*waves*

Life is short and fickle, you know?

I got some terrible news yesterday, the kind of news that puts everything in perspective. The kind that rocks your little world for a few violent,  torrid moments, like you're the island and fate is the towering tidal wave. The kind that makes you spend a lot of time afterward grateful that you were only vicariously traumatized.

That you aren't the one having to live through that reality, right in the very thick of it.

What am I saying?

I'm saying that despite it all, despite the love or hate or whatever else, everything is so inconsequential when it comes to the world you create around yourself, for whatever time you have. And I let myself get so upset about these words I have collected here, just full of flailing and tears and anger, that at first I wanted to feel bad about that. How small and stupid and selfish of me . . . but then . . . the things that bring you joy, no matter how small or stupid or selfish they might be, are the only things that might make your time here worthwhile. The little things that you love are the things that define you and I'm perfectly content to let my existence be defined by my words.

The ones here, the ones still stuck inside me, the ones I haven't even thought of yet.

So, yesterday was a complete loss. I was worthless. I spent the time reposting chapters, getting frustrated with formatting issues, fighting against time and energy and real life and readers, who plow through words faster than I can put them up.

---> The Other Way is fully posted and I'm putting the final touches on the PDF, just in time for Christmas. (Because I'm mf'ing SANTA, ok?)

---> Chalk, Mind The Gap and all of the outtakes are up as well, PDF in the works.

In the meantime - My head is being eaten up with original work. I only say this because I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to Double Struck. Floundering is what I'd like to call it, but it's really more that the spark was snatched away in all the dirty din and dizzy mess that sprung up around me like a goddamn swarm of locusts and I just have not been able to locate it again. Like searching down a long dark hallway with your arms outstretched because you know there's a light switch somewhere, you're just not entirely sure where.

I'm still fumbling.

Thank God for Hadley Hemingway.

And let's talk about her for a minute, shall we? Because after I got that terrible news yesterday, you know who I called? Her. Not my mother. Not my sister or my friends. Her. How did this happen? This random, fandom friendship we created on a fluke that has now become so important to me that I reach out to her in times like that? I'll tell you how:

Because we're soul mates, I shit you not.

How do I know this? I know this because I picked her name out of hundreds for a reason. I know this because we can talk on the phone for HOURS, but a lot of that time is spent in comfortable silence as we work, just like an old married couple. I know this because we think things at the exact same moment. I know this because I don't make friends easily and she slipped on just like that old favorite pair of gloves. I know this because we call to check up on each other and I start to feel funny if I haven't talked to her in a couple of days. Her family puts up with me, both from afar and in close proximity, and my husband always knows who I'm talking about even though I jump from her Hadley moniker to her real name and back again without even blinking.

She has my manuscript.

She also has my heart.

XXOO

HBM

Okokok,

*takes a big, big breath*

I'm trying to remember to do that. Breathe. 

First, I can't even begin to describe the amount of support that I've gotten in the last few days. Not only from readers, the ones I knew about and the ones I've never heard from until now, but from other writer's here as well. Inboxes flooded. A tsunami of love that I damn near got crushed under and I can't even begin to answer everyone separately. All I can do is say thank you. From the bottom on my mushy, fragile heart and from the very depths of my indignant anger.

I think we can all agree that as soon as you've decided something, you'll be shown the light. 

I decided (based on some sufficient fucking evidence, mind you) that the fandom didn't want me. Turns out the haters really are few and far between. Like crumbly little bits of mortar holding up a giant wall of bricks that all say something like "you can do this." 

"Please don't leave." "We need you here." "I need you here." "Don't ever stop writing."

When brick walls fail, it's not the bricks. 

It's the mortar. 

I've been Hadley Hemingway's neediest child this week, and even got her RL boy-child on the phone ON HIS BIRTHDAY because he's more of a tech genius than the both of us combined. That's love right there, I can't even explain. But she's helped me to come up with a plan, one that not only honors my fanfiction for what it is, an exploration and a minor side journey along the way to a much larger adventure, but also allows me to move forward. 


There are a lot of things I wish I knew about this fanfiction thing before I started. A LOT of things. I wish I knew about the love and the hate. About the veiled backstabbing and the downloading. I wish I knew that my words would be taken so lightly, so heavily, because I might have done it different. I might have been much more careful with them. But I did it how I did it and now I'm going to do it my way again. 

