Category Archives: Writing

Apocalyptic flash fiction

07 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by in Short Stories, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

I screwed up. I admit it. My bad.

But, you know, what are you gonna do? It wasn’t like I woke up this morning and thought, “Huh, I think I’ll destroy the planet. That sounds like fun.”

And it’s not like you aliens are actually destroying the planet, right? The cockroaches are probably going to be fine. The rats might survive, too. They’re very adaptable creatures.

The only ones who are really out of luck… well, the dogs are probably not going to be too happy. They kinda rely on human beings, don’t they? The house cats, especially the ones that are declawed, yeah, they’re going to be in trouble. The goldfish, doomed most likely. Cows, chickens, pigs—they’re probably not going to make it either. None of the zoo animals will have much chance.

So yeah, okay, it’s not just humanity that’s out of luck.

But seriously, I’m willing to accept responsibility for my share of the problem, but it’s not like it’s all my fault. You aliens asked me a question. You didn’t tell me ahead of time that my answer mattered.

And why should I think it did? Twenty-seven years I’ve been on this planet and it’s not like anyone else has ever cared a whole hell of a lot about my opinion.

When I was a kid, I didn’t want to go to school, but did that matter? No, it didn’t. My mom said it was the law and the cops would drag me if I didn’t go willingly, so I went. I did figure out eventually that the part about the cops was bullshit, but by then school was better than my house, so off I went. Not a lot better, not better by much, but after my dad left, my mom got… well, school was better.

And let’s face it, school doesn’t exactly teach you to think your opinions matter. It’s a real sit-down-and-shut-up environment. My dad used to rant that it was for training drones, that schools were designed to create factory workers who could stare at an assembly line all day long and not go insane, and I’m not saying he was wrong. I could probably stare at an assembly line for forty hours a week without losing it. If there was money in it, a decent paycheck at the end of the week, and some vacation time every year, hell, yeah I could.

But there aren’t any assembly line jobs left. Not here, anyway. Maybe off in Asia somewhere. I bet those drones don’t think they’re lucky, but they are.

Well, they were lucky. Not so much, anymore, huh?

So how are you guys going to do it? Plague, maybe? Like AIDS, only faster? It’d have to be faster, I guess. Maybe like that Ebola thing, with blood coming out of all our orifices, even our pores. Sounds gross but hey, it’ll be over quick.

I kind of expected big explosions. You know, mushroom clouds expanding over all the major cities. We’d probably get a real good view from up here. Where would you start? I guess maybe if you threw one nuke, like at Washington DC or something, you could just stand back and let us take care of the rest.

Our president wouldn’t be shy about blasting back. He’s the kind of guy who if he goes down, he’ll take the world with him, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if he pushed the button even without aliens taking out DC. Although I suppose if you took out DC, you might get him, too. Him and all his buddies.

Huh, that wouldn’t be so bad.

But you’ll probably have to hit a lot of cities to really wipe humanity out. China, Japan, the big ones in Europe. Paris, you’d have to get Paris. I once read a book about how all the historical shit in Paris, all the great art work, how it all survived World War II ‘cause the German general in charge of the occupation couldn’t bring himself to destroy it.

Well, I say read, but I didn’t really read it. I had a job, temp thing, with a guy who played audio books all day. Annoying stuff at first, but I got used to it. Two months of work there, it wasn’t bad. But then the holidays were over and there wasn’t enough work and… yeah, you know the story.

Anyway, I guess Paris survived the Germans, but not me. Funny, huh?

Sad, I mean. Definitely sad.

Not that I really care. Not like I’d ever see it for myself. So what? Some painting of a chick with a smile burns, it’s not like the end of the world.

Except that it is, of course. The end of the world.

Man, this is not how I figured this day would go. When I woke up this morning, I thought sausage biscuit for breakfast, then some Edge of the Universe for a few hours. Then an hour filling out applications online. Boring as shit and totally pointless, but my mom gets on my case about it. She keeps saying she’s gonna kick me out if I don’t start contributing so I like being able to say I did what I could. Then some more EU. Afternoon games are better when the kiddies get home from school. Nothing I love more than wiping the floor with the noobs.

