Fall
I'm going to miss the Pacific Northwest, more than I care to think about at the moment. Fall is starting to settle in, the first good rain after a long goodbye to summer; the smell of wet grass, and dripping pine trees, being able to buy pumpkin and apple-cinnamon bread mix again. Normally I'm overjoyed to see fall coming. Halloween is on the way, the kids are back in school and I can have a semi-normal writing schedule, these are all fantastic things. This year won't mean driving to my hometown for Halloween, where bobbing for apples still takes place at the fire department. It's going to mean moving. On top of that, it seems I'm usually moving during Nanowrimo. This usually means I don't manage my goal.
National Novel Writing Month is always inspiring, and daunting, and chaotic, and when you add trying to drive from one side of the US to the other, it becomes an almost impossible task, the last two years I didn't even try, but this year, I'm going to give it a shot regardless. This will hopefully succeed in teaching me to write anywhere, instead of the slightly obsessive-compulsive habit of needing my own writing space.
If I am completely incapable of doing, or at least making a dent in, the project it is bound to push me off the deep end, so come the end of November my posts may be those of a mad woman rather than the only slightly sane one I am now.
Single Paragraphs
So I seem to have a major problem with single paragraphs. I went through my writing files, something checked off on the to do list at least, and found that I have a massive quantity of files containing single paragraphs. Am I alone in being in love with the single paragraph? Are other writers just as addicted?
Case # 1
"Murder?" I looked through him, as if he were as transparent as the wings on the dragonfly bouncing against the window. It's funny the things you notice when something happens, those few seconds where time shifts. I walked around him looking out the window, at the small life that was haphazardly throwing its existence away trying futilely to enter a world that it couldn't have. I thought about it for what felt like hours, but passed in mere moments before I felt his hand come around my waist. We aren't really much different from that dragonfly are we, all reaching for what it isn't possible to have. I pushed open the rain spotted glass letting the incandescent insect in.
I have abandoned this paragraph for so long that I don't quite know what it was born to be. Yet I save it, because someday it might be something, at least that's what I keep telling myself. So is there an island for misfit introduction paragraphs, those miscellaneous hook devices toyed with then abandoned? Or do they belong in the graveyard of files kept for later?
Case #2
The palms of her hands were moist, dripping with deception. Calm down she coaxed herself. Her long auburn hair fell haphazardly into her face, she brushed it away. It wasn't really that bad. Her subconscious desperately wanted to get through to her, make her realize just how horrible she had become.
This poor lonesome paragraph has been left to gather dust for so long that I had to double check to make sure I wrote it.
If nothing else, at some point, I will gather all my little forgotten and mistreated paragraphs together and breathe an ink life into them and tape them inside some journal to be kept and loved.
Toe socks
There is something about toe socks that makes me smile like a child at the fair getting cotton candy for the first time. Each time I slip the banded outrageously colored creations on another fairy gets their wings.
They also make it easier to write.
I think I've already established that being a writer coincides with being slightly out of your mind, but if not I'm fairly sure that this will seal the deal.
There is something magical about toe socks that make it easier for me to write, they're like hot apple cider in the fresh fall morning, they're a comfort.
So for now I'm off, to slip my feet into toe socks and work on my newest project. I'm sticking fairly close to my newly produced goals, given there were a few days off for my sister to have her baby. :)
