A Writer's Musings

WFMAD - Aug 11. 941 words

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:10:35 GMT

Today's prompt was about making bad choices. I moved from Dawn's story over to my "Funny Thing Happened" story - this takes place after a family of 3 (plus dog) were teleported across the universe to another planet - and a teenager's attempt to be "normal" again.
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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
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I hadn't really gotten very far in my physics homework when my lab partner sent me a text. Being on this planet was cool – everyone had cell phones and text messaging was sort of the standard. It worked differently than back on Earth, but I didn't really worry much about the details of it. I plugged words into a gizmo. That gizmo sent those words to the person I wanted to see them and they answered back to my gizmo. Just because the gizmo sent the words to a contact lens instead of to a handheld device's screen didn't make it any less a cell phone and text messenger, right?

So, anyway, like I said, I was just starting my physics homework. Everyone thought I would be a physics whiz because of my dad, but I just couldn't get into it. Sure, the math was easy, but it was basically boring stuff. Physics here was enough like physics back home that there wasn't really anything new. Now biology! That was cool. But, back to physics. Yeah, I know. I get distracted.

I was working on a momentum problem – there was supposedly this spaceship that moved by exploding bombs and using the thrust to push their rocket along – when my contact rang with a text message. I'd forgotten to turn my contacts off. Dad wasn't the only space cadet in the family. So, instead of just letting my earring take a message – yes, that's where the storage was. Hey, you try to get 32 gigs of storage into a contact and you'll see why putting it in an earring stud makes sense. You use the post as the antenna for the blue tooth... except they called it red eye here.... anyway....

Jack texted me. He said there was going to be a flashmob at the local caffeine joint in 12 minutes and was I going? I wasn't supposed to bother texting him back – I was supposed to show up and text 10 other people. I didn't know 10 other people here on this planet yet. Well, I did... but not that I would text for a flashmob. There was my dork brother and a couple of his friends.... a few guys at school... that kid I met at the convention we popped into on arrival here.... not many others.

So. Was I going? I had this mountain of homework in front of me. I was supposed to be watching my dork brother – even though he was really old enough to watch himself. Ever since we arrived on this planet, Dad had been all protective and stuff and that meant I had to know where either my Dad or my brother was at all times. It seriously put a crimp into any dating possibilities that might arise. Not that any were showing up in the near future or anything.

My contact rang again. It was Xrecti with the same flashmob message. I clicked past that text and cleared the screen...uh, contact. Handy when the mouse is your eyeball and you click with a blink, huh? I really wish I could take some of this tech and get back to Earth. I'd make a million. But I couldn't get to Earth and I couldn't get a date and I couldn't get away from the laundry that was piling up here just like it did on Earth and...and... dammit yes! I was going. I'm 17. I can make my own decisions! And besides, I could use a cup of coffee... uh, tleca... whatever it's called here. I'm short of caffeine, so how was I supposed to do my homework, right?

I blinked and rolled my eyeball, bringing up my contacts list. The heck with that – I took the message that both Jack and Xrecti sent me, hit "forward to" and chose "random contacts, number=10." 10 of my friends were going to get the flashmob invite.

30 seconds later, I grabbed my sneakers, purse and scooter keys and was out the door. 90 seconds after that I was driving my scooter and again forgot to turn off my phone. My contact rang, and it was my Dad. Instead of letting that one go to my earring, I answered it.

Bad choice. The cops here are real hardasses about driving and texting. Their computers alert them to who is "distracted" while driving and out come the bubble-gum lights and on go the sirens. Damn.

So there I am, pulling over less than a block from the caffeine joint, reading my Dad's oh-so-fatherly harangue while tuning out the cop and watching my friends drive past to the flashmob. Again, bad choice. I should have signed off from Dad, let it all go to the hard drive and retrieved it later. I should have given my attention to the cop. I should not have watched Xrecti drive by, and catch his eye. Innocent enough with an earthling, or at least a human-derivative species. Xrecti was a squid-derivative species. He has to focus on what he's doing. If he gets distracted, startled, or upset, he inks. And if he hasn't inked in a while – don't ask, it's not a polite thing to talk about I guess... something that teenage Xrecti's take care of in the shower or something – anyway, if he hasn't inked in a while, it can get really messy. And I distracted him.

It took the HazMat team over three hours to get us, our vehicles and the surrounding half block cleaned up. And yes, the cost for the clean-up, and the ticket, is coming out of my allowance.

Two days of writing here. WFMAD 8 (505) and 9 (609)

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:40:43 GMT

I didn't feel like posting yesterday. Anyway...

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
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The prompt: Write about a childhood breakfast.

Mother and I got up very early that morning, found our flashlights and pails that we had set aside next to the camper door. The sun was just starting to hint its imminent arrival far away to the east as we slipped on sweats over our pajamas. We stuffed our feet into our knock-around sneakers, the ones we wore when hiking along streambeds, and made our way up the trail we found last night.

We tried not to make any noise, but it was impossible to stop the giggles once they started. So we just hurried as best we could and scooted up the trail and away from the campsite so as not to wake Daddy. He was probably awake anyway and feining sleep, just to give us girls the time we needed to "surprise" him on his birthday. He was good like that. He even let me continue to believe in Santa Claus until just last year, even though I'd know since I was six that it was really Daddy under the beard.

We wound through the underbrush and found the side trail off the main path only because Mother had marked a rock with chalk the night before. Pushing past the brambles for a couple of hundred feet, we broke out into the open just as the clouds were getting rosy with new sun. We almost didn't need our flashlights any more, which was good because we'd need our hands free to pick the abundance before us.

