Character Coup In Progress
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| Image courtesy of Idea go at FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Indie Romance Author Elijana Kindel loses it in Walmart parking lot.
Armed with a stack of post it notes and a stapler of indeterminate origin, Ms. Kindel unleashed a fury of to-do lists and flying staples on the general populace while shouting incoherent messages foretelling doom, gloom, and a flurry of paper cuts to those who stand in her way of world domination. (That's her world, not yours.) More to come on tonight's news at... blah, blah, blah.*Sigh* So no kidding, the characters in my head have staged a coup. A hostile take over. Whatever. Bottom line is they've got something to say and I (and my life) are getting in the way of their mission. So what do they do? Exactly what the picture describes: Stand and deliver a good old fashioned ass kicking. Primary target of interest: The filter in my mind that prevents me from blurting out EVERYTHING I think (and by think we mean everything I see and hear in my crazy, story-filled head).
Okay, so I'll cop to it. I've been a bad writer lately. Instead of telling the world, "Hey, World, I've got stories that need to get written so back that dump truck up and direct the shit fairy to someone else's doorstep", I've been grabbing my ankles and taking it like the good, little Southern girl that I am. Don't get me wrong, I'm good with being the good, little Southern girl that I am, but did life give me a complimentary reach around to go along with it? Hell no. Are we surprised? *see me bark out a hearty guffaw* (Yeah right, like I'm gonna answer that one and give the hand o' Fate any more temptation to quell her boredom.)
But, hey. I get it. It is what it is--life. It happens. It's crazy, insane, and chocked full of unexpected suspicious smelling puddles o' mud. Hell, between the characters in my head and the ones in my real life, I can honestly tell you that I now know where schizophrenia comes from and how one "catches" it.
Top on my list of "you've got to be freakin' kidding me" happened a few days ago when I took Lucky the (Leprechaun) Landcruiser (aka, the mama mobile) in to the shop to check out the grinding brakes. Did I get any warning that the brakes were about to go? No. It just started one day. Fine, I get it. Wear and tear happens. Whatever. So I hustle me and Lucky to the shop expecting a simple fix. Oh how naive I am. Because what I DID NOT expect was for the guy at the service station to come into the lobby and say:
"Girl, where have you been with that truck?!!"
Answer: In my drive way. That's paved. In a subdivision. With paved roads. "Why are you asking?"
"Because (insert a manly shudder of revulsion) there's a freaking snake wrapped around your brakes!"
A WHAT???!!!
Yep, you guessed it. A snake of indeterminate length mistook Lucky the Landcruiser for Noah's ark and slithered its happy self on up into the rear (left) brake, then coiled itself around the thingy ma-whoppers that slow Lucky's roll and... said snake met its maker. Which left me asking myself... why, how, what--did a snake get itself tangled up there? (Note to self, don't ask questions you don't want to remember the answers to.)
Because I'm not done--there's more! (Yay, me. I'm so lucky.) That nugget o' fun was preceded by an odd occurrence where the cats brought me a present. In the form of a live snake. In my house. OMFG, do you think I panicked? You bet your sweet ass I did. Adrenaline shot straight up from the bowels of my soul and I grabbed tongs from the utensil drawer and... caught me a snake then threw that bugger out the door and slammed it shut. (General note to self, I had no idea I was that skilled with tongs. I should add that to my list of skills to be endorsed on LinkedIn.)
Right after that, the durn cats indulged their boredom and delivered a dead mouse to the hamster cage. Hey, I'm not making this stuff up. It happened. The damn cats caught and killed a field mouse, then brought the corpse to the kidlet's room and laid it out right in front of the cage door like some sort of sacrificial lamb. Which left me and my infinite genius asking... WTF were those cats thinking? Did they mistake the mouse for the hamster and... in a vain attempt to prevent a kidlet meltdown over an "accidental" rodent death during an unsanctioned playdate... so they tried to sneak the hamster back into the cage hoping the kidlet wouldn't notice? Or were they trying to deliver a message to the hamster as if to say, "You're next."?
I have no freakin' clue, but I'm leaning towards the You're next theory. At least I was until... the hamster pulls a Houdini and disappears from his cage. OMFG, you've got to be freakin' kidding me. That's it. There's gonna be a meltdown of epic proportion in this house when the kidlet finds out. You think Chernobyl was bad? Ha, meet my kid and her pre-teen angst. But on a good note... Yay, the cats are happy! *sigh* Whatever.
