Pre-Made Covers

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Maybe It’s Time to Give Up

An amateur is not someone who is merely new. An amateur is a mindset.

Source: Maybe It’s Time to Give Up

It isn’t #TalkShitThursday but I needed to talk…

Tonight I was happily browsing through Facebook and posting in some groups when I came across this article titled “Indie Community, You’re Being Catfished.” Being an avid mem…

Source: It isn’t #TalkShitThursday but I needed to talk…

I Made It

This is my final blog post that is done solely fro the reason I will be graded on it. It’s a bittersweet moment. When this quarter started, overwhelmed would have been a kind description of my nattered and torn psyche.

Since then, I’ve found bits of my brain while still searching for the main engine room, had my thyroid meds changed, had my son in more trouble than I want to think about, and met a group of new friends that make me feel safe outside of school, and made a few from class who hoed this row with me in my difficult classes.

Is it worth it? Was it worth the loss of time on my own writing, my art, my sewing…MY FAMILY? Short term, part of me feels that the answer is no. I was late returning edits on a book for a publisher that was all but proofread when the quarter started, didn’t finish a single painting, was exhausted beyond belief, have had to deal with the regression of my 7  yo Down Syndrome child whom is still struggling with the concept that I am okay, even if he can’t see me, a husband who is working full time PLUS so he can provide and trying to meet his needs, and I’ve had to deal with crippling uncertainty as I’ve come to grips with my new learning levels.

However, I’m not generally one stuck on the shortsightedness of the here and now. My pragmatic side kicks in, turning dark thoughts to ones of hope. Is it worth getting my general AA? Yes. Many of these credits are artistic in nature, some writing, and others, general knowledge that will help me write what I need to sell my art and writing. Also, I finished something.

I started this journey around fifteen years ago, when my son was a baby. I’ve had cancer, babies (unexpected), moved many times, lost a home, job, a brother to a senseless accident I still can’t believe resulted in death. I had to beg for reinstatement of financial aid as my health deteriorated before they found that the goiter was cancerous. I had to deal with the fact I was just plain too fucking tired to do more than see that there was grass, but not even look at what color the Jones’ grass was, because dammit, I couldn’t even walk on mine.

Amidst it all, I had to deal with my mother’s voice in my ear telling me I was incapable of finishing anything. I’ve had up to 13 books published through publishers (I’ve seen pulled them, and re-released a few) of all different lengths and styles. Yet, that naysaying of my ability to finish is all I heard IN MY HEAD because I hadn’t finished my AA. Like a black cloud of turbulent winds following me around, it eroded my confidence in myself. Every time I filled out a dreaded application, the empty box of finished degree that I  could not check glowed the like neon lights, accusing me of not being good enough. I was always over qualified or underqualified. Although that’ll still be true, at least I have an AA and experience (which will sometimes equate to a BA), and I FUCKING FINISHED IT.

This quarter has been full of introspection for me because of the short term costs for my family and I. However, at the end of it, I’ve grown stronger. I believe that me finishing has been a good example to my kids. Eventually, as Isaac gets older, I’ll do a quarter at a time to get my MFA. In the meantime, I finished. Today is the last day of classes, and even if I bomb the finals (which to me means getting less than a B), I have enough credit to pass my classes.

I made it.

Well, hell.

It’s late, but I’m posting anyway. This week has just been off. Some medical issues (not serious, just time consuming and annoying, mainly because if they aren’t taken care of, it turns into major issues), some family issues, which spilled over into school issues.

However, in the midst of all this malaise and meh-ness, I had a breakthrough.

As anyone who follow me knows, I’ve had thyroid cancer, which means, I had both thyroids removed. This caused major brain fog. As the years progressed, my meds haven’t been quite right (partly due to health care availability), which meant I could feel my IQ points slithering their way into the ionosphere as I continued a downward slope.

It’s disheartening to have your ability to learn curtailed, thrown into a tight, sealed container, with keep out signs in the forms of cannon blasters that gave you migraine style headaches if you tried to cross that path anyway.  I retained basic math skills, partly, I believe, because I was a bookkeeper at the time. I’ve retained a large portion of my reading skills (though retention was ever an issue and I slowed down my pace some, but at least I could still read and write) and some of my art skills, and worked on improving them around my newfound learning skills.

Since having my cancer, this is the first quarter I’ve had a full load at college again. It. Has. Been. Hard. Hard as hell. I’ve struggled with so many aspects. I spent the first two weeks in a panic (no, this is not an exaggeration) because I couldn’t find my brain, like I’d been using a back up generator, but when I went back to fix the main power source, it was gone. Kaput. I was in tears nearly every day as I struggled to stretch my retention skills, find my way through things I used to be able to do without trying.