There were raspberries and blackberries everywhere. They were as big as my thumb and jucier than anything I'd ever seen in a grocer's. My pail didn't fill quite as quickly as Mother's did, nor were her lips as berry-stained as mine. But we had plenty of berries for what we needed and knew we could come back again should we need more for later.

We made our way back down the trail and set about making breakfast. Mother stirred up the fire while I made the pancake batter. By the time the coffee was percolating and the bacon was started, we took pity on Daddy and "woke him up" so he could officially start his day.

Mother moved the bacon to a platter, all brown and crispy, to drain on some paper towels. I brought my pancake batter over and scooped a ladelful into the spitting hot bacon grease. I put too many berries in the pancake batter, and they didn't cook right – we ended up having bowlsful of pancake-and-raspberry pieces instead of good ol' flapjacks on a plate, but they were good. You didn't need butter or maple syrup on them, because the blackberries did the job. The blackberries were too big and didn't even stay in the batter for long, but sort of simmered in the bacon fat until Mother fished them out and into our bowls. A little bit of a squish on the hot berries made a fresh syrup right in the bowl over the crispy pancake bits.

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LHA's writing prompt: "What crazy, ridiculous huge life-changing thing would your character do if s/he were guaranteed it would be successful? What fear is holding her/him back from trying? Show the tension between the character's dream and fear in a scene with a person who brings out the worst in your character."

In starting this writing session, I just let my fingers type what they wanted and then let it morph slowly into a recognizable scene. Like I said, this is raw, unedited, stream of consciousness sort of stuff. If it ever sees the light of day elsewhere, it will be edited... but this is basically an exercise in getting to know my MC better. My WIP is told in a lot of flashback - from the present back to the 1940's. This section is in the 70's - and I don't know as if it will make it into the book at all. But it's good for me to know that this happened. I know my MC better now.

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What crazy huge lifechanging thing would my character do? Wow... at 15, Dawn only dreams of being a writer and is doing that every day anyway. She's successful as far as she can tell – she'll work on school newspapers, major in journalism in college and so forth.

However, somewhere along the way she got sidetracked. She ended up leaving college early to get married. She had only the one child, but she was a good "60's Mom" and stayed home until JoAnn was in school... then yearned to go back to collge. That would have been possible, if her husband had lived. He was sent to Vietnam as a war correspondent and was killed in 1967. The insurance didn't pay for much and Dawn was left with a mortgage and a young daughter to raise – so she went to work at the newspaper, editing copy and working her way up to be a damn good administrative assistant to the editor. However, she always wanted to write those stories – see them published and let others enjoy her characters.

So... setting is Dawn's workplace. It's late in the day, after deadline has come and gone for this issue and Dawn has a moment to breathe.

The old reporter's notebook was calling to her again. She had left her characters just at the beginning of a wonderful love scene and knew that she should some day get back to it and let them live out the joys that she could never herself have again. It was tempting... and with her work basically done for the day, she figured it was as good a way as any to spend the next half hour before clocking out. She took out the notebook, turned a couple of pages back from where the action needed to be picked up and reminded herself about the mood and setting she had left her characters in. She had just picked up her favorite pen – the old fountain pen that she had to actually fill and clean on a regular basis, not the cheap ballpoint that she took dictation with – and was just about to launch into the scene when Phyllis came up to her desk.

"Whatcha doin' there Dawn?" Phyllis' gum-snapping eastern diction always grated on Dawn's ear. She always had a way of sticking her nose into other people's business right when it was so spectacularly not wanted. It was as if Murphy himself whispered in her ear and sent her on errands to do his Law's bidding. She was also the assistant editor, so certain niceties needed to be maintained.

"Nothing important, Phyllis," said Dawn, closing her notebook and capping her pen. "What can I help you with?"

"Oh nothing..." Phyllis eyed the notebook. "Are you doing some investigative reporting that will break the city wide open?" Phyllis laughed. Dawn didn't join in. Niceties were fine, up to a point.

"No. It's nothing for work."

"Oh, you're doodling at your stories again?" asked Phyllis.

"Look, it's really none of your business..."

Phyllis' eyes hardened. "If it's none of my business, then it has no place in this business site, does it?"

Dawn's mother had said three good breaths were an important way to keep your job. Dawn never really understood that until she worked here. She took those three breaths and three more. "I'm sorry. Is there anything I can do for you then?" Dawn started to put the notebook back between the dictionary and the Elements of Style books when Phyllis grabbed it. Dawn stood up.

If she could have gotten away with it, Dawn would have slugged Phyllis as hard as she could.

More Dawn - WFMAD 6 Aug, 521 Words

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:13:08 GMT

I totally ignored Laurie Halse Anderson's writing prompt and kept working on my Dawn book. Need to do some more research here - but I like where this is going.

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
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Dawn watched as the Army trucks rumbled up the long driveway from the front gates. Security had been getting tighter lately; there were no trips into town scheduled for the next few weeks, at least. Anything that had to be gotten from town was sent for and the Army would pick it up. Probably. The PX was stocked full, so there was really no need to go into town for basic groceries. And it wasn't as if Dawn went into town very frequently anyway. But the thought that she couldn't go if she wanted to made her feel more cooped up than ever.

It was also very hot. Midsummer in New Mexico tends to toward the hot-and-dry side of things, but the drought was just making everything worse. Combine that with the cooped up feeling that everyone seemed to feel and it made tensions run a bit high. So Dawn understood why her father actually raised his voice and yelled at her. Understanding it didn't make the hurt of it go away though.

