NaNoWriMo 2021 and ROW80 Round 4 2021 Goals

My NaNo Profile

It's time to put writing fiction back into the passion category in my life. 

I set it aside after the death of my husband last fall in favor of personal journaling and poetry.  Then when the opportunity to move into my own place came in mid July all writing got set aside for the chaos of packing up, moving and unpacking and setting up my own home for the first time in over a decade.  For the first time ever living alone since I went straight from my parents home into my marriage in 1976

See the latest photo essay of my new place, including writing station here:

Almost Home? A Photo Essay

Though they are calling it independent living I can't be left completely on my own with visual impairment, high functioning autism and mood disorder so I have a support system in place of social workers and caregivers.  The latter come several times a week to help with chores and errands I can't do correctly or safely by myself.  Things that involve stepping more than a dozen steps outside either door, hot ovens, knives or making messes I can't see well enough to clean up thoroughly enough to prevent them from attracting pests.  Like the ants me and my two caretakers had to deal with this past week.  UGH.

I was frustrated when it became obvious that my caretaker schedule was being increased from two to five days per week as I had been liking the four unstructured days in a row and thinking what a treat they would be come NaNo.  But then two weeks after the move chaos and tamed to the point the time I was spending on unpacking, sorting, organizing, cleaning etc and dropped from ten hour days to less than four and I still had not added writing back, I relearned an old lesson: I MUST HAVE STRUCTURE.

Without it I'm more likely to binge watch a series on Netflix for 20 hours than to write for my daily story fix.

And I remembered that most of my best writing has happened when I had MADE time to write when it was most inconvenient to do so.

Habits and Accountability are key ingredients.  

I could not let this be the first NaNoWriMo missed since 2004 so I'm jumping in even though I got no prep in for it and I'm jumping back into ROW80 mid round for community and accountability. I've also joined the Vancouver WA regional NaNo community.

For my NaNo novel I've settled on reviving an old flash fiction piece I posted in 2007 which I claimed at the time was the prolog to a novel I was planning.  Which was true but possibly left the impression there was something more substantial than there was because there is very little left in the notes that wasn't crammed into that flash fiction piece.  The rest was in my head and has continued to haunt me all this time.

This particular story is perfect for this NaNo though, not just because it is a ready made story concept that still haunts me but also because it's theme is the very thing I'm struggling with as a writer.  Right now.  

The very thing that has been preventing me from maintaining a consistent writing habit for years: self-censorship out of fear of loosing even more of the few human bonds left in my life.

This issue with truth telling became huge in the final year of my husbands life and then after he died when it became clear to me that my complicity had played a role in his alcoholic devolvement because I covered for him with family, friends, employers and landlords.  

That had been forefront in my mind the day I walked into his empty apartment a year ago and immediately started taking photos with intent to post. I was done with covering for him, done with whitewashing my life.

Then a week later his brother tells me that seeing those pictures on fb had broke his heart and then days after Christmas he died of a heart attack.

And I stopped writing again.  Even journaling escaped me for months.

Then a few weeks ago, even tho I'd not reread the piece in years, that flashfiction character began to haunt me and I knew that she had to come out and play for NaNo because she might be the only one who can give me back my voice as I had invested her with all the courage I wish I had.

I'm going to repost it right here because the old post has lost all it's formatting and I don't want to spend an hour fixing it.  I've noticed that in a lot of my old posts.  What is Bloggers problem? Beside the point.  sigh.

A Tale of a Wail

by Joy Renee

Her mother would tell the tale for decades of how Abigail Ames sucked in her first breath and released it in a vibrato wail, with no impetus but surprise and how it took her seven years to break her daughter of the embarrassing habit of howling in the face of the tiniest frustration.  And her mother had broken her well.  So well that she didn’t cry when at age eight, she watched her brother’s dog Griswald break the neck of her kitten Calypso while her brother, Darcy, stood by laughing.  So well that she didn’t cry out at age ten when Darcy and his buddy Curtis strung a rope over a high tree branch and put a noose around her neck and slowly tightened it until crying out would have been impossible anyway as simply drawing breath burned like fire.  When they lifted her into the tangle of leaves and branches and then let go of the rope so that she fell, breaking her right arm and spraining her left ankle, still she was silent.

Her self-enforced silence began the night of her seventh birthday when her mortified mother removed her from the dinner party after she let loose an endless open-mouthed howl when eleven year old Darcy blew out her candles for her and told her that meant he had just stolen her wish.  Her wish had been to someday sing the part of Annie in the Broadway musical.  It didn’t strike her that the transference of such a wish to her brother was a ludicrous concept.  All she had registered was the irrevocable loss of hope.  She was inconsolable.  So her mother took her to her room and lectured her on the protocols of social engagements and the expediency of stiff upper lips for young ladies.  Especially for a daughter of the Apostle of the Airwaves, Amos Ames, author of Daring To Profess. 

"If you simply must cry, then go somewhere no one can hear you.  And if that is impossible, then at least get off alone and put your hand over your mouth like this."  She placed Abigail’s own hand over her mouth and pressed.  "There, see?  You can cry as hard as you want and no one can hear.  Pretty soon you will learn to do it without even using your hand.  Once you learn to do it without screwing up your face into that unsightly mess, you can scream and cry and carry on in a crowd without even disturbing your make-up."

Abigail took the lecture to heart.  She never again cried out loud.  But nor did she ever again sing out loud.  Not, at least, until she was nearly out of her teens and too old to play Annie.  Darcy had stolen her wish after all.  The first of many precious things he stole from her.  And now he was about to take from her the last precious thing because he refused to take her years of silence in lieu of an oath of eternal silence.

"Swear on what, Darcy?"  she asked.  "On my purity?  On my honor?  You took those from me long ago.  And what point is there to swearing an oath to a man without honor?  It would be nothing but babble in his ears.  Easy enough to disregard on a whim."

Nor would an oath suffice.  Darcy had not gone to the trouble of tracing her after ten years just to hear her mouth a ritual phrase.  She doubted he, on his own, had the means to track her to this remote mountain cabin in Southern  Oregon.  But he had managed to get a message to her through the one childhood friend  whom she hadn’t the heart to cut loose of.  Nor would Darcy have gone to that trouble on his own.  It had to be on behalf of, and with the resources of, Curtis Christopher, currently campaigning for United Sates Senator in Idaho.  Darcy had been Curtis’ campaign manager for every election he ran in since his run for Class President his senior year of college.  Abigail had been privy to the inner-circle of that one, though still in high-school herself.  She knew that Curtis kept himself willfully ignorant of the tactics Darcy used to make things go his way.  She knew that their ambitions had been, from the beginning, to go all the way to the White House.  With stakes that high, there was only one guarantee of silence that would satisfy Darcy.

Darcy’s mistake was in thinking that she had spent the last decade cowering in this redoubt, nurturing terror and shame, with nothing more than a salacious tale to tell that could be spun as sibling rivalry, if she ever dared to voice it, an embarrassment that could be averted by a single stroke. He could not suspect that the timid, biddable Abigail had been preparing to sing on a stage dwarfing any stage her seven-year-old imagination could have conjured, for if he had he would not have attempted to back her into the corner that abutted that stage on one side and the abyss on the other.  

For, far from nurturing terror or shame, she had been cultivating a network and a name recognized for integrity and intrepid truth scrounging.  Trudy Ann Daring, Investigative Journalist and founder of TruthDaring.com, had created the stage on which she would sing.  And her tale was far more than an uncorroborated he said/she said family scandal.  She had proof--documented facts and the living, breathing truth, that last precious thing--Truth Ann Daring, not yet ten, sleeping that peaceful sleep of innocence--just this little bit longer--in the loft over Abigail’s head.

 _____________________

Those words are not to be counted in this year's NaNo of course.

The title of the NaNo novel is Truth Daring.  Yes it is part of the Fruits of the Spirit Storyworld.  And yes, Abigail was raised in the cult featured in that storyworld.

Now for my NaNo and ROW80 goals:

Just one really: Write every day of November in the Truth Daring file.  Give Abigail back her voice so she can give me back mine and hope that spending enough time channeling Trudy Ann Daring will rub a little daring off on me.

After I've established that daily habit, I will see about adding goals.  But from where I sit now I think it would be HUGE if that is the only goal for the entire month of November and I meet and maintain it.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: The Influence of Reading on Our Stories -- and a snippet

Thomas Covenant Trilogies

Several months ago I started reading Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series.  The first two trilogies are re-reads but I've not yet read the final quartet.  This rereading of the first six books had two purposes--to prepare to read the final four and to facilitate the rewrite of my story Blow Me a Candy Kiss, because I'd given one of my characters an obsession with it.