Early in the quarter, I missed two days of meds because I wasn’t home and forgot to bring my medication with me. Holy hell, I don’t recommend doing that. I struggled with math. What made it worse was/is students who make comments, that you’re never quite sure if they mean for you to hear them or not. For instance, if I’m relieved that we don’t have to do trig anymore in my 100 level Astronomy class, another student rolls his eyes and says, “It’s college.” as if that means EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW TRIGONOMETRY. HELLO, WORLD. Did you know first years are supposed to be comfortable with trig or they get made fun of?

On top of this, all of my life, I’ve had text anxiety. In high school, a very good teacher realized it, and sort of did his own test to see if he was right. Maybe to prove to me I know the stuff and shouldn’t get so stressed? I don’t know. He gave us a paper to do. Said no sharing, or book, he just wanted to see where we were at. I got A+++ Did all the work and extra credit, no struggle. The very next day, he gave us same paper, said it was a test, and I got a B…and I struggled hard. Well, at forty some years old, that the dread, the firey fear of not passing hasn’t changed, but my recall has been severely impaired.

I was to the point of wanting to quit school. However, I’m stubborn. I cried. I’d been sharing my test anxiety on FB, and friends from high school who know I’m not an idiot, have been encouraging me. I hit the point where I talked to a teacher about alternate testing methods. That was last Friday. This past Monday, I had an astronomy exam. I’d lost have the notes for the class, was on the way to a meltdown. I used some skills I’d been teaching myself in mind-over-matter, and found a visual. Every time this deep dread sought to take over my mind, every time pop-rocks exploded in my gut and threatened to release the Kracken, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and used the visual. I got a B on the test. A ten percent higher than average, AND that was without half my notes!

This has been one of the worst weeks in my personal life since school started as far as my outside obligations getting in the way. Yet, I had a breakthrough on Monday for my thyroid issues and memory stuff at school! Holy hell, it’s been a week.

So, even though this week threw a dark slew of problems at me, tried to take me down, I prevailed, and I hope, that by doing so, I made a difference. I hope that others struggling with test anxiety or other things have been inspired to rise above it, to challenge themselves, to be in the darkness watching for the stars until they become a star.

 

 

I Am Alive

Yes, I am alive. Happy to be so. I’ve seen so many deaths in recent months, that I’ve become introspective about death. With my brother’s death anniversary cropping up so close to the death of loved ones, I have been able to be more on point in wording of compassion to those who need it. I’ve tried to do what I would need done. Mostly, though, I’ve been grateful for those still left with me and for my own improving health.

Allergies are smacking me in the face, and my son is getting hit as well. For five years, (seven total in the last 17 years) I lived in a place that tried to kill me. Rag weeds, fertilizer plant, industrial sand blasting, I lived within 50 feet of them at one point and half a mile for the five year stint. Doctor said I would day if we stayed there. We left the first time, but were forced back.

Both times in living there, I almost died. First time, while pregnant. During the five year stint, I could pretty much count on being sicker than a dog for 90 percent of my life there. I tried exercising, meds, everything I could. It would work in spurts, until a specific pollen or black mold caught me, and then it was months and months of being terrorized by snot, which in turn slammed me with bronchitis and pneumonia. At one point, if my husband had not stayed home instead of leaving as I told him he could, I would of died. Instead, he took me in.

So when I say I’m alive, I mean it fervently and with great joy. I am alive. Alive to enjoy the smell of petrichor, alive to see the reds and purples against the dark green foliage, alive to scent the sweetness of lavender and roses, alive to hear the birds chirping and squawking.

I am alive.

 

Wrenching Grief

Tears have filled the well of my heart and spilled over.

I’ve been trying to be upbeat and funny in my blogs over the years. Though my Your Book, Your Business series gets down and rough some of the time, I want people to look at and find the positive side of writing amidst the negative that’s all too easy to see and hear.  Today is different.

Today, I’m grieving.

Perhaps, if this wasn’t an assignment, I’d not write this. I may have, though. I know as well as anyone how writing is cathartic. However, it’s been seven years. Seven. An emotional seven years full of trench deep lows and Oort Belt highs. An intense seven years have passed as of Monday, April 25, since a freak accident took my twenty five year old brother. He was the glue that held me to my adopted family, the one I could be open with, who accepted me as I was. He made a point of seeing me before leaving on that fateful move to Georgia, even though I lived like four hours out of his way.

