Just to bring us all up to speed, I’m still not working in a “conventional” sense, though my husband and I have started a small business catering to our historical re-enactment group that’s been showing some promise.  The hubby is blacksmithing while I’m doing needlework and weaving.  That’s given me a good bit of pleasure, figuring out new patterns and seeing them come alive and then watching them walk away with a happy someone.

Stitching for Viking apron.

And it’s given us a small (very!) amount of money to help supplement the household.  Not as healthy for the bank account as desired, but certainly a lot more fun than typing up disciplinary memos.

After sending out hundreds of resumes and/or applications and only landing about a half-dozen interviews, with all thanks-but-no-thanks responses (used to be if I could get an interview, I got the job – but that doesn’t happen anymore…) I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of going back to an office environment.  Didn’t think that I’d have a problem with that, but being told you’re not wanted anymore is different from deciding that you don’t want to anymore.  Yeah, let’s just add more fuel to the depression.

And I hit a milestone this year: the half-century mark.  Yep, I turned 50 a few weeks ago.  At least, that’s what my driver’s license says.  My mom says I’m only 41 since she’s only 59 and she wouldn’t lie to me, would she?  I know, probably not something I should brag about, given today’s youth-oriented market for just about anything (writing included), but dammit, I earned those years.  When I was a kid 50 seemed like some unheard of ancient age that no one ever really reached, but now that I’m here, I wonder what all the fuss is about.  I don’t feel like 50 and I’ve had people tell me that I don’t look like 50, which just makes me wonder what the hell does 50 look like anyway?

I also stopped coloring my hair.  Partly because I just couldn’t afford the salon bill anymore, but also because I was just done pretending to be something I wasn’t.  Let’s just age gracefully, shall we?  It helps that I seem to have a lovely shade of silver coming in, instead of dull grey, with a bit of a wave to the hair it didn’t used to have.  All those years of perms and color and here I am just letting Mother Nature do Her thing to get the same result for free.  Lessons learned.

And while I haven’t been writing here, I have been writing.  Some.  Not nearly enough and I’m ashamed that I’ve been wasting the opportunity given me with this time on my own.  I’m determined not to piddle anymore of it away.  I finished my novel earlier this year, and then choked for months on the query letter to an agent I’d like to have represent me.  That’s on my hit list to get completed this week, come hell or high water.  I’m tired of being afraid it won’t be perfect.  Nothing is perfect.  And nothing gets me nowhere, so I might as well get over my OCD issues and just throw it out there.

I finished a short story and just submitted it to the third magazine for possible publication (two rejections already – I took them better than I thought I would).  I also have two other short stories in process, and have been mulling over possible story lines for a sequel to my novel.  My initial plan was to go back to a trilogy I started years and years ago, but I got side tracked.  There are a couple of characters that have been running around my head for the last few months, demanding attention.  They started out as part of a fan-fic mental exercise I gave myself, trying to envision how a favorite sci-fi show could be rebooted ten years after the fact using these new characters as catalyst.  Then they just kind of took over and dragged me into a world wholly their own.  Sometimes you just don’t have a choice in these matters.  I’ve already jotted down several scenes and they haven’t shut up, so I guess it’s on to a full draft now.

So, there you go.  Not exactly all the details, but enough to let you know I’m still around and still trying to plug through this.  Okay, maybe I’m not as exciting as the Republican debates on Fox News or as cute as the kittehs on icanhascheezburger.com.  But neither are you.  And that’s why we’re here, commiserating and swearing and beating our heads against the table, so we can make our own way in this crazy world.

© 2011  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

I had a long period of unemployment back in the early ‘90s, but that could be explained away by being in an exceptionally poor locale for jobs and not having a lot of skills beyond being a musician and writer.  I took the courses, got the experience, worked my butt off so I wouldn’t have to go through that again.  And yet, here I am.   College degree, professional certifications, loads of experience.  And obsolete.

That’s how I’m feeling anyway.  The media keep talking about the economic recovery, but I’m certainly not seeing it.  And neither are any of the people I know.  Government bailed out Big Money and left the rest of us out to dry.  I’ve seen the unemployed referred to as lazy users of the system who don’t really want to work, watched banks gleefully foreclose on homeowners by the thousands, and stood by helpless while unions (and the middle class they represent) are attacked and virtually destroyed.  A union without collective bargaining rights really isn’t a union, Mr. Governor of Wisconsin.  Stop trying to balance the budgets on the backs of the very people who can’t afford it.

There’s only one reason businesses (and by extension governments) end up in fiscal trouble – bad management.  I watched a business go into bankruptcy.  When I started there it was raking in $300M a year and its stock was selling for over $20 a share on the NYSE.  Five years later, it was gone, the result of poor management on top of bad decisions fed by arrogance and greed.  Being in the legal department, I got to see it first hand.

