NaNoWriMo. Day Eight. I have to write my first sex scene. Oh dear…

Posted: November 9, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , , ,

Word count: 17,310.

Gulp.

Yeah, I’ve never done this before. Didn’t quite expect it and I’m not sure how to go about it.

I’ve certainly read enough of them in books and to be honest, I don’t quite care for them with few exceptions.  I much prefer the author let me use my imagination.

But, now it’s important to the character and the story because, well, she’s been having a rough time lately and really isn’t into the whole “trust thing” with guys and this scene needs to convey a few things and one of them is her vulnerability with this guy.

This guy. The great guy that no one knows yet how great he is. In fact, right now you can’t determine much about him or whether or not he’s worth her trust OR just another loser that’s come into her life.

So, there they are and it’s time and it has to be written perfectly to move the story onto another level and make the relationship cohesive.

It also needs to be just right to play into the back story of the loser husband that she dumped and sex with him was, well how to you say this? Let’s just say she wasn’t sure she even needed to be in the room with him when it was happening. Know what I mean, jelly bean? Thought so.

I am a believer in letting a reader use their imagination as much as possible with a story. Tell them enough so they know what’s going on and keep it moving at a steady pace, but don’t give them too much detail. Let the reader see what they want to see and let them, with their own imagination, contribute to the story.

That is one of the reasons I don’t care for heavy sexual scenes in movies or in books. The same with violence. I don’t need anything shoved in my face. Let me read or watch and participate with my own thoughts and ideas. Let me enjoy a story the way I want to.

I didn’t quite expect this to go this way with the story. Yes, I intended for them to get together, but I’ve written a much deeper and complex woman than I originally thought I could. I hadn’t thought that this scene would be so important to her and the story, but it is.

Maybe I should go pick-up some romance novels, which I don’t generally read.

I can’t believe I am blushing while I write.

NaNoWriMo. Day Seven. Why the hell did I eat carbs today?

Posted: November 8, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , , ,

Word count: 14,959.

I took a quick road trip yesterday to see my family and didn’t get much writing done. Now that I’m back, I am wondering why I thought it was such a good idea to have blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

Oh, yeah, I remember – BECAUSE THEY TASTE FRICKIN AWESOME! That’s why.

Plus my Mom and my cousin made me do it. Yes they did. They actually did. My cousin put a gun to my head (right there in the restaurant and no one called the cops) and my Mom said she would be disappointed in me if I didn’t eat them.

Because I’m a writer, I get to make shit up. Like the above. I get to do this all day long. Well, most of the day I don’t because I have to earn money and I can assure you, no one is paying me to be a writer. I don’t know if anyone will, but no matter; I’ll write anyway.

I am tired but it was worth it. I had a great weekend with my family and will be going back up there for Thanksgiving. That is one reason I am trying to keep such a high word count. I plan on being done with NaNo before Thanksgiving so I can take some time off, take my writing and shove it in a drawer where the sun don’t shine and start on my next project.

But, back to the carbs. I don’t eat them hardly ever, but when I do, it’s like a drug. I get the immediate high and then the crash. Plus the fact that it took me over an hour to drive through Sacramento due to some horrendous car accident, by the time I got home my butt was killing me.

I have not figured out how to write standing up, so here I am again. Sitting down with a headache and pounding out the words.

The story is going fine and I’m just getting into the next section of it and am at a bit of a loss on what to do next. I’ve got the outline but I am learning to segue better. I still suck at it, but it’s getting better.

I am also way behind in my own personal reading. I just picked up a book called “Once bitten, twice shy” by Jennifer Rardin. I’ve been hooked from the first paragraph. I will be reading everything she wrote. Godspeed Jennifer.

NaNoWriMo. Day Five. Still here.

Posted: November 6, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Word count: 12, 644.

I’m still here with the rest of you. I am reading your blogs and comments on G+ but mostly too bleary eyed to say much back. I can handle a comment here and there on a thread and I must say, reading how everyone else is doing is helping.