She hadn't meant to eavesdrop on their conversation. It's just that the stairway was one of the best places to catch a breeze on those hot days. With everything open, any sort of cool air would come in the downstairs windows. All the hot air would leave by the upstairs windows, and that caused a steady stream of air to come right up the stairs as the circulation wound through the house. Dawn's characters were in as much of a mood as she was, so she abandoned her hot sunny writing nook in favor of reading of some Arthur Ransome on the stairway.

Just as the Swallow, a little sailboat in the Ransome book, was getting a hole knocked in it, Dawn's father came home. Dawn barely heard him usher Dr. Oppenheimer into the sitting room – the water was rushing into the Swallow faster than Dawn could bail the words past her eyes – so she perhaps can be excused for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Soon the Swallow was safely on shore, Captain John and his brother and sisters were lamenting the damage, and Dawn's attention suddenly shifted to the voices drifting up from below.

"We're ready to go ahead with Trinity." Dr. Oppenheimer's quiet voice rumbled. "I've discussed this with the military and we've set the date for the morning of July 16th. "

"I see, sir." That was Dawn's father. He had never lost his grad-student's deference for Dr. Oppenheimer, even though they were technically colleagues now. "What can I do to help, sir?"

"I want you to be one of the men with me at the test site, John. I need your expertise – and your fast fingers. We're going to be gathering a lot of data very quickly and I don't want to lose any of it."

At this point, Dawn could hear the tap-tap-tap of her mother's heels on the kitchen linoleum. The house was small enough that she could work in the kitchen and still be mostly a part of conversations in the sitting room.

WFMAD - Aug 5. 542 words

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:46:17 GMT

For those just seeing this, I am joining Laurie Halse Anderson (halseanderson) in WFMAD (Write Fifteen Minutes a Day)

The writing prompt today was use one (or both) of two odd words Laurie had pulled out of the dictionary. I continued from yesterday's WFMAD thoughts. So, again this is for a book I'm writing on growing up at Los Alamos during the Trinity test in 1945.

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
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There were times when Dawn would get all settled into her writing nook, pen filled, paper ready, feet propped just so, and the words refused to flow. It was rare, but it did happen. Often it was just after she had finished a story and her characters were all settled into whatever "ever after" they were now living, if one can say that fictional characters "lived." This was why she often stopped in the middle of a section, because her characters would chatter inside her head, driving her back to the page to continue writing. Leaving off in a "settled section" allowed the characters to get lazy. Comfortable characters were boring characters – they wanted to stay where they were and resisted all writing attempts to get them to move onto the next chapter.

But there were times when the writing was just done. Sure, that's when the editing could start, but Dawn preferred writing to editing anyway. There were times, at the end of one story, that the characters or places or ideas were still ready to keep going. That's what would start the next story. But sometimes the end of a story was really the end for a while.

That's when Dawn would drag out the Big Dictionary. It was the 1934 unabridged edition of Webster's New International Dictionary and had over a half-million words in it. Dawn loved to browse through the pages, diving into the words and swimming within the pool of language that was her playground. Other kids her age thought she was a little odd, which, when you have two scientists for parents wasn't all that surprising, but Dawn loved to read the dictionary. Just read it. Not even have a word to look up. Not have a destination in mind... just find a new word and get to know it. Really know it. And if the words in the definition didn't make sense, well... the dictionary was right there to help. Dawn flipped open to a random page and found this:

DWALE: [In sense 1, a variant of DWELE n., = OE. *dwela, dweola, dwola, dwala, error, heresy, madness; in sense 2 app. aphetic for OE. edweola, -dwola, etc. error, heresy, madness, also heretic, deceiver; f. ablaut-series dwel-, dwal-, dwol-: see DWELL v. Cf. OE. dwol- in comb. ‘erring, heretical’, and Goth. dwals ‘foolish’.]

A noun. So someone or something could be a dwale or... be in dwale. You say someone is in error, so you could say someone is in dwale. But it also seems to carry a sort of religious meaning, with the heretic stuff. Hmmm.... how could she use this in a story? And then she had it. The next time she had a story where a character was mad, a liar, and pushing the madness into heresy, she would name him Mr. Dwale. Sir Edmund Dwale. Sounded like a stuffy old math teacher in a Scottish boarding school. Hmmm... and what would make Mr. Dwale a mad heretic? Maybe there was a ghost haunting the school, and....

Dawn's mother had to call her three times before the outside world broke through long enough for Dawn to realize that three hours had passed and another notebook was filling up with her stories.

WFMAD - Aug 4. 465 words.

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:31:22 GMT

Prompt today was to write about your writing area. This is for a book I'm writing on growing up at Los Alamos during the Trinity test in 1945. Since my main character is a writer, I thought I'd write about HER writing area.

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
====

Dawn loved to write. She never felt like she had writer's block. A blank page was a challenge not an obstacle. Filling the page with words was like nothing else in the world to her. Seeing a story come together in front of her eyes was like smelling brownies as they are baking; the smell fills your head and drips down to your mouth and you can practically taste the chocolately goodness right out of the air. Writing was like that to her. Putting word after word onto the paper, filling her head and her heart with people and places and goings-on... it was as if she could travel anywhere with a stroke of her pen.