Oh, you don’t know that one? Great game. I play it a lot. Hardcore PVP but the graphics are quality. I’ll miss some of the guys I play with, I guess, but eh, they’re all assholes, too. I bet if they’d gotten asked the question, they would have given the same answer. It’s not like I’m the only one who hates the whole rotten lousy place.

What?

A second chance?

You want to ask the question again? You like to let the representative consider his answer for a while before making a final decision?

Oh.

Thanks.

I guess.

***

*Posted for Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Apocalypse Now

The pros of the apocalypse

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in Depression, Florida, Grace, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

I’m camping in Blue Springs State Park this week, famed as a home to manatees in winter time. I’ve visited this park before as a day visitor, more than once, so it’s not new to me. But this morning while I was walking Zelda, I was imagining myself in a post-apocalyptic world. The kind where plague has taken all the people, not zombies. I wasn’t scared, it just felt incredibly empty. Every other time I’ve been here, there have been lots of people, but of course, that was never before dawn. Then I spotted some manatees in the water and got much more cheerful, because probably if the human beings all died out, the manatees would have a much better chance of surviving. The pros of the apocalypse.

Last night, it rained. My weather app — which honestly, seems fairly useless, except for the immediate weather — had been claiming rain for days, including an entire afternoon of lightning and thunder yesterday, but it didn’t happen until 4:43 AM this morning. I can be so precise about the time because I woke up and it had barely started, a little tap-tap-tap on the roof of Serenity, but as I lay there wondering what that noise was, it really started. It went very quickly from tapping to torrential, which sounds a lot like being inside a drum. Or maybe a heart beat. I haven’t had nearly enough rain in Serenity, because I do enjoy it so much. Last night, I could hear the difference in the sounds of the rain hitting the roof and the rain hitting the plastic vents over the fans. It was music, definitely. Albeit slightly boring music after ten minutes or so. Plenty of rhythm, but a lack of harmony.

Despite the rain and the bleak apocalyptic thoughts, I’m really happy to be here. Right now, I can see a cardinal sitting on a branch outside my open door. There have been squirrels darting through the trees—or maybe one very busy squirrel. I’m surrounded by trees and greenery. It’s definitely not the most peaceful park I’ve spent time in—the train tracks must be incredibly close because wow, the trains are loud when they rumble through—and there must be some kind of construction going on nearby because there was a lot of heavy equipment moving around, including those annoying backup beeps, earlier this morning. But it’s not a parking lot, it’s a park.

I spent the last two weeks sitting in a campground that was a parking lot: trailers on either side of me, nothing separating me from my neighbors, and my view consisting entirely of people stuff. My goal was to finish Grace or give up. I did neither. I didn’t get very far, but I did come up with a new ending and a new plan, so I’ll be persisting. But I did learn that I should really, really not sit still for so long in a place that doesn’t inspire me.

While I don’t seem to get a lot of writing done on the days that I’m moving from place to place and planning moves takes energy that I could be putting into writing, my level of depression rose steadily over the past couple weeks. Or my mood sank steadily? And the trap that is depression was sucking me in: I knew I was starting to feel bleak but I lacked the energy and motivation to make a change. It’s really only today — gloomy apocalyptic thoughts and all — that I’ve been able to wake up and realize how much I had lost my joy. That’s because having a cardinal sitting on a branch avoiding the rain brings it back. I don’t want to live in places where I have to search to find the beauty, even if they are cheap.

Of course, that does mean that I should earn some money and that means that I should be writing Grace right now. So off to do it! It’d be nice if I could get out of the scene I’m in and back to a scene with Grace and Noah together. Not that I know what happens in that next scene, but I’m a lot more likely to find out if I keep writing than if I wait for inspiration to hit.

 

Owls are cool

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Florida, Grace, Randomness, Serenity

≈ 2 Comments

I saw an owl this morning. Two of them, really, although the second one was a black blur on the wind. I wouldn’t have recognized it as an owl if it were not flying in collusion with the first one. And the first one… well.

It flew across the sky in the pre-dawn light, clearly a bird. Clearly a big bird. My brain had to process. What is that bird? In Florida, the default on a big bird is vulture. That’s what we’ve got the most of. But this bird didn’t say vulture to me. The wings were wrong. The flight was so smooth, such a glide, so quiet. Eagle? No. Hawk? No. Falcon?

