Category Archives: Slice of life

Life crazier then fiction, Slice of life

Life crazier than fiction or my epic quest to get a Green Card – Part 2.

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This is the continuation of a story I had started last week, so in order to understand what I’m talking about, you might want to read Part 1 first.

So two days before we had to board a plane and head back to the States, we rented a car (because we had already sold the old Toyota we had been driving around Pizza, since shipping it back home would have cost more than the car was worth) and drove all the way down to Naples. Well, my husband drove; I just enjoyed the ride… right until we reached Naples itself. After that point, he tried to get us to the hotel in one piece, while I tried not to have a heart attack.

Driving in Naples is an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. In this city, the rules of the road are more like suggestions that nobody really pays attention to. The street has one lane each way and a sidewalk? Good enough for driving three wide… and yelling at the poor pedestrians who are trying to get home on foot without getting run over.

By the time my husband had safely gotten us to the hotel, he was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. He parked the car and said, “We are taking the cab from now on.”

The next morning we gathered all of or documents and, after a brief struggle with the language barrier at the reception, managed to call a cab and headed for:

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Level 3: The Embassy

Boss battle: Prejudice

Our first stop before the US Embassy itself was at a local clinic where I had to undergo the most extensive medical examination I ever had in my life. I swear they even checked for lice, though I assured them that I wash at least once a month. Sadly, my attempt at humor was lost in translation, or maybe the doctors and nurses were just having a bad day.

By the end of the morning, I felt like I had just escaped a horde of vampires – bruised, battered and drained. And I never ever wanted to go through that again. So I clutched the envelope with my medical records to my chest like it was made of gold, and I would have fought to the death if someone had tried to take it from me.

That afternoon, we finally arrived at the US Embassy for our final interview, and I made the mistake to think that the ordeal was finally almost over. Oh, how mistaken I was…

Boss fight: prejudice.

I don’t know if I was just unlucky to get the most prejudiced embassy official I’ve ever seen of if it’s the norm (God I hope not), but the interview was a nightmare.

We brought all of our supporting documents, as well as the “suggested” documents, like our wedding and vacation photos, letters from his and my family addressed to both of us, testimonials from our friends. The immigration office on base told us that those documents were optional, and that nobody ever checked them, but it was good to have just in case. Well, he checked every single one of them. And asked us a bunch of questions, like which side of the bed we slept on, or whether I knew if my husband liked to take his shower in the morning or in the evening…

I understand that the reasoning behind this is to make sure that this wasn’t a fake marriage done just to get me a Green Card. I understand that it happens, and that it’s the immigration officers’ job to verify that. So it’s not the questions I had problems with, it’s the tone in which they were asked. This whole process could have been handled with humor and good grace, but we both were showered with condescendence, suspicion, and prejudice…

When we left the Embassy at the end of the day with the sealed envelope containing all my documents and the “Approved” stamp on top, I felt like this had been the hardest level yet.

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Level 4: Airport Immigrations Office

Boss battle: human error

We were tired after a nine hour flight and eager to get through customs, catch our next flight, and finally get to our family in Indiana. Of course, there was a waiting line at customs. There always is. When our turn came, I handed my Green Card package to the officer with a big smile. He opened it… and we both got escorted to a side room.

Turns out my medical records (the ones that I had spent a whole morning being tortured for) weren’t in the package. The people at the Embassy who had put the package together forgot to put them in.

Now I must say that the package the applicant gets is SEALED with a big notice saying that it can only be opened by the immigration department at the airport. It also specifically says that if the seal is broken before that, the package is not valid. So we had no way of knowing that something was missing. Talk about a big and unpleasant surprise.

Thankfully, the Immigration officer in Washington DC was a lot nicer than the Embassy official back in Naples. He looked at our exhausted faces, our luggage, and the cat carrier with a cat that was so done with it all she wasn’t even moving anymore, and assured me that this was in no way my fault.

“Human error happens,” he said.

I got a one month visa, the phone number for the Embassy at Naples, and a new date with the Immigration office in Raleigh where I had to bring my medical records once I got them.

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Level 5: Raleigh

Boss battle: Time difference

The department responsible for these kinds of problems at the US Embassy in Naples only works from 1 to 4 pm (GMT +1 time zone) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Getting anyone to answer during those three little hours is equivalent to winning the lottery.

Once I finally got someone to answer the phone, I spent the next hour being ping-ponged around the different departments, and everyone tried to persuade me that the package was complete when they sealed it, and that I must have tampered with it myself. Nobody was willing to help me.

