Snoring -- Holiday Accompaniements & Other Breathing Exercises

We were going to spend today in a genial haze, beginning with a nap in which the retriever managed to wiggle between us and snooze on the pillow. It's warm and relaxing to realize the the dog and the SO have matching hair and temperments, which helps one to nap peacefully. Until the dog rolls over. And stretches all four paws into the back of his master while yawning and drooling over my pillow. At this point, the nap is essentially over, replaced by a rolling hug/shove fest in which the retriever tries to reassert his position as nap leader while the rest of us to try to retake the bed. It usually ends, as it did this morning, with the retriever in posession. This leads to the next stage of end-of-holiday activities...getting crosswise with your SO over ways to enjoy the LAST DAY OF THE HOLIDAY. Do you realize that we have to go back to work tomorrow? Suddenly, people are yelling, pouting, and generally treating each other like children who must go back to work the next day. In this way, neither person is actually responsible for choosing something to do on that last day. Instead, the afternoon is left to quiet time (reading, napping, blogging) while one recovers from the headache brought on by the fight brought on by the LAST DAY OF THE HOLIDAY brought on by having to work for a living. Which, of course, reminds one to be thankful that one has a job, a SO, and two dogs to keep one company. Shortly, one will also have chicken salad prepared in the mini food processor, which will make up for the awful Thanksgiving turkey. Compressed turkeysteroids that took twice as long to cook, resulting in a Martian-dry landscape of stuffing would have made a better science project (or Sci Fi show) than dinner. Fortunately, my SO has both more patience and a greater ability to stomach funky meat dishes than I do. The dogs probably would have loved a turkey football of their own, but we didn't have a back-up plan. Now, for the Christmas Music Siesta!!

Best wishes,

Chrissa :)

Turkeys and Other Gobblers

Yawn. In the perfect hobbit tradition, I've had breakfast (early slice of pie, deviled eggs) and second breakfast (crusty homemade stuffing, potato salad), cleaned my dishes and am preparing for a pleasant midmorning nap. There will be no crazy shopping frenzy, which I'll just chalk up on the Board of Things I'm Thankful For, along with naps and warm fuzzy puppies. Yesterday, my SO recreated his mother's Thanksgiving feast in credible, edible detail. We watched the parade (and I monitored my inane chatter/constant promotion tolerance, finding it severly low this year) and the dog show. What with one thing and another, it was a day that I was thankful for, lots of togetherness and no running around and collapsing exhausted with a plate in the early afternoon. This should be about NaNoWriMo, and the triumph of 50K, but that's just not quite top of the list this morning. Rather, I'm glad that all of us were together this year, my SO and two wonderful SDs (significant dogs) and that we were able to share another glorious afternoon napping under the influence of turkey and sentiment. :)

Best wishes & happy holidays,
Chrissa

Eye Strain

Back on track with my NaNo project, I'm having to type this with my eyes closed because I've managed to strain them with a few marathon weekend writing sessions. It's a beautiful day, or so'm led to believe. I'm sitting in the dark of the computer room and tyring to dream of a low-carb casserole that I can bring t owork tomorrow, since it's my day to bring lunch. I've decided to give up on the low-carb thing at work because I'm not much of a salad person and I'm not really following the diet except every other day at work. I was accused of being one step away from a starch molecule in college and I'm just going to have to say that lumps come with the territory.

I'm coming through the slog where I was really disliking my characters. I'm sure they were just as bored as I was with the narrow strictures of their storylines. I've turned them out in the 'real' world now as refugees from the fantastic. They are learning the language, adapting to different light and noise levels, and learning to date!! Admittedly, I'm fudging the language adaption, since I'm positing a magical translation protocol that is no longer functioning when they hit the Gulf Coast in the 70's. That's really difficult for me -- I've never had more than a passing knowledge of another language and I don't really know how long immersion would take you. Similar language bases? A common language based on the closest geographical area to your fantasy realm? I could get away with that for one of the characters. I know that I won't be inventing a lexicon or a different language, so everything will be monolingual in the story.

The language bothers me somewhat, since I'm hoping to chart a realistic evolution that involves a society running in parallel to ours, several running on unrelated but rumored tangents to ours, and our own. We'll see how this goes over the next half of the book. Now, I just need a kick start for the plot so the action starts up.

