I’m actually offended by this, taken from Neil Gaiman’s latest blog:

“The strange thing is that, as an author, there are places publishers never send you, and the American South (if you don’t count Atlanta) is one of those places. When I’d ask, I’d be told it was because people didn’t really buy books there, or there wasn’t a demand, or something.”

Of course, I’m not offended by Neil at all (don’t shoot the messenger?) but I’m a bit disgusted by ‘publishers’.

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but that actually hurts my feelings! :-S

Well, speaking for the ‘American South’, who are quite intelligent despite the stereotype, WE LOVE BOOKS YOU A-HOLES!

I just need to stress that a real Christian would not say the things that Pat Robertson said.

That’s all.

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This blog is intended for readers 18 and over only. I will not be held responsible for any horrified and frightened persons due  to the graphic nature of this completely true story. I also retain all book and movie rights, so don’t even think about it, Mr. Rob Zombie!

My Greyhound horror story started days before I even boarded the bus. I purchased my round-trip ticket to Chicago online. It was a few days before I was to leave and I drove to the station one morning before work to pick up my ticket. It was a little after 8:00a.m and when I got there I was surprised to see that there were no employees in the building, the lights were off and there was a keep-out-the-likely-robbers gate around the front desk. Hmmm, the sign said they open at 5:00a.m, so where the hell was everyone? Ok, so technically there were people in the station, but they did not work there and by the looks of them they were not passengers, either. I’ll be up front; they were crack heads and maybe a few homeless men taking up residence inside the station. They watched me eerily as I walked through the room and this made me extremely uncomfortable. The station was humid and sticky and it stank horribly like…well, like drunks and body funk. :-S

I left. Without my ticket.

When I got home I called Greyhound (their main headquarters, or whatever) to complain and to find out why there were  no employees to print my ticket. I was upset, knowing I had purchased a non-refundable ticket and that I was going to have to go back to that awful station and wait an hour or more in it before I could board my bus and get the hell out of there. I expressed my concerns about being mugged and made it quite clear that if anything happened to me that I’d sue the shit out of them.

After I hung up I immediately called the station I had just left and after several minutes of busy signals and no answers, a girl finally answered. Her excuse for not being there was that she left to get breakfast at Mc Donald’s. Really? Must be nice to just leave like that whenever you want to during business hours and there be absolutely no one to pick up your slack.

Anyway, we had words and she was rude and I was rude back.

The night of my leave:

I was to board my bus at 1:10 a.m so I had to be there an hour early. My brother took me and we waited outside in the parking lot forever, and during our wait we were approached by a pimp/crack head/drug dealer! He kept coming up to the car window and I was so scared I just wanted to get out of there. Where were the security guards? Where were the cops? This place was crawling with EVIL! We watched a drug deal happen right there in front of the bus station, which once again was devoid of employees save two strange guys that seemed to like talking to the pimp. :-| Anyway, it was after 2:00a.m before my bus finally got there and when I got on I was forced to sit for two hours to Memphis with two drunks directly behind me, constantly saying extremely loud ‘motherfucker this’ and ‘motherfucker that’. They smelled so bad that I could have vomited if I let myself breathe like a normal person.

Then there was my bus driver, who like just about every Greyhound bus driver I’ve ever had the displeasure of being driven by, couldn’t seem to drive without swerving. Needless to say I did not sleep a wink from Little Rock all the way to Chicago. I guess if I was going to die in a fiery bus crash I wanted to watch it happen? I don’t know, but I couldn’t sleep and that was the longest 13 hour ride, ever.

{INSERT HAPPY CHICAGO TIMES HERE}

I dreaded getting back on a Greyhound to go back to Little Rock and I almost spent my car payment money to buy an Amtrak ticket instead. In fact, for a long time I was dead set on going home by train as I refused to step foot on another bus. When it came down to it, I knew I didn’t have the money and that I needed to stick it out (if I lived on the way back) and get it over with. Brian and I went to the Downtown Chicago station an hour before I was to board and once again, before I even got on things were awful. I stood in line forever to check my bags as the customer service woman talked on and on with two girls about everything but tickets and such. She didn’t care that people were waiting in line. Finally when it came my turn, she was just rude in general; the way she hardly looked at me when I spoke to her, how she wrinkled her nose when I asked her what gate I needed to board at. She didn’t even verbally answer my question, but rather stuck my ticket in front of me after writing my gate number on it. I wanted to smack that woman.

It got worse.

As Brian and I were sitting down and waiting on my bus to arrive, the same customer service woman was being so rude and nasty to an Asian lady because the Asian lady could not understand English. It was really sad because that poor woman was so distraught and upset that the Greyhound lady was being so horrible to her. At that point I was fuming! I was so close to walking up to that woman and telling her fat ass off.