The first time I read it was the year the first one came out, the year I married.  I introduce Ed to it and he became as enthralled if not more than I and over the next decade or so that story colored all of our communication.  We found shorthand ways of saying what we were trying to say via everything from themes to metaphors to scenes.

Remember that Star Trek Next Generation episode where Captain Picard was kidnapped by an alien captain who isolated the two of them on a planet with a dangerous entity that would take cooperation to defeat and proceeded to use the situation as a way to teach Picard their very alien language?  That language was entirely based on knowledge of the stories of their culture.  Nearly the entire vocabulary consisted of phrases of this order: [Name of character] at [name of place].  Well that's how Ed and I once used the Thomas Covenant story.

Since I discovered that the story problem in Candy Kiss was the damaged communication between husband and wife, Iris and Greg, and because some of the themes in the story, especially those represented by Greg, are the same as those in Thomas Covenant, I decided it fitting to incorporate it into my story.  It gives me a lever with which to move them out of the rut they had dug for themselves.

I thought I'd share a snippet of the the current structural rewrite of the opening scene, incorporating advice from my beta reader and Hooked by Les Edgerton and showcase  how Donaldson's story is influencing my rewrite.

If you would like to compare the original 1990 version of the opening and/or see how the story ends:  part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5;

Blow Me a Candy Kiss [the beginning]

by Joy Renee

Turning the last page, Iris let the book fall closed on her lap where it settled the weight of despair on her thighs.  The lengthy expose of the foster care system by an investigative journalist had just quashed her latest (last?) hope of creating a family with Greg.

An indignation propelled surge of words swell in her throat, threatening to flood out of her mouth in a helpless harangue. How can an agency created for the best interests of the child actively discourage their foster parents from getting attached to the kids or allowing the kids to get attached to them? 

By policy no less! Love, they were told, was not their job.

What?  Are they trying to create a generation of sociopaths?

She desperately needs to talk to Greg about this and about where do they go from here--overseas adoption? open adoption? surrogacy? in vitro?  But the cost of any of them was prohibitive.

Besides, the fact of their childlessness was a topic they had talked to death long ago and buried under a tombstone marked TABOO.  

Yet it remains, a black hole to which all other subjects gravitate and  distort, leaving naught between us but the vacuum of my womb. She looked across the chasm separating them knowing Greg's face was hidden behind this weekend's fat novel.

After a brief glimpse of him laid back in his recliner with his book propped on his chest, she quickly looks away for fear the welling tears blurring her vision for the last fifty pages would slide free just as he happened to glance over the top of his book while turning a page.

Then he'd ask what was wrong or (guessing) not.  Which would feel worse?  Not something I want to find out.  

Either way, it's better to save the tears and rants for when she's alone.  For above all she couldn't bear to see his silent agony whenever he saw the sadness or anger overwhelming her--that look of pain and defeat in his eyes as his shoulders slump, his hands hang empty and impotent at his side and his eyes find anywhere to gaze but at her.

As she waited for her tears to dry and to be sure she had them well banked, she stared unblinking out the window beside her solitary seat in the loveseat-rocker--once one of their favorite weekend hangouts--watching the tops of the trees along the creek bordering their backyard converse with the sky.

Even the trees can shoot the breeze with the sky, while Greg and I can barely discuss anything besides the weather, aches and pains, or what's for dinner anymore.

Eying the whiplashed treetops again she noted that the predominant gusts seemed to be coming from the west.  She couldn't see the horizon in any direction so could not tell if there were clouds moving in on their summer-blue, heat-shimmered sky but the sensation of weight pressing down on the top of her head and pushing out from behind her eyes seemed more intense than what could be accounted for by the summer colds she and Greg were nursing on the only day of the week they both had off.

Sunday's and summer-colds.  Two things we can still share. Iris crooked her mouth in a grimace of irony.  All is not lost yet. 

"Hope it's not raining at the coast.  The girls were so excited about playing in the surf." 

As was she!  They were supposed to be camping at the coast with their parents and sisters this weekend but when they'd woke up Friday morning feeling miserable the others had gone on without them to soak up surf and sun, leaving Greg and Iris at home to soak up tissues and time. 

Greg did not respond as he'd started snorting and coughing just as she started speaking. Casting furtive glances toward him she sighed.  Not worth repeating.  What could he say anyway?

Staring at the cover of his hardback copy of Donaldson's The Wounded Land which blocked her view of his face she fumbled for something she could say that would prompt him to close the book on his finger or let it lay open across his chest so she could see his face.  How is it possible to miss so intensely a face that's in the same room with you?

What she really needed was to lay her head on his chest and listen to his heart beat as he talked about this story that had so enthralled him since his teens he'd reread the series from the beginning every time a new one was about to come out and from the beginning to the end of the second trilogy every two or three years since.  

Sharing in his enthusiasm for The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant had been an integral part of their courtship in their late teens. Reading the first trilogy through together the year after her high school graduation, they'd carried on impassioned discussions about the relationship between Thomas' two worlds and between them and our world.

They'd shared many such rousing discussions on numerous topics in the early years.  But not only had it been years since the last one, she couldn't remember when she last saw Greg roused about anything.  His reticence had gone beyond stoicism into implacable guardedness. 

He’s Colossus of the Fall, she thought, flashing on that iconic image from Donaldson’s Land.  Nothing represented his stance toward his world better than that monumental clenched fist of rock raised against a vast sky on the edge of Landsdrop, a ward against enemies of the land.  

Once this trait of Greg’s had given her comfort, a sense of protection against threat inside the circle of his ward. But of late she felt exiled from that circle.  When did I become an enemy to be guarded against? She wondered with a surge of adrenaline spiked surprise.

As she watched him find the corner of the page with his right index finger, she smiled at the memory of Greg's reaction to his professor's response to his essay analyzing the metaphors in Donaldson's series carrying the themes of shame, grief, regret, guilt and redemption.  She'd said that, though she hadn't read any of the books, she could not imagine such serious themes being so trivialized by wrapping them in the frivolous fantasy venue.  He was over-the-top outraged.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Flash Fiction by Joy Renee

That's me on the day before the 2007 Southern Oregon Library Closure.

This little flash fiction was written (and posted) in 2006. Years before my recent diagnosis of ADD.  Yet it is obvious now that's what's going on with Juneau.

That Was a Mistake

by Joy Renee

Juneau began to wonder if getting up was a mistake the minute she put her foot on the floor that morning and it landed in a squishy pile of cat barf. Her consternation was reinforced when she pulled an ice-cube tray out of the microwave instead of the bowl of oatmeal she thought she had put in there. She found the uncooked oatmeal in the freezer. And again when she sat down in front of the hot bowl of cereal with her mug of coffee only to find it was the jug of cream and she had put her freshly poured coffee in the fridge.

Things continued to happen to set off the warning alarms that it would be a mistake to leave the house that morning. But she had a couple of dozen library books and DVDs due that day and failure to return them would result in loss of library privileges until the fine was paid.

Now that would be the worst mistake of all.

So she plunged ahead, getting ready to go, maintaining her determination to stick to her plan even in the face of finding her hair lathered with shaving gel and her loufa lathered with shampoo.

Even when she forgot to zip up the backpack before she picked it up off the bed and all of the books and DVDs fell out and scattered all over the floor, she just methodically repacked them and grabbed up her sunglasses and sun visor and headed for the door. Out on the sidewalk she turned left and walked at a good pace for three blocks before she realized she was headed to the park where she liked to watch the ducks and swans while she read or wrote instead of to the library. Keeping her mind on what she was doing in the moment was one of Juneau’s biggest challenges. She would always rather be thinking about the story she had been reading or the one she was writing than about the curb that was coming up or even her next meal.

That is why she was hardly surprised to find herself sprawled on the ground having just fallen over a tyke on a small trike. Luckily she had not landed on the toddler and his mother was full of concern over her skinned knee and embarrassment with her son’s gleeful laughter.

“Oh, let him laugh.” Juneau said as the woman tried to shush her child. “He knows funny when he sees it.”

Her knee cleaned up with the damp paper towels the woman had brought to her, Juneau continued on her way. At the library things went surprisingly smoothly and she thought maybe she had been jolted into good sense by that tumble. But apparently it had just been that being in the library, handling the books and movies--the stories--was just one of those things that could manage to keep her in the moment where mistakes were more easily caught before they were committed.

One of the books had been so captivating she had to pull it back out of her rolling backpack as soon as she was out the door and sit on the bench under the cottonwood tree to read until it was brought to her attention by a series of convulsive sneezes that she had made another mistake in not noticing that the cottonwood was shedding its fluff.

