Month: March 2012

  • Plllllbbbbbtttt

    The other day, Liz Poole IM’d me and was like, “OH MY GOD ARE YOU STILL AWAKE?”

    And I was like, “YES. YES I AM.”

    Because Internet, I am still not sleeping. As in, at all. As in, the shadows are moving. As in, this would be kind of cool if it were in a movie and not in the real world. As in, hold me, Internet. Hold me.

    I’ve mentioned before that I have three or four really good hours in which I’m all GO GO GO! like the zhu zhu motorized hamster Marilyn bought for the cats Christmas of 2009. That’s more or less still accurate, only instead of GO GO GO! it’s CRY CRY CRY!  Because apparently the feeling like shit is the new black. Who knew?

    I say these things not so people will feel bad or to induce pity, but because these days, mind-altering drugs are passed out like freaking antibiotics. Can’t sleep? Try this pill. That pill makes you crazy? Try this one. And there’s a lot they don’t tell you about these pills. Crazy things. Frightening things. Things that would make you reconsider whether or not you just needed to work out more before bedtime or maybe lay off the caffeine. Because hey, what would be the fun in that?

    I remember being sixteen years old and going to my doctor and telling him I didn’t like to take Paxil because it made my face twitch and my mouth taste funny. And my doctor was like, “You’re just saying that for attention.”

    And then it came out that Paxil had been known to cause convulsions in women during the first six months of use.

    Because Paxil sucks, yo.

    Anyway, so the no sleeping thing. It got so bad that last week I went to do a sleep study, and the doctor there was all, “So here is a list of medications. Check off the ones you’ve tried. If you tried a medication that was over the counter, or an herbal remedy, or something not listed here, you can use the slots at the bottom to fill in your answer.”

    And I was like, “Wait, I’m going to need another notebook, Mr. Doctor Sir, because that is how many medications I have been on.”

    And then he gave me a horse tranquilizer and I slept for eighteen hours.

    Which is good except for the part where I haven’t slept but hardly at all since.

    And this not sleeping thing? It totally sucks. I think it sucks worse than any other kind of being sick.

    Because at least when I’m out with the flu or strep throat, there’s this assurance that either I’ll get better or die from it.

    But with insomnia? Fat chance. Even when I do manage to get some sleep, I always wake up anxious. Because what if that was a fluke? What if I never ever get to sleep ever again?

    What if I go back to the sleep doctor and he’s like, “I can’t give you any more horse pills, ma’am. Because I think you’re only here for attention.”

    It affects every aspect of your life, too. Like how my house looks like a bomb’s been dropped on it, because with the not sleeping and all, I can’t be bothered to feed myself, let alone sweep a floor.

    But the worst part of it is that when I’m sleep-deprived, my defenses go to shit and I start telling myself things. Things I should never, ever be telling myself. It’s like living with a bully in my head. Or worse, my mother.

    Which is why it’s such a good thing that America’s Next Top Model is back with new episodes, even if they have kind of sucked for the past five years. Because now, whenever that bad part of my mind is getting the better of me, I can rest easy knowing that at least I didn’t just eat my weight in haggis.

  • Sunday Excerpt: Ninjas versus Squids

    This Sunday, I wanted to share an extended excerpt of the middle grade novel I’ve been working on, Ninjas versus Squids!

    It is about a twelve year old boy who, along with his best friend, PJ, learns the monsters populating his favorite video game are very, very real…and that he’s destined to stop them.

    Here’s the excerpt:

    ***

    It was pitch black by the time we stopped walking. Behind me, I could hear the cheerleaders whispering amongst themselves, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. In front of me, Molly was quiet, so quiet I would have forgotten she was there, had she not held my hand in a death grip.

    She turned to the other cheerleaders. “Rowan and I want to be alone. You guys keep watch.”

    My heart kicked up a notch. Brook ruffled her pom-poms in my face one last time, and I watched as the dark outline of the other five girls disappeared against the backdrop of nothingness.

    “Now then.” Molly put her hand on my shoulder and guided me backwards until I was flush against the brick building. Her other hand was still wrapped around my wrist, and I noticed it was colder and clammier than it had been before. But then, I reasoned, probably so was mine.

    She leaned in closer, and closer still, and what happened next was a blur. One minute I was trying to remember what Chuck Finley, a second-year eighth grader with whom I’d spent most of my thirty-eight days of in-school suspension last year, had said to do if I ever got a girl alone, and the next Molly had wrapped something cold and clammy around my neck and suspended me a foot in the air.

    “Where is it?” she yelled, only it didn’t sound like Molly’s voice anymore. It sounded deeper, rougher, like she’d been smoking two packs a day since before she was born.

