Just saw that I got a cover for the first book in my Blaze trilogy:  The Player’s Club: Scott.  And lo and behold… Scott!

I love this book, and this series.  It’s sort of like The Dead Poet’s Society meets The Bucket List… or maybe Fight Club.   And Scott’s our introduction to it.  He sees a group of guys meeting in a back alley across from his apartment at two o’clock in the morning, but they don’t look like criminals — they’re wearing anything from skate grunge to tuxedos, and he can’t for the life of him figure out what’s going on.  When he decides to investigate, he discovers two things:  an underground Club, dedicated to facing what you’re afraid of and doing what you’ve only dreamed… and his cute girl-next-door-neighbor Amanda, who mistakenly believes Scott’s some kind of daredevil!

I’ll be putting up the blurb and an excerpt soon… but had to share.  Can’t wait to see this one come out!

My husband and I bonded over an eclectic CD collection — Eminem and Eekamouse, Bob Marley and Michael Buble, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Manson.

The Boy, still in my womb, had a tendency to rock out to thrash metal.  He still insists on listening to “rock and roll” given any opportunity –Queen, Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers are on his personal playlist.

I love Broadway musicals.  Love that The Sing Off is back on the air — something about acapella music just gives me the shivers, in the best possible way.

Spanish guitar or Saint Saens’ Dance Macabre?  Sign me up.

On the other side of the coin, absolutely anything with a bass line that makes me want to move?  Oh, hell yeah.  Hip hop, electronica, just a driving drum beat.

Love music: hate concerts.

All that said, I generally have not been a fan of live music. Part of this is probably the fact that I’m adverse to loud noises and crowds — which, let’s face it, is the point of a concert.

But in my youth (set the way, way back machine) I did go to a concert or two.  Well… just two, actually.  And both were for the same band.

Yes… my first concert was Oingo Boingo.

Don’t judge!  If you’re from So Cal, you know that nobody else on earth does a show like these guys.  And I was so nostalgic for that experience that I saw a cover band, Dead Man’s Party.  They weren’t as good, couldn’t possibly be, but they were still fun and the music still made me want to dance.

So my question to you :  what was your first concert?

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of kick-ass heroines as much as, if not possibly more than, the next gal.  I’m certainly not looking for a repeat of pretty “girl hostages” or spunky sidekicks that are there to be rescued.

But really — does it take a katana sword and size-zero bondage gear to truly create a heroine?

A celebration of the kick-ass Everywoman.

I’ve been working on a new series that will come out next Fall.  I’ll be telling you guys about it soon, but the bottom line is: the heroine does kick ass… eventually.

She wasn’t genetically altered.  She hasn’t been training in martial arts since she was two.  She isn’t some preordained guardian of whatever.  It isn’t fate: it’s dumb luck and her unfortunate ability to make some amazingly bad decisions.

On the plus: she’s wickedly competent; she’s got a sense of humor; and when it comes to people she cares about, she’s going to do everything she has to, no matter what lines that crosses.

Seeking:  normal women stepping up to extraordinary circumstances.

So I went on a hunt to find characters like that: girl-next-door turned fierce, funky heroines. And here’s who I came up with:

1.  Linda Hamilton in Terminator (the original.) 

She’s a waitress, for pity’s sake.  She can’t balance her checkbook, and she’s supposed to be mother of the guy who saves humanity?  Yet when push comes to shove, she manages to crush Arnold in a metal-press.   Check, please!

2.  Amy Adams in Enchanted.

Naive in New York, she manages to befriend rats, charm cynics, and then put the pain on a King-Kong sized dragon.  In a designer dress.  Booyah!

3.  Elizabeth Shue in Adventures in Babysitting.

When a girl gets stood up for her dream date, she decides to pick up a few bucks and watch some kids for a neighbor.  Next thing she knows, she’s mistaken for a centerfold, she’s running from murderous criminals, and stopping  a gang fight with a switchblade.  Best line:  “Don’t…fuck… with the babysitter!!”