Dawn's favorite place to write was up in her bedroom on a sunny afternoon. Their little house on Bathtub Row in the middle of Los Alamos was one of the nicer homes in the compound. Her father's job, the fact that her mother was one of the few female scientists and their friendship with Dr. Oppenheimer secured the house they now had. Looking out her south-facing window, the New Mexican summer sun streaming in, Dawn would watch dust devils and sun-shimmers play across the landscape, seeing them transform into actors on a stage for her to enjoy. It was as if she only had to watch the play and capture a transcription of the action in front of her.

Sitting on her favorite ottoman, the purple carpeted "Mehitable the Sittable" that Dr. Oppenheimer had given her for her fourth birthday, Dawn propped her feet up onto her desk and leaned her back onto the wall in the corner. Scooting the chair around to be within reach, she arranged her favorite pens on the seat next to some extra notebooks that just came in from town. Dawn had just enough time before dinner to finish the story she had started in Civics class today, but you never know when inspiration would strike and another story would announce itself and demand its own place in a notebook.

Getting comfortable, legs at just the right angle for notebook propping, pen newly filled and ready to go, Dawn read over what she had scribbled down this morning and let the scene form in her mind. The sun was hot on her lap, but this bright wonderful corner was the best place to capture the stories as they danced by on the breeze. Her mother would complain that Dawn's posture was getting worse by the day because of that corner and why didn't she ever use the desk as it was intended instead of a foot-rest? But this was the way Dawn wrote. It worked for her, and even at age 15, she knew enough not to mess with success.

WFMAD - Aug 3. 878 words.

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:58:19 GMT

Prompt today was to write about making a meal - man I've got some weird things in my head. This is set in yet another story I'm working on called "The Sideways Universe."

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
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Like everything else in the Sideways Universe, preparing and eating food takes some getting used to. First of all, remember that the three dimensions you are used to are a bit screwed up – the X, Y and Zs that you remember from geometry class are P, D and Q here. And while digestive systems which were made in our universe can deal with things here in the Sideways, the trip that the food takes is... well, let's just say it's different.

The first thing I noticed when we went to the kitchen was that all the walls were very brightly colored. Shades of what we'd call orange and yellow were splashed up against bright pink. The walls also shimmered with what I found out later to be UV paint chips. I felt as if I were being bombarded by an exploding paint factory. Marta, my host, sauntered in and I could see her shoulders relax as she entered this chaotic room to start preparing our meal.

"I wish you could taste the walls as I do," said Marta. "It's so calm and homey in here."

"Taste the walls?" I asked.

"Sure. I've worked with enough of your kind to know that you have to actually touch things to your tongue to taste them. That's so weird. Me – I can taste things just by looking at them. You, for example – you taste salty to me. You must be a scientist."

I wasn't sure how to respond to this. Tasting things by looking? That sounded like the brains here were rewired too. "So... how can you hear things?"

"Oh, that's easy," replied Marta. "My skin catches the sound waves and I feel what the waves are doing. You only have your little ears to hear with, yes?"

"Uh... yeah. This is weird. So... you see tastes. You feel sound. I'm not sure I want to know how you smell and feel..."

Marta just laughed. "Look, everybody goes through this adjustment at first. And we all make allowances for it until you get the hang of things." She put some purple strands of something into a bowl and poured a thick, brownish liquid on it. If I were in my own kitchen, I'd say it was like making oddly colored spaghetti and marinara sauce... except the marinara looked more like thin peanut butter. She put this bowl onto what looked like a stove and turned on a burner. A three-sided splash shield raised up around the bowl and black flames enveloped it. I could hear bubbling and started to smell the food as it cooked. It had an odd, nutty sort of garlic-touched smell, with a hint of lavender somewhere along the line as well. It didn't smell like anything I'd ever smelled before, and by this time I was hungry enough to eat just about anything, no matter what it was like.

"I'm not sure you want to eat with me quite yet," continued Marta. "I'm used to seeing how you folks eat, but I'm not sure you're ready to watch how we do it."

"Now you have me curious," I said. "Look, I'm an anthropologist. I've studied lots of different cultures and peoples and seen some of the weirdest things on Earth..."

"But you're not on Earth any more, remember?"

"I know. But I think I can keep an open mind. At least, that's what I've been trained to do."

"All right," said Marta, a little skeptically. "Don't say I didn't warn you." She pressed a button on the stove. The black flames faded away and the splash shield retracted into the cooktop. She picked up the bowl in her bare hand – I was about to warn her it was hot, but she had not problem with it.

Marta then took two plates, or at least what pass for plates in this universe. They look flat enough to the uneducated eye, but the centers contain more gravity than the rest of the dish. This keeps all the food moving toward the center and staying on the plate no matter how you hold it. I'm still getting used to things like that, even now.

We reclined against the wall – this universe's way of sitting at a table – and each took a plate. Marta scooped some purple spaghetti for each of us, and I watched it scoot automatically to the center of each plate. She then gave me one chopstick-like thing and told me to dig in. The chopstick acted more like a spoon than I was expecting and my first few bites were quite messy. But the food was good. Really good. It was more meaty tasting than I had expected; a sort of lobstery steak kind of taste with a garlic toast feel. It helped when I didn't look at it, as my eyes kept expecting it to taste one way and my tongue was telling it an entirely different thing.

After I got used to my food, I looked up to where Marta was reclining and eating. She had unbuttoned her shirt at the midriff and tied it back out of the way.... and she was putting the long purple strands one at a time into her belly button. I almost lost it right then.

