WIP

So far this morning I have pounded out another 3,000 words to what may be an entirely useless chapter in my novel. I started out by writing a formal bio for Shay's boyfriend Jake so I could post it here for you guys, but then I sidetracked myself by being inspired to write in the actual novel. It can be quite draining because I mix in my own personal experience with Shay and then I start to think, Am I going to offend someone by writing this? What if they know that I'm referring to them in my novel?  Then I have to steer myself in the direction of simply not caring at this point. I'll worry about all that when it's finished. I'll revise as necessary. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing else I'd rather be doing, well, maybe plunging my toilet but this is truly what I want, no matter how daunting it may be at times. It's stuff like this that makes me think I'd be more fit to work at Starbucks or something. But then I come back into reality and realize I don't like people all that much and I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut. I was born with no filter and it seems that science has not quite gotten around to learning how to install them. You would think they'd get on that shit seeing as how it's such a common defect with people. So for the time being I know this is what I am meant to do.

On another note, I have been vigilant about writing and envisioning what my success will look like and for the most part it's been great. But there are some days when, and I know this sounds silly, it's just too much effort to pull myself from the dreggs of the quicksand that is my mind. Sometimes I just want to sit in my shit. I allow this for about fifteen minutes and then I force myself to write about my dream life. It eventually turns out well and I feel better and more inspired. I may break and go paint my furniture, which is also turning out better than I thought. Here's a picture of the top of the chest, the lid, I have started working on. It's no where near finished, but it's also a work in progress.

Or I do this. (Blog) This is my break from the fierce suction of emotion that Shay can take from me on occasion. This chapter in particular is her reminiscing about her childhood days. Phew! Can we get some happy going here? I'm trying to figure out how to make it a little lighter a bit more humorous.

Any suggestions?

Soul Mates Award

Look! Look! I got another award. I love awards. It's from my crony Terry Towery at A Writer of Wrongs. Thanks Terry. I would give this award to Terry if he hadn't already given it to me. He has been supportive and motivational on my writing journey and his blog is absolutely fantastic. He's a pretty interesting and entertaining guy. You should go check it out.
Okay, so the rules for this one are to pick five followers to give this to and make up big, fat lies about them. So, here goes...

First up is Meleah over at Momma Mia Mea Culpa who by the way recently won the title of Ms. Italy in their 2010 beauty pageant. She was an assassin for the Italian government, it's just like the Mafia, and was given the key to the Doritos factory where she had her last job. She eventually retired and decided to build a straw hut in the jungles of Columbia where she now stitches baseball's for a living. (Wink Wink).

Next is Kellie at Women's Life Link. She is a street performer at Piccadilly Circus in London and regularly shows off her mad snake charming skills by Eros. She had to flee the United States for taking her lion to the movies and she ripped the tag off of her mattress, but the worst part of it all was she was wearing her Wal-Mart clothes when she did it.




 

Third on the list goes to Dana and clearly has a guilty conscience because she blogs at Confessions of A Random Chick.  Confessions! I'll say. She moonlights as a clown and does parties for the retired community when she's not too busy sluggin' 'em back. Her day job is the only woman Matador in existence; the bullfighting kind not a jet-powered missile.

 

Fourth is Nancy at The Retired Biker Housewife. She is actually a Time Bandit and has met Coco Chanel when she traveled back to the 1920's. She was a part of the Women's Rights Movement and would frequent the speak easies with Zelda Sayre, Louise Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. When she traveled back to 1857 she gave Joself Gayetty an idea that led to the invention of toilet paper. Ten years later she gave Walter Alcock the idea to put it on a roll.

 And lastly is Wendy a.k.a.Quillfeather at W.M. Morrell's Musings From Down Under. She is an archaeologist who was present when the red granite head of Amenhotep III was recently discovered. She was so enraged that she cast a spell on the archaeologists that stole her thunder. She turned them into Aye-Aye's and they haven't been heard from since.

It was hard to pick only five because there a few more I would have liked to include and you know who you are. You're next up if I get another award from somewhere. ;) I love all you guys.

~Live Happy

Domain

I bought my domain name so the blogspot part of the URL is removed. The URL is now just
http://amuseinmypocket.com

It will still direct you to my blog even if you use the old domain name but some of the gadgets won't work, like the Follow Me button. So if you have me listed on your side bar as blogs you follow please take out the blogspot part, if you would be so kind.

Shay ~ Character Bio

Shay was a vivacious, curious child. She is a free spirit but it’s hindered by all of the voices from the past. Shay had a heart that spoke loud and clear to her and she always listened to it without question. There was no difference between her heart and her mind, they were in perfect alignment with each other. It never mattered to her much what others said; teachers, mom, grandparents, etc... Although, she liked what her grandfather had to say because she respected him and he protected her and allowed her to be who she was.