I’m tapped out for the evening, but I know there are more out there.  Can you help me find some?  Who are your favorite fierce Everywomen?
Photo by Cameron Photography.  

Part of me is going “whee!!  Dedicated writing time!”

Part of me is saying, “He’s so little — how is he going to manage with all those big kids at that big school?”

Then, “When did he turn five?  When did I become the mother of a five year old?”

Then, because if you knew him you’d see this is a viable possibility:  “What if he’s organizing a prison riot during recess?”

The Legend of The Boy.

My son is a character.  I am told this is not surprising: he comes by it honestly.  He’s the one who came up with “Fatten down the hatches!”  (He’s since learned it’s really “Batten.”) He makes me laugh, and as much as I love the free time, there’s definitely a slightly poignant shift as I rattle around my empty house, wondering what, exactly, is amiss.

So for those of you not on my Facebook page (and because frankly I am scattered today), here are some of The Boy’s greatest hits from the past few months.

The Boy’s random quote of the day: “When I date… I’m gonna look FANCY.”

The Boy & I, thumb wrestling. “You’re not allowed to count faster!” he says. “Only I’M allowed to!” I ask him why that is. “Medical reasons,” he replies.

The Boy: “Mom, I’m hungry!” Me: “So have a carrot.” The Boy: “I’m not *that* hungry.”

The Boy and I have made a newspaper. He wants to sell it door to door. “You start the sale,” he says, “then I’ll go in for the kill.” And yes… he’s five. #soproud

My Boy is a fishing god, apparently. Caught 18 — count ‘em — EIGHTEEN fish today. “You know,” he mused, “I should do this more often.”

The Boy has constructed a castle of cardboard boxes — I’m to report there, with a secret password to enter. “How about ‘lollipop’?” I suggest. He wrinkles his nose. “How about something more sophisticated,” he replies. “Like… ‘fighterjets.’”

I have accidentally run over The Boy’s Green Lantern sticker with my office chair, mangling it. He now says I have broken his heart in two, that he doesn’t even know me any more, and that I am not invited to his birthday party. Am now eyeing the multitude of packing boxes and wondering what postage would be to send a 44 pound boy to Australia.

I said: “Please play for a bit while Mommy works.” The Boy heard: “Please turn the house into the inside of a goat’s stomach while my back is turned.”

The Boy: “if I were a superhero for real, I could fight bad guys every day… with my laser vision! BOOYAH!” He is so my kid.

The Boy is officially enrolled in Kindergarten. We drove up to drop off paperwork, and I told him “this is where you’re going to be going to school.” He looked, curious, and said, “so this is college?”

The Boy and I at the park, watching a pair of Huskies out on a walk. Then, one mounts the other. I try to ignore it, say “oh, look at the trees” and he blinks, looks at me, and whispers in a faux British voice, “Shocking.”

The Boy makes up his own karate moves. “This is a combination of a duck and a kick!” Big, feral smile. “It’s a DICK!” I could not keep a straight face.

The Boy’s new favorite song: “Bad” by Michael Jackson. I am being punished for something. He also thinks Pearl Jam should change their name to something catchier: “The Pearl Jams.”

Got lost on the way home with The Boy. Guy cuts me off, then proceeds to go 7 mph and turn on blinker randomly. “I see you’re lost, ” I mutter, already at the end of my rope. The Boy then yells out: “So are we, woman!”

“You see that tree? That’s really a man in a tree suit,” The Boy says, pointing.  “I’M ONTO YOU, TREE!”

One of the things I’ve appreciated the most is this exercise she does, where you come up with ten things that will help you shift your mood when you sense that all hell is about to break loose.

(She also has you write down “ten signs that all hell is about to break loose” — so you can recognize when you’re about to jump the tracks.  I now know that when I can no longer see my kitchen counter for the mounds of dirty dishes, or when I reach for a third cup of coffee, or when I start yelling about really small things, that I’m basically on the merry road to catastrophe.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what little things instantly make me even a touch happier… and which ones can’t easily become abused. Chocolate can calm the beast somewhat — actually, anything sugary and indulgent can take the edge off.  TV can be a balm of sorts.  Video games that force me to concentrate (and thereby numb or block out anything that’s stressing me) have been helpful.