A little bit better informed this time:

I will be reposting my stories here, but they will remain here and nowhere else. 

I guess if you're intrepid enough to go about downloading each and every chapter separately as they post, then by all means, be my guest. Once the story is complete, a PDF will be made available here and you only have a very limited number of minutes in your lifetime. And when your minutes are up, that's it. No more. If you're ok spending a bunch of those precious minutes doing that sort of thing, that's your call. The same goes for the other stories, because as of now, the plans for those are the same. A PDF option and chapters to read online. I'm no tech-genius and I can't suit myself and my words up in armor, all I can do is offer you the versions I would like you to have and hope that you'll play along.

The bricks will.

The mortar won't.

But bricks are heavier and mortar is really just fine-grain sand if you think about it. 


So to you, dear readers: Be the brick. The bricks are what make this community what it is. The bricks make walls that hold up roofs. Hold down floors. Frame out windows and let the light in. You make a sheltered spot for us to keep our stories, away from the rain and the wind. Warm and dry and well fed. Without you, it would be a cold and lonely world for us writers. We love you and we need you to be strong for us. We need you to hold yourselves up high and support us because no matter what, no matter who we are or what we are writing, we are trying our best. And sometimes, our best is so hard come by, so hard to reach and we need a pile of bricks to climb on top of to give us a little boost beyond the self doubt and the endless shuffling of words. 

Seven in the morning, and I'm rambling about bricks.

The important stuff to know:

- I'm still here. I'm not leaving.

- I'm still writing. I'm never gonna stop.

- I'm posting Chapter one of Double Struck here today. I'll do what I can to post one chapter a day until I'm caught up, and then I'll try to step back to my once-a-week (or so) schedule. This story has been a rocky road to start with, but through thick and thin, it was just meant to be twific. It was meant to be here. I have got to finish writing it or I'll always feel like I failed it somehow. Once the story is complete, I will offer the PDF here, so again, decide what you want to do about your hourglass of minutes, ok?

- I'm gonna do the same for the rest of it. Pretty PDF and the entire story posted here. It's not gonna come all at once, I have a real life to deal with, but it will come. Be patient with me, and I'll be patient with you. I'll give you my downloads if you give me your thoughts. I need it, the outside perspective. Tell me how I'm doing, what moved you and what didn't, because it's so fucking hard sometimes when I'm thirty chapters deep and wondering if what I just wrote is even going to make sense to another person, much less make them feel something. I need to know from you if this is working. If the words are working. Please. Because otherwise I'm just in this for myself and even though that's some of the truth, the last week has shown me that it isn't ALL of the truth. 

Because you're here too.

If I could give the fandom a hug right now, I would, but y'all gotta hop in the shower first and wash off the mortar. 

xxxxoooo

HBM

Thanks for the tragedy. I need it for my art.

This was posted as a new story on my ff.net profile, only because it was the best way I knew how to reach the majority of my readers in one fell swoop.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is my new story.

It’s a story about give and take. Push and pull. 

Puppy dog love and pit bull hate.

About a girl and her computer and her wild imagination, which will never just fuck off long enough for her to get a spare thought in edgewise. It’s a story about a joke, her first fanfic written in jest, then about a challenge. A sidestep. Stretching her fingers and her words for the pure fucking thrill of it. The linguistic exploration of it. Playing with plot lines like there was nothing wrong with it, molding characters into everything they shouldn’t be. 

She was pretty fucking brave there, for a while. 

Now, this girl, let’s talk about her. That’s something that should be done, given the conjecture, don’t you think? Let’s set the record straight. Yes, let’s. She’s a Pisces who lives in the mountains. A fish, surrounded by rock. She paints too little and smokes too much and covers herself in tattoos she doesn’t want to explain to you. She dreams in technicolor and her favorite words are the bad ones. She is married to her high school sweetheart and, yeah, they’ve tagged their fair share of walls together. She climbed rocks until she tore out her shoulder and quoted Fight Club at her wedding. She’s turning thirty in few months and still feels as soft and vulnerable as a baby most of the time. She grew up without a television, she hates peanut butter, and she likes to think she’s tough.

But she really isn’t. 

