Sisters Before Misters!

So today is Wednesday. And for some reason I happened to be thinking back to about two years ago... It wasn't the easiest time in the world for me. I'd been pulled out of university because I couldn't afford it, and the man I was in love with was still there, 1,280 miles away. You can imagine, all I wanted to do was leave home and somehow find my way back up to school and my boyfriend. But now that I was home, my parents were depending on me for a lot of stuff and I couldn't just pick up and leave yet. I started working, but work kept me so busy I could hardly write at all! And almost never got to talk to Kiki or my BF. It was about then that Kiki introduced me to the show Two Broke Girls and we made a plan to move to New York together once she graduated. Of course you can imagine I was thrilled! My best friend in the world wanting me to move to the best city in the world with her! The possibilities seemed endless. I could go to NYU. Get a job. Publish my books. It would be epic!!! And as I'm sure you can imagine, I couldn't wait to tell my boyfriend. That night when he called, all that came out of my mouth was this excited rush about Kiki and New York and publishing. And you know what he said? My super sweet, encouraging, wonderful boyfriend? He said "That's kind of dumb of you, Ash. New York is a nice place to visit but why would you ever want to live there?! And you've never even met this 'Kiki' person. How do you know she's not really some old guy in his mom's basement? Even if she's who she says she is, you're not gonna still be 'best friends' in another three years. By the time she graduates, you'll both have grown out of this Internet phase and grown up. Just think about reality, Ash. It's not gonna happen."

Yeah, my COMIC BOOK GEEK boyfriend told ME to grow out of my "Internet phase"??? We didn't talk for several days, and when we did I tried to defend my best friend. Three weeks later, he dumped me. But you know what?! He promised to still be my friend. Swore on his life. And where is he now? I have absolutely no idea because he refuses to talk to me at all in anyway but guess who's still my best friend. So SUCK IT, JACKSON!!!

And that's why I'm so excited about Kiki's graduation coming up!!! Because he said we wouldn't be friends and we were childish and stupid, but he was wrong. We're closer than ever and have grown together as people and as friends. And he's still a single comic book geek/gamer living with his mom. (Yeah, I Facebook stalked him. Found that out. Ha!) So I wonder who needed to grow up after all.

Unexpected Inspiration

One of the things I struggle with most in writing is finishing what I started. For some reason it is hard for me to write the end of a story once I've finished it in my head.

I love reading novels, but it's always been hard for me to find a book that can capture my attention long enough for me to finish. Most of the books I pick up are boring. And even if they turn out to be really cool, they start out boring so it takes forever for me to get to the cool parts. I don't remember how old I was when I decided to actually try to publish a novel, but I do remember thinking "I want to write something that'll catch people with the first few lines and carry them all the way to the end.

Now the thing I struggle with is finishing the books. I have a hundred and one good beginnings, a few middles here and there if the story was lucky enough, but no ending. There are lots of story plans lying around if you look in my room. They're not hard to find. I keep them in a binder marked "Outlines." And there are even more story ideas than I can count! Those are in a jar. But I have no finished novels. Nowhere.

Here's the problem. While I'm planning and writing this story, I come up with hundreds of different characters. Hundreds of different ideas and scenes to put them through. And for a long time, well into the writing process, I'll struggle with the end. I could be several chapters into the book and still have no idea where it's headed. When I find out what the ending is, the will to write the book completely disappears.

I told my mom this the other day. She told me it was selfish. That now I've filled MY need for good stories but no one else will ever be able to read them.

Kiki's really been helping me with this. With writing to the end and finishing stories to share with the world. She's been so supportive and encouraging. She told me once when I was blocked "You're thinking too much, Ash. Just let the words flow. Just start typing. It'll come to you." and it did! That was one of the best posts I've ever written for our stories!

She also told me once, a good writer writes all the time. Even if it's just one sentence every day I have to write. And that if you write one, it's easier to write another and another. Before you know it you've written a whole page and could keep going! She taught me that, and I wouldn't still be writing right now if it weren't for her. She's the best!!!

Seasons Update

The Seasons books are coming along great, I think! So far Kiki is doing all the writing. Wish I could help!!! But I have only a vague idea of what happened in the story before I joined in. Still, it's an absolutely fascinating read! You'll have to take my word for it but really, so far Kiki's got me on the edge of my seat after only two chapters, and you can ask anyone who knows me, it takes forever for me to get into a book so that's saying something. Haha.

Reason I've been thinking about this today is that I've officially started writing the first chapter of our future set book "Bang!" (Meaning I've opened Microsoft Works Word Processor and have spent the last hour staring at this...)

But hey! That's almost three paragraphs right? So... PROGRESS!!!!!