Shay lived in the moment, as most children do, regardless of the grown-ups always trying to pull her out of it. She wasn’t big on rules but she would never cause harm. She wanted to be friends with everyone and didn’t understand the pettiness that went on to cause her friends and family to fight with each other or get mad at her.

To Shay, life was magical. She holds a secret that many forget. Life is meant to be fun and lived to the fullest. Anyone can do anything they want. Life was a wonderful gift and Shay was determined to explore every aspect of now and waste no time with meaningless chatter about history and algebra. She didn’t care how a plus b equaled c. She didn’t care that a guy named Christopher Columbus discovered America; maybe. She could have cared less about the extensive detail of any war that ever took place. And most of all, Shay couldn’t understand how anyone could teach anything and name it as fact, when they weren’t there to experience it themselves. Her most prominent thought was usually, How do you know? You don’t know. You weren’t there. Shay wanted to explore and live in what our predecessors made possible. That’s how she would show her appreciation to them. She would live to the fullest in her freedom.

She ignored and avoided anything that seemed to cause strife and anger; which was almost everything. Shay could not stand negativity. It seemed the world was overrun by these types of people. This left Shay alone quite a bit and she didn’t like to be alone. But she would rather be alone than surrounded by assassins.

Shay had a very strong and powerful way about her that she was unaware of. Shay disagreed with her mother most of the time; or maybe it was that her mother disagreed with her. She couldn’t understand why the mom would come home every day, miserable and angry, complaining and crying about her job and the people she worked with. Shay couldn’t comprehend why the mom would go back to a place every single day that she hated. Why didn’t she do something she loved?

As a result of her view on life, Shay was continually treated as if something was wrong with her while growing up. When she became a teenager, she was pretty well programmed subconsciously to feel as if she were defunct and irreparable from the inside out. This is when her mind and heart separated. She began receiving conflicting messages within herself. As she got older, she was in conflict a lot with her view of the world and the way others saw it. Things became more difficult for Shay and it wasn’t fun anymore. Her self-confidence started to decline and she was angry a lot of the time. They had succeeded in breaking her spirit and she didn’t even know it.

In 7th grade she met someone that understood her and seemed to bring the fun back. She smoked her first joint with B. This is where things really started to go downhill for Shay. She found an escape from the misery at home and she wasn’t willing to let it go. This led to a series of erroneous events that included, rehab, medication, an overdose, more rehab, plenty of arrests and eventually leaving home. She was determined to find the joy that she knew existed in life. She also knew she wouldn’t find it living with her mother and her mother’s husband. This is where she began her journey of self-exploration, many mistakes and finding her own happiness; so she thought.

Because Shay had little coping skills and lack of direction she had to find things out the hard way. Life was not turning out the way she wanted. Living an oxymoron of a carefree, confident junkie was not what Shay had in mind for her life. Still not caring what people think and still not big on following the rules, Shay does what she wants. Yet another phase in her life of self-exploration because she decides once again, that this is not the life she was meant to live. She had visions of her life and this wasn’t it. She knew she could have it all, she just didn’t know how. But she was ready to learn once again.

Poop Doodie

It turns out it has been nice enough all week so that the poop that has accumulated in my back yard was sun dried enough to finally pick up. Yay! And I wanted to get it picked up before the next snow. It snowed last November and my yard has been covered in a two foot blanket of snow up until last week.

I put on my picking up poop shoes, double wrapped my hand in Jewel bags, and grabbed an extra  one to put the poop in. Well it turns out that I needed a 13 gallon garbage bag to hold all the dried up white turds.

I forged into the battle field and the shit was abundant. I would put the bag down, bend over and scoop. As I was dropping the duty into the bag, I would see another pile out of my peripheral vision. I would pivot my foot and turn without standing up. This went on until the area I could reach without moving the bag was entirely poop free. I would stand and scope out my next site, which was only two steps away. And I repeated this process for about an hour.  There was poop everywhere I looked! It seemed to go on for miles.

I would tip toe around the yard walking slowly and quietly, with my infra-poop goggles, so I could do a sneak attack on any left over doggie muffins in the yard.

The task finally ended and I had to double bag the garbage bag. Lifting it into the big can was no small feat let me tell you. I'm just under five foot four and the can's opening is almost that. So to lift a fifty pound bag of shit without a big scene was quite the art form. Mission accomplished. Thanks for stopping by.