She didn’t really know what she was doing here so, she just went for it. Some might call that courage but, really, it was just dumb fucking luck. Or stupidity. Or genius. Who knows? All she knows is that she can’t stop writing. She’s always written, and she winds up a little crazy inside if she goes too long without stringing letters together like beads on a string. That’s definitely called a compulsion, she’s sure of it. She loves these stories, in ways that she can’t even express, in ways that no one will ever understand, because there’s too much of her in them to unravel the giant, tangled mess. Too much unresolved angst and tormented trauma that she’s pulled out from underneath her skin. Too much of her own hurt and anger and fear and curiosity taken out on words that she tried to pass off as fanfiction. 

Her time here has taught her a lot. 

It taught her to write a story, how to round out an arc and how to dip her head into a character. It taught her not to be so damn stubborn all the time, to let the characters just run with it. It taught her to follow them, even when it was scary. Especially when it was scary. It taught her to breach her barriers and to connect with other writers, ones that she secretly and shyly admires and respects, all of whom are doing things here that elevate fanfiction to entirely new levels. Her time here taught her to lay it all out on paper but, she missed the class on how to bite her tongue, which may have been the most important lesson. It taught her that some people will just take and take and take and that nothing will appease them, not even her appetite or her sanity, and that she would wind up starved and insane if she let herself. It taught her to hold on tight to those who are in it for the good, and it taught her that she just cannot control everything.

Just enough that she can begin to feel ok again. 

She has been slowly compiling her fics into PDFs for a while now. Call them ‘ongoing projects.’ Mostly for herself. These copies include the beautiful banners that were made for her by people who are far more talented than she is. They include all of her selected outtakes and the other removed material she chopped at the last minute. The photos and songs that she used for inspiration. Scrapbooks, sort of, and they’re kind of beautiful. She loves them. And those are the copies that she wants you to have, not something you downloaded off ff.net with all the typos and weird formatting. 

Not a copy off a copy off a copy. 

Her version. In its full glory.

She can’t make promises. These are called ongoing projects for many reasons, and one of these is reality. Her blog, the space she’s using as a mid-ocean island pit stop, is where these PDFs will post, in whichever order she deems worthy because she’s fickle like that. At any given date, because she’s hard to pin down, even on a good day. She needs a little patience, mostly with herself, but Double Struck just might see the light of day at some point. Somewhere.

She gets it. 

These PDFs will eventually fall into the hands of people she doesn’t want to have them, the plagiarizers and the haters, but there’s nothing she can do about that. Nothing, except rest content in the knowledge that when they do finally sit down to read her fic, they’ll understand what all the fuss was about. 

And she shouldn’t tell you, she knows that she shouldn’t . . . but, fandom, her heart hurts. 

Maybe more than it should. Because she’ll kind of miss you, most of you, the ones who have followed her around from story to story. She’s sorry for being such a shitty player, for never really replying to your reviews and maybe she should have done a little better at that. But she read them all, each and every one, and most of you made her cry at inopportune times, or laugh out loud in public. 

Most importantly, above all else, above anyone else, this experience taught her that the only reason she started down this path some three odd years ago, was so she could eventually find Hadley Hemingway. Right now, in this moment and for the rest of the moments ever to exist ever, she is all that matters. 

Because there is a future. 

An HEA, even if she never was all that great at writing those. 

She’s still writing. She’s still dreaming, and she’s still taptaptapping stories, Hadley’s giggles and love and fancy red pen cleaning up her mess as she goes. She’s not sure how it’s gonna work, because she’s still feeling achy and violent and bruised all over and everything hurts if she moves too fast, so she’s moving slowly. Like a caterpillar. Cocooning. 

She plans to be brilliant on the other side. 

She hopes to see you there. 

XXOO

HBM

Words are the most powerful drug known to mankind.

I am an addict.

Logophile.

Word Junkie.

I keep them on notecards, somewhat organized, not really organized at all. On the front covers of notebooks and pieces of paper that I find in my pockets weeks later. The skin of my arm, because if you write on your hands, it's going to wash away too soon. Collections of words and each one of them is beautiful, in its onwn special way. 

Fuck is my favorite word.

First only to every other word ever spoken or thought or carved into a rock, scribbled in sand, painted on canvass. Millions of words, but fuck how I love that particular one. It just feels so good, especially when you say it with some omph, give a character enough drive to really mean it. 

Someone who is like a Mum to me told me that I was going through a 'blue period.'

I believe her.

Lately it's all been rough. 

