I’m editing my NaNo now. For the uninitiated. that’s what we NaNoers call our NaNoWriMo stories. What’s NaNoWriMo? Wow. You really are uninitiated if you don’t know that. It means National Novel Writing Month. It happens every November, that thirty days of wacky wildness that thousands of people participate in. It’s not that hard — all you need to do is write 50,000 words in thirty days. That is less than two thousand words a day. Very do-able. You can do it. Next fall. Start thinking about it. I want more folks to do it with. The few thousand that did it in 2009 weren’t enough for me. Go to nanowrimo.org and check it out.
January 24, 2010
December 9, 2009
Clarion classmate has a story posted
Jason Wittman has a story posted in a place new to him, podcastle. It’s a good story. Give it a read. Or a listen. Whatever you call it when your eyes don’t have to be involved.
October 19, 2009
It Walks on Ceilings
I wrote this entry for the Scariest Freaking Story Ever contest. It’s found here:
http://bit.ly/185t7B
If you’ll go over there and vote for my story, I’d be glad. It’s probably more of a popularity contest than a writing contest, because the entry with the most votes wins.
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I sat at the kitchen table reading deep into the night. I did a lot of reading in that house, that one-story house on an isolated rural road. I’ve always read a lot, but in that house far away from all my friends and relatives, with no TV and no phone, I read even more. That night, my husband was at work, and my daughter and newborn son were asleep.
I heard someone walking overhead. It was a crunching sound, as a person in heavy boots walking on gravel, only amplified. It began in the living room, then came across the ceiling diagonally to the kitchen. I froze in place and watched the ceiling. I couldn’t see anything, but I had to keep watching. There was something there. Something. Or someone. It stopped right over my head.
When the sound stopped I wanted to run outside and see whether someone was on the roof — in the middle of the night it was unlikely, but it was the only thing that made sense. But if there was something bad in my house, walking on the ceiling, I did not want to leave my children alone with it.
I told my husband about it when he got home. He looked at the roof, and called me out to look. There was nothing there, there was no ladder or anything else that anyone could have climbed on to walk on the roof. The downspouts were flimsy and wouldn’t have held a human. He asked me how fast the walking sound was and I counted it off, a slow walk. He shook his head. There was no way anyone could walk that fast on such a steep roof. I was making it up to get attention. I had post-partum depression. I was imagining it. In other words, I was off my rocker. I was ticked, but I couldn’t prove I’d heard anything.
I tried to forget it.
Three nights later, I heard it again. The same sound, the same part of the house. I went to the children’s room and listened. The walking sound was coming from the kitchen and living room. I could hear it from the bedroom, but it didn’t follow me to the bedroom. I don’t know what I would have done if it had.
This happened five or six more times, and my husband dismissed it every time until one weekend evening it happened when he was home. He looked up, startled. He spoke in a whisper. “What in the name of God is that?”
“That’s the sound I was telling you about. It starts right over there, over your head, then it goes to the kitchen table.”
He looked like he was going to wet his pants.
We started packing and moved out a few days later.
September 10, 2009
Pens: Bic Pro recommended
I just got a comment from The Magster on my pen article. Actually, it was about a pen. Here’s what she had to say:
“just got a free Bic Pro as a promo and I am IN LOVE!! the ink glides out all even and pretty-like. i think they’re cheap-ish pens too? even if they were expensive they’d be worth it. greatest pen i’ve written with in quite a while… doesn’t look like much but man does it write!”
Maggie wondered about the price of the Bic Pro. I found it in 4-packs for $4.99 for the ballpoint, and $5.99 for the gel version. I don’t know which one she has, but I suspect it’s a gel pen because I know she likes those. I’ll amend this entry later if she lets me know.
The Bic Pro has a comfy grip and is refillable. It comes in 4 colors, including a 4-pack with all 4 colors (blue, black, red and green — yeah! green!), and it’s not expensive. My kid says it’s a great pen. This is a good recommendation. Give it a try.
September 9, 2009
E-mail petitions don’t work.
Email petitions do no good at all. The White House, the Senate, the House, the Forest Service, any large corporation — anyone, really — will ignore any e-mail petition. The signatures are not real. Anyone could make up a list of names, they are not signatures, since there is no way to verify them. And when you get one of these petitions in your e-mail, and it says to forward it when it gets to 1,000 signatures (which aren’t really signatures at all), if everyone did that (and of course they won’t, since it’s harder than just typing your name and hitting “forward” without even removing the previous e-mail addresses — another pet peeve of mine), then there would be hundreds of duplicates of the same list in the addressee’s inbox. They’d have to sort them out.