The bird settled on a tree branch and finally my brain — in my defense, it was early, before coffee — put together the flight, the time of day, the size of the bird, its silhouette on the tree branch, and the calls of Whoa-whoa-whoa-whooooo that I was hearing and said, “Owl.”

Actually, it was more like my brain said, “Owl. Owl, owl, owl, owl, OWL!” I’ve seen them in captivity and I’ve seen them in photographs and once or twice, I’ve seen one in the wild from a far distance when someone else has pointed it out to me, but this was my first real close-up of a wild owl. And then another one flew by, and the first one joined it and they tried a different tree. I tried to follow them, but they moved again, out of the campground and deeper into the fenced-off forest that surrounds the campground, and I resumed walking my dog. But my morning no longer felt prosaic and dusty, but a little bit magical.

Owls are cool.

In other news, I’ve been having the most amazing time writing. Not, alas, writing Grace. But approximately 16 days ago, I got impatient and frustrated with myself and I decided that every day — every single, solitary day — I would write 1000 words of fiction. Not careful polished words, not words where plot and characterization mattered, not words that built to something, that were part of some larger whole, just… words. Quick sketches. Snippets of scenes. Bits and pieces of story. But a thousand of them every day.

I missed one day, because it was a moving day. That was the day I left Trimble Park and spent the night in my dad’s driveway, so it included cleaning and organizing, drying and stowing the kayak, loading up the camper, and then much sociability. Apparently I just didn’t even think about writing that day. But every other day for the past two weeks, I have written 1000 words and wow, I have been having so much fun with them! There is something about the freedom to write terrible words, the joy of pointless words, that has let me get madly creative. Most of the words have been starts to stories, world-building that goes nowhere, but I’ve had magic and vampires and dramatic confrontations, children of the gods and immortal courts and SO. MUCH. FUN.

I’m trying not to stress about the future. A writer who only starts things and never finishes them is really never going to earn a living, even if she’s trying to subsist on ramen noodles and other people’s driveways. And I’m still working on Grace every day, even though what mostly seems to happen is that I have a great time writing for a few hours and then grimly open the Grace file about mid-afternoon and stare at it until I can escape into feeding and walking the dogs. But yesterday I actually had some Grace insight and my 1000 words of fiction included several hundred on Grace, so maybe today…

St. Augustine

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Boring, Florida, Pets, WIP

≈ 7 Comments

I am staying at a campground, a state park, on the beach. The lovely ocean with miles of sandy beach is easy walking distance away. And yet, I haven’t touched it and have only seen it once.

Traveling with dogs is totally worthwhile, but also more challenging than I expected. When I say “easy walking distance,” I mean easy walking distance for Zelda and me, not for Bartleby. It would be a long, long walk for him and an even longer walk for me if I wound up carrying him. But that’s irrelevant because dogs aren’t allowed on the beach. If I wanted to go to the beach, I’d have to leave both dogs behind in Serenity.

Want to know what else is not allowed? Leaving your dogs unaccompanied at your campsite. And actually, I’m pretty sympathetic to that one: the chance definitely exists that both dogs would bark in misery the whole time I was gone, if I wanted to leave them, which I don’t.

So I’m at the beach, but not enjoying the beach. Fortunately, I am enjoying my campsite. It’s pretty and big and quiet, tucked back in a corner of a reasonably empty campground. Two nights ago I was a little freaked out by its isolation as I listened to very loud rustling in the bushes, but I finally dug out my flashlight and shone it out on the raccoons climbing the tree about ten feet away from my window. I was then still a little freaked out — raccoons are kind of big when they’re so close and there were two of them — but hey, it wasn’t a bear or a serial killer, so I did relax enough to go to sleep eventually.

I’ve also had some really lovely walks around the campground. There’s a loop called the Ancient Dunes loop, which is supposedly a pleasant half hour walk (presumably for people who aren’t being walked by a fast-paced Jack Russell terrier), but is a fun up-and-down trek on a sandy path through the Florida forest. Lots of mosquitoes, of course, and they do love me, and a few too many spiders who built their webs across the path — sorry, spiders, for destroying all your hard work, and ick, ick, ick, spider webs on me — but it’s so primeval that you can almost imagine yourself in the Jurassic. Well, or at least a few hundred years ago. I think the trees are probably all too small to be good dinosaur territory. And the occasional signs explaining the history and the plants sort of destroy the impression. But it’s still fun to be taking our usual morning walk through such different territory.