After I had been given the run around for three times, my husband put his foot down and hired a lawyer. The medical records were miraculously found and FedExed to us within the next week. It’s sad that sometimes the only way to get what you need is to bring out the big guns…

The rest of the level was an easy walk to victory. I got the records, drove to RDU on the day of my appointment, handed everything to a very nice Immigrations Officer, told her the story of my ordeal and drove back home with a new Green Card.

victory

I’m glad I did it, but I don’t wish to repeat this experience ever again (and sure am glad that I don’t have to). Compared to that, becoming an American citizen was a walk in the park.

editing, Life crazier then fiction, My Works, publication, random musings, Slice of life, writing

Writing is a life-long journey

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writing - lifelong journey

Let me start this post with a personal anecdote. I have a full-time job and a family, which doesn’t leave much time for writing. In the past year, I had slowly taught myself to write whenever I had a few spare minutes, but I do the bulk of my writing at night before bed and during lunch. So I’m pretty used to showing up at restaurants with a notebook or a printout and a pen, and usually people don’t pay much attention to the crazy lady in the corner boot mumbling to herself and scribbling furiously in a notebook.

But last week I had an interesting encounter which made me think about what I am, what I do and where I go from here.

I had a “writing lunch” at Applebee’s last week when the waitress asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing a short story. She seemed genuinely interested and asked if I had anything published.

Got anything published

This is when the first shift in perception happened. See, up until May this year, I had been a pre-published or aspiring author. But then my short story, A Small Detour, got accepted and published in this anthology. If you are interested, you can read my post about this exciting event.

So when asked about published work, I could legitimately answer, “Well, yes, I have a short story on amazon,” and give her the name of the anthology. And then something extraordinary happened: the waitress came back with her Kindle and made me input the name of the anthology for her. And then she bought the book!

Of Dragons and Magic

And I realized something important – I was actually a published author, even if all I had published so far was a short story. When I began my writing journey last October, I hadn’t even dreamed to be able to achieve that within a year.

This also made me think about why I do this. I mean, when I started the first draft of my novel Of Broken Things, getting something published had been the sum of my ambition. Ten months into the journey, I realize that for me it’s a life-long commitment. Money is not the end goal (though it would sure be nice to earn some) and neither is fame. My goal is to create compelling stories that people would want to read, because seeing the excitement in the waitress’s eyes when she said she couldn’t wait to read the anthology was the best reward I could ask for. She would spend a few hours blissfully lost in the wonderful worlds the authors have created, and one of them was mine.

So where do I go from here? Well, I continue writing of course, because the more I write, the more ideas pop into my head waiting to be put into stories.

I’m halfway through the first major edit of my novel Of Broken Things. I have the ghost of an idea along with most of the characters for my NaNo 2014 project.

I’m editing a novelette I had written back in May, and I have another unrelated short story to edit as well.

I have finished a new short story set in the same world as A Small Detour and about the same characters, and I have ideas for at least three more stories in this world. Once I finish them all, I am considering self-publishing them as a series. More about that in future posts.

I also want to dust off a project I had started a couple years ago. Back then I was just dabbling in writing; I had no idea that writing was hard work, and that first drafts always sucked, and that you had to push through it all, good day or bad day, to get to the end. I got frustrated because what had seemed so awesome in my head turned out total crap on paper and abandoned the project. But the story had potential and I love the characters, so I want to give it another chance.

Oh, and did I mention the dozens of half-baked ideas clamoring in my head and which might or might not turn into full-fledged stories?

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So all is well in my world: I am a published author, I am still in love with what I do and I have plenty of ideas to last me for a while!

Slice of life, writing

Progress and evolution

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If you happened to glance at my blog last week, you might have noticed a radical change in the design and presentation. This happened because I came to the realization that I had finally outgrown the original blog design.

When I first started blogging seven months ago, I didn’t have a clue as to what I would write about, how often, or what I wanted my blog to look like. So I chose the first theme with colors that I more or less liked and just stuck with it. The theme was Dusk to Dawn and I still love it.

Dusk to Dawn

And it had served me faithfully for seven months. But now that I have almost fifty posts worth of content, and it was growing more and more difficult to look through them all, I had to admit that I outgrew that theme.

This was actually a good realization, because it made me think long and hard about what I actually wanted my blog to look like and what kind of content I wanted to provide. And sadly, Dusk to Dawn simply wasn’t flexible enough for my growing needs.

First of all, it only had one sidebar and it was growing rather overcrowded. Secondly, it didn’t have a top or bottom menu at all. Yep, it was time for a change.

I spent a whole day last week going through the different themes available on WordPress and decided to go with Twenty Fourteen, though I customized the colors a bit to make it look more like what I had before.

Twenty Fourteen
Twenty Fourteen

I think it makes my blog easier to navigate and a lot more user-friendly. And as a bonus, I got to add my bio and Twitter feed to the sidebar! And as another added bonus, I finally took the time to go through all my categories and instill some semblance of order to the madness. Yay me!