The book is going very well, humming right along. I’ve written this one character (based on a true story) that is a real asshole and the more I think about him, the more I want to kill him off. I don’t know if I will or not, but it is quite amazing how we can take things that happen to us and turn it into a story.

I have had a few things come up on this book that stirred some long forgotten memories and emotions. My book has a bit of truth mixed in with the fiction, but I think we often use that to tell our stories.

I also know enough not to slam down a true story carelessly or to write about people I know. That I would never do, but it’s interesting the things I am using from the past to write fiction.

Whether this or other characters stay in the final draft, I do not know. Right now it’s all about getting it written the first time and letting the story evolve.

Last year when I did NaNo, I was completely alone with no support system. Now I have G+ with a bunch of writers that I chat with and it has been an amazing difference.

I’ve never taken myself seriously as a writer until a few years ago when I just jumped in and started doing it. There really is no way to prepare for it or to really understand it. You can’t easily explain to someone why you would rather stay home and write all by yourself than go out that evening.

But now that I am this far into it and it’s going well, I am enjoying my time with the story. I am now finding it relaxing and not hard. I am magically making the time for it and that is becoming a bit of a struggle, but that’s OK.

I like what I’m doing and I’m proud of myself.

That says a lot.

I am tired and bleary eyed, so I’m keeping this short. Hopefully get some sleep and start this all over again.

NaNoWriMo. Day Four. What the hell was I thinking?

Posted: November 4, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , , ,

Word count: 8,808

I mean, really? What was I thinking about when I decided to write this story? I’m not going to bore you with the details of it. Besides, you can buy it when it’s published and I’m rich and famous.

Yeah, right! It sure doesn’t seem that way right now. I thought my story would be easy to tell. I have it outlined and all I’m trying to do is follow the outline.

Why didn’t anyone tell me that the outline doesn’t mean shit when suddenly you have characters showing up out of nowhere and won’t leave?  An outline is supposed to be how your book begins and ends with a bunch of stuff in the middle, right?

Wrong! Oh no, not for me apparently. It seems that while I’m writing, if I have a thought about a scene or a character, suddenly I am writing something that isn’t even planned. It’s like I’m possessed.

But then I’ve got to explore the idea and see where it goes. Because I have to. I HAVE TO.

Sure, it’s great for the word count and is probably one of the reasons I’m a bit ahead of target. That plus I’m blowing off everything I can in order to write this month. So I realize it’s about the quantity more than the quality.

But that is a lie that I tell myself because the quality of what I write IS more important than the quantity.

My story is starting to get complicated. I’ve turned off my inner editor and am slugging it out, but I had hoped to keep this story simple and lean and it’s not cooperating with me. At all. Whatsoever.

How well do you follow your outline?

NaNoWriMo. Day Three. Is my writing more important than you? Umm…give me a second.

Posted: November 3, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , , ,

Word count: 6,994.

I realize it’s only the 3rd day, but I can already feel little parts of my life tugging at me. It’s just little nudges here and there, but it’s actually more about my mind-set.

You see, I have a tendency that when I decide to do something, I don’t let anything stop me. The reverse is also true. If I don’t want to do something, nothing can get me to do it. Even if I know I should. That makes it worse and makes me even more stubborn. Yeah, I know I should exercise an extra day, but if I don’t want to, the more someone points it out to me, the further I dig my heels in.

I like to think of it as part of my charm but I am sure there are a few people around here that would tell you it’s not so charming.

I am trying to stay ahead of the word count so I can take a day off this weekend. I’m going up to my Mom’s for her 82nd birthday. I haven’t seen my family in a couple of months and I am looking forward to it. I actually am but I know that it will take a lot of effort on my part not to have my mind on my writing.

I will have to learn to play nice with the other kids. This will be good for me. This will help me to get out of my writing planet and walk around with non-writers. I won’t have internet access there and I keep telling myself that it is good. I will be fine. The planets will not collide if I’m not online for a day. I can do this. I know I can.

Then why do I already feel pangs of anxiety starting to run through my body?

