I spuddle.

Yesterday, Clayton took the kids to his mum’s such that I could spend Saturday polishing my toenails and watching Project Runway writing one of the five books that I’m currently writing.   I know I mention this all the time, but that’s because I also am baffled about why I’m writing five books at the same time.   After two years of not writing ANY books, to have five on the go is … I don’t know.    Hilarious?   And I keep having new ideas.    My brain is an idea fountain, a veritable VOLCANO OF IDEAS but I do not have the time to write all the books, ergo, overwhelming.    I am abandoning the YA about the undead (temporarily because it’s almost finished) because if I see another book about the undead or a vampire, I’m going to kill myself, so it seems counterintuitive to keep working on it at this time.   Which leaves four, two of which are finished but that I’m rewriting in little spurts because it’s impossible for me to leave them alone, much like it’s impossible to see the word “spurt” without thinking something unclean.

Which really leaves two, two books that I’m flipping back and forth between while I wait for the phone to ring but that’s a metaphor actually for waiting for an e-mail to appear*.    One is a YA that apparently involves a ghost although I didn’t intend it to when it started, it just happened, there was a ghost and what could I do?   I left the ghost.   At least she’s not a vampire or a zombie or a Freemason.  Now I guess it’s a ghost story.  It takes place in the 1980s which is hilarious to me because, guess what?   Indeed, I WAS IN HIGHSCHOOL IN THE 1980s.   Yes, I’m that old.    The music!  The HAIR!   My god, people, there is so much room for hilarity that I cannot believe I didn’t write a YA set in the 1980s prior to right now.   The other is “women’s fiction”.   All labels for genres that fit this book fill me with loathing and angst — “chick lit”? — so I won’t label it, but it’s pretty funny and involves reality TV and blogging and medical school and good hair.   I love reality TV.   And blogging.   And good hair.   Not so much the med school.   So what the hell, I’m going to be the 10,000th person to write a funny “women’s fiction” novel that involves reality TV and blogging.    Oh, I’m also working on a mystery.   I haven’t written anything on it for months though so it’s in suspended animation.   I hope I remember what I called the file because apparently until this moment I’d forgotten I was working on it.

Speaking of med school, this weekend marks the sixteenth anniversary of the Pizza That Changed My Life.    See, I was at school (UBC) doing premed (a BSC in physiology) crazily hurtling towards my goal (med school).    I was doing all sorts of other things, too.    Like running.   If you know me now and didn’t know me then, you’ve probably just hurt yourself laughing.   I know!   Who WAS I?    I will tell you:  I was a person who did not yet have degenerative disc disease, a fused ankle, and/or falling out lady parts.   I was all YOUNG and stuff.   Also, I had three jobs and went to school full-time.    And a small problem I like to call “never eating”.    Then, one fateful night, I ate a pizza that had been left out for a while.   The pizza gave me salmonella.   My body, which astonishingly was a tiny bit run down, did not know how to compute.   My electrolytes went crazy.   The room went grey and then disappeared.    CPR was administered.   An ambulance took me away.   By the time I’d recovered, I was behind in all my classes and could not catch up.    It was impossible.   I missed midterms and I’d already been barely keeping up with the jobs, the school, the INSANITY that was my life.   I moved home and started writing, only it wasn’t that tidy, I’m summarizing because this is a blog, not my life story, a little book I like to call, “I Don’t Remember All the Details, But…”

So Happy Anniversary of my Near Death Thanksgiving!    To celebrate, while Clayton and the kids ate at his mum’s last night, I opened the fridge and thoughtlessly re-heated some pizza that I thought was from the previous night.   THAT I THOUGHT WAS FROM THE PREVIOUS NIGHT.   It didn’t taste great but I was writing and not paying that much attention.   After the first piece though, I had a thought.   That thought was, “HOLY HELL, WE DIDN’T HAVE PEPPERONI PIZZA LAST NIGHT.”    This is what happens when you never clean out your fridge.   YOU CAN GET YOUR PIZZA LEFTOVERS CONFUSED AND ACCIDENTALLY EAT WEEK OLD PIZZA ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE WEEKEND WHEN OLD PIZZA NEARLY SENT YOU STRAIGHT TO THE PEARLY GATES WITHOUT PASSING GO OR COLLECTING $200.

Now?  I have a stomach ache.  I do.   It could be entirely psychosomatic or I could be about to die.   Either way, happy thanksgiving!   I hope you’re having turkey, unless you’re American, in which case you probably are not.   But maybe you wish you were.   I really have no idea.

*I am looking for a new agent.   I have made a list of agents, starting with the one I most want to have representing my PLETHORA OF BOOKS and working down the list from there.   I submit.   And now I wait.  But!  It’s just like how it isn’t cool to wait for the phone to ring when it’s a BOY, it’s also not cool to check your e-mail 750 times a day to see if an agent has responded to your query yet.   So even while you check your e-mail for the 751st time, you have to pretend to yourself  (because no one else actually cares or notices) that you aren’t checking to see if the agent has responded to your query, you are just casually looking, because checking SO OFTEN seems desperate, and everyone knows that agents — much like boys — can SMELL DESPERATION and you are not desperate, you are merely… curious.   Curious to see which agent in the Great Big Sea of Agents is going to be the one who is going to become WEALTHY AND SUCCESSFUL from the strength of your multiple book sales.   Curiousity.   Yep.   That’s all it is.

Filed under: Books, Me, Myself and I