6 posts tagged “writing”

Why are there things that are painfully obvious to me that no one else sees?

I want to talk about them.

I don't want to tell the world his secrets, but I want fresh perspectives.

Need someone to point out the flaws in my reasoning.

What if I'm wrong?

I don't want to ask, because I don't want to know.

But I want to know.

I'm still trying to make my heart stop hurting.

It was getting better.

Talking to him is going to tear it open again.

Whether he explains or whether he smacks me down, it's going to hurt.

I'm not who I was. And yet I am who I am.

If I don't talk to him I'm never going to get over it.

I'm not sure I'll get over it anyway.

But it's worth a try, right?

Better than some smart-assed comment leaping from my fingers to the screen and making me sorry.

Even sorrier than I'll be for talking about it directly.

If he'll talk to me at all.

---------------------------------

I keep telling myself--

Nothing has changed except what's in my mind.

I keep telling myself --

There will be other loves.

I keep telling myself --

They won't be him.

Since it's finally 'hit the presses,' so to speak, I'd like to present to you The Very Well-Linked Story, courtesy of Rob at cockeyed.com and myself as about one of 500-some others who contributed links to the story.  I thought the idea was terribly interesting and signed up to contribute right away.  So go forth and click, ye of my tiny, possibly non-existent reader base!

If, by chance, you are arriving from said very well-linked story, I congratulate you for your discriminating choice of words and welcome you to my little world.  I'm just now getting back in the hang of writing after having my soul sucked out by working retail at Christmas time for the second year in the row, but things are moving along.

This morning I woke up from my dreams with the fragmented beginnings of what might actually be a story that I can write floating around in my head.  I hit the sleep button a couple of times while I was trying to distill what was floating around into something that I could get up and hold in my mind until I could get it back out on paper (or, shall I say, into Notepad).  Dreams have that crazy quality of not usually being quite tangible enough to keep from the moment I rise off the pillows, but I think I managed most of it this time.  With luck, I'll be embarking on that project in the near future.

As for more personal details, there isn't a whole lot to say.  I'm a former (and, with luck, future) student who happens to be toiling in a retail establishment that purveys the printed word.  As I like to say--a bookwench.  One of the few perks of my job (along with the marvelous forced talent of being on my feet for eight hours at a time several days a week) is that I can check out pretty much any book at work for free, read it, return it, and take another one, just as often as I can finish one and find another.  Lately, this means that my average books-per-week is around four or five, though I've been dreadfully lax about tracking them on here since I got things started again last month.  For example:

I'd planned on giving this thing some attention on the 16th, as that would have been three months (Oi.) since I actually wrote in here.  Unfortunately the 16th came and went in a flurry of Wii playing, snow, and God knows what else.  Work, probably.  I put in some overtime (well, over my scheduled time--I came in at just under 40 hours for the week) at the end of the week because they needed some stuff done, and for whatever reason when I hit 40 hours a week the odds of me writing in here decrease dramatically, rather like they did in November.  Probably has something to do with the fact that I'm sleeping until the last possible minute, hurrying off to work, then coming back and crashing as soon as I can so I can get the most rest possible to get ready for another full day of work.  And weekends were really all about laundry, dishes, and just trying to deflect the craziness of the week past and the coming week as well. 

So anyway. Yeah.  I guess there really isn't any particular need to apologize, but of course I still feel apologetic.

Life has been more or less ordinary for me, but for whatever reason I missed all the snow-flying months, so perhaps that's a little to blame as well.  There's still the occasional chance of flurries on the radar, but after the drenching rain we've been getting since last night just after I clocked out at work, I think we're moving more-or-less smoothly into springtime, which is definitely foryay.  Sunshine and warmth will be most lovely to see again, I think.

It occurs to me that I probably can't even possibly log everything that I've read over the past three months, but of course I'll give it a try.  Some things stood out, like P.D. James' Children of Men, and Christopher Moore's You Suck (for which I had to read Bloodsucking Fiends to keep up), as well as getting through Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books.  One that I've been trying to get myself into lately is a book called The Dark Mirror, but I've had it out of work for a week and managed to only hack out about a hundred pages or so.  I want to read it, but it just hasn't grabbed me yet.

Stephen King's Dark Tower books are getting a comic series to match, but it turns out that my bookstore won't be carrying them.  Le sigh.  I was actually kind of looking forward to a comic book that I was really interested in.

