Querying

In the interest of moving forward with my writing career I have polished my favorite manuscript and I am about to start querying agents. Wish me luck!

Time flies when you're....

...weaning a 5 week old kitten! I haven't written in ages!

Wyatt is doing pretty good! We're still having some diarrhea issues even on the meds for it so I think I'm going to do ANOTHER fecal flotation on Monday. This will make poopoo check number FOUR for him, the previous three clean. I guess I'll look even harder for coccidia GR.

On friday after work I had to go grocery shopping so I left him at the hospital for the 1/2 hour I was gone and when I came to pick him up he was sleeping in a little ball in his towels and he wouldn't wake up to come to me. I called his name, I rubbed his back and all he'd do was shake and bury his head! I was so worried so I took him into one of the exam rooms and took his temp...103.4!!! OMG!! So I called the doctor and he had me make up some amoxicillin drops (its the pink stuff we all took when we were kids!) and bring him back the next day to check his temp. (It was normal yesterday THANK GOD!)

The poor baby felt SO bad friday night. He just laid in the corner and shook the whole night, I couldn't even get him to take a bottle!! So before I went to bed, around 2am!, I put some canned food in his cage and went to bed. Around 3:30am or 4am, he woke me up crying and he'd eaten all his food! I was so happy because I'd been SO worried.

The last kitten I fostered died around 4-5 weeks and it was just heart breaking. His name was Calvin Meeps and I called him Meepers! He was such a sweetie. He had congenital heart defects and his lungs were adhered to the wall of his chest in a manner that made it impossible for him to breathe :o( We had to euthanize him because he was in such distress and there wasn't anything we could do :o(

^^^^Thats him someone found him in a Chuck E. Cheese parking loot and brought him in. He was soooo skinny and covered in a nasty fungal infection. I got the infection almost totally cleared up and made the last week or so of his life much better but I was still devastated.

So going through these scares with Wyatt just made me feel like I didn't really want to do foster kittens anymore. I'm so sleep deprived STILL and I just can't wait until he's old enough to go to his new furever home. I love him to death, but its so difficult. Its just as bad as when Bella's sick!

Who needs sleep...right?

I got the new kitten a week ago today, so he's approximately 3 weeks old now. When I got him his eyes were not even open all the way, neither were his ear and as of this weekend he's starting to play, staying awake after his meals, and today he even drank about a table spoon of formula from a saucer. Only the one time though, the second time I tried to give him a saucer he just threw a fit!! He weighs 8 1/2 oz, so just half a pound!

He is SO cute! I don't have my camera this weekend (left it at work!) but he's just a tiny little tuxedo boy. All black with white up to his hocks on his back legs, only his fingers are white on the front and his belly and chest along with a teeeeny white strip going from his chest up to his chin and into his mouth. The rest is black except his whiskers and ear hairs. I found this picture on google, so its not him, but to give you an idea:

He is SO darn cute! I named him Wyatt and he is a MAJOR stinker, but such a sweetheart! The other kitten, she's about 6 1/2 weeks old now, (the tortie) is getting along nicely, no longer really feral at all, and she'll start living at the hospital tomorrow. She's ready to find her forever home! How exciting! Bella will be pleased!!

Life for me has been the absolute polar opposite of exciting for the past week. Up until Friday night I was up every 2 hours bottle feeding Wyatt and sleeping for only 2 hours at a time (when it takes me a good 15-20min to fall asleep!) is not conducive to a happy well rested me! Now hes teething so he's sleeping poorly and wanting to chew on the nipple rather than have the bottle and its so darn frustrating! I'll say one thing about infant kittens though: EXCELLENT BIRTH CONTROL. I can't WAIT until he's eating completely on his own so I can get some freakin' rest!! I adore him though...

Exhausting work!

Three main things going on in my life this weekend.

1.) Went to Stillwater for dinner with Jen and Sashley, the new receptionist. It was loads of fun, even though neither Sash nor I liked our dinner at all! The fries were excellent though, as always. We laughed loudly through most of the meal and at more than one time I'd judge our volume went from outdoor-voice to obnoxious. I don't even care, it was a hysterically good time. Sashley tried to eat Jen's blue cheese crumbles, our waiter looked like Ron Weasley, and a girl at another table kept looked down my blouse without even trying to be inconspicuous! Our conversations ranged from nonsense to sharing imagination and I even told Sashley quite a bit about Shamahley...it was an awesome night.

