P is for Politics

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

Boy, I musta been over caffeinated when I picked my topics for the month. ;)

Here's hoping I don't piss too many people off.

I was born into a family of liberal democrats, married a man who considers himself extremely conservative, and I fall awkwardly between.

Yes, I am - gasp! - a centrist. A moderate. One of those wishy washy middle people who tries to find a reasonable compromise and thinks the screaming folks at both ends of the spectrum are equally nuts.

Sorry if you're one of them and that bothers you, but this is my blog.

I have a few hot-button issues, but mostly I'm socially moderate with a slight liberal lean, and economically moderate with a slightly conservative lean. In short, I straddle the political fence.

I know that anyone's life can go to hell without warning - sudden job loss, house destroyed by fire, accident, whatever - and there should be programs and safety nets to help. However, I do not believe in a life long (or generations long) free ride. I'm happy to help pick someone back up, dust off their backside, then, once they're moving forward again, let them go on their way, but I don't want them camped out on my couch forever. Also, I tend to learn from my screwups and I get aggravated when someone apparently doesn't get it despite making the same damn mistake over and over and over. Once, okay, here ya go! Twice....  eh, fine. Third time, figure it out for yourself. I'm not your mommy.

I'm apparently a hard ass that way.

I refuse to go to church, but I donate to charity. A LOT. In fact, every penny of my ebook sales is donated to charity, plus I'm a regular contributer to our local animal shelter (I buy bags of cat food and drop it off at their door), our local homeless shelter (I donate groceries), local library (new, current books), hospice (quilts), volunteer fire department (fundraiser supper and raffle tickets) and the battered women's shelter (I've sent books, clothes, toys, money...). I also happily buy whatever crap local kids are selling door to door because if some kid has the guts to go around knocking on doors, the least I can do is buy a candle or package of cookies.

I believe abortions should be safe and legal, but they shouldn't be the 'first choice' option for birth control (there are lots and lots of ways to not get pregnant in the first place so wise up and use something!), nor should late term ones be allowed except under medical necessity (why can't they just c-section deliver the babies and adopt them out??). I couldn't imagine having one myself, but I don't feel it's my place to tell someone else they can't, especially if they've been molested or raped or there's something medically wrong with them or their baby.

I believe in personal responsibility, not government control.

I believe that we need to stop shitting in our own ecological living rooms by polluting our water and land and air, and there should be tight regulations on industry to ensure our environment is kept clean, but I think Carbon Credits are a bunch of hooey. They're just another way for someone in a fancy suit to make money. Also the first step in improving our environment should be to STOP RIPPING UP WILD AREAS. You want a new factory or housing development, put it where urban blight has left vacant buildings to crumble and decay. Clean that up, repair and rebuild what we already have, and leave the remaining wild places alone. Then expand the wild places, not with rows of easy-to-maintain pine trees, and kentucky bluegrass, but with the same kinds of wild plants, trees, streams and whatever else that was here before we came and ripped them out in the first place.

You wanna be green? Don't build a new house, buy an old one and fix it up. Think of it as upcycling. And it's cheaper, too.

I'm a flat taxer. Simplify the damn tax code already and I don't care if you charge every citizen the same $$ amount or the same percentage, just make it simple enough a 4th grader can figure it out. You made this much, you pay that much. End of story. We could do it with postcards, it'd be so easy.

While we're simplifying the tax code, simplify legislation, too. Bills should have one piece of legislation on them, not a pile of expensive riders just so some Senator's brother's company gets a lucrative contract for something that's essentially worthless. One thing. If it's a bill for housing for the poor, then that's all it is. Vote on that, just that. Additional funding for low-rent housing in an economically blighted area? Pick one, yay or nay, and let's move on. Quit padding the popular bills with expensive crap, and passing horrid, freedom-crushing legislation because it has one good rider stuck in there everyone wants. Pass the good stuff, vote down the crap. How can that be so difficult?

