Mombie – a bit of everything

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.

NaNoWriMo Day 2

I’m challenging myself to do National Novel Writing Month and for my own amusement (and possibly yours) I will be posting my favourite line of the day and my practice writing (kind of a warm-up exercise before I get to my novel writing). I got the idea to share work-in-progress from Austin Kleon‘s book Show Your Work! The stuff I share this month will be pretty unpolished so please be kind. – See more at: http://mombie.com/#sthash.76ZOZpNm.dpuf
I’m challenging myself to do National Novel Writing Month and for my own amusement (and possibly yours) I will be posting my favourite line of the day and my practice writing (kind of a warm-up exercise before I get to my novel writing). I got the idea to share work-in-progress from Austin Kleon‘s book Show Your Work! The stuff I share this month will be pretty unpolished so please be kind. – See more at: http://mombie.com/#sthash.76ZOZpNm.dpuf

Fave line of the day: He just looked at her with a hurt and puzzled expression, as if she were letting him down for not finding him as fascinating as he did.

Word Count – 2606 for the day, 5211 total (not including warm-up writing)

Practice (my writing warm-up for the day):

Day Two

She tried to tell herself that the practice was the important thing but it hardly every worked. After spending your formative years being taught how to strive, it was hard to let go of the notion that you had to be heading somewhere.
It didn’t help that most of the people in her class were under ten. That’s what happened when you decided to take a group ukulele class. She had naively assumed that there would be other adults who would want to learn to play. She had imagined going for coffee after class, laughing about their nerdy instructor, picking away on their ukes while they chatted. The class was nothing like that.

For starters, the instructor was anything but nerdy, he was a muscled handsome man with hair she could just barely keep her fingers out of. He had a rumble-y voice that carried over, or rather beneath, the earnest plinking of the ukuleles in the room. She couldn’t concentrate when he spoke. As he began, she would drop her fingers from the uke and just listen. It wasn’t conducive to learning an instrument, but it was probably good for his ego. They probably would have ended up in a very different conversation if they hadn’t been surrounded by a group of eager 9 year olds whose enthusiasm far outstripped their skills. It wasn’t really possible for them to strike up anything, aside from a glance and wink, while the squad of plinkers filled the room with an unholy noise.
She practiced at home, partially to try to improve, and partially to impress him. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere though, to her ears, she still sounded like a joke. She wished she had signed up for private lessons.
That began a whole other set of ideas of how the class would go. Matthew leaned around her, showing her where to put her fingers on the strings. That deep voice in her ear as he gave her further instruction.If she closed her eyes, she could picture the whole scenario. Half an hour of her struggling to concentrate on the ukulele. Perhaps meeting after class for coffee then deciding that he should walk her home.
The thought didn’t make her group class any more appealing, so she called in the morning to switch to private lessons. The rest of the week was eaten up in practice – practice conversations, practice outfits, and even some ukulele practice. By the time that Friday came she was composed entirely of nerves and adrenaline.

What was he going to say? Was this a waste of time? Had she misunderstood their connection? Would her week of practice be a waste?

Her boot heels clicked along the tiles in the hallway, giving her steps an authority she didn’t feel. She took a deep breath and turned into the classroom where he was waiting.

 

 

National Novel Writing Month

I’m challenging myself to do National Novel Writing Month and for my own amusement (and possibly yours) I will be posting my favourite line of the day and my practice writing (kind of a warm-up exercise before I get to my novel writing). I got the idea to share work-in-progress from Austin Kleon‘s book Show Your Work! The stuff I share this month will be pretty unpolished so please be kind.

Here’s Day One:

Favourite line: Her knuckles were white as she peered over the steering wheel at the dark road ahead. It was always annoying when the metaphors in life got this obvious.

Practice: (this has NOTHING to do with my novel)

Eloise had never been one of those people who longed to know the future. She didn’t visit psychics, never glanced at tarot cards or runes, she didn’t even read her horoscope. So when her fall over the stairs left her able to glimpse a few minutes forward, she didn’t thrill at the new discovery, she was horrified.

It sounds, at first, like it might be exciting to know what’s coming but it’s really the worst kind of horror, since a few minutes is often enough to see something horrible but not enough to do anything about it.

Sure, she had had time to grab the toddler who took a sharp left into the traffic on Water Street while his mother was picking up some dropped packages, and she could put up a hand to catch the frisbee careering towards her head at Bowring Park, but it hadn’t been enough time to convince that teenaged girl that her skateboard trick was going to end in disaster.

It was typical, really. Probably fifteen-year-old Eloise wouldn’t have listened to a middle-aged Mom who came racing out of the convenience store and begged her not to try the jump either. It was harsh to be the Mom in that scenario, even if the kid wasn’t yours. She had felt like she had to bear witness though, to stick around while the girl – Hannah was her name, judging by her friend’s sobbing repetition- built up speed and ramped over the path next to the building. It looked fantastic at first, her black hair soaring out behind her, her arms extended for mid air balance. For those few seconds, it could have been a photo in a ad. It didn’t last.

Something went wrong as the girl was about to land. It was hard to tell what happened exactly, but anyone could tell something was off. The girl’s trick ended just as Eloise had seen that it would, the one light brown arm folded over the girl’s head, the other out to the side, legs crumpled underneath, and a long, bloody scrape up the side of her ribs. The mental image had been horrible. The reality was, of course, far worse. She wasn’t dead, the jump wasn’t that high, but she as going to be in a lot of pain for a long time.

Eloise sent flowers. It didn’t feel like enough, but what else could she do? Sure, Hannah would likely listen to her now, but what good would it be to warn her of upcoming blood tests and the way her face would look when the meds wore off? Seeing a few minutes into the future was useless.

The papers didn’t think so, though. They started calling right after Hannah’s accident, one of her friends must have told someone about the crazy lady who had warned them not to do the jump. So Eloise had an inbox full of media requests, and her voicemail was full. She wasn’t going to talk to anyone about it though, there was no point in cataloging another way that her reality didn’t match up to people’s expectations.

 

 

Heya!

This is my Smartmouth Mombie site, it’s got a mix of writing about storytelling, taekwon-do, writing, feminism, and life in general. I try to write regularly, sometimes it works. My most recent posts are below.

Zentangle

I’ve been practicing meditative drawing. This is my favourite so far so I thought I’d share.

If you are looking for my Encouragement, Self-Kindness, and Re-story-fying Coaching page, please visit Three Deep Breaths. It’s a work in progress, just like everything I do (and everyone I know), so if you catch it at an in-between phase, please be kind.

If you are looking for my professional ‘portfolio’ type page, please visit Christine Hennebury.com. That’s also a work in progress but isn’t that how portfolios should be?

I have an important question for you:

Have you had fun today?