In a very strange way, I am glad I’m not dating anyone right now because, well, you know how distracting that can be. For hours and days and weekends. Just…too…distracting…

Where was I? Oh yeah,  I was talking about putting writing ahead of people. I may not have the answer for that but I can attest to the fact that anytime you sacrifice who you are for someone else, you might as well just call the funeral director for the burial because you’ve just committed suicide. It might take a while for you to die, but eventually you will. If not physically, you will suffer a slow and painful death spiritually.

So,  is my writing more important than the people I know? Yes and no. It’s a matter of being true to yourself and keeping the agreements you make with YOURSELF. Yeah, you. You’re the one that said you would do this crazy contest. You’re the one that said you were a writer and then started to write. You’re the one, just like me, who has no idea how to do it all.

When I see my unanswered emails sitting there and looking lonely or it takes me hours to return a text message because I’m writing or I find that I don’t really want to go out for coffee or dinner as I would rather write, then yes, my writing is more important than anything else.

I think it’s OK to be this way for a very short period of time. I’m the only writer I know so no one really knows how hard I work at this or how much time I put into it. It seems to be never-ending.

Books and stories and poems and songs don’t get written by themselves. Everything you read, someone sat down and took the time and energy to write it and I am sure it was hard to do. I KNOW it was hard to do.

So you tell me. How do you do it? How important is your writing to you? What do you sacrifice, if anything, in order to write?

NaNoWriMo. Day Two. Who wants to share the first sentence (or two) of their book? Fine, I’ll start.

Posted: November 2, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , , , ,

Word count: 4,752.

How many of you are brave enough to do it?  I actually would like to read them, so please share them with me. I know for me a book has to grab my attention fairly quickly if I am going to continue reading. I may give it a chapter, but when I’m in a bookstore and trying to find something to read, that first sentence and paragraph is very important.

I also won’t buy books online if I can’t read parts of it. Sorry, it’s not about the money. It’s about me spending my valuable time with a book. Whether I spend $1.99 for $25.00 on a book, if I don’t like it, I feel ripped off.

Here’s the first two sentences of my book:

Eli thought it had been a wonderful business trip for the last week until she came home and found a used condom in the bed she shared with her husband Sam. Up until then, it had been great trip but not so much anymore.

I love this first and second sentence. Every time I think about tweaking them a bit, I just can’t. I don’t know if  they will survive the second draft, but for right now, I love them.

I’ll also confide something to you, but only you and that is: this is based on a true story. That one moment in life where everything changes and goes off the rails. But before you jump to conclusions, it didn’t happen to me but it did happen to someone I know. I’ve put a bit of a creative spin on it, but it did happen.

It’s funny how we as writers can take a moment and build a story around it. I think that makes us the coolest people in the universe. Whether any of us get published is not relevant. What is important is our stories and what we do with these moments in life and how we use them.

If you look around, there are stories everywhere to write about it. All it takes is the intention to do it and sitting your butt down in a chair for a long, long time and telling the story.

So, don’t be shy. Tell me about your story so I can learn.

NaNoWriMo. Day One. All bright and shiny, aren’t we?

Posted: November 1, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , ,

Words written today: 2,356

Not bad for my first day, but it’s always like that. You know it’s coming and BAM! Off you go! I’ve been chomping at the bit for over a week to get started.

Here we go, right? All bright and shiny. I found it hard not to start before today. You commit yourself to this idea of writing a novel in a month – you know it’s nuts – but you just can’t help but be excited about seeing what you can do.

This is my second year of doing it. Last year, I heard about it for the first time about 3 days before it started. I signed-up and jumped in without any idea of what I was going to write about.

I had started writing again about a year before. I gave up being a writer years and years ago for all the wrong reasons. I have a busy life with lots of stress, just like everyone else.

I agreed with a “friend” that I wasn’t good enough. See previous blog on my various acts of stupidity and that was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.

Life had gone in a direction I had never imagined, most of it pretty brutal and unhappy. I’ve had to overcome more than my fair share of hurt and betrayal.

One day, I woke-up and I was 50. 50! How the hell does that happen? It was a really turning point for me and all in a good way. I spent a few months really taking a look at my life in between doing the paper chase.

