Author: Christine

Christine http://www.mombie.com I'm a writer/storyteller/director/creativity & lifestory coach with a black belt in ITF Taekwon-do. I read voraciously and I write like my fingers are on fire. I'm the founder and Co-Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl and I'm the current president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival. I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.

December Stories #2: Baking

It wasn’t that she didn’t like the baking, she loved that. And she loved the eating part even more, but she hated the cutting out. Christmas cookies were all about the shapes, Santa, stockings, candy canes, presents. Each one a mess of corners and edges that needed to be carefully pried from the cutter.
She hated the rolling, too. Sprinkling the flour, getting the dough all the same thickness, then, after the cuts were done, gathering the scraps and rolling them into another sheet of dough. It was tedious and it was time consuming and she could barely stand to do it.
And to make matters worse, when the cookies were done – hopefully without too many crispy edges- she had to wait for them to cool and then decorate all of those edges. Making four bowls of different coloured icing was entirely too much.
It wasn’t that she hated the baking, she just hated the fuss. And she hated that she had once enjoyed it and had started bringing fancy, little cut-out cookies to all the holiday parties. She had set a precedent and now she was having to drag herself through the consequences.
Yes, she could make a different kind of cookies, or she could buy some, but then she’d be spending the evening listening to people ask where her cookies were. Or, worse, joking about how they missed her treats and then saying ti was a shame that she didn’t get to them this year. No one would be mad or anything, they’d just have an air of disappointment about them and she didn’t think she could bear an evening of that. Especially if she didn’t have a good reason for not keeping her end of this particular social contract.
It would be different if she could claim an oven malfunction, or perhaps say she was busy at work, but there was nothing like that on the horizon and everyone knew that the office ground almost to a halt this time of year. It just didn’t seem right, didn’t seem in the ‘Christmas spirit’ to say that she didn’t make cookies because she didn’t feel like it. There was no way she was going to a party with that as her reason, she’d never hear the end of it.
Sure, there would be sympathetic smiles and small nods from some, but mostly there would be that sense that ‘of course you don’t feel like it’, that what you felt like doing had nothing to do with Christmas preparation.
She dragged herself out of her chair and went into the kitchen to face the bowl of cookie dough. She looked at the oven, with the light flicking on and off as the temperature hovered around the 375 mark and that’s when she decided.
Half the cookie dough went back into the fridge. The other half she flung on to the cookie sheets in little misshapen lumps. She wasn’t going to any damn party and the wine would wash down cookie lumps just as well as it washed down fancy shapes.

Perhaps what she felt like doing could be part of her Christmas preparation.

December Stories: #1 – The Truth

I'm tossing around the idea of writing some flash fiction every day in 
December. Let's see how it goes.

It’s not well known, but it’s absolutely true:

Elves don’t actually like Christmas.

I know they pretend to, and they are grinning idiotically on all the Christmas cards and the like, but that’s mostly artist’s depictions and actors dressed as elves. True elves wouldn’t touch Christmas with a ten foot candy cane if they could help it.

They can’t though. Help it, I mean.

They are under a spell you see. That man that you call Santa Claus? He’s not a jolly old elf like you think. Sure, he seeeems nice, bringing presents to children and all that, and that part of his personality is totally cool, but there’s more to him than that.

He’s an evil wizard and he’s playing the long game.

Sure, it’s been hundreds of years of Saint Nick and Santa and all that, and it’s been him behind it the whole time, and he’s been building this image of himself as benevolent. That’s all part of the big plan.

What’s the big plan, you ask? I’m not sure yet. I am only skirting the edges, gathering the details so far. Investigative journalism is tricky when your subject sees you when you’re sleeping and sees when you’re awake.

I just know that evil is afoot and that foot is clad in a big black boot. That big black boot is prepared to crush us all at some point, I just don’t know when.

I do know, though, that the elves are part of it and I know that because I’ve seen their dazed expressions. I’ve seen the thin golden chains that link them to the tables that they work at. They are drugged on sugar and small sips of whiskey, and they are trapped at those tables while Santa gets most of the credit.

It’s been the same crowd of elves since the beginning, you know. They look young but elves age very very slowly. I’m not sure whether that’s an advantage or a disadvantage in this situation, but I know it’s true.

I’m hoping I can count on you to help me free them when the time comes. When I have the big plan figured out. When the opportunity presents itself.

