Poem: Little Did You Know

​What about me? 

What about my hurts, my woes, my deep seeded fears? 

Don’t they matter too? 

I scream, from the inside out. 

Can’t you see that the fear in my eyes isn’t rebellion, it’s all a telling disguise.

My cries for help are obvious, but no one hears me scream. 

They’re oblivious. 

When I speak; I’m hushed.

When I cry; I’m told to stop.

It’s like any form of emotion is outlawed, unless it’s you who shows them.

If you cry, or scream, yell or curse, it’s warranted.

If we did it, it was bullshit. 

How dare you, you’d say, most kids dreamed of my life. Dreamed of the bed I slept in or the food I got to eat, no one liked a spoiled rotten bitch like me. 

I should feel like shit, she’d say, complaining about injustice.

I should let them verbally abuse, misuse, and harm my soul.

For what? 

A roof, some food, a sanctuary where I fear to breathe? 

I can’t even open a book to read, without being ungrateful. 

How dare I want I better life, or a life that’s in a dream.

I should be more grateful than I seem.

I shouldn’t fear my parents, but I do.

I shouldn’t hold on; but I do.

I should move on; I know.

But how?

Because little did you know, I was just wanting a home. 

Not this. 

On Research: Sexuality & Toys

As a writer, a curious human, and someone who craves experiences and the possible stories I can tell, this week's On Research is brought to you by Sex.

 

It's no mystery, but I was raised on romances, relationships, and the many-sorted sexual dalliances that they procured.

All the while, my parents didn't monitor me, but I got to see healthy versus unhealthy.

 

But did it over-sexualize me at a younger age?

Is that why I had a hard time in my late 20s-early 30s trying to figure out my sexual prowess?

Was I just stressed?

I mean, a mix of everything, I'm sure.

 

I learned about Sex by way of books and movies; even the school's sex-ed classes and the many shades of less is more had a hand in teaching me. Christian schools teach abstinence. So, it didn't surprise me the day another bookish friend, and I found a book about a Las Vegas prostitute at the new Dollar Tree.

As our whole class gathered around for storytelling, we didn't think we looked suspicious. As an adult, now I know better. What harm could a group of hormonal teenagers get into when huddled and whispering as we took turns reading chapters? Not much, but much like English class, the school needed to approve.

 

Which they did not, the book was snatched up. We did get sentenced to the sex Ed video that started Topanga from Boy Meets World? I don't know. I remember two things: Sex was like a roller coaster, and my body was a flower.

If you give away all your petals before marriage, you're basically a useless, sexual piece of shit. You a ho.

The Christian teachings left a lot to be desired.

 

Later, in public school, my 8th-grade year was pure magic, in the sense that we watched 3-4 different videos and it sealed the deal on me ever procreating. They blew what I first learned out of the water by showing us a weeks-long parade about other ways to give birth. Then, when you thought you could take up alcohol instead, they slapped some drink goggles on us and made us walk around.

 

Plus, my high school years, some bus rides, learning who Anne Rice was, and getting asked for personal advice or given highly personal information because I seem to have that aura about me.

Tell me your deepest sexual secrets- aura.

So, I've collected data in my head over the years and researched as I go.

 

I used to think it was taboo, but it was only in my head because that's what I was taught. It was not too gently shoved in my brain that if I had Sex, I was on my own. Here are some condoms; if I was going to fuck it all up, at least use one of these.

One tastes like strawberries if you do the oral.

 

On that note, you shall learn about my journey into the research land of sexual nature.

 

The books I started reading in middle and high school brought up a lot of good questions, and thanks to the internet, I was able to ask. Over the years, I have collected quite a bit of knowledge but still learned new things on the topic.

 

I'm working on a rom-com book called All Things Considered, and I needed the first chapter to be my first experience at a sex store.

At 18 years old, my sexual world opened before me with a plethora of weird-ass experiences that started at that very spot. I've been to several since and love having awkward conversations with the team. And yes, I seriously had a fifteen-minute conversation with sales staff about the importance of dilation before butt pluggage.
I love getting people to open up; I now know how to use that to my advantage. Tell me your dirty secrets; I just love learning about the things people think about. This exercise helps me understand people's backstories and allows me to file away character traits that I'd like to portray in a book.
Also, if you piss me off, you will definitely make it into my book one way or another.