Chrissa

Fuzzy Dog vs. Arthritis

As I try to concentrate on my NaNoWriMo novel, I find that I am worrying about our eldest dog, Wynn. Adapted for icy conditions found only in my fridge here in Texas, he has become prone to sliding across the tile floor and straining his hip. This is directly influenced by his need to see what's on the counter, what's out the door, or possible, what's on the other side of the retriever. Pop! Forepaws off the floor and fuzzy hind paws sliding out. Safe! Or not, as the case too often is. Thankfully, he doesn't seem to be in pain, at least not the kind of pain that results in yelps and guilt-inducing brown eyed stares. Instead, this is the kind of pain that keeps his left hind leg tucked tight to his body and morphs his gait into that of dog-rabbit.

This is not the calm influence of the retriever's tendency to nap. Except for balancing 70 pounds on my left ribcage last night (resulting in an all-day twinge today), the retriever tends to be a very relaxed dog. He is laying beside me on the floor, treating his forepaw as all-day sucker and waiting for my SO to come home so that he can relocate to the more gastronomically advantageous areas of the kitchen.

Somehow, this is converting some of the stress of the day into actually peace. I sometimes wish I could take the retriever to work, so that we could all pile on the couch for some much-needed relaxation. In the meantime, I guess I really to get some work done.

Peace and dog kisses,

Chrissa

Novel Writing Paralysis

I need to stop reading e-mail before I start writing. I spent the majority of yesterday obsessing about bland characters...after deciding that I like bland characters (vis-a-vis, my typical TV schedule). This is not an interesting or usable character flaw, unlike a penchant for sharing nachos with the dog. The white and fuzzy dog seems to be recuperating from his hip issue and the retriever is snoozing happily behind me (nacho bliss--I remember that from college).

Meanwhile, my characters are desperately trying to hijack a new story line and are currently wandering about loose in between scenes. I believe they are eventually going to hitch a ride into a more interesting yarn, but I'm still waiting for that ride myself. I've gotten them out of the castle, which was hampering their ability to do anything but stare out invisible walls and fume about things that were happening elsewhere. Although I can relate to that experience, I can also vouch for it's being nothing to share. So, I knocked the top of one of the towers and flung the little darlings out into the ocean to get themselves to a more interesting place.

My writing group seems to be doing really, even my SO has managed to pull together a decent story with an actual plot. I know this exercise is supposed to be about finishing something so that you can go back to it, but I'm not sure how to finish this particular story apart from a really dull day...the main characters are navel gazing, bend forward, and start to see a black hole where their navel should be...lean further forward and time stretches out and they circle the spiral of their own vast emptiness until SSSSHHHHWWUP! Inside out and eternity...

Well, I can only put this off for so long...I'm many words behind.

Chrissa

Oh No! NaNo!

After deciding to start NaNoWriMo over my vacation and having worked through the first few pages in more or less rapid succession, I was in a great mood to continue after going back to work. Then, I realized that I seriously disliked my story. Yes, my main character is a lump of borrowed surface that has inflated to its proper height, not quite 7k words.

The grand frustration is listening to my SO talk about his wonderful story, with actual plot and character. It's amazing. Despite being good for a few entertaining fights, it doesn't really help me to advance through the muck toward a livable story. The problem is the artificiality of the story. The main character, a prince of an Arctic kingdom of shape-shifting Walruses, is bored with the story. He'd rather be at home, exercising himself against his awful cousin, GrundWal, who believes himself to be the star of any number of wonderful fables. GrundWal is focused, and this focus helps him run more smoothly in the grooves that generations of Walrus royalty has etched in the icy redoubt that is their Beachhead.

ErwineWal, on the other hand, is an empty pair of eyeballs through which we view the story. He might as well be a wall with a peephole cut in it, for all the effect he has in the story. Crushing boredom.

It's even worse on rainy evenings, when the retreiver is as close to me as he can be because of the thunder outside, but not quite close enough to stretch out beside. Authorial privilege doesn't quite extend to stuffing the dog in the story and letting Erwine take the nap I'm really starting to want.