I realized that I had never gone after the one thing I always wanted to be and do and that was writing. I don’t know how it is for other writers, but I hate having people read what I write. Doesn’t make much sense because isn’t that the main point of writing? Have others read it and like it?

The fear of rejection is very powerful. More powerful than I like admitting to. But there it is. I soon discovered the world of blogging and with a very deep breath, I published a silly little story on a website where I had been chatting with about 15 people the previous year.

The next thing I knew, they said they loved it, laughed along with me and wanted the next chapter. Chapter? What chapter? I had no intention of doing anything other than that little story and now people wanted to read more?

So, the next day, I wrote something else and they wanted more. Suddenly I was writing this book, a chapter a day and making shit up as I went. All thought the story was true!

Oh geez! What do you do? Do you tell them the truth that you’re just pulling it out of your ass as fast as you can or do you tell them that it’s true.

I said nothing and kept writing. After I posted one chapter, I got emails within an hour wanting the next one.

No one was more shocked than I. Plus I was doing it at work because I didn’t have a laptop or computer at home. Hell, I still don’t have TV or cable. I would come into work early, write something and post and then go on with my day. I ended up writing, for fun, what has now become the first draft of a novel.

I print it out and now my family wants to read it. They, of course, love it but they are biased but that’s OK. My sister then buys me this laptop with the promise that I will write everyday and never stop. I agree to 4 days a week and a deal is struck and I come home with this little laptop.

Fast forward to NaNo last year and I jump in and I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING! None at all. I remember spending a lot of time alone during that month and becoming obsessed with word count. I would check in on Twitter for some words of encouragement, and it helped. But in the end, the only one that can do the writing is the writer.

I found out I was committed to doing this and honing what I could about writing all by myself. I’ve read a million things about it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all opinion. What matters is that I – and you – write and write and write and not worry about it.

So, here I am again and I decided to blog about it because maybe it will help me to do so and maybe it will help someone else. I hope so.

So here we are. The first day is complete. I spent the previous weekend getting as much done as I could at home. But the laundry will need to be done again this coming weekend, I’ve got to be out-of-town with no internet access on Sunday. My job will still require at least 60 hours of my time and the world will continue to spin with or without me.

I write because I like it, but it’s hard and lonely. There’s a lot of things I don’t do so I can write, but that’s my choice.

But for now, I’m good to go. I still don’t know how I’m going to get all of this done.  I love the idea of my story but getting it done in a month without me tossing the laptop across the room will be interesting.

So, how was your first day?

Halloween AND the night before NaNo?

Posted: October 31, 2011 in NaNoWriMo
Tags: , ,

Could it get any worse for people with kids who are participating this year? I think other than December, November has to be the worse month to do this, but here we are.

I have much empathy for you as I live alone, so it doesn’t matter what I do tonight. I can hand out candy or turn the porch light off and pretend I’m not home.

I admit that I ate a lot of the candy last night. I couldn’t help it. That’s why I never buy it because that’s what I do – I eat it.

Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of posting and talk about not being ready for NaNo and I think that’s the whole point of it. It’s not about being ready. It’s all about doing it in spite of it.

This will be my second year and I’ve been ready to start since last week. I am using this time to finish my first draft of a book I started over a year ago. I seem to be able to always find something else to do.

But over the last few weeks, I have put my writing way on top of my list of priorities. After eating, sleeping and working, it comes in at 4th place. Sometimes I nudge it down to 5th when family/friends obligations come up, but not too often.

But maybe someone can answer me this – How DO you get ready to take a month out of your life and rearrange it completely and make writing your priority? How does anyone do that?

I know what I do. I get up early and try to write, but I always seem to forget that I am the WORSE morning person to have ever awakened. I’m not kidding. I’ve never been someone who is wide awake and happy first thing in the morning. In fact, I’ve actually had fights with boyfriends and family over it. I tell them “Look, it takes me awhile to wake-up in the morning, so if you could just cool it for about 1/2 hour, everything will be fine” and then they take this as some type of challenge. Yeah, that’s about the time I start looking at tossing my coffee at them, but I’ve learned to just to smile and not say anything until they stop bouncing around like Tigger on meth.

