The Navy SEALs must pass through something called Hell Week in order to become an actual SEAL. If they can’t take Hell Week they can always ring the bell that signals that they are opting out and then they get coffee and donuts. For five and a half days the SEAL candidates are expected to operate on four hours of sleep while being cold, wet, and presumably yelled at (since no one seems to do anything in the military without being yelled at). To this I say… What pansies.
OK, the cold and wet does sound miserable. But try operating for three months on four hours of sleep while being constantly yelled at and then having someone puke in your pants. And in your hair. And on just about everything else. Then we’ll talk. OK, OK, so you can snap a man’s neck with your bare hands. I can shoot milk out my boob. What else you got?
All kidding aside, one of the unfortunate side effects of becoming a mother (or probably a Navy SEAL) is that sleep is immediately curtailed. Which makes lots of things, for instance, writing novels and running a business, more difficult.
Side effects of prolonged sleep deprivation include:
Weight Gain
Loss of Sex Drive
Impaired Alertness, Concentration, and Problem Solving
Depression
Aging Skin
Memory Loss
Greater chances of death due to accidents
Greater chances of other health problems
It’s not that being a mom is so difficult; it’s that being anything else, while being a mom just increased in difficulty due to our adorable little time sucking children and the constant sleep deprivation. Which makes every word I type a minor triumph. I will not be ringing the bell today.
PS Please forgive any typos I may make. I blame them on my daughter.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.png00Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2014-11-05 01:00:282016-02-23 18:08:02Hell What Now?
Recently my daughter learned to crawl. She’s six months old, so basically any time she learns something it’s “recently”. But as she learns new tricks she forces my husband and I to adapt (and hopefully overcome). Sadly, in our sleep deprived state we find ourselves relying on the training we did with our previous “child.”
As she learns new things my mind reaches out for words that will get the result I want. Ack! She’s chewing on a power cord! Drop it! It works on the dog, so my brain now auto selects for those oh, so useful training phrases. Sadly, the phrases mean less than nothing to my daughter. The only one she obeys is “stay” and that’s only if she’s strapped in the car seat. As a result my dog, Kato, thinks I got the runty, stupid puppy of the litter. I can practically see the thought bubble over his head. “Look human puppy, I am demonstrating what to do. Figure it out!” The tiny daughter’s thought bubble says, “Look at those shiny eyeballs; if I could pluck them out, it might be fantastic. Why is the fuzzy one leaving?” Which is a terrible way to treat a dog who is trying his best to be supportive.
Kato performs many important baby related jobs. There is the “I alert you to the fact that the baby is crying.” (Believe me Kato, we know.) There is the extremely useful butt check. Kato, would you like to smell this butt? Oh, you would? Must be time for a diaper change. And the adorable guard dog duty. He is not quite sure why the human puppy hasn’t been weaned to dog food, but if I’m going to insist on breastfeeding her, then he will do his best to guard us while we’re vulnerable.
But she is learning. She now knows her name and his name, and she knows where the dog food is and how delightful it is to spill it all over the floor. So while the dog thinks she’s dumb, I can see the day coming when he will realize that her little monkey fingers are useful to help him get the delicious human food he desires. Hopefully, by then she will also know what “sit,” “stay” and “drop it” mean.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.png00Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2014-09-24 15:02:592023-03-10 17:51:01Puppy Training
This is my first blog on the Girlfriends Book Club! I’m excited to be on the same “team” with so many fun authors, and hopefully they’ll think I’m a good addition to the blog.
I’ll start with a little bit about me. I write what I call women’s action-adventure. It’s a good amount of mystery, a little bit of romance, a lot feminist, and of course, totally incomplete without action and adventure. Did you ever see an action movie and think, “Why does the girl scream a lot and then fall down?” Well, if I made movies, they’d be a lot shorter. Scary man in a mask, calling from inside the house? Bam. Yes, officer, I appear to have shot a deranged psycho hiding in my attic, please send a coroner. The End. None of this waiting for the hunky hero to come save the girl; my heroines save themselves, and possibly the hunky hero too.
My first two books Bulletproof Mascara and Compact with the Devil form the basis for my Carrie Mae Mystery series. (Coming in 2015 – High Caliber Concealer!) They feature Nikki Lanier a twenty-something red-head who, in desperation, decides to sell make-up to make some cash, only to discover that the at home make-up sales giant Carrie Mae is also running a clandestine militant wing staffed by all women with the lofty goal of helping women everywhere.