We tried a change in management for our government this last November.  While Big Money is loving it, us poor working serfs are even more likely to be left in the dust.  Yes, I’m a registered Democrat, but I’m also a fiscal conservative who doesn’t want to see a lot of government poking their fingers into my business.   I’m pro-choice and pro-guns and I don’t need Big Brother telling me how to take care of myself.

But we have an unprecedented disaster lurking in the shadows of the Heartland.  I understand the need to make it easier for business to be able to do business, but for all the money spent and/or waived on them, I’m not seeing any results down here in the trenches.  25 million people have dropped off the unemployment rolls and still have no jobs or are under-employed.  40% have been out of work for over six months, a rate that hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression (On Point, with Tom Ashbrook: The Long-term Unemployed). A good chunk of those people have mortgages, car payments, credit cards and all the other things that our modern society seemed to decree we have.  It is all crashing down on us.

I suppose the argument could be made that, if my husband and I had bought a house that we could afford with just one income, it wouldn’t be so scary now trying to figure out where the next house payment is going to come from.  But what we could afford with one income would have meant sleeping with guns under our pillows and plenty of fresh paint waiting in the garage to keep up with the barrage of graffiti.  Getting a house that would require both of us to keep working allowed us a little better property in a little better neighborhood and my extremely security conscious husband could sleep a little better at night.

We never thought it would come to an end.  I never thought I’d be middle-aged and facing disaster.  What did I do wrong?  What could I have done differently?  I’m not stupid or lazy or any of those other things so many people seem to think about the long-term unemployed.  Okay, so I’ve made it pretty clear I’m not keen on going back to a regular office job, but I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we keep our bills paid.  And I’ll do it with a smile on my face, even if there’s not one in my heart.

Yeah, I’d much prefer to write and I’ve been looking for writing/editing jobs.  But, like most things, the job requirements have become tougher, with even entry-level jobs wanting advanced degrees and years of experience.  I don’t have the time or money to go back to school for yet another degree/certification, and I certainly don’t have the patience for it.  In the vernacular, I’m screwed.

I don’t know what to do.  I feel the stress levels going up in my husband, even if he doesn’t say anything to me, even as he suffers through a job that is slowly killing him on all levels.  I wonder if something’s wrong with me because I can’t seem to get even the simplest job.  I worry that if the finances go down the tubes that my marriage will too.  The one thing, with the one person, that means more to me than anything else.

I’m standing here, screaming into the darkness, wondering when it’s my turn for a bail out and it doesn’t make a difference.  Not even on a therapeutic level.

The next time you see me, I’ll be on the corner with a cardboard sign…

© 2011  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

I’m talking about the novel, of course.  Finally finished the writing after fifteen months and now it’s off to several people for critique.  Once those comments come back, I’ll do a final polish on it and start sending off query letters to agents.  If I’m repped I have a better chance of getting published at one of the “better” publishing houses, not to mention probably a better advance and overall contract.  Yeah, there’s a growing market with print-on-demand and self-publishing, but, despite the struggles the publishing industry is suffering, it’s still the gold standard.  I figure I’ll start at the top and work my way down.  You only get to the moon if you actually shoot for it.

Ironically enough, I finish the writing and the job market starts to open up.  I’ve actually had a real interview for one job, and finally got a top-tier placement company to notice me, after I-don’t-know-how-many applications I sent in for jobs they had listed.  Got to talk to an actual person face-to-face.  Blew the doors of their tests and left the placement counselor baffled as to why I was still unemployed.  Right there with you, sister.

But it also opened up a whole ‘nother can-o-worms:  I don’t wanna.

The thought of going back to the land of 9-5, power suits, office politics, thermostat wars, and whiny execs who can’t find their own butts in the dark has actually made me nauseous.  It is a visceral, physical response the likes of which I have never experienced.  The logical mind understands it for the anxiety attack it is and tries to work past it.  But the emotional mind just bull-dozes it all and I find myself wondering how to get my big fat ass under the bed to hide with the cats.

I was side-tracked for so long in cubicle-ville and so unhappy for most of that time.  Yes, I’m good at being an administrator.  Damn good, in fact.  And I can partition myself so those at work will never know just how much I don’t want to be there.  Once given a job, I don’t know how to do it half-assed:  I can only give it the best I can all the time because that’s the work ethic that was instilled in me from my parents.  But it’s a good thing the average person can’t read minds, ‘cause some of the evil fantasies I’ve had about some of the people I’ve worked with would scare the likes of Stephen King.

