Pink Hands

 

I think I find myself in writing. Tonight I came home and just had the itch to write articles. I joined a website you’re probably familiar with called All Voices, wrote an article for them, and also wrote an article on Examiner on love, given the not-so-official upcoming ‘holiday’.

 

I’ve sort of lost touch with article writing over the last year or so, simply because I lost interest in it. I used to write a bunch when I first graduated college, because I was trying to generate an income from it. Back then though, I had no idea what keyword placement or impressions were, and didn’t realize how little I was making, nor did I understand how I could optimize my articles so they’d be seen. While I’m no content marketing guru, I do know a thing or two about writing for the net, and I think working in online advertising has benefited me in that regard.

 

More to the point however, I am happiest when I am typing away. It doesn’t even feel like work (when it’s something I want to write about, that is). But even when it’s not something I’m interested in, immersing myself in learning new things and crafting a story behind them, is an amazing feeling.

 

So I came home and did just that. Now that my applications are through, I have been coming home after work each night and working on random projects, whatever the hell I feel like working on. Monday night, I wrote 755 words in my e-book on applying to business school, journaled a little bit, read about 20 pages, and did some research for my web series idea. Tuesday, I reflected the entire night. I think I wrote a blog post…? Yes, that was last night. But I ended up sifting through old poetry, and a journal full of my favorite literature quotes. Or was that Monday?

 

Point being, when I come home from work, there’s no goddamn structure. Nothing is expected of me outside of work, so I do whatever the hell I want. The only small problem with that is I seem to be A.D.D with all of my projects, and happiest when I have multiple. I need to be writing a book, maintaining my blog, researching a web series idea, and taking an HTML class all at the same time or I’m not happy. I go into a zone, if you will. My bedroom is like a room in the tallest tower of a fairy tale place, and when I close the door behind me, I’m a mad scientist, rather than a princess.

 

Oh yeah, and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Isn’t that sweet? I look forward to spending it with my sweetheart. Even though he despises the holiday because “if we go out to dinner we have to order from an exorbitantly priced dinner menu, and the flowers always die so what’s the point?” But he’ll be a sweetheart on the actual day anyway. Last year we went to Beso in Hollywood.

 

182

 

(I may or may not be missing my short hair).

 

I told him I didn’t really care what we did this year, as long as I could be with him. I even mentioned going to one of those Dine-in theaters and seeing the new Die Hard because I know he loves those movies. How fucking cool of a girlfriend do you have to be to let that be the Valentine’s Day date? Pretty cool I’d say. But I love him like that girl from Les Miserables loves that guy who doesn’t love her back when she’s singing about him in the rain, so whatever we do I’ll be okay with, so long as we’re together.

 

Enough SAP! I’m going to go do some more writing probably or maybe apartment hunt or maybe Tumblr peruse or maybe finish my book. What are you doing for the big V-day? Leave me a comment, let’s rub noses.

 

 Valentine's Day

January 29, 2013

Typing 2

Well, an e-book, and it’s going to be about my experience applying to business school, but it’s a book none-the-less.

Tonight was the best night ever. I worked out, did some work in my coding class, a bunch of blog maintenance, and wrote two pages in said e-book about business school. Why is it the best night ever? Because I am not working on my applications to business school. Because those are done. And now I get to spend my nights how I want.

And I get it, the verdict isn’t in. I don’t know if I’m accepted yet, but I think I have some valuable information to share with business school applicants anyway. Whether or not I get accepted will definitely have some major impact on this book, and whether people will even want to read it, but applying to business school took up such a significant chunk of my life, I wouldn’t be Monique if I didn’t decide to write the whole thing down and throw in little bits and pieces here and there about what kind of person it’s turned me into.

Essentially the e-book is going to be about a chick (moi), who read a book about applying to business school, and her experience implementing the good stuff that business school book told her to implement. You know how there are so many leadership books out there you could fill a small kingdom? My book is going to be about my experience actually doing what those leadership books tell you to do. More specifically, actually applying to business school after reading Your MBA Game Plan (a book on applying to business school).