 

I haven’t made nearly as much progress on Grace as I was hoping for — it’s been hard to get back into the rhythm that I had going so well in Vero Beach and I swear that the mere existence of NaNoWriMo now causes my writing ability to freeze solid — but I’m hoping for today to be a better day. So hi-ho, hi-ho, off to write I go.

Quick post

20 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Randomness, Tassamara, Travel, WIP

≈ 6 Comments

For the past three months, I’ve written some… but I’ve also worried that my plan to live in a camper and write a lot was maybe not really going to work out. Because living in a camper is great, I adore it, but the temptations are endless, far more so than living in a house (where I was also not getting enough writing done!)

There’s always some new place to see, some new adventure on the horizon. And I’m not talking about big adventures — whitewater rafting or mountain-climbing — but little adventures. Taking the dogs to a new dog park, spending an hour exploring a new grocery store, finding a way to get my laundry done. And also, of course, visiting people and spending time with them instead of staring at my computer.

However, my plan to sit still for ten days and bore myself into writing has been working incredibly well. I am really happy with what I’ve accomplished with Grace. Lesson learned: I’ve now scheduled the next several weeks and they’re not going to be adventurous. Until Grace is finished, I’m going to sit in Serenity. But I’ll be living in Tassamara, at least in my imagination, and really, it’s a pretty darn fun place to be.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be back at this campground: it’s basically a parking lot and there are a lot of parking lots in the world to explore. No need to stay at the same one twice. But apart from the wonderful dog park, which we have visited every single day, I’ve really loved walking in the dark here. It’s the time of year — it takes forever to get light in the morning, so I’ve been walking Z before sunrise and it’s getting dark early, so I’ve also been walking her in evening darkness. But it’s been incredibly beautiful. The moon was fantastic the past few days, so bright, and the sky was clear enough to see stars, not by the hundreds, alas, but at least by the dozens. In the early morning walks, I cast multiple shadows on the ground, moonlight shadows and streetlight shadows and shadows from lights showing up in trailer windows.

When I write my Massachusetts stories with magic (someday, someday!), there will be at least one character who can send her shadows off to do odd jobs for her. And in a desperate moment, she will search for lights to create many shadows, and in another desperate moment, she’ll be trapped in darkness, unable to find a shadow anywhere.

Someday on this trip — maybe even before I make it to the Grand Canyon — I’m going to visit a place where I can see thousands of stars in the night sky. I want to have that moment of amazement and wonder, that hold-your-breath awe at the beauty that lurks above us all the time that we hardly ever get to see.

But today, I’m going to write some more Grace.

Weather report

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Grace, Randomness, Recipes, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

I parked in this parking-lot campground seven days ago and I haven’t left it since. I ought to be going totally stir-crazy — I haven’t even spoken to another person in the past week, apart from the occasional hello to a passing stranger — but I’m really not. Every day the weather report says that it’s going to be cloudy and rainy and every day it’s actually mostly sunny instead. That’s sort of representative of my mood, too. I feel like I should be bored, but I’m quite content.

I keep thinking that I’m going to need to go to the grocery store, because I’m going to run out of food, but then I keep making up something new from what I have. Yesterday, I had leftover pancake batter that was too liquid. It was the last remnants of the box of gluten-free pancake mix and not quite enough mix to balance out the single egg that needed to be added. Since it was going to be crepe-like, I made it savory — I added green onion and cilantro, then topped it with hot sauce and rolled it up. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t violate my “no complicated meals” rule and it really didn’t — it was leftovers! — but making something interesting and delicious out of remnants is so satisfying. Today, I still have two apples, some cheese, some salad greens, a cucumber, eggs… I even still have some of my precious gluten-free chocolate chip cookies left. Yeah, so today will still not be the day I go to the grocery store. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve mostly stuck to my only knitting and writing principle. I did give myself a book on Saturday night, but I’d done great work during the day, so it felt justified. Yesterday was not so great — only 700 words — but I have high hopes for today. And since I have nothing interesting to blog about — really, I wrote about the weather? — I’m going to get back to the words that I’m really working on. Favorite lines from yesterday… dang, all the good ones are too spoiler-y. But good words were written!

