Ghost-of-a-Chance

People love saying, “Love is blind.” I have to disagree. I think love is looking at someone, knowing that somewhere out there, a tree gave its all to ensure they have air to breathe, and feeling feel sorry for the tree…and knowing you’d burn a whole forest to the ground if a single tree took offense at supplying your idiot with oxygen. 

I love my husband. He’s an idjit, but he’s my idjit. I’d love him even if he had to be reminded to breathe.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite (age-appropriate and modern) books described a place as “a screen door town.” The explanation was that every time something happened, no matter how trivial or innocuous, every screen door up and down the street would open and slam shut twice in a ripple effect—once when the occupants came out to snoop, and again when, having discovered it was unimportant, they went back inside. 

Last year, Cold and I moved into “a lawnmower neighborhood”—meaning every day, there’s at least one person outside mowing somewhere on the block, and most days, their neighbors join in whether or not they need to mow, and the ripple travels further and further until everyone in earshot is mowing. Cold and I sleep during the day and we can only deal with the lawn very early or on his days off, so the constant mowing is a sore point. 

Well, earlier today, I heard the mowing start up again while I was trying to drudge through beta-reading a chapter from someone who might not have proofread first. As close as the mower sounded, I figured it must be that one neighbor who has an overpowered mower and an undersized lawn. I suffered through reading the same sentence half a dozen times, then stormed into the kitchen to get some tea and wait it out. When I heard Cold come through the door, I started ranting about “whatever asshole is mowing this time can kiss my ass” and a few things otherwise.

Then I saw him and I froze. My husband was sweaty and covered in grass clippings. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Asshole. I mowed your lawn. Prepare to give me butt.” 

Awhile back, someone on a random Reddit post suggested I might be neurodivergent. I’d only heard the term used for people with autism – yes, I live under a rock – so my initial response was disgruntlement. My husband, after all, is autistic, and I had a mental image of the time he met my prudish religious neighbor for the first time and made a joke about his dick; if we were both that awkward outwardly instead of just on the inside, we’d be a right mess. There was also a sidenote of, “shit, I’m even more fucked up than Cold, how dare this person compare him to me? He doesn’t deserve that insult!” indignance. 

Come to find out “neurodivergent” applies to several diagnoses and disabilities; it applies to most (any?) condition resulting from deviations in how the brain is wired...including mine. Apparently, I am neurodivergent. So is Cold. So many things make sense now. That Redditor was right and I had no idea.

That said...I’ve been editing a chapter of my novel with Boney M.’s “Rasputin” playing on repeat for...uh...an hour? ...or three? Because it’s stuck in my head? Okay, so maybe there were signs. Maybe. 

Cicadas when I’m trying to write late at night: “I respect you and want you to succeed, so let me sit on your window and scream about it.”

I just opened my office window and told the damned bugs on the screen to go get laid somewhere else because I couldn’t think straight from their noise. Our neighbors probably think I’m nuts. Meh. They drive ugly cars; people who drive ugly cars don’t get an opinion on my sanity or lack thereof.

If life could just take a break from randomly skull-fucking me for once—or at least schedule a time and ask consent—yeah, that’d be great.  (In which Ghost is a cis-woman who gets sick like a man and requires medical intervention on the regular and inevitably ends up with horrible cramps AND yet another random household crisis, all at the same time.) I’ll live. I feel like roadkill, but I’ll live. 

The other day, I noticed a draft coming through gaps in a few of our windows (it’s an older house, but not old enough to have been built well) which led me to this long list of actions:

Find appropriate sealant. Fix one window (it looks like a toddler finger painted with dad’s tools but whatever) and move onto the next. Prep window frame. Realize the windowsill was probably last cleaned in the 90s and is full of grease, lint, dust, and animal hair. (Hurk) Decide you don’t want to seal that junk into permanence with something that dries clear. Grab cleaner and scrub the gap clean with a bristle brush (cleaner sprays brown crap everywhere, barf) and knock loose some paint that may have been white back in the 80s. Realize the cleaner will need to be rinsed out and the paint touched up before sealing the gap.

Give up. Sit on the couch and question your life choices while staring at the tube of sealant and convince yourself that cussing at inanimate objects is immature and you’re better than that. (I’m really not.)

Realize that the entire time, you were standing in the window with the blinds open and the lights on at night wearing a man’s shirt and no bra with People-of-Walmart hair, and your next door neighbor is out on their porch watering their plants…at night.

Homeownership would definitely keep my millennial ego in check if it ever got big enough to worry about.

Would anyone be up for a second opinion on a single chapter of a work in progress? I don’t really need any editing. (…unless someone notices a missing word or comma both I AND my editing app missed.) I asked on Reddit and got a reply, but they ghosted me. Ghosting someone who goes by “Ghost” is a bit on the nose, but whatever. It was a dick move.