I would have put a picture up for you but I didn't want to over do it. Plus, it gets your imagination muscles working. ;)

Insert head here

This is what I feel like most of the time. Once I remove my head, I'm sure things will start flowing.(Ha! No pun intended, I swear. I just got that myself).
Between, writing articles, fiction, non-fiction and painting furniture, I get lost in what I'm really doing. I'm having fun, don't get me wrong, but I am still getting to know myself in this free state of mind and play. It's not really free. Everything has to come with a bit of discipline. It's hard to be your own authority figure, especially when you don't like authority.

But for now here's the article that was written in accordance with the interview.
My friend Terry Towery, did some editing for me. Go check it out, if you haven't already.
Human Trafficking: Sex Slavery In America

~Live Happy

2,000 words today so far.

All Over The Place

Shay seems to be on hold right now. 

I am side tracked with other things. My self-discipline seems to have gone awry. Another writing project came up and I can't seem to stop myself from writing it. This was the first writing project I started but didn't feel like writing it so I tried to write something else. My first project haunts me on a regular basis. This is why I have decided to give in and go with what needs to be written first, whether I want to or not. It's one of those things where, as I was writing, the question would come up, "What is the purpose of this?" Then I would send myself into a tailspin of many reasons why I shouldn't write it. Well, I've finally decided to just do it.

I was able to manage 1600 words on the first day, 8,000 yesterday, and 1500 today so far.

In the mean time here is a link to my very first interview:  
The Barnaba Institute: A Non-Profit Organization Helping Victims of Human Trafficking

There is another article posted that I had written but for some reason, it's keeps telling me it's missing the content, so as soon as this is corrected, I will post the link here.

The more people that click on my article, the more I get paid. ;) ;) So pass it on.

~Live Happy

Update on the trip

I have been avoiding telling all of you this, but here goes.

We did not go to Bike Week, Daytona Beach and Key West as we had planned. Before you put your sad faces on for me, it was a decision I made, because financially it would have caused me great distress and more of the no sleep thing. Couldn't have that.

By the way, the sleep is wonderful. We bought a brand new beautiful, luxurious bed made of bamboo and recycled materials. It is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. I also took Melatonin for a couple of weeks and wrote many jibberish pieces. I'm still not quite sure what that was all about, but it's over for now. Phew! Okay, back to my road less traveled.

The guy who was going to marry us on the beach in Key West said we have a year to fulfill that commitment before the money is lost. It was a relief to find out that we still had that time. So that lifted my spirits a bit.

I know without a doubt that this is the man I am to spend my life with. This is the man I am to grow and learn with so the getting married thing is just a technicality. I know it will happen and there is no rush. Besides, the weather in the Keys was terrible the week that we had planned on being there. It was cold and windy, so it was a blessing in disguise that it all turned out the way it did.

This was probably one of the most responsible choices I have made in my life, so I did learn something from all of this. I learned that I am not as irresponsible and impulsive as I thought I was. Or maybe it's just a change that took place over time and I had an opportunity to apply it.

When we do make it there to get married on the beach, I'll be sure to post pictures and share our adventures with all of you. Maybe I'll be able to get my five gallon tanks on the bike before we go. (And lose fifteen pounds).

My millions is on the way, so I won't have to worry about this stuff for much longer.

~Live Happy

My Life Coach

Hello to all of you. I've missed you so.

Okay, so, for the last six weeks I have been working with a life coach. Something I have always wanted to do, but would not allow myself the luxury. 

As of late, an opportunity was presented to me and I jumped at it.  
It has been an eye opening experience and it is not for the faint of heart.  Or the lazy.

Being willing to take responsibility for our lives and our actions is a must in this process. 
Being open to suggestion and then applying it is a must (if change is to be made).  


It is freeing to know that I am in control of my life, regardless of the past. The past is all an illusion. It's gone. I can change my mind at any time and start over at any moment in my day, no matter what! How frackin' great is that?!


Kellie, at Women's Life Link, has been absolutely wonderful. She has such a kind and gentle voice. I feel no judgment at all when I talk to her. She has helped me in more ways than I thought would be possible. More ways than she probably knows. 


I guess this is why they call it a Life Coach. It can be life changing. It has helped me get through some blocks and barriers that I have been struggling with for most of my life. But here's the catch; you only get out of it, what you put into it. 

I have realized that I have to be completely honest with her if she is going to give me the direction that I truly need. If I'm not honest, the only person I am hurting is myself. So, it only benefits me to tell the truth. 

This is definitely a 50/50 relationship. I give her information, she gives me direction based on that information. I apply the direction that is given to me and then we talk about it on our next scheduled call. Accountability. Yet another wonderful motivator for me. 


My attitude has changed, my perception has changed, therefore, my actions change and then my reality changes. Quite simple, but not easy. 


If anyone would like to give her website a look, you can find it here.


Well, that's all for now. 


~Live Happy