All those years I was a good little soldier in the fight for the American Dream, I was miserable.  My bills were paid, my chores were done, I kept up with the Joneses, but I was crippled creatively.  I was so mentally exhausted from dealing with the office bullshit and the sheeple that perpetuated it I couldn’t do anything that entailed tapping into that right brain stuff.  I found myself rotting away from the inside out, losing more and more of who and what I really was and turning into another empty shell just going through the motions.

Two years ago I had a good job with a well-respected firm.  I actually liked most of the people I worked with, and I enjoyed being financially stable enough to not have to worry about how the bills were going to be paid or if we could afford to hop out to the movies one night.  But I was dead inside.  A putrid cancer rotted my soul and I realized that had happened because I had stifled the real heart of me.  I found myself having a serious conversation with the Goddess, wondering where I needed to go, asking for guidance, a hint, a bat up-side the head, something.  A week later I was let go.

It was oddly liberating.

The logical, practical side was scared to death, even with the nice severance package and the coming unemployment.  But the creative, intuitive side was overjoyed at the opportunity.  Within a few weeks I had returned to my natural state, up until the wee hours of the morning and sleeping until noon and doing all those creative things that had been so hard before.  For those two years, and despite the perpetual fight with my chronic depression, I’ve actually been more at peace and happier than I’ve been in a long time.  I know it probably sounds oxymoronic to be a happy depressive, but trust me on that one.

But now it looks like I’ve been told my time is up.  The unemployment is ending, I’m not making any money as a writer yet, and my husband can’t carry the bills by himself.  I have to get back to The Office.  Not that I haven’t been trying for the last two years, but now it has become a red-alert imperative.  It means shelving the creativity and hoping the metaphorical cancer that has been in remission doesn’t explode into full bloom again.

And then there’s waiting for the commentary to come back on my novel.  The wonder at what the readers will say.  This is the first time anyone outside of family and class mates (and a couple Hollywood types) has read any of my stuff and I find myself worried.  Not if they hate it or love it.  Those extremes can be dealt with in their own ways.  But what if it’s just okay?  What if it’s just ordinary?  What if there’s not anything really special about it?  It’s not failure or success I fear:  it’s mediocrity.

For awhile I had my dream, but now it looks like the nightmare is back.  I just want to know who I pissed off in one of those past lives, that keeps me from being one of those people who gets to make good money at something they love.

Damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

I was hoping I deserved better than that.

(c) 2011  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

All I want for Christmas (since I have my two front teeth) is for holidays to actually mean something again.

You see, we here in America don’t seem to give a crap about what a holiday is actually for anymore.  Back in the olden days of my childhood, a holiday not only meant you didn’t have to go to school, but businesses were closed and you spent time with your family and friends at home.  No running out to the local grocer for some forgotten ingredient, no trip to the movies, no dinner out.  Period.  Emergency services were available because, well, shit happens and there have to be people who can help.  But everybody else was supposed to be enjoying a rare day off without obligations.  Where did we go wrong?

Somewhere, some capitalist decided he could make good money by being open on a holiday.  I’m still not sure how that works, because not only is he having to pay the expenses of keeping the business open and paying employees overtime for working on a holiday (at least, the schmuck SHOULD be paying his employees overtime), business volume probably isn’t as good as a normal day.  So it seems to me that he’s really losing money in the long term.  Not to mention my good will.

My husband has been on a tear about this lately, ranting at great length about the problems with businesses being open on holidays.  It all started when his work (which has been closed on Christmas day the entire 16 years he’s worked there) put up a volunteer roster to service several customers on Christmas day this year, supposedly by those customers’ special requests.  The roster, thankfully, met with a resounding vacuum and was quietly taken down several days later.  Management claimed that it was a joke someone had been playing, not official, but no one was buying that lame-ass excuse.  Tired though I am of my beloved’s repeated harping whenever he sees ads for another business open on Christmas, I have to say he’s dead on right.  The all-mighty dollar rules, and who gives a crap about the people this all affects.  Sorry, folks, but I just can’t be convinced that businesses open on holidays are really making any money.  And if you can’t get yourself organized enough to make sure you have everything you need before the holiday, then you deserve being out of sugar, batteries or whatever come the day.

We seemed to survive just fine when I was a kid.  Being stuck on Air Force bases in the Mid-West for a good part of my childhood, we also dealt with various “Blue” laws – things that weren’t supposed to be sold on Sunday, like alcohol, tobacco and blue jeans.  You could get food and usually gasoline, but not much else.  It was just part of life and we planned accordingly.  And we survived just fine.  We had Sunday and holiday dinners at home.  We went outside and played with our friends, riding our bikes with no helmets, tossing lawn darts and being blocks away from home for hours on end.  We knew it was time to come home when the dog showed up (Mom would tell him to go find us and he would – always have a hunting dog if you have kids).  Somewhere, the world turned into a reverse Karma planet, where people don’t matter, the green-back rules, and back-stabbing your way to the top is the accepted course of action.