When she discovered that she had forgotten to pack her allergy meds and eye drops, not to mention tissues, she knew she had no choice but to head home and hurriedly packed the book and her reading glasses into the front pouch of the backpack instead of in the roomier interior where the glasses could ride safely atop the pile of books. With visions of the books spilling out as they had done that morning, she thought it would be safer to not open the main compartment.

When she decided to hoist the pack onto her shoulders rather than pull it along behind her on its wheels, she thought she was insuring a safer return trip home for herself, the books and the glasses. But that was a mistake of monumental import she realized as she found herself laying in the crosswalk ten minutes later, having had to throw herself backwards to avoid being hit by a red pickup that had just run the red light. Of course it was a mistake not to have looked both ways before stepping off the curb the moment she saw the walk signal. But all she could think about, even as the bicyclist who had slammed on his brakes just behind her as she fell back and was now somersaulting over the top of her, was her reading glasses in the front pouch of the backpack which were now undoubtedly crushed. Even the realization that she could not move her legs was not as alarming as the thought of not being able to finish that story.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Excerpt from WIP

My NaNoWriMo Profile

As promised last week this is the excerpt from the WIP I'm returning to for NaNo this year.  Of course these words, most written in the early 80s while still in my 20s, will not be counted for the win.  Only new ones.

This was the only thing that survived our 2001 move in which was lost:.  All the world building notes and drafts of scenes, maps, floor plans, calendars, roster, character sketches, glossary, timeline, solar system charts.  This was all paper files as it was a decade before my first word processor and only the scene drafts that had reached a significantly polished state were ever typed.

Trilogy Title:  The Ward's Prevailing
Book I The Wailing Womb 
Chapter 1. The Mourning Mother
by Joy Renee

Warm is his body and alive. Secure in my arms, next to my heart. My son. Soft and supple his skin, deep and dazzling his eyes. Blue eyes that gaze into mine. Soul to soul a bond of love is forged. Stronger than the strongest steel. More enduring than diamonds.

To hold him, to touch him, to kiss his rosy cheeks, to caress the smooth skin, to lay my finger gently on his throat and feel the pulsing of his tiny veins and know that life is in him and that life from me. Passionately possessive I feel, ferociously protective. No harm shall come to him. I will prevent it with my life.

He is mine and only mine, I think, and yet know that he is his own and the Womb’s above all. And sooner than I wish he will break free into the private world of his own soul. He will assert his independence, leave my arms empty and yearning once more, declaring his dominion over the earth as all men have since the Advent. But for now he belongs only to me and the union of our souls is more passionate, more galvanic than that between a man and a woman, more profound than that between a soul and its Augmentor.

***********************************************

Mourna awoke. Tears washed out from beneath her lashes as she blinked her eyes open. Dreaming again. Such strange dreams. Thoughts so foreign to her that even the images and words used to form them had a strange feel to her as the dregs of the dream floated in her mind. Augmentor. She formed the strange word silently with her tongue. The word did not belong to her. But she still felt the emotion it conjured up. Awe and utter trust. And beneath that was the straining of energies harnessed and directed….

The images were fading. She could never hang onto them for more than the moments it took her to come fully awake. All that was left was the feel of an infant’s supple skin and blue eyes gazing into hers. And with these a feeling of desolation washed over her. She came fully awake then, crying out, “My baby. Oh my son, I want my son.”

And with the sound of her own cry she remembered, and knew she would never see him again. A wave of desolation inundated her. Even now Jamyl could be dead. But no, somehow Mourna was sure that she would know when Jamyl no longer lived. There was a bond between them, indefinable but indestructible. It had been there almost from the moment she became aware that life was growing within her. Jamyl had been torn from her arms, had been banished from the Body. But only death could truly separate them.

That death would come soon for Jamyl. A matter of hours. And with his death total desolation of soul for Mourna. Her soul wailed within her and instinctively she put her hands to her belly where so recently he had lain curled. A slight swelling still remained to testify to the truth of his existence. There was an ache in her womb and an emptiness. She felt the emptiness consuming her. Could she survive the death of Jamyl? Did she want to? NO! the answer screamed within her heart like the cold winds of the Season of the Far Suns. She must hold her son in her arms again or die! With that thought she sprang to a sitting position on her sleep-couch, every muscle tense, every sense alert. She must rescue Jamyl!

Why had she not thought of it before? Of course it meant defying the Body, but what more could they do to her? They had already banished her to the colonies of the Woeful. But what if she had to contend with the Defenders of the Body, that elite corp of guardsmen who would be guarding the Cairn of the Corrupt. They would stand guard until the Suns went down on the night of the Rain of Rocks. But there would be time, after they took shelter within the Body, to rescue Jamyl and find a place to wait out the Rain. She had the advantage of knowing the territory. She had done much forbidden exploring. It had never occurred to her to wonder how she had gotten away with that or even why she had had the urge to explore. None of her peers had ever displayed an interest in seeing anything beyond the confines of the Body.

With hope in her heart for the first time since that awful moment when they took Jamyl from her, she arose from her couch. Pulling her long fur-lined cloak around her shoulders she peeked though the flap of her tent door. She could see none of Zircon’s four moons from where she stood but there wasn’t enough expanse of sky in her line of sight for her to tell what time of night it was. She would feign sleeplessness and go out and talk to the Defender who stood guard at the camp’s fire.

She was about to open the flap when a tugging on her arm brought her attention to her pet Purryl. La’Zurra chattered agitatedly and commenced an acrobatic dance about the ten, finally coming to a stop on Mourna’s shoulder.

“Oh, so you wanted to come along and thought I had forgotten you, eh?” She scooped La’Zurra up and gazed into her multifaceted eyes. They whirled and seemed to spark, glowing an intense blue. Mourna had come to know the Purryl’s emotions by the color of it’s eyes. This blue meant happiness, excitement, hope.

‘It’s as if you know what I am thinking La’Zurra.: she whispered in her companion’s tiny ear. “I wonder do you think I’m mad to be considering such a thing? The Rain of Rocks is at dawn the next after this which leaves me only one Dur to retrace the steps I took in two. But I will think of something. I must! Shall we go out and keep the Defender company for awhile?

The night air was chill, a harbinger of the Season of the Far Suns which was nigh upon them. Earlier she had fancied she could see the two suns shrinking as they traversed between the horizons of Dawn and Dusk. With a shiver she pulled her hood up to envelope her face and with La’Zurra riding on her shoulder she headed for the cooking fires where the watchman would be keeping himself warm.

The light of Adze, the largest of the four moons, shed a ghastly red glow over the land like that of a conflagration. The huge red globe hung suspended from the sky, haloed by the pearly colors of Zircon’s ring.  ‘The arm of the Lord’ it was sometimes called, and ‘The Anger of the Lord’ and ‘The Eye of the Lord’. There were many tales to go with the many names and Mourna had always been fascinated by them but remembered the bard Khor’ol who had come with the merchants and supplicants at the beginning of the fertile season. He had been full of such tales and hinted at many more. She wished she could have listened some more but Mal’ys had said ‘Enough!’ he was irked by Khor’ol’s effrontery in bringing Purryls with his act. It was well known that Mal’ys had no affection for the little creatures. But whether he held them in disdain or disgust was debated. He strongly discouraged their presence in the Body. But even he, the Head, could not forbid it. It was said that any who harmed or intended harm to one whom a Purryl had attached itself to, would suffer similar fate.

Mourna had admired Khor’ol greatly. He had seemed to be speaking directly to her the whole time, as if he had been saying to her ‘We will not be strangers.’ she was mesmerized by his presence, entranced by the sound of his voice. She allows her memory to transport her back…back to that day so many Durs ago…

His costume is a voluminous robe shimmering with all the colors of the Ring. He sits on a pillow with his harp in his hand. His slender fingers move across the strings. The music he weaves with them swirls about him like a thing of substance. The Purryls form a circle around him. They begin to dance and to perform graceful acrobatics that seem to be both choreographed and spontaneous at once. He begins to speak. His voice, a resonant baritone, is controlled. The words are carefully chosen. The words, the voice, the dance of the Purryl, and the music, combine and become one entity--the story. Then a wondrous thing happens. The shimmering colors on the robe coalesce, become a moving picture which acts out the story.

It is the story of the Advent. Of a time before the Body. Of a time when there was only one, long hot season.  There was no fertile seasons or seasons of the far suns, no Rain of Rocks and no Ring.

