Voices in My Head

a day in the life of siobhan macintyre

2008-10-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

4:30: Shut off the computer, and THEN see the call that sneaked into the queue at the very last micro-second. Oy.

4:45: Finally make it out to the parking lot because I’ve been gabbing with Karlene and Ronda. Sometimes Karlene is already gone, and we’re just waiting until she’s clear of the parking lot and it’s safe to go out. J (Love ya, Karlene!)

4:50: Pull up to the curb and have to PARALLEL PARK in front of MY OWN HOUSE because the neighbor, who has a billion cars, has parked two of his trucks along the curb and taken my parking spot, and Valerie’s friend is parked behind Gail in the driveway. Make mental note: Charge Jamie rent for parking spot.

4:55: Get out of the car. (Yes, it took me five minutes to parallel park. Thanks for noticing. One minute was actually spent listening to the last bit of Jimmy Wayne’s “Do You Believe Me Now” at a decibel that can be heard in Omaha, so there.) Pet indoor/outdoor kitties (Pudge, Bandido, and Sylvester).

5:00: Finally in the house. Husband asks, as he does every night, why it takes me half an hour to drive less than a mile home from work. Son answers, as he does every night: “Because she’s flapping her jaws.” Daughter asks if she can “take the car” to “go on her walk” to the park; still not sure how driving to the park equates to taking a walk, but that isn’t the oddest thing about my family, so I don’t worry about it too much. I go downstairs to my bedroom and change into my sweats, and head upstairs to do homework.

5:50-6:30: Check my e-mail. Do homework while watching [The Office/House/Dexter/Supernatural/CIS/24—depending on what night it is or what Gail’s rented] and while serving as Gail’s living & breathing spell-check and thesaurus—he’s writing an e-mail to [pirate brother/rocket scientist brother/teacher brother/sister/nephew] (Yes, my one brother-in-law really is a rocket scientist. He works for a company that subcontracts to the Department of Defense. When something goes wrong with a rocket or missile, David is one of the guys who figures it out) (no, my other brother-in-law isn’t REALLY a pirate; he just talks like one).

6:30ish: Somewhere in here Gail makes dinner and brings me a plate or coaxes me to the dining nook table.

Around 7ish: We feed the animals. The cats are conditioned to the clanging of their food bowls almost like Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned to the ringing of the bell. The dog cowers by the back door with her food dish, afraid to wade through the writhing mass of feline feeding frenzy (she has learned hard lessons). For her own safety, we let her out in the back yard until they’re done. We have to break up several ninja-kitty skirmishes because the kitten, Chloe, tries to steal everyone else’s food.

7ish to 10:00: Done enough homework. Now I can get a little writing done!

10:05: End up in chat with my writing girlfriends…

11:45: Realize it’s nearly midnight and I’ve only written three paragraphs, but I had a good chat with my friends. They had some good ideas for my tricky plot issue. Now if I could just find time in my busy schedule to write…

Morning has broken (don’t expect me to fix it. I can barely keep track of the superglue in my house).

5:45: Hit snooze button first time

5:52: Hit snooze button second time

5:59: Hit snooze button third time

6:06: Hit snooze button fourth time (after letting it play a little because a good song is on)

6:13: Hit snooze button fifth time (Gail is starting to make little grumbling noises of annoyance)

6:20: Hit snooze button sixth time—because I know what you guys don’t: my clock is set seventeen minutes ahead because when I reset it after a power outage two years ago, the silly thing went so fast, it went right past the correct time. I made a mental note that it was seventeen minutes ahead, and there it’s been for two years. So really, it’s only 6:03.

6:27 (aka 6:10): I roll out of bed, stumble into the bathroom, brush my teeth and hop into the shower. After five minutes or so, I’m able to open my eyes.

7:07 (aka 6:50): Makeup and hair are done. I get dressed, wondering for the one-trillionth time where I put my dark blue backless Keds… Maybe they got sucked into the same black hole as my first wedding ring and my favorite book…

7:17 (aka 7:00): Eat a breakfast with one hand while holding Chloe with the other so she doesn’t dive into my plate—only because my male offspring has gotten up early and went into the bathroom and doesn’t appear to be emerging from it any time soon, so I can’t corral her in the bathroom (I can’t even walk down the hall when he’s in the bathroom without him freaking out: “Don’t come in, Mom!” Like I’d want to…).

7:47 (aka 7:30): Gather my jacket, sunglasses, glasses & contacts cases…put them all down because I HAVE to straighten the living room before I go…gather them all back up, forgetting my glasses & contacts case as I do every morning. Run out to the car. Run back in the house to get my cell phone. Back out to the car. Have to move the seat back while standing outside because the daughter borrowed the car last night and she’s short. Start the car, check the gas gauge. Hmmm…MAYBE I can make it to the gas station on these fumes she left me…

7:52: Pull into the parking lot a la Jeff Gordon (watching Ronda leap out of the way), almost late because there was a line at the gas station.