To put this as simply and briefly as possible, my brain got fried with the packing, moving, and all that entailed. I had no time to write. Now that I have time, my brain is struggling to switch back to non-crisis mode—the storms and renovations aren’t helping—and focus. It’s stuck in a hamster wheel of “so tired/gotta keep working/where’s the box tape/shit, is that bug something to worry about/fuck, my ass hurts, why do I hurt so much,” and so forth. My writing muscles are atrophied to noodles and I’m struggling to get sentences out. I’m not really happy with the second half of my most recent work, the flow, or the pacing. It’s been well over a year since I updated the story, and I won’t even get started on the delay my others are experiencing. If anyone can help, I’d appreciate it more than my fried brain can express.

This can be a one-off, and I’m happy to correspond by Google Docs. The chapter has some cursing and questionable humor but nothing really dirty; the bulk of it, sans headings and notations, is just over 3,100 words, and I’ve already done what I can for editing. You shouldn’t run into any mistakes. Also, if you’ve read any of my other writing, I’m not writing any accents or using non-English language aside from a couple of words in elvish. I’m trying to keep this story simple, easy, and posted in small bites unlike my usual approach to writing. Fandom is Dragon Age: Inquisition; I’ve got the other chapters posted in the archive if anyone is morbidly curious.

Earlier tonight, I fed one of my non-fanfiction short stories through Pro Writing Aid’s “chapter critique” to see how it measures up against my fanfiction. I never thought I’d see the day when AI would smut-shame me.

Yep. Seriously. “…some might find the level of detail in the sex scenes excessive.” What if I don’t wanna associate with that sort of person, huh? Fade to black is for wishy-washy people and FFN, not my filthy shapeshifter plowfest. Stay in your lane or bend over.

Kids these days will never experience many of the rites of passage my generation valued more than gold. For instance: saving up your allowance for three weeks during the summer so you can buy one of those giant plastic Pixie Stix at the public pool’s canteen and downing the whole thing in one go to use it as a snorkel and spending the rest of the month with a burning feeling in the back of your throat that tastes like cherries, chlorine, and stale pee. 

…those lucky saps.

There are many unmentioned benefits to marrying your best friend…benefits such as them bringing you a cat to cuddle because said cat got too comfy in their lap and ripped a loud, wet, nasty fart.
Yep, it was Heiferlump. Also yes, Cold did run away cackling afterward. Boys. 

Well, y’all, we finally did it. We’re moving to a new house in my hometown! And nobody died in it so I should be the only Ghost there! 

Going on hiatus sucks, for sure, but I’m still so happy I could squeal. Heifer and Woozle are predictably unenthused, but cats don’t get a vote. This area has gotten too damned expensive and dangerous for us, and I’m tired of being homesick. Fortunately, the Woozle-bug already has a great vet in the city to help with his health problems (the scariest of which is showing some improvement, yay!) and Heiferlump? She’s going to have an entire neighborhood to give her attention when she inevitably convinces them she’s stuffed then moves. (Yep. It’s gonna happen. She’s got a history. We expect heart attacks on the regular.)

Now if we can just finish everything early in the year so I can get back to writing! 

Just now, I saw something absolutely smoking hot on the internet. I mean, she was a seriously sexy beast—the kind of beauty I see in my dreams and drool over in centerfolds, regardless of whether I’m in public. If I encountered her on the street, I would absolutely embarrass myself, stare like a loon, and profess my undying adoration to her. 
 

A wolf-whistle, three muttered “damns,” and a couple of impressed tongue-clicks later, my husband gave in. Cold sighed, rolled his eyes, and grumbled, “just show me the car.”

He knows me so well. 😆 It was, in fact, a classic muscle car—a ‘67 Oldsmobile Tornado. In my defense the lines on this bad girl are what wet dreams are made of, and I pity Cold for his lack of taste. It’s a sad way to live.

Y’all, my husband needs a warning label. I’m sitting here, sucking on a peppermint and minding my business with headphones on—the better to block out his party chat trash-talk—and I hear THIS: “You ain’t had pussy since you came out a pussy.”

I don’t know who was laughing louder, the recipient of the burn, Cold, or me, but I very nearly had a Star-Brite lodged in my throat.   This guy kills me.

Whoever has the Ghost Chance voodoo doll right now, if they could give it a break, that would be nice. I don’t want to share details, lest my family find this site, recognize those details, and realize it’s me—right now, the last thing I need is a mass-shunning because I’m bi in a family of homophobes. But…

Woozle. Our cat, Woozle. The little bag-obsessed orange garbage-baby. Our sweet, smelly, mouthy, single-braincell-bearing fur-son. That Woozle. We just found out he’s incredibly sick, the kind of sick that creeps in without warning, may not even show, and will eventually end his life. Right now, he’s still healthy and happy enough that his quality of life isn’t in question, but that could change without much notice. It could be a few years, or a few days, or who knows how long, but my little monster is terminally ill, and I’m a fucking mess right now. We’re doing everything we can, but there’s not much we can do to begin with.

So. Yeah. Give your pets some cuddles for me. I’m probably going to go cry again because this fucking sucks.

