Month: October 2012

bookmark_borderAHA Moments

Posted on by PaulaO

…are so cool.

I’ve got one novel finished and sold (To Sleep) and then I did the huge sequel, The Awakening. By the time I got that one done, I was very frustrated. It was huge and I didn’t want it to be. So I set it aside for a while and tried to write another Butch Girl book (Stereotype This or maybe BG and Stereotypes).

Then today, I get an AHA moment. You know, when suddenly the clouds part and angels sing out a single note (maybe two) and suddenly you Get It.

The first book is called “To Sleep” because I had the phrase, “To sleep, perchance to dream” as the phrase to start with. I looked it up in Wikipedia to see if anything popped out.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Duh. It did. The second book is now called “To Dream”.

Like TS, this book was to have two halves. One was the dream, the second was the waking up. I never found a true dividing line so it doesn’t really have one. But what if I just did the dreaming part? What if…

And there I went.

PS For those of you who now have that soliloquy in your head, go to No Sweat Shakespeare to read it in full.

bookmark_borderButch Bags

Posted on by PaulaO

LGBT lesson of the day: In case y’all didn’t know, I self-identify as a butch. That means I embrace my masculine side more than my feminine side. Those on the opposite end of the spectrum are called femmes. I ain’t one of those. Not as many lesbians go for the role thing anymore. It’s not really a role, it’s a state of being. But that’s a different lecture as well as the theme to Butch Girls: Stereotype This, the next BG book I am trying to write.

Anyway, as a butch, I don’t carry a purse. Never have, I don’t think. I might have some in high school. I remember something about a leather bag with a horseshoe? That’s been a while! I’m lucky to remember what I had for breakfast this morning! Where was I? Oh, right, purses and the fact I don’t carry one. I’ve used various bags over the years to carry my shtuff. My fave by far was the Mountainsmith Day bag. I loved it except for one thing: it had a waist strap. They could be tucked into the back but it added bulk I didn’t want. I could have cut them off but sometimes Lorna needed it for something and she liked to use the waist strap. The bag had served me well for many years but was starting to show its age (aren’t we all?). Then when I had to start carrying medication for my headaches, then the glucose meter in addition to the usual bag crap, it was getting to be just a tad too small.

This summer, I got a laptop and a cool bag but after using it at the GCLS con, I didn’t like it very much. Since I carry my laptop bag at my feet, the messenger bag flap was a pain in the ass. If I left the flap flipped back, then the front bit slowly unzipped. When my niece was with us, she didn’t have a laptop bag so I gave her that one and got a new one. Since I’d only used it that one time, it still had the new stink to it. She loved that it was so big because then she could carry her art shtuff. I got a toploading bag, the same as the other one but without the flap. I started carrying my necessities in there in the front pocket. But its a huge bag. Nice bag, cool bag, but huge ’cause I got a huge laptop. So then I started just stuffing my pockets whenever we went anywhere, put everything in the truck, then restuffed when I got home. Bigger pain in the ass.

So I started the search for a new bag. I hit the usual websites (Campmor, REI, Duluth Trading, etc) but just didn’t find one I liked within a reasonable price range. 80 bucks for a laptop bag is one thing, 80 bucks for a butch bag was another. I didn’t want waist straps or backpack straps so that left out a huge chunk of them. I wanted removable shoulder strap. I wanted a carry handle. Yes, I am picky. I looked at Targus’ smaller laptop bags but, really, that’s not what I wanted. Close, but not quite. Timbuk2 has some awesome bags but pricey and the ones I liked didn’t have removable shoulder straps. Campmor didn’t carry much of the Mountainsmith bags so I went to their website. And I found it.

It’s the Mountainsmith small Messenger bag. No cool name on it but it is made of recycled water bottles. At least 7.5 bottles went into the construction. I got it from eBags, a site I should not be allowed to visit. Because for all of my dislike of purses, I love bags. Not flowery stuff, but bags. Yeah, I’m weird.

It finally arrived today! (bit of trivia: companies use FedEx and UPS because they are allegedly faster. They’re not. More expensive, too. However, for many of the rural areas, FedEx and UPS take the packages to the Post Office who then delivers them. So I waited ten days for a FedEx delivery, only to have it delivered by the post office who could have originally done it faster and cheaper. sigh.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, it came today. And I love it already. It has tons of pockets. The flap has a zippered pocket and there’s an odd open one on the back. One side has the mesh bottle holder and the other has a padded MP3 player pocket with headset cord hole. Cooool. My iPod Touch (hush Kevin) fits so all is well with the world. Inside there is the usual big open space. Along the back ‘wall’ are several more. There’s a big open pocket (hook-and-loop tab in the middle). Then a zippered one (with a key hook thingy). Then another open one (no tab) and yet another zippered one. The shoulder strap is well padded and removable! The handle is rubber and easy for my hand to grasp. And big enough to slide over the armrest of my chair.