I hope they aren’t all Stockholm Syndromed at this point and unable to do anything to help themselves. I hope they won’t fight me as I try to free them. I hope I can find a place to hide them where Santa won’t find them.

I’ll keep you in the loop. I’ll let you know when to spring into action. Be ready.

Lessons from NaNoWriMo

I finished National Novel Writing Month again this year but I didn’t achieve my true goal, which was to write 2500 words a day until I finished on the 20th (also to post favourite lines on my blog. That didn’t happen either). I’ve spent a little time trying to figure out why that was.

I was doing well for the first 7 days, I even did more than 2500 some days. I can write really fast when a) the details don’t matter much or b) I know what I’m going to write in advance.

NaNoWriMo is ripe for the first condition. It doesn’t matter w=one bit how good your novel is, you can ramble on, switch character names, have them do improbable things, it completely doesn’t matter. Obviously, it means you will have to do more editing if you ever decide to publish the thing – and I do think that this year’s is possibly publishable- once I do some serious tidying- but in terms of getting the words on the page (or the clay on the table as my friend Tina says), you can’t beat NaNoWriMo for encouraging the gushing of words.

The second condition is the one that confounds me. I write faster when I have an outline but I don’t enjoy outlining alone. I love a good brainstorming session and I love the spark of an idea that prompts me to write* but I go blank when I sit down and plan to outline. It’s silly, since I end up sitting down at some point and planning out the next few scenes anyway. I am working to get around it and researching a few ways to get better at outlining.**

So, I guess that for the first 7 days of NaNoWriMo this year, I had an idea of what sorts of things to write about so I had that going for me. And I put my writing as early in the day as I possibly could. Both of those things contributed to me keeping momentum at first.

However, on that 8th day, I had a ton of things to do and I was having my birthday party. I put the writing aside for that day and swore that it was only going to be that one day.

It wasn’t.

I ended up staying up way too late that night and was wonky the next day because of it and couldn’t bring myself to get to the computer to write. So, I didn’t have the prep work done, and I didn’t know what I was going to write about. ***
And, of course, my momentum was broken at that point.

Once I have a daily habit, even after only 7 days, I get ridiculous when I miss a day, I always want to double up. That turns the practice into a BIG THING and I hate BIG THINGS. So there’s another lesson for me. I have to find a way to be okay with letting go of a missed day without trying to make up for it and I have to learn to recognize when I’ve made a practice into a BIG THING.

My days tumbled into one another after that point, with a variety of family birthdays and social/work obligations distancing me from my writing.

Finally, on the 20th I decided to get back at it and I have had two 10,000 word days since then. The best part about those two days is that they were easy, not at all stressful and I got lots of other things done, too. I managed to get over my own brain and just write up a storm.

This past week, I’ve been writing a lot and I’ve been organizing and doing a lot of thinking. It’s been one of the best weeks of the year. I can learn a lot from that.

So, my lessons?

1) Practice a variety of outlining techniques
2) Learn not to care about the intial rush of words during the rest of the year, editing is my friend.
3) Let a single missed day go, and return on the next without the burden of the missed task.
4) I can write 10,000 words in a single day on a regular basis and I should do that a couple of times a month to give my writing energy a boost.
5) The more I write, the happier I am.
* I should say the spark that gives me something I want to write about. The only thing that prompts me to write is my self-reminding tactics – I forget how much I enjoy writing until I am actually doing it. I hate making decisions in the moment about what to do and I will waffle away my time unless I have decided what to do with it in advance.

**Frankly, I think a lot of it is leftover resentment from how I HAD to make outlines in school. I swear there is nothing less likely to make you want to write than the way they try to teach you in grade school.

***To be fair to myself, and maybe only other writers will get this, but my characters ended up having very different motivations than I realized at first and that threw off my idea of the plot. It took giving up on trying to write a story and just doing a lot of writing of background for me to figure out where I was going next.

Day Four: National Novel Writing Month

Words today: 4286. Words in total: 12,000.

Favourite line: And the two of them could have been quite the team, especially if Trish was willing to overlook the occasional dead body in the hallway.