Words worn to a bloody mess, like sandpaper to skin, but I just can't help it. 

Sometimes, the darkness is far more interesting than the light and writing offers a unique way to experience something without having to actually experience it. Sinking into to something, somewhere, and living someone else's nightmare for a moment. Their daydream. Moments built on pure imagination.

Would be Bluebird is about a drug addict, and I swear on my own head that I've never done any of the substances that eventually kills both characters. I've never beaten anyone up, though I fantasize about it a lot, yet Bite Club is a busted up, broken down clusterfuck of blood and fists and rage. 

All of it peppered with more 'fucks' than you could shake a stick at.

Somewhere, in the debris, there are strings of words, whole entire sentences that hit from nowhere and are beautiful enough to make me cry. To make my fingers hurt. That warm soft thing that lives inside of you, up against you spine and throbs in time to your heat beat, gets flustered and fidgety and downright fucking elated. 

LOOK at that beauty of a sentence. Goddamn, that thing is magic. 

I could go crazy, stumbling over every attempt to perfect paragraphs. 

Everything you read, EVERYTHING, is just a different combination of the same 26 letters.

When does a writer meet their break?

Never mind the big one, the flashy-lights-and-signatures break that comes with a well-timed manuscript. Some perfect piece of alphabet art. Prepackaged to be adapted into a screenplay. 

I'm worried about the final break, the epic one that seems to come at some point after the flashy lights, or after no lights at all. 

The mental one.

--------

I've been writing A LOT. 

Far more than I admit to anyone. About things that I definitely don't admit to anyone. Hundreds of thousands of words: 15,000 there, 25,000 over there, 92,000 way over here . . . . 10k in a document, stalled in progress, 12k written as an alternate point of view. Words that I'm still not sure if I've squandered on something meaningless. 

Because let's not even start to discuss the 350, 000 word manuscript I haven't even glanced over at in over a year. 

So when do writer's have that mental break? When they're old and rotting from the inside, soaked in liquor and prepared to light themselves on fire, scribbling down their very worst in their very last moments?

Maybe it's the moment when you look at that stack of books you're reading, all ten of them, and your shelves, every precious inch of space on them saved for the combinations of letters smashed up between bindings that truly moved you and you want you name on a book like that bad enough that it burns a hole right through you. 

I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, honestly. 

I type faster than I can think and some of it leads me nowhere but then sometimes . . . it does. And typically in a direction I never would have guessed. And for some reason it lead me into this weird, weird place because you know all those prepackaged screenplay/books that are becoming mega movie franchises right now?

Yeah, they're fanfiction.

And let's just preface THIS conversation by saying that no one liked me over there. I didn't follow their rules. I broke up their eternal-love couples and made them lesbians. Made them drive on the wrong side of the road and sneak into buildings to paint the walls with murals of cowgirls shooting stars. I made them love someone else, someone they weren't supposed too, and I sure didn't paint a nice romantic ride off into the sunset when I found my finish. I doped them up and tore them down and really enjoyed myself for the most part, even if no one else did. A testament to this fact is that yeah, I changed their names and posted stories here that were originally written as Twific, but in all honesty are just too fucking good for only that. 

I'm a vain asshole. Whatever.

I LOVE writing. So much that it's killing me. I smoke too many cigarettes and don't do enough laundry. I drink whiskey and don't eat enough. I hide out in the back of the house while the rest of my life goes on around me, ignoring phone calls and deadlines and relationships because I just can't get the words out of my head. They just won't stop and this is probably when the writer meets their break. 

When it just won't fucking STOP. 

When they can't even see beyond the letters and no wonder they all go crazy in the end. 

 Oh, contests . . . . 

I still don't know why I do this to myself, my anxiety is bad enough as it is, but here I am again. Entering something, up against a bunch of spectacular other writers and sure to fly quietly under the radar (that's my style, no?)

This time around?

Angst.

As in tears.

As in heartfail.

As in 'goddamn that hurt in the best sort of way.'

Go see if you can find me hidden in there . . . vote for your favorite when the time comes and I'll just be over here in the corner, chewing my nails off until this whole thing blows over.

 TLS ANGST CONTEST 2013

Honeybee's Adventures Into A Fandom

Can we all just keep in mind that I have a dirty mouth and mind? Ok, thanks.

Let's just be honest here.

This all started as a joke.