Citizens have to live within their means and the government should, too. Suck it up and get it done. If someone's living expenses get too high and they dig a deep debt-hole to pay for it (like our government has done oh so well), private individuals generally have to do two things at the same time: make more money and cut expenses. The government needs to do that, too. Maybe they can hire Congressmen out as babysitters on weekends or make Senators greeters at WalMart or something. Have congressional staffers fry burgers, I dunno. No, wait! How about cut spending and raise taxes?? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Also, you cannot have every freaking program under the sun for free, okay? Social programs cost money and have massive staff and overhead requirements. That money has to come from somewhere, it's not freely floating around the air. It's not. If a program is needed, something else has to be cut. In the opposite hand, you can't keep crushing the working class and expect the economy to grow. There has to be a balance in there, between all the cuddly teddy bears on one side and the corporate interests on the other. We need BOTH, okay? Big business and social programs. We do. Don't expect the ever shrinking working class alone to fund all these programs.

And, goddammit, stop allowing any private company that receives government funds to give big bonuses to its executives when the company LOSES MONEY, especially if they're still in debt to the government. That's freaking insane! Btw, if a large company is losing money, it's not the lowly clerk's fault. The worst they're doing is wasting a few staples and staples are cheap. Don't fire the clerks and janitors to trim payroll and expenses because, frankly, it's stupid. Losses are the big-shot decision maker's fault. Fire them instead because they're the ones going through huge budgets like they're breath mints with expense accounts and thousand dollar suits and trips to Barbados and crazy ass ideas that don't do anything but burn money. Clear out corporate (and governmental) bloat from the top down, not the bottom up, and most everything will run a lot smoother.

Lastly, I think that just about every politician above the local level is a greedy crook and the only real difference between the two parties is the color of the team-stamp on their foreheads.

As an illustration of the above comment, as a centrist I have noticed that the Right is calling Obama almost word-for-word the EXACT SAME THINGS the Left called Bush. Same complaints. Same descriptive put-downs. Same extremist paranoias. Same every freaking thing. Oh, the specific details might vary. A little. Bush had Haliburton, Obama has Solyndra, that kinda thing. But it's the same crap as the last guy and, frankly, I've seen little difference between them. I also don't love or hate either of them. I rate both as 'meh', they're okay, I guess. Just one more rich guy in a suit tying to separate me from my money, and slowly boiling the frog of my personal freedoms. But, then again, so has every other administration and congress I can personally remember. I've lost count how many times one side proposes this idea that the other side DESPISES then, two years later (or four or ten) the second side proposes the same dang thing, only this time it's the FIRST SIDE that despises it. Heck, how many times has a politician ran on tearing down the other guy because he voted for this crap thing, or slept with that prostitute, or took money from that dastardly interest group or whatever, then, once elected, did the exact same thing. It happens so much we barely notice any more.

They're all crooks, and they're all in this together. Their primary goal is more power for them, less for us. As long as we keep taking sides against one another, the red vs the blue, the politicians win and we all lose.

When talking about local people serving in local offices like city councils and county boards and things, some are really great people trying to make a difference, some are wannabe bigshots who'll screw over anyone who isn't greasing their palm. By the time a politician's reached the national level, the genuinely-trying-to-make-a-difference has almost always been beaten (or bought) out of them. As far as I'm concerned, professional politicians suck.  Politics sucks. No matter who wins, we're all screwed.

Deep breath.

Thank goodness tomorrow it's all about Quilting. I'm getting rather tired of these aggravated emotional topics. ;)

O is for Oxycontin

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

Back with another narcotic.

My dad died several years ago from complications of diabetes. Along the way, he had numerous heart attacks, surgeries, dialysis visits, and an oxycontin addiction.

He called it hillbilly heroin. Never heard of such a thing before my dad's addiction, but it's a common term and a problem all over the country. On the black market, it's expensive stuff. With prescriptions in hand and decent insurance... not so much. Either way, it's potentially deadly.

I can't remember when he first started using Oxycontin, probably after an angioplasty about a decade before he died. It's a pretty powerful opiate based pain killer and I know he was in quite a lot of pain for a long time. I vaguely remember him taking Percocets, some Vicodin, but once he got the Oxycontin, that was it. No other drug would do.