The only problem is, I don’t simply do something long enough to shift states: I tend to sink into it.  One square of chocolate is fine.  A whole bag of Oreos… not fine.  Especially when a sugar migraine follows.

There are the zen recommendations:  ten deep breaths, a tall glass of water, a walk in nature. These take a little effort and investment — they’re not sexy quick fixes.

Then, there are the sensual recommendations.  This was the most surprising for me.  I had fun thinking of songs that I love that make me happy.  When in a bad mood, I usually went straight for “I hate you world!” music, either hip-hop or punk, with a bass line that could give you a concussion. I’m starting to see that probably fed the problem more than alleviated it.  Goofy songs that made me smile (and made me want to dance) were infinitely preferable, and not as much of a stretch as doing the zen ten breath thing.

So far, I’ve got the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Skinny Sweaty Man” as a go-to.  The Chemical Brothers’ “Block Rockin’ Beats” and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” were others — especially the video for that last one.  I’d always thought of Christopher Walken as a highly entertaining psychopath until I saw that video, and I swear, I fell a little in love with him. (And then I saw the cowbell sketch on SNL, and fell the rest of the way.  Which reminds me, that clip will also go on my “emergency bad mood lifters.”)

As it turns out, the other secret weapon for shifting my mood came from a really unexpected sense:  smell.

Everyone always says smell is the key to memory.  The smell of a garage can remind you of your grandfather, fresh cut grass can remind you of summer camp.  Hell, apparently the smell of baking cookies can help sell a house.

For me, the smell of tube rose or jasmine is very evocative, lemon and mint are uplifting.  But the one go-to scent that never fails to make me happy?  Almond.  I kid you not.  When I’m gritting my teeth mad, I force myself to go to my kitchen, unscrew the cap to the almond extract, and just take a sniff.

And damned if I’m not feeling a little better… at least, enough to do the ten zen breath thing or go for a tromp in the woods or whatever’s next on the list.

So what about you?  What sort of things help snap you out of bad moods?  What songs, what scents, what actions?

I was hired as an assistant for the account management team.  To give you a sense of the reputation of the account management side, here’s a joke I learned while working there (from an account manager, no less.)

The joke.

A copywriter, a creative director and an account manager are at an ad agency at one in the morning, trying to finish a big project.  They’re visited by a genie who promises to grant each of them one wish… whatever they wanted.

“I want to live on my own private island, writing bestsellers whenever I felt like it,” the copywriter said, and poof!  He disappeared to somewhere in the south Pacific.

“I want to live in a luxurious house just outside of Paris, painting whatever I wanted and making millions doing it,” the creative director said, and poof!  She disappeared to her luxurious mansion.

“So what do you want?” the genie asked the account manager.

The account manager glanced at his watch.  “I want those two assholes back here right now.”

Mad Men (and women.)

If nothing else, it was fodder for one of my books.  The hellish, worked-a-thirty-six-hour-day scenes from L.A. Woman were inspired by several bosses, but during that first job I did book a 108 hour work week.  My first week, I was told to get tickets to a sold out show (when I pointed this out, I was told “well, of course — because anyone could get a show where tickets were available!”)

I wound up learning that the miraculous was often substandard.  Healthy boundaries?  Personal life?  I quickly had those whipped out of me.

Then, I had one particular manager so heinous that, when she was transferred to Mexico some years later, I heard they were passing the hat to have her kidnapped.  (And I almost sent in a dollar.) But thanks to this manager, I inadvertently learned one of the most valuable things I’ve ever picked up on any job.

Desperate times call for… well, you know.

I was perilously on the verge of crying all the time.  So one of the kind guys in Creative told me about his sister, who had dabbled in Santeria and voodoo.  “Whenever someone pisses her off, she does the bottle spell, then puts the bottle in a freezer.”