WFMAD - Aug 2. 536 words

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:29:13 GMT

Prompt from Laurie Halse Anderson was to look at a yearbook page (she had one posted) and write whatever feelings it evoked.

I looked at one of my Jr. Hi yearbook pages - oh so helpfully posted on Facebook. It's here. I'm the one in the upper left corner. And it brought out some good emotions.

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
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"You'd be so much prettier if you were a little thinner..." "You know, if you lost a few pounds, you'd look great." "You were always a big girl...." "You'd have such a great body, if you only...." "You would... if only.... but...."

Damn.

Looking at the yearbook photo now, she saw herself as a girl who sure, could have lost a few pounds and not missed them. But she was nowhere near the obese kid she felt she was. As a teen, she was probably 10 to 20 pounds over the recommended weight for her height and age – but she could buy clothes in most stores and not worry about having to go to the "fat girls' store."

"You'd look so great in this outfit, but it only goes up to a 10... ah well, maybe next year?" "Your chest is so big, I bet the boys are after you... they will be if you just had a thinner waist to show it off better." "Why are you wearing that baggy sweater? You'd look so great if...." "You'd be so pretty if...." "Your figure would be a knockout if only...." Her dad always had a way to put the barb within the compliment – to put the pain within the proud parent's offhand comment.

And it's not like her dad was an Olympic runner himself. He was a 300 pound plus person himself, and a lot of his genes were showing up in her. Her older brother, who went into the Navy, had the luck of getting their mom's metabolism – the "eat what you want and still lose weight" sort of metabolism. And her? She felt that she could look at a commercial of cheesecake and put on pounds.

Combine that with the dinner rules – you must eat everything given to you, you must try every dish with at least two big bites, you may not leave the table until your plate is clean – and you can see how she would have a few screwed up thoughts about food, body image and self respect.

If she had a time machine, she could go back in time and tell her preteen self a few things. "Your dad had his own issues, and he had no idea really how to be a parent," and "Don't take what he's saying to heart... he means well, he is just very clueless." Best of all, she could take her dad by the scruff of the neck and drag him from 1975 into today where he can see just how much weight she is carrying now. How much her sense of self is defined by food – and how screwed up her body image is now.

She felt so fat back then – and that was reinforced by so many negative images coming in. Now, she has the 300 pounds that her father carries no longer. In fact, once they put the oversized coffin into the ground, she will turn her back on her father, her past, her pain – and find a way to live. To claw herself out of the living coffin that she is carrying – and try make it back down to the weight she was when she thought of herself as fat.

WFMAD

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:20:52 GMT

WFMAD = Write Fifteen Minutes A Day.

Two rules:
1) Write 15 minutes a day every day.
2) That's it. No word count, nothing big... just write every day.

I'm taking the challenge that Laurie Halse Anderson has put out there and am going to attempt to write 15 minutes a day every day. I may post bits of it here. I know this is my "NaNoWriMo persona" but hey - it's a free account I've already got set up so why not?

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Note: all stuff written here is mine (warts and all). It's probably first draftish stuff, and hasn't seen the inside of an editor's head yet, so be warned. And also, please don't steal it. Thanks.
====

There are some days when I wish someone had invented an automatic translator so you could understand your pets. I mean, I always wonder what our dog Max thinks when my brother sneezes lightning around him. Does he think "wow... what a cool light show" or is he scared to death and just not admitting it?

Now there's a thought – do dogs, or cats, think like that? That would be so cool to figure out. Do they put on a "cool" face just to impress us? Well, cats might... I don't think dogs can. Dogs wear their hearts on their sleeves, well, if they wore sleeves anyway. It's in their tails. It doesn't matter if I've been gone for three days or three minutes, Max is right there by the front door, tail thump-thump-thumping to see me.

Do we just interpret that as happiness when it's really something else? Maybe they're just hungry all the time and they associate us with their food. You know, sort of like what Pavlov did. No, wait... then they'd be drooling, not thumping, right?

And when the sneeze-lightning happens, Max is all like "so what?" and goes back to sleep usually. He didn't at first, but he's used to it now. Like the rest of us. I just wish my brother could do it on cue. It's not like he sneezes lightning every time he sneezes... only when he's around Max. And the lightning only goes around Max. Hmmm... maybe there's a research project I can do on that – it might be one way to get my grades up in this school here.

That's another thing. School back home I could deal with. I knew how to read the teachers and give them what they wanted, so I could put out the minimum amount of work and still get the A's that Dad knew I could get. Darn that stupid IQ test when we were kids anyway. And I've tried to tell him a hundred times that IQ and grades don't necessarily correlate – that there's lots of research out there to prove that and besides, IQ tests given at that young age are bound to be way off. He listens to my arguments, and then systematically, scientifically goes about knocking down each roadblock I try to put up. Like the age thing... we've been given IQ tests of 7 different types and each one is "within an acceptable statistical variance." Which means that it's basically the same IQ each time. And when your IQ is that high, and you actually do know how to get A's, then those A's better be coming home from school on a regular basis or have a good reason why they're not. And "because I didn't like the teacher or the subject" is not a good reason. I found that out one semester.

So anyway, I'm good at getting A's and doing very little work for them. It's mostly because I'm a really good people reader. And I know what teachers want and how they write their tests. It got to be so easy to take some of those tests that I would not even need to read the chapter – all of the answers were hidden within the test itself somewhere. You just had to know how to read it.