Oy. I need coffee!!!

just a little lazy bloggers fun...

2008-08-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

Funny thing is, this lazy bloggers generated post actually sounds a lot like me...except I don't really drink that much. Honest.

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F*** me dead I just got hit on the head and recalled that I have not updated this since people stopped clapping and Tinkerbell died... You would not believe that my hands were chopped off and I was waiting for bionic ones. Seriously!.

I am swilling chardonnay with silk ropes, selling my soul to Google, just generally being an embarrassment to society in general, my day seems to involve the authorities from when the nightclubs close to I run out of alcohol. I am beyond drunk most of the time. can't they see I am blogging.

I will try to remember I promised you I will write something that makes sense soon. What? Unless of course the pool with the cocktail bar is heated!.

it's all about me

2008-08-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

It is, after all, my blog, so technically it is all about me. ;-) However, I realized today that I've given people precious little information about me. So here goes. If you're interested, read on.

--I am a Grammar Ninja (thanks, Danielle!). It sounds much better than "Grammar Nazi", which is what I've been called. Having German ancestry, the "Nazi" word makes me cringe a bit even though I've used it to describe myself. I feel if you love language enough to make it your life's obsession, you should be respectful of the beauty of its structure.

--Siobhan MacIntyre is a pseudonym. My real name is Sharon (not so far in pronunciation from Siobhan). I answer to Sio ("shy", and yes I am).

--I am not just an avid reader, I am a voracious reader. I will read anything from children's fiction (Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter) to Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta novels) to traditional horror (Poe, Lovecraft, Chambers) to historical romances (Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series) to fantasy (Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series). My favorite book is The Woodwife by Terri Windling. I've read it thirteen times and I'm not tired of it yet.

--I started writing when I was 11. I worked starting at the age of 12 to keep myself in typing paper and typewriter ribbons. I now work to keep myself fed and sheltered and to pay for my internet access, flash drives, printer paper and ink.

--I don't always write chronologically. My current WiP has two completed chapters that I have no idea where, exactly, I'm going to stuff, and the epilogue is written.

--My characters' sarcastic senses of humor come directly from me.

--I am a WYSIWYG person. I'm the same online as I am in real life. I'm also the same in church on Sunday as I am outside of church every other day of the week. Changing personas may fool a few people, but nothing fools God.

--I am married, have three children (two by birth, one by court appointment), one dog, and seven cats. Yes, seven. As if six weren't enough, my husband rescued a kitten from the Dumpster where he works and brought her home. I'm hoping to sell a novel to keep myself in cat litter and Friskies.

--By day I am a financial aid advisor for a community college. I've seen and heard some things that make me pray for selective amnesia.

--I am currently querying agents regarding my women's fiction novel. It is not the first novel I've written, but it's the first I'm marketing.

--I have a OneNote notebook filled with potential story plots, vague ideas, and research. If you aren't familiar with OneNote, I suggest you use it. It's the niftiest little gadget I've ever used. I keep all my writing stuff in one notebook, a section for each individual project. That will ensure that I will have a complete nervous breakdown should I accidentally delete the file. (Luckily my writing folder is backed up to my Xdrive at seven every evening.)

--I'm not a poet, but I write poetry (there is a difference). You'll see some of my poems stuffed into the blog here and there. I hope you enjoy them. If not...oh well.

--My favorite saying is from the movie Big Trouble: "I'm going to go to my room where it's not so...I don't know...stupid."

--My second favorite saying is from Keeping Mum: "You're half a day behind the rest of us, you know."

--Like my main character in my novel Office Politics, I am very fond of tequila, especially in the form of margaritas. Jose (Cuervo, that is) and I had a feud for twenty-four years after a raucous 19th birthday party and a week-long hangover. We now keep each other within certain boundaries and all is well.

--I live in the Pacific Northwest and would not want to live anywhere else. I have been in this city since 1975, in my current house since 1989, and the only place that might lure me away from here is Forks, WA, on the Olympic Peninsula. It sings a siren song I find quite bewitching.

That's me in a nutshell, now that I've bored you to tears. ;-)

leery of queries? take heart...

2008-08-07T18:50:00.000-07:00

My good friend Jinx put me on to this incredible blog Query Shark, where aspiring writers can send in their query letters and a professional literary agent critiques them (as well as all the blog followers). Here's the skinny:

*E-mail your query letter and wait...wait...wait...