I’m not likin’ it so much.

By allowing that change to happen, we have diminished ourselves.  We are no longer important.  The real reasons for holidays are forgotten.  Capitalism is the Truth, the Light and the Way, and anyone who doesn’t fall into that line of thinking is anathema.

Well, it’s time for a revolution.  I’ll see your anathema and raise you heretical disillusionment and blasphemous denunciation.  JUST SAY NO.  No to businesses that are open on holidays.  No to people who espouse the Greenback Regime’s rhetoric.  No to kids who what to go to Disneyland instead of Grandma’s house.  No, no, no.  Just no.

In today’s stressful times, when jobless rates are at record highs, employees don’t have the luxury of saying no when told they must work on a holiday.  But something we as patrons can do is make it clear to businesses that we do not support them being open on holidays.  And I don’t mean don’t visit them just on that holiday, but don’t visit them AT ALL.  Stay away from the money-grubbing corporate monsters and stick with your locally owned stores.  They often close on holidays because they want the time off themselves.  What we forget in this me-centric world is that the store we’re running to on Christmas day, just for a “quick errand,” has to be staffed to be open.  That means those people working that day aren’t able to spend it with their families.  And, as my husband so eloquently put it, that means we think we’re more important than them, because they are servicing us on a day we have off.  And we think there’s no more caste system in the U.S. – HAH!

A national holiday should be just that: the nation’s closed.  No grocery stores, no movie theaters, no Disneyland.  We stay home and remind ourselves of what we have and who is really important to us and be grateful we can do it.

So that’s my wish, Santa.  Yeah, maybe Peace on Earth would be easier, but I’m a dreamer.  Besides, if we can get our holidays back, maybe Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Men wouldn’t be so hard to do after all.

Happy Holidays, and Blessed Be.

© 2010  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights reserved.

So let me clarify:  we take showers at our house.  Ease of use is the big reason – just hop in, lather up, rinse off and out you go.  No waiting for the tub to fill up, no fighting off the cat who just has to play with the bubbles and inevitably falls in, and no temptation to lean back and fall asleep, to emerge a gigantic prune an hour later.  Another reason is that the bath tubs provided in tract-built SoCal homes are barely big enough to be foot baths for the likes of my husband and me.  We’ve come to the conclusion that what contractors and manufacturers determine to be “normal” sized has actually been measured against the Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The downstairs bathroom has the usual shower/tub combo.  The tub is the “standard” size for a residential home.  That being, about 4.5 feet long by about 1.5 feet wide by about a foot deep.  Go check out your own tub, and you’ll probably come close to this.  Now, find a NFL linebacker and put him in your tub.  Add water.  If you manage to get more than three cups of water in without it overflowing, than your linebacker is too small and probably needs to be traded.  Otherwise, you now have a pretty good idea what it’s like for me and my husband to try and take a bath in something considered “normal” sized.  We look longingly at four-person hot tubs, thinking “Wow. I might actually be able to stretch out in that.”  Note the singular, by the way.

And upstairs in the master bath, they thought they’d get all fancy and we have a shower stall separate from the tub.  Now, mind you, the shower stall is barely three feet square, so putting the likes of one of us in it becomes an exercise in contortionism, but we’ve been in far smaller (or no stall at all) while camping, so it’s not that big of a deal.  The tub, however, makes me wonder if somewhere someone shrunk the blueprints and never told the builder.  It’s supposed to be one of those nice little soaker tubs, a lovely oval with plenty of surround for all the candles and bath salts you’ll be using.  It’s four feet long, two feet wide at the widest point, and ten inches deep.  Yup, ten inches deep.  If I could lay flat on my back in the thing, my nose would stick up past the rim.  At least we know I wouldn’t drown.

I actually tried taking a bath in the upstairs tub shortly after we moved into the house, thinking that it would be a nice, relaxing thing to do after the three hour one-way commute from the West LA job I had at the time.  Putting aside the fact I could only get half my body wet at a time, I also hadn’t had my knee replacements yet, so getting up and down was a bit of a challenge.  When it came time to get out of the tub, I couldn’t.  The whole thing was so low to the floor, and I was so slippery from being bubble-bathed, I couldn’t get any leverage to get up, and there was no panic bar.  I toyed with the idea of just rolling over the edge and onto my hands and knees, but there would have been a tidal wave of water and suds onto the upstairs vinyl floor and I just didn’t want to deal with that mess.  So I called for my big, burly husband.  The man who can hold up an engine block with one hand while changing the transmission with the other.  The man who moves 248lb. blacksmith’s anvils around the garage like they’re child-sized.