Unsurprisingly, my bus was over an hour late. When I made it to Memphis again, I had to switch buses and ended up with a grouchy bitch for a driver that was as rude as the customer service woman in Chicago.

I’ve explained enough and won’t go into detail about what she did and said to me and other passengers, but I think I’ve summed it all up.

So that’s my story. I will never ride a Greyhound bus again for anything. I hate to say it, but Greyhound is truly the international travel for crack heads, loudmouths  and other people like them. The stations are nasty. The buses are nasty. The bus drivers (most of those I’ve encountered anyway) are horrible with people, rude, falling-asleep-at-the-wheel, threatening and thoughtless. Their schedules are whacked out with layovers as long as 6 hours or more, overcrowded buses, rude passengers that want to take up both seats and will make it known they don’t want you sitting next to them.

It’s a horrible way to travel.

Enough said.

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Note: To make something clear, I am not ‘quitting writing’ or ‘giving up’! That is not what my blog below (posted yesterday) was about and I should have made that a little more clear. I have simply decided not to go the agent route unless by some miraculous stroke of luck one approaches me, then that’s different (but we know that won’t happen!). I’m just saying that the whole agent process is just not for me.

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OK, so I received my last agent rejection today. I say it’s my last because I can’t put myself through this ‘process’ anymore. I have gotten 20 rejections and 11 ‘no responses’, which is the same as saying I’ve had 31 rejections. Of those, I only had 3 agents who requested more, only to reject anyway. I still have 4 out that I haven’t heard back from, but only queried them about 2 weeks ago. However, I should probably just add them to the list too and get it over with.

And that’s OK.

The thing is, I used to love writing with everything in me. Other than my kids, writing was my life, my world. I remember how the very thought of it would excite me so much. I would write at work when I was supposed to be working (7 years at a desk at a construction company), I would jot down notes on anything readily available when I didn’t have my note pad on me (napkins, junk mail, post-it notes, my jeans, my hands). I have a large file cabinet packed full of tablets, single sheets of paper, readily available stuff. I’ve been creating stories since I was a child and writing them down since I was about 14. Funny, those stories I started writing when I was a teenager I never thought about publishing. I never sat back and dreamed about being some famous author, pumping out books like Stephen King, or being rich, or being on some ‘Best Selling’ list somewhere – I didn’t even know that such lists existed (and I was better off).

It was only when I was about half-way through my vampire novel (recently titled Hallowed after many, many years) that I truly thought about what it would be like to have it published.  Why? It wasn’t technically my idea, to try and get published. Someone, who I will not name because I don’t want them to feel I’m blaming them (that’s ludicrous!) mentioned to me after telling him/her about the story and after they read a sample, that I should try. I have to say, that was the moment when two things happened to me. #1…my mindset changed. I started picturing my name on a book in Books-A-Million. I started dreaming about what it would be like to have ‘readers’ and I loved the idea of writing stories that other people loved.  #2…Realizing more every year that went by what it takes to get published slowly turned writing into a chore.

It slowly but inevitably broke me down. I got to the unfathomable point where I dreaded writing the next chapter in this or that story, when I stressed over the technicalities so much that I started hating myself for still putting myself through it. But I never gave up. I pushed myself for many years, telling myself I wanted this, that I was born to do it, that I was meant to write.

And you know what? I was born to write and I was meant to be a writer. I do not deny that fact, nor will I ever deny it. What I do deny now is that I was ever meant to become a published author.

The whole agent process, quite frankly, is bullshit. Now don’t get the wrong idea as I do understand fully that it’s a ’subjective business’ and that it’s kind of like fishing. I fully understand that agents have to sift through hundreds of queries. But I really think that agents should be a little more genuine and honest than so many of them are.  These are people’s dreams you’re screwing with, people’s emotions and feelings, but I don’t think many of them care much. The number of form letters that I received was disheartening, not to mention, sickening. What’s worse is that some of the agents I queried, it stated on their sites they ‘understand what the writer is going through and they will give a reason why for their rejection’, but did they? No. Form letter. And every form letter I received pretty much sounded exactly the same as the one before it. Originality anyone? Is there some site out there that has free downloads of agent rejection form letters like there are resume’ templates? Why am I saying this? Why am I risking making myself look bad in public by doing the ‘forbidden’ and ’speaking my mind’? Because I think agents need to know. Just a little honesty can go a long way and if they took that into consideration, maybe so many spirits wouldn’t be broken.  Whether it’s good honesty or bad honesty, it’s still something more than a few template words you toss at people to get them out of your way. To be blunt, I would rather not be represented by any agent that doesn’t care about people. Especially like one I got that simply said: ‘Not for me, but thank you.’ No ‘Dear Jessica’, not even a complete sentence.  I’m glad she declined… :-S

The last agent I received a rejection from today, I have to say was the only agent out of 31…THIRTY-ONE…that said something that seemed original and was encouraging. It is comments like his that help writers grow and continue to believe in themselves. And it is agents like him that, I believe, deserve the most from their careers because I think agents like that care about people and their dreams and that is far more important than caring more about how much money a writer might be able to make for you.