Next up, see me spending an entire day (because I love my kidlet as much as I love my sanity and having a happy, peaceful home) following around two perky cats trying to catch said hamster before his appointment with destiny. All frickin' day long. By the time bedtime hit, I was exhausted and gave in to the voices in my head which said... sleep on the couch tonight, all will be fine. Oh yeah, like I'm buying that one. So I gave in and slept on the couch. It was nice. Peaceful. The moonlight was soft and filtered through the living room curtains. It was great. A nice change. That lasted for a whole 45--frickin'-minutes.
Oh yeah, get this. There I was stretched out on the couch, relaxing and doing what I do every night--ignoring the cats. They were chasing something. Whatever. I was too tired to care. Until one of the cats jumped up on the love seat across from the couch. I heard one meow. Two. Crash, boom, bang, then a shriek of angry hamster talk.
*two brain cells fire in my demented imagination, my eyes pop open, and my life flashes before my eyes*
Sitting above me on the back of the couch is the silhouette of a cat. Ella. That's Ella--with the crazy soft fur--who has the instincts of a hunter. But what's that ball of whatnot at her feet doing laps around her flicking tail?
OMFG, HAMSTER!
The hunter has her prey. Holy crap! I'm doomed. Chernobyl is gonna happen. Red alert! All hands battle stations! Quick, where's the light? Don't have a light? Grab the iPhone and use it like a flashlight. Fifteen minutes later, a mid weekday miracle is performed and the hamster is back in his cage. Now if only some marketing genius hadn't created the phrase, "Rinse and repeat." Because two days later, the same freakin' thing occurred.
(All together now...) *SIGH*
Do I know why this stuff happens? No. Do I wanna know why this stuff happens? Are you frickin' kidding me? Do I look like a glutton for punishment?! Okay, so maybe I do have some glutton-like tendencies that, in hindsight, should have had me listening to my gut when it was trying to get my attention. See, to my way of thinking of what you might call a belief system, "things" happen for a reason. There's no spontaneous generation (abiogenesis) of events. There's a reaction for every action. Granted, it might take time for said reaction to manifest itself in my whacked out world, but it manifests. In one form or another. Because energy is energy. Okay, enough psychobabble-E science crap Ellie Mae, get on with the point and tell us what your gut was whispering to you.
Okay, okay, don't nag me, I'm getting to it. ;-) The point is that energy is energy. It can be moved from one place to another. Absorbed, but not created (hence the no abiogenesis thing). It can be transferred from one system to another--displaced like the water in the tub was when Archimedes sat down, watched the water spill over the lip of the tub, then shouted the whole Eureka! thing. So like the water in Archie's tub, the energy in my mind (aka, the stories associated with the characters staging the hostile takeover) is being displaced into my conscious world. Because seriously this sort of shit ain't normal. It's fiction, but it happened so it's non fiction and... it frickin' happened! But what was holding me back from getting the stories out of my head onto the page?
Answer: The filter in my head.
You know what filter I'm talking about. The one that makes you refrain from blurting out a sarcastic (but so true it makes your teeth ache to say it) reply to a silly question. The one that stops you from commenting on a family member who stops the microwave (that has a turn table in it that turns during the whole 9 minute cooking cycle) at 4.5 minutes to rotate said dish on the turn table. The same filter that prevents you from telling your mother-in-law what you really think of her.
Yeah, I'm taking about that filter. I had the settings to mine set so high that I cringed every time the characters in my head started to tell me in their words what the frick-frack-and-whatnot was going in their story. Every time they dropped the F-bomb in my head I chuckled then backed away from the keyboard. Every time the heat got dialed up a notch or ten I smirked then wheeled the office chair backwards (inevitably over a cat's tail) and away from the keyboard.
But seriously, folks...? Enough is enough. I have a filter, yeah, and I can use it in polite conversation, but these characters... the gloves are coming off right along with my filter. It's time to give as good as I get. And then some. Okay, so yeah it's either that or my sanity and since we all know how much I love my sanity... I'm dropping the F-bomb on the filter and kicking it to the curb.
There. Enough said. Coup mission complete. Characters win. Filter destroyed. Writer unleashed.
Until next time... rock on and power to the people!
~Ellie Mae of the elf clan, Kindel
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