I just spent an hour of my life updating a page on the blog. It looked pretty good. I had a few tweaks left to make it perfect. I hit the save button and it didn't save. So all of that work got shot to hell. I'm more than a little bit mad right now. I would like to have a cup of tea and sulk but I have stuff I need to get done. I think I will be working on that page listing out all the books in the series and their synopsises (I forget how the hell you pluralize synopsis. Just tells me that I should have taken a dead language or two this what I knew how to do that but I didn't get the chance at college.)
So, I am a very frustrated person right now. I'm not going to sit here and rant about how life has been strategically managing to piss me off in a wide range of directions right now. No, I'm going to tell you a story.
Once, I was a little kid and I got picked on a lot by a significant number of people. One of the things that they harassed me over was the fact that I loved art and I loved writing. I was regularly told to get my head out of the clouds and stop 'drifting through life at the fringes of society'. It sucked. I found my refuge in my art and my writing. As I got older, the tolerance for my artwork shrank to microscopic levels but my writing wasn't ignored. Instead, I had people take an interest in it because they thought that writing was an easy profession and that they could turn me into a meal ticket. I didn't like the motives but I took that interest and pushed it as far as I could manage. When I didn't get a book contract immediately out of high school, they thought maybe it would happen after college. They thought that the writing industry was lousy with people desperate to publish anything. I was pressured at the same time to try to find a 'good' job with my college degree.
The fact that neither of those panned out resulted in my getting kicked out of my parents house for a year while I was severely ill. In many ways, things returned to square one about how my writing and art was worthless. I was pressured to find work in a job market where there was none to be found. I was pressured to stop hanging out with my friends (which only happened on a monthly basis) and 'focus on my future'. During this time, I worked a part time job and lived off of a combination of the generosity of my paternal grandparents, the support of the guy who is now my husband, and public assistance. I never stopped writing. That year that I got kicked out of my parents house let me have some breathing room even as it was very hard. That was the year that I decided I wasn't going to let anyone control my art or my writing.
When my parents came to move me back 'home' in preparation for my wedding, my mom threw away another painting of mine that I had hanging up prominently in my home. She looked at it and said "what is this?" before tossing it into a garbage bag giving me zero opportunity to say that it was something I wanted to keep. I still make art but I have it hanging up in the back hallway if I have it up at all. It's something I do to protect it. In the main living area of my home, most of my kids' artwork is on display. I have one painting that I did up too. It's funny. I made that painting as an anniversary gift for my parents. It sat in a dusty corner and when I moved out of their house, they gave it back to me saying it belonged to me, not them. It's a damn fine watercolor painting of the farm I grew up on. Probably one of my best. I'm surprised they didn't throw it away like they did the rest of the artwork I kept attempting to give them.
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