 

I enjoy experiences as much as I like the conversations; trying or attempting to try is just as fun. You're either going to succeed, fail, or have a hilarious story to tell in the end. Either way, it gets filed away.

 

Like, Ben Wa Balls, for example. I bought some over the weekend because I'm at the curious age of 33, I have extra income to spend, and I don't care to hold on to the ounce of prudish nature I had left. Buy the sex toy, try it out, and do your thing.

Don't like it? Cool, don't use it.

Also, I figure why not after watching A Nice Girl Like You.
Or, after reading an excellent review about the Lelo brand, I may or may not have, purchased.

Yolo.

Now, my first toy buying experience? Embarrassing as all get out. I think I bought my first one when I was 19/20, and it was at the Spencer's. It was purple; it took me an hour to pick one out because I was nervous. I even bought a birthday card with it, pretending I was gifting it.

For the second one I bought, I threw down $85 for the Rabbit…. because of reasons. I was also wiser and more mature, and my ex-husband wasn't the most remarkable maker of love, so I had something to prove.
To myself.
And that it wasn't me.

 

That's beyond the point I'm trying to make. The fact is that I hold very dear those moments in my life that made me question what I thought I knew. I'm the same way now, if not worse because I genuinely yearn for knowledge. I'll try new things just to gain experience points like I'm waiting to level up.

I want to have master-level experiences, and I don't think I'll live a day and not want to do something new, so maybe one day I can write about it or use it in a book or a blog like this one.

 

Example: after washing my pet cat last night (she's a big girl, fluffy, fur for days), I tried something new and dried her off with a blow dryer. It worked great! She loved it. Until I realized it blew off so much fur that I had to deep clean the bathroom, then myself.

It was everywhere, rolling around like slightly damp tumbleweeds. Imagine black fur stuck to every available white surface that was the entire bathroom.

 

Even if it's a little thing, you bet your ass I will try it. And if I sit long enough to overthink it, I will have a funny diatribe or two on the subject matter.

Funny to me, at least. 

​On My Brain: Internal Playlist

​Please tell me I'm not the only one who lives with music in my head. My life has a literal playlist that rolls through, it summons forth a song like it's thumbing through a Rolodex from my memory banks, inserts it and plays.

 

Did someone just REALLY pull out in front of me TWICE?

The Bitch Came Back by Theory of a Deadman

Depression kicking my ass?

Anything by Evanescence.

Happy?

Cue the Millennial Mixtape.

Time to remember my childhood and everyone that wrong me?

Anything with teenage Angst.

It's purely emotional. 

When I write I have music on and a tarot deck near by. 

I have three. 

I also use it when writing my books. 

The tarot cards are a whole other discussion. Hint: I use them when I need something random to happen in a story. They've become excellent storyteller tools.

Weekly, YouTube updates My Discovery file, and I get lost down the hole during the workweek. I sucked it up and bought the membership with how much I fucking use the music function. 

YouTube: You're welcome. (PS, Thank you.)

At the same time, I try to avoid Florida driving hazards. Humans, school buses, and cars with humans in them drive 15 below the posted speed limit pre coffee. My weekly commutes to and from work are 15-20 minutes each; I have enough time to jam out and file away songs into my' book' playlists, personal and work ones. Then, if I'm alone at work, I replay the songs in the book file I'm working on blast, letting them tell me a story and then building on it in my head.

Movies, music, and tarot cards are where the storytelling starts for me; something always pops up; a memory, a feeling, an idea. It pearls up until it's a striking thing in my mind, and it's brought to life via music, then finely tuned by my imagination. It's an orgy of sounds, colors, TV show scripting, and nine yards of uncut fabric that deserve the perfect cut garment. If a particular song comes on, I imagine the start of a book I'm writing as if it were playing out before me as a show or a movie. I know what I like in my shows and films to start; I want to be knee-deep into something that I only have to slightly figure out. I like my mind to be in it, working through the problems the character is working through right then and there. I like feeling the same things they do.