A big fat funny one that I laughed and laughed and laughed over.

---------------

Red Spark is the jello shot queen. And she rules with an iron fist. I have a beloved black moleskin full of her recipes that I've gotten thoroughly trashed on and have trashed other people on. Those little wiggly devils have a bad reputation and there is nothing I love more than proving people wrong. When I asked Red Spark what she wanted for her birthday, in return for that treasured little notebook, she came at me with guns blazing. 

As one of the few people in the world to have read my original fiction, she hit me right where it counted.

She wanted a fanfiction. 

A dirty one.

Now, Red is also the sole reason why I started reading fanfiction in the first place. In all honesty, I've read very little of it myself, mostly the basics that would considered required. At that point I didn't understand that there might be rules. That there might be standards or taboos. 

I wrote Coupling.

As a great big joke.

I turned dear Bella into a lesbian and that smooth, sexy vampire into a clutz. I made Jasper a graffiti artist and threw down every cliche in book. Unplanned pregnancy, some tropical island, a crazed redhead with a death wish. I researched aspen trees and spray paint. Adoption regulations and emancipation legalities. I got Jasper to paint bikinis on the the girls and Edward to duct tape Jasper to a tree. I sent a pack of rabid bees after our beloved golden couple and pushed them off a cliff. I let Alice climb onto a bed and put on a one-woman show for Jasper. I walked Bella through her first sexual encounters with a guy, after years of girls. 

300,000 some words later, and it was twice as long as my legitimate novel. 

*headdesk*

Who want's to read Twific anyway? Apparently everyone. I posted 72 chapters to ff.net and in a couple of months, got 300 or so reviews.

--> Floored.

300! Holy shit, I mean, that's a fucking lot, right? I dunno . . . but man did my little heart sort of run around like a hampster on meth for a few weeks. This is what drugs feel like. How does anyone not become an addict?

--------------------

About that time, I moved back to my hometown. A little like Forks, but less rainy. Classic Colorado mountain town . . . snows in July . . . you know . . . the usual. Bought a cute house with the Mr. and started hanging out with my little brother a lot more than I have in a long ass time. Too long. Kid is fucking HUGE now, with a mustache and a cute girlfriend and a new hobby.

Climbing rocks.

This hobby came along with friends who were kind of hot and sunburned and talked really funny when they sat in my backyard at the end of the day, drinking beers and chatting about their 'manky' climbs. 

Time for a challenge. Coupling averaged somewhere between 2,000 to 7,000 words per chapter. PER CHAPTER. Let's try to do something small this time, girlie. No chapters over 1,000 words, ok Honeybee?

Chalk.

Short and sweet and I didn't give a fuck about what they did in their real life. I didn't want to work out the stupid details about their homes or their cars or their jobs. Fuck that noise, I'm gonna write about rocks. In a thousand words or less. 

Bam, that sucker gets 500 reviews after a shout out on the Fictionators, a whole other aspect of the twilight fandom I had no idea even existed up until that point. Then it's up to 600. Then 650. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Again, no idea, but the fact that they aren't required to say anything nice to me, but still take the time to do so was like throwing shots of whiskey down the throat of an alcoholic.

--------------------

Then everything changed. 

For better? Worse? Maybe some of both?

By this point it was obvious to me that most readers were looking for something they kept referring to as 'lemons.' Wtf? Lemons? As in lemonade? These twi people talk as weird as the rock climbers. 

Oh, THAT sort of lemon. 

Aha.

Ok, well, I've done the lesbian version. And the fuckhot typical hetero versions. Coughed up a sweet one for Chalk . . . this time, I'm gonna write a threesome.

Only took me 28 chapters, a lot of fucking anxiety, and more than two mental breakdowns to get there.

----------------

The Other Way fucking wrecked me. This is honesty here, people. I have a lot of buried trauma over my time spent in Africa. Too young to control anything and witnessing the horrors of the third world at an age that is supposed to be saved for tender, sugar-coated care. I'v spent lots of time in therapy, even more time trying to deny it ever happened. 

Frankly, The Other Way is Alice's story. Not Bella's Not Edward's. Not Jasper's. Alice's. She was by far the character who struggled the most, floundered the furthest and it was only that her head was too torturous of a place to venture into that saved us all from getting that fic from her point of view.  