    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I managed, clawing at the clammy something wrapped tightly around my neck.

    “Don’t lie to me!” She slammed me back against the building. “He stole it and gave it to you! Where is it?”

    “I already told you. I don’t know”–she slammed me against the building again–“what you’re talking about.”

    “Lies! All lies!”

    Molly flung me across the alley, and I sailed through the air and landed flat on my back, on top of a flattened cardboard box smeared with something I sure hoped wasn’t dog crap.

    It was still completely dark, but I could hear the rustle of pom-poms and the slither of something snake-like behind me. I hurried to my feet and felt around in the darkness for something–anything–I could defend myself with. Finally, I came across something long and thin, and unmistakably metal. I closed my fists around it as though it were a baseball bat, and swung hard.

    Strike one.

    The rustling was beside me now. I swung again.
    Strike two.

    “I’m over here, silly,” Molly taunted from somewhere behind me.

    I swung again, extra hard this time, and came into contact with the brick wall. The metal stick snapped in half and I swore loudly.

    Molly, Brook, and the rest of the cheerleaders laughed.

    “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Molly said. She was still behind me, but closer now. “Is that any way to talk to a girl?”

    “Probably not,” I said, whipping around, jabbing in all directions, hoping I’d get lucky. “But you’re not a girl, you’re a–“

    “Squidmonster!” I heard PJ yell. “Get away from him! Hiyah! Hiyah!“

    What happened next was a blur of scuffling and rustling and the clang of metal on metal. One of Molly’s somethings grabbed me around the waist and flung me into the air again, only this time I landed on my feet.

    “Peej!” I yelled, still darting and jabbing, in case Molly should be around. “Where are you?”

    “Over here,” PJ yelled. “Don’t move. I’m coming to get you.”

    The scuffling intensified. I couldn’t tell who was winning. For that matter, I couldn’t tell who was fighting. I just stood there, armed with a broken metal stick, my senses on high alert, waiting for something to happen.

    The movement was getting closer. PJ let out a loud “unnngh” to my left. There was a squish and then a splat. And then I was covered head to toe in goo.

    I don’t know how to adequately describe what the goo smelled like. It was like vomit, rotten eggs, rancid fish stock, and gym funk all at the same time. I wanted to open my mouth to scream, or at least to barf, but I was afraid if I did, I might get some of the goo in my mouth.

    Instead, I shrugged out of my windbreaker, turned it clean-side out, and wiped as much goo off my face as I could.

    “Uggh,” I said to PJ. “What is that stuff?”

    “I’ll tell you in a minute,” PJ said. “First, you need to eat this.”

    I turned my nose up at PJ. “Eat what?”

    “This,” PJ said. And he shoved something into my mouth. It was small and sour, kind of like the pickled plums my dad used to eat. Only it tasted way worse. Worse, even, than the goo had smelled.

    I tried to spit out the whatever-it-was, but PJ held my mouth closed until I’d swallowed.

    “Gerroff me,” I mumbled from behind his hand.

    “Not until you swallow the ink sac!”

    I wrestled with PJ, sending the two of us rolling around in the foul-smelling goo.

    “You have to swallow it,” PJ said. “One of them must have inked you when you got here. The ink sac has the antidote.”

    I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. It was like the time my mom and I had gone on a road trip to French Lick, only the radio had stopped working halfway, and we spent the rest of the trip listening to NPR on one of the only AM stations we had left. I knew what he was saying. I recognized the words. But I couldn’t get them to make sense.

    “Do it,” PJ urged.

    I held my breath and shot it down in one gulp. After a few seconds my body started feeling warm again. I opened my eyes and saw PJ staring down at me, his blond hair covered in dark green goo.

    “You OK?” he asked me.

    I nodded.

    He took his hand off my mouth and helped me up. I looked around the alley. The lighting still wasn’t the greatest, but at least I could see everything. I looked at the cardboard box where I’d landed a few minutes before and confirmed my suspicions about the dog crap. Then I looked down at my feet. I was standing in six inches of the sticky, dark green goo.

    “Yuck,” I said to PJ. “What is this stuff?”

    “Squid guts,” said PJ matter-of-factly.

    “Squid guts? You drenched me in squid guts?“

    “It’s not like I did it on purpose.”

    “Uh-huh,” I said, using one of the nearby walls to scrape the gunk off my shoes. That’s when I noticed the little red welts, each one about the size of a dime, wrapping around my wrist like a bracelet. “So, uh, Ninjas versus Squids. That’s just a game, right?”

    PJ made a face. “I thought so,” he said. He walked over to the far corner of the alley and picked up a couple of mega-size Slimeades. He wiped the goo off of one and passed it to me. I took a swig and instantly felt better.