A light appears in the night sky. A second light split off from the first. It seemed to fall out of the sky and disappear behind Mount Womb. Then everything was still, as before, except for the new light in the sky. A shimmering blue light, very much like the light of Laz. Why, that’s exactly what it was! Laz, the smallest and nearest of Zircon’s four moons.

As dawn lit up the horizon, two figures were revealed on the peak of Mount Womb. A man with star-white hair wearing a robe of red. Eyes of the same color as his robe shone like flame. His gaze was searing, passionate. He held the hand of a woman with ember-hued hair flowing long to her waist. She wore a robe of blue the color of her eyes. The blue of scintillating, sunlight-shimmer on deep waters.

They stood there, never moving, their faces towards the rising suns. As the red sun’s circle first peeked over the horizon they began to raise their arms over their heads, still holding hands. The light of their eyes pulsed in rhythm with their synchronized heartbeats. Two bodies, two minds, one purpose.

With that image held in her mind Mourna found her own purpose to rescue her son enhanced. And infused with a sense of power that evaporated the despair which had engulfed her since the moment they took Jamyl from her arms, she strode toward the Defender.

As soon as she stepped out from the protective embrace of the shadows among the tents, he swung his gaze towards her calling “Who’s about?”

“It is I, Mourna.” she called.

“It is late, Lady.” he admonished.

“That I know, sir. Sleep has departed from me this night.”

“We break camp at dawn. We must be sheltered by the First Watch of Laz next Dark.”

“Lord and Lady be willing.” she said.

“May they be.” he made the formula response, touching first his forehead then his chest. “For Head and Body’s sake.”

“Sad you must be to separate from your young one and her mother for this long season upon us.” she attempted to commiserate with him, but he stiffened his shoulders and looked pointedly over her head.

“The Body must be served.” he intoned.

“So it is said.” she heaved a huge sigh and reached up to caress La’Zurra who nestled contentedly against her neck.

“And so it must be.” the Defender completed the homely. “Lady, to resist the Body’s decree is unseemly. It can only lead to woe.”

She knew he referred now to her. It had been no secret within the Body that she had resisted the banishment of Jamyl. She had made no quiet protest. Her wailing and accompanying imprecations had resounded throughout the stone halls and chambers. No other Member of the Body could have acted so and expected to remain in the Body; for such behavior must issue from insanity and thus be cause for banishment to the Colony of the Woeful at the very least.

But Lady Maerfaum had at first received only mild reprimands and importuning from Mal’ys, until she dyed her white lock black and proclaimed her name no longer to be Maerfaum but Mourna--for she would never cease mourning for her son. Then, as Head of the Body, Mal’ys could no longer protect even the favorite of his son, Jharmyn naMal’ys, from the implacable Will of the Body. Even so he declared her banishment to be for one season only. If she showed herself to have repossessed her senses after the passage of time, she would be welcomed back into the Body.

Never in the Memory of the Body had such an exception been made. But never in the Memory of the Body had there been such a one as Maerfaum. With her bright eyes colored like sea mist shimmering in dawn light, with that white lock sweeping back from the center of her forehead that seemed to glow with an inner fire whenever light fell upon it, she was set apart from the Body whose members were uniformly black-haired and dark-eyed. Set apart also by her nature that swung to extremes like the very sea, Maer herself, among a Membership complacent and calm and predictable, she had early on received uncommon treatment from the Body. Nobody had thought to question it, nobody had thought to resent it, for the Head had Decreed it and the Head always knew the needs of the Body.

Seeking to draw the Defender into further exchanges, Mourna chose to ignore the allusions to herself in his words and instead, with an impish tone asked: “What then did you defy that you are banished to the Woeful?”

“Lady,” he said, his widened eyes the only sign of his alarm at her insinuation. “It is not banished I am. It is honored. As it was I who found you when I was yet but a Marsh-reaper, and presented you to the Head and Body, it is fitting that I take charge of your defense for the duration of your banishment.

“Found?” she whispered on an in-taken breath. “Was I not born of the Body as any other Member?”

The Defender froze in place, dismay dilating his eyes. Time stretched taut in the silence. “Forgive me Lady. I have forgotten my place.”

“You must answer sir. It unbecomes you to hide behind custom”

“I have said more than is proper.” his voice tightened on words gripped in a fist of formality.

Mourna felt his refusal as a blow. Her mind reeled, straining the bonds that moored her to sanity. La’Zurra chirped in her ear and she turned to gaze into the red maelstrom of the Purryls eyes and found her panic focused into a fiery crystal of anger that rapidly bifurcated as it enlarged to fill her mind. She turned her eyes upon the Defender and said “Tell me.” It was a command.

As his eyes met hers the crystal shattered and in its place was the answer she had sought. His memories, forced from him, assaulted her mind with a kaleidoscope of images, sounds, thoughts, all suffused with the volatile emotions of a boy on the verge of manhood. She whirled away from him and ran, uncaring where she went. He made no move to stop her. He made no move at all except a slow blinking of his eyes.

She ran heedlessly, blinded by a viscous fog of moiling emotions. If she was not of the Body, then who was she? Where had she come from? Where did she belong? She felt cut adrift as on a raft upon the Maer, far from the sight of land and buffeted by wind driven waves and rain, she crested a rise of land, a grass covered dune, and sighted the sea. Maer--oft-times home to her weary or troubled spirit. In a daze of despair Mourna unfastened her cape and let it drop to the ground unmindful of La’Zurra who chattered franticly from her refuge in the hood. The Purryl tumbled to the ground with a screech of protest that failed to penetrate the miasma of memories and emotions that possessed her mistress.

Mourna, having zeroed in on that one seemingly coherent thought, ran for the safety of the sea. She splashed through the surf until the waves tugged at her thighs and then dove into the breakers. She swam with a fury of futility until weariness weighted her arms and legs then rolled to her back and floated. The light of the stars, the moons, and the Ring laved the surface of the water and she imagined she felt their gentle caress upon her face. She allowed herself to be soothed by their aleatoric beauty, letting the colors fill her mind replacing the chaos of alien thoughts.

The filmy white cloth of the j‘mah, animated by the water, caressed her body.

########
(Glossary: j'mah is a loose-fitting one piece suit gathered at wrist and ankle by bands and at the waist by a girdle) This was the only Glossary entry that survived the loss of the file of notes and drafts because I had typed it directly into the manuscript.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Weird Sisters and Script Frenzy

William Rimmer's Three Weird Sisters

Wow time just got away from me today.  I've been so rapt (pun intended) up in my script I nearly forgot to post.

I wanted to provide an excerpt from the pages I adapted today but I don't know how to make script format in Blogger so I'm going to go post the excerpt on my profile at Script Frenzy where, last year at least, they preserved the format in their platform.

Here's the link to where that excerpt will live once I get it posted.  If it isn't there yet check back later.  It is interesting to compare the two versions side by side.

Meanwhile I am providing her the excerpt from my short story Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities which I'm adapting to film script.  The one story isn't going to be enough so I'll proceed on to Making Ragdoll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes when I've completed Of Cats.  Both stories feature the same three characters who I think of as my three weird sisters and the events in Rag Doll Babies take place a few weeks after Of Cats.

The reason for that will be made clear in the following excerpt

I've posted the entirety of both stories in serial outtakes before and the links to them can  be found here.


[Previous to this scene Faye had fainted in the back seat of her Chevy Belaire driven by her twin sister Julia and a passing state patrol car had escorted them to this diner where Faye had been brought in by the female officer and provided with a bowl of ice water and a rag by the waitress to cool her face and neck.  Meanwhile Julia and Faye's sister-in-law Wilma had remained outside to secure the car


This scene opens with Julia and Wilma arriving at Faye's table inside]