The man who contemplated getting his engine hoist when he couldn’t get me out of the tub.

To be fair, the problem was largely one of extreme slippery surfaces combined with lack of sufficient leverage.  We ended up draining the tub and using towels for rescue ropes to get me out.  Needless to say, I’ve never done that again, and the tub now largely serves the cats as an ambush site, when one is lying in wait for the other to go to the litter box.  Much more entertaining than taking a bath.

And the sad truth is, even once we lose the weight we want and get back to our fighting form, as it were, we’ll still be far too large for those puny little tubs.  We’re both descended from those giants of the European north, those Germanic rabble rousers who refused to bow to Rome’s demands and made Charlemagne decide doing his nails was more important than crossing that last border.  We are not Oompa-Loompas.

As a child, we all want to be “normal,” to fit in and have friends and just cruise through the world unnoticed and without hassle.  Well, that wasn’t the childhood I had, and it certainly isn’t the adulthood that’s followed.  My current challenge is to accept that, since I’ve never been “normal” before, it’s okay to not be “normal” now.  Or ever, for that matter.

Now to just figure out how to fit a four-person hot tub in the upstairs bathroom…

©  2010  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

The largest part of the problem stems from the fact we had to take that last trip to the vet with our oldest dog.  Bronwen was one of the sweetest animals I had ever enjoyed.  Only the second dog I had “owned” as an adult, she was a foundling that had stumbled down the overgrown alley behind where I lived at the time.  Ten weeks old and all cuddly.  Mostly white with some hidden light brown spots, the vet thought she might be an Australian Cattle Dog mix.  Something she proved over her life time as she continually tried to herd us and the cats, could never walk in a straight line, and was always on patrol in the yard.  She actually wore a track around the perimeter, that’s how dedicated she was.  Never a boisterous dog, she only barked when it was really, truly necessary.  And though she got on well with just about any other animal she met, she tended to be on the shy side with new people.  That was one of the indicators my husband was the one for me, when Bronwen walked right up to him and plopped herself at his feet upon their very first meeting.  Can’t really argue with that review.

But time catches up with all of us, and the last couple years took their toll on her.  She developed arthritis in her back, to the point that it was pinching the nerves and caused her to walk like a drunk.  Her eyes grew clouded and she came to only hear the loudest or shrillest of sounds.  Then she had a spell that looked like she was having a seizure, so off we go to the emergency vet, just hours after I’d come home from urgent care where I’d been diagnosed with pneumonia.  The ER vet kept her overnight and hundreds of dollars worth of tests later determined that she had Canine Vestibular Syndrome.  While initially it looks like a stroke or seizure issue, it actually equates to a really bad case of vertigo.  Something that is not that uncommon in older dogs.  But it seemed to take a lot out of her.  She lost some weight, something she really couldn’t afford since she’d always been on the thin side, because she just didn’t want to eat.  And even once she got back to eating regularly, she couldn’t put the weight back on.  She had a couple, milder, episodes over the next couple months, but by then the writing was on the wall.

Toward the end, senior dementia also set in, and the house she’d lived in for nearly half her life became a confusing maze.  She’d go round and round in circles trying to find whatever she was looking for.  We’d have to guide her out the back door or to her food dish, and PetZyme, Woolite Deep Cleaning Carpet Shampoo, and Febreeze lived on the counter because clean up from “accidents” became a daily chore.  Despite all that, she still patrolled, even though she was falling over every few steps and couldn’t get up by  herself anymore, yelping for help.  It became a struggle for both of us, her trying to walk away from her pain, and me trying to keep her safe since she couldn’t be left alone.  I’m ashamed to admit it, but there were times when I grew so angry with her because she just wouldn’t stop being old and helpless.  Every five minutes, having to stop whatever it was I was doing to go and pick her up from where she’d tangled herself up in the dog house, fallen over on the concrete, or tripped herself up in the middle of the back yard and lay baking under the 100 degree sun.  The last few weeks, she was almost desperate to walk, not able to get comfortable no matter where she was, even in her cushy dog bed up stairs, whining and yelping for help every few minutes.  When our other dog, who had never liked Bronwen, suddenly started laying next to her whenever she had fallen, that’s when I knew the time had come.

So she and I made that trip to the vet, holding the outside hope that he could offer some miracle of pain relief that would bring back the sweet dog that had been with me for nearly 16 years.  Modern medical technology is good, but sometimes you just have to ask yourself, are we doing anyone any favors?  And that’s what it came down to.  Yeah, maybe we could have stretched it out a few more weeks, maybe even months, but the bottom line was the dog I’d known was already gone and all that was left was a pain-filled shell operating on instincts.  It would do neither of us any good to postpone the inevitable.