I try to write like that. 

So I start writing as if we are falling into a character's most private of moments; I start in their head. I know I'm always in my head; I also love learning what other people think because those moments are truthful.

I started We're All Okay, with a typical On-Call moment when I worked for Child Services. I start it out with the mundane but exciting to me, the start and end of a work night. I start and end it off without spoken words because half of the exciting things are inside.

And when you work by yourself at night, you don't talk much, and you're stuck thinking about what time you'll be off, what time you'll have to flex till the following day, and what you're walking into because it's always a mixed bag. What bag do I grab? Infant, Toddler, older? What chapter am I on in my book? Should I grab another one just in case I'm here longer?

As a kid, I spent more time with myself than with other kids, parents, or siblings. I was personally okay spending time with myself, especially since I couldn't get in trouble if I was just keeping myself company, right? Nope, even being a bookworm got me fussed at. All of my teen years, to be exact, got me fussed at because I didn't act like a typical teenager. 

It still boggles me that I got yelled at for reading. 

Anyways, I digress. 

At the start of All Things Considered, I got into the main characters head because she’s who I was in high school. She’s a bookish woman, loves writing, crafts worlds in her head, but lacks a life outside of the pages of her books or her magazine column. We see it through, her world, and her view of the magazine. I have her explain things in her personality. Through her eyes, I grant her the ability to show us where we were going with the story. 

Last, in Trauma Bound I use a fear of mine and make it real. I also use music I liked when I lived in Alabama. I let music mould a story loosely before I step in and add the flourishes. 

It’s team work. 

I try new stuff per story, so I'm not repeatedly using and rehashing the same story with different names. In essence it’s because I’m still learning to navigate the literary waters I’m treading blindly into. However, I do find my voice one literary leap at a time, so that’s nice. 

Question: What’s  on your inner playlist this week?

Mine: 

New York by Cyn

Outsider by Rachel Grae 

Hero by Grace Gaused

Mercy by Duffy (opening song to All Thing’s Considered) 

You Know I’m No Good by Amy Winehouse 

Sunday Morning by Maroon 5

Oh My God by Adele

A-O-K by Tai Verdes

Born For This by Foxxi

On My Brain: Characters

 I wanted to start something new for me. I felt that May was the month to start it, looking into my crazy brain and what I think about as a writer with ADD, Dyslexia, and a full-time job.

Early this morning, I rolled over. My brain yelled out that I needed to write an in-depth explanation of how I got to my characters and character building.

Okay, weird, but sure.

 I woke up thinking about this Monday morning. I do that frequently, and I guess I should listen to my brain more often instead of putting it off for another day because I'll forget.

 In short, each character I construct has a piece of me either hidden or blatantly prevalent as I write. One of my favorite characters came about a few weekends ago, and it's a homage to my past. To the girl who wasn't yet wounded, who fell head over heels in love with reading, notebooks, and pens.

  

I'm writing a new Rom-Com set in New York City, and I'm crafting the story around what I had wanted for my future at that point in time. My high school years meant a lot to me; they were formative in shaping who I was becoming, who I am now. Before moving from Las Vegas to Pensacola, FL, throwing everything I knew into a whirlwind of uncertainty, I fell in love with reading. My mother took us to the thrift store, and I stocked up on books that summer before we left. I had gotten books from the school library or the one down the street from my father's house. Still, there was something about Danielle Steele, Nora Roberts, and my all-time favorite, Sandra Brown, making me yearn for reading. 

 They had romance, mystery, drama aplenty, and they kept me sucked in and glued to those pages. I didn't meet a book that I didn't love; I read them all.

Diana Palmer, Johanna Lyndsey, etc.

 This was a fresh start for me, and I was excited. I had notebooks for days, stored just about everywhere, pens, gel and regular, high lighters, colored pencils; everything, everywhere. I would write on paper stories, ideas, quotes, doodles, whatever came to mind in my free time.