 “Well, land’s sakes Sister!  Looks like you’ve taken a shower with your clothes on.  Did that meter-maid have to throw water in your face to revive you?”
    “Really, Julia, you exaggerate.”  Faye lifted the cloth from her face.  “Try it.  It’s quite refreshing.
    “Thanks just the same, I’ll pass.”  Julia pushed the bowl of ice water away and slid into the booth beside Faye.  “A nice tall wine-cooler over ice is the ticket for me.  What an invention!  Even the name sounds refreshing.”
    “It will be the ticket for you all right.”  Wilma dabbed at a film of sweat on her lip with a fresh linen handkerchief.  “A ticket for drinking and driving, most likely.  As you are already called to the attention of the police it seems an unwise choice.”
    “Oh shwise, shmise!  A wine cooler has less alcohol in it than that cough syrup you swig.”
    “That is a prescription.  But you digress.  Driving under the influence of alcohol is against the law.”
    Faye was relieved to see the waitress approach. Those two could continue such exchanges endlessly, unsheathing insults like cats spoiling for a fight--or settling on ones lap to sleep.
    “I’ve orders to give you ladies first class service.”  The girl flashed a grin at Faye and with casual brushes at errant, rusty-hued tresses said, “At your command m’lady.”  Pad and pencil ready in exaggerated pose she deferred to Faye with elevated brow.
    Faye ducked her head to hide another blush, stammering her order for a cola and chocolate-cream pie.  What is it with these insinuating winks and grins implying non-existent alliances?  She only half-heard Wilma order unsweetened iced-tea, an unadorned bagel; Julia request cottage-cheese, fruit cocktail and the wine cooler she’d likely been jesting about before Wilma’s lecture.
    “So’s you know who to ask for, my name’s Sandra.  I work this here section.”  She encompassed the nearby tables with a wave and brushed at her hair again.  “It’s quiet now, but the dinner crowd’ll be here soon.  Be busy then.  But you ladies got my undivided.  Just wave.”  She gathered up Faye and Cassie’s iced-tea glasses and the bowl of ice water in which Faye had deposited the cloth.  With swift swipes of a damp rag, condensation rings from the glasses and splatters from the compress vanished.
    In Sandra’s absence Faye focused on the view out the window, afraid Julia or Wilma might see her discomposure and twit her.  Squinting at the sun-flashes off passing wind-shields, she recognized the Chevy by its distinctive outline rather than its garish color scheme, for glare reduced the purple to muddy gray.  A disparity kept her eyes straying to its silhouette--ah, no reflections of people or buildings on its windows as on other cars along the curb.
    “The windows are down!”  She turned toward Julia in alarm.
    “But of course!”  Julia replied.  “Who wants to return to that oven on wheels to the aroma of baked cat?”
    “A crack would have sufficed.”  Wilma said.
    “Toasted cat.  Roasted cat.  What’s to choose?”  Julia pulled the front of her tank-top out and fanned herself vigorously with a Nickel, a local want-ad paper she had picked up at the entrance where they were displayed under a sign proclaiming ‘FREE’ in foot-high letters.
    “But Sister, it’s inviting passersby to help themselves.”
    “Don’t be silly.  We’ve got clear line-of-sight.  If anyone did abscond with one of our fancy-sacks, how far could they get?  Relax!”  She gave Faye’s knee a constraining pat.
    Faye subsided into her corner, her ration of defiance spent.  She devoted attention to the Chevy, alert for any potentially suspicious move made by occasional passersby.  The trickle of late afternoon customers seeking refreshment and relief from the heat soon became a torrent, spilling off from the five-o’clock flood of pedestrians rushing by outside, impeding Faye’s view of the car--her brief glimpses abruptly cut off by pieces of bodies, purses, brief-cases, shopping bags.  She squirmed in her seat, leaned a smidgen left, right, craned her neck until it ached, all but stood on the seat to keep the car in sight.  By the time Sandra returned all moves had begun to look potentially suspicious so she was glad for an excuse to relax her vigil.
    Her view funneled between elbow and waist of an angular woman at a leisured amble amidst the hastening home-goers.  Faye watched her, intrigued by incongruities reminiscent of ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ games.  Spike-heeled sandals slowed her pace without detracting from the dancer’s grace of her carriage.  Golden curls cascaded down her back to pool in the hood of a knee-length black rain cape.  The cape, flung over the shoulder to free the right arm which supported a large canvas bag and held aloft an umbrella, flaunted a lining aglow in the sultry light with the hew of fresh blood.
    With rain-cape and umbrella on a warm, evening identified as the incongruity, Faye turned back to the Chevy.  But something niggled, fidgeting her eyes to the puzzling woman, whose progress was marked by the black umbrella displaying a pentagram delineated in a silvery substance that shot light-arrows into incautious eyes.  Like the last word of a crossword puzzle she couldn’t get because the clue wasn’t in her repertoire, the inconsistency continued to elude her.  Resigned, she shifted focus only to see the solution.
    As is usual when a woman of striking self-possession walks through a crowd with the svelte grace of a cat, many admiring glances were cast her way, but only from behind-those facing her kept their eyes carefully averted, except for one small child who gazed up at her with riveted awe in spite of admonishing tugs on the arm.
    Solving one puzzle created another.  Her insatiable need to watch people was shameless, but so seldom did she leave the seclusion of the estate, she must soak up sights and sound to savor in the solitude of long, somnolent evenings.  The novel and unique drew her, provided threads of exquisite mystery for weaving numinous dreams.  This woman would wander wondrous dreamscapes-forever faceless and eternally ethereal.
    Feeling regret nigh on mourning when she lost sight of the woman, Faye turned to her pie for consolation until Julia nudged her and jabbed her fork at the window.  “Will you look at that!”
    Faye looked and there was her mystery woman--cape, heels and umbrella, but now the umbrella was closed and dangling from it…
    “My bag!  The cat!”  Faye jumped to her feet, knocked her knee against the table, jarring the dishes into a jittery dance. X
    “She poked that umbrella in there, pretty as you please and out came the bag.  And staring straight ahead all the while too.  Cucumber-cool.”  Julia slapped the table and cutlery chuckled in counterpoint.  “She cased the car, walked by it three times.  I wish I could see her face when she finds out what she’s bagged!”
    “Aren’t you going to do anything?”  Faye was frantic.
    “What’s to do?  She hasn’t got anything valuable.  Let it be.  It’ll learn her a lesson.”  She ignored Faye’s attempts to get by.
    “One should not make a scene in public.”  Wilma cautioned.
    “Who’s afraid of a scene?”  I’d show you a scene alright if it’d been my boots she’d hooked.  Look, she’s coming this way.  I do believe she’s going to walk right in.”  Julia laughed
    Aghast, Faye watched the woman walk in, peer about, come right at them, and seat herself in a booth across the aisle.  The riotous curls framed an ancient face from which peered searing blue eyes like sapphires embedded in a walnut.  Withered lips parted over teeth like fine, white porcelain as she queried the empty air and nodded sagely at the answer.
    “Let me go talk to her.”  Faye begged an un-budging Julia.
    “Leave her be.  I gotta see this.”  Julia said.
    “It’s not polite to stare.” Wilma proclaimed.
    “It’s not polite to steal either.”  Julia said as Sandra brought coffee to the woman’s table and poured it without exchanging a word with her.  “Ah.  She’s a regular.”
    “Ladies.”  Sandra turned to them.  “Anything I can do you for?”
    “We’re fine.”  Julia answered, her eyes fixed on the woman.
    Sandra leaned close to whisper, “That’s Estelle Starr, a bit dotty but harmless.  Used to be a performer of some kind.  Shows up in Westmont last year and we took to watching out for her, but in such a way as saves her pride.  She’s partial to riding the bus ‘tween here and Vancouver.  Folk’s here drop tokens and coins in odd places she’s apt to be.  Fancies herself a witch.  Always muttering in rhyme and talking to invisible friends.”
    They watched Estelle’s animated conversation with her unseen seatmate, drawn by its dramatic expressiveness.  Julia’s mouth twitched with barely restrained hilarity and Wilma’s lips pursed with pent remonstrance.  Faye, quivering with indignation at her enforced impotence, had a mind to push Julia off her seat.  Such desecration!  All to satisfy Julia’s whim and sooth Wilma’s wounded propriety.
    “Westmont attracts her kind.”  Sandra went on.  “Ekcentrics, ya know?  We got a passel here abouts.  We’re partial to ‘em I guess.  One runs a cat ranch up on the ridge, drives this hotrod my kid brother drools over.  She’s a raycluse, doesn’t come to town much.  Even so stories of her doings would fill a library.  And if they’re all true she must be ancient cause my gramma tells some she heard as a girl…”
    Her attention riveted on Estelle Starr and the bag, Faye was barely cognizant of Sandra’s chatter.  Her feet fairly itched to march over there so she could spew out the words of accusation and condemnation that flooded her mind.  But helpless against the concerted front of Julia’s determination to be entertained and Wilma’s studied obliviousness, outrage withered and she sank in her seat with a sigh.  She filled her mouth with chocolate to calm herself as she watched Estelle fondle the bag--patting it and smoothing its creases.  Mesmerized by these motions Faye missed the moment she parted the lips of the bag to peer in.
   