I totally understand the need to stop the pain, I do. Instead of one pill every so many hours, though, he'd take three or four at a time, all day long. I remember him having several huge bottles of the stuff, all prescribed by different doctors, there on his nightstand. He'd wrestle one open, scoop out a few, and chew them all at once. Half an hour, maybe an hour later - or whenever he happened to wake up - he'd do it again.

It bothered me that none of the doctors, especially his primary physician, did anything to limit his access. I suppose it was a case of 'we know he hurts, so let's let him stop hurting'. Frankly, I can accept and appreciate that, but it was obvious to everyone around him that my dad wasn't taking the pills to stop the pain in his feet or belly or whatever, he was taking them to stop the pain of his ever increasing addiction. And he did it for YEARS. An end of life decision to limit pain is one thing, encouraging a long term addiction is something else.

He ultimately lost the ability to think, to reason, to play guitar, to do anything but sprawl twitching and passed out in bed. He'd burn though a month's supply in a day or two. He'd get the shakes if he didn't have pills within reach. It was a horrible thing to see, and I learned that you cannot negotiate or reason with an addict. The screwy thing was he knew he was an addict and, despite a lifetime of badmouthing drunks and druggies, he wasn't at all interested in changing.

My dad's decline from diabetes was inevitable, but becoming a heroin addict along the way was sadly unexpected and added a tragic footnote to an otherwise talented life.

N is for Nightmares

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

Okay. Nightmares.

I think I'd rather go back to talking about God or Fear, but here goes.

I have had nightmares for as far back as I can remember. For most of my adult life, I lived in a state of non-dreaming, or rarely dreaming, and trained myself to wake up every 20 minutes or so, all night long.

If I didn't wake up soon enough, if I allowed myself to dream, I'd sit up in bed, screaming. This isn't good for anyone - especially not my poor husband trying to sleep beside me. My not-really-sleeping became a state of normal for me (also an N word, ha ha) but it also invited depression, anxiety, and a host of physical complaints.

People need to sleep. Even folks like me.

I learned that sleeping in the daytime, where it's light out and I can see when I open my eyes, helps. That's probably a major reason why I'm a night-owl. The dreams can't get me if I'm awake all night. The real world doesn't embrace that backwards schedule so I have to sleep at night like everyone else. I'm forty seven years old yet I need a fairly bright nightlight, somewhere nearby, so I can see. If I can't see, when the nightmares come, I'll wake up screaming. Since we keep the hallway light on (which indirectly lights our bedroom), it's not so bad. When Bill was working nights I also had the curtains and blinds up so the streetlight down the block and our neighbor's back yard light brightened things up quite a lot.

Imagine waking to this every night
only with a black cavern mouth.
Screaming at you.
And, oh, the teeth. Lots of teeth.

Most of the time - not always, but most - my nightmares consist of something big and heavy falling toward my head to crush me, or a crazy, horrifying woman in garish makeup beside the bed screaming at me. I call her 'that kabuki bitch'. Imagine if you will, waking suddenly, heart pounding, because you'd just woken from the certainty of getting your head crushed under a falling car or boulder or airplane part, and you're laying there, gasping, trying to calm yourself and keep your heart from leaping out of your chest and running away, only to turn your head and some crazy Kabuki bitch is right there, just past your nose, is if she'd been breathing in your ear, and as soon as you see her she lets out an ear splitting scream. Only it's probably you, screaming, because she's actually laughing because she knows you'll do this same damn dance with her in 20 minutes, if you dare to fall asleep.

Yep, super fun times with the kabuki bitch.

She didn't follow me to this house after we moved (thank God), but the falling things... they're still here. As is the less prevalent but still common dark, looming thing in the corner (it left a few months back, thanks to Bill). Other less common nightmares include being chased, stabbed, cut open, beheaded and falling from great heights.

Creepy little bastard.

So, um, yeah. They're a blast. And Kabuki bitch would laugh at me then, too, but she's gone. Yay!!