Excited? Yea? Yeah? YEAH?! I am. ;)

The last four years. Big Changes. Hard Choices.

So a lot has happened in the last four years. A lot of stories have been started, and sadly both friends and stories have been lost. I'll tell you a little bit about that as we go on but first I would like to say one thing.

I love my best friend. To death. And back. Kiki (LiveFreeLoveWell, or now IrelandKiss) is the greatest person in the whole world! I could never ask for a better friend. When I'm upset for any reason she drops whatever she's doing to listen. When I'm blocked she does everything in her power to help. And I try to be as good a friend to her as she is to me. If time could be rewritten and we could redo some of the things from back then I wouldn't change a second of it. Not even my mistakes. Because through those we grew closer together to become the bestest of friends we are now.

But back to our story. So Kiki joined our story and honestly made the whole thing even better. Drama (Allie) was a good writer in my book but Kiki was and still is way better! I can't tell you how much I loved waking up in the morning and running to check if she'd posted yet, or getting a text from her in the afternoon saying "My post it up! :) " I loved reading her work and it was SO easy to reply to. I didn't have to think about it or anything. The words just flowed through my head in continuation with wherever she left off.

(I should put here that in the past year I've totally sucked at writing replies right away but you know... I'm getting better. I am. I swear!!)

Things were going really good for about the first year. When I started school I asked Allie to take over a little posting for me. She wasn't in school and it was hard for me to keep up with a lack of reliable internet access. She agreed and for the four months of the fall semester at university she wrote my characters for me. Biggest mistake EVER!!!

As a writer, I'll admit I'm a bit of a control freak. I know my characters inside and out. I know all of their likes and dislikes. I know their tempers and their mood swings. How they think, how they talk, how their eyes change with their emotions. I know it all just as well as if they were real people. These characters are very real in my head and I know for a FACT that everything Allie wrote for me was completely wrong! She took a strong, confident, sexy male character and made him act like a mushy, feminine, romantic pile of goop. I hated it! I hated reading it. I hated knowing she was writing it. The thought of my suave male lead acting like a sappy teenage girl made me physically sick at my stomach! Of course I never said anything to anyone about it at the time. I'm sure she'd worked hard on those posts and in her head that was how he ought to have acted. But obviously she knew nothing about him because it was bad. And I mean BAD!

When I was able to post again with them, I continued on with the story as if the entire thing had never happened. I wrote my male lead the way he was supposed to have been written and tried my best to never refer to that scene ever again. Things went well again for another several months. Then Allie started school...

The thing about Allie is this. Before she was in school she was at home, taking care of her brothers and her niece and helping her parents keep the house in order. She did a lot of work and her computer time was her only down time. She when she came online and wasn't writing we forgave her. After all, playing solitaire for an hour while chatting with friends took much less brain work than writing three paragraphs. Then again...

This thinking is what got us in trouble. Because see, she had this bad habit of...zoning out. Where she wasn't playing a game. She wasn't chatting. She was simply sitting in front of the computer, staring blankly at the screen. She referred to this as "dying." I can't tell you how many times we'd be in the middle of a conversation, and after ten minutes or more of silence, Allie would finally write "Sorry. I died." It was bad. When she started school, it got worse. She'd "die" nearly all the time she was online. It would take days for her to even read our posts, weeks more for her to reply. Kiki and I started writing separate new stories that only the two of us wrote on JUST so we'd have something to write! It was that bad.

In October of 2010 we'd had enough. We waited for one of the rare times Allie was online actually talking to us, sat down, and told her the cold hard truth. We wanted her characters. All of them. We wanted to take them off her hands, write them for her, and maybe when she had more time in a year or so she could take them back and things would go back to normal. You can imagine that didn't go over well... But we did it anyway. She kept up with the stories more then. We didn't chat with her much but she tried a lot harder to make an effort to talk to us and keep up with the stories. By the middle of September we'd agreed to let her back and things started to be okay again. The three of us were back together and it seemed like she'd changed.

She hadn't.

Almost exactly a year later in September of 2011 we'd had enough. She'd gotten worse. She'd play games when she said she was writing. She'd call us then spend our time on the phone talking to her other friends or her roommate. She'd log in to play games and avoid chatting with us so we didn't ask about the post or lie that it was almost done or flat out tell us she didn't want to write. It was ridiculous! The stories we wrote with her were for fun and there was no fun happening there. It was all so much stress! Kiki and I were actually trying to put a book together. We were working on something that could earn us both money and Allie was wasting our time with all her crap. We'd taken more than enough of her behavior, listened to way too many excuses. We kicked her out for good. We took her characters and cut her off completely. We haven't spoken since...

