Paramourtal now available for purchase!

Hey guys...just wanted to let everyone know that my first published work, Of Fate and Fire, is now available for purchase in the Paramourtal anthology. Follow the link below to be one of the first to buy it! The book will also be out on Amazon in around 14 business days, but if you purchase it from the CreateSpace site in the link, we get more royalties. Have pity on the starving artist, huh? LOL

Yes, I will click here and buy a copy of this phenomenal book that has the world's greatest story in it.

Thank you guys! Happy reading!

The beautiful craziness of an hyperactive kid...

  My kid has ADD. To be more specific, ADHD. Which means not only can he not focus on his schoolwork (or brushing his teeth...eating his dinner...completing a sentence) he also physically cannot sit still for longer than 0.5 seconds. Unless, of course, he’s reading a book about space or watching Discovery channel. He comes from a long, proud line of dorks.

  We’ve tried the medication thing, we’ve tried the therapy touchy-feely thing, we’ve tried natural remedies and diet modification, and still if he’s left alone he will run around in aimless circles for pure enjoyment’s sake.

  In fact, last night as I was writing on my porch, he was supposed to be in his room doing his homework. I could see him through the back window (although at first he was unaware of this) and his door was shut, so I know he wasn’t performing for his sister, either.

  For a full five minutes I watched in complete astonishment as he directed a concert with his pencil, made ‘airplane arms’ and flew around his room, drummed on his desk with said pencil and an eraser, made funny faces at himself in the reflection from the window, and turned around backwards in his chair to ride it like a horsey.

  After a very long week of teacher/counselor/diagnostician conferences, sitting in class with him every morning to help get him on track (try writing paranormal romance surrounded by 7-year-olds sometime…it’s no cake walk), and various other school-related issues, I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry at this behavior.

  On the one hand, it truly disturbs me that he cannot – cannot – force himself to focus. I know he wants to be a good student, and I know he wants to make his very sweet, very capable, very tired teacher happy. But he honestly has no control over his little body, and I want desperately to find a way to help him.

  Yet as I sat there watching his performance last night, I began to wonder if maybe we should all be a little more like him. He is so enthralled with the beauty of the current moment, that the idea of responsibilities and chores go right out the window. The happiness he feels at zooming around the room is so complete that his little brain just forgets there is anything else. A chair-horsey becomes his reality, and the huge smile on his face tells me that while there might be some kind of chemical short-circuit going on in his head, his little spirit is completely intact and functioning beautifully.

  What if we all had a little bit of that in us? What if we took a moment to just stop and fly around the room? Aside from possibly getting fired, would it really hurt anything? We would not cease to be responsible, upstanding adults if we relished the thought of a tent made of sheets or a pencil-led concerto. In fact, it could very well make us better human beings.

  We’re still searching for the answer for my son, because no matter how much I want to nurture that beautiful, creative, spontaneous spirit, he will have to learn at some point to balance it out at least a little bit if he is to function in today’s society. That makes me kind of sad, to be honest, but it’s the way things are.

  So while I’m looking for a way to help him learn to control and better distribute his fantastic natural gifts, I am also looking for a way to help myself let go and honor my own more often.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make some airplane arms.

Confessions of a Real Mom

So I found a pop-tart in my couch this morning. I would like to say it is an uncommon occurrence for me to find food in there, or that I only found a few crumbs on the cushions, but both of those would be a blatant lie.

As it was, during the innocent fluffing of the couch pillows, I saw the sugary offending party peeking out at me in its entirety from in between them. Resisting the urge to scream at my two lovely children (who would subsequently blame each other or the dog, in any case), I removed said pop-tart and disposed of it properly...by giving it to the dog, of course. It was only afterward that it occurred to me this could have been her plan all along.

I tried to think back to my childhood, and whether I would have ever even considered stuffing a pop-tart in my mother's couch. I must say the answer was a resounding 'no'. Everything in my mother’s house was clean, organized and sanitized. It wasn’t a sterile environment by any means, but if you spilled grape kool-aid on the carpet you weren’t going to just walk over it and go back to playing. That kind of thing. Not that anyone has ever done that in my house. Really...  *ahem*

Stopping to look around at the condition of my home, I realized that contrary to what is supposedly an unavoidable outcome, I had not turned into my mother. And in this case, that was not necessarily a good thing. Papers covered basically every flat surface in sight; toys littered the floor in a trail from the children’s rooms to the living room. Both sides of the sink – yes, both sides – held dirty dishes that I was still waiting for the kitchen fairy to take care of, and three dirty-laundry bins taunted me from less than four feet away.

How did I let this happen? I am a writer, a stay-at-home mother, and both my children are in school for the better part of the day. My partner works regular hours, so it’s not as if she’s underfoot and preventing me from being Supermom. So what gives?

Granted, I wrote almost 10,000 words on my story this week, but at what cost? How could I ever expect my children to realize that putting a pop-tart in the couch was not a good idea, when all they see is disorder and chaos around them?

“Ah,” said my inner self to…well, myself. “But didn’t you play lots of board games this week? Didn’t you watch your five-year-old’s dollies put on a show twice in a row? And weren’t you at the kitchen table for over two hours helping your son with his homework? Besides, the kitchen wouldn’t be a mess if you weren’t so concerned with feeding them real food, and cooking every night. Is that really such a bad thing?” Myself decided that it was, indeed, not a bad thing.

Maybe a perfectly clean house is not the measure of a good mom, after all. Maybe it’s the smiles on my children’s faces, and realizing that they are really, truly happy little human beings. I decided right then and there I would not even mention the couch incident to them. It was no longer what truly mattered.

Just as I was feeling really good about my laid back approach to motherhood, and patting myself on the back for not overreacting to something as simple as breakfast-food misconduct, my partner walked into the living room. Giving me a hug and a quick peck on the cheek, she walked toward the kitchen for a snack.

“By the way,” she said offhandedly, “I was eating pop-tarts on the couch last night and I think I lost one somewhere. You might want to check the cushions.”

I give up.