It will by no means be a serious book, but a useful, and might I add helpful one, for anyone considering business school. On topof everything? It’s going to be free. Yup, free. The catch? It’s only going to be available to readers who subscribe to my blog. Thank God subscribing is easy and free. (See upper right hand corner).

But that’s all down the line, in a few months. Not only do I have to beautify (and finish) this book, but I’ll have to implement the functionality on my blog to deliver the e-book directly to your inbox after you’ve subscribed. There’s lots of little things I want to do, but maybe after I finish this book I will hire a developer to help me out. Actually, there’s really no maybe about it. That’s kind of a must.

As for my current subscribers! You lucky readers, you! I will be sending you an email the moment I have it ready for you to download, and you will be able to read it at your leisure (preferably with a glass of Merlot and some dark chocolate, as those themes permeate the book, and recur throughout).

See you tomorrow. We’ll see what that will bring.

November 15, 2012

Having been so swept up in my business school applying, I haven’t given a shred of soul to anything other than word processors and junk food. But tonight I took a few hours out of my night to see my good friend Jax read her poetry at The Wine Crush in Long Beach.

Jax and I met at Cal State Long Beach, and remained friends through our shared love of poetry. Seeing her read tonight, along with all of the others, took me home. It’s been so long since I sat down to read poetry, let alone write it, that I forgot how moving it was, and how much of a poet’s life was put into each line.

I remember how obsessed I was with it, struggling to find my voice, while imitating the voices of other, more prosperous and well-known poets. It was so hard, but in that awesome way that learning an instrument is hard. The hard that you love, the hard that you know will one day become easy, and even enjoyable! Imagine that? An enjoyable effort! Kind of like this blog.

And the cool thing about this place where I went, aside from the fact that I scored the last toilet seat cover in the bathroom, was the rocks in the sink. Imagine that! I was in a rain forest.

And the wine glasses were huge! (Huge shout out)

And just so you know where I’m at mathematically, I’m going to go look up some ways to get extra credit for my Finance class, and purchase a math tutor.

Please subscribe to stay posted on my mostly molecular majestical molestations of the numerical variety. AKA, how I end up doing in this math class, and whether or not I sound off some more on wanting to get back into poetry.

Tempestuously yours,

November 3, 2012

They say when you drink, your true feelings start coming out, or average things start to look and feel incredibly satisfying. Take double-doubles for instance. Cheeseburgers. They always taste great, but after a couple of beers, there isn’t a single thing that could stop me from going after one of those cheesy, melted pieces of divine light.

I realized this evening, first hand, something quite novel about my love for writing. I stayed in tonight to do some laundry and work on my admissions essays for business school. I was pretty successful. I finished one of them, and was fairly pleased with it. Halfway through the second one however, I was stuck and decided to have a beer. This helped me relax, and ultimately un-stick myself.

Then I decided to have another beer, because golly this stuff was really working well! But halfway through that, something odd happened. My writing turned…fictional. It started to turn a little too ‘story-time’ and a little less ‘here’s why I want to go to your business school’. Before I knew it, I was opening up a new Word document and starting a story, a short one. (I’ve been working on a short compilation of stories in my copious free time).

I couldn’t help myself. It was like, writing is the one thing that I am 100% passionate about, and after a beer and a half I found myself flocking to it, in much the way drunk people flock to IHOPs and Dennys after a night on the town. They go for what they crave. They don’t think about it, they just decide it’s time for a treat, and they boogie the fuck down there and score themselves some Moon over my Hammy. It’s simple logic.

And that’s what I did. I was completely unprepared for that distraction, but it happened. And after it did I realized that writing was my Moon over my Hammy. My juicy double-double. My living end. My humble companion when all things turn sour and dank. My Rhett Butler to that one chick in Gone With the Wind who was in love with him, but he was in love with Scarlet (and yes, I spelled Rhett Butler right on the first try).

So my advice to you this Friday evening, or any evening if you’re struggling with figuring out what to do with your life, is to watch a couple of inspirational videos by Lady Gaga, start writing an admissions essay and have a beer. I’ve heard good things.