Belles loiterers,

Chrissa

Discipline, lack thereof

I should have posted my picture here, since I can't seem to hold to a thought for more than two minutes. The dogs are napping, which is perfect, since it lets me off the hook for feeling like I should be doing something. I realize that lately I've been missing being able to speak and it strikes me as curious that I should have lost that talent. Perhaps the challenge with sticking to a writing routine is that the only time I'm having a conversation that isn't in permanent edit mode is when I'm writing, and the computer or notebook isn't an expressive conversational partner.

I don't really understand why the art of speaking should suddenly seem so dangerous -- just offering an opinion, mentioning a shirt looks nice or that an idea isn't really as detailed or relevant as needs be feels like a dart aimed at a target. There is no criticism, just facile compliments and grunts. Forget speaking out, taking the other side -- no one has a bridge for that chasm. And so, I sit on every syllable and grow rounder with the dialogue that is swallowed daily.

Hence writing about nothing -- aarrrrggggg! The really quiet grunting was a dog hiding under the desk. Now that I'm awake, I guess it's time to call it an afternoon.

Chrissa :)

Thunder Liz, Pt. 1

I'm fighting with the following story, since it was begun at the request of a family member and just never felt right. Lately, I feel like my short stories are a hair away from a fight with the family -- so I'm hoping that as the story progresses, the irritating main character will GROW UP! Why inflict them on harmless blog trawlers? I'm assuming that the vast filtering capacity will break the story down into easily digestible pieces. We'll see.

Thunder Liz, Chapter 1

I saw the van from the maroon velvet ledge of the window. My arm was canted across the glass behind my head and my cheek was pressed against the window, flattened agains the cool rhythm of a pelting storm. The water sheeted over the other van. He had parked sideways across an empty asphalt lot, showing off the paint job of thunderclouds that rolled over the edges and down the panels. Faint green swells glowed under the curves of the clouds, half-alive in the deep gray afternon.

We stopped early, just as the light turned yellow. Dad had been waiting for minute when a strip of electrons fused and dropped a shaft on the van. Light slammed down with a stomach-turning shimmy, bursting through the tires and crackling over the paint. Tiny balls sizzled over the puddles. Shocked blind and still, the window slapped away from my cheek as the thunder shuddered through our van.

Mom is usually pretty nervous about things like that, but she was fuming silently, lips curled under as the frustration of the lunch date burned in the sacred chimenia at the back of her throat. "Did you see that? Why are we out in this weather, Liz?" Dad looked back to see if we were okay. I slid back into the seat and shrugged my shoulders and arms inside my sweater. "You kids okay? Don't often get to see lighting bolts that close. Almost 20 million volts just grounded into that car. Did you see the tires blow?"

"Yea, Dad." I was back to staring out the window, wondering if anyone had been in the van. I closed my eyes, but that only sharpened the dizzying vision of a pitching van recoiling from the strike of a hot serpent of electricity. I hissed under my front teeth, trying to calm my stomach. My head was hurting from the storm, fatigue, and hunger. I'd skipped a meal or two on the strength of a new sweater and I was ready to heave the rest of them out after that show.

The light changed and the van crawled forward. "We'll just get to the restaurant, eat lunch, and go home. Aunt Bert isn't staying," she growled.

Welcome

I tend to hem & haw through introductions -- and I realize, as I'm carrying on an IM conversation to one side of the screen and trying to figure out what "redeeming feature" this can be said to have, that it's more fun to peruse than pontificate--no wait, got that backwards. To be honest, I'd rather be napping with the dog. Too bad we are staring out of the window, distracted by the sidewalk. It's finally cool enough to appreciate the afternoon, so we continue to stare. Laziness builds into the afternoon. I think I could sit here and stare out the window, held by the glare of the sun if not by the surfaces it strikes. zZZZZZZzzzz.

Well, that's great, napped through most of the first entry. Guess I'll go locate the snoring dog and find another patch of sun. Hope you get a chance to enjoy a grand nap in a patch of autumn sun.

:)

Steve the Carrot, The Entire Thing

Welcome to the first and entirely too long post. Things may become clearer later...but probably not.