But here, on this planet, I have aliens for teachers. I have no idea how to read them. Or rather, I'm learning how to read them. And they don't give multiple choice tests! They quiz you one-on-one and test to see exactly how well you understand the material. I mean, is that fair? How am I supposed to laze around and just pass when I actually have to work? And it's not just reading a book here – to study about anything, you actually do the thing. Like build a real bridge that you have to ride your own bike over or write a Syndarctic poem. (I had to read about three dozen of those before I even had a clue as to how they were different from Protolarean poems.... both of which are all the rage in this part of the galaxy.)

Another badge and more stuff

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:11:56 GMT

I am claiming the "...and" badge because I have quoted song lyrics (twice) and am writing out contractions in this draft. I'll put back the contractions in the next draft, but for the wordcount, I'm grabbing all I can. Yeah, it's cheap but so am I.

Anyway, if you want to see another scene or so of what I'm doing...

Sarah Jane was tired. Constantly. She fell asleep on the train. She fell asleep during staff meetings. She even fell asleep at lunch, in the middle of a sentence. It was starting to affect her work and her supervisor, Daniel, called her into his office to discuss it.

"I know you have been having a hard time lately, Sarah Jane," started Dan, indicating that Sarah Jane should take one of the seats in front of his desk. Dan was a proponent of gentle management, and he came from around his desk and took the other chair, so the power of his position was lessened during the conversation. "Can I do anything to help?"

Sarah Jane just shrugged. "I am just having a hard time sleeping lately."

"Not sleeping?" asked Dan. "Have you talked to a doctor about this?"

Sarah Jane struggled to not roll her eyes. Talked to a doctor? She had seen more doctors in her life than a person really ever should have to see. Her current medical staff included her primary care physician, her dermatologist specialist – she had occasional keretoses, or non-cancerous bumps, that had to be burned off with liquid nitrogen – her dentist, optomotrist, gynecologist, and of course her social worker, her psychiatrist and her endrocrinologist. These last two were either working together to concoct a melange of drugs that would pacify the demons inside Sarah Jane's skull or using her as a living laboratory to see what a human body could take. Sarah Jane was never sure.

At her last appointment, Sarah Jane finally told Dr. Hill-Gupta that her sleeping problems were back. "I am always waking up at 4:13, every night, no matter what," said Sarah Jane. "It does not matter if I am dreaming or not, I just wake up."

Dr. Juli Hill-Gupta was Sarah Jane's fifth shrink in four years. Two were removed from her case because of family issues, one moved out of town and the latest went a bit odd himself. Sarah Jane's case worker finally requested a new psychiatrist for her when Dr. Jansen could not stop talking about some particulars of Sarah Jane's case... even when he was in public. He never mentioned Sarah Jane by name, of course – but he seemed to be tranferring symptoms and projecting parts of Sarah Jane's case onto almost everyone he saw. Dr. Jansen was sent on an extended vacation with hopes of being able to take up his practice again soon.

Dr. Hill-Gupta joined Sarah Jane's stable of doctors just three months ago. In that time, Sarah Jane had seen her 8 times and each time Dr. Hill-Gupta had the staff endrocrinologist take blood samples with the express idea of changing Sarah Jane's medications yet again. Sarah Jane, of course, did not speak up about this to Phyllis, her social worker, because to do so would probably mean that she would get yet another doctor...one who might be yet again even worse than the chemistry experimenting doctor she had now.

"So, you are waking up at 4:13, are you?" Dr. Hill-Gupta had the bedside manner of a squid, and they were not anywhere near a bed. Most people have Hollywood ideas of what a shrink's office visit is like. They think you lay down on a couch and stare at the ceiling, talking non-stop while a wise old white-beared man takes copious notes and nods his head, sometimes asking that one pointed question that moves your therapy along at the prescribed pace. Sarah Jane's experience was wider than most people, but it was not until she started seeing Dr. Hill-Gupta that she actually laid down on a reclining leather couch like they do in the movies. Dr. Jansen had an office with comfortable chairs that Sarah Jane could burrow into and not say a thing all hour if she wanted to. Before that, Dr. van der Meer's office was one where you sat on the floor and there were cushions of every shape, size and color scattered all over the floor. Dr. van der Meer would include that day's choice of cushion in his notes as if that meant something about his patient's state of mind at the time.

Sarah Jane's favorite shrink was Martha. Just Martha. Yes, her full name was Dr. Martha Fitzgerald, and there were a bunch of letters after her name on anything official, but she was just Martha to Sarah Jane. She was Sarah Jane's first shrink, and if things had worked out differently, Sarah Jane might either still be a client of hers or, as was Sarah Jane's fondest dream, finally cured. Martha was killed in a freak car accident when Sarah Jane was 17 – an accident that Sarah Jane had the terrible misfortune to actually witness.

"Yes, doctor, I am waking up at 4:13. Every night this past week. It is all in my journal." Sarah Jane kept a meticulous journal, not because Dr. Hill-Gupta asked her to, but because she had found it quieted her mind. If she had a place to keep the thoughts that were wizzing around and around in her head, some place safe so the thoughts knew they would not fly off and get lost, then the thoughts would settle down and stay in the journal and not keep swirling through her head. It was something she had done since Martha had died, and Sarah Jane liked to think that maybe Martha would have approved.

"So, what do you think it means, this waking up thing?" Dr. Hill-Gupta asked this question very seriously, but Sarah Jane saw right through it. It was an expected question, number one on the list of Expected Questions Psychiatrists Ask Their Patients.

"I do not know, doctor," replied Sarah Jane. "Nothing really. I just wake up."

"And this 4:13 thing. Why 4:13? Does that have any significance to you?"