So, morning doesn’t work well for me. I’m much more creative in the late morning and early afternoon, so most likely I will spend my lunch hour working on my word count. I usually take about 15 minutes for lunch, but even then I can get something done.

I have an evening or two that I can work on it, but there’s a few nights that I can’t. What I ended up doing last year was jamming on the weekends and that requires turning off the phone and unplugging the internet.

What is hard is that the people around me just don’t understand but they know me well enough to realize it is absolutely pointless to try to tell me anything or to get me to do something I don’t want to do. I tell them about NaNo and I get this hesitant smile from them and you can see them mentally scratch their heads and nod. It doesn’t make any sense and why should it?

It’s insane to write 50,000 words a month and I have yet to learn how to turn off my inner editor. I’ll post more on that later, but it is a huge challenge for me and most writers.

Last year I had severe sleep deprivation and I am hoping to avoid that this year, but I honestly don’t see a way around it. I am going to have to force myself to write in the morning and do everything I can to hit my daily word count.

Plus I am trying to finish before Thanksgiving, so my word count will have to be at least 2,173 per day.

So, here we go! Tomorrow is a big day and I would love to know what you do. How do you make the time to do this?

Have you done this before and if so, what happened to your book after Thanksgiving? I am still working on mine. For me, about mid-year of completing it, lots of things went wrong in life and I had to put my writing aside to take care of a family emergency. I found that I lost my momentum and it was very hard to start it back up again.

I hope that by doing NaNo again this year, I will enjoy it and get back into the habit of writing every day and actually finishing the first draft and start my next book.

What are your long-term goals for NaNo? I am dying to hear from other people

My job is to make you stupid. Sorry about that.

Posted: October 27, 2011 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,


Yes, that’s what I do. I make people feel stupid. It’s amazing that I get paid to do this.

And I am really good at it. In fact, I love it.

Why do I do that? Because that is the ONLY way to get a human to learn. I didn’t make the rules on this, but it is the way we learn.

You think you’re afraid of failure? Nope. You’re just like the rest of us, you’re afraid of looking stupid. See, when you fail, you look and feel stupid.

When you slam a hammer down on your thumb rather than the nail, after you stop screaming, you feel stupid. Well, it was a dumb thing to do.

If you trip and fall and the whole world sees you, you feel that horrible redness take over your face. You want to run and hide or wish the earth would open up and swallow you. You want to go back in time – rewind and re-record it before you slipped on the sidewalk. You knew, right before you fell, that you should be paying more attention. You should not have been walking and texting at the same time.

You feel so stupid for having dated/married THAT person. Your friends told you not to do it. Your family begged you to break off the engagement but NO! You went ahead anyway and when it didn’t work out, you felt like an idiot. Well, you probably were one. And I know it took you a long time to let people know it was over.

But, think about it. You know that burner is hot and not because you read about it. There is no owner’s manual for a human. You know it’s hot because you can feel it and probably have burned yourself once or twice on it. See? You know it’s hot but you still burned your hand.

You know that pizza needed to cool off for a few minutes before you dig into it, but you don’t wait and burn the roof of your mouth. How many times have you done that? I do it every single frickin time. No lie.

You knew it was a bad idea to send that money to the poor orphan in Nigeria who was dying of cancer in a jail and who only had you out of 6.5 billion people to help him. You were the only one that could save his life.

No one likes to look or feel stupid, but that’s how we learn. That’s what I do for a living. I teach. I teach business owners how to run things better and in order to do that, they have to see what they’ve been doing wrong. That’s where I come in.

I don’t do it to be mean. I do it to help but unless you’re willing to smack your head against a wall a few times, you will never learn.

I have to get them to see why bribing employees is not such a great idea when they’ve been late, non-productive and a Queen Bitch from Hell and that maybe giving them a raise won’t improve their behavior. It actually makes it worse, just like giving a child candy every time they have a temper tantrum.

