WRITING IN CHAOS

So my life is a bit chaotic right now - I'm an accountant, so the day job is a nightmare that goes without saying to anyone who's every known an accountant in January. And of course, my house is torn up for the great moving adventures which will take place the first of March - three months ahead of time (and with one week's notice from my contractor - thank you very much). The marketing plan shaped up nicely, but I've got that big, heavy albatross of a proposal hanging over me and I can't seem to get it to work.

The problem is, I am SUPPOSED to be writing with humor and there's just not a darn thing funny or even remotely amusing about my life right now. Well, technically, I guess the bath bed thing and ripping my husband's boss's stairwell to shreds was worth a laugh, but that was weeks ago and I can't seem to get my funny bone geared up for proposal writing.

Any of you write humor? If so, how do you get your "funny on" when life is anything but amusing?

Interested writers want to know.

Tagged

Colleen tagged me - she probably should catch up on my blog and realize she shouldn't even touch me much less tag me, but she did so here I go:

What were you doing ten years ago?
I was getting a tatto and motorcycle and a new man.

What were you doing one year ago?
It was tax season. I never remember tax season.

Five snacks you enjoy...
Brownies
Cashews
Chips & queso
Homemade cookies
Beer (hey, it can be a snack too)

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics...
Guns & Roses' Cold November Rain
Motley Crue Shout at the Devil
Almost anything by George Strait
Way too many songs by the Backstreet Boys
Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang (got you on that last one, huh)

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire...
Travel, travel, travel
Put in a swimming pool
Open a no-kill animal shelter
Visit a fat farm and get skinny
Pay someone to cook every meal so I could stay that way

Five bad habits...
Picking at my cuticles
Eating poorly
Not exercising
Cussing (but only when it is absolutely earned and due - grins)
Buying new underwear instead of doing laundry

Five things I love to do...
Read
Write
Eat
Extreme sports
Hang out with other writers

Five things you would never buy or wear again...
Pantyhose
Cheap purses (for everyday use)
Jeeze, other than that, I'm not saying no to anything else - you never know

Five favorite toys
Shifter kart
Miter box saw
Computer
My dog Bogey (hey, you play with dogs)
and last but not least - wouldn't you like to know?

Five people I'm tagging...
It's tax season. I can't even think of five people I know.

Unlucky Part 2

Okay, so now even I'm buying it - I'm definitely unlucky. Not sure if it's a paranormal connection with my current heroine or not but for whatever reason weird things are happening to me.

My current horror - where to eat breakfast.

For ten years (five to seven days a week) I have eaten breakfast at the same restuarant. I have friends there in the staff as well as the customers. I speak with the same people on a daily basis and we solve the world's problems. It's also where I write my books. Three and a half years I've sat at the counter, drinking coffee and telling stories.

I have a proposal I want to get out by next week, so I headed out early to my breakfast spot only to see a big "CLOSED" sign on the front door. The owner of the chain closed every location in Texas. No warning to guests OR employees.

I feel like a homeless person. Now, realize, that my house is torn up and junked up from us preparing to move in February. You couldn't have a creative thought in that mess if your life depended on it. And now my working place is gone. Before next week I have to find a new working place and force myself to think I'm in the habit of working there or I'll never finish this proposal.

Good grief. When I move, I'm going to do most of my writing at home so this dependency doesn't happen again.

I'm appalled. I'm disgusted.

I'm apparently unlucky.

Unlucky

Okay, so most everyone read my (non) bath bead fiasco, and for those of you that have been around a while, you probably remember that I can't walk like a normal person and fell off a sidewalk at Thanksgiving, giving me a goose egg on my right ankle.

Well, disaster has struck again.

In fact, the day after the bath nightmare, I went out to walk my dog and was no more than five houses from being home when I fell off the sidewalk and twisted the same ankle again. I yelled, scared the heck out of the dog, and stood like a stork for a good five minutes wondering if I should pull out my cell phone and call someone to drive me the quarter of a block to my house. The goose egg returned post haste.

The following Friday was frought with disaster since I had the contractor tell me they were finishing my house a mere four months early and I get to move in like five weeks. Oh shit! I had my author photo later that day and went to it with hives on my neck.

The next night my husband and I went to a couple friend's house to eat pizza and watch a movie. They have one of those cool spiral staircases that circle their entry-way (you already see it coming, don't you). Anyway, the staircase is carpeted except for the bottom step which the builder referred to as a "starter step" and they paid extra to have it the same wood as the floor. Well, it's pretty, but you perception in dim light is that you're about to step on the floor, NOT another step, so I caught the end of it with my LEFT ankle and twisted the heck out of it, fell on my bad shoulder and a knee, broke a nail and in my horror of falling, reached back to grab the railing and completely wrenched a wrought iron stake out of their stairs. So I tumbled to the ground essentially clutching the equivalent of a fire poker. Not my most graceful moment. Now I have TWO goose eggs. Do you have any idea how ridiculous it looks to limp on BOTH sides????

So I was talking to my husband about my run of bad luck and throwing out the question of whether I was taking on the characteristics of my current heroine who had a voodoo curse put on her and is unlucky, which is also the working title of the book. I decided that if I'm going to have some paranormal connection to my heroine, I am writing a lottery winner next.