"None that I can think of, doctor."

"Ahh. Hmmmm...." Sarah Jane could hear the tap, tap, tap of the tip of the pen cap on the doctor's startlingly white teeth. "4:13... what time did your bus get home from school when you were junior high, Sarah Jane. Was not it about that time?"

Sarah Jane could not quite stop a groan from escaping. They were going to rehash The Incidents again. "Good god, I think she has got a sick voyeuristic fascination with this stuff," thought Sarah Jane very very softly, almost afraid that Dr. Hill-Gupta could hear her very thoughts. She let out a deep sigh and got ready to dive back into the morrass of that pain again.

Streng Wittchomber grabbed his whistle and let out three short blasts. These were followed by one longer one, a pause then a repeat of the three short and one longer. A second pause and a final set of three short blasts and one long and he let his whistle fall back to his chest. Three morse code "V's" was the miner's signal to go fast and deep, to dig for all they were worth until the foreman blew the "take a break" code of three sets of a short followed by a long blast. Dit dah, dit dah, dit dah. Morse code for a period... or a stopping point.

Cadence Strippleworth came jogging up to Streng from where he had been working repairing a cart, eager Streng was sure, to get to digging finally. "Boss, can go?" Cadence's enthusiasm was almost painfully innocent to Streng's experienced eye.

Streng looked the boy up and down. There was something about him that made Streng keep him out of the deep mines most of the time. His clear bright voice was one sure asset, and Streng turned to that again as the best way to use the boy's time. "Call a song for the boys, Cadence. Call... let us see..," and Streng listened to his muse once again. "Call out 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for the boys – can you do that Cadence? Make it the full dance mix too, if you can. This is going to be a long push, but damn it is going to be worth it."

Cadence was clearly disappointed, but he knew that arguing with Streng was as good as arguing with a wall. So, he took his water bottle, because he knew his throat would go dry before the end, and stood at the top of the shaft. Already the men were calling for a song to keep them in sync with each other, promising Cadence the first pick from each of them for the Call. Cadence took a deep breath and began.

"Is this the real life-
Is this just fantasy-
Caught in a landslide-
No escape from reality-
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see"

Dr. Hill-Gupta nodded sagely, as if Sarah Jane could see her. "And the boys would put MTV on, rather loudly, right? So that your mother would not hear what was going on?"

Sarah Jane just sighed in response. The strange part was that she still liked most of the songs of her childhood, no matter what other events were associated with them. It was the overly dramatic songs of rock and metal hair band ballads that would bring on the most pain. Especially when a song kept running around and around in her head. Like those stray thoughts that needed a place to rest. Like now... she had no idea what sparked a Queen song to start spiraling through her head. And as the song kept winding inexorably through the increasingly odd lyrics, the pounding of the beat started manifesting into the pounding of a headache. She put a hand up to her forehead.

"Sarah Jane? Are you all right?" Dr. Hill-Gupta shifted forward in her expensive padded leather desk chair with six wheels and adjustable head rest. The first time she had seen it Sarah Jane was surprised it did not have a seat belt. "Sarah Jane?"

"I... I am all right doctor. Just a slight headache starting," replied Sarah Jane.

Dr. Hill-Gupta pushed a button on her multi-buttoned phone. There was a buzz, followed by the soft "Yes, doctor?" of the receptionist. Dr. Hill-Gupta sent her compliments to Dr. Lazarus, and could he step into her office immediately please? Within moments, Dr. Benton Lazarus, the endrocrinologist, was there, taking various samples, while Sarah Jane's headache just continued to grow and grow to the point of a migraine. No remedies were offered until this round of vials were filled. Then, Dr. Hill-Gupta had an orderly come and take Sarah Jane to a "Quiet Room" where she could rest and take the current cocktail of cure-alls that Dr. Lazarus wanted to try this time around. At least the Quiet Room truly was quiet, and the lights could be turned off and the door could be closed and even locked from the inside. Sarah Jane was sure there were keys to the door on every Doctor's key ring, but the illusion of a locked door was as comforting as the illusion of medication.

"It will not help," thought Sarah Jane. "It never does."

"Have you talked to a doctor about this, Sarah Jane?" Lights came back on to Sarah Jane, as she suddenly rushed back to the present. It took her a moment to reorient herself and she took a breath, grounding herself in the now of reality.

"Yes, thank you Dan, I have," said Sarah Jane quietly. "They are doing everything they can to help."

"Good, good..." said her supervisor. "Is there anything that we can do here to help? Change your hours around a bit? Shift your duties some?"

"No. No thank you Dan. I am fine, really." Sarah Jane tried to put all the reassurance she did not feel into her words. "I will get past this soon, I just know it."

"Well, look... if you need to take a few days off, just to catch up, I know we can handle things here for a bit. Would that help?"

"I do not think so Dan, but thank you." Sarah Jane was horrified at the thought of losing her routine, her one grip on the reason she needed to stay in reality. "If I change my mind, I know where to come, all right?"

Dan looked relieved. "All right. But look... do not be a martyr or anything. If you need a nap, then go ahead and grab one. We can put a cot in the archives room and you can make up the hours any time. OK?"

"OK, Dan. And thanks." Sarah Jane got up and out of the room as quickly as she could. Bohemian Rhapsody was starting up again.

Oh... BADGE!!!

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:17:22 GMT

I almost forgot. I decided that I've earned a badge.

That's the "Caffeine Abuse" badge - earned by "consuming dangerous amounts of coffee, tea, or caffeinated soda in your quest for 50K.

