This great talk for both Frasier fans and writers alike:

This week, Will and Kie discuss (and ‘narrate’) the email interview they conducted with one of Frasier’s most beloved writers: Joe Keenan. Discussing his favourite episodes, actors, and behind the scenes trivia, this mini-episode pulls the curtain back on the show we love. 

Want some tips on writing productivity? Check out my #5onFri guest post for DIYMFA called Five Ways to Fit Writing into Your Busy Schedule.

Here’s the cold hard truth. You’re not “too busy” to write. There is a whole lotta other crap in the way.

And, brace yourself, you are also doing lots of things to waste the time you do have.

So it’s time to get real and wind up your writing life. (see what I did there)?

(What are ya doing reading this anyway-click the link!)

First of all, you’re banished from this blog if you say “who is John Cleese?”

Although, I am fair-minded, I will give you a few hints:

Now that you know who he is…you can be jealous to learn that I had the ridiculous amount of luck to be face to face with him via Zoom (thanks COVID) and talk to him about writing, my experiences with Monty Python, and the Dunning Kruger effect.

So before you yell at me for wasting the man’s time, know that he is well-versed in it as he admitted to me that he has dinner with David Dunning three days a week because they are good friends.

So what is the Dunning Kruger effect? I’ll wait.

All caught up? Cool.

Then there is:

So, now that you get where we are going this this. I asked the man…himself (because I am a huge nerd and I needed to have something to say instead of just giggling and drinking my nervous energy away) if he thinks that Impostor Syndrome is the opposite of Dunning Kruger and to my surprise…he said

“No!”

And among other things, he went on to explain that your job as a writer, artist, what-have-you, isn’t to get so good at things that you don’t think you’re good at them anymore or that you don’t deserve your success.

But to acknowledge what you are terrible at and keep doing it until you get subjectively “better”–which will probably be NEVER. *double pikachu face*

Everyone has blind-spots.

Ultimately, he said it is also important to surround yourself with people that are good at the thing you are not good at so they can remind you you are terrible at it but also how to do it right.

End of the day, it’s a good thing to be humble and acknowledge where your blind-spots are and always be looking to collaborate with other imperfect people.

So, there you have it. Advice from someone much much MUCH more experienced than I am, because really, who am I to be giving you writing advice?

I’ll work on that…

So, I am finally doing it. After a few months of avoiding it, I’m going to write something about COVID. If you know me, you know that I have been avoiding this topic. I typically try to avoid it whenever I can, in conversation, in my daily writing life, anywhere it might come up. “How?” and “Why?” you might ask.

Avoidance.

That’s just how I roll, people. Part of the stuff that makes me what I am, rainbow glitter and cupcake batter aside…is my neurosis. Hate to say it, but I’m admitting it right here and now. And I know, it’s such a ten dollar word to describe what’s wrong with me, not to mention probably one that hasn’t been used since the 50’s, but it’s the one I’m going with today.

I’m too neurotic for this COVID shit. It’s just too much for my brain to handle.

In the beginning of all of this, I was an absolute wreck. I couldn’t watch the news. Hell, I couldn’t listen to someone else watching the news. I couldn’t have a conversation with someone who just watched the news and wanted to talk to me about it.

Which brings me to another aspect of my neurosis.

Trust.

Do you trust other people? I mean seriously, if you watch the news, I don’t see how you can. You see how other people are handling this situation when trying to rectify it…

You see how the people who are supposed to protect us do the opposite…

and at least where I am in the world, people blatantly disregarding regulations meant not only for the safety of others but for their own safety…

I mean…

Like the next gal (guy), I can make light of certain situations. I even encourage my readers to use humor as a way to deal with difficult subject matter, but it seems, in all honesty, I tend to draw the line at life or death situations.

It’s no accident that I have an overactive imagination where I can catastophize (sic) every moment of every day. I can easily spiral into an OCD level of cognitive dissonance where I imagine every worst case scenario possible.

Oh yeah, the OCD, a nifty little bugger who rests on your shoulder and forces you to watch and keep track of how often a person touches something with their bare hands. He’s extra fun these days.

And during COVID, my OCD and neurosis like to hold hands and taunt me with their PDA and oversharing. You know, like that annoying couple on Facebook. You know the one!