Now that my eyes are fixed (had them lasered 2 years ago to correct severe nearsightedness) and we have lights on, when I have a nightmare I can open my eyes and see that everything's okay. Before... not so much.

And, oh, yard gnomes creep me out, too. Sometimes, in my dreams, they follow me, no matter how I try to hide. Shudder.

Kabuki bitches and yard gnomes. They're the stuff of nightmares.

M is for Manuscript

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

As a writer, I need to utilize and maintain proper manuscript format when working with my agent and publishers. I am, admittedly, old school in this regard, and, so far at least, it's served me well.

Actual page from Stain of Corruption

I use 12 point Courier, double spaced, with one inch margins all around. Always. I underline text that's supposed to be italics. Always. My chapter heads stand out, about 1/3 of the way down the page. I have my first line indent at .5 inches, have one space between the ending punctuation of one sentence and the lead letter of the next, and let MS Word center whatever needs to be centered. Lastly, I never, EVER use tabs.

Why no tabs? Because when the text gets converted and placed into the program (often QuarkXpress) that publishers use to typeset and print books, tabs create a host of problems, including (but not limited to) alignment errors, digital 'gibberish' inserted in random locations, and missing text.

So don't use tabs if you're setting up a manuscript for submission. Please.

Why do I use such old layout options? Why not just type it up in Verdana, email it out, and be done with it? After all, Courier is so freaking UGLY!!

It's easy to pick out all of the letters and punctuation in Courier.
Even when you're tired. Easier reading = fewer mistakes.

Because, when you're working with a printed manuscript (especially all day, every day, like editors and copy editors and typesetters do), double-spaced Courier is easy to read. It's easy on the eyes. It's easy to see punctuation. And it's easy to get an accurate word count.

Yeah, yeah, all word processors give word counts, I know. But, those word counts might not be the word count a publisher needs. They calculate those counts based upon the number of pages in the manuscript, and the number of words that should be on every page.

For example, in my page setup, Courier makes a 66 character line. Yep, 66 characters. The average word in the english language is five letters, plus one space, together they makes six. So, with a five letter word, plus one space per word, out of 66 characters I get ELEVEN words per line. Doesn't matter to the publisher if there are actually three really long words or twenty short ones, it still counts as an eleven word line because it's 66 characters long. Always. In my page layout, a full page has twenty five lines, so my calculated word count, per page, is 275. Multiply that by the number of pages (full or not) in a manuscript, and you get the word count that publishers use.

It's writer math.

For me, a 400 page book makes a 110,000 word story. Some writers tweak their page margins to get 60 characters a line (10 words a line) which then makes 250 words a page. It's a quicker calculation.

I know that ePublishers have different rules, and regulations, and I know that lots and lots of places ask for manuscripts to be set in Times or whatever. I do, so there's no need to tell me. My agent and editors still like Courier (and I know from personal experience it's easy to mark up for edits and revisions) so I'm sticking with it until someone shaking a check at me says otherwise.

L is for Laudanum

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

Make your troubles float away...

For those of you who are new here, I write forensic fantasy novels, and they tend to pull no punches. As I worked through the events in the books, one of my major characters needed a way to face not only a daily grind of rapes, murders, and worse, but manage and minimize their reactions to the horrible things they've experienced. In short, they needed to cope. Like a lot of real people who self medicate with drugs and alcohol, this particular character turned to a narcotic. Laudanum.

It's an opiate derivative, similar to modern morphine, and it fit in well with my setting's timeline. This stuff used to be widely available in patent medicines and tonics. Makes me wonder how many opium addicts (by today's standards) existed in the 19th century when they could buy Laudanum and other opiates without any sort of restriction or prescription. It was even added to Absinthe to increase the high (oh, the fun of mixing narcotics and hallucinogens) and the side effects... wow.

It's nasty, yet incredibly awesome stuff, at least from a story teller standpoint. ;)  Just think of the fun things I can do to my characters!!

