Identity

Writing and Submitting



One of the things that I find hard right now about writing is finding an audience. I could simply publish my fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry on one of my blogs. Not here, perhaps my WordPress site, but somehow that just feels like when I was in school and my stories would be passed around among my friends and classmates. It’s like this blog too or even my writing groups.  Just not enough.

There are writing contests aplenty. Between my two writing groups and a few magazines I have looked through, I have found more than enough contest opportunities. Currently I believe I am waiting on four contests and have three more I can enter. Good. But still not enough. I want to see something with my name on it in a newspaper or magazine. I am plaguing the Globe with one Fact and Argument piece a week now. I submitted one of the stories from my Sci-Fi series of shorts to a Sci-Fi/Fantasy magazine based out of Edmonton. Literary magazines of any genre are hard to find though and many will not take submissions from unpublished writers. So, what’s a frustrated writer to do?

Submit online.

Yes, apparently there is quite the sizable and respected community of literary magazines on line. I discovered this through an article in Writer’s magazine. The editor of failbetter.com wrote a piece about his and others’ online collection of tomes. Quite a list and one that goes back into the late to mid-90’s in terms of longevity. There are even literary awards for online lit mags. Cool.

I made my first submission to a site called Our Stories which looks for emerging writers and promises feedback for submissions within 3 weeks. More than cool. I sent a story I wrote for Rob called The White Boots. I based it on an anecdote he told that was first told to him by Shelley, his late wife. Seems that when she was in high school, there was a boy a bit older than she was whose pick up line was stealing girls’ shoes at parties and leaving his white cowboy boots in their place. Rob said it had happened to Shelley once but that he didn’t know the outcome. I found the whole idea intriguing enough to get out of bed in the middle of the night and jot down the basics of what became a pretty decent short story. When I let Rob read it, he thought it was strange to see personal details of his high school days and meeting Shelley fictionalized but he liked the story a lot. My Fort writing group liked it too though none of the women got the reference to “Aunt Flo” and I came to find out that it is apparently an American slang term for one’s period and not a universal one. Our Stories accepts submissions year round, as do many of the other lit sites do, and like them it will take only one submission per category a quarter. I am working on a few other things that I will look at sending in after March 31st.

Failbetter.com will take novel excerpts, so I was looking through my novel last night while I sat with Katy in the living room. She wanted to watch Quest for Camelot, an old feature length cartoon that proved a bit too scary. The main character’s father is murdered within the first five minutes or so and it really doesn’t get any better from there, so we switched to Curious George and I went back to surfing through my novel. Now that time has passed since the first draft, I am able to be a bit more objective. It’s pretty good in places but there is revising to be done.

I was telling Rob this morning that I had yet another dream where my wallet (sometimes purse) was stolen and when I found it again, the contents were gone. An obvious loss of identity theme and he wanted to know why I felt that I had lost my identity. Too much cooking, cleaning and laundry? Well, there is that. My mini-inner feminist is disgusted by the extent to which I am really finding joy and fulfillment in making a home for my family, but there is also the issue of teaching. Less and less do I miss the actual job but more and more I realize that I am in between having been a teacher and being an actual writer – partly because of the whole getting published issue. And of course this is just an issue of patience but there is a sense of fibbing when I tell people I am a writer because I am not published and my two biggest works are incomplete. 

Perimenopause



I have never been a fan of my plumbing. From the day my mother handed me a little booklet with characters out of a John, Jean and Judy book explaining the “exciting and wondrous miracle puberty”, I pretty much knew that girls got more than their fair share of the short end of God’s stick. It starts with not being able to be an altar-boy and just goes down hill from there. I think I was in sixth grade. Not quite twelve. And big for my age. So, my mother assumed, incorrectly I might add, that it was time to bring me up to speed on the whole menstruating thing. As it turned out, I didn’t start having a regular cycle until the beginning of eighth grade and that my greatest source of information about getting my period was not my mother, who’d had a hysterectomy before I was even born and hadn’t ever had what one could call a “normal” cycle, or the charming pamphlet or even the 1960-ish filmstrip presentation the sisters at my school inflicted on all the girls when they reached a “certain age”. No, like most things to do with the nether regions of my body – I learned what I needed to know from my peers. A dubious source of information to be sure but one that has stood the test of generations of young people everywhere. That is to say – the near-blind leading the legally so.

Now that I have once again reacher “a certain age”, I am finding that my peers are once again the leading edge of information as I wander, sometimes willingly and sometimes resentfully, into the valley of the shadow of menopause. 

Ironically, it is my husband who has supplied me with much of my current information as he as been down this path, so to speak, before with his late wife. All manner of natural supplements have been suggested for my own good and his comfort. Black Cohosh and red clover for hot flashes, he thinks. The hot flashes are mainly a night time thing right now and only around that time of the month. Too much information? The change is like any other phase in a woman’s reproductive and sexual existence. When it is in season, it is fair game for conversation. That’s why preteens obsess about their breasts and when they will get their firs period and teens and twenty somethings can think and talk of little else but sex. It’s why married women suffer, loudly, about baby hungry and pregnant women will divulge the most intimate (and disgusting) information to anyone without even being asked for it. Labor and Delivery stories, breast-feeding adventures, and the big C of life – we are arguably more fascinated with our bodies than any man could ever be.

