Category: Inside Lane

I never liked this house. 

We moved from a pretty little Colonial, open floor plan, 2-story, on a wooded, water lot in Virginia, to an ugly, ranch style (gold and brown carpet throughout, and terrible, terrible wallpaper that is still here),1-story off a drainage ditch in Texas.  Granted, we could have moved into a castle, and I would have sulked.  I loved our house in VA, water rats and all (because I wasn’t old enough to be bothered by rats that were as big as our Shih Tzu.)

My first impression of this place was eating Patio burritos in front of the empty fireplace. Have you ever eaten a Patio burrito?  They are terrible.  They have all the makings of a real burrito, but taste like shoe.  It was fitting.  Because this house had all the makings of a good house–lots of rooms, a good backyard, a good climbing tree in front–but it tasted like shoe.

I didn’t like it.  I was afraid of it, and our fearless Husky seemed to be, too.  We thought we had lost her the day we moved in. Hours later, after searching the streets for her, we found her under a bed, against the wall, shivering.  My sentiments exactly.  Although, after a short lifetime of loving to hide under my bed, I suddenly had a reason never to venture there.

We had traded water rats for water bugs and drainage ditch rats, and no matter how clean the house was, there were those bugs.  Hated those.  They blended in with the brown carpet, so sometimes you didn’t know one was there until it had run across your toe.  They climbed curtains, and bed hangings, too. There was that incident with the canopy netting I tried to install, that has put me off canopies entirely.

If the uglies and the bugs weren’t enough, there were all the thumps and creaks of a new-to-us house to get used to.  Squirrels, rats, and oppossums in the attic and walls competed for attention, and I swore the place was haunted.

We hadn’t been here too long, me nursing my 11-year-old suspicions about ghosts, before the next door neighbor clued me in that a suicide had taken place in my bedroom.  That was just the cherry on top of poo sundae.

Mom has been in this house for 32 years, since we moved in on November 4, 1981.  I have never learned to like it, much less love it.  In fact, I still hate it.  It’s like I hold this house responsible for everything bad that ever happened to me. To be fair, a good number of bad things went down in this house.

It’s funny to have a grudge against a house.  I have loved, or at least had some fondness for every other home I’ve been in–apartments included. 

I probably just need to get someone to come smudge it out with sage. 

This isn’t the ideal setup, but I found out how to connect the keyboard from my iPad to my Android phone, and I now have the ability to blog.  There was no way I could have typed out a blog entry with my thumbs.  This small thing alone has brightened my dulling mood.

You see, I am a terrible nurse.  I am not a care giver by nature.  Oh, I’ll help you, but I will be resentful and hurried about it.  I think a lot of that is because I am afraid of hurting someone worse, and if I don’t touch them, I can’t hurt them.  The rest of it stems from how much I hate touching gross things, and getting my hands dirty.  Wound care is my idea of hell.  Having someone cough up bloody phlegm into a kleenex and then hand it to me is horrifying.  Guess what I’ve been doing.

At the hospital, it was hard, but there were real nurses there to do the things I could not force myself to do (like give a sponge bath around all the tubes sticking out of my mother’s body–oh my word.)  When I got her home, I had a very similar reaction to having brought Thor home from the hospital.  It went, “You cannot do this to me! I don’t know what I am doing!  I will accidentally kill her if you leave her in my care!”  I haven’t killed her, and haven’t even caused her significant hurt, but I’m still kind of wild-minded about the potential for damage I could cause.

My mother’s breastbone is glued and wired shut, and her chest is glued and stitched back together, and she has several other stitched up places where veins were transplanted.  She is healing well, and is doing better than I had expected, but she’s still a patient dealing with a nurse who has limited patience.

I’m pretty proud of myself that I have not lost my mind, or my temper.  Because, when you add all my ish about sick people to how much I hate for my mom to be sick, and the usual mother/daughter fun that comes of having been stuck in a small room together for 6 days, and going stir crazy from cabin fever for another 4, you have me primed for a dramatic meltdown. 

