Writer Dame

Challenge!

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I am currently at work on a bunch of fiction projects and I am revamping all of my websites and this has led to a little bit of stuck-ness as I try to figure out what content will go where. However, I also know that I will never figure this out unless I actually get back to writing in one place or another. .

Sooooo, in the interest of jump-starting my work on this, I’ve decided to do the A-Z Blogging Challenge. I’ve never done this one before but apparently lots of people choose a theme for the 26 days and I’ve decided to go with Connections.

You may not realize this but I am the Queen of Metaphor and Analogy ( I sometimes rule Simile, but that’s a part time gig) and there is nothing I like more than taking a skill or an idea I have learned in one aspect of my life and applying it to another.  Sometimes I’m pulling info from fiction I have read, sometimes it’s putting taekwon-do information into my writing practice, sometimes it’s telling myself a story about my new TKD pattern so I can remember it.

I just really like connecting information in a big web and seeing where the threads lead me. This should be a marvellous help for figure out where the pieces of my online self should sort.

So, from now until the end of April, I’ll be blogging about Connections from A-Z. Have fun reading!

 

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.

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.

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.