I am technically not menopausal. I know this because I was having issues last spring and my wonderful doctor did blood tests and had an ultra-sound done just to make sure that nothing more sinister was afoot (which caused a fair degree of worry for both Rob and I because we are now firmly in the camp of “it can happen to us” because it has). As it turned out I am just experiencing that long and winding down part of the reproductive years. From my reading, I know that it can take up to a decade to wind down to the point of actual menopause and that your best predictor for a time frame is the age at which your mother and grandmother stopped unwinding and ground to a halt. Being adopted, I don’t have that information. But, given that I was about 42ish when I first noticed things starting to change, then 52ish is a good guess. That’s eight years. Good God. That is a heck of a long time to wait for the demise of something I have never been all that fond of in the first place, and the list of symptoms that I am/could experience just bring up the short stick thing I mentioned earlier. One of the symptoms I noticed on the list was memory and concentration problems. Oh great. First it is PG brain, then mommy brain, followed by caregiver brain and then widow-brain. Top these last six years off with the hormonal (or lack thereof) induced thinking blips caused by peri and definitely menopause and by the time I am in my “right” mind again I will be too far gone in senior “moments” to notice.

Until recently, the whole aging thing hadn’t been a big deal to me. I look a tad younger than most of my peers – which I attribute to good genes and a near shunning of the sun when I was a teen and in my youngest adult years (fat girls don’t wear bathing suits). But, the white hair is getting harder to hide with just highlights and the physical things I once did without thinking need to be thought about it, and I am not sure that when you throw hormonal imbalance on top of this that I am as indifferent to getting old as I have been in the past. Rob is always talking about having this finite number of “good” old age years. As he sees it, one can still be okay – as in fit and healthy – enough to do as they would like during the 50’s and into the 60’s but that one gets maybe about 15 years max once you reach the top of the hill and round over. That is so depressing and what is worse is that I appear to be under the elder Boomer delusion that I will still be functional as a 70+ year old. Of course, perhaps I will. I read an article in the Globe yesterday about a couple of studies down with centenarians that determined it is not simply good genes that help people live into their 90’s and hit the 100 mark. Lifestyle is key as well and that they really can’t say when it is too late to improve one’s lifestyle. 

It is not easy. Undoing the damage of caregiving and the stresses of the last years. Going on six now since Will’s first troubling symptoms began. I have started Yoga and I find that if I ignore the Mahareshi side of it I enjoy it quite a bit. I walk. I even have Rob walking. I can run again but try not to overdo it as it is hard on my knees. I lift weights. Heavy ones. I am Zena. I am a near total vegan but I need to work on the fruit thing. I hate out of season fruit. It’s squishy during the winter. How can anyone think about putting squishy fruit in her mouth without gagging?

Perhaps I will do okay. 102 is a good age to shoot for, don’t you think. One can’t set too lofty a goal where living is concerned, in my opinion.

Word Press, Cell phone novels, and Me (again)


Okay, so because I haven’t joined nearly enough blog sites (MSN-Spaces, dot.mac, LiveJournal, Blogger, Blogher, NaBloMo) or have blogs enough, I went to WordPress the other day and started a whole new account and am rebuilding this site essentially at WordPress. A really neat function allowed me to transfer all the stuff at Blogger (which are the same posts as here) to WordPress. I called the site Anniegirl1138 which was my “handle” at the YWBB. In my first post there I explained the story behind the name too. While most people at the widow board tend to create monikers based on their loss, my name was all about me. What an selfish little thang I am, eh? But I saw being there as being about me anyway. Not Will. I was there to see if I was normal (found out that normal is a bit more relative than I had believed it to be) and to rant (as I had no outlet for it in my real time) and I wanted to find people who were coping, internalizing and moving on – which is what I was more than ready to do. Rob was teasing me a bit this morning about naming my site for myself as he is grappling with what to call his on site. I named this site Second Edition because it was the second blog after my Widowed:The Blog at MSN-Spaces, literal name and boring, but I like the idea of my blog being christened with my online persona.

WordPress is a bit more complicated and I am still playing with the free features before I upgrade (which I think I will have to do to get the cool stuff) but I think it will eventually be my permanent – and only – online home. I want to continue this blog there and also have a page for my writing and a page of resources for widowed people – just cause I want to help and I haven’t much of an outlet for that right now.

Cell phone novels are a big Japanese thing right now. I went to look at a couple of blog articles on them and wondered if I could do something like that myself. It made me wonder too if I could, or should, put some of my own fiction online. I used to write fanfic in the long ago. It was fun to get feedback and have an audience that was so immediate. It reminded me of when I was a sophomore in high school and I was writing a soap opera satire that all my friends (and even kids who weren’t my friends) were asking to read it. I couldn’t write fast enough. I love writing for people. How did I lose that? Why did I forget that? Oh, yeah – I was told I wasn’t quite good enough when I tried to go back and get into the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa. Now if that happened I would chalk it up to a problem with the source but then I was twenty-seven and very insecure.

Rob and I have talked more about the Texas move and my working and my writing. I am being silly to worry about what feminist society thinks about my role. Shouldn’t my role be whatever I choose for it to be? I choose to be a writer who does the stay at home stuff. Men are practically applauded for that but women are selling themselves short and up shit creek at the same time. As Rob has pointed out on many an occasion, who decided that career and all its material accouterments were the be and end all? If everyone let fear of failure or loss of status or society’s aversion to living a scaled -down material life get in the way of the pursuit of one’s true talents, interests and dreams what a real shit-hole this life would be.