“Does it work?” I sniffled.

“Certainly,” he said, proud.  “It works so well, she had to buy another freezer to put food in!”

This wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, either for voodoo or his sister’s sanity, but like I said, I was desperate.  So my co-worker and I tried it.

And damned if it didn’t work.

Shortly after, I got a new job and relatively more sane bosses: I never got another call at eleven o’clock at night from a boss saying “where the fuck have you been?”

Since then, I have seen this work on evil landlords, crazy PTA moms, conniving co-workers and even psycho clients.  In only one case has it failed — and, strangely, even caused the freezer to break.  I’m not sure what happened there.

Without further ado…

THE BOTTLE SPELL.

Note: for those of you concerned, this is simply a “binding” spell.  It doesn’t do active harm.  It simply prevents the person who is annoying/harassing/dangerous to you from doing so anymore.  You’re not trying to hurt anybody, you’re just trying to get them the heck away from you.

For those of you looking for something more aggressive, I guess those doll things with the pins are always an option, but the guy in the creative department didn’t know about any of those. 

1.  Get the bothersome person’s name on a piece of paper.  Most ideal is a copy of their signature, but barring that, simply writing their full name on a small piece of paper is usually enough. If you’re feeling really symbolic, you can tie it up with red string or yarn, knotted nine times… but really, just folding the paper’s usually enough.

2.  Get a small bottle.  Baby food bottles are good, or small spice bottles.  I’ve found glass works well. 

3.  Stuff the paper in the bottle with some garlic.

4.  Close the bottle and seal it with candle wax.  White or red are good colors, but really, anything’ll do.

5.  Throw that bad boy in the freezer… deep in the back, hidden behind the mystery meat or that healthy meal you know you’re never defrosting.

Results vary, but I’ve found that the offending person usually stops bothering you in under a week.  It’s the weirdest thing ever… but hey, it works.

Best.  Job training.  Ever.

Third place in two and a half years, but hopefully we’re settled for a bit.

I am currently surrounded by boxes. Weird piles of clothes (I think they’re clothes) are currently making a foothill in a corner of the master bedroom.  The Boy’s room — well, it’s more of a mountain, and I don’t think it’s clothes.

The kitchen… holy hell, don’t get me started on the kitchen.

At least the living room’s fairly clean.  Sparse.

Because, you know, we’ve still got a small mountain range of unpacking elsewhere in the house.

Metaphor for my life, y’all.

Because you know I love me a good metaphor.

It seems like my life has been in one big state of flux, especially recently, which I posted about.  I am coming up with systems.  I’ve taken on new projects.  I’m closing off old ones.

It’s like a cross between synchronized swimming and fighting a rip tide.

I’m currently wading through boxes.  Sometimes organization wins.  Sometimes, I get bitchslapped by a file cabinet.  Hopefully still metaphorically.  (Ouchie, moving bruises.)

The bottom line is, at some point I’ll have the boxes unpacked, and the house will be in a semblance of order, and things will sort of shake out as they should.  In my perfect world, the house would look like a cross between a loft in Paris and a hobbit hole, cozy and comfy.  My office would be an Arts & Crafts reading room with a huge and deliciously organized desk, the Boy would have a palatial playland, and we’d be living in a provincial paradise.

But as I was falling asleep last night, it sort of hit me.

Everything’s temporary.

Including this house.  We’re going to move — not soon, we hope, and not out of area.  But at some point, all of this will be in boxes again, and there will be a new system, and a new transition.

The trick, apparently, is to be okay with whatever state — packed, unpacked.  Foothills of chaos and spreadsheet-like order.

It’s just there.  Yes, it’s annoying as hell to have no microwave and discover the oven’s broken.  Yes, I wish I remember which box I packed the book I was reading.  And I’m quite sure The Boy had more underwear than that before we relocated.

But it’s just there.

It’s just annoyance.  It’s just moving.

It’s just life, right?