You know when a writer tells you that they had nothing to do with the creation of a story, other than their fingers to a set of keys? That the characters just ate the whole thing up and spit it back out and it ended somewhere far, far away from its original intention? 

Yeah, these characters didn't really give a fuck about my opinion. 

They took off and I followed. In the end, even I was surprised. They managed to adhere to my one stipulation though, and waltzed themselves right into two of the hottest lemons I have ever written.

I had just posted chapter 27 when the world caught on.

A rec on The Lemonade Stand and I got five hundred reviews in a DAY. I got inducted into facebook groups. I got pats on the back and high fives and then I posted chapter 28, the first of my back-to-back threesomes, and I started getting stones.

But I'm ahead of myself here . . . 

I knew it would happen. These people read Twilight, for fuck's sake. I read that book and threw it against the wall. I read it again, and then the next three, and threw all of them against the wall at some point. I hated Bella and Edward sort of creeped me out but I'm married to my high school sweetheart and I'm a sucker for that shit. 

No one was expecting this out of me, I hadn't spoken a word of my poly-minded intentions and I knew some of my new readers were bound to freak out.

-----------------------

That's how I found Hadley. 

It was really between her and one other reviewer, two people who consistently left me constructive, thoughtful reviews. Who seemed to understand my language and talked to me about books they loved, all of which I loved too.

I picked Hadley because I love Hemingway.

This is one of those moments that is a perfect example of fate.

On the technical side, Hadley helped me write the end of The Other Way. Lots of deep, analytical phone calls, therapy for both me and my broken characters. There is no way it would have finished as smoothly without her, and now way I would have made it through the hailstorm either. 

On the not so technical side, she held my hand while people ranted and raved. I purchased a helmet for myself. Posted the second threesome and it got broken. There were days I talked to her more than my husband. 

-----------------

What am I even saying here? It's all just a bunch of bad-language rambling that probably comes off just shy of whining. 

Again, with the honesty thing - there have been more times than I care to admit that I've seriously considered pulling everything and disappearing. Deleting it all, hunting down those who downloaded it, demanding it back. It's mine, my thoughts and my hurt and frankly, a lot of myself rolled around in a fine dust of fandom. So fine, in fact, that I've taken several stories and changed all the names, altered a few minor details, read them aloud in public. 

On a microphone. 

No one the wiser. 

Am I wasting myself? These ideas, could they put to better use elsewhere? Maybe, but I guess that's the classic problem. Do you leave the fandom for something you think might be better?

What do you do when the magic starts to die a little?

If you're me - you come back around with something so different, no one will recognize you.

--------------------

I wrote Slow Pony Home for The Happily Ever After contest.

A fic that I rated T, but only because there was a very vague reference to sex. A fic that centered more on the relationship between a cowboy and a little indian boy, rather than a man an woman. A fic that sat on that list of stories, ignored for three months. Every time someone would guess another title as mine, my heart failed a little bit but you know . . . that's what I intended to do. I intended to lose. 

They wanted some hot Edward and Bella action, I gave them the Disney version of Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

Imagine my flat out fucking amazement when I won something.

A judge's pick, with a perfect score no less, and the fandom proved me wrong. It was kind of nice, really, to be proven wrong . . . 

---------------------

These days, I'm writing to scare myself.

And yeah, Bite Club scares me, but I love it. It's dirty and raw and unpolished, just the way I like my fics. Some may argue that I've got lots of polish, but that's just good editing.

 I don't want pretty, shiny people. I don't want easy. I don't want mindless. 

I want reality and reality doesn't always taste good. 

---------------------

This is me saying that I'm still here. Still writing. Still sucked way too far into something that I never intended to get sucked into and loving more of it than I hate. 

Maybe this was just a pep talk to myself, a 'look at how far you've come' retrospective, because Chalk is close to 1,000 and The Other Way just might make it to 2,000 if a few more people pick it up. I might not ever be one of those 10,000 reviews stories, but a couple thousand feels pretty fucking good to me. I'm just as grateful now as I was about that original mind blowing 300. I've met a lot of spectacular people and yeah, some not so awesome ones (I keep trying to remind myself to be honest here) and have made one or two close friends that will have to kill me if they ever want to be fully rid of me. 

For every smooth surface, there is a piece of sandpaper and I might be your sandpaper, but it's the fine-grain type. 

The one that wears you down slow.

*blows kisses*

*runs away*