Our children, my youngest, his oldest (and turns out only) child were born a mere three weeks apart, his a beautiful girl, mine a beautiful boy. His wife and child put the most tender look on his face that I’d ever seen on him. They were his whole world, and he was taking them on an adventure to better their lives.

Those precious moments meant more to me than he could possibly fully comprehend. When you’re left out and left behind, when assumptions are made that are impossible to know where to begin to defend because they’d been made for years without your knowing, most not based in truth, or with a twisted version impossible to unravel, you begin to expect the worst. Your heart becomes like an Arthurian stone holding on to the sword, never letting loose.

But he always took his own path; he loved and laughed on his terms. Grief, after years of being manageable, has struck like a mac track hitting a wall, leaving bricks and mortar of your soul scattered across the black floor, shards to trip you up and make you bleed.

Dark, harsh, relentless grief has no time limit. It will wilt your insides, churn them up like butter then spit them out in a configuration of salty wetness or verbal bile. Burning like blue fire, hot and cold, it tears you apart; the inferno either swallows you into vast nothingness, no longer having even mass, or it forges you.

I’m not a stranger to pain, to grief. From child hood abusers, project kids who bit and kicked and worse to being an adult ho finally understands the stigma associated with those abuses, and a spouse who beats you, therein lies pain.

Having a son go into respiratory arrest multiple times will tear you into shreds of panic, flaying your heart and throwing the pieces into your throat so that even air causes pain. That scary moment, while driving, you have to reach back, grab a handful of his shirt with the carseat straps, and essentially punch your son in the chest because he’s quit breathing and you have no one to help. Your one friend isn’t around, and your other is waiting for your other child as you frantically drive from a dinky town to a small one with a small hospital. That moment will NEVER leave your mind, haunting you as if it were yesterday at the oddest moment.

I’m used to going at it alone. So used to it, that I forget–or chose not–to cry for help. My heart turned into icicles during that time of my life, and I learned to keep things compartmentalized, and it took a lot to let people in. God help them if they betray me. It all bottled up over time, and I became a crier. I haven’t lost that part, but I am learning to not bottle it all up.

When my daughter had brain surgery, I learned the benefits of social media. My FB family proved I’d grown, opened up, if only to crack open the door, and social media became a more ritualistic outlet for me.

So today, I’m blogging this.

I’m using what I learned before to help me now as grief clutches my heart with razor sharp claws to pierce me with the shadows of sorrow. I’ll write until the sun breaks through and gives new life to reverberate within my soul, like crocuses breaking through the hard wintery ground.

I will do more than survive. I will become. Become someone I love more, someone who can lead others to the light, to see that grief isn’t an end, to help them learn to reach out and love so that they too can become.

Today, I will kiss my son and laugh with all my children, enjoying my blessings and thankful for the love shown me by my kid brother and pass it on.

I LOVE YOU TIMMY LUKE CUNNINGHAM

 

 

 

 

The Danger of Too Many Ideas

Have you ever been so full of ideas, you had to pare things down to just one or two to write about? Or, have you ever been, oh, I don’t know, say, in the shower, in bed, anywhere where getting ahold of a writing utensil or laptop or iPhone or anything is impossible. Not such a bad thing. I mean, as a writer, too many ideas is great! We have a plethora of things to cherry pick like professional connoisseurs with the best of the best laid before us.

But no, it isn’t so. I present to you the idea *pun intended* that it is not only possible to have too many ideas, but dangerous. How is that, you may ask. First, let me say, I could hear the groans from far and wide, from across the globe, as writers everywhere remembered all the times the ideas came…and left, as surely as the water sloughed off them and down the drain, impossible to recall, or to recall in their glory. Pieces of the idea may hang around, like water dripping from hair to annoy instead of clean, refresh, invigorate as originally intended. We will address that aspect later. The point here is, did you not become stuck trying to remember that fantastic idea you had, the one that would strike blind the gate keepers of the big six, leave the author of fifty shades of what crying in her beer as you took over the number one spots ever? Did you not despair, weeping on the shoulders of your writing companions at the cool-of-cool idea that is lost, perhaps even hold a memorial–oh wait, you can’t because…well, because you can’t remember!