Warm-up Writing: Piles of leaves creeped her out.
She hated how they smelled, she hated their brown crumpled shapes. She hated how they looked in a pile, hated how they came to life and skittered across her driveway in the wind. She hated the word skittered. When the word came to mind, because there was no other way to describe the moving leaves, she would shudder and wish that she hadn’t thought about it.
Despite all that, it wasn’t really the leaves themselves that were the problem. The problem was that they created space for things that she would rather not nurture. Under the leaves there was room for worms, and beetles and those tiny things with all the legs that her sister insisted were centipedes but Laura insisted were too small to have that name. If the leaves didn’t pile up, and they would, no matter how diligent you were with the rake, then all of those bugs would probably still exist but they would be far better hidden. Then, Laura wouldn’t have a reminder of their existence all of the time and she wouldn’t have to slow her breathing to look out in her own yard. She could go most of the year without being afraid of bugs, even spiders in the shower didn’t upset her, but somehow once fall came, the world felt like a blanket of creepy crawlies trying to draw themselves up over her shoulder all the time.
Fall was bad enough, with the sky darkening so early, with the smell of rot rolling out of the woods, with people chirping on about sweaters, and with Christmas boosting starting right after Hallowe’en. The leaves were really the final straw, the thing that would tip the balance between her being ‘Fine’ when people asked and her growling at them in some sort of primal fashion for daring to inquire.
She just couldn’t live with the notion of the leaves, dank beds for bugs laid our across her back lawn. Usually she was out there immediately after they fell, raking like her life depended on it, but this time they had come down in a bit of a rainstorm and they were slick before she could get to them. There was no way she was taking a rake to them now, to have beetles and bugs of all kinds rushing away from the areas exposed by her instrument. She was going to have to hire someone to take them all away, rake them, bag them and remove them. She didn’t usually shy away from difficult tasks but she wasn’t getting close to this one. It was bad enough to see the leaves at this point, if she raked then dreams of slippery critters would crawl through her nights and she’d never rest again.
She wasn’t even bothering to try to live with her fear, or to take control of it, she just wanted to be on the other side of it and able to look out her window again.

Piles of leaves just creeped her out.

Day 3: National Novel Writing Month

Favourite Sentence: (about arguing about minor things before getting to the real point) It would be like a warrior heading off the killing fields but stopping to argue with every peasant along the way.

Warm-up Writing:

Elizabeth had dragged me out of the house at 9PM, getting me to change out of my slippers and pajamas, forcing me to put down my book. The trade-off was supposed to be fun. The party was supposed to have great food, terrific music and hot men. Instead, the snacks were chips and cheesies, someone was flipping rapidly between iTunes play lists and the men all had a kind of sweaty sheen to them but not a single one of them could even be called cute. I was doing my best to avoid everyone. I just sat in the corner, scrolling through texts on my phone, trying to look like I shouldn’t be disturbed.
I couldn’t believe I had let myself be dragged along again. Elizabeth always had these rumours of ‘great’ parties, always snagged an invitation to something ‘cool’, but they were rarely even interesting, let alone cool or great. Elizabeth was like that though. She was so enthusiastic that she brought you into her excitement without you really realizing what was happening. She would arrive, face bright, words tripping over each other as she spilled them out, hands moving like sparks.
Even though you knew better, you’d find yourself somehow believing that this was the one, this was the party you had been hoping for, this was the epic event that you would be talking about for years. It never was, of course. It would end up being just like every other party, not bad, but seeming worse because of the picture Elizabeth had painted of the terrific time you would have.
The worst of it was that Elizabeth was crushed every time. You’d think that after the first few parties that she’d ease off on the excitement or at least prepare herself to be let down, but instead, she was passionate about every single one. She genuinely believed, each time, that this was the event she had been waiting for, that this was her Cinderella’s ball.
It wasn’t that she was looking for a prince, that wasn’t what Elizabeth was about. She was looking for magic.
Not spells or potions or anything like that, she was looking for that kind of evening where you can’t believe how fast the time has gone. The night where you look around and everyone seems caught up in the same thing, each of them some sort of cog in a party machine that just keeps generating excitement for as long as the celebrants can absorb it. The kind of party that goes on in everyone else’s photos, people caught in a moment of joy, arms overhead, faces ecstatic, feet a blur.
I’ve never been to one of those parties, at least not with Elizabeth. I never have the heart to remind her, though, when she shows up at my house with the party possibilities spooling out in front of her, that she felt this exact same way about the last one.