The Weirdness On The Wind

A couple years ago, I thumbed through my diaries and picked out some of my favourite scribbles, which I typed out on the intersnacks. These rather short writings have been stored away in a super secret blog that no one has ever read. Except me, of course, which is a mighty relief, to be honest, considering how painful it is to even glance at these posts. No, seriously. Even my most favourite entries are so tedious they make me want to weep tears over how I massacred the English language. 

Anyhow, tonight I found myself going through these handful of writings. Why? That's not too clear. Maybe I wanted to revisit the tortured years of my youth, or maybe I wanted to do some serious mental cringing. If the grotesque grammar and preposterous punctuation weren't enough to cause me to recoil, then the subject matter would have done the trick. 

Every last entry was an ode to forlorn love, being wronged, not liking the girl I used to be, and how heartbreaking the world is. Needless to say, I haven't always been a bright ray of sunshine. Most of my youth was spent feeling lost, uncertain and angry - how I imagine a lot of people feel in their younger years. Still, not everyone wrote down their inner turmoil to read through and relive later on in life. Lucky them. 

If you think I'm going to be sharing any of these embarrassing excerpt with you, think again. No one of them is good enough to show to a blind and deaf mule, let alone a unprepared reader. Having clarified this, there was one line that caught my attention.  

I can hear the weirdness on the wind and my heart echoes the sound. 

Something about this line made me smile. Truth be told, it's very hard for me to look at anything I've written and think it holds any sort of merit. To find this line, especially in writings well over a decade old, is a miracle in and of itself. It simply struck me as a beautiful observation. 

Yes, I am weird, but so is the world. It's in the wind. And I hear it. If weirdness is all around us, inside all of us, then we are never alone in our strange ways. Of course, I can't even remember writing the damn thing, but I must have, because it's here in my super secret online diary, riddled with typos even grade schoolers wouldn't make.  

And yet, in all the messy words, choppy paragraphs and complete lack of white space, I found a golden sentence. 

There is something very comforting in thinking the common thread binding us together is our weirdness. How perfectly abnormal we are. It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? To think we are all colouring outside the lines together.   

Sheep Teeth

What an odd title for a post, right? I mean, what could I possibly have to say about sheep teeth. Well, in fact, nothing. I have nothing to say about sheep teeth, except this.

A friend of mine, Missy, is editing through Seeking Eleanor. Yeah, yeah, that same old first book I wrote. No, I won't give up on her. You can't make me! I love her, love her. And she deserves the limelight she will one day get. *insert anguished cry here* Now, where were we ...

Despite all the edits (over a million) and rewrites (at least seven) there are still typos. Mostly because, I am human and I make mistakes. God, that was hard to admit. Actually, a bit painful. The simple fact is, when I sit on my human butt and read with my human eyes, I don't see all my human mistakes. Even worse, I didn't even stand a chance at catching the ones in the draft Missy is reading and this is because, just between us, I didn't even read through it after I finished rewriting.

Yes, that means I actually handed her a semi-rough draft. I know, I am a terrible person.

So, she's actually catching things I might have caught on my own. I use the word 'might' because it's touch and go with what I actually see when I read. The truth of the matter is, there are certain things I will never catch because I know what it is supposed to say and my brain fills in the correct word and punctuation and crap. The only way for me to catch everything is to print it off and read it aloud. Because I have a huge respect for trees and an appalling disgust with the price of ink, I won't be printing out my manuscript, which is currently four hundred and thirty pages. Yeah, that's a lot of pages.

And I was supposed to be cutting stuff. Oh, that makes me laugh.

Back to the point, one of the edits Missy came across and corrected was 'sheep teeth'. There's this part at the end of the book where good meets evil and evil has sheep teeth. I actually laughed myself silly over this mistake. I mean, there's the bad guy standing in front of you, skin paper white, eyes yellow and bloody, lips cracked and bleeding, and behind them sheep teeth.

Not really the imagery I was going for. 

Sure, sheep teeth are totally terrifying when you get in there and really look at them. And maybe they would have added a certain uniqueness to my baddie, but they aren't exactly the image I was hoping to conjure in the minds of my future readers. Still, it gave me a good laugh. It also makes me wonder about how my fingers are trying to sabotage me. Sometimes the simple act of typing amazes me. I think one thing and my fingers put it down on virtual paper. Well, not all the time. Sometimes they put in a similar word. Like sheep instead of sharp. This might not surprise you, but it happens a fair amount. Which only confirms my suspicions that my hands hate me. 

Haha. Sheep teeth. 