Monique has so much stuff she wants to share with you about turning 27, the business school research process, and her feelings about running an 80’s themed 10k tomorrow but it’s LABOR DAY WEEKEND and her first love is WRITING, so she wanted to show you something special that combines the two.

Open Road Media, a digital publisher, created a brief but wonderful video for Labor Day on what a few popular authors did for a living before they were able to write full time. (You want to pay me to write all day? Hmm, I have a pretty full schedule but I think that could work. )

Monique has GREAT experience with this. She scored a part time internet marketing internship that eventually hired her, all while saying quietly to herself “But it’s really just writing I want to do. I think I’ll use this to pay my rent, and write at night.”

That never really happened though. She ended up getting into party mode and slightly feisty and started coming up with ideas and ended up wanting to go to business school. But things change. The point is, Monique has always wondered how writers ‘make it’. Do they just collect unemployment and write all day, hoping it’s a best seller? Do they give it their all at a day job and then slave away at night? OR are they one of the lucky few that just land a writing job?

Below is a short video on what authors like Edna O’Brien, Susan Dunlap, and Patricia Bosworth did to pay the rent before they became published authors.

And on that note, have a beautiful Labor Day weekend!!

shit girls sayFlailing on the edge of the ‘Shit Girls Say‘ bandwagon, holding on for dear life, Monique can’t seem to focus on anything but this Saturday, when she and 3 others will venture around Los Angeles, video camera and lip gloss in tow, in hopes of portraying an accurate picture of ‘Shit Single Girls Say in L.A.’.

She pauses here to put on her headphones so she can concentrate. Feeling but looking nothing like this little cousin guy. –>

This Saturday she will be co-starring in her first scripted YouTube video. Here’s what’s going through her head: ‘sure I can act in my room in front of my mirror but in front of a camera?’ and ‘can we really finish the entire thing in a day?’ and ‘I wonder if it will go viral’ and ‘is this trend even viral-able anymore?’

Her gut tells her it doesn’t matter. She’s only in it to have fun and make people laugh. A more serious side says, “But yeah you’re dedicating an entire Saturday to this. A Saturday you could spend studying for the GMAT and possibly fitting in a 4-mile run. Something good better come out of this shit.”

She ignores both gut and serious side in favor of a large sip of water and a long back crack. Also, she opened up her novel last night. She read it in its entirety. 12 pages. Twelve whole ones. She wrote a small paragraph, tweeted it, and got so distracted she made herself sleepy.

 

Does that number of lines even make the paragraph minimum? By the time she’d removed her contacts and the rubble from between her teeth she could barely get through more than a page of the book she was supposed to review weeks ago before drifting off to a rather shortish-long sleep that should have been dreamless but was not.

A note on dreams before she showers and pretends to read again before she sleeps: they’re real. Here’s why.

When Monique first picked up the idea to write this novel and popped it into her mouth like a mint from a welcome dish, she’d had a dream about her dog. This was either early to mid 2011. She dreamed her dog had choked on a green tennis ball, dying before her eyes, choking and spasmodic. Without a clue as to how to rescue the dog, she pushed on the bulging tennis ball lodged in the dog’s throat, and the dog was alright. The moment of the choke however, was a long and grueling one, and those brief air-clogged dog seconds were like hours in her dream-fog.

Just a mere week and a half ago, Monique’s dog had a seizure right before her very eyes, violently shaking and convulsing in much the way the dog choked in the dream. It was the first time one of her dreams attempted to predict anything but her true life insanity, which she was already vaguely aware of. Why did she remember this petrifying dream? Because she opened her novel. That very dream is described on the very first bloody page of it. It gave her goosebumps. Maybe that was why she couldn’t get past a paragraph the night before.

If her current dreams are any indicator of the future, she should probably tell you that last night she dreamed Oprah passed away in a red dress. Everyone lowered her body in a body of water slowly, some strange burial service she’d requested before her death. You can imagine the world’s shock when she rose from the water seconds after she was submerged, alive.

We all felt pretty bad about it.

Ascension is her priority, but distractions persist like a dry itch, and each night she must reaffirm her mission, her quest–to write a novel. To be something great. This entire blog is dedicated to one directionless twenty-something, trying to be something great. Here’s how all of this began.