2.) For the time being at least I have a new kitten. A tiny teeny tortoise shell who I've only just named Annabelle. We call her Annie, Lil Bit or Small Fry for short. She is 100% feral and a hilarious joy to have in the house. She's young, about 5 weeks old so she's adapting to us very very well. She slept in a blanket in Jen's arms most the afternoon and this evening she slept in my pocket for about 1/2 hour. It adorable. She's just trusting us enough to play with us and realize that she gets lonely when we aren't with her. She's barricaded in the hallway right now and if she can't see or hear us she MEW MEW MEW MEWs and as soon as we come she's like HISS HISS HISS HISS because she is feral and still so scared. But she has not lashed out at me yet, its amazing. It is so awe-inspiring to watch her trusting us. I can't wait to hear her purr, I'll probably get teary! Right now its not my immediate plan to actually keep her. Bella is very jealous and feels very left out. She even tried to bite me today, she never does that. Bella is a very "one cat household" kitty and I totally respect that. The only way I will keep Annie is if she turns out to be a "one person cat" and can't adapt well to a new family. My hope is that I can get her well adjusted so that I can find a great furr-ever home for her.

3.) Becoming the famous author you all know I will be ;o) Today I researched ALL DAY LONG about query letters and the whole process, from how to gracefully accept a rejection letter (one unpublished author recommends setting a rejection letter goal: her personal goal is 100.) to how long it can potentially be from the time an agent accepts your full manuscript. Then there are revisions and etc and hopefully a publisher will buy it. I am excited to get to that point, but for now I just need to focus on finishing The Heart of Shamahley and editing it and revising it myself. I need about 36,000 words to bump it up to 100k and that seems to be a good number for publishing a fantasy. I could probably write 200k and if it ends up being that long I'll break it into two novels, something I'd toyed with anyway.

Aside from the vehicle situation I'm pretty okay with my life right now. As long as Jen doesn't plan on moving to Stillwater this January (which I'm pretty sure she is and she probably won't tell me until December, I mean why give me fair notice? Right?) I feel like I have a good goal in place: Write Last Sunrise in November and until then focus on finished The Heart of Shamahley, and after November I'll start editing it. Before next November I want to start sending out my queries. Plans are GREAT!

Spot on

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

^__ Robert Cormier

Happy Re-Birthday!

I've had Bella two years ago today! She's FOUR! I consider this her "re-birth"-day because it was the day she came home with me and ended her life of being abused FOREVER. Of course for some reason my Catster page INSISTS that she's six! Whatever!!

I bought her some treats, she hasn't had any non-diet kitty treats since I put her on her diet so they make her uber happy! And I also bought her two toys for her kitty re-birthday! She also ate a TON of steak but thats only because I turned my back too long HEHE.

I can't BELIEVE how skinny she's gotten compared to that picture! She's like a whole new kitty cat! Yay.

I have two more pieces of news: 1.) I read my nano novel from last year "The Heart of Shamahley" and LOVED IT. LOVED IT. I can't believe I wrote it!! If you'd asked me a month ago I'd have told you it was the worst thing I've ever written! So not. I got CHILLS while reading it today, it was awesome! I'm alive with ideas for editing it...its very exciting.

The second piece of news (Namely, 2.)) is that Doc still hasn't found me a car so until he does I'm going to be driving around a Lincoln Continental. Yeah. Its a boat, not a car ;o) I'm cool with it though. As long as it drives I'm happy as a freakin' clam! It probably won't have a CD player or AC though, boo. Still, totally excited.

The Gunslinger: Oh, Roland he of many whens

I've started reading The Dark Tower again, I may have mentioned it. I'm just so in love with the story being told and I'm so attached to everyone involved.

I'm reading The Gunslinger right now and within the next handful of pages he will let the boy drop, no matter how much I dread it. There are other worlds, yes, but I remember when I first read this book and I didn't even know it was part of a series and these words of other worlds fell dead in my ears because I just didn't understand.

This series is so underestimated and its so unfair. So many who have read it condemn King for his ending and I can't understand that. Did he not say from the beginning that Ka was a wheel? I was surprised by the end, I won't lie, but it was beautiful in its own way with its many implications. I did not read these seven books to arrive at the end of the journey anyway. In fact I put off reading the last book for a couple of years because I didn't want it to end. The joy was in the journey itself, the joy was in sharing the secret world of Roland and his mismatched Ka-tet and even though most of them meet fates that leave me in tears I know they'll still be there full of life every time I re-open these books and I'm only about a hundred or two pages away from meeting Eddie Dean again, my favorite character in any book I've ever read. I can't wait. Even though it means Jake dying to get there. I also know that only a few hundred pages lie between his rebirth into Roland's world. Because, as he keeps telling us, Ka is a wheel. And of course, Jake is a major part of Roland's Ka.

*sigh*

I know, I'm a geek sometimes, but everyone has that one book, or that one series, you know? The one that draws them in and wraps them up and refuses to let them go. Thats what The Dark Tower is for me.

