I thought I’d give you all an update on the goings on at The Bright Compound. 

So, it seems that we have had some unwelcome house guests.  Unlike other Sisters, mine have been of the winged variety.  Apparently two wasp colonies have taken up residence at our house.  One on the front porch and the other on the back fence.  I don’t know if they’re like rival wasps gangs or what, the East Siders and the West Siders.  Perhaps they fly around in E or W formations, or maybe they make little gang signs with their wings or something.  I don’t know what the deal is, but they’re here and, against my Buddhist nature, they must go

My Honey is very brave, for a bass player, that is.  He decided that he would take care of the problem.  He’s like a musical SWAT team.  Obviously, I didn’t know this bust was taking place or I would have been VERY concerned.  My Honey is an extremely capable man, but this whole plan seemed like a bad idea.  I understand that he’d planed this himself with no backup.  Ed, where were you?  What could you possibly have been doing that was more important than watching My Honey’s back? Whatever.

Before you panic and start calling the hospitals or watching for the disaster on the news, I will tell you that My Honey is fine.  Nary a sting.  I suspect that you are now thinking, in the most sadistic way, that this story is proving to be a let down.  Oh, Readers of little faith, you should know better than that.  I do try to fulfill our covenant.

Instead of describing a disaster, I shall describe to you his uniform.  Please remember that we live in the southwest and today it was 9 million degrees because we are approximately 12 feet from the sun.  Picture if you will: blue jeans, steel toes boots, long sleeve shirt, a bandanna around his lower face and another around the top, a hat, gloves and goggles.  He told me  that the only skin showing were his ears, and he confided that they blinked there on each side of his head like red “Sting Me” beacons.  

I guess he sprayed the holy hell out of the little terrorists with wasp spray and they are now deceased.  The prospect of building new nests will be strongly discouraged.  I sincerly doubt that their funeral will be as extravagant as someone else’s lately, but they’re dead and the Brights did the Snoopy Dance of joy. 

I tried to get him to admit that he squealed like a girl and ran away, but no.  I will concede that I am a little disappointed.  It’s OK if you are to.

The Sisters three are all in a funk, a malaise if you will, and for a variety of reasons that I won’t spell out here.   We met for lunch today, we do this at least once a week.  We talk and text a million times throughout the days and nights, but we need to actually meet at least once to refuel and have a bit of Sister therapy, talk about our stories, or trouble with our stories, and to grouse in person about how much we (read I) hate rewrites and edits.

Today was more of a mope session and, sometimes I guess, you just have to let the funk happen.  I’m sure it’s healthy to once and a while allow for the frustrations, the stresses, the illness, the woes, and the rest of the stuff that lays heavy on your heart and your shoulders.  It’s just unusual that it would happen to all of us at the same time.

The three of us need a loooong vacation.  I’m thinking that Johnny Depp has that nice little island, and a week there is just the ticket.  There is a  theory that everyone is only six degrees of separation from every other person on the planet.  Apparently I only need to line up the right four people. 

You don’t want the Sister’s having nervous breakdowns, now do you?  So, let’s put our heads together, people.   Surely one of you out there can get us even just a little closer to dear Johnny and that island.

I hope everyone had a nice holiday.  Over here at the Bright Compound we had a fairly traditional day.  I got a sunburn, and the kids slept through the fireworks. 

I can’t for the life of me figure out whyI am the only one who ever gets sunburnt.  And don’t give me any of that malarky about sun screen.  I did use sun screen, but I am fairly confident that I could slather the stuff on 3 inches thick and still burn.  For all the good it does me, it might as well be Crisco.  I am seriously considering the vampire possibility again.  And the real tragedy, after going through the pain and the blistering, is that I won’t even get a tan from it.  I’ll come out of the whole thing white as a beluga whale.

Oh, and another observation…we left the Idiot Dog in the house when we went to see the fireworks downtown.  He’s a fraidy-cat coon hound with sensitive hears.  He’s afraid of the lawn mower, the vaccuum, popping bubble wrap, and me throwing my laptop (see below), so we were pretty sure that the fireworks would have given him a heart attack.  When we came home, we found that he’d eaten an entire bag of coconut.  Don’t you think that’s weird?  Of all the things available, that’s what he chose?  Odd.

On a different note, there is something funky in the universe right now.  I just want to alert you and expose myself and Isabella as cautionary tales.  I lost an entire chapter last night, and my Sister lost 18 pages.  I have no idea.  I was writing away and then POOF.  Seriously, POOF, the laptop actually went POOF.  All gone.  I searched everywhere.  The moral of the story of course, is to save your work.  Whether you email it to yourself on a routine basis, or use an external hard drive, just do something.

So I’ll sit here, directly in front of the fan, coated in Aloe Vera, and type away on my story with the only things not lobster colored:  My fingertips.  And then I shall save my work.