It all started on a cool, smoky night in Vegas at some posh club.

Monique was sitting down on the sidelines because her feet were experiencing a pain threshold only Jesus himself could identify with. Like many women aged all-of-them, she felt it was her civic duty to sacrifice agony for elegance, and so it came to pass that she was seated all alone, with only a half watered down cranberry-vodka as her consort. And so she sat, and every once in a while, her toes nodded in agreement.

A lady in white approached. “I absolutely love your hair!” (See hair —–>)

“Thanks!” Monique replied. “I’m cutting it tomorrow!” The exclamations are used for effect. It’s to give the reader the feeling of being at a club where the music’s so loud, you can’t even feel.

The lady in white did not make a face. Her carefully tweezed eyebrows raised with delight instead. She smiled and said, “It’s going to look gorgeous!”

This lady is definitely drunk. But Monique keeps going on about the hair, because she’s all alone with her toes and there’s no one to talk to. She expounds upon topics such as: the length of time it took to grow such a stream of brunette, as well as her fundamental reasons for doing away with it (see left).

It was at this pivotal moment when she realized that the lady in white had heard nothing of her drawn out hair spiel. The lady in white stood there (admirably), nodding, pretending to listen to this poor, afflicted damsel who at this point was going on at a terrific speed about this split end or that when suddenly, the lady in white leaned down slowly, put her lips to Monique’s ears and said softly, “You’re gonna be great.”

There was something in the way this lady said this one single line. It was as though the music stopped, and all the people disappeared. The entire universe took a breather so this stranger could whisper this single thing into Monique’s ear…

And it was the way she made me feel. Great.

It was at that moment, and many moments before that moment I assure you, that Monique decided she was destined to do something with her life. Not just any something, but something great.

And so, while she’s not sure yet where this path to greatness ends, you’d better believe she’s traveling barefoot, with this blog as her sole companion.

 

Why do you blog in third person?

January 31, 2012

ThingSeconds ago, I had the idea to start posting from this blog in the third person. Why? Because I believe it will help get me into storytelling mode to write my novel, and what funner way to get into storytelling mode than by narrating your own silly thoughts, actions, and characteristics? I also think it will make this blog a tad more entertaining because it will read like a novel–a novel about one  girl, trying to write a novel and be something great. And other things occasionally.

The second fine idea Monique had this evening was to put this idea she’s had sizzling in the back of her mind to good use. She’d put this problem on hold for many a fortnight because she’d stumbled onto the problem of creating a website to house said fine idea. There simply weren’t enough resources or creative minds at her disposal to get this project going, and so she focused on her words, her Subway sandwiches, slam poetry YouTube videos, and fake mustaches, anything but this one fine idea. And so the idea simmered, snoozed and was almost snuffed until…

Today was the day she found a solution when she wasn’t even looking for it, and the solution came in the form of a single word: Tumblr. This was the free and easy space that would house this fine idea because its platform was right for the job. She raced home, moaning inwardly that her gimp knee prevented her from running this evening, but determined to make something happen. She tossed her worrying to the winds and focused solely upon this one, single, monumental thing, and by golly she did it! She created a tumblr account (not her first) and posted a post, and created  a Twitter and Gmail account specifically for this great thing in the back of her mind that she’s always wanted to do.  And even though she didn’t get much studying done for the GMAT tonight, and even though she is starving because that little whositwhatsit she ate for dinner was about the size of a saucer, she is thrilled.

What was this fine idea you ask? She thought you’d never!

It’s a blog where anyone can submit five good things that happened to them today, yesterday, and every day. Monique has found that merely reading about five good things that happen to people throughout their day puts the biggest smile on her face, bringing more good things her way. She does of course realize that throngs of people may have something similar going on with friends and family, but has yet to see a shared network of people celebrating the good.

Anyone can submit their five things via email or under the “Ask” page, and she’ll post them for our little world to see. While this blog is still in its infancy, check it out when you’re not busy being so great: http://yourfivethings.tumblr.com.