*Receive e-mail from Query Shark that your query letter has been selected and posted for critique.

*Bite fingernails. Take an hour to summon courage to go look at what others have to say about your best sales tool.

*Splash water on face to put out the flames of embarrassment because everyone says your query needs works. Remind yourself that YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELF FOR EXACTLY THIS REASON because you KNOW you don't know what you're doing. You have three rejection letters in as many weeks from the top three names on your Top Ten List of Desired Agents and you're worried your query letter might be the problem.

*Get ahold of yourself and admit your query letter is the problem. Revise, revise, revise. Agonize. Make spouse read revision 1 and revision 2 and demand an opinion of which is better (yes, demand). Agonize more. Send both revisions to best internet chum for her opinion. Agonize more.

*YAY! Best internet chum likes revision 2. Polish it up and resubmit to Query Shark. Wait...wait...wait....

*Receive e-mail from agent and message from best internet chum that your revision has been posted.

*Agonize. Bite fingernails. Summon courage to see how your revision was received.

*REJOICE!! SHE LIKED IT! "Much much better" she says! She has tagged it "good example of a revision".

*Polish it up, personalize it, and send it off to said agent (well, why not? she's already familiar with it, and besides, she's on your Top Ten List of Desired Agents!)

I have enormous faith in my novel Office Politics. It has been well-received by everyone who's read it, including a handful of men. I anxiously await to see if it will be well-received by an agent.

This is not the genre I normally write in--Jinx and I term our genre as Modern Gothic Horror Romance, more commonly lumped under paranormal romance. Indeed, I have a 175,000 word novel completed in this genre (The Wyckham House) as well as a follow-up WIP (Gothic) about two-thirds completed (yeah, I know...175,000 words. I'm trimming it, really, but there's not much "fat" in it. Honest.) Dark and gloriously supernatural. But Office Politics literally walked out of my head and onto cyber-paper, all 72,000 words in three months. I had very few struggles with it, and all were overcome with credibility. Awesome possum. I'm planning another humorous women's fiction as we speak.

It's a tough business. It's a crazy business. You may never pay the bills with your earnings from a novel. My parents always said being a novelist was an excellent way to starve (yup, my wonderfully supportive biological origins).

But if you're truly a writer--like me--the earnings are only icing on the cake. The real gratification comes from giving those voices inside your head an outlet before you end up on Haldol or Thorazine or whatever they're using these days. No rubber room for this girl; my insanity is called creativity and I'm thrilled to share it with you.

another poetic snippet for ya...

2008-08-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

This Dark Carnival of Wonders

Trying hard to understand the woman I became
by looking back to the girl I had been.
Pretty but never popular,
always on the outside looking in
at the pageant of wonders I believed those cliques to be.
Exquisite people: visions of petite blonde fantasies
and strong-jawed desire with dark, careless locks
falling across their cheeks.

Money in their pockets and themselves on their minds,
they took no notice of the quiet, shy girl who never spoke in class.
I doodled character names and plot lines
instead of flowers and unicorns and pot leaves,
while teachers spoke on subjects with no relevance
to the veracity that was bearing down on me:
The vehicle of life was a dark carnival ride of
freakish wonders and black, guilty delights,
with all the bolts loose and the attendant blind and deaf.

The crash was inevitable.

Oppression (don’t speak don’t think don’t disagree).
Don’t deviate from the path laid before me by my
biological origins who could not manage to
see their way beyond their own brutal despair.
My youth raped, my potential aborted
by their narcissistic ideals of The Great American Family.
Too many choices, too many ways to screw up,
too many blind alleys on my map of life.

Too bad.

I painted myself into a corner of desolation
until I deemed I’d chanced upon the One,
the golden knight, the champion of my cause.
But I had no foundation upon which he could build that castle,
and his quest took him to distant lands
to vanquish his own enemies and tilt at his own windmills,
an American Quixote with no demonstration of honor, respect,
or dignity.

Yet …
Life has a way of building when one isn’t looking.
Hope will tunnel through brimstone rock
and sail salty seas of persecution and plague,
to come at last to the golden shores of acceptance.
Peace like a melodic fragrance pervades
the quintessence of Me.
Still on the outside looking in,
but no longer enamored of that delusion.

© 2007 Siobhan Macintyre (pen name)

OWWch!

2008-07-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

I'm fond of writers sites. I enjoy getting feedback from others who have a calling in this sometimes thankless craft. I adore knowing that I've entertained or bewitched my readers for the time my words held them captive. And I love having someone else's eyes find things that might need to be fixed. I am, after all, so close to my work that while I know what I might mean or where someone might have obtained information, others have no clue unless I tell them.