It was a good decision over all, though. Kiki and I have gone back to having fun writing! We've taken out a lot of the stress of writing. The RPs list has been smooshed down to five stories (which you can link to with the pictures in the side bar) and we're working on a couple books that we're really excited about. I'll talk more about those later.

I hate to say it, but though I'm grateful to Allie for introducing me to Kiki, cutting ties with her was one of the best things we've done for the stories and ourselves. I've found out through facebook now that she'll be graduating soon, and that she's pregnant...but sadly single. I do wish her the best with her new baby and her new job. I hope she's happy and hold nothing against her. Really. But I don't regret what we did. It was the right choice.

Thank you, Drama!

One of the players to join my story was a girl with the screen name Queen of the Drama. She asked to be called "Queenie" so that's what we called her. My screen name was Black Dragon Bride so, through no direction of my own, people started calling my "Dragon." Cool name right?? Anyway... For the first week of the role play, things were going very well. People were involved. They were all communicating and writing a lot. But after the first week one girl stopped writing without warning. The next week two more join, but two left. By the end of the third week we were down to four people who were constantly posting. I was one. Queenie was another. To make matters worse, we were the only two of the four who wrote more than three sentences at a time. The story was going no where, and for us, the more experienced players, it was getting to be a chore to write with the other two girls. After a few days more, Queenie emailed me.

I won't transcribe the entire conversation here, though I very well could. I won't, for two reasons. Firstly, because the conversation was long and relatively boring in retrospect, and I'm sure you're not interested in the tedious details of what exactly was said. Secondly, I'd rather not dwell on the past shared with this girl. Despite the fact that she became a great influence in my life, we are no longer on speaking terms of any kind and I'd rather like to keep it that way. (Whoa... just wrote that in a British accent... Weird...)

The long and short of it is this. Queenie PMed (private messaged) me on the website, expressing her extreme frustration with other the two girls (I assume they were girls) we'd been writing with. She said, in short, "I can't stand writing with these one-liners! It's hard enough to come up with good paragraphs for my characters when I'm responding to a good writer. When I have to do the thinking for both characters it's practically impossible and so stressful!" And it was obvious she was stressed. It didn't take me long to decide what had to be done. That night I closed my RP. For good.

Or so I thought...

After closing it, Queenie and I continued talking. I told her about an RP idea I'd had that was similar to the one I'd just closed, but "better." She agreed to help me open it so we set to work that night.

Of course I was excited about it, but I was even more excited when Queenie sent me this:

And that is how I met my best friend. =)

Best Friends

All my life, I have always been extremely close to my family. I consider my mom, sister, and grandma to be some of my closest friends. But looking back on my life up till now, I have to be honest in saying that I have not had many good friends outside my family. Of course, there have been the many BFFNs. Best Friends For Now. As long as you have something they want, they will stick by your side till the end...of your convenient services. And there have been many BFWYHs. Beast Friends While You're Here. But the minute you leave, whether it's leaving town or leaving the room, they've turned on you. Next thing you know, then entire world knows your secrets and your left friendless and exposed to ridicule. Welcome to middle school, by the way... That's about all you can expect from THAT crowd.

So it's safe to say my experience with friendships has been a rough one, but I have found a few friends. People who like what I like and enjoy being with me for the sake of being, and I with them. I can say now I have three friends who really fit that bill. Friends I can talk to for hours on the phone, and always depend on to be there when I need them. Even if they aren't close, an even though I miss them a lot, it's nice to know they'll always be around. But even those three aren't my best friend.

A best friend is someone who knows you better than any other friend ever has. She (or he) takes the time to learn you. Your likes and dislikes. Your ups and downs. How to tell when you're safe just from the sound of your voice or the lack of 'lol's in a text. A best friend is someone who will tell you the truth, even when it'll hurt. Who'll always be there for you, no matter what. A best friend is someone who loves you like family, and accepts every quirk and whim you have without question. You can be completely yourselves around each other and you love each other for it. A best friend understands you. And most importantly, a best friend is deserving of all of that from you too. The whole 'Be a friend to find a friend' thing is more true than you could imagine!

I have one best friend. And she's the greatest woman in the universe!! But we've never met. Like penpals, we met over the Internet. We were introduced by another girl. That was almost four years ago. When I met that girl, I never once in my life ever imagined she and I would be so close!! And yet here we are. She's the closest thing I have to a twin and I wouldn't trade her for the world!!!

My parents think its strange. They don't understand how two people could become so close and never have even met once. Well, I don't know exactly how it happened, but I'm gonna tell you. Step by step. Maybe somewhere along the way you'll figure it out with me. Then maybe you can try explaining it to my parents! Haha.