Steve the Carrot
“…Lectro…”
“Yo Yo Man!!” Steve’s mouth was on auto while he stared at the collage pinned to the side of his cubicle.
“Excuse me?” Bill paused and looked over into Steve’s cubicle. Brad’s manager, who had been watching him as he spoke shifted his eyes out the window and relaxed into vacancy.
“Sorry, just looking at these figures.” Steve didn’t glance back, just flicked over to two new worksheets and leaned closer to the screen. If his IM account had been up, LectroBrew would have been busted by PostNoBill$.
“Oh, yeah. Well make a note of it. I’ll be back by later.” Brad shrugged slightly at his manager and led him off toward his own office around the glassy bend of the main room.
“Whatever.” Steve’s mouth was back on campus, his eyes on the primary smear of a spreadsheet stretched across his dual monitors…he was widely dispersed this afternoon. Leave here at 5:15 this afternoon, stop by the apartment, head down into the city for Jim’s Beer for Drones. Celebrate all of us actually having jobs this year. Mapping out his schedule didn’t help, his ears and eyes and fingers and head didn’t want to all be here this afternoon. He decided to get a coffee and try to focus.
The cheap coffee bar was hidden out in the reception area, tiny paper cups hidden by a tall tropical plants. Leaning stiff muscles against the warm glass, Steve saw a jungle temporarily lit by a sideways shaft, tall tropical plants hiding arthropods in place of monkeys. Dusty crystal highways gleamed between the leaves, like tiny threads of asphalt on an evening drive. He shifted his right shoulder against the glass, letting tension from a morning of precise mousing twitch itself quietly away. The afternoon sun, warm and ancient against his back, wasted its gilding on the foyer to the lab, which shimmered in the blue-white florescent haze that reminded him of a movie set.
A manager from his section strode by with a cup of coffee, causing Steve to stand up directly under an AC vent trying to put the Texas afternoon blaze so kind to his kinked muscles. The cube farm around the lab might as well be located in Minnesota as far as he was concerned. A temperature differential slithered across his body and rustled the leaves of the plants he was staring at. A shadow dropped through the window and he looked back outside.
Clouds raced over the thinning and ragged edge of the carefully groomed suburban woodland. “Too bad, shag cuts don’t look good on anyone,” he muttered. How long it would take the new subdivision on the other side of the tree strip, with its shaved landscape and odd angular timber growths, to soften back into obscurity? Probably longer than it would take for him to soften and become ragged in the daily tumbling of the office. Lately he had become sensitive to the sound of typing. The lab admin had told him one late night while he was waiting for the last set of measurements from one of the projects that small bursts of typing sounding like the clacking of old-fashioned plastic doll eyes. Now he associated the sound with a vertiginous line of blank secretary dolls blinking in unison, and the late nights started to feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
He shook his head and his body wiggled restlessly. “I’m going to take a stroll around the campus and shake the kinks out of my fingers,” he called back to the receptionist just inside the office door. She waved and answered another call.
Once into the formal lobby, with its walls of windows, he began to feel a pressure build. Outside, each blade of grass telegraphed the coming pressure ridges and he felt his sinuses shift in preparation and another part of himself relax. He was thirsty, it was a dry evening and the grass around the poured and sculpted pavement poked stiff needles into the heat.
A blue BMW convertible pulled into the parking lot, radio announcing an upcoming singer from the Houston area in just a few minutes. Steve wondered how it felt to take that deep breath, finger the introduction, and then sing directly into the microphone, pouring out a song into an invisible audience.
Steve changed direction toward the parking lot, pulling out his cell phone as he went. He called the office from the hood of his car, wheezing like an excited child. “Elaine, are you looking across to Bill’s office? Is he in there? Jeff Toulber just pulled in and he’s looking like he had a great weekend. Yes, I know what day it is…you know Jeff. I’m going to knock off early this afternoon. Jeff’ll keep Bill in his office for the next hour or so. Yep, I’ve got my keys and my wallet. Give it an hour, then shut down my computer, okay?” As Elaine gave him the rundown of others who were working tonight, Steve thought about the plants in the lobby, one side perpetually turned toward the window, the other starkly working in the perpetual florescent light.
“So, no meetings to miss and most of the rest of guys pulling shifts into the evening? Good deal. You go home ON TIME. Early if Bill and Jeff knock off. You need the time as much as I do. Yep, I’m heading north…thinking about looking in on the old alma mater. If I see him, I’ll say hi, okay? Bye.”