Now that I have my “space” back, in the form of being connected to my blog, I feel better.  It’s my own little bit of territory carved out, where I don’t have to worry about anyone other than myself. ME.  ALL ME!  ONLY CHILD ME!

I am so thankful my mother is alive, and I honestly don’t mind doing anything for her.  I just wish I were one of those kind people who enjoy caregiving, instead of being the kind of person who wants to just shove you out of the nest and yell, “Fly, sucker!”  My fantasy sibling loves nursing people back to healthy.

I just sent my mother back to surgery, and am sitting in a terribly uncomfortable chair in a waiting room, waiting. The good news is that I have a fully charged iPad, a bluetooth keyboard, and there is free coffee. It’s funny how much hospitals have changed since I was a candy striper. It’s funny how much technology has changed since then. In 1985, the only waiting room entertainment you got was an old National Geographic, and me. I think the chairs were more comfortable, though.

For now, I’m going to plug in my headphones and close my eyes.

Very nice reviews over at Ai Love Books and  Sapphyria’s Book Reviews today.  Also on Sapphyria’s blog, you can read up about my propensity to pretend I am smarter than I actually am.  Not that you haven’t already experienced this yourselves.

So, my book cover is a nice, strawberry ice-cream pink, with tiaras in the title and hanging off the title itself, and the back cover says pageant, pageant, pageant–I knew going in that this would be off-putting to hundreds of thousands of people, and it is exactly why I did not try to book any author events at the womyn’s bookstore.  I fully expected to attract a niche audience, though I hoped (still hope) to draw a larger group.

I have been so pleased, and so appreciative of the bloggers who have hosted my tour, and who have said things like, “I’m not a pageant person,” or, “I don’t like beauty pageants,” or “I never cared about pageants,” only to talk about how Destinee won them over.  I really love Destinee, and I’ve said I tried to write a character I wouldn’t mind taking on a road trip.  It feels really good when I see those reviews saying despite their initial misgivings, they enjoyed spending a few hours in the proverbial car with Destinee.

My mother has surgery next week, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be online.  No internet at her house (how?!) and the Starbucks down the street closed (seriously?!)  I will try to queue up a few entries, but if there’s radio silence, consider it a great time to read Tiara Trouble.

Oh, and to celebrate the Miss Universe pageant being held tomorrow night, Tiara Trouble goes on sale for Kindle on Saturday.  99 cents!  Go, Miss USA!

There is a happy little review of Tiara Trouble over on Brooke Blog’s today.  I’m glad she’s looking forward to the next installment!  So am I.  Now, if it would only cooperate, we could all be happy.

I’ve rewritten the first half of the book five times now.  I’m on the sixth iteration of it.  Each time I think, “This one is it!”  So far, I’ve been wrong.  Outside of making the plot iron out properly, I am very worried that the next one won’t be funny at all.  I’m afraid I used up all my pageant humor.  I definitely used up all my funeral humor.

Middle children are the rebels, though, right?  So if TIARA TROUBLE is the first born, and MISS MAYHEM is the problem child, then whatever the third one ends up being named should be the happy-go-lucky, adored baby of the family, yes?  I just need to get MISS MAYHEM born.

Meanwhile, I am awaiting word on the romance novel.  I use that term loosely.  Romance, I mean.  It’s definitely a novel.  I submitted it about a month ago, and got a request for the full manuscript about a week later.  Last week, I realized that I responded to the request for the full manuscript using the wrong subject line.  The publisher had asked for a very specific subject line.

When I saw that, I panicked and thought I’d either sent myself back to the slush pile, or I had ruined my chances by being careless.  I emailed an apology with the proper subject heading and got a response (on Friday) that the manuscript had made it through the first time, and was in the final stages of the submission process, and I’d hear from the publishing house within the next week.  Tomorrow marks the end of “within the next week.”  So, I’m watching my email like a hawk.

On the plus side, I do feel like with that submission I finally got the hang of the query process.  I think I have the hang of how to write a good synopsis, and have a decent grasp of the log line.  You know, words I rarely used in my everyday vernacular up until a few months ago.  Funny how every trade has its own language.