Day 15. Clearly, I Kind of Suck at This

Well, so much for B.E.D.F.A.Y. (Blog Every Day For A Year). That's already over and done and out the window. Not saying I quit and will now stop even trying to blog for the remaining days of the year, just saying I have clearly already fallen short of the goal. I could make excuses (I was out of town on business, my kids were sick, I was sick, wild llamas ate my homework, etc.), but that's all they would be: excuses. The fact is that sometimes life gets in the way, and you just have to make do with what you can and try your best and not beat yourself up about the little things (and let's face it: failing to blog for nine days is a little thing in the grand scheme of things. If given the choice between blogging and getting paid to do my real job so that my family can eat or taking my kid to the doctor to avoid serious respiratory infection, call me undedicated, but I know which side of the line I'm coming down on). I can be honest. Things happened that made blogging less than easy. It would have meant some late nights or some early mornings or both. I hit a wall with the characters/story line I was developing but really wanted to work with it instead of doing another exercise, so I just stopped writing altogether. The point is, I'm back now, and the only thing we can do from this point is get back in the saddle and keep writing. (NOTE: Writing from the saddle is less than effective and will most likely lead to illegible chicken scratch.) Head down and power through and whatnot. I have decided to take the advice of Bonnie Neubauer, who wrote the exercise book, and go back to the exercises to help me with the piece I have been developing. However, I am sort of cheating (some might say). I've deliberately skipped around the book a bit until I found an exercise that I think will help me to carry on a new section of the story. I like to think of this less as cheating and more as using the book the way it was designed (there are no rules in it that I have to do each exercise sequentially; in fact, Neubauer recommends jumping around if you feel so inclined, which I do). In the meantime, here are some snapshots of things that have been happening in my personal life lately (since that's also sort of what a blog is for):

Item #1.My hair (and eyebrows) are officially out of control. If Joe Jonas and Jasper Hale had a lovechild, its head would look like mine.

Family and friends are seriously considering an intervention.

Item #2. I am looking forward to Clash of the Titans more than I looked forward to Christmas. Brendan and I watched the 1981 version last night, and it only fueled my frenzy. I love the original because of the bad effects and its MST3K potential. I hope that the remake will have all of the same plot holes and inconsistencies but that it overcompensates with effects that "bottle my mind." I am counting on you, Louis Leterrier. Make up for the hot mess that was Transporter 2. Do not let me down.

Item #3. I love few things more than people who over-confidently misuse colloquialisms in public forums. Case in point: I saw someone tweet a celebrity last week, proclaiming his music to be "mind-bottling." A huge part of me hopes that there is an inside joke there and that the poor girl who wrote the post realized her mistake and made it on purpose. The rest of me has just been having a ball using the incorrect phrase as often as possible (see above paragraph). I've even got Brendan doing it now.

Item #4. This one is more of a question than an order of business. Why, God, why, on American Idol, do they let the good people sing for about two lines but let the truly terrible people sing for a full minute or more? I love the crap auditions as much as the next mocker in the peanut gallery, but sometimes, I am beyond thankful for my DVR and the ability to skip over the 20-second, off-key wails that some of these people belt out.

U like mah hairs? I can haz goldun tickit?

Okay. Time to get back to work. I've got writing and "real work" to do and little time in which to do it. I'll be back tomorrow for more B.E.D.F.A.Y.