And again, I think that’s part of what makes me-me. I think it even goes back as far as childhood.

My mother was pretty neurotic. If you don’t believe me I could give you examples. She used to love to tell stories too. But they were the warning kind. It was clear she did her own level of catastrophizing(sic).

My three favorite stories:

1. The story about the careless child who left his shoelaces untied and rode on the escalator, got his shoelace stuck, and had his entire foot taken off.
2. The story about the careless child who hung his arm out of the window while the car was moving and had his arm taken off by a pesky road sign.
3. The story about the careless child who laughed while he was eating and choked to death because he didn’t properly cut up his grapes and hot dogs.

The moral of all of these stories: that all of these catastrophes were altogether preventable (avoidable). I like to use preventable, because it’s a word a lot of the doctors used when they diagnosed me with late stage Lyme disease. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

A lot of people handle disease and pain differently than I do. In fact, plenty of them assume that most things can be treated with over the counter medication, and or the sheer willing of it to not exist.

That pain in your left arm, that’s not a heart attack it’s just every day aches and pains. That pain in your ankle, that’s not your bones and joints deteriorating, you must have bumped it on something. That rash on your back, leg, and face, it’ll go away on it’s own and it’s not the sign of some horrific disease that is killing you slowly.

And 9/10 times this person is usually correct. But I find that I tend to be that 1/10 times, and it’s annoying. Oh, yes. That one time I was right and everyone else was wrong will haunt me forever.

When I started feeling symptoms, I knew exactly what was wrong. The problem is no one believed me. They kept talking me out of it. Oh, it’s can’t be that, it’s B, and if it’s not B, it’s C, and if it’s not B or C, it’s definitely D. Thing is while B was the common cold and C was a fungal rash, D was Lupus, and E was Cancer. So that wasn’t much help. Why could it not be A? Also how is Lyme disease worse than Cancer? Who knows.

“Well isn’t the solution just going to the doctor?” You would think so, except doctors, and pharmacists, and so forth avoided the L-word (not that one) like plague (heh) for some reason. Which is odd, because if you are a medical professional you know that the longer you wait to diagnose and treat Lyme disease, the worse it gets. It starts to eat away at your brain, so it’s best to get on top of that sucker, ASAP.

And yet, if you are a medial professional, you might also know why some doctors were too shy to (mis)diagnose me. I had the added luck of contracting Lyme disease at a time when people were suing doctors left and right for malpractice and misdiagnosis of Lyme disease. And I learned the hard way that if you wanted to be diagnosed and treated for it, you had to make an appointment and not say what for, then come in tell them you have Lyme disease and that you want to be tested for it. Then you sit and stare at them until they do it.

Well, that’s what I had to do anyway. And long story, short? I had had it for just enough time for the toxins in my body to almost kill me but not long enough that it started to affect me neurologically.

Although…jury might be out on that one, amirite?

“Wait,” you might be thinking, “I thought this was supposed to be about COVID 19?”. Alright, you, settle down.

So let’s rundown the list of people I don’t have a lot of trust for: Medical professionals, other people who don’t understand the nuance of disease, and who is left?

Our leaders?

Don’t get me started.

Without going on a political tirade (today) I will simply say that bottom-line: I haven’t been dealing well with the uncertainty. If there was a poster child for social distancing, I would be she. I have probably left the house 4 times since March, meaning going further than my backyard. Which is a place I don’t even like being man, there are bugs in my backyard, ya know?

Never Her Color

Submitted for Contest #47 in response to: You check the time. Perfect. As intended, you’ve arrived fashionably late.… view prompt

Five years. That’s how long it’s been since you’ve seen any of them.

And that is an ugly amount of time to be away from people you once considered your closest friends. They invited you back into the fold again, and you aren’t sure why.

So, you took your time when in the past you would have rushed. You would have been sweaty with anxiety and changed three times. You would have second-guessed your makeup, your hair, your entire face, and body and wished you could throw them all away, pull new ones out of your closet and have a do-over.

But now, you ignore the time on the wall, the time on your phone, the time on your grandmother’s old watch. You wait just long enough until you can see the time in your mind. But still you don’t check it. You double-check your hair, and your face, and your clothes, and your jewelry. Everything is still perfect, nothing out of place.