I interviewed for an administrative assistant position a couple of weeks ago.  Apparently it didn't go so well, despite my interview which seemed rather promising.  I suppose we can't always get what we want, but boy would I like to get out of the bookstore.  It's not so much any one thing in particular that I'm tired of so much as I'm just tired.  This time of year the schedule's awfully lean, and we really could use a bit more money (who couldn't?) but I'm really hesitant to go to, say, Evan's job, which he really doesn't like but makes decent money--enough money, in fact, that he ends up kind of stuck unless he wants to downgrade his income--something we can't afford right now.  Meh.

The real impetus for this post was realizing that my totally anti-social best friend, J, is now maintaining a journal.  It's a writing journal, and she doesn't have much of the kind of personal posting that I'm much more apt to be making, but there's no reason that I can't do this if she can.  So I'm hoping to get this thing moving again, because I think it really is a part of my life that I want to continue.  Just not when I work a lot.  Or when it snows.  Ahem.

Anyway.  It's good to be back (I hope), and here's to keeping on keeping on. 

As another effort towards getting back on track, I thought I'd post about the book I (finally!) finished yesterday.

Lisey's Story

Stephen King

Yes, more Stephen King. Shock and awe, I know.  I actually read The Stand before this, mostly because of its correlation to Lost, and while it was kind-of-sort-of interesting, I found myself skipping over a lot of parts just to get to what I felt like was the meat of the story.  I'm sure I missed a few important things here and there, and my only excuse is that there was so much story that by the end I just wanted to know what happened.  Didn't help that it was the "complete and restored" edition where King put back in a good portion of the stuff that had been taken out when the piece was originally published.  Anyway.

This one is new, brand new.  It's taken me a week to plod through it, but I've also flipped through a few other things as well, and haven't read it on my lunch breaks or anything, just because the hardcover is a lot more bulky and difficult to deal with than a paperback that I can just tuck into my apron.

There were only a couple of particularly gory bits that made me uncomfortable, and in that, I suppose, it's somewhat uncharacteristic for the author.  It seems that of all of King's work, I'm still kind of darting around the edges, reading the stuff that's pretty much not like all the other things in his repertoire.  Also, of course, I wondered if the "dead author" aspect would connect to Dark Tower at all, and I guess the answer is not really, though the Long Boy kind of reminded me of the thing that chased Roland, Susannah, and Oy through the dark train stations/Dogan/whatever that was (it's been a while, or certainly seems it).

I really like the idea of Boo'ya Moon, and the 'pool where we go down to drink' that I think most serious writers and/or readers will identify with.  King does tend to write about writers a lot, but I suppose there is some truth to the old adage, "write what you know."  Also, I think almost dying after getting hit by a car is probably enough to make anyone think about the what-ifs and all the possibilities, let alone someone who's probably got one of the most vivid, unpredictable imaginations out there.  Naturally, it makes you wonder just how much of the story he relates to himself, how much he tortures himself to face whatever it is in him that brings out the stories he writes. 

Enough to make any writer think, really.  The pool is an interesting metaphor, if nothing else.  Evan has a copy of On Writing laying around here somewhere.  I'll probably pick it up just to see if I can draw any lines between the two.

All in all, I enjoyed the book, and thankfully had enough reasons to pace myself without racing to the end.  What I didn't have, to my relief, were nightmares, which this particular author tends to give me.  Bleh.  Since most people probably haven't read it yet, I don't really want to run the risk of spoiling, but needless to say, it's worth a look.

Not really much else to say this morning, except that I'm looking forward to my Thursday off, even if it does mean I have to work on Saturday.  Right now I'm just wondering what they're going to do with my schedule next week...

For some reason I didn't want to disturb that post with adding a bunch of other stuff to it.  Who knows?  It might end up as the basis for a story or something. *grin*

Speaking of stories, the RP that Tarsis is talking about over there may well become one also.  I have a good deal of it set out in my head already, as that's what kept me busy at work yesterday and made the hours simply fly by.  Needless to say, Claire has pretty much completely captured my imagination of late.  I'd like to get some of that down "on paper" here at some point in the near future.

Today is going to be a day of household maintenance, however, as Evan and I have tons of dishes to do, and the house needs a general cleaning-up.

First and foremost on our minds, though, is a doctor's appointment I have in a couple of hours.  Hopefully this appointment will lead to free/cheap medication of the type that a girl who's married but doesn't want to have babies would like to have.  Ahem.  Needless to say I'm a bit anxious, if only for the fact that I've not been to a doctor, period, in longer than I can remember, and that this particular thing is fairly...involved.  Anyway, moving on.