And for tonight, I’m having a whoopie pie, a cup of tea, and I’m snuggling into bed.  Because sometimes, life calls for it.

This is a good thing.  It’s a fantastic school district.  We’ll be in a house with a ginormous back yard: plenty o’ trees and nature and loveliness for The Boy.  It’s good financially.  It’s good on a number of levels.

That said:  hello, moving stress.

Lots of other changes.

I’ve been shopping my Top Secret Paranormal Project, and I’ve been getting lightly spanked by the “it’s-not-you-it’s-me” rejections from editors.  Yes, it’s lovely to hear “we love your voice.”  That said, I’d prefer to hear “we’d love to publish this.”  Little things.

I have been working with the absolutely phenomenal Entangled Publishing.  They’re new: they’re launching in August, and I am like a frickin’ wriggling puppy, I’m so excited.  I have six authors that I’m promoting, as a publicist.  Because I’m new at this, and they’re new at everything, we’re setting up systems and looking for wheels to not re-invent and things.  It’s very exciting.

And, erm, a little stressful.

I also have my writing blog, Rock Your Writing.  I have been working my ass off, getting that up and running, and this past month I’ve been doing my Mad Plotter special.  I swear to God, it’s so much fun, it doesn’t even feel like work.  I get to talk to people about their plots.  Figure out where they’re stuck, and un-stick them.  They’re happy.  I’m happy. And yeah, I even get paid.  So big fat YAY there!

But here’s the weird thing.  Love, absolutely. But still with the stress, this time stress of the new. And the busy-ness of the business, to use a terribly punny pun.

When life’s chaotic, there’s only one thing to do.  One thing I have pretty much always hated.

It’s called letting go.

I can’t do everything for everyone.  I can’t do everything all at once. 

My arms are too full: I’m trying to carry a mini-van’s worth of groceries in one trip.

I need to put something down.  Put something off.  Let something go.

I have traditionally hated this.  It always feels like a failure.  Like I wasn’t strong enough, or didn’t Tetris-ize my life effectively enough. 

Or I’m afraid that if I put something down, it will vanish.  Or implode.  Or something equally unpleasant.

Sometimes, I’m just scared to let something go.  Like, yes, it’s a lot… but if I let one thing go, then there’s a likelihood my balance will go all cattywumpus and bam! It will all go.  Like pulling out the bottom apple in the neatly organized pyramid at the grocery store.

I don’t know how logical this is, but it’s there, like a particularly real-feeling nightmare.

Sneaking up on letting go.

I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths, and reading some of my favorite go-to support systems.  Havi Brooks, in my estimation, is a goddess.  She’s got amazing posts on letting go and talking to walls, and if this doesn’t count as a wall, I don’t know what does.

I’ve also been reading Cairene, from Third Hand Works, and looking at her concept of “containers.”  Like nesting dolls, I’ve got my life, and then I’ve got containers for the different elements of my life. The Boy gets his own toy-box styled container.  Hub gets his, as well.  Work.  Writing.  Self-care, a.k.a. “Things That Feed Me.”

The move especially feels like a big metaphor for shedding. “Do I really want to move all these files?  Do we need quite so many frayed towels?  Why do we even still have this Mr. Potatohead?” 

Re-evaluation. Knowing it’ll be good for me.

It means letting go of projects for a while, too.  And most of all, letting go of preconceptions.

I don’t have a lot of clarity right now (see again:  moving) but I wanted to get this down.

What about you?  What are you afraid of letting go?  And when you do let go — what helps you uncurl your fingers and finally put it down?

Photo by Charlotte Morrall.  Isn’t it cool?

He then asked me, “Do you want to be a princess when you grow up?”

I am already charmed that he still believes I haven’t grown up, that I still have options.  I also love that he believes “princess” is one of the choices open to me, much like “rock star” or “ballerina.”

What did I want to be before, though?

Childhood.