    “There she goes.”  Julia’s voice conveyed a smug and eager expectancy.  Sandra broke off in mid-sentence and turned toward Estelle, briefly blocking Faye’s view.  Then with an exclamation of concern she was hurrying to aid a swooning Estelle as Julia gasped between exultant giggles, “Did you…ever see such…a sight for sore eyes!  It was better than I’d hoped!”
    At Fay’s incredulous, “For shame, Sister!”  Julia chocked back the giggles and managed to look chagrined.
    As Sandra rose from a recumbent Estelle to rush off, stuttering something about blood, paramedics, police and a Halloween Gagger Estelle stirred, muttering hectically.  Stray phrases reached their ears.  ‘…gouts of blood…the bloody business…wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep...craft celebrates pale…offerings…”
    “Methinks the lady suffers pangs of morbid guilt.”  Julia said.
    “As well she should for such mangling of Macbeth.” said Wilma.
    “Ah, our star speaks lofty words.”  Julia chortled.
    Estelle, struggling to sit saw her bloody hand and moaned.  “What hands are here?…Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?  No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”  She commenced rubbing her hands together as if under a faucet.
    “The wine of life is drawn.”  Julia intoned, baiting her.
    Estelle turned sharply with widened eyes, encouraging Julia’s merciless taunting:  “We the three weird sisters be.  Let us meet and question this most bloody piece of work, to know it further.  Was there warrant in that theft?”
    “Fears and scruples shake us.  In the great hand of God I stand.”  Estelle clutched the ill-got bag with defiant courage.
    “Your cruelty shames me Sister, have you no mercy?”
    “Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty!  Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse.  That no compunctions shake my purpose.”  Julia intoned.
    Wilma winced, “If you must misappropriate the lines, at least refrain from misquoting them.”
    “Thou marvel’st at my words, but hold thee still, things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”
    During this exchange, Estelle dared again to peek in the bag.  Her shriek quelled the incipient quarrel.  “Avaunt!  And quit my sight!  Let the earth hide thee!  Thy blood is cold.”
    Julia meowed like a tortured cat.  “Thrice the brindled cat hath mew’d.  it will have blood, they say, blood will have blood.”  Her voice became a cadenced growl.  “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and caldron bubble.”  At the sound of sirens wailing in the distance Julia chanted:  “By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes.”  Then to preempt further protestation from Faye or Wilma she turned to them with:  “I am in blood stepped’ in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
    Estelle was again agitating her hands. “Will these hands ne’er be clean?…Here’s the smell of the blood still.  All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
    “Now does she feel her secret thievery sticking on her hands.”  Julia mocked, not hiding her glee with this impromptu game.
    Estelle trembled at the sound of approaching sirens, moaning, “How isn’t with me, when every noise appalls me?…Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath those clamorous harbingers of blood and death…Out, out, brief candle!”  so saying she once more swooned.
    “Now you’ve done it Julia.”  Faye remonstrated.
    “Thou canst not say I did it.  Never shake thy gory locks at me.”  Julia shot back.
    Sandra returned, ushering in the paramedics.  “Still out poor thing?  What a shame.  You ladies may want to stay put for a bit.  The press is swarming out there.  They got word of another Halloween Gagger incident already.”

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Script Frenzy Begins

So Script Frenzy started at midnight. To my extreme surprise I had my 3 page quota by noon. I've spent the time I've been awake since late afternoon tweaking it and then trying to get it to display here in screenplay format which is apparently impossible. By using align center, quote and quote inside quote I got an approximation. The worst offender left is the dialog which is supposed to be only about three inches wide and indented so it is almost centered yet is still left aligned while the lines wrap after only 30 odd characters. There are supposed to be no blank lines between the parentheticals and the dialog but using the quote function creates them. The only thing I think might solve this is to insert each dialog from character name to end of speech inside a table to control the margins.

As I mentioned earlier this week I'm setting this in the story world of my 2008 NaNo novel, Mobile Hopes. Though much of the story I have in mind is not the same and some old characters will not be included while new ones will be created, I decided to start with one of my fav characters and use the interior monologue ramble I wrote in her voice--not as part of the novel itself but a 'get to know her' exercise--to open this script.

I liked it so much, I posted Gerta's ramble as a snippet of my NaNo novel in 2008. You can read the whole thing here. If you read both it and the script excerpt below you will notice that one short paragraph of the monologue has taken me to 3 whole pages of script. If that becomes a trend I should get 30 pages of script out of it. Then I could extend the script by adding to her ramble or using one or more of the other character's rambles.

Mobile Hopes

a screenplay

by Joy Renee

(excerpt)

EXT. MOBILE HOME PARK DAY


GERTA, an elderly woman with hunched shoulders sits in a wheel chair under a porch awning fussing with the buttons on a frilly silk dress. In her lap is a small pouch from which she pulls small wrapped candies and pops them in her mouth.

The sky is deep blue with very few wispy clouds. A heat shimmer rises off the asphalt of the lane meandering between two rows of trailer homes set so close together a tall man could reach out and touch his neighbor's house while standing on the edge of his driveway.

Intermittently are heard the pops, sizzles, crackles, booms and high-pitched whistles of fireworks.

A clash of music and voices eminate from boom boxes, car stereos and TV sets by open windows.

Dogs bark and growl. Cats hiss and yowl. Chases ensue between some unleashed ones.

Filling the air are hoots, hollers, honks, whispers, whines, whistles, small children's squeals and teen's screams, adult's laughter, pre-teen giggles, and voices of every timbre from soft as a whisper to loud as the calling across the lane from one porch to another.

Gerta sits next to a rail that is just a yard or two from the edge of the lane watching the action.

GERTA (V.O.)

(whining)

I don't know why I'm here. It's too hot. It's too crowded. It's too noisy. All those pops and whistles. The yammer yammer. And all those kids running and yelling.

(with disgust)

The mouths on them too. Land's sake. It's like they got not much more than a four word vocabulary and the first three are Me, I, and my. And the forth one. Land of Goshen Papa woulda made em chew the bar of soap! My skin wants to crawl right off me. I don't know why I can't just go home.

MONTAGE LANE GERTA'S POV


Children and adults of all ages stream in both directions at times forming eddies that hold in place as they stop to chat, allow their leashed pets, toddlers or babies in strollers to commune.

Children between 3 and 13 circle each other on bikes, trikes, scooters and skates. Teens over 13 travel in packs that swirl, coalesce and break apart with some walking backward in front of others.

The couples among them entwine arms or fingers despite the heat. Some walk with hips touching and hands inside each others back pockets. Sometimes a boy carries a girl piggyback.

Many of all ages are dressed in swim wear with towels wrapped around waists (girls and women) or necks (boys and men) or shoulders (small children). Those going one direction are dry while those going the other are wet.

The sounds of splashing and whooping come from the pool the other side of the back yard fence and of basketballs bouncing on the cement strip under the hoop just outside the pool fence.

Occasionally cars pass squeezing the others to one side. When two cars pass going oposite directions everybody on the lane has to wait them out on the nearest driveway or narrow strip of grass or gravel in front of the nearest trailer.


EXT. GERTA'S PORCH DAY


Gerta sucks on a hard candy, smoothing its celophane wrapper flat in her lap as she watches two preteen boys on bikes approach. The one in the lead is weaving all over the lane purposely blocking the other boy from passing him.

The second boy, younger than the first by a year or two, is forced to plant one foot on the ground to avoid colliding with the rear wheel of the bike in front.

BOY ON BIKE 2

(yelling in rage)

You're making us late you freakazoid! Mom's gonna freaking flip!

He bends to tie a loose shooelace as his brother rides circles around him, poking his back, ribs and butt.

BOY ON BIKE 2

Knock it off turd face!

(rising to grip handlebars)

Just you wait! You gotta sleep sometime.

BOY ON BIKE 1

(chants)

Try and die!

If you try, don't close your eyes!

Give me flack, don't turn your back!

Payback's a medevac!

Gerta fishes a wad of tissue from behind one hip extracting a small cat turd from it which she then wraps in the cellophane candy wrapper, twisting the ends closed.

As she focuses on this intricate task with arthritic claws, the upper plate of her dentures slides in and out between her lips.

She looks up as the first boy stops chanting and speeds ahead before his brother can remount. As he passes, she takes aim and pitches the cellophane wrapped turd at him. It hits his ear and falls to the ground.

He spins his bike sideways across the second boy's path, leaps off letting it fall as he rushes toward the other bike.

BOY ON BIKE 1

That's all she wrote Billy Goat!

He lowers his head and charges and with a flying tackle topples boy and bike, pummeling with fists before they hit the ground.

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Nudging That NaNo Muse

In last night's post I talked about switching out of the POV you are using for your novel into any of the others as an exercise in warding of writer's block. So, say if like me you favor limited third person you could switch to omniscient (which I discussed yesterday) where a global perspective of your story allows you to write about any setting, character, plot point, event, examine relationships among them, muse about theme. The point is not to generate words that will stay in the story but to keep words flowing and stay open to ideas that will inform future scenes, that may resolve a sticky plot issue or give you insight into a character's motivation and personality which will make that next dialog they participate in easier to write.