Steve’s Nissan was sitting in a good corner of the parking lot, away from view of the lab windows and close to the entrance. His radio was tuned in to the same public radio station and the local artist, Jill Henry, was describing her day job. She worked for Parks and Wildlife and was enjoying lots of time alone to concentrate. The mind demands its own space, he thought. He shuffled through some of his meeting notes on the passenger seat, looking for a space to jot her name down.
She threw out a chord, paused in her narrative, and accepted another invitation from the interviewer to sing. Steve was shocked by her voice, broken from the young and cheerful interviewee to the warping yowl of the singer. The change wrested his mind into remembered territory.
In college, after a few too many beers and grade B movies, he had decided to make a battery connecting a circuit through his beer, his head, and some leftover wire. He might have been planning for some static discharge at some of the cuter girls. Everyone thought “Electro-Beerman” was hilarious. He began to wind the wire around his wrist, lecturing about Miller Coils and Bud Atoms like his least favorite Chemistry professor.
A few hours later he had woken up in bed, his wrist wired to a dried-out carrot apparently found in his fridge. The end o f the wire was pressed into his skin and a rusty scrim of blood marked it’s sharp passage on his wrist.
“Damn!,” he shook his wrist, trying to free it and flinging the carrot against the wall. The thud scrapped a new line against his wrist and woke him up. The sight of the carrot, sprouted and dry, suddenly depressed him. He was still taking biology course and both his parents were avid suburban gardeners. He didn’t remember buying vegetables recently and wondered if the depression reflected lingering guilt about the way the semester seemed to be tanking so thoroughly, something he hadn’t shared with his parents the last time they came up. They may have brought home-grown veggies for him and his roommate. His head began to beat in rhythm as their neighbor woke up to “Metal Mania AM” from the college station.
He grabbed the carrot and headed to the kitchen. He found a clean saucer in an upper cabinet, filled it with water and grabbed a knife lying by the sink. He unwound the carrot and lopped the shriveled bottom root from the carrot. A sudden disorientation dropped through him. He barely made it to the hall bathroom three steps away.
It was one of the last nights he had been able to party with the same group he had been hanging with since his freshman year. Several of them graduated the next spring and others fractured out into senior and junior year specialties. His roommate suffered a wild hair mid-year to pledge, was accepted and moved out. Steve himself moved slightly further off-campus into a row of townhomes that was only about 50 percent college students. He had several rowdy weekends to look forward to, but no more Electro-beerman chants. In fact, after his girlfriend moved in, it was more on the line of dinner parties around the pool.
Gradually, though, his dreams were changing. They shifted toward sensation dreams, as if he was having difficulty interfacing with the display behind his eyes. He would dream that his toes and fingers were hungry, that each hair on his body received a different chemical signal, trying to find and locate “colors” that he couldn’t remember. He would wake up kneading the covers and sit up, waiting for his hunger to localize itself back in his stomach.
He began buying natural floral scents for his girlfriend, who had never really been the type to see flowers as anything other than background or tribute. He became allergic to her other perfumes, sometimes having odd bouts of hunger or nausea, depending on the scent.
Steve continued his studies, half-aware of his increasing concentration on areas that were ‘cost-effective’ to study. A few company representatives from further south in the suburbs at the very edge of Houston’s awareness would come up and hold brief seminars or lectures on new opportunities in new communities.
Throughout the dating, studying, engagement, interviewing, and weekends visiting his family, he began filling up the windows in his kitchen with carrots grown from seed and the sprouted tops that floated in shallow glass plates balanced on metal bookends screwed into the frame of his windows. Slight changes in pressure and light surrounding his window frame became part of his consciousness.
One weekend, his fiancé was looking for something appropriately sleek and satiny for the ring bearer’s pillow and dragged him up to a strip of tiny wooden shops not far from campus selling handmade clothing and crafts. They were just on the frontage of a big warehouse complex, the parking lot a sandy overlook with a guardrail at the edge of slope directly down to the feeder of I-45.