Weekly Update

So I gave my first workshop today - I'm officially a speaker!

Essentially, I bored a very nice group of women to death with the Internal Revenue Code.

Not really, at least, I hope they weren't bored (not all of them anyway), but let's face it, taxes are something that make most people's eyes glaze over.

Hopefully, I helped everyone understand their rights and how to file and what to take, etc. I have the benefit of also being an accountant, but I definitely understand the horror people feel when looking at a Schedule C for the first time.

Took my author photo yesterday and my photographer has got his work cut out for him. I took a side trip to visit our new home (currently under construction) and flagged down my contractor with a question. We spoke for a minute then I asked "so are we still looking at closing in May?" He gave me this strange look and said "no, this house will be ready by February 28th."

HUH!!!!! As in barely over a month away!!!!!!

So I showed up to my photo shoot with hives all over my neck - a sure sign of stress.

(big sigh) Maybe I should have named this blog "Making Things Worse by Talking to Your Contractor." I mean, what are the odds - I'm probably the only human being in the world who had the contractors finish their home early and I'm the only one in the world who wanted them to finish late.

Guess I better get off of here and get to packing.

Author Photo

So I finally quit fighting it (and ran out of time to protest) and I'm having my author photo done today. Do any of you hate having photos made as much as I do? I mean, I can never figure out what exactly to do with my expression. I don't want to smile because I always look stupid when I smile, but I don't want to look like I've sucked lemons either. Especially since I'm a humor writer and people not think I'm very funny if I'm that disgruntled looking.

Then what do you wear? How do you style your hair? How much makeup do you wear? Do you do one of those chin on the hands shots or just a head? Do you throw in the boobs for good measure or is that waaaaaayyyyyy too much of me for the back of a book?

AAAAAARRRGGGHHHHH!

I'll update you later on and post a picture when they are ready. I swear the only person who is excited (besides my agent who has been nagging) is my mother, who hasn't had a professional photo of me since I was 21.

How to Make Things Worse in Less than 10 Seconds

Have you ever noticed that when things aren't necessarily going all that right, you tend to make stupid mistakes that make everything worse? Or maybe you're not cursed like me and these things don't happen to you. Anyway, I figured someone ought to get some entertainment out of my misery so I'm posting my latest screw up on my blog.

So you've all read my woes with the pinched nerve in my neck and how painful it is and blah, blah, blah. Well, I'd been at the keyboard most of the day and was hurting pretty bad, so I decided to take a hot bath in my spa tub and try to work out some of the knotted muscles. I had one of those new aromatherapy sets, so I decided to give the "scented" bath thing a whirl. I started my water and opened the container of scented beads. They were those little gel looking things, vanilla colored, and smelled all right so I dumped some in my bath water.

Then I turned off the lights, lit a candle and hopped into the tub for a moment of relaxation - the phone was downstairs, the dog was locked in the kitchen - it was all about me time. I sat for a minute in the churning water and decided I couldn't really smell the bath beads all too well. So I picked up the container and read the label on the side, but all it gave was the ingredients. So I opened it up and dumped twice the amount I had before in the bath.

When I went to place the container back on the side of the tub, I caught a glimpse of a label on the bottom of the jar and flipped it over. And that's when I realized I'd just made a bad situation worse - clearly printed on the bottom of the jar were the instructions to "spread the beads around items in the house and enjoy the aroma" followed by "NOT for use in the bathtub."

Well, hell.

I'd just gotten in the tub so no way was I getting out. Plus, if I drained the tub now, the possibility of having enough hot water left to fill it again after I cleaned it was not very likely. So I figured, what the heck, I take baths hot enough to boil eggs. The things have to dissolve, right?

Wrong - Says the woman who just spent twenty minutes panning for aromatherapy beads in her bathwater.

See, now don't you feel more relaxed? I know I do.

Give Me a Forty-Hour Day!

Sorry it's been so long since I posted. The pinched nerve in my neck has reduced typing to an all-time low as that's the position that hurts the most. I have made improvement however, and actually slept in a real bed this weekend instead of my recliner. In the meantime, this is the busiest time of year for the day-job and it's pretty darn busy on the writing front too. Add to that some personal stuff and I need a forty-hour day - a full month of them. Here's just a few of the things I have to take care of in the month of January:

1. Get cover ideas to editor/art department (they are starting work now)
2. Get marketing plan to editor within next ten days
3. Figure out how to write marketing plan
4. Niece's one year birthday is this Sunday - buy gift - wrap gift
5. Am giving workshop on taxes at RWA meeting in Tyler on the 21st. Haven't written the workshop yet.
6. DARA meeting (Yeah!)
7. Check out construction on new house once a week and take pictures - report any problems with construction to builder.
8. Get hair done this Saturday.
9. Schedule appointment with photographer for author shot (yuck)
10. FINISH PROPOSAL!!!!

then there's the day job:

1. Close 15 set of books
2. Send books to tax accountants
3. W-2's
4. 1099's
5. Quarterly taxes
6. Upload 2006 budgets
7. Create all new 2006 spreadsheets
8. Send year-end reports to banks and owners

and finally, on the last day of January:

1. Collapse