I knew I’d made the right decision when, within a few seconds of receiving the sedative they give prior to the final shot, Bronwen released a sigh of relief the likes of which I’ve never experienced.  She was finally without pain, and she passed quietly to the Summerlands as the sweet dog she had always been.

My pain at her passing will take a little while longer to dull, but I can only hope that when the time comes, I can go peacefully in the arms of a loved one like Bronwen did.  We are allowed to release our animal children from their pain because we don’t want them to suffer, understanding that delaying the inevitable does more harm than good.  Maybe one day human medicine will come to the same conclusion.

© 2010  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

The video was a badly shot cell phone recording of a convention visit actor Ben Browder (Farscape, Stargate: SG-1) did several years ago.  One of those boyishly handsome kind of guys with a pair of ice-blue peepers that could melt the heart of even the most jaded among us, Mr. Browder could have just shown up in jeans and t-shirt and every woman in the place would have been a puddle at his feet.  However, apparently not one to leave well enough alone, he decided to add a little to the visit, and appeared on stage in a full white bunny suit – ears, tail and all (inside joke for Farscape fans – if you haven’t seen the series, it’ll take too long to explain…).  Worth the price of admission in and of itself, and then he’s devilishly funny on top of that.

But that’s not what caught my attention.  I lived in Hollywood proper for several years during and after film school, and white bunny suits would have been mild compared to some things I saw there, so seeing an actor on stage in one just didn’t rate.  No, what caught my attention is a comment he made about his chest hair, a comment that came across as being somewhat embarrassed by the fact he’s got a healthy patch of brown fuzz across his pectorals.  He claimed that one of his fellow actors on Stargate teased him about his hirsute status, and talked about how the others would shave their chests but that he wasn’t about to submit himself to such things. (You can see the video here).

And that’s when that epiphany thang hit me upside the head – there is no hair out there.

Look around and see for yourself.  All those stylishly hip ads in magazines and on TV are rife with gaunt, pouty, eight-packed, chest-hairless boys.  Body builders have been shaving for decades, using the argument that you can see the muscular definition better, which might be true, but since Arnold they’ve just turned into comic-book mutants as far as I’m concerned, so I don’t look anymore anyway.  Back in the days BH (before husband) I used to pick up the occasional Playgirl, and not to read the articles because they were largely trite party-girl stuff I wasn’t interested in, but to browse the merchandise, as it were. (Side note:  yes, women are just as interested in looking at the opposite sex as men are.  We just keep our eyeballs in our heads and our mouths shut when we do it.  And married doesn’t mean dead!)  With issue after issue filled with nicely built, but smooth men who looked barely old enough to be there, I finally stopped buying it because I got bored.

Men everywhere and not a chest hair in sight.  My husband, during one of his more redneck moments, postulated a correlation between hairless boy-men and the sexual proclivities of the production people around them, a theory I found difficult to debate, having been exposed to The Business and its quirks.  Sometimes that Kansas boy is right, but don’t tell him I said that – his ego’s big enough as it is.

So I started thinking about the guys I did like, the men I could look at all day long, sighing wistfully and thinking thoughts that really can’t be posted here.  The obvious first one on the list would be my husband, a big, strapping Midwesterner who uses a four pound hammer when he blacksmiths on the weekends and has been described as an Albino Gorilla (I was told that I’m not supposed to take them home from the zoo…).  The only blond on the list, it’s probably better that way ‘cause if he were brunette, some guy from Alabama with a shotgun would try to claim his carcass to sell off as a Bigfoot.

The afore-mentioned Mr. Browder is on the list, of course, and not just ‘cause he’s pretty to look at, but he’s one helluvan actor, too.  They always seem sexier when they’re good at what they do.  Tom Selleck is there, too, because I was a young, impressionable college co-ed when he hit the airwaves as Magnum, P.I., often romping through Hawaii showing off his own manly chest carpet (and thankfully back on TV again with a new series).  As I recall, there was actually a bit of a controversy about it, because there just hadn’t been a lot of bare-chested he-men on the telly prior to that.  It was considered just a little too raunchy.  There’s a story from the days of the original Star Trek that told how William Shatner could only have his shirt off if he was smooth-chested, but it was okay for Leonard Nimoy to go au-natural because his character was an alien.  That and twin beds for married couples and you have the Hollywood standard back in the day.  No, I didn’t say it made sense.

Gerard Butler joins our team, representing the European contingent, and no, maybe not as thickly forested as some of our entries, (and not at all in 300, but with all that beef on the hoof, who cares?!?), but he makes up for it in shear smoldering machismo.  Backed up by Clive Owen, who’s acting versatility equals his plain ol’ hotness, it makes me think of other reasons to visit the Continent besides prowling through museums looking at embroidered coifs from the Middle Ages.

