On Chaos and Platitudes

I owe you some winnahs!

From Skye's post about rejection, the winner is Cherie J! Cherie, we love you, please have a book to ease the pain of getting fired on your birthday! How totally harsh! Email me at sonja@sonjafoust.com with your address and the book of your choice from my inventory at BookMooch and I'll send it to you.

From my post about my blue hair (which is still blue and getting bluer, by the way), the winner is Amy S.! Amy, email me at sonja@sonjafoust.com with your address and I will get The Shoe Queen by Anna Davis in the mail for you. Hopefully it will erase all bad memories of the Wal-Mart highlights.

My writing world has been suffering of late, mostly because the rest of my life is (or rather was) in a bit of an upheaval too. But this weekend I managed to clean my house which just makes life seem so much better. I also hopped on the bandwagon and joined FlyLady. I always kind of thought I didn't need platitudes to keep my house clean, but it turns out I sort of do. So, um, thanks FlyLady, even though I'm kind of embarrassed about signing up. But not as embarrassed as I was about my CHAOS: Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. And now I'm FLYing: Finally Loving Yourself... uh... Myself... or something. (Do you see now what I mean about the platitudes? FlyLady is chock full of them, lucky for me.)

So anyway, now that my house is no longer a disaster, I can get down to the business (fun business) of writing! So here are my upcoming goals:

Numba One
Edit Lying Eyes
Submit
Deadline: August 15


Numba Two
Finish Courting the Preacher's Daughter
Figure out where to submit
Submit

Numba Three
Write a Regency (Skye even promised to critique it, even though she doesn't read Regencies.)

You all have my full permission to beat me with a wet noodle on August 15 if I cannot provide you with a touching tale of how I've edited at least the first three chapters of Lying Eyes and sent it off for Cerridwen to hold onto for like 90 days or something ridiculous like that.

So what about you? What are your upcoming goals, writing or otherwise? Are you going to finish that home improvement project? Read War and Peace? Join FlyLady with me? Spill.

A Hairy Weekend

It's my turn to post again, but I was just giving you all some time to mull over whether you want to leave a comment on Skye's post and win some stuff. So I'm giving you an extension. You have, like, another 2 days to scroll down and leave a comment on her post and win an unnamed (but totally awesome) prize. Do eet.

I have nothing exciting to share with you besides the fact that I dyed my hair. In fact, I don't even think I've told Skye about this yet. Whoops. Well, we'll call it even since she's been withholding big important pieces of news from me too. Because my hair is totally big important news.

Anyway, the change-my-hair bug bit me on Friday night. I looked through my "emergency" stash of hair dyes and found a lovely midnight black and an equally lovely platinum blonde. The platinum blonde I'd never attempted before because my hair is naturally dark and platinum blonde usually turns puke orange on my head. But, somehow, I convinced myself that this time, it would be different, and I was going to do a strip of blonde in front a la Rogue from X-Men and the rest in black. I was very professional about it. I used foil and everything.

The professionalism wore off a little when the peroxide sort of oozed into my eyeballs in the shower and I screamed, "Oh my god it burns!" I don't imagine professionals do that too often. Still, I soldiered on. By the paltry light of nighttime, it didn't look too bad.

By the illuminating light of morning, my poor retinas screamed again, this time in fear. What had I done? The funkadellic streak I'd been going for was, in fact, white at the roots and pink everywhere else. Jeez. Not only that, but I'd managed to miss large swaths of hair with the black dye, so I had a pink and white strip in front and chunks of black and chunks of faded red in the back. I cried. A lot. And then put on a hat and went to the store to buy another box of midnight black.

Saturday night, I dyed my whole head midnight black, hoping to correct the pink strips and the red chunks. It's slightly better now, but there was an unintended side effect: The blue undertones of the black hair dye show up a LOT on the parts of my roots that turned white from the platinum blonde dye. So now my hair is mostly black... with navy blue strips in front.

I give up though. Funkadellic blue strips it will be. (Thankfully, you can't see the blue too much in this picture. Hopefully that's what it really does look like and not the electric blue I imagine it to be. Although my boss said to me this morning, "Your hair is less blue today." Um. Thank you?)

Make me feel better: Tell me your worst hair disaster story and be entered in the running for The Shoe Queen by Anna Davis.

Boredom = Danger

Like Sonja, I often change my hair based on what's happening. But usually, i do it in tune with how bored I am, instead of how many rejections I get (i get so many, i'd be bald in a few days, so it's safer that way).