What I sincerely detest, however, are rip reviews or reviews left by people too lazy to carefully read my work and therefore miss pertinent information and obvious, clarifying points.

I've received a few such reviews of late, a couple of them on OWW. Now I don't want to seem like I'm bashing all of OWW; I am sure there are some perfectly lovely people with truly helpful advice roaming that site. I appear to attract none of them.

I present you with this example, the reviewer's comments in parentheses:

Ben provided a constant source of irritation over the years, mostly to the city council and the Ladies' Historical Society. His scathing letters to the editor in the Mills Gazette and his eloquent, demeaning speeches at public meetings in which he raked council members over the coals had long been a source of amusement to Ron, as Aaron's close friends, family, and—well, everyone called him. (THEY CALLED BEN, RON? WHY? OR--WHO IS RON?)

This fine reviewer goes on later to say that Aaron just disappeared and this Ron took over the POV, and I need to pick a POV--either Ron's or Aaron's. I believe the paragraph clearly explains that Aaron's close friends, family, and--well, everyone calls him Ron.

I doubt the intent of this review was malicious, but I find carelessness almost as insulting as viciousness. So intent was this person on garnering reading points so s/he could post more of his/her work that my writing was only cursorily evaluated and unnecessary or inapprorpiate advice given.

I understand why some agents are impressed with a potential client belonging to OWW. I myself might be more impressed if the advice and evaluation were more on target.

the words call me

2008-07-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

I posted this tagline on one of the writers sites I belong to (I even made it up myself): "If I live in a dream world, it is only because the words call me and I am powerless to resist."

After a tragic accident claimed the life of our daughter's ex-boyfriend, I found myself unable to conjure up either the energy or the words to continue any of my WIPs. I was barely even able to edit my finished manuscripts, and went through a period of lackadaisical querying, fearing that I might actually get picked up by an agent and then have to try to conjure some more creative words from thin air.

I'm writing again, thankfully, and better than ever. I'm excited, not full of dread, when I come across an agent who accepts submissions in the genre my novels are written. The words are calling me, and I am indeed powerless to resist.

Now if only those words weren't all adverbs...

and now for a brief intermission

2008-05-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

So. I've come to the conclusion that a brief respite from the voices in my head (aka ficitional characters in my novels) (really! I'm tellin' the truth!) is not such a bad thing. I fear that I live in the worlds my mind has created a little too much and disconnect from the real world a little too often.

For those who don't know me who are reading this, I've been unable to write anything except this blog and one poem since my 18-year-old daughter's ex-boyfriend fell from the understructure of a bridge (where he was drunk and stripping *sigh*). I know everyone needs time to mourn, and this kid spent a lot of time in our house for about a year while he was dating my daughter, so mourning was expected. I never expected the words to log-jam, though--words are my lifeblood. But they're still there, just...contained for now, I suppose. Perhaps it's nothing to do with Dustin's death and more to do with the fact that I have two novel-length manuscripts languishing in a computer file that need to do more than collect cyber-dust.

So I'm using this time to be more involved in a new writer's community; to brush up my query letters, synopses, and manuscripts; to actually get out and weed that garden; to walk the dog, who is starting to be as chubby a bunny as her owner; to enjoy the company of my long-suffering husband and children. Maybe I'll even clean the house....

Nah!

a little poetry for ya

2008-05-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

Like Sweet, Dark Wine

Ink drops
splattered on the page like blood.
Open vein of my soul
bleeding anguish and enchantment,
a river uncontained.
Make a cut and let emotion flow
like sweet, dark wine.
Intoxicated by my need to share
these visions in my mind,
I offer you the cup of my fantasies.
O, drink deep!
Live wild and free in the lands of my imagination!
Gather up with greedy hands
the illusions that I offer to keep at bay
the burdens of your realities,
and in drunken revelry cast your cares away
like decaying fetters, and race unchained.
Roll naked in my fields of wrought passions;
I’ve made them just for you!

I write…I write and I cannot stop.
Will you read?

hearing voices?

2008-05-20T22:54:00.001-07:00

You might have some characters in your head, trying to find the exit.

I've often said that I must write to give the voices in my head an outlet or I'd end up in one of those wards with the locks on the wrong side of the door.

Funny thing...this week I found myself actually interacting with those voices. Call it incipient psychosis if you so desire--and you may be right--but the...ah...interaction has opened up some interesting avenues for dialogue and plot direction.

I don't know if I'm doing it right, this writing thing. Are there right and wrong methods of writing? Is the end result what truly matters, or just the vehicle of travel?

Damned if I know. I'm just a knackered novelist. Or is that hung-over hack?

This is Sio, over and out. ;-)