All of my crap fits with room to spare. If I had a tablet computer, it would probably fit. I know it is big enough for Lorna’s Nook. Not sure it is big enough for an iPad.

Oh, and the water bottle is new, too. It is the Nalgene OTG (on the go). Not sure I like the lid, though. I just ordered another, the OTF (on the fly) direct from the company. We’ll see how the lid is. If I like it, I think that lid will fit the OTF one, too. I drink a ton of water each day and wanted a smaller bottle to carry in the truck. At my desk, I usually have a huge 32oz Nalgene with a sippy cup insert. Seriously. Yes, I have the smiley face one but I usually use one of the others and let Lorna giggle during the day.

I cannot wait for my new chair and new cushion to arrive. My current one is looking rather ratty!

bookmark_borderCome Out!

Posted on by PaulaO

It is National Coming Out Day. As in coming out of the closet and saying to the world, “I’m a homosexual and damn proud of it!” But I ask, when is the heterosexual coming out day? I feel sorry for those folks. There’s no Het Pride Parade, either.

I can look back now and see where I knew I was ‘different’. I was quite young. Not even a teen. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Sigh. And Wonder Woman. Bigger sigh ’cause she’s got bigger lungs. During the entire show, when she was in that costume, it was not her face I was watching. Sears and Roebuck catalogs. Didn’t all of us go to the underwear section? But I looked at the women section more than I did the men. Trivia fact: most men underwear models are stuffed. As in padded to hide everything, not make it look bigger.

I was in 7th grade when we were shooting the sh..breeze in class. Someone said that if another girl said she liked her, that she would freak out. I said “But it’s a compliment. It’s like someone with the same bike as you admiring your bike. They know what you have, what you got, and what it’s like.” Silence. Absolute silence. I didn’t consider that maybe I was a lesbian.

In high school, it came up a few times but, really, I had better things to do than sit around and consider stuff like that. I lived on a farm. We were too busy to wonder about such stuff. Although, the funny thing is, my grandmother lived just up the road from us. And a lot of times, I’d walk home from her house down to our place in the dark. She’d say “Be careful. One of those homosexuals might drive by and pick you up.” She also whispered when she said homosexual. And she meant MEN homos, not women. I kept telling her that homosexual men wouldn’t want me. To this day, I still don’t think she understood what a homosexual was. Add in the fact we were in the middle of absofreakinglutely nowhere, and it was even funnier.

It was in college that I figured it out. I kissed my first girl. Immediately I thought “Oh. Well. That was different.” I’d kissed guys before that. Four I think. Three? Anyway, that kiss was so very, very different. I could not describe to you the difference. I just figured all the guys I had dated were really bad kissers. Nope. College for me was a very emotional time. I got off the farm and discovered there was a world out there. Not always a good world, either. My relationship with J did not end well and after college, I moved up Nawth where Mom and both brothers were.

It was in NJ that I finally realized who and what I was. And, typical me, I reached that conclusion in a very weird way. It was the early 90s and HIV/AIDS was considered God’s way of cleansing the planet. Being gay was not a good thing at all. It was frightening to think about. But I worked for a non-profit agency and had a cool co-worker. She mentioned her girlfriend and I asked her about what being gay was like. She was cool about it and answered questions and little pieces started fitting together. So I talked to her one day, after much thinking, and said I was going to live like a lesbian for 6 weeks. Think, act, live, be a lesbian for 6 weeks then decide if that was what I was to be. Seriously. Well, girlfriend, when I came out of that close? It was like…it was like I had come out of the cocoon and was a butterfly. I haven’t looked back sense.

Telling my family wasn’t as pretty. Mom was NOT happy. Older sibling just laughed and said I’d get over it. Younger brother was cool. I don’t remember his reaction much. About a year later, I found Lorna and that’s where and who I have been since. Mother has gotten over it I guess. My younger brother’s kids call Lorna “Aunt”. 22 yrs and it seems we keep going backwards, not forwards.

I saw a bumper sticker in a catalog that said “If you want to defend marriage, why not ban divorce?”. And: “If the fetus you save is gay, would you still fight for its rights?”.

So, how did you know you were gay? How did you know you weren’t? When did it first occur to you that you might be gay or not?

bookmark_borderIt ended, finally

Posted on by PaulaO

I just said The Freakin’ End to The Awakening, sequel to To Sleep. Holy cow. It’s huge. Absolutely freakin’ huge. As in over 140K words. 141,964 to be exact. My fingers, they are tired.

I really like this book. It is very woo-woo, metaphysical, metaweird. But me likey.

I’m going to let it sit and stew for a while. I need to think about where it ended up and how to get there in fewer words. The MC can’t seem to keep out of the infirmary and I need to decide if that was necessary. Someone once said that every lesbian fiction has to have a shower scene (got that, several), a concussion (actually have two of those), multiple orgasms (yeah, got that too), and a misunderstanding. Ooops, missed that one. There’s a lot of not understanding but no misunderstanding.