And lately there’s been a growing wave of real men arriving from Australia, Hugh Jackman and Alex O’Loughlin being my first picks for Team Drool.  I watched the movie Australia just to see Hugh’s nicely defined … acting style.  And the new Hawaii Five-O is definitely on the viewing list just because Alex is romping in the water shirtless (it helps that it seems to be pretty good otherwise, too).  Something about those Aussies just screams…, well, let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

So, Ben – relax.  Real women want real men, and real men have chest hair.  My thanks to you, Tom, Gerard, Clive, Hugh, Alex and all those other real men out there who have shared your fuzzy torsos with the world, and given women everywhere something to hold on to, in more ways than one.

Speaking of which, I should go thank my husband, too…

©  2010   Cheri K. Endsley  All Rights Reserved.

Since the beginning of the month I’ve managed to write a sum total of 394 words in my novel.  I’m at the point in the story when things really are starting to get interesting between my two main characters, but there’s still a lot of gaps in the back story and in the story progression, so I’m finding that the scenes I want to write aren’t the scenes that need to be there.  Sure, the wanted ones are getting jotted down in a separate document for future use (if at all, depending on how things go), but the actual word count in the novel has only crept up by about two pages in three weeks.

So, instead of actually sitting in front of the computer stewing about what I need to do next (‘cause I have no idea – my characters aren’t talking to me right now.  Something about who has more page time, and I’m just not getting into that argument.), I’ve been avoiding the issue all together.  I’m watching Farscape on DVD (what an amazing show – way ahead of the curve and too bad more people didn’t appreciate that), playing with new card weaving patterns, reading, writing my column at Examiner.com and sleeping.  Lots of sleeping.  As in 10-12 hours a day of sleeping.  You’d think I was a teenager all over again.

Some might argue that excessive sleeping is just part of being a depressive, and that might be true, as the urge to hide from the big bad world has been increasing exponentially.  It doesn’t help that the SoCal summer has finally officially hit, with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees and the unwashed pollutant-filled air causing me raging sinus headaches, or that I’ve been out of work for 18 months without so much as a single interview.  It’s cool and dark in the bedroom, with a humidifier to help the sinuses and cats purring to ease the tension.  Why would anybody want to leave?

Amidst all that sleeping is a lot of dreaming.  Mostly round-filling, some anxiety purges, and the usual zombies and aliens.  Maybe somewhere in there is the answer, if only because I can’t have all that going on in my head and not get anything out of it.  I have noticed that the more I dream, the more I’m able to write, and the more fantastical I dream, the better my fiction writing seems to be.  I suppose that probably shouldn’t be all that surprising, since it’s all coming out of the same head, but sometimes the doors aren’t all open.  Every now and then you have to run down the hall and kick them in.  Guess that’s what all the sleeping is about, the subconscious trying to get the necessary doors to crack so we can get on with things.  Just as long as that big one at the end of the hall with the chains and locks on it doesn’t get opened, that is.  That’s one nightmare monster that doesn’t need to get out again…

So here I am, avoiding the novel, wondering who’s going to make it through to the finals in America’s Got Talent, drooling over Ben Browder, playing with string and segregating my M&Ms before I eat them.

Man, I’m exhausted.

© 2010  Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

You see, the story has been with me since junior high school.  It first lived on about seven pieces of notebook paper as a skeletal short story and spawned several equally thin sequels.  My currant male protagonist didn’t even show up until the second story.  Then, sometime after film school, it progressed into a screenplay, becoming only marginally more fleshed out in the process, now closer to a badly decomposed zombie than a skeleton.  By necessity, screenplays are little more than short stories while in the written form.  The real flesh and blood comes from the collaborative process of movie making, the director, actors, producers, all adding their own unique contribution, ending up with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.  (At least, that’s what we writers hope.)

So when I went to begin the process of novelization, there was still a lot missing.  A bare bones story line with one-dimensional characters and little reason for them to all play together.  I began by taking the screenplay scene by scene and transcribing it into prose, managing to add just a tad more to the corpse.  Once done with that, I had about a slim novella.  Then I sat down and took a hard look at what I had and compared it to what I wanted and what I’ve read in other books.  I also pulled out the notes I had from the script doctor I’d sent the screenplay to a few years ago.  One of the few I’ve met that I actually liked, he had some very good questions and comments about what I was trying to do, being constructive in his criticism instead of just bashing my writing.  (Had one many years ago declare that the only reason I wrote strong female characters who carried guns was because I had penis envy.  Yeah, that was constructive.  NOT!!)