So now, instead of slaving away, putting forth words, words toward your future, whether a blog, the next paragraph, the outline of your next book (if you’re a plotter…) or brainstorming, you have writer’s block, and you’re lamenting your loss. The mourning takes hours, or days if it really was the stellar idea bright enough to start its own solar system. Okay, perhaps we’re getting a bit melodramatic, but are we not writers? Do we not write? Do we not cry when the writings don’t happen? Do we not bleed if we have to cut our word babies when editors spring forth their words of wisdom and that red pen? Fine, it’s a track changes button and typed words, but it can be red…

Then there’s the other side of the scenario. (I can see all the writers now, slowly pulling the blanket over their head, staring at the screen between the fingers as their avid imagination springs forth with where I must be going.) You have all these ideas, and they do not, I repeat, not, leave you alone. You’re another person by day. Mother, retail, or maybe, you get to write all day. Whatever it is you do, this bouquet of ideas keeps wafting their scents across the way, their sweet, sometimes spicy  aroma tantalizing your senses, turning your mind like the headiest of French perfume.

Your eyes glaze over, your breathing quickens, your heart beats faster, fanning the flames of lust cooking those bouquets until their scents permeates every corner of what you’re doing. Yep, it happened. You fell in love with another idea. As it cooks, percolates, it seduces your writer’s soul, the creative bit that wants to keep building and building, and you neglect the foundations. You neglect to lay out the rebar, to choose the flooring, plan the stairs, make sure all rabbets are in place. These ideas, while enticing, get in the way of editing, marketing, contract reading…all those pesky non-creative parts of being a writer. The parts of the love life that is more than feeling good, of flash pheromones and surface looks, the real work, the commitment to follow through, choosing cover art, filling out forms. The finding a marketer or learning how to do it yourself, even if you are with the big six.

The danger is the seduction of the new shiny without finishing up with the tarnished armor you put on your story in the beginning and polishing it up ready for jousting with its peers on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, without adding the herbs and spices to the full meal. Instead, it is left to languish in the large fields of garbage as it wallows in comma splices and run ons, woefully full of passive voice and exposition. The new shiny starts out fresh, clean, perfect, but soon, it too will lose that heroic bearing, that fresh scent of a five course meal, and become the next broken armor.

Dangerous. Too many ideas are dangerous and become mixed metaphors of life–if you even remember them. If an idea is plaguing you when others are up on the chopping block of edits, then give it a little attention, write down the gist you need to remember it later, and save it in a special folder. Then leave them alone. Develop tonight’s meal so you can be the hero of the kitchen like a proper chef. When it is finished, then prepare for tomorrow’s meal as we all want to continue to eat, build your next spaceship, practice your sword moves in preparation for the next joust…and any other metaphor that fits the genre you’re writing in!

As for the ideas in an impossible-to-write-down-situation, I suggest you marry an inventor who creates the writer’s shower recorder so you can speak a magic word, and it will record your very idea with the I’m-in-bed-and-almost-asleep mind reader option. Or if you can’t marry the inventor, sell your soul?

In the meantime, may that sweet spot of plenty of ideas at appropriate times follow you all the days of your career.

My Shiny Bio aka Lesson One

Hello my faithful fans and followers who’ve stayed around despite my ineffectual use of WordPress to date. That is changing (at least for the next ten weeks! lol). First assignment, I had to do a bio.

*Holds up hand* Okay, you peeps in the background laughing, you can stop now. I hate the dreaded bio; it’s number 3 under query and synopsis, but I did manage to spruce up my official bio to be inclusive of the instructions. No, really, stop laughing. I did it. *ponders* Perhaps I should send the updated bio to my editor?

Okay, well, while the peanut gallery of peeps who know me well get their laughter under control because I am forced once again to write a bio, you can all enjoy my freshly minted bio without waiting.

My biography:

Leona Bushman goes by many names, but the most well-known one is superhero. She earned this name from preventing authors from annihilating whole words with the touch of the button and saving a dragon from a knight—and yes both are as hard as they sound—all from her home in Washington. The dragons taught their queen how to write, and Queen Leona hasn’t looked back, even when her muse tries to muck things up.

She lives with her husband and kids in a constant state of creativity from painting to writing to quilting—when she’s not camping or visiting the ocean. She can be found goofing off and loving dragons and other creatures of the supernatural at these places:

Twitter: @L_Bushman

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLeonaBushman

https://www.facebook.com/LeonaBushmanArtisteExtraordinaire/

 

 

Ha! I’m going to learn.

For next 12 weeks, on top of the usual stuff, you’ll be finding blogs. Yes, real blogs from me on this site. I’m taking a class that is teaching me how to use this site. We shall see if this old dog can learn new tricks. I will still post other work and reblog, but Thursday/Fridays, you will begin to see more things. Starting with this week.

Tout a lous and wish me luck!