I have to go over, in great detail, why the person answering the phone needs to be friendly and not say “WHAT?” when picking up the incoming call, even if she’s his niece and is in desperate need of a job because no one else will hire her.

Then there’s the time I had to make a guy feel really moronic in getting him to stop hugging his employees and having “daily affirmations” as part of a staff meeting and to shut the hell up about his political beliefs. Yes, I had to do that and it took a long time of me pounding this into his pinhead for him to finally say “Well, OK, maybe that’s not such a good way to run a business after all.” Ya think?

Or the time I had to make a client feel bad about being online all day rather than, I don’t know, actually running his business?  Boy, did that guy feel pretty stupid by the time I was done with him. But, he never did it again.

I have my own trail of stupidity, so you aren’t alone.

I was stupid when I thought that an abusive man wouldn’t be that way to me. Wrong.

I was stupid when I thought by ignoring the IRS, they would go away. So very wrong.

I was stupid when I thought I could walk all day in 4″ heels. Wrong and I have the damage to my feet to prove it.

I was stupid when I listened to a bonehead “friend” who said I didn’t have the talent to write. I hope the bitch is reading this right now.

And I was incredibly wrong in thinking that the “check oil” light in the car would magically go away. I ended up with a cracked block on that puppy and an enormous bill from the mechanic to prove how stupid I can be.

But, all of these things, I never did again. I don’t hang out with mean people, I pay my taxes on time, I wear flats when spending the day walking around San Francisco and I run to the mechanic anytime something is wrong with my car.

I still bite into hot pizza though. I actually can’t help it.

We all have these trails and rather than be bothered by them, learn from them. You don’t learn about life from reading books.  We learn about life from falling down and getting up again. We learn when we admit we are wrong and try to find a better way the next time.  We learn from our mistakes. We are the only ones that can teach ourselves. We are the only ones that can change who and what we are.

So go out there and make a fool of yourself. Let your weirdness shine. Smack your head against the wall a few times if you need to. Fall down and scrape your knees and get up and do it again. I always tried to tackle that very long and steep street with my roller blades. I have permanent scars on my knees, but I eventually won. It took a whole summer, but I did it. How I never sustained worse injuries than my knees I will never know.

There’s nothing to be afraid of. So what if you make a fool of yourself? Why should you be different from any of us?

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Women I have known: Crazy psycho bitch.

Posted: October 21, 2011 in funny stories
Tags: , , ,

Not only was she a crazy, psycho bitch, but I actually hired her! I do cringe in typing that and maintaining my vow to be honest as a writer. But, yes, I’ve hired a few of them and I really should have seen it coming.

This particular one I am thinking about was the last one in a chain of them. We shall call her…Debbie because I don’t feel like getting sued.

I realize that it’s hard to get a good overall idea about someone during a job interview and I know that people are struggling. I was struggling a bit as the owner of a small business and I really needed a competent and stable individual to take over my sales department and get things moving back in the right direction.

I also violated the advice we give all our clients. “Don’t hire in desperation. Better to leave the job unoccupied than to hire a moron.”

But, there I was and she had come with some great recommendations from people I know. I interviewed her and so did my boss and we decided to give it a try. There is a long runway in our business, but she seemed eager and willing and most important, she was hungry.

You want your salespeople to be hungry, all the time. It seems to be the only way they can get a close. When they are fat and happy, they get careless, but when they are about to be evicted, suddenly they are closing everything in sight. Feast or famine seems to be the way it runs.

It was on the second day that I knew we had made a mistake, but I said nothing. I knew that even though this wasn’t someone I liked or that I wanted to have coffee with, if they can bring in income, the rest I can deal with.

Her first mistake was assuming that because I am packing a uterus, this gave her a “right” to get personal with me. This is a big mistake with me because regardless of my gender, I am a business owner and everything is about the bottom line. I am not there to make friends or socialize or chit-chat about my life or anyone else’s. I am paid to deliver a service to our clients and it’s my job to not only do that but to make sure everyone does.  I don’t hire people so that I can hear about their weekend or what their children are doing. I tolerate it because on some level I care but mostly because I have to.