At one point, I wanted to be an Olympic ice skater.  That is, until I came to the crushing realization that I have absolutely no sense of balance. No triple axles in my future. And that was before I heard about the “get up at five o’clock in the morning to practice” nonsense.

Then, in high school, I was absolutely convinced I was going to be a (don’t laugh)… geneticist.

I have no idea where that wild hair came from.  I know I was watching a film about Mendel and the damned pea project, and I thought “wow, recessive genes, that’s AWESOME.”  Maybe it was a control freak thing.  Whatever.  That dream went the way of the dodo when I realized that while the heart was willing, the attention span was weak.  Especially when it came to biochem.

When I signed up for college, I was a double major.  I wanted to simply be an art major, because by senior year I was convinced I’d discovered my true calling:  being an animator.  I’d been in love with Disney movies and other cartoons all my life. (Still am.)  That was what I wanted to do.

Of course, my parents said: “Art school?  No way are we paying for you to learn how to starve!”  (This was before Pixar.  Oh, if only they knew, huh?)  So I made it a double major with Mass Communications, so I could learn advertising.  That seemed “solid.”  They went along with it.

Practice of Art became Art History when I learned that nobody at Berkeley seemed to believe animation was an art.  D’oh.

Adulthood.

When I graduated, I discovered that a degree from Berkeley did nothing for my career in any field.  My blazing typing speed, on the other hand, was a valuable commodity.

I became an ad slave.  An ad sales slave. An office manager.  A product manager.  A legal assistant.  An executive assistant.  A financial analyst.

And during all that time, I plunked away at writing.  Scraps of seven-chapter false starts.  Pages of plot outlines.  Character sketches.

Not because I thought I was going to be a writer.  No, real people weren’t writers.  Nobody I knew made a living as a writer.  I wrote because if I didn’t, I’d go nuts.

I didn’t dream of growing up to be a writer, because it’s just there, like brown eyes and being right handed.  Nobody I knew got paid to be right handed.

My “thing” became my job, which became my dream.

It isn’t easy being a self-employed writer.  There are lean months when the royalty check is a long way away in either direction, and “pasta again?” becomes a plaintive cry.  When there’s more debit than credit.  There are definitely days when I miss the steady pace of a bi-weekly paycheck.

But I have been lucky enough to do what I love.  To essentially be what I am.

My son knows I’m a writer.  Sometimes when we play, he likes writing stories with me on a huge piece of paper, which he then illustrates.

He knows that he’s already a writer, too.

And he didn’t even need to wait until he grew up to do it.

As I was about to get on, it suddenly occurred to me:

You know, we could just drive.

My subconscious says “enough.”

I woke up laughing.  Apparently, my subconscious finally decided to weigh in on my crazy ability to complicate everything in my life.  I have a gift for making every thing way more convoluted than it needs to be.

Considering the things I’m juggling, I guess I should call it a “curse.”

Systems and starting over.

I run another website, Rock Your Writing, which covers promotion, marketing, and business concerns.  It imploded.  I tried adding something to it, and consequently screwed my coding all up… long story short, I can see the text of some of my posts buried in code, but I have not for love or money been able to extricate them.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall (and tech support) for the past two or three weeks, trying to fix this problem.  Largely because I haven’t been able to let go.  I worked too hard, for too long, to just watch those things disappear into the ether.

Letting go is the lesson.

Simplification, I’m discovering, doesn’t seem to be about restructuring.  It’s about editing.  Specifically, it’s about eliminating.  Streamlining.  Surrendering.

I’m a firm believer in Havi Brooks’ concept of fractal flowers.  Long story short, when you take care of one small thing, everything else is tended to.  Learning to edit a scene will help me learn how to simplify, say, my website.  Or my laundry process.  Everything’s related.

Take one small step, and everything moves forward.

So I’m going to let go of the past work, and start moving forward on a cleaner, more streamlined site. I’ve got a new series on the market right now, shopping as we speak.  I’ve got a trilogy hitting next year, in January.

I’m going to stop complicating the business of simplification.

Photo credit:  Ryan Somma.