No. No. HAY-ell to the no!  We have had enough fucking tornadoes  here for several lifetimes, and I’m fed the fuck up with them. 🤬

Yes. Tornado in 2011. Tornado several years ago. Tornado last month, and another last freaking night. Yes. Last night. My family, husband, and I are all safe, and I believe all our friends are safe. We didn’t live within the danger zone this time, but my PTSD was already kicking up over the season and impending trauma-versary. This? This is going to give me night terrors. Again. Can’t have Ghost go more than a month without dreaming about Cold dying a bloody, gruesome, tragic death in her arms, now can we? 😭 It’s a good thing I put everything on hiatus because I’m barely able to function right now, and it’s just gonna get worse.

If you see this post and you live in the United States, take this as your cue to go buy a weather radio and keep it on and stocked with batteries. The sirens in my hometown didn’t go off, and they weren’t sounded in another nearby town last month. Weather alerts on your phone won’t go off if the cellular network fails, and you can’t count on hearing the sirens, and a tornado can happen anytime of the year, on any continent, given the right conditions. If you’re looking for volunteer opportunities, there are several communities that are going to need help over the next week or so.

Seriously. Fuck tornadoes.

It’s never an easy decision to make, but I’ve had to make it: all my active stories are now officially on hiatus. 

Nothing (very) bad’s happened – at least, this time around, nobody is dead, dying, or terminally ill. Life’s just thrown us a curveball and Cold and I are even busier than usual. Most days, I barely have the energy to handle day-to-day work, let alone time and energy to write. Heck, I haven’t even gotten anything written on my most recent chapter of my novel in a few months now; that’s how crazy it’s been lately. Since my fanfiction may not be updated anytime soon, I decided to head it off at the pass before readers start deciding I’m dead.

...yes. That’s always a possibility, considering how infrequently I can update.

It sucks, but better to give myself permission to not write than continue to bludgeon the desktop with my head when my brain is too stress-fried to write. On FFN and AO3, I put notes in my current stories, and updated the summaries of the stories that have fallen by the wayside. AFF frowns on author’s notes as chapters, so I’m not sure where to go beyond adding something to the summaries.

I hope the fanfiction writer’s curse has missed more of y’all than it’s hit, that spring is treating you well, and that this doesn’t last too many months. Now if any of y’all need me, I’ll be in my burrito-blanket muttering there’s no place like home and fuck-this-shit-I’m-out.

So. Is it colder than a witch’s cunt where y’all are, too? No? Just us? Muh-zurr-uh’s done froze over, folks. 

That moment when you keep hearing a soprano velociraptor playing one-sided Marco Polo out in the hallway and realize, oh, no, it’s just the Velcro cat wailing pitifully because you locked him out of the office. 
Woozle. Because of course, it’s Woozle. Never mind that I locked him out because I have cramps, a headache, and writer’s block, and I don’t feel up to fending off his usual shenanigans. By Shenanigans, I mean shaking slobber everywhere, whining, trying to insinuate his fat butt between the desk and my rack, and trying to scale Mount Mom’s-Desk and causing a landslide.

Kid, Mama needs to work! Stay in your box!

Y’all, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. I’m editing a new chapter of A New Lease on Life <500 words at a time with ProWritingAid, and the Readability checker gave me such a double take I heard my neck crack. I posted a screenshot on Tumblr because pics or it didn’t happen.

An (admittedly wordy) paragraph got a hard to read flag. Everything is spelled correctly, but it has several big words regarding language and its various parts and traits. You know. Words like consonants, syllables, dialects, and pronunciation. Hard, however, seems excessive.

Right above this paragraph is one marked easy to read. The entire thing is written in (intentionally) misspelled Scots and Scots-Gaelic that gave the spelling and grammar checker a stroke…and it’s easy to read…

…what…the actual…fuck… 

While my husband fed the cats a moment ago, I squirted the younger one’s liquid medicine down his throat. Woozle, the little shit, let half the dose drip out of his mouth and roll down my shirt and shorts. I grumbled about it—because that medicine stains, turns into tar, and smells like rotten fish a roadkill—and what did Cold say?

”Well. Pussy likes to dribble.”

 I married this clown. I married him. (He’s not wrong, though.)

Using AI to edit your smut can be so wild. ProWritingAid decided that this sentence…

Quote

Kai’e’ie is insatiable—ravenous, breath-stealing, and covetous—and its expression is primal and passionate fucking.

…needs this correction: 

Quote

Kai’e’ie is insatiable—ravenous, breath-stealing, and covetous—and its expression is primal and passionate about fucking.

I mean, sure, I’m as passionate about fucking as anyone, but that isn’t quite what I was going for there. I can only assume the algorithm assumed Kai’e’ie is a name rather than an emotion and that I was trying to make small talk instead of comparing two different emotional states—Kai’e’ie versus mi’lee’veez—related to intimacy. (Kai’e’ie’: combined from syllables from words meaning love, say, life, and bond; combined, the meaning is, literally love said, life-bound, or figuratively, without you, I die. The fictional people who created this word are apparently as dramatic as I can write them. Mi’lee’veez: the root words in their entirety and proper order mean my dream heart. Sappity-sap-sop, someone get a mop.)

This is what I get for creating a fictional language for my novel. 🙄 J.R.R., you’re a horrible influence.