You step into the night air. You hail a cab. Still, you don’t check your phone or your grandmother’s old watch.

You walk to the door, and nod to the doorman. You take steps toward the elevator. The only numbers you look at are the ones lighting up the wall, drawing you closer to the party at the penthouse. Once you step out of the elevator you walk down the long corridor. You approach your friends’ door.

Now you check the time. Perfect. As intended, you’ve arrived fashionably late.

And you don’t feel sorry about it. You feel vindicated.

It’s a damning thing when you go through divorce and your friends claim to stand by you, but then they just don’t. And it isn’t because they sided with your ex. They despise him. They use the time you spent away trying to hold everything in your life together against you. And now, five years later, they act as if they don’t even recognize you.

And they shouldn’t. You dress differently, your hair is even different, now that you’ve been granted the serenity of self-care. Before, when they watched you spend too much time doting on another person, they would grumble about it in hushed tones behind your back, acting like you had water on your brain. Like you weren’t fully cognizant of how unhappy you were.

“Doesn’t Gloria see how he flirts with other women?”

“She mustn’t.”

“Doesn’t she see what a mess her life has become?”

“What a dope.”

“She dresses so modestly now, that must be his doing.”

“And what is going on with her hair; I would certainly never wear my hair like that.”

“Her apartment has cockroaches.”

   “He always smells of sweat.”

“Green was never her color.”

It was as if they enjoyed watching him hold you down. They relished that you couldn’t even wriggle around under that heavy force of everything going wrong. They had the instruments to cut you loose, but they never did. Not like a real friend who should have ridden the wave with you and come out waiting on the other end like Valerie did. You learned the word for it in therapy: Narcissism. You learned this is the type of person you gravitate to, the type of person you are constantly surrounded with, the type of person you tend to look up to.

So, what are these people even doing in your life? You enter the jungles of your memory and find those late-night parties that kept you up in the wee hours and with red, raw eyes. You remember how you used to have fun. How you used to be a person. And like a dream you don’t exactly remember when you awake, you can’t put your finger on who you used to be.

Something was lost in those dense jungles of self-exploration. Too many nights holding your other friends’ hair back. Too many nights wondering how you will pull the strands of your own life together. Too many nights helping them with their schemes and goals, while they climbed up your back, tugging your hair, and then trampling you with their stiletto heels.

And as you wipe away these remnant shimmers of your once happy twenties collecting like dust in the lines on your forehead, they balk at your “lateness”. Screw them, how many times were they late to the dinner parties you threw? How many times were you trapped in the bathroom with the three of them while they gossiped, took way too long to put on makeup, and argued with you when you looked at your watch? What kind of friends were these?

“You said the word individual, Gloria, the individual is irrelevant, everyone knows that, you should have belted that dress and I also don’t like your shade of lipstick and why do you wear your grandmother’s old, gaudy costume jewelry?”

Your grandmother, a holocaust survivor, who told you many stories of suffering, was no longer around. These were the only pieces you have to remind you of her, of her suffering, of your own suffering, of how her suffering was so much worse than your suffering. But did you dare say any of those words aloud? No, you were so dumbstruck by your friend’s rudeness, you couldn’t even gasp for air. You simply blushed and stammered like an idiot. No wonder they always thought you were so stupid.

You weren’t allowed to have thoughts, ideas, or opinions for a time either. Each one was clouded with the assumption that you didn’t really understand anything, that you never once bothered to open a book.

That evening you remember going home to comb your memory for friendships and lovers that didn’t make you feel like garbage. You reach and reach and reach until you are eight years old again. The first time you asked your friends if you could follow them on your bike.

They laughed at you and said, “Only if you can keep up.”

Only if you can keep up. Something you have no problem doing now. Now you are whip-smart, with clever anecdotes, perfectly styled-hair, and that short skirt looks damn good on you.

Green is most definitely your color.

So excited to update you on June’s progress.

I’ve been behind in updating this blog, so I apologize.

If you didn’t know already. I started a super AWESOME facebook group for both writers and closet-writers (who are already writers in my mind) called:

FILL THE BLANK PAGE! So, check it out.