If you just laughed while reading that, then you’ll know exactly what my friends did when I told them the idea. (They also promptly made up the Carrie Mae salute – chest thump into a mascara flip.) But I knew that I could write that book and that I could make it work. I knew that it would be funny, feminine, and feminist, and I could choreograph some awesome fight scenes.
I’ve written other things, and there have been books that I intended to write because they sounded like a good idea, but when I find the book that I have to write… have you ever heard the sound a metal pan makes when you take it off the burner and it starts to cool down? That little tiny ting? That’s what I hear when my brain produces a freshly baked perfect novel premise. And that’s what I heard the day I realized that at home make-up sales were an incredibly cut-throat business.
So hopefully you’ll join me as I search for the next tiny little auditory hallucination that tells me it’s time to sit down at a computer and make some stuff up.
I was staring at an app advertisement on my phone the other day when a brilliant idea for a novel came to me. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because it’s awesome and I don’t want the net gremlins to steal it. But as I pondered the awesomeness that was my own idea, and then shining beacon of sheer stunning gloriferousness that is my brain (Yeah, I just made that word up. What are you going to do about it?), it occurred to me to wonder – what would happen to me if I didn’t have my brain?
And ok, yeah, obviously, dead. Plop. But what about if I had someone else’s brain? We all look at the world from the unique transponder of our brains. We see the world differently, if only by a hair, than the person sitting next to us.
For example, I have a friend who is somewhere around seven feet tall. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s his actual height. We met in college and we had several classes, including life drawing, together. (Life drawing, for those who haven’t been to art school, is code for “drawing naked people.”) For one semester our life drawing instructor was a curly haired, 5’2” dreamer who once suggested that zoning out while driving on the freeway was a good place to get creative ideas. (We don’t have time to really go into that statement.) Anyway, at some point, she went around to my friend’s drawing board and suggested that his perspective was wrong. He checked, he double checked, he thought about it, and then politely suggested that he really did have it right. She stared up at him, she stared at the model. Then she drug a chair over next to him and climbed up on it. “Oh, nope, you’re right.” Your perspective is just different when you’re an extra two feet up in the air.
Two feet and an entire picture changes. If I had someone else’s brain, surely the ideas I have for writing books would be totally different. If I had them at all. But since I love my ideas, I love my brain, I don’t think I’ll be heading to Dr. Frankenstein’s lab to test out that experiment. But go ahead and thank your brain today, because it’s awesome.
Hell What Now?
/in General Writing, LifeThe Navy SEALs must pass through something called Hell Week in order to become an actual SEAL. If they can’t take Hell Week they can always ring the bell that signals that they are opting out and then they get coffee and donuts. For five and a half days the SEAL candidates are expected to operate on four hours of sleep while being cold, wet, and presumably yelled at (since no one seems to do anything in the military without being yelled at). To this I say… What pansies.
All kidding aside, one of the unfortunate side effects of becoming a mother (or probably a Navy SEAL) is that sleep is immediately curtailed. Which makes lots of things, for instance, writing novels and running a business, more difficult.
Side effects of prolonged sleep deprivation include:
It’s not that being a mom is so difficult; it’s that being anything else, while being a mom just increased in difficulty due to our adorable little time sucking children and the constant sleep deprivation. Which makes every word I type a minor triumph. I will not be ringing the bell today.
PS Please forgive any typos I may make. I blame them on my daughter.
Fictional Character, Real Personality
/in Carrie Mae, General Writing, Girlfriends Book ClubPuppy Training
/in LifeRecently my daughter learned to crawl. She’s six months old, so basically any time she learns something it’s “recently”. But as she learns new tricks she forces my husband and I to adapt (and hopefully overcome). Sadly, in our sleep deprived state we find ourselves relying on the training we did with our previous “child.”
As she learns new things my mind reaches out for words that will get the result I want. Ack! She’s chewing on a power cord! Drop it! It works on the dog, so my brain now auto selects for those oh, so useful training phrases. Sadly, the phrases mean less than nothing to my daughter. The only one she obeys is “stay” and that’s only if she’s strapped in the car seat. As a result my dog, Kato, thinks I got the runty, stupid puppy of the litter. I can practically see the thought bubble over his head. “Look human puppy, I am demonstrating what to do. Figure it out!” The tiny daughter’s thought bubble says, “Look at those shiny eyeballs; if I could pluck them out, it might be fantastic. Why is the fuzzy one leaving?” Which is a terrible way to treat a dog who is trying his best to be supportive.