I do have some good news, which is that, over the weekend, one of my best friends from high school proposed to his girlfriend!  I'd heard the rumor from J, my best friend, sometime a couple of weeks ago, that he was looking for a ring, but it appears that he not only found it but got her to say yes.  He's been though a crappy engagement once before, but from what little I know of this girl, I already like her a lot more.  And he's grown up a lot since then, too.  I'm fairly amused by the fact that they both promised her parents when they started "courting" (their word, not mind--fairly conservative, homeschooling, Christian families here, so take that as you will), that they were taking it slow.  I'm pretty sure they haven't even been together a year yet.  But ah, well.  Love is love, and I can't honestly say that Evan and I didn't know how things were going to end up even three months into things.  So much love and happiness and congratulations to them.

The other funny part about that whole thing is that I'm nearly positive he proposed almost a year to the day from when Evan proposed.  A year to the day or off by one.  Which is still kind of amusing.  They're setting a date from around June 5, and we went for May 20th, so they'll have slightly more time than I did.  I'm all excited about getting to go to a wedding that's not my own! (Mine was only the second I'd ever been to, and would have been the first if two of our friends hadn't made a mad dash to the courthouse about a month before we had ours, because the husband is in the Navy and was shipping out for a while.  This will be the first in a big church will all sorts of fanciness, I imagine.  Ours was small, but I can't imagine his being that small.  And her parents, I think, are fairly well-off.  Time will tell~)

Anyway, I think that's the extent of the more mundane update.  Evan'll be up soon and then we have to get moving.  Ta!

 "Describe an unusual interior space, one with lots of interesting appurtenances and gadgets sticking out: a submarine, a small plane, a subway tunnel away from the platform, a boiler room in the subbasement of a high-rise building, the warehouse room-sized vault of a Federal Reserve Bank.  Do not yield to the easy use of this scene.  The boiler room, for instance, we all expect would conceal an axe murderer.  Put two innocent children in it instead, romping and playing among the glow and roar of the fire and steam vents as if this were a sunny playground (their father is the superintendent of the building, and he prefers to keep the kids where he can see them).  500 words."

The old barn was going to explode.

Mickey knew this because she put the bomb there herself, twisted the wires and set the timer, just like they said to in McMillan's Eclectic Electric Miscellany, 101 Things You Never Know When You Might Need To Know.  The lights had blinked, and she'd backed away, careful not to trip over the 1973 Cub Cadet Special.  Lyndon, that asshole, had traded the neighbors his mother-in-law's--Mickey's gramma--antique dining furniture for the thing, and he'd set out to deconstruct and clean the engine, then put it all back together and sell it on eBay for a "fantastic price!"  Much more than the dining set was worth, he said.

Only the one vital part he needed to make the thing actually work wasn't sold any longer, could only be found in heaps and junk palaces like this one, and so the project had been abandoned, the tractor half-covered with a stained floral bedsheet, once Mickey's, she remembered, the other half buried by an ever-growing pile of family detritus, once beloved, now discarded and left to dry-rot in the dust.

Mickey backed into a teetering tower of cardboard boxes, which slumped to her feet with a muffled thud.  Old toys spilled out, teddy bears with eyes or ears or both missing, staring up at her in helpless, blind pleas for the safe, loving arms they once knew.  For escape.  Salvation.  She booted one with a savage kick, turning her back on the bomb now, ignoring the domino-effect crashes the small, fuzzy corpse created as it ricocheted off box and bag, carton and crate.

She flung the barn doors wide open, the sudden burst of sunlight glinting off of the antique farming tools that hung suspended from the rafters, a mad grin crossing her face.  Would the sickle, once wielded by Grandpa himself as he reaped what he and his wife had sown, slingshot across the yard, wedging itself in the back door, or better, slice through the window and find a meatier target?  The coffee cans full of rusted nails, bolts, and screws, once carefully saved, now discarded like so much rot.  Would they find a new purpose, find more than wood to bore into with a wicked bite?  And the bags of beer bottles, never taken to be recycled despite numerous claims to the contrary, were evidence of the filthy, lazy layabout who had usurped, who had ruined, who had betrayed--they, stacked up along the wall nearest the house, just so, would serve a purpose as well.

Mickey would be long gone by then, but Lyndon would not.  And she would prove her point to him, once and for all.  The past could come back to haunt you.  And it would.

The old barn was going to explode.

Roughly thirty minutes for writing, ten for editing.  470 words.