Also, as promised we have a way to subscribe so make sure you do!

And *drumroll* So you know that place I am always raving about DIYMFA?

Well, I work for them now, yay! This is so exciting and I can’t wait to share more about that with you.

Stay Tuned!

This is me back in May of 2016. Almost exactly 4 years ago. Pre-COVID, Pre-Trump getting elected. Even with all of those things not having happened yet, my life was somehow still full of problems.

But that day I made a choice, after making many before it. But it a was a finalizing, equalizing, definitive choice.

Some might have seen the actions I made that day as simply an effort to leave my ex-husband, but those who know the truth, know that it was so much more than that.

If I have learned anything from my experiences in the last four years, is that when things end, everyone has their own narrative about “what happened”.

Well, here is mine.

Back in 2016 I did a few things. First, I typed “THE END” on the last page of my first draft of a finished manuscript. It was a painful haul. I was drawing much of that narrative from personal experience, including confusing and difficult friendships and relationships I endured during my adolescence. I was having conversations with people from that time and hoping to glean their perspective and narratives to keep myself honest.

I was also staying up all hours, not sleeping in my own bed, forgetting to eat, and admittedly letting go of my daily effort cling to and fix a person. I was also letting go of a relationship that just wasn’t working anymore.

Disclaimer: I recently deleted a few teary recordings of myself that I couldn’t bear to listen to until recently, recounting what I was going through and how it was all affecting me. It was eye-opening but I remembered what I was trying to do with all of that in the first place. I was learning to be honest with myself.

As ayemtea, I was writing poetic serials. I had an active following. Daily I would post these poems that you could probably consider productive procrastination while writing my novel. But I had a lot of words stuck in me that wanted to come out. During my teaching job, while a student was taking a test or reading quietly to themselves, I was writing. I was outlining my book or I was writing the poem that I would release that evening over IG.

When I wasn’t teaching, I was working retail to supplement my income…and having an awful experience. But it was how I filled my time. What was the rest of my time filled with? Church. Believe it or not I was very active in Evangelical circles. I was in that life mostly because I was pressured into it by my ex-husband and some friends I had at the time, but I will own that I walked into that life willingly.

I was convinced that I was doing my best to better myself. I was trying to give back and see the big picture and believe in something bigger than myself and all that nonsense. All the while I was decidedly losing who I really was. I was burying her under suffocating doctrine that I didn’t even fully believe in.

If this post is littered with links, it’s just in an effort to show how I have tried to explore these difficult chapters of my life through writing, which is something I have always either done wittingly or unwittingly. And I know it has helped me.

But it also pushes me. Once the word-well runs dry, it’s time to take action and that is what I did. I’ve made decisions like this before, and had long journeys, and struggles and have been in the wrong, certainly.

Like I said I will always own my part in whatever goes wrong because it always takes two. But that’s ultimately why, despite the litany of reasons I could give. I left because I was the only one doing that.

It was strange. The day I decided to leave, I no longer felt any of the things that kept me hanging on. It was if I had spent time working through all of them, literally iterating my life to somehow get it back on track, but it just refused to do so. I couldn’t go back to being the person I was before certain things happened. There was no going back.

And even now life is never easy, but one thing I learned is that I will never again pretend to be something I am not. It seems fun to think that you could mold yourself into someone that everyone finds agreeable and likable and great, but if that isn’t who you are, eventually the true colors come out. And you know what, that’s okay.

Love is about embracing those colors. And once more if you can’t then maybe it wasn’t love to begin with.

I’m not saying I’m not a good person. But that was the rub. The definition of good for some is a much higher standard than what it is for others. For some “good” is an impossible, inhuman standard that involves crushing your soul into a box that keeps getting smaller. And I refuse to do that.

For #ForwardFriday, think about your own journey. Do you have stories like this? Are they painful? Are you embarrassed to share them? I know, even talking about this, which I never really do publicly, was terrifying. But I have to be true to myself and who I am. I hope you can one day do that too.

Disclaimer: I’m doing something a bit different today. Usually I ramble on with my thought process about the post. Today I will answer it with prose.

This is what the work looked like before it ended up in its final form:

Sometimes you have to fill one blank page before you can fill another.

Evey’s Skeletons