And that’s when the hard work started.  When someone picks up a novel, they want to be lost in the world contained within, and so that world has to have all the believability of the one we live in everyday.  The characters have to be real people, with quirks, tempers, desires, idiosyncrasies, just like the rest of us.  There has to be a reason for them to be who they are and where they are.  They have to have life and love and wonder, and the world they inhabit has to have just a rich a history as ours.  Even if the reader never sees it in its entirety on the page, the writer has to figure out all those little pieces.

Now, some writers will spend untold hours answering all those questions before they ever write a word of the actual story.  J.R.R. Tolkien was one of those.  Others, like Stephen King, will start with just a “what if?” situation and see where it takes them.  Either way is equally valid, especially if the final result is something we all want to read.  I tend to fall somewhere in between the two, so when it came to working on the novel, I realized I didn’t have all the pieces I wanted.  I had to retro-engineer a little more flesh to my characters, a little more support to my story, and piece it all into the existing words without so much as a comma out of place.

That’s why it’s like restoring a tapestry.  Each individual thread has to be seamlessly matched and entwined with its neighbor so no one would ever know there was a hole.  As I add character details or fill in the back story, they have to fall into place in the existing framework as if they had been there all along.  Not an easy task under the best of circumstances, and even more challenging when your characters take over the writing, as they inevitably do.

So here I trudge along at about 250 words a day, realizing that, at that pace, I probably have about four months more of work before I can start thinking about who to foist this thing on for review and commentary.  After which I can polish it and start sending out those lovely query letters we writers so despise (it’s tough to be a reclusive creative depressive and then turn around and be an energetic marketing manager).  With luck, spring of next year will bring me good news from a publisher.

Until then, I slowly make my way to the finish line, hoping I’m not leaving a slimy trail, and looking forward to the next project.  It’ll be so much easier starting from scratch.

© 2010   Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.

What I ended up with is cathartic expressionism; rage against the political machine; shouting at the devil; and the occasional post that actually makes sense, on a haphazard schedule.  That whole discipline thing is still a work in progress.

In looking back at what I’ve done so far, too much of it radiates my emotional state of mind, namely, depression.  Given what I am, it’s not exactly a surprise, but I was hoping as part of the exercise to try and develop a more neutral tone, and to find humor in my situation.  Something in the vein of Erma Bombeck or Dave Berry.  Sadly, and probably not surprisingly, I’m not coming anywhere close to the five-year-old down the street with his fart jokes, let alone those two stalwarts of humorous commentary.

There are people in this world who just seem to have a knack at seeing the absurd in the ordinary, the funny in the sad or the pratfall in the tragedy.  I grew up listening to life’s observations from Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, George Carlin, Robin Williams and Richard Pryor.  From trips to the dentist, budget airlines, heart attacks, drug abuse and even setting oneself on fire, those guys were able to give us a laugh even in the midst of the most mundane or the most troubling settings.  Their wits are light years ahead of the rest of us, and sometimes I just look at the dust they left me (and most of the rest of us) behind in and can’t help but be awed.

My humor is limited to a handful of musician or lawyers jokes, repeating Monty Python movie lines as if they were religious mantras, and watching the Muppets.  My husband introduced me to Pinky and the Brain so I can claim understanding most of that as well, but it came to me late in life and thus didn’t have any influence on my humor function’s growth.  And, most of today’s comedy just doesn’t work for me.  As the old joke goes, I’d say it’s sophomoric but that would be insulting to sophomores everywhere.  Talking about your “ho” in a sentence filled more with graphic expletives than actual words or making a movie that’s basically just one disgusting bodily-function-gone-awry scene after another is not my idea of humor.  Being rude, insulting, prejudicial or hurtful to other people is not funny.  Making poignant observations about the human condition in such a way that we all see ourselves mirrored in the story, while also showing us the absurdities of how we live, now that’s funny.

So today’s exercise is to try and find the funny in my life.  Not exactly an easy task, given that it seems my life is presently a perfect storm of disaster headed for the brink of a cliff.  But if Richard Pryor can laugh at almost burning himself to death, and get us to laugh with him, then there’s got to be something I can tap into for my own little drink of silliness.

Having animals would make for some easy pickings, if mine ever actually did anything.  The dogs don’t even know how to play fetch, fer cryin’ out loud.  Husbands are usually good for a few laughs, too, but the one thing about mine that really makes me laugh can’t be discussed in a public forum.  The cars work fine, the neighbors are boring, and my friends would probably kill me if I ratted them out on anything.

So that leaves me, and, sorry, but I just ain’t funny.  I can write good stories, play several musical instruments, build things out of wood, weave and sew and embroider, and can  organize the hell out of your office, but making you laugh isn’t in my programming.  The best I can do is try to be less of a depressive while standing on my soapbox beating my chest, raging against the machine.

I am writer:  hear me mew.

© 2010   Cheri K. Endsley.  All Rights Reserved.