My Honey and I had a date tonight.  I think my mother thought I was on my way to a nervous breakdown, so she volunteered to take Sassy and The Bandit for an overnight.  It was probably the crying jag I’ve been on this week that clued her in.  Anyway, it’s a win win.  The kids have the glory of spending the night with Grammy, and My Honey and I were allowed the privilege of eating a dinner with no yelling.  We decided to see a movie, too.  One with absolutely NO animation.  What a treat, I’m telling you. 

We went to see Public Enemies.  Isabella claimed that she didn’t even know a Johnny Depp movie was opening but, believe me, my loins alerted me to the fact weeks ago.  Johnny Depp has a really nifty thing about him.  Guys love him because he’s unrepentantly cool, and women love him because he’s unrepentantly hot.  The movie is a little slow, and maybe a tad long, but is very Johnny heavy, meaning he’s in it A LOT.  Which is good, of course.  

Now I’m home writing.  It’s getting very late, but my brain is revved up and ready to go.  It’s hard not to think about love and sex when you have Johnny on the mind.

I’ve mentioned before that the Sister’s all have jobs.  That’s not exactly true.  Two of the Sister’s have jobs and the third is in the process of securing one, but she’s not happy about it.  Let’s face it.  Jobs suck.  They are demanding of our time, they stress us out, and they are mostly unfulfilling.  And in this market, keeping them is a challenge.  Sometimes, my job is so stressful that coming home to write is almost impossible.  By the time I get the short people through dinner and their baths, chaperoning them while they pick up their toys and go to bed, my brain is fried.  And then after being on a computer all day, the last thing I want to do is start typing again. 

It’s truly miraculous that I enjoy writing as much as I do, otherwise it’s just so sapping of  whatever brain power I have left, if it felt like work I would never finish anything.  And I guess, since I take so much abuse during the 9 – 5 part of my life, it is a little empowering to play God for a while. 

So, as this Independence Day draws near, let us all look towards the thing that will give us independence.  The thing we want the most.  I know what that is for me.  My perfect job would involve being paid for my writing.  And maybe, if I could finagle it, reading for pay, too.  Even if I won the lottery tomorrow (!!!) I just know I’d still spend a great deal of my time writing.  And seeking publication.  That is my Golden Ticket.

What’s yours?

I have posted a sneak peek of the short story I just submitted.  Pop on over to the Amylynn button on the top menu.  If you hover there a drop down menu appears.  The second item down is  Sneak Peak – The Sea Rose.

Read. Enjoy. Come back here and post a comment.  I’m dying to know what you think.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how much writing will get done tonight.  The Bandit has plucked my last nerve.  By tomorrow I fully expect you can begin referring to me as “The Defendant”.  There is no point in telling you the exact infraction that has caused the escalation of my heart rate, but the fact of the matter is, the child has no skill in self preservation.  He was caught doing something he has been expressly forbidden to do, and was in major trouble for doing it just last week.  This time when I caught him, he laughed at me.  LAUGHED AT ME.  And now, I sit writing this while sitting on towels because all the furniture is wet.  He has been put to bed while the sun is still shining.  Of course, he has gotten out of bed any number of times and each time I catch him, I’ve taken away more toys.  By the end of the night, the boy will not own one single thing.  My bed is covered with Matchbox cars, dinosaurs and horses. 

Needless to say, I’m not in any mood to write about love and romance.  This is the trouble with trying to write with kids.  Or with anyone else with in a 100 yard radius.

I think I hear him up now.  I just hope that you will all visit me on Sundays and bring me cigarettes to barter.

It’s done.  The buttons have been pushed and the emails are sent.  It’s always hard to put your baby in that attachment and send it off without anyone to watch over it, but it must be done.  Ava sent hers too, although I’m sure she’ll tell you I bullied her into it.  Isabella’s isn’t far behind, I know.

So, send good thoughts out to the universe.  My confirmation email said to give them 3-4 months.  What! I know! That’s a long time to obsess, isn’t it?  I’ll keep busy, I have another short story about 1/2 way done and revisions on Seeing Love Clearly to finish (as soon as Ava finishes nit picking it) and the sequel 1/4 of the way done.  So obviously, I have a lot to do. 

It’s hard to let your babies go out on their own.

I’m not exactly sure how my sisters go about doing this, but I feel a much better connection with my characters if I write a biography on them.  I do a pretty extensive job of it, too.  I will find picture of people I think they look like, or just pictures of eyes, hair, or in one unsettling example, a cleft chin.  It may look a little stalkerish, and someone might worry if they stumbled upon my computer notebooks and didn’t understand.  But, nevertheless, it helps me.  I have pictures of anything relevant in their lives: their ship, the family crest, the motorcycle they ride, whatever.   Additionally, during the writing of the book, character traits come up, physical descriptions, and other things you’ll want to note in these “biographies”.   Trust me, seventy pages later you don’t want to have to try to remember if the eyes were blue with green flecks or green with blue flecks.

What have the rest of you writers done out there?