Speaking of getting to know your characters. A good way is to let them, one at a time, hog the stage for a lengthy monologue to rant, whine, piss and moan, preen, brag, gossip, muse, pontificate, remember, dream etc. etc. etc. This would be first person of course and not intended to stay in the manuscript. At least not right there where you detour away from the stuck place. But I believe they are fair game for NaNo word count. Its purpose is to keep the words flowing and get to know your characters.

I had good success with this two years ago with my NaNo novel Mobile Hopes. I'm going to repost Gerta's moologue here as an example of what I mean. Note the repetition of the phrase 'I don't know why...' That was another gimmick to keep the words flowing for every time I paused to think for more than five seconds I would start a new paragraph with 'I don't know why...' The whole think took little more than half an hour and at 1300 + is less than 300 words short of a NaNo daily quota. Since then I began to keep a list of phrases like that to give a character for their monologue.

Well, here it is. I confess I did subject it to some minor editing but for the most part this is what flowed off my fingers that night two years ago.

Gerta's Rant

I don't know why I'm here. It's too hot. It's too crowded. It's too noisy. All those pops and whistles. The yammer yammer. And all those kids running and yelling. The mouths on them too. Land's sake. It's like they got not much more than a four word vocabulary and the first three are Me, I , and You. And the forth one. Land's sake my Papa woulda made em chew the bar of soap! My skin wants to crawl right off me. I don't know why I can't just go home.

I don't know why that loony Lucy picked this dress for today. Too fancy. Don't see no need for fancy on such a hot day. A day like this Augustus would say no need for a dress atall. We would walk about in our birthday suits inside our house. The house we first lived in 1932 the year we married. And every house after that. There were four more in three different states before the house he built with the help of his brothers and my father that hot summer of 68. The house the sheriff took away from me last month. I don't know why.

I don't know why I can't just up and walk on back over there. It's not that far from here. I used to walk tween here and there all the time especially on hot days like this. Bringing the kids on down to the creek to wade and splash. But that was before they put in this trailer park and the malls and all those streets and painted lines on them and put up signs and signals. Stop Go Cross Don't Cross. If Agustus were here he'd say it was time to move on. House or no house. He'd build another if he had to. In another big field with acres separating us from neighbors. I don't know why he had to go.

I don't know why I don't just join him now. It were up to me I'd a been there before now. If that looney Lucy would drive me back home I could at least be in the rooms where we used to be together. Our house had big wide windows everywhere to let in the light and the breezes. Only air conditioning we had 'sides that was a few old fans. Didn't get the new fangled cold air blowers til sometime round the time that Bedtime for Bonzo guy got to move into the White House. Remember thinking How'd a guy with a dirty monkey get to move into that nice house. Agustus would have been gobsmacked by it but he was gone by then. I don't know why I hooted and pointed at the TV that day and told Agustus to look at that monkey's uncle now.

I don't know why looney Lucy won't let me go outside. Its too hot she says. What does she know about hot? I can see those trees moving. She can't tell me a breeze like that under the wide sky wouldn't be better than the stinky one that box in her bedroom window blows through this big tin can. I just might go anyway. I can wait until she is sitting on the floor in front of that ridiculously big TV with her nose trying to sniff her own butt crack and I'll say I'm going to the bathroom but I'll go out the back door. I don't know why I need permission from a looney Pee Lotta Teas teacher anyway.

I don't know why she doesn't cut that hair of hers. I've told her and told her til my teeth bout fall out that hair like that begs to be grabbed like a rope and swung. I tell Carl nearly every night he needs to take and drag her back to the bedroom with it. I offer to cut it for him if he'd only hold her down for me. I don't know why all he does is grin and say "What a card you are Grandma."

I don't know what he thinks he knows about cards. Now his grandpa. He was a card. That man would put worms in a peanut butter sandwich and serve it to one of the kids. Tell them that eating worms was how fish got gills so they could breathe under water. Only kid who ever fell for it and actually took a bite was Carl. The last of all our babies and grandbabies. He wasn't yet three that summer. I don't know why Agustus didn't wait til he was near about Kindergarten age like with all the other kids.

I don't know why Agustus couldn't watch his mouth around the babies. I don't know how many times I told him if I had to soap one more child's tongue for something they heard him say, I was going to stuff the bar in his mouth and make him chew it. Wasn't it that same day he gave Carl the worm sandwich that I came closest to doing it too? It was the summer we were building the house. It was the day Agustus dropped the roof beam on his foot. I heard him yelling clean out to the garden where I was picking green beans for lunch. I yelled back "What you want Agustus?" and Carl who was swinging on the tire swing hung from that tall maple yelled over to me, "Grandpa says 'Frost my balls' Grandma." I don't know why I didn't drop that basket of beans.

I don't know why these teeth won't stay in my mouth. When I fall asleep in this here chair, my head hanging tween my collar bones, I often wake to find them gone. Then the great denture hunt begins. Found them tween my titties once. Found them tween the cushion and chair arm many times. Once looney Lucy found them in the cats' water dish in the kitchen. I don't know why she thinks I put them there just to get her goat.

I don't know why she dotes on those three cats like they was her own born babies. Now Agustus he liked his dogs but I never once saw him kiss one of their noses. Nor hug on em like they was one a his grandbabies. He wasn't much for cats either. Said they were too fulla themselfs. Said they held thier noses so high cause they were so fulla of it and couldn't get their noses outta the stink. Speaking of stink. They used to keep that litter box right beside the toilet. No matter how much gagging I did while in there they couldn't be convinced to find a better place for it. Not until the day anyway that I lost my lunch along with my teeth right into it. I don't know why they couldn't find a better place to move it then the floor of their room right under the window the cooler sits in.

I don't know why they make such a fuss when I go out the door. That loony Lucy thinks she's my Mama or somethin always askin 'Whatcha doin Grandma?' What's it to her what I'm doing? What's it to her if I want to go sit on the porch and watch the hummingbirds swarming the flowers? What's it to her if I want to get out the hose and water the flowers? Leave it up to her and they would wilt. Just lay their heads on the grass and die. I don't know why a grown woman can't step out the door and get the mail without answering a hundred questions.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: An Exercise pt. 2

This is a continuation of last week's exercise and is again totally off the cuff and composed directly in Blogger:

Snags in Her Stitches

While spending the next half hour with an icepack held against her left nostril and her head hanging back over the arm of the couch waiting to be sure her nose had stopped bleeding, Jan surrendered to the inevitability. Besides now that there was blood on the thread there was no longer reason to regret slicing it to shreds. As soon as she was sure the sweater was safe from any further precipitation from her nose, she took it up again and bent over it and with the freshly washed seam ripper she began snapping the threads one by one.

She fought the sensation that she was slicing through her own veins, wincing with every sudden parting of a thread. Soon there was a small pile of tiny threads on the table. She lay the ripper down and cupped one hand around the threads, lifting the wastebasket up to the edge of the table but as she began to sweep the threads toward the basket she heard the sound of Barney's distinctive chatter--the one that meant 'I've got my eyes on you little birdy.'

The kitten was on the back of the couch with its head poking through the blinds. Jan set the wastebasket down and brushed the thread into her hand instead. Then headed for the back yard fence from which sprouted three or four bird feeders. She lay her fist full of thread on the roof of the largest. Now she could at least imagine them serving a purpose instead of just rotting in a landfill.

As she turned to head back to the steps she looked up into the tree to try to spot one of the nests just in time to receive a nitrate filled 'thank-you' smack on her sixth chakra.


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I borrowed Jan from this little flash-fiction exercise from 2007. Gave her the same task I'm currently engaged with.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: An Exercise

I'm tired of my own excuses so I'm going to combine advice gleaned from Rick DeMarinis' book which I've been reading all week, and John Daniel's workshop which I attended last week, and recent personal experience of which I've been blogging all week into a fiction writing exercise.

This may or may not ever be incorporated into a story--thinking that is supposed to relieve the pressure to perform. But if it ever were, the autobiographical elements would be less thinly disguised.

So here goes. Totally off the cuff and composed directly in Blogger:

Snags in Her Stitches

Jan held the seam ripper poised over the purple sweet pea stitched on the front of a heavy knit sweater. There was no way to save it. She had given four hours to an effort to fix the snags put into her carefully laid stitches by Barney's kneading. When tacking down, adding cover stitches, pulling to the back with a crochet hook, and combing the stitches with her fingers had not worked she had attempted to remove the stitches one by one, preserving the thread at least. But she had only made a mangle of loops out of her once smooth satin stitches. She was going to have to cut them out.