Favorite non-spoiler-y lines from the weekend (brought back from a previous version, I think):

Grace crossed her fingers again. “I’ll do that.”

She shouldn’t lie to her brother. But it served him right. He shouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.

 

 

Vero Beach

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Grace, Pets, Travel, WIP, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

I’m attempting to bore myself into writing. So far… eh, it might be working, but if so, it’s going slowly. Maybe by Monday I’ll have made some real progress.

I’m staying at the same campground for ten whole days. And not a beautiful or fun or inspiring campground — a parking lot campground. In fact, when I first got here, I thought it was creepy as hell. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay even for two days, much less ten. The next day (aka yesterday) I realized the creepiness — a general impression of a ramshackle, disheveled ghost town — was the result of the hurricane. It’s actually been sort of fun to watch them clean it up, one stretch after another going from debris-strewn to neat and tidy.

Plus there is a lovely huge fenced field labeled a dog park. I’ve been working steadily during the past eleven weeks on improving the dogs’ stays and recalls and a big space gives them a chance to really practice. Alas, status quo remains: Z is a rocket scientist and B has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I tell Zelda to stay and she sits and trembles and waits as I get farther and farther away, until finally I turn and point at the ground and she barrels toward me at joyous hyper speed, her ears trailing behind her, as if she actually thought I might leave her behind. B, on the other hand, bounces along two steps after me no matter what I say or do. But hey, eight more days in this park gives us a lot of time to practice.

Especially because I’m trying really hard to not let myself do anything but write or knit. No reading, no television, no internet browsing. Walking dogs and any form of exercise, okay. Eating, yes (obviously!); planning and cooking elaborate meals, no. I’ve given myself permission to write anything so I’ve written lots of personal babble, but I’ve also done plenty of staring at Grace. And enormous amounts of daydreaming. I wish more of it was daydreaming about Grace, but at least some of it will work its way into future stories. I love lines of thoughts like “People who feel rejected do stupid things: if Fen felt rejected, I wonder what she would do? If you had magic and felt rejected, hmm…” And off my brain goes. It’s so nice to feel like my daydreaming might be useful.

My sister tells me that I write about Z a lot and rarely about B. I’m not actually sure that’s true but just in case she’s not the only one who wants to know how they’re doing with the traveling lifestyle…

B loves it madly. He is more energetic, more rambunctious, happier and bouncier than he has ever been. He gets adored in campgrounds: all small children instinctively gravitate to him and he takes their attention and sticky hands as his due. He has entirely stopped hiding under furniture and in closets, perhaps partially because there aren’t a lot of places to hide in Serenity, but he doesn’t even try anymore. Instead, he cuddles up next to me and suggests I pet him. And he’s looking great, too. People have commented that he’s lost weight and he might have, but he also just seems sleeker and shinier and healthier. And happier. In Massachusetts, I very confidently said, “B doesn’t play,” just as he tore across the room and grabbed a tennis ball ahead of Z before returning it to my uncle, tail wagging.

Z, on the other hand… I think she likes parts of it. She likes our morning walks. She likes exploring new places, sniffing new smells. But it also seems to stress her out more than I expected it to. She’s gotten even pickier about her food, often rejecting her kibble entirely, and she’s seriously clingy. She’s always been a very attached dog — the feeling is mutual, I’m very attached to her, too — but her level of worry that I might disappear entirely seems to have increased. As long as she’s touching me, she’s calm, but she seems more high-strung and anxious than she used to be. Her separation anxiety isn’t manifesting as destructiveness, thankfully, but it’s hard to leave her. Although now that I’m analyzing this, she has adjusted to Serenity as home. She’s fine about being left in Serenity now. She’s just not fine about being left in other people’s houses, which I’ve had to do because it’s been too hot to leave her in the van when I can’t run the AC. Hmm, so I just need to go to colder climates to keep the dog happy. Works for me. 🙂

But not until I finish writing Grace, so I had best get back to it!