Original by nord_modular on Flickr
Original by nord_modular on Flickr

And of course, being a writer, this change looked to me as a good metaphor for a writing career. You start small, not very sure of where you are going, how to get there, and what results (apart from hey, I want to publish a book!) you want to achieve. Then you start working on your book and you quickly realize that getting it finished and (hopefully) published is not a sprint, but a long hard journey with a lot of milestones along the way. If you are serious about writing (and blogging), you are in it for the long run, and things will change along the way. So I think that last week I reached my first blogging milestone. This calls for a small and belated six months anniversary celebration!

So here is my new and improved (and hopefully easier to navigate) blog. What do you guys think of the changes?

random musings, Slice of life

Lightning never strikes in one place twice, right?

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Today, I had planned to write a review of yet another book I read, but live proved to be more interesting (and scarier) than fiction. So my house got struck by lightning Friday evening. Never thought I would be able to say something like that… Well, to be precise, it wasn’t a direct hit – the lightning struck the pool in my backyard. That didn’t prevent it from wreaking havoc around the house though.

But let’s start from the beginning, shall we? That afternoon, my father-in-law was cleaning the pool and left the pool net (the one on a big metallic pole) propped next to the pool deck. It started raining, so he switched the pool off and went inside. Unfortunately, he didn’t unplug the pump or put the net on the big metallic pole back in the shed.

Two hours later our peaceful evening was interrupted by an ear-shattering crack and the loudest bang I have ever heard. It really sounded like an explosion right in our backyard. My thirty pound dog jumped up my lap so fast, it looked like she teleported. My 85-pound German shepherd tried to dig her way under the sofa, but only succeeded in pushing it all the way towards the wall almost knocking herself out in the process. And my two cats relocated under the bed upstairs, and it took me several hours and a can of tuna to persuade them the sky wasn’t falling on us and we weren’t going to die. That is after I finished having my own heart attack.

When we finally managed to sort all the animals and humans in the house out and crawled outside to see what the heck had happened, we saw scorch marks on the deck right where the pole used to be. The wooden plank on the railing was split in half. We found splinters of it by the fence about ten feet away. The metal pole itself was laying on the ground with what looked like a bullet hole on the top and the netting at the bottom shredded to pieces. Not to self: yup, that’s why they say not to leave metal poles standing around during storms…

Nope, that's not a bullet hole, that's lightning damage.
Nope, that’s not a bullet hole, that’s lightning damage.

The lightning stroke the pole, scorched part of the deck, dug a trench in the yard from the end of the deck towards the power outlet by the pool pump, and fried the whole pool system. I mean the outlet was so scorched we barely managed to pull the plugs out. And the impact was so intense that that dirt from the trench ended up floating in the pool. It’s an above ground pool with 4 feet tall sides.

But the damage didn’t stop there. Through that outlet, the lightning then traveled into the house, melted the circuit breaker that was supposed to shut that circuit off, and did wonders on electric devises.

 

Yup, it's toast.
Yup, it’s toast.

The Direct TV box got so messed up that it literally hang itself and would not reboot. The poor technician spent 5 hours on Saturday trying to make the thing work again. In the end, he had to replace both the receiver and the dish itself. Our TV decided that it had suffered enough abuse and decided to shut down permanently. The sound system still works, but the subwoofer is toast. Several electric outlets around the house quit working. Oh, and the cherry on top – my beautiful, less than a year old desktop might as well be a door stopper now.

Good news is that nobody got hurt and that our homeowners insurance will cover the damage. So we certainly got the fright of our lives, but the consequences could have been more dire.

I also learned a few things from this unfortunate encounter with lightning. First of all, never ever leave a metallic pole outside when it’s raining. That’s just inviting disaster. Secondly, always back up your work. I mean all my writing was on that desktop. So thank God for Google Drive!

So that was my weekend. How was yours?

Slice of life

Merry Christmas!

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ImageTime flew by. It seems like only yesterday it was October and I was getting excited about participating in my first NaNoWriMo. And now it’s Christmas Eve! And I have many things to be merry about this Christmas.  I have participated and won my first NaNo, but more importantly, I established a habit of writing at least 600 words every day, rain or shine. My first novel Of Broken Things will be finished in about 3-4 chapters. I have discovered a wonderful writing community with many like-minded people who kept me motivated to finish my first draft. And most importantly ever since I sat down to write my story, I have been assailed by different ideas, clamoring for my attention. I have been patiently writing them down and putting them in my “future plot bunnies” basket. So all in all, creativity is flowing, life is looking good and snow… is nowhere to be seen. Yep, no white Christmas for me in North Carolina.

So I wanted to wish everyone who is reading  me a wonderful Christmas. I hope you send it with the people you love. And don’t forget to tell them that you cherish them on this wonderful night.

As for me, I will spend Christmas day eating good food, drinking plenty of wine… and crying my eyes out as I watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special and say goodbye to the Eleventh Doctor.