K is for Kale

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

Last night, my laptop blew its hard drive*. I spent today driving halfway across the state to the Mac Store and back again, and I'm just now getting a chance to post today's entry. So it'll be short and sweet. :)

Bill and I have been trying to improve our diets and part of that includes adding more green, leafy veggies, like kale. I've been putting it in soups and pasta dishes, for example, and we like it okay, but Kale Chips are, by far, everyone's favorite use of this versatile veggie.

Kale Chips are baked, they're crispy, and salty and when I make them they disappear. Our daughter even squees and runs off with the bowl, munching.

Very yummy, incredibly simple, and they're healthy, too!

*The laptop was still under warranty and it's now sporting a shiny new hard drive, the Mac Geniuses even managed to save my working book files. Yay! It just cost me some time. :)

J is for Joneses

You can find a full list of my A to Z challenge posts here. :)

About 24 years ago, I was incredibly blessed to be absorbed into Bill's family. Unlike my family (which I'll talk about on the S entry), the Jones clan encompasses a couple hundred individuals. Yep. In the 'immediate' family.

Seeing as how my whole family lived in a span of a handful of houses on the same block, Bill's family is MASSIVE. And almost all have been to our house. At the same time. With one bathroom. ;)

Ahem.

I was welcomed without question or reservation - at least none that I'd ever heard of - and some members of Bill's family, especially his Aunt Edna (yep, he has one too. Doesn't everyone??) are among my select few 'favorite people on the planet'. I know, with utter certainty, that I can pick up the phone and, with one little phone call, have a houseful of guys to help move something heavy, or build a new roof, or whatever. Need to borrow a car? Easy peasy. Need an emergency babysitter? Gotcha covered. Have any crisis at all, and a horde of Joneses - aunts, uncles, cousins twice removed - will descend like magical, friendly locusts and get it fixed, hauled, cleaned up, or corralled. Shortly after we got married, one of Bill's cousins had to move, and we - along with a lot of others - appeared at the house and got everything out of there and loaded in the truck, EVERYTHING, in less than an hour.

BAM! It's like magic. Joneses do not screw around.

Besides being generous with their time, the Jones family tends to be rowdy. And LOUD, everyone talking over everyone else. There's generally beer somewhere, and quite a few have issues with substance abuse (not that my family is clean in that regard, but the reasons for the abuse tend to be different). It's never quiet at a Jones family gathering and they get together every 4th of July. When we were first married, the annual party/family reunion was held at Bill's parents' house, but after his mom died it moved to ours. One year, when I did the head count, we had 177 people over, including children, and, yes, we had one bathroom. It was a madhouse, but since we had a huge yard, we managed. And it didn't include Uncle Charles' branch, or Aunt Marlene's branch, Duane and Jo's family (who mostly lived out of state), anyone from Sharon's side, or the folks who had to work.

Still, more than 175 people. In the "immediate family".

After several years, we decided that our poor septic system couldn't handle the stress anymore, so the party moved on, to Charles' house, then a park, then back to Bill's dad's, then another park. I'm not sure where it'll be this year, but it promises to have a lot of food, a lot of volleyball, and a whole LOT of kids running around. Every ten years or so they have the BIG family gathering and there were more than 300 people at the last one.

You don't get such a huge family without having a lot of children. We were the oddballs in the group because we only had our one daughter - and one of Bill's brothers has no children at all - but four to seven kids per family seems to be the norm. Cousin Johnny (who'd had a whole string of girls) once joked he was making his own softball team.

I know with a deep and abiding certainty, without a hint of reservation, that if our house were to burn down, or Bill's job evaporate, or a hundred other possible catastrophes were to fall upon us, the Jones family would be there, immediately, to help clean up or offer a place to stay, or money or whatever.

Bam! The helpful horde would descend.

Despite being solidly working class to downright poor, they're just incredibly generous and giving people. I have to admit it took me awhile to get used to the loud, rowdy, rambunctiousness of the family, but I love them all and I'm positive they know that if they need anything - anything - we, too, would be there to help.

Love you guys!!