Kato performs many important baby related jobs. There is the “I alert you to the fact that the baby is crying.” (Believe me Kato, we know.) There is the extremely useful butt check. Kato, would you like to smell this butt? Oh, you would? Must be time for a diaper change. And the adorable guard dog duty. He is not quite sure why the human puppy hasn’t been weaned to dog food, but if I’m going to insist on breastfeeding her, then he will do his best to guard us while we’re vulnerable.
But she is learning. She now knows her name and his name, and she knows where the dog food is and how delightful it is to spill it all over the floor. So while the dog thinks she’s dumb, I can see the day coming when he will realize that her little monkey fingers are useful to help him get the delicious human food he desires. Hopefully, by then she will also know what “sit,” “stay” and “drop it” mean.
Helllooo Girlfriends!
/in Carrie Mae, Girlfriends Book ClubOriginally Published at www.girlfriendsbookclub.org
Hellloooo Girlfriends!
This is my first blog on the Girlfriends Book Club! I’m excited to be on the same “team” with so many fun authors, and hopefully they’ll think I’m a good addition to the blog.
I’ll start with a little bit about me. I write what I call women’s action-adventure. It’s a good amount of mystery, a little bit of romance, a lot feminist, and of course, totally incomplete without action and adventure. Did you ever see an action movie and think, “Why does the girl scream a lot and then fall down?” Well, if I made movies, they’d be a lot shorter. Scary man in a mask, calling from inside the house? Bam. Yes, officer, I appear to have shot a deranged psycho hiding in my attic, please send a coroner. The End. None of this waiting for the hunky hero to come save the girl; my heroines save themselves, and possibly the hunky hero too.
My first two books Bulletproof Mascara and Compact with the Devil form the basis for my Carrie Mae Mystery series. (Coming in 2015 – High Caliber Concealer!) They feature Nikki Lanier a twenty-something red-head who, in desperation, decides to sell make-up to make some cash, only to discover that the at home make-up sales giant Carrie Mae is also running a clandestine militant wing staffed by all women with the lofty goal of helping women everywhere.
If you just laughed while reading that, then you’ll know exactly what my friends did when I told them the idea. (They also promptly made up the Carrie Mae salute – chest thump into a mascara flip.) But I knew that I could write that book and that I could make it work. I knew that it would be funny, feminine, and feminist, and I could choreograph some awesome fight scenes.
I’ve written other things, and there have been books that I intended to write because they sounded like a good idea, but when I find the book that I have to write… have you ever heard the sound a metal pan makes when you take it off the burner and it starts to cool down? That little tiny ting? That’s what I hear when my brain produces a freshly baked perfect novel premise. And that’s what I heard the day I realized that at home make-up sales were an incredibly cut-throat business.
So hopefully you’ll join me as I search for the next tiny little auditory hallucination that tells me it’s time to sit down at a computer and make some stuff up.
Brainiac
/in General WritingI was staring at an app advertisement on my phone the other day when a brilliant idea for a novel came to me. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because it’s awesome and I don’t want the net gremlins to steal it. But as I pondered the awesomeness that was my own idea, and then shining beacon of sheer stunning gloriferousness that is my brain (Yeah, I just made that word up. What are you going to do about it?), it occurred to me to wonder – what would happen to me if I didn’t have my brain?
And ok, yeah, obviously, dead. Plop. But what about if I had someone else’s brain? We all look at the world from the unique transponder of our brains. We see the world differently, if only by a hair, than the person sitting next to us.
For example, I have a friend who is somewhere around seven feet tall. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s his actual height. We met in college and we had several classes, including life drawing, together. (Life drawing, for those who haven’t been to art school, is code for “drawing naked people.”) For one semester our life drawing instructor was a curly haired, 5’2” dreamer who once suggested that zoning out while driving on the freeway was a good place to get creative ideas. (We don’t have time to really go into that statement.) Anyway, at some point, she went around to my friend’s drawing board and suggested that his perspective was wrong. He checked, he double checked, he thought about it, and then politely suggested that he really did have it right. She stared up at him, she stared at the model. Then she drug a chair over next to him and climbed up on it. “Oh, nope, you’re right.” Your perspective is just different when you’re an extra two feet up in the air.
Two feet and an entire picture changes. If I had someone else’s brain, surely the ideas I have for writing books would be totally different. If I had them at all. But since I love my ideas, I love my brain, I don’t think I’ll be heading to Dr. Frankenstein’s lab to test out that experiment. But go ahead and thank your brain today, because it’s awesome.