This ’subjective’ business is not for me and so I’m going home.  I’m going back to my writing roots when I did it because I loved it and I wasn’t worried about impressing someone else ‘higher up’.  I’m not ‘quitting’. I’m not one of those bitter people who think agents suck and don’t know what they are talking about (they know far more about the business than I do). I simply want to write and love it again, and in the end that’s all that matters to me. I may end up being one writer with fifty or so completed novels never published, but at least I will have enjoyed writing them.

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Yesterday, my youngest son (Jonah) and I went with my brother and sister-in-law to Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It was an hour and a half drive that turned out to be a waste of time, gas and admission money. :-S

The first strike: their cafe’ was closed.

The second strike, there was a wedding scheduled for that day…

…so some of the place was blocked off to ‘outsiders’. Quick side note: Have you ever been in a public place where some private event (such as a wedding…especially a wedding) is going on and you walk around seeing all these people coming to and fro all dressed up and you feel like an outsider? OK, maybe it’s just me (and not to mention, I have a grudge against weddings and other joyous events of the like, anyway) but I felt that way yesterday. It’s like they are walking past me and thinking, “Ewww, people like that dressed in casual clothes and who aren’t part of this wedding shouldn’t be allowed in. We paid for the use of this place and the public are just mucking up the scenery.”

Yes, it’s probably just me….

So, onto the rest of my complaint.

It started out alright. The beginning of this hour long trail was nicely landscaped and showed promise, but as we walked along further, that promise and the flowers began to quickly thin out. So, their brochure and the web site make this ‘garden’ out to be a beautiful place with thousands of flowers everywhere and waterfalls and unicorns and such. We were really excited to go.

But we realized fairly early in the walk that there were more flowers in my brother’s front yard than there were here. We were extremely disappointed, especially since we drove so far to see it and paid to get in only to see what we could have seen anywhere within ten miles of where we lived.

To make matters worse, more than half of the area was under construction. Now I understand that sometimes places must get a makeover. Nothing wrong with that. But what I did have a problem with was not knowing this in advance. I never saw anything about construction on their web site. If it’s there, it wasn’t put where people can see it clearly. Something like that should be on the front page and in bold letters, if not on a banner.

So we have a closed cafe’, a wedding, barely any flowers, construction zones all over the place and then, get this, our coupons that were printed from their site said between certain dates (which we were within) that the gardens closed at 8:00 p.m. Nope. They told us they closed at 6:00 p.m. even though the coupons said otherwise.

How about a happy picture before I go on?

Or, maybe a cool one?

Anyway, to top it all off, where was the friggin’ chapel?! They advertise on the site and the brochure a beautiful outdoor wedding chapel called Anthony Chapel, but we did not see it anywhere! Nor did we see the Garvan Pavilion, which would have been a beautiful sight to see. It became apparent to us that maybe they were on the far side of the gardens, but the weird thing was that we saw no signs to point us in the right direction, or really any evidence of either structure being there at all. I mean sure, they have to be there somewhere, obviously, but you would think they would be two key points of interest for most visitors, so the obvious thing to do would be to put up visible signs no matter how far away they were.

I’m sure Garvan Woodland Gardens is a beautiful place to visit when it’s not under construction and there are actual flowers bloomed to see, but I would like to have been given the opportunity to plan my visit for a later date when it was actually ready for visitors, and they should have made sure people knew that important information in advance.

On another note, I’m having my gallbladder removed early in the morning and I’m terrified. :-(

I’ve been dealing with some serious issues on the homefront. I won’t go into detail because that part doesn’t matter, and it’s nothing worse than what anyone else has to deal with in difficult times. I’m more or less just using my blog as a way to vent a little. Stress can kill you! It’s true, and the sooner we all realize that and take steps to keep it at bay in those difficult times, the better off we’ll all be. I just need to take a step back and say to myself over and over as needed, “I can get myself out of this. There are ways. I just need to do what I can to change it and look forward to the day I’m finally out.” Yes, it’s much easier to say that than to believe it, but it’s a start. Maybe I’ll come back and read this every time I feel on the verge of losing it.

On another note, the Dirty Eden blurb is up on ‘The Work’ page. I’ll be adding a pdf. file of the first chapter for everyone to read once it goes through its editing phase.

I’ll keep you updated.