Grateful for my sense of humour. 

Laugh At Yourself

It's the strangest thing, how often I make myself laugh.

Yesterday morning, I was running late. Of course, I put my shirt on inside out. 

Then backwards.  

It made me laugh. Because that's life, isn't it?

When you're running behind, you're going to do silly things. 

This morning, I got my hair all pretty looking, only to realize I still had my hooded sweatshirt on. Yeah, yanking that puppy off completely effed with my 'do. Sure, I could have gotten upset, stomped my foot and cursed the Gods. Instead, I laughed. 

I've noticed people don't like to laugh at themselves. Like it's impossible to conceive they'd make a oopsies or do something silly. This is unrealistic. Perhaps it comes down to ego. Thank goodness I don't have one. 

For anyone wondering, you look like a fool at least once a day. Possibly more. If you can't laugh about it, then you need to check yourself because life is going to be far more tedious than it need be. Human means fallible. Are we not simply imperfect creatures struggling along, lost and just making it up as we go along?

There's no point pretending we're perfect. 

I love the fact that I find life funny. That I laugh at myself. Shake my head. And carry on. It's one of the things I am most grateful for. Sure, other people might roll their eyes and think I'm not as funny as I feel I am. But that's on them, not me. Because I am truly hilarious.

For me, it just happens to be one of those important life lessons. It makes everything easier. Honestly, it feels way better to laugh than to get frustrated and upset about messing up. I mess up every single day of my life. It's called living. And because I can laugh it makes it easier to mess up again. 

V Is For Vampire

Good old Dracula used to be the most famous of all the vampires but seems to have handed his cobwebbed crown off to the emo vamp Edward. This fills me with sadness. When I was a girl, vampires were something to be feared. A creature? In the night? Living in a coffin? That can turn into a bat? Who wants to suck your blood? It used to be frightening to think about. Now it's all perfect hair and trendy clothes and not ageing and getting all gross looking when they miss a feed. 

And it used to be the sun was our friend. Even that's been taken away from us. The myths have been rewritten. These creatures of the night no longer burst into flames and burn from the inside out during daylight hours. No. They have creams to protect them. And special rings. Some of them don't even burn at all. They sparkle. Which is a bit ridiculous. Since when is being covered in gold stripper sparkles terrifying?

Some of the new breed of vampires don't even sleep in coffins! I know. Isn't that tragic? 

Almost as tragic as the whole bat thing. What bat thing, you might ask. The non-existent one, obviously. Bats haven't been likened to vampires since the cult classics. Where did it go? I'm not too sure. I think it made them less appealing for paranormal romancers and thus went the way of sunlight being a threat. I mean, you can't have a swoon-worthy vampire hanging out at the local hotspot, picking up chicks, and have them changing into bats or bursting into flames and burning to death. All that ash and bat poop simply isn't attractive.  

Yes, I mock. Because vampires are no longer a threat. Everyone seems to want to date them, not stake them. The things is, I don't think we can place all the blame on Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse series. It's actually a combined effort from a lot of different sources. Interview with a Vampire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all played a part in vampires morphing from predators to gentleman callers. I mean, what fourteen-year-old in 2002 didn't want to date Angel? And let's face it, Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestate de Lioncourt were prettier than any girl on their wedding day. Those locks. The flawless complexions. Not to mention their lusty appetite for women. 

But they still sucked blood. Human blood. Their sharp teeth and ruthless mealtime manners made them terrifying. As vampires should be. 

That's the thing, though, I don't think it's wrong to have pretty vampires. No, no, no. It's part of the myth. And vamps have always had the ability to make the human-folk swoon. Mind control, mind compulsion, hypnosis, glamour. Whatever you call it, our feeble minds have always been weak to the ways of these blood suckers. Which was another reason they were so dangerous. 

These days, vampires don't feel dangerous. They are too busy going to school, driving Volvos, eating in diners, looking for synthetic blood, dining on animals, hanging out in sunlight and falling in love and acting like petulant children to feel dangerous. 

People can go ahead and disagree with me too, but there is no way any woman would ever have considered dating Nosferatu. I mean...can you imagine if tweenie-boppers had this guy's picture on their walls? 

I'd actually pay good money to see that happen. 

In the end, I fear there is no fear. Perhaps we should start a movement to bring back the original blood suckers. To reinstate the terror and remove vampires from the romance genre and return them to horror where they rightfully belong. Come on, say it with me, "Stake Don't Date". 

It's my new motto. Pretty awesome, right? 

I'm also making t-shirts up that say "Bring Back Drac". Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? Make your orders here.