On her second day, she was standing by the fax and started to talk to me as I was rushing out of my office. I was on an important call and I had the client on hold and needed to ask my boss a question. It was quite obvious I was in a hurry, but suddenly I heard her screech (she really did screech and shout most of the time) “SUSAN, I JUST LOVE WHAT YOU ARE WEARING! WHERE DID YOU GET IT?”  I hesitated for a moment and vaguely recall saying something about Goodwill as I turned the corner.

Later that day, she walked into my office and plopped (yes, plopped) down in a chair and had this weird look on her face. I was in the middle of sending an email and did everything I could to ignore her, but finally she said “DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE TO TALK?” and I said I did. She then began to tell me about her weekend, her children, what she had for lunch, her parents, her friends and a few other things that I managed to forget. I tried, really hard, to be interested and to look interested and I think I fooled her. She seemed to like my responses and eventually left my office grinning as I mentally snapped and snarled at her as she left.

Some of the things that happened over the next few months were:

1) Telling me, everyday, how amazing she was.

2) Giving me advice on how to deal with clients even though I had been successfully doing it for over 20 years.

3) Constant complimenting me on everything I wore even if it was a stupid outfit. To me, she acted like I walked on water.

4) Not knowing how to dress for her full figure and always wearing shirts with horizontal stripes that added another 20 pounds to her waist.

5) Yelling at my assistant when I wasn’t there.

6) Crashing her car into a tree in the parking lot one morning and didn’t think it was funny when I told her that at least her make-up didn’t smudge.

7) Telling me that my business would fail without her.

The fact that we had somehow managed for 15 years before her arrival was not a valid point. My response was “Debbie, the day my survival depends on you is the day I kill myself.” She laughed about that and told me what a wonderful sense of humor I have.

8) Wanting to talk about everything, and I mean everything. If we had a meeting and everyone was agreed, she would still come into my office and talk  ad nauseam about some minor point, over and over until I wanted to pull my hair out.

Finally one day, I had enough. I sat her down and told her “Look, when something is taken care of, there’s no reason to keep going on and on about it. If I have more I want to say, I’ll say it, but you don’t need to stress about things constantly.”

She gave me a quizzical look and I realized she didn’t know what I was talking about because she was psychotic. She had no or very little connection to what was around her. She was operating off of some idea of HOW she thought things were which had no basis in reality.

She was a psychotic bitch.

It was all so clear to me suddenly. No matter what I said or did, she would twist it. No matter how much we all tried to help her, she was going to turn every conversation into something it wasn’t and never let it go. She tried to change every successful action we had established in our business.

She was THE reason some of us women have a bad reputation because in all honesty, after being around her for a short period of time, I wanted to smack her and I’ve never been violent in my life.

I knew the bitch needed to be taken out and I was going to do it for mankind. I felt I was on an honorable mission and I wasn’t going to fail.

She was also a salesperson that couldn’t close a door and I was tired of picking up her slack. I can put up with a lot from people but the one thing I will not tolerate is incompetence. Not on my watch and not on my dollar.

I had a long talk with my boss and we decided that he would talk with her. My boss is an amazing man and one of my best friends. I would trust him with my life and he is one of the few people whose opinion I value. I also understand that I was exasperated and being a bit reactive towards her, so we talked it out. We decided that he would talk with her and see what he could do since we had invested a lot of time in her.

I was satisfied with that. The next morning, she comes into my office after talking with him and is crying. I ask her what happened and she tells me that she decided to leave and start her own business!  I sort of nodded and then suddenly she’s giving me a bear hug and telling me how much she likes me and will miss me. I was kind of pissed that she hadn’t gotten fired. I know, a bit petty, but that’s the truth.

She packed up her things with promises of staying in touch and having coffee. I smiled at the right time and nodded and when the door was closed and she was on the other side of it, I RAN into my bosses office for all the gory details.

She had been fired and had stood in front of me and lied. Flat out lied. I was tempted to run down to the parking lot and let her know that I knew she had been fired, but decided that would be just a bit too childish.

But I really wanted to do that. I really did.

Older Entries
Newer Entries