Boredom, as my parents can tell you, is not good for me. Or those around me. I've been known to pester, poke, prod, plague, provoke and uh... other things to people nearby when i'm bored.

At any rate, I like to think i'm growing out of that, but who knows. Those who know me best are probably more able to tell that.

I know, i know, those of you out there in Blog Land are saying "Well, just write when you're bored." But dang it. Haven't you ever been so bored you can't do anything? Boredom sucks motivation. You could have 14 things to do and still find yourself bored and unable to do anything anyone suggests.

Me: I'm booooooooored.
My mom: Read a book.
Me: No.
My mom: Watch a movie.
Me: No.
My mom: Go for a walk.
Me: No.
My mom: Well, at least stop harrassing your brother.

For example.

Still, i've at least gotten over the habit of changing my hair whenever i get bored. I used to dye it different colors and cut it when serious boredom with my lifestyle came upon me. But i haven't done that in quite some time. Maybe i'm maturing!

Want to know a secret? I haven't been working on my book as much as i should be lately. Know why? I've been bored. Not even the world in my imagination is enough to get me out of a bored funk. Look out world!

'Do Don'ts

A writer friend once pointed out to me how often I change my hair. I laughed and responded that I always do something new with my hair when I get a rejection. She understood then.

Well, Saturday I had my first non-rejection hair appointment in a long while. I got the red kicked up a bit and the chunky front pieces blended back in.


I was pretty pleased with myself and my non-rejection 'do yesterday.

But in a cruel twist of fate, guess what I found in my inbox this afternoon. Go on, guess.

Yep. A rejection. (They didn't like puma man. How could you not like puma man, huh?)

I think that from now on, I'm going to have to not get my hair done while I have a submission out. This could get hairy. Heh. [The audience groans, the band tries to help with a funny sound effect, it totally doesn't work.]

What about you? Have any silly superstitions?

Mine Is Bigger

To all who were worried about why Skye never submitted Misdirection, her manuscript of action and intrigue, to The Wild Rose Press, don't worry, I've goaded her into finishing her edits and submitting, mostly just so she can say "nyah nyah I'm published too and mine is bigger." What, you thought we were above that sort of thing? Nevah.

Also, we could collectively make peoples' brains explode with our awesomeness, were we to come at you from the same ePublisher. That's my theory anyway.

We'd have to work on that whole separation of identity thing though. I'm pretty sure at least half of HCRW thinks we are the same person, which I guess is understandable in a group socializing mostly via email. We are both S.F.s (which is so 5, by the way), we both use gmail, and we're both twenty-somethings who use the word "awesome" a whole lot. (Alright, Nora Roberts, I admit that you were correct in writing your last twenty-something heroine's dialogue with the word "awesome" sprinkled liberally in lieu of real adjectives. We twenty-somethings suck at adjectives.) It doesn't matter that Skye has way awesomer boo-- uh-- hair than me and we really look nothing alike, because people only "see" us via email.

So, here's a visual aid to separate ourselves a bit for our faithful blog minions:

Sonja:

Skye:

Sonja:

Skye:

Sonja:

Skye:

Helpful, no? Everything all cleared up now? Good.

Sass-pot Returns

Just so you know what an awesome friend I am, instead of helping Skye load a large Uhaul full of stuff to move on Saturday, I instead spent almost 5 hours getting my hair dyed and cut. I'm awesome like that. (Check out my blog for pictures.) I hadn't intended to be there quite that long, but it was totally worth it because (1) the haircut doesn't suck; (2) the dye looks really good; (3) the instructor who checked my hair at the end said I looked like a "sass-pot" and I don't know what that means, but it totally made my day. But, um, I would have loved to load a Uhaul instead. Really.

Yes, so then after my marathon haircut, Romeo and I went out and bought a treadmill. If we both use it every day for 10 months, it will have paid for itself, because we quit our gym membership and bought the treadmill instead. Any bets on how long it will take both of us to use it for 10 months worth of days? I'm guessin' longer than 10 months. But I don't know. Maybe we'll both be magically inspired to use it, now that it's there. Romeo says he's going to damn well use it just because it was such a pain in the butt to drag into the house and assemble. (I swear to god that thing has got to weigh like 800 pounds. It's freaking heavy.)

So those are the two things I did do this weekend.

I did not:

(1) Help my bestest buddy move her shit;
(2) Feel overly guilty about not helping my bestest buddy move her shit, though I feel a little guilty about not feeling guilty;
(3) Clean the bathrooms;
(4) Do the laundry;
(5) Eat anything that might be construed as healthy.

Hm. I'm so 5.