Category: Uncategorized

Crazy

I hate the word “crazy”.

When we call someone “crazy”, we are assigning the label to someone’s entire identity,  as if a mental disorder is the entirety of who they are. Their behavior may be crazy, but they themselves are a complex human being who happens to have a disorder.

I am one of those people. I have bipolar 2, and I have to do a careful balancing act to keep episodes of depression and anger/impractical elation at bay. I’m functional, although sometimes I get stressed enough that the symptoms don’t break through.

When people think about the fact that I’m bipolar, I also want them to remember my sense of humor, my drive, my intelligence, my alluring beauty (just kidding), my love of cats, my relationship with words.

If someone uses the word “crazy” around me, I fear that they forget everything but this label. If you’re trying to describe someone who is not functioning well with their disorder, use the word “dysfunctional”.

Using the word “crazy” is a hard habit to break, but a bad habit to keep.

Recovery

“Here, this won’t hurt a bit.”

This is my favorite picture from Missouri Hope’s moulage headquarters. Here I’m demonstrating various techniques on one of our moulage artists who was kind enough to let me bruise and cut her up pretty badly.

I estimated from yesterday’s stats — 180 roleplayers in three shifts, 4-6 moulage artists per shift — that boils down to 7-10 roleplayer moulages per person per hour.

I haven’t totally recovered yet. I feel like I have jet lag although I haven’t gone anywhere — except to the mythical country of Atlantica, torn by tensions between north and south, crippled by an earthquake and its aftermath. A country I helped create.

Life will be back to normal, back to writing, in a day or so, when I find my feet on firm ground and arrive home again.

Another year of Missouri Hope in the books.

Role players: 185

Amateur moulage artists: 6

Scenarios: Earthquake, car bomb, refugee camp, water rescue, beatings by marauding gangs.
Injuries: impalements, burns, disembowelments, cuts, scrapes, plucked out eye, bruises, lacerations, broken bones, drowning, cholera, old injuries badly treated.

Real world emergencies at the moulage headquarters: 0

I’d say we had a successful Missouri Hope at the moulage building.

Moulage mode

I can’t talk about writing today, because my brain is completely into Moulage Mode.

I walk around the house looking for random objects that look like they’d make good impalements.

I have a gallon and a half of fresh fake blood by the basement door and I wonder if it’s enough.

I have gone through two and a half pounds of powdered plain gelatin and I wish I had more.

I was told to prepare for lots of impalements. I have prepared 28 impalement prosthetics thus far.

Unflavored gelatin smells like burnt hair. My house smells like burnt hair.

I am dreaming third-degree burns.

I love this.

I’ll write when I get time. It’s going to be an intense couple of days moulaging for the biggest exercise that Consortium for Humanitarian Service in Education holds.

Naptime

What I could use right now is a good nap.

I think it’s the change in the seasons, even though it’s supposed to get up to 85 degrees today. Or maybe it’s because midterms are coming up, or Missouri Hope is coming up, or …

I am falling asleep at the computer while I type.

I miss my morning naps from kindergarten, when we put rugs on the floor. I didn’t nap back then, instead staring up at the bare bulb in the hallway outside the door, and imagining conversations with it. If I had known that my future would be bereft of morning naps, I would have taken advantage of the time and slept.

Napping, especially in the middle of the day, is oddly satisfying, Thoughts of what needs to be done retreat temporarily and comfort seeps into my bones. My mind wanders into dreams of sorts, and then shuts off. Then I wake up 20 minutes later with my mind less cluttered and my body rested, and it’s time to enter the fray again.

I really need a nap right now.

The Art of Gorifying

Last night, I made shrapnel. Lots of shrapnel.

Missouri Hope is this weekend, and all my creative brain cells are occupied in making prosthetic plant-ons for casualty simulation. These are used to simulate impalements, and can be glued on someone’s skin with spirit gum. I learned this from Will Lanfear, who is a professional moulage artist in New York state.

I made a quart of special effects gelatin — 2 cups each of water and unflavored gelatin, 1/4 cup each of sorbitol and glycerin. It’s actually fun and soothing to make, and it can be frozen.

The loops of intestines are ready, and all they need are fake blood  (1 jug liquid starch, 1/4 cup red food coloring, 1 teaspoon blue food coloring).

Yes, moulage (casualty simulation) is gory. It’s a lot of sitting around the dinner table talking about the color of day-old bruises and how laminating plastic makes good glass debris. It’s googling pictures of hand deglovings (this is exactly what it sounds like) and third-degree burns, and then figuring out how to recreate those injuries. It’s buying a large wheeled toolkit to bring supplies in to the site.

It’s being nicknamed “The Queen of Gore” by a retired Army brigadier general.

Yes, it’s creativity.

ISO publishing coach

I am shopping around for a publishing coach, because I don’t seem to know how to get myself published.

I’m serious about this writing thing. Even if I have to self-publish, I want to find a way to get my words out there and not beg my friends to buy my books. I know I’m not going to make a lot of money on this (breakeven from all the coaching and stuff would be nice, though). I dream of being well-known and well-liked, but this may not happen either. But I want to be read.

Jackie Kibler, one of my colleagues and a motivational speaker, has gotten me started on this venture. She, like I, think the traditional agent-publisher route is broken by too many writers vs too few publishers. Like any situation where there’s a limited number of sellers/producers (otherwise known as an oligopoly), competition in the marketplace is that of branding, not of price or innovation. The marketplace of ideas is no exception.

So I am working on something new. Send happy thoughts and encouragement.

Positive today

I find it miraculous at times that I am still writing, that I still consider myself a writer, despite all the rejections and the setbacks. Maybe this has become part of who I am, and getting published will just be, as they say, the whipped cream on top of my mug of hot chocolate.

(Note to readers: Tell me your favorite hot chocolate recipe. I will feature you in a future column.)
It’s Sunday, and I’m going out to write today. I’m finally done with the major revision of Apocalypse and all I need is a pass-through to send to my dev editor. My goal is to try to finish Whose Hearts are Mountains before NaNo time, so I can have fun writing a Santa-filled romance novel (more quirky and meet-cute than Hunky Santa in a G-String, if you know what I mean.)
I have not given up.