. So I guess this one counts as the 'most beautiful'. It was my 'Memories of Sept. 11' post. I'd never written down my memories of that day and it had been 10 years this year, so I thought I needed to have some sort of record of it. 

2. Most Popular Post:  This one will be easy. I'll just check on highest traffic on which ever post..this might be kinda fun..:)
    That would be my 'Summer of Bloggerly Love' post where I swapped with the lovely and talented Michelle Simpkins at Greenwoman. I posted on her blog about love and she posted on mine. Her post was supposed to be about how much she loved going camping and it turned into the camping trip from hell. If you didn't get a chance to read it, here it is. She is such a hoot! Love her!

3. Most Controversial:  Well...I'm not sure any of my posts qualify as controversial. I'm not really a 'controversial' kinda girl, but I'll look anyway. After looking, I found the 'Meme's gone wild' post which involved the 'Evil Panty Meme' that Michelle started and evolved into the hazing ritual for the #goatposse...lol. So here's that one....it's pretty funny, I have to say.'Meme's gone wild. These Twitter people I hang out with.'



4. Most Helpful: Hopefully I have one that's somewhat helpful. I like to help people any way I can, so hopefully there will be at least one post on here that would qualify. I think this one was helpful to a few people as far as considering their teenaged audience. I'd been reading some YA novels while living with a 17 year old and felt like there were a few discrepancies. Teenagers was the name of that post.


5. Most Surprisingly Successful: It surprises me any time I look on here that people from all over the world have read this blog. It's sort of mind boggling that somebody in Lithuania or Germany would actually read something that I wrote. Especially someone I don't know. So I'll look, but to me, every post I have fits in this category. I think the Teenagers post also had the most comments. I felt privileged that an actual teenager (@rileyredgate of In the Jungle) yes, she has a blog, commented. Made me feel good about that one. :)

6. Most Underrated Post: Hm. Not sure about this one either...I'll have to check. I think one of my first posts called, "A Beautiful Day", is so descriptive.  I thought I did a pretty good job of going out in my back yard and taking everything in and then going back and writing it all down. It needs paragraphs, but the content is pretty good, I think. A Beautiful Day...see what you think.

7. The post I am most Proud of: My first instinct is to just say my first post. Because blogging wasn't something I'd ever done before and to jump into this new world was scary, but I did it anyway. I'll have to check. There may be one I'm forgetting about that I really liked.
Now that I've been looking at these, I think this is the one I'm most proud of. It was my very first short story that I wrote for Michelle's blog for her feature, "First Sunday Short Fiction" I'd never written a short story, but I looked at this picture on her blog for a contest and went for it. She had to poke and prod me a little, but with some encouragement from her, AMSupinger and WriterCherie, I did it. Then I posted it for all the world to see...which was WAY unnerving to me. The coolest thing was I got two compliments on my writing from complete strangers, which validated me even more than hearing it from my friends. Deep down you think...they're just saying that because I'm their friend...lol. But these other people...didn't know them at all, so that made this post really special. :)

Hope you've enjoyed this last blog post of 2011...in case something pressing comes up...I'll see you after New Year's.
Have a good one!
Suze

Just a few days before Christmas

Well, here I am.

I guess you guys thought I'd drown in the sea of Christmas programs and preparations, but I did survive it all. The two weeks before we got out for Christmas were grueling though. They always are. And as I get older, it seems like the drain on my body gets worse, but I just have to say no to a few things in order to survive it.
This year it was writing. I had to put all of that on the back burner for two weeks because I couldn't get up at my normal 4:00 am to write in the quiet house. I was just too tired. I tried to write at night...but once again...couldn't hardly finagle (is that really a word?) a complete thought out of my spent body to get anything written down. I decided it would be best to just rest and then hit it hard as soon as school was out.
So that's what I've done. And it's worked.
I feel more energized and the words and scenes in my head are flowing much better now that the stress of three Christmas programs is  over. To me, I don't really get stressed out for the actual Christmas day. I guess because I have to spend so much physical energy in performing with my kids, that everything else feels easy.


So, with that said, I hope all you guys have a great Christmas , Hanukkah and Kwanzaa season and a Happy and Prosperous New Year. It always surprises me that the end of the year is upon us during the Christmas season. It's just so hard to believe the year is almost over. Overall, It's been a good one for me. I can't complain because I'm alive, walking and talking, with no major health issues for me or my family.All of that counts as a good year.

I don't really like making resolutions, but I do like to set goals.
I've been thinking about my writing goals for the coming year. I hope to get my first novel out there in the e-publishing world. I may try to query it, just to see what happens, but I think I'd just rather publish it myself. That way, all the people that have said, "I want to read your book, when can I get it?" Will be able to read it. Those people have supported me for a long time. I feel like I owe them that at least.
Anyway, thought I'd post a little Christmas cheer on here to liven things up a little. I like pictures and color on here..so this a good way to fill that need of mine.
Here are some Christmas-y pics from around our house.

 This is our house after a day of putting up lights. And having to buy more since some of them had gone out.


My new blingy stocking...my old one was stained and had seen better days.

Cassidy's pink Christmas tree in her room that her aide from elementary school gave her. It matches her pink walls! ;)

Everybody got new stockings this year. Shannon loves her pink zebra one!


So have a good one and I'll see all of you in the New Year!
Happy happy to you and yours.
Suzanne