 So, when I thought up, All Things Considered, I was watching A Nice Girl Like You starring Lucy Hale, and I fell in love with my young self all over again. As I watched this sexually frustrated woman play out on screen, watched as she did things outside of her norm, I realized I was similar.

 I had lost track of her over the years, finding/losing myself, forgetting about who I was when I was happiest, when I had promised. I let many people dictate my worth over the years, and it got me down. 

 I lived in a victim mindset for so long, wondering why I was constantly being pushed down. I realized it was because I wasn't sticking up for myself as an adult. I couldn't save myself as a kid, but my old ass could now. I had no excuses now.

 Neltilda "Nel" "Nelly" Hanson was created on a Saturday afternoon in my head; she was bright, vivid, and alive. She was me when I had hope.

And I was fucking ecstatic about her.

 I lost track of that beautiful, free-spirited girl, the one with hopes and dreams, who had a drive I envy to this day. She could power through ten books in a week, work part-time, pass high school, and not blink an eye. Not that I don't know, have hope, but I had dreams before the crushing world of being a Millennial became a reality; I got stuck in it, this survival mode.

 Nelly is social enough with the girls in high school that had similar wants and hobbies. She wants to be a writer just like the women who wrote her favorites; she wanted to be someone girls like she looked up to and wanted to be. She wanted to inspire the next generation of creatives.

 Nelly is me, circa 2003. I took this path because 2003-2007 me was gorgeous in every way; she was real. I stayed a virgin until I was 19; even today, I have people telling me about their most personal secrets upon first meeting. When I was in my Journalism class, I wanted to run an advice column, definitely in Cosmopolitan, or become a psychologist because, for four years, I was the go-to. The only time I mentioned to anyone, what we talked about confidentially, was when a friend told me she attempted to kill herself. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if she did. I'm glad she didn't because even though we don't talk anymore, she has a beautiful family and is married to the love of her life. I'm proud of her for sticking around even when things got tough.

 I wasn't okay with the thought of sitting. Still, I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel, gain experiences, learn all the languages, read all the books, troll every garden, coffee shop, and rooftop in every city. But, as time went on, wars started, life changed, and my home life shifted. The abuse became something that wore me down, and I started working harder than ever, collecting houseware instead of books and planning to move as soon as humanly possible. In six years, my brain shifted from what I wanted to survival mode. I lost a lot of that young innocents. Still, I wanted to bring that back up with Nelly, my struggles as a young woman who held on to herself over the years, hoping for something better down the line. 

 I chose to skip the formative years of my personal life; I started fresh where I wanted to back then if things had been a little easier. What if my parents divorced instead of sticking it out? Would it have been better? Would I have stuck with journalism? Would I be in new York? What if I didn't marry the first guy I moved in with? What if, what if, WHAT IF?

 I don't hold much to thinking about the past because everything I went threw brought me here, where I'm at now, to my beautiful life. But I love dreaming about it. I've always had an active imagination, so story tales fit me a lot better than someone who lives many different lives or thinks about the depressive possibilities while residing in the Burbs. I love handcrafting a character to fit what I think would have happened. I'm a creature of struggle, so Nelly has her fair share. 

 There's beauty in the struggle, and I want to show that. It's the little things, the little moments, the being stuck in your head, the daydreams, the breakdowns. It's the happy moments, the sad ones, the happy tears, and everything in between. I want you to find the humor in the mundane, just like I do, and I try to craft it into beautiful pieces for your enjoyment.

 If Colleen Hoover's writing taught me anything this past year, it is that it's okay to write about real things, about struggle, about what you know. So, in All Things Considered, I'm choosing to write about my first loves: Teenage me, Writing, Romance, and New York City.

 It fits because I'm starting a new chapter in my life this year, and damnit, I'm excited again. I'm finding myself again after losing her there for a while, but with a lot more know-how and life experience, I'm a better writer for it.

 Now to just work on my grammar and editing skills! (Yikes.)

 Here's to finding your passion again after years of second-guessing yourself. Here's to finding yourself and making YOU the main character in your life story.

 You deserve it, girl.