    “And now?”

    PJ shrugged. “I dunno.”

    Neither of us said anything for a long time. We just stood there, drinking our slimeades, looking around at the green goo covering everything. I was just thinking about how we were going to explain the five giant squid-like carcasses to the rent-a-cops policing the water park when it hit me:

    There may have been five carcasses, but there had been six girls.

  • Six Sentence Sunday: Urban Legend

    A blast from the past today, because this excerpt is from Urban Legend, a paranormal romance I wrote in 2009. It had ghosts and serial killers and small towns and cheerleaders and teachers and mysterious drownings and nosy neighbors and women who fall in love with their older sisters’ boyfriends and police officers and funnel cakes in it. THERE IS YOUR SYNOPSIS, INTERNET.

    Years ago, a series of rock slides and heavy rains had penetrated the dikes surrounding the township, and with the exception of a handful of houses that dotted the fringe above the flood line, the entire town had been erased, along with much of its two hundred years of history. The town had since been rebuilt, and the old site repurposed into a storage reservoir for the hydroelectric plant. Now Old Whistlewood was split down the middle, with a series of land trusts on one side and an industrial park on the other.

    They were headed for the industrial park.

    Frank held tight to Susannah as they eased down the embankment leading to the footpath. The stench of the diner was long gone but the chill remained, and the warmth of his body felt good against hers.

  • Side Effects May Include Heart Palpitations and Zombie Nightmares

    So let’s talk about sleeping pills.

    I mean, they sound so great, don’t they? Take this pill and you will rest. You will rest so hard, the instructions tell you, that you probably should not plan on doing anything for the next eight hours.

    Except sleeping.

    But what they don’t tell you–or actually, I think they do tell you this, but in very very very fine print–is that sleeping is only what happens sometimes.

    Sometimes you sleep.  And sometimes you drive to Taco Bell in the middle of the night wearing just your bra and panties, and because you’ve left your house key at home, wake up half naked on your porch swing covered in verde sauce.

    When I was on Lunesta, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was going to be one of the 0.003% of patients who experience a reaction that is opposite of that which is intended, aka CAPS! LOCK! MODE!

    So instead of thinking:

    “It’s late. I’m tired. I should go to bed now.”

    I kept thinking:

    “I! SHOULD! GO! TO! BED! NOW!”

    “OR! MAYBE! PAINT! A! WALRUS!”

    “QUICK! FIND! ME! A! WALRUS!”

    “NO! TIME! FOR! PANTS!”

    “BUT! MAYBE! THE! WALRUS! WOULD! LIKE! TACO! BELL! FIRST!”

    After about three nights of this, I was like, Dr. Dude, this isn’t going to work. I need something else. Something that won’t try to turn me into a human fast food taco.

    In the meantime, I break my cardinal rule of never reading dystopian and/or zombie novels by picking up both The Forests of Hands and Teeth and The Hunger Games, the former of which because I already had it in my bedroom and the latter because I like to read books before I see movies, and I think the movie looks really good (even though I probably will not be watching it now, thanks to the book).

    I want to take a moment to apologize to all the wonderful writers out there who write dystopian novels, some of whom I know well enough to know they are not at all as scary as their books. Most of them are fine, upstanding, cat-loving people who would never eat another human being. The others are Democrats.

    HA HA.

    BURN.

    But regardless of how nice they are, I cannot read their books. Can. Not. It doesn’t matter how good or popular or interesting they are. I. Can. Not. Read. Them.

    And the reason why is because they scare me shitless, no doubt due to the fact that my grandmother, from an early age, groomed me to fear the coming zombie apocalypse.

    And I wish I was making this up, but I’m totally not.

    Except for the zombie part. She didn’t believe in zombies, just like she didn’t believe in Democrats.

    My point is, you read a dystopian novel and it’s a book. And I read a dystopian novel and start looking for quotes on bomb shelters.

    So picture me in bed, Wednesday morning, unable to sleep thanks to a clap of thunder that woke me up just as I as drifting off, and I’ve just finished reading The Hunger Games. The sun isn’t up yet, but I’ve taken a second Ambien and after thirty-six hours of little cat naps, my vision’s going fuzzy. When who do I see but fucking Effie Trinket in the corner, sawing off her own head, chirping at me about painting the roses red.

    This goes on for maybe half an hour–half an hour of hell–and then I finally drift off to a place where I’m the only passenger on a rollercoaster that has no seatbelts and every time I go upside down, the lettuce falls off my taco.

    “What do you think that means?” I asked a friend in an email shortly after it happened.

    “I dunno,” friend said, “but I hope it’s a euphemism for something dirty.”