They won’t sort them out. They aren’t real anyway, so why would they?
The only thing they will pay attention to is individual messages sent to them. It is very easy to see that these come from different computers, from different people. It would be best if the e-mails were not identical, but individually written. They should be accompanied by the person’s legal name and full physical address and phone number so that they can be contacted and verified, and so that they look more real.
Don’t forward e-mail petitions. They don’t work, and they give you an illusion of having done something, when you’ve done nothing.
August 12, 2009
new fun link added
I just visited a blog my daughter, The Magster, told me about. It’s pretty funny. A lot of people think it’s okay to use quotation marks to emphasize something. Sometimes they do it on signs. Sometimes the signs also have misspellings or other grammatical or punctuation errors. http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
As Dr. Seuss wrote, “These things are fun, and fun is good.”
August 3, 2009
troubles
I’m just having some troubles with my blog — I feel bad about starting it and not doing much with it yet. I will, as soon as I get the various difficulties ironed out. I hope to have some nice content posted eventually. This is a very lame post. It doesn’t mean I’ve given up, though.
Watch this spot.
July 14, 2009
Cotton candy – yuck.
Spun sugar, so soft looking, delicate, cottony. The whole look enticed me, color and all. It looked like a lovely pink cloud. It was more attractive even than the elephants and tigers and the lady on the swing so high in the air.
But the reality was something other. Not fun, not lovely. It smelled weird. The texture was spider web, nasty, horrid. The taste was excessively sweet. I’d never thought anything could be excessively sweet. But it was. Terrible, terrible sweetness, and sticky, too.
Even as a little child I hated sticky stuff on my fingers. I wanted to be clean, and there was no way to be clean with this crap. I couldn’t lick it off my fingers, that only made it worse.
I don’t remember now all that happened. I do remember crying, and I do remember that I could not be near it for years and years. Only in the past, oh, three years maybe, have I been able to go near cotton candy without feeling the urge to barf.
Did I throw up the first time I had it? Or did I just not like it and Dad made me eat it? I don’t remember. I don’t want to remember.
July 11, 2009
She tried them all.
A mini-story
Joella spotted someone she hadn’t tried yet; the last man in the house. “What’s up, Doc?”
Phil pivoted.
She pointed up at the mistletoe.
Phil dimpled and rolled his eyes. He was pudgy, true, but that smile was killer, and his Louisiana drawl sounded a lot like home to her Texan ears. He stepped closer and took her hand.
Now or never. She stood on tiptoe, balancing with a hand on his chest. She swallowed, wet her lips and tipped her chin up. She kept her eyes open just enough to aim.
Phil met her halfway, planting a tender kiss on her lips.
She lowered herself with a sigh.
He raised his eyebrows. “Anything?”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Nada.”
He clucked. “You’ve got it bad, Hon, if one of my kisses doesn’t do it for you. You have to find that guy of yours. You aren’t going to be happy with anyone else.”
“No shit, Sherlock?”
July 8, 2009
She wants my what?
a mini-story
Jeanne’s green eyes threw off sparks of outrage. She concealed the pity better. “My hair? All of it?”
Phil had tears in his eyes, but he nodded as he lifted a curl of the strawberry blond stuff he loved so much. The stuff that went all the way to her waist, the stuff that stopped traffic. “Yeah, your hair, Hon. It has to be yours. You know the drugs have made her a little delusional…”
“A little?”
“Well, okay, more than a little. But this one delusion is persistent. She’s sure that she’ll survive both the cancer and the chemo only if she’s wearing a wig made of your hair. She says it’s because you’re the strongest woman she knows, and there’s magic in you.”
She turned away from him and rested her forehead on the window. Her reflection in the dark window showed him nothing but her outline, twisting her hair around her finger. The rain made rivulets down the glass, new drops joining the old streams, changing directions. A lot like their lives, always something coming along to redirect them.
He didn’t know what he’d do if she said no. He didn’t know what he’d do if she said yes. It was hard to be caught like this, caught between the two of them.
She turned around and looked up at him. “If she thinks it’ll work, then maybe it will. I’ll do it. But only because she’s your mother, and I love you.”
He held her close and let the tears come.