To-do lists

18 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in Personal, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

I had an incredibly productive Monday morning:

    I scheduled an appointment at the RV dealer to get Serenity’s vent fixed.
    I called the fence people about the permit problem.
    I took a load of stuff to Goodwill, probably the last.
    I stopped at the pharmacy and picked up a prescription and discussed arrangements for refills on the road.
    I called my doctor and got a couple extra refills added to my prescription.
    I took some old cans of paint and bug spray to the landfill.
    I loaded up Serenity with four bookcases and a chair and drove them to the house of the friend who’s taking them.
    I posted a question about traveling with pets to Facebook.
    I emailed my realtor.
    I called the guy who’s taking my porch furniture and made arrangements with him for Thursday.
    I talked to my sister and set up a time for my nephew to come collect a few things.
    I spent some time researching temperature monitoring solutions for when I have to leave the dogs in Serenity.*

And then I sat down at the computer to write and… didn’t.

I have this fantasy where I’m so engrossed in the story I’m telling that all the trivial details of my life are simply flotsam and jetsam drifting past unnoticed while a current of pure story drives my days. Reality is never so smooth. If Grace was a kayak outing, it would be an insanely frustrating one where the current of reality keeps driving me into eddies and backwaters. Actually, that’s a really good description of Grace anyway. I keep thinking I’ve got it and then… I keep not getting it.

But the day is not yet over. Admittedly, it’s after 7 and I haven’t had dinner and still need to take the trash out and my realtor just answered my email… but words can still be written! So off I go to at least try, having fulfilled one more item on my checklist of things to be done. (I’ve managed to blog every Monday of 2016 — I didn’t want to break my chain!) A week from today, I’ll be on the road, headed to PA, and all of the vast multitude of house-related to-do list items will be… well, done. I don’t know whether I’m more relieved, scared, or excited.

*The temperature inside Serenity hit 122 degrees the other day. I was impressed. That was with all windows closed and no AC on, of course, on a Florida day in July — a situation in which I would never leave the dogs. But I would like some kind of warning system for when I do leave them, although preferably one that doesn’t cost a small fortune.

Head hopping

25 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by in Grace, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

One of the “rules” of fiction-writing that I learned while A Gift of Ghosts was getting critiqued at critiquecircle.com was that you should pick a point-of-view character and stay, absolutely consistently, in their point-of-view. Don’t show thoughts of other people, don’t show actions that they can’t see, don’t mention knowledge that they don’t have. (Critique Circle was extremely useful for me, so don’t take this a criticism of the site, please. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants useful feedback on their own writing.)

I wish I had never learned that rule.

It’s a good rule, actually. Since then I’ve read a number of works by beginning writers where head-hopping makes the narrative hard to follow and confusing. And it’s enormously helpful when writing description or setting a scene to be able to focus on what your POV character would notice or care about or feel. I stopped getting stuck on writing descriptions when I got better at remembering to think about what the POV character cares about and to use scene-setting as an opportunity to develop character. And I’m fairly sure my descriptions got a lot better, too.

But it’s also really limiting. I’ve been stuck on Grace (I know, I know, you’ve heard this so many times!) so I’ve been reading and revising early chapters, trying to figure out where this story could go. Should go. Is going? I was close to deciding to give up on her again, because even getting an ending — a good ending, a romantic ending, a charming ending! — wasn’t getting me through TO the ending. But there’s so much in it that’s fun. Their first kiss is just great. And Grace is a riot — pragmatic and romantic, efficient and flustered — she might not work for everyone, but I love her.

But I realized about six chapters in that flowing between points-of-view, not just switching at scene or chapter breaks, but actually flowing from one point-of-view character to another, would really help the narrative. All the points where it’s confusing are times when switching to Dillon for a while and seeing out of his eyes would make everything so much simpler. And most of the fun belongs to Grace and Noah, but most of the tension belongs to the ghosts. Right now, it feels like it seesaws between fun chapters and tense chapters, and if I blended — no, head-hopped, if I head-hopped — it would be much easier to keep both the fun and the tension going at the same time.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this realization. NOT go back and start Grace over. And not revise the whole thing either. But I think I’m going to start breaking the rule about no head-hopping and write what I want to write, where I want to write it, focusing on what makes the story easier for me to tell. And if it gets confusing, well, I’ll confront that issue when I get there. Words on pages are a lot easier to fix than words that don’t exist.