Sweat beaded on her lip and the bridge of her nose as her hand hovered over the stitches. So much was riding on this. She hated the waste of the yard or so of floss nearly as much as the thought of undoing her carefully laid stitches. But time took precedent now. She was doing this project for her landlord in exchange for a month's rent and had promised to have it done by the end of the month.

Her hand wavered a bit as she aimed the ripper at the flower. It wasn't just the loss of thread and of her work unnerving her. What if she snagged the yarn of the sweater with her ripper? Just as Jan inserted the prong of the seam ripper under the row of carefully laid stitches her glasses began to slide on the sheen of sweat and she raised her hand to push them back in position, with the same hand she held the unsheathed seam ripper.

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I borrowed Jan from this little flash-fiction exercise from 2007. Gave her the same task I'm currently engaged with.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: Script Frenzy Wrap-up

I was so wrapped up in that crochet project yesterday I forgot to prepare my script for submission to the word-count verifier. Not that I was close to a win or anything but I did want to get an 'official' count. My rough estimate of my page count is 30-40 pages of sceenplay format. The Celtix script program I'm using says it is 64 but I know that over half of that is still untransformed from the plain text that I pasted in straight from the two short stories.

The Celtix ap allows me to highlight a paragraph and then select from a menu of formats: Action, Character, Dialog, Paranthetical, Slugline etc. After I got flummoxed by the sections of my short story that were thoughts and memories in Faye's head, I started picking through the stories for the dialog sections and transforming them to script. It is ninety percent mouse work. A page of dialog from the short story becomes approximately two pages in script. I've completed the dialog for the first story and about a sixth of the dialog from the second story. So I'm fairly sure that the two stories together would have easily made a 100 page script--the quota to win Script Frenzy.

But then there are whole paragraphs of the narrative from the stories that probably need to be cut. I left them in the script because of their info content--info that is important to plot, motive or theme that I need to figure out how to get into the script in proper format. I have to keep reminding myself that a script is not a story but instructions for how to tell a story in sound and image.

Overall I'm pleased with what I accomplished in this my first Script Frenzy. I may not have reached the quota of 100 pages but I reached my main goal which was to begin to learn the script format and get a feel for how scripts differ from narrative fiction.

Will I participate again next year?

Maybe. I still want to learn both TV series and stage play formats. So it might be worth it for that purpose. But I would have to find an alternative to Celtix for that as it is only for screenplays.

That question and answer was off the cuff and I learned as I typed them that my heart isn't really in it. The script format is not where my passion lies. But I'm willing to consider that is mostly because I'm still fumbling around in it and if I were to get fluent as it were, I might feel differently. Right now working with script format turns the editor in me on red alert and she then bullies my muse into a wimpering wolf chewing on its own leg.

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Friday Forays In fiction: NaNo Snippet

I finally have a snippet from my NaNo novel I'm willing to share. To set it up here is the synopsis I posted at NaNo:

Set in a mobile home park Mobile Hopes features the lives of a dozen or more separate families through the summer and fall of 2008. Each family is living its own crisis that is impacted by the current events of July through November. From the immigrant family hoping for citizenship to the family forced out of their foreclosed home in the suburbs hoping for another chance at the brass ring, they epitomize the American Dream and breathe life into the headlines.

The concept is to create a novel out of a collection of short pieces--short stories, vignettes--so that a weaving together of a community is witnessed through the eyes of at least a couple dozen individuals. Each individual is undergoing challenges and crisis that are exacerbated by the current economic crisis.

My snippet is an internal monologue from Gerta who is 97. Born on the 4th of July around 1914, she is old enough to remember when women could not vote in America. She has been widowed over thirty years and has just recently had to move in with her grandson and his wife after the house her husband built for their family was put up for auction by the state for back taxes.

Note: this is still very rough and unfinished. I have never shared a fiction piece that was this raw and relatively unedited before. I don't know why I'm so eager to do so now.

I Don't Know Why

by Joy Renee

I don't know why I'm here. It's too hot. It's too crowded. It's too noisy. All those pops and whistles. The yammer yammer. And all those kids running and yelling. The mouths on them too. Land's sake. It's like they got not much more than a four word vocabulary and the first three are Me, I , and You. My skin wants to crawl right off me. I don't know why I can't just go home.

I don't know why that looney Lucy picked this dress for today. Too fancy. Don't see no need for fancy on such a hot day. A day like this Augustus would say no need for a dress atall. We would walk about in our birthday suits inside our house. The house we first lived in 1932 the year we married. And every house after that. There were four more in three different states before the house he built with the help of his brothers and my father that hot summer of 68. The house the sherrif took away from me last month. I don't know why.

I don't know why I can't just up and walk on back over there. It's not that far from here. I used to walk tween here and there all the time especially on hot days like this. Bringing the kids on down to the creek to wade and splash. But that was before they put in this trailer park and the malls and all those streets and painted lines on them and put up signs and signals. Stop Go Cross Don't Cross. If Agustus were here he'd say it was time to move on. House or no house. He'd build another if he had to. In another big field with acres separating us from neighbors. I don't know why he had to go.

I don't know why I don't just join him now. It were up to me I'd a been there before now. If that looney Lucy would drive me back home I could at least be in the rooms where we used to be together. Our house had big wide windows everywhere to let in the light and the breezes. Only airconditioning we had 'sides that was a few old fans. Didn't get the new fangled cold air blowers til sometime round the time that Bedtime for Bonzo guy got to move into the White House. Remember thinking How'd a guy with a dirty monkey get to move into that nice house. Agustus would have been gobsmacked by it but he was gone by then. I don't know why I hooted and pointed at the TV that day and told Agustus to look at that monkey's uncle now.

I don't know why looney Lucy won't let me go outside. Its too hot she says. What does she know about hot? I can see those trees moving. She can't tell me a breeze like that under the wide sky wouldn't be better than the stinky one that box in her bedroom window blows through this big tin can. I just might go anyway. I can wait until she is sitting on the floor in front of that ridiculously big TV with her nose trying to sniff her own butt crack and I'll say I'm going to the bathroom but I'll go out the back door. I don't know why I need permission from a looney Pee Lotta Teas teacher anyway.

I don't know why she doesn't cut that hair of hers. I've told her and told her til my teeth bout fall out that hair like that begs to be grabbed like a rope and swung. I tell Carl nearly every night he needs to take and drag her back to the bedroom with it. I offer to cut it for him if he'd only hold her down for me. I don't know why all he does is grin and say "What a card you are Grandma."

I don't know what he thinks he knows about cards. Now his grandpa. He was a card. That man would put worms in a peanut butter sandwhich and serve it to one of the kids. Tell them that eating worms was how fish got gills so they could breathe under water. Only kid who ever fell for it and actually took a bite was Carl. The last of all our babies and grandbabies. He wasn't yet three that summer. I don't know why Agustus didn't wait til he was near about Kindergarten age like with all the other kids.

I don't know why Agustus couldn't watch his mouth around the babies. I don't know how many times I told him if I had to soap one more child's tongue for something they heard him say, I was going to stuff the bar in his mouth and make him chew it. Wasn't it that same day he gave Carl the worm sandwich that I came closest to doing it too? It was the summer we were building the house. It was the day Agustus dropped the roof beam on his foot. I heard him yelling clear out to the garden where I was picking green beans for lunch. I yelled back "What do you want Agustus?" and Carl who was swinging on the tire swing hung from that tall maple yelled over to me, "Grandpa says 'Frost my balls' Grandma." I don't know why I didn't drop that basket of beans.

I don't know why these teeth won't stay in my mouth. When I fall asleep in this here chair, my head hanging tween my collar bones, I often wake to find them gone. Then the great denture hunt begins. Found them tween my titties once. Found them tween the cushion and chair arm many times. Once looney Lucy found them in the cats' water dish in the kitchen. I don't know why she thinks I put them there just to get her goat.

I don't know why she dotes on those three cats like they was her own born babies. Now Agustus he liked his dogs but I never once saw him kiss one of their noses. Nor hug on em like they was one a his grandbabies. He wasn't much for cats either. Said they were too fulla themselfs. Said they held thier noses so high cause they were so fulla of it and couldn't get their noses outta the stink. Speaking of stink. They used to keep that litter box right beside the toilet. No matter how much gagging I did while in there they couldn't be convinced to find a better place for it. Not until the day anyway that I lost my lunch along with my teeth right into it. I don't know why they couldn't find a better place to move it then the floor of their room right under the window the cooler sits in.

to be continued...

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