Some better, some worse

So, some better. Doc is helping me out with my car. He's helping me find something outside of a dealer that he will purchase and I will make bi-weekly payments on. The only drawback that I can readily foresee is that this won't go towards a better credit rating for me. I'm going to pay off a semi-hefty loan and its going to do nothing for me, you know? That isn't even something I'm going to focus on though because this is just the most amazing thing that has happened for me in a really long time. I have never, repeat never been the girl that things just "work out" for. I always have problems, I always have obstacles, I always have some huge stone to move from my path, you know? So its just so unreal to me. This is help, this is what it feels like when things work out. Its an alien feeling and I'm holding on to this relief with an iron fist. Last night I slept better than I have in months, and I ate a real meal, and I've been smiling. Doc is an amazing man, I can hardly comprehend his greatness. Who in our world is so innately good anymore? Its like fresh air, spring after a cold winter and all of that.

The worse. About an hour after Doc and I talked I learned that my great grandfather who had heart surgery (two actually) Thursday was recovering from the surgery wonderfully and that was great. Unfortunately a routine MRI uncovered 4 malignant tumors that are believed to be very similar to the cancer my grandma has been fighting tooth and nail for about ten long years. This shows that my mothers side of the family has a genetic predisposition to this particular blood cancer. That is extremely scary. My grandmother found all this out about her dad while she was in the hospital doing her last round of chemo before getting her own MRI to check on her tumors. As soon as he's well enough we're moving him from Idaho to California to live the rest of his life as the doctors have decided that he's too old to put him through Chemo. As soon as he's there and settled I'm going to fly out and visit because this will be the last time I see him and he's just been such an important part of my life. He's so incredible, and strong, and free. Its so unfair. His soul is still so full of life and his body is giving up on that unimaginable life force. Its so damn unfair.

I am going to miss him like you can't believe, but I will handle it. Its cancer, I have some practice accepting that. Cancer I can handle (as long as its not me anyway).

UGH!! (and other frustrated words)

It is really getting down to the wire (a week from today!) with the whole car thing. I have been turned down so many times I have officially lost count. Okay, my credit score sucks. I get that, I know, bad Amanda. It is my fault, I take responsibility. But that doesn't mean that I can't get stressed to the effing max about the fact that I apparently can't qualify for a decent car period. How is it going to affect my credit score when the only place I can get to finance me will only finance me for a 1990 car that has about 180k miles on it. They are going to charge me $300 bucks a month for this car which is absolutely ridiculous. What is the probability that this car will actually run for the 2 1/2 years my loan is for? Pretty much zilch. So how is this going to affect my credit when I am suddenly being forced to pay for a car that went belly up? GR. I just feel like I have put SO MUCH into making my life better for myself and I feel like I fail at every turn. Its incredibly frustrating.

I emailed a sales person at Carmax this evening and told them my credit score to see if they could work with it, we'll see... the thing is, i don't even know how to improve my score. I pay my cards early or on time and I try really hard to pay over the minimum, what more can I do?

I found a lump on Jen's cat this evening. I was holding him and it was right on his side where Bella's was...Rabies on right. I'm guessing its a reaction to the rabies vaccine, which Bella's was also, and if that is the case it needs to come off ASAP. I'm taking him in on Monday and we aren't going to feed him tomorrow night in case we end up having enough time to fit him in. How scary, right? Two vaccine reaction kitties in the same house? I thought it was supposed to be rare. Its not, its not as rare as people are lead to believe and the number of dogs I'd seen with autoimmune disease from vaccines is just mind boggling. I have come to the decision that vaccinating your animals is almost too risky. I mean, if it goes outside, keep it up to date on Lepto and heartworm preventative but outside that? Screw it. I won't vaccinate another animal I have after their baby shots. Its so not worth it!

I'm going to watch 300 then off to sleep!!

Justin and JLi

A really good friend of mine from CA, Justin, called me a weekend or two ago and announced that he was in the end stages of his divorce. I mean, I hadn't talked to this guy in about a year and I didn't honestly know he'd even been married! This is the same Justin who convinced JLi to get married that one time they were in Vegas (yeah he didn't even know the girl, remember?). I guess he didn't know the girl that well before they got married and once they moved in together she turned out to be this horrible mooch and yadda yadda, whatever. I was not really shocked, per say, about him getting divorced, I was shocked that he actually got married! He was the one who had a different girlfriend weekly. Him settle down? Nah. I've been talking to him almost daily here lately, ever since he called a couple weeks ago. I still have a teeny crush on him, he's uber hot and just awesome. He's funny, and musical, and hot. Perfect. Plus, he's a Dark Tower fan! If he weren't so flighty and indecisive he'd be perfect!

I haven't done much of anything today. We're watching neighbor Jake's dogs, Turk and Commala, and their Dobie (Commala) had MAJORRR diarrhea all over their dining room last night. So I spent a half hour or so getting that cleaned up. Ew. It sucked, but whatever, had to get done. Both of their dogs are super cute and sweet.

Other than showering and laundry I'm not planning on doing anything else today. Yesterday was an exhausting day. I swam alot and got super tired so today I'm a lazy bum! Bella's driving me nuts though. I think she's just hot and uncomfortable, but she's acting totally off. Whatever, she'll be fine ;o)