Writing this reminded me that back in October I was thinking that POV was my problem with this book. I did get freer with POV after that, but not within scenes — I stuck to switching POV characters using breaks. I wonder if I’d started head-hopping back then if I’d be done now? And that’s not a useful thought so I’m not going to pursue it. But someday soon I’m going to get back to writing 1000 words a day, whether they’re good or bad, and I really hope that eventually those words add up to a story I feel good about.

Meanwhile, a few lines that were alone almost enough to keep me writing yesterday:

“You can’t escape destiny with a to-do list, Grace,” Lucas said.
Grace gave him a cold stare. “Perhaps you can’t, but I certainly intend to.

Yoga

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in Grace, Reviews, WIP, Yoga

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I haven’t been making it to yoga at the Y nearly as often as I would have liked. Partly that was motivation: with C gone, it was harder to get out of the house at the right times. Partly it was bad planning — I kept intending to go to evening yoga instead of morning yoga so that I wouldn’t be so tired in the afternoon that I didn’t write. But then I’d forget or be busy and miss the evening class. Last month, though, my favorite yoga teacher left the Y. And I knew that given my future plans, I’d be needing to come up with another solution if I wanted to keep yoga in my life.

So question one: did I want to keep yoga in my life? Easy answer: yes. As with any exercise, I struggle to get motivated. I don’t love pushing my body and it’s always easier to just sit and do nothing. But yoga enriches my life, brings me a sense of peace, helps me feel stronger and more competent, doesn’t push me harder than I want to go (hanging out in child’s pose is always an option in classes at the Y), and has generally been an all-around positive for me. Even though I’ve been going weeks at a time without making it to a class and haven’t been choosing to practice at home, I knew I’d regret it if I just stopped.

Voila, yogadownload.com. Holy cow, this place is a bargain! I didn’t want to only stream classes because I know my future life is not going to be friendly to streaming (mobile data plans are expensive and limited) so I bought the $90 elite membership, which gives me a year of free downloads of their own classes and streaming episodes from their content partners.

So many classes! So many options! So many choices to work any part of your body or to have whatever kind of yoga experience you’re looking for! I keep winding up downloading more than I can feasibly do because I’ll be looking for a class that fits one idea and I’ll see so many that interest me that I wind up with three or four. Dorm-Room-Yoga (to see if it could be future RV yoga), Moon Salutations (because it was short), Sunset Flow and Night, Night, Don’t Sleep Tight (because it was the evening), Yoga Break for Writer’s Block… I’m downloading ALL the yoga.

And so far the classes have been great. Clear videos, good teachers, reasonable expectations. There have definitely been moments where I have to pause and try to figure out what the instructor is doing and a couple times that I’ve been like, haha, isn’t that cute, NO!, to poses that abused my knees more than they could bear, but I am without question going to get my money’s worth from that $90. I’ve done yoga three days in a row, two classes on Saturday, and the reason I’m writing about it right now is mostly because when I woke up this morning, thinking about what I needed to do today and what I wanted to do today, yoga was at the top of my list. Yay! My Future Me is going to be very grateful to Present Me for being willing to include more exercise and stretching in our life.

Anyway, if you’ve ever been interested in learning more about yoga, but group classes seemed too ambitious or you didn’t want to over-commit, yogadownload offers some free classes or you can pay by the class or package if you don’t want to commit to a subscription. That said, the Elite membership is really a bargain.

In other news, possibly more exciting, I — for the first time ever — found an ending for Grace and Noah. I’ve had an ending for the book, a place where I thought it would close, and I’ve sort of had a scene in mind for Grace and Noah, but one of the reasons I’ve just been wallowing around in this closing third act for so long is that I didn’t see and couldn’t get to a HEA or even HFN (happy-ever-after/happy-for-now) ending to the romance. I think I found it on Saturday. Still not there, but it’s like sighting land at the end of an ocean voyage that’s been taking forever. So my other goal for the day — write lots of Grace! Get myself to that ending!