Here, while kicking around in the sand outside one store fully of tiny aisles and carefully balanced knick-knacks, Steve noticed a patch of green just off the tiny landscaped area. Tired and hungry, he decided to go sit for awhile in the grass and watch people coming and going. As soon as his hands touched the ground, pressing against it as he levered himself cross-legged, he felt better. The wind, the temperature, the tang of something he couldn’t identify at the back of his throat, it was the perfect spot to release his carrots into the wild. His fiancé, Sherrell, had already told him there would be no “excess greenery” in their new house.
That weekend, after the shops closed and Sherrell went over to her friends’ dorm to lay out her new wedding paraphernalia, Steve drove back to the spot, parking behind the shops on the drive leading up to the warehouse, and smuggled his spade and row of window carrots out into the grass. He set them down in a spot, waited to how it felt, and then began to dig.
He held his fingers against the sides of the holes he had dug for the larger carrots, feeling the soft mix of muddy sand, emended with the last of his potting soil. He planted each one individually, feeling the hole before he set the plant in, and then fed them, for the last time, with a mix of fertilizer and compost he had been working on for the past several months. The carrots seemed to settle, well-feed and comfortable, into the ground. The view was good and Steve concentrated on it and on his memories from earlier, trying to put the slopes and greenery into a breathing pattern both deep and calm. Communication through the emotional variation and electromagnetic interference, the gentle ebb and flow of an entire universe echoing through your head and body while the specific reactions of a patch of vegetables modulated the existing patterns, was conversation incomprehensible. Steve didn’t know if he was receiving carroty impressions or continually flashing back to a night of inebriation, but he believed, especially now as he planted his tiny crop, that he was releasing a community of awareness into the hillside, and that allowed him to believe in an interaction that was not part of any stated or remarked area of his life.
He looked out to the other side of the highway, his face breaking the stream of air that rushed along this slope and contemplated this spot of ground. It was within a few yards of shops and workspaces, tucked back so that you could observe both without interacting with either. The pines edged up along the fence, then stopped at a mow line. For a minute, Steve was concerned about the mow line, but he had been careful to locate his plot in the middle of stand of fence weeds that would probably not be there if the mow line extended this far. A rime of clover and buttercups indicated the edge of the grass line, bordered by the scrub weeds that grow along most east Texas highways, interspersed here with the lupines the shopping center had thrown out to complement the Texana theme. In fact, he had been careful to set the carrots down away from that semi-cultivated area as well.
Once his fiancé had decided they needed to break up because she was going to graduate school “and we don’t want to be tied down while we’re still so much in flux,” Steve had taken the job he’d been offered, moved into his small townhouse and dissolved into his job.
On his way back up toward Huntsville, Steve stopped at a Wal-mart store, buying a cheap metal spoon and two tall glazed-yellow bulb pots.
His memory of the old stores was tame. Last year, the last of the shops closed and it settled down into a sagging sleep against its neighbors. The warehouse had closed in the interim and a giant For Sale sign hung over the carrot patch, which avoided the depredations of deer more or less and of moles and other critters through a corporate defense barrier, since it was not only Steve who gained through awareness. They lost a few members on the edge of the plot, but colonized a few different areas, invading the lupines, the fenceline, and the mow line.
This was now a deer-trampled edge of the Piney Woods. The buildings snoozed against each other or sagged slightly inward and the fence around the overgrown warehouse hadn’t been maintained in the five years since the owners had dissolved into another business venture. His carrots had taken over this patch of earth. He investigated the edges of the patch, trying to get used to the strong feeling of earth around him and a new awareness of the sun and breeze. He picked out a few younger carrots, and went back to the car for the spoon and yellow glazed pots he had stashed in the trunk.
Steve started digging on the edge of the carrot bed, chatting softly about his beautiful and empty garden window over the kitchen and his neighbor who grew corn plants on the back patio.
He took his tiny carrot herd home to his kitchen window. That evening, he brought his new carrots out, arranging them around his tiny glass patio table and stretched himself out under the table, so that the carrot tops were almost touching his cheek. He located Orion and began to listen to the sounds around him, letting the night sky push down through his eyes so that his ears were the only earthbound senses.