Oh, and I made sure I got the Prologue right. Would you believe the submitted version starts off with the Epilogue? Yep, I totally screwed it up. And I didn’t catch it for about 2 weeks into the submission. (insert image of P banging her head on her desk and her niece laughing)

Snippet for the needy:

Prologue
There’s a parable of sorts about these two little boys. One is an optimist, the other is a pessimist. The little boys are shown two stalls in the barn, both stalls full of manure. The pessimist is disgusted but the optimist starts shoveling the manure. “Because underneath all this shit? There has to be a pony!”

Well, we certainly have been through enough shit that there ought to be a pony for all of us. The ‘we’ I mean is me and my friends: Julie, Gin, Chris, Frankie, and Helen. And Mona. Can’t forget her.

and from the first chapter:

“Hey, time to get up.” Julie said. For the fourth time.
“Don’t want to.” I mumbled into my pillow.
“Do you want me to send Frankie in here?”
That did it. I got up. Last time she sent Frankie in with the command to get me up, I got dumped on the floor.

(and yes, I know I got the punctuation wrong in the dialogue. I got them all wrong kinda sorta but not really on purpose. All will be fixed in the edits. I hope.)

bookmark_borderSpectacles

Posted on by PaulaO

I wear prescription glasses and, because I hate sunlight, I wear prescription sunglasses, too (no, I don’t glitter when I stand in the sun). I recently had to get both (sigh, gettin’ old ain’t fer wimps). I usually just keep wearing the same frames and get new lens but both were getting rather fugly. So I had to get lens and frames. Ouch. Just under $800 for the two. Less than we thought it would be but still, wow.

Anyway, the staff at LensCrafters were very busy so L and I wandered around on our own which is always better. I could care less about brands. I don’t wear shirts with the brand emblazoned on the front (like Hillfinger). I guess the only thing I wear with the logo showing is my jeans. And if someone is close enough to my butt to read it, they really ought to be careful back there.

I also hate how eyeglass places are slowly drifting toward gender segregation again. As in men’s frames and women’s frames. Being the fashion queen that I am (stop laughing), you know I sooo want flowery crap on my glasses. And check out this $485 frame. So, as usual, I had to go to the men’s section to find frames I liked. We glanced through the women’s section but, yeah, move along, nothing to see here. Years ago, I had an argument with a sales lady at Sears. She basically refused to show me any frames designed for men. It took us about two minutes of push pull before she crossed her arms and refused. That’s okay, I refused to spend my money there. We both won, I guess.

My new glasses are by Brooks Brothers. The only reason I know that is its on the case. I don’t look for a brand or label. Silly me, I go for what looks good in the mirror. Not that I look in those evil things that often.

The new sunglasses are Ray-ban. I liked them because they curved and will keep the sunlight from creeping in from the side. And I wouldn’t have known they were Ray-bans but the sales guy said so. He was quite proud of the fact that their logo would be on the lens. I asked if I got a discount for the advertising. The guy had no comeback, bless his heart.

Anyway, I got the glasses last week (I. Hate. Bifocals.) and the sunglasses today. The guy who helped me today was much better but had no answer as to how to remove the logo without ruining the lens. Dangit.

For all their high prices and logo everywhere, the case is teh stoopid. It’s a soft case vs hard. The regular glasses have a cool hard case but the new sunglasses won’t fit. So I did a Google search to see where I could get a hard case. OMG WTF? It was like I had did a search for eyeglass porn. That’s how creepy some of the site addresses were. Ebay was the calmest one. Then there were all the “How to tell the fake from the real” sites. I learned on CSI that if they are upright when on the table in the morgue, they’re fake.

Where was I? Oh, right, the point. The point to this diatribe is to ask if anyone knows where I can get a better case. I don’t mind going back to LensCrafters and asking them. Or going to one of those sunglass kiosk cart things in the mall. I just would prefer not to.

Oh, and The Awakening is at 133,555 words. It’s alive and growing.

bookmark_borderBullies

Posted on by PaulaO

I visit a website/blog called “Crumbs from the Communion Table“. It is an awesome source of inspiration and demonstrates that there is a middle ground where we can all meet and discuss each others side of the story.

Today he posted a video featuring a news anchor somewhere. Doesn’t matter where she is, but what does matter is the message she has to give.

It is so true. Kids repeat what they see and hear.

When my niece and nephew visit us, what they see and hear are some road rage ranting (use your turn signal, gas is on the right, and get off the damn phone); some parking rules (stupidity is not a disability entitling you to that handicap parking spot nor does ‘I’m only going in for a minute’ mean you can park in the hash marks); and how two lesbians’ lives are not that much different from any one else (I don’t know, hon, what do you want to do?). I hope that I do not teach them that calling people names (other than idiot, hang up the damn phone and drive) is a good thing.