Yesterday was election day - and Starbucks was giving out free "tall" coffee to anyone who voted. I have an official mug from them - it's "vente" size, and I brought it along hoping that I could (a) do my part to save the environment from one more used paper cup and (b) get more coffee that way. It worked.

I went to five different Starbucks in under 6 hours - with laptop in hand. I consumed coffee at each location and jammed away at 3K+ words while under that influence. And I've learned one thing.

I've decided that I really don't like Starbucks coffee. Even free. It tastes burned to me. But, I kept going around to get my free coffees and free electricity for the laptop all day.

So... is that good enough caffeine abuse to earn the badge? I think so.

In another note - if I got my "aha" moment before Nano started does that count? I'm not so sure about that one... but I'll take it if it's all right with everyone else.

Doing well for having skipped 2 days

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:04:30 GMT

I was way too busy this weekend to get any writing done, so I'm a little behind, but not badly so. I'm at 6023 words when I should be just over 8300. Not bad... yesterday was a 3K day, today was a bit over 2K. And some solid scenes written too.

I'm getting a good handle on my main character. Things are going to change, of course, but I'm liking her - and I don't like what's happening to her. Which is good. I shouldn't like the crap that's going on - it's the conflict that needs to be resolved. Anyway...

Sarah Jane struggled to stay asleep, to ignore the outside world and stay safe in the world between dreams and reality if at all possible, but the pain in her head and the fact that her bedside lamp was, of course, still on drove her to reach once more for the pills on her bedside table. “I'm glad I don't share an apartment any more,” she said to the pill bottles. “Flo's cat would always knock you guys off the table and make me search for you.” She found the ibuprofen bottle and with a well practiced move had the top off in seconds. Three brown round pills were in her hand and down her throat before the next thought.

“Hmmm....” said Sarah Jane, mostly to herself but also directed at her sleeping pill bottle. “It's only 1:25. I can't take you yet. Well, I could but I'd rather not throw up in an hour. Let's see....,” and she reached into her side table drawer and brought out some herbal remedies that sometimes helped. “Melatonin? No. That's one of the components of the sleeping pills, if I remember correctly.” She looked around for her well worn copy of the Physician's Desk Reference until she remembered that she'd taken it in to work so Autumn could look up some information about the drugs her father was taking for his cancer regimine. Sarah Jane let out a sigh and rummaged still further in the drawer. The L-tryptophan bottle was next to be brought into the light. “That's the ticket,” said Sarah Jane. “That's what's in turkey that makes everyone fall asleep after a big Thanksgiving meal. That should help.” Action followed thought and the pills were followed by a half glass of the ever-present water. Sarah Jane gave a sigh of relief and turned next to her pillows.

She had been sleeping on two foam pillows which had somehow become a soft at bricks in the just over an hour and a half since she had lain down. These pillows got tossed to the foot of the other side of the bed – Sarah Jane slept in a queen-sized bed, always on the left side as you looked at the bed which was the right side of the bed as you were lying down in it. She rarely moved much when she slept and could have been comfortable on a bed the width of a cot. But she had bought this bed last year in a vain hope that perhaps a new bed would help her in her search for sleep. She'd even splurged on a “Sleep Number” bed and spent the first three months zeroing in on her own specifically unique sleep number. Starting at 100 and going all the way down to 3 – at which point she was basically just sleeping on the box springs underneath the mattress – she found that she didn't have a perfect sleep number, because she never ever got perfect sleep. “Perhaps my sleep number is pi or the square root of negative one or some other imaginary number,” she once joked with her coworkers during lunch. At which point, Dale, the most boring and irksome of the group, launched into a sermon about the difference between imaginary numbers such as “i” and irrational numbers, such as pi or “e.” No one, except Sarah Jane, listened after the third word of the lecture. Sarah Jane always listened to what anyone said. “You never know what you'll learn,” was one of her mother's mottoes.

Sarah Jane pulled two feather pillows over from their place at the head of the other side of the bed. She fluffed them just so and settled them under her head. “Now what gets my attention? Should I continue to read the book that I got another three pages into before falling asleep or is it podcast time?” Sarah Jane was a devoted listener-member of WBEZ, the NPR station of greater Chicago. She would rather listen to talk radio than most music because firstly, she could ignore the lyrics of most music and secondly she didn't care for most currently popular music. With talk radio, she had to focus on the words, on the content of the message being put across the airwaves, and by doing this she could tune out the words and voices in her head – if only for a little while.

Reading had the same effect most of the time, but too often lately Sarah Jane found herself re-reading paragraphs and pages that got into her eyes but then somehow got blocked between her eyes and her brain. It was as if her own brain was fighting her, which was, of course, a patently silly idea. In any case, reading was becoming less and less effective for drowning out the voices in her own head, so Sarah Jane decided it was time to reach for the mp3 player. Sarah Jane was not “hip” enough to own an iPod of any form. She didn't own a Shuffle or a Nano or any other sort of i-product. Sarah Jane had found a refurbished mp3 player on the internet that not only had the same storage capacity as a standard iPod, but also allowed for the use of flash media cards. Sarah Jane had a visceral reaction to the deletion of any information, no matter how easily re-retrievable it was, so she had cards and cards of podcasts and music which she could swap in and out of her player without deleting any of the main content. It was silly in many ways – she knew she could always re-download any of the podcasts she had archived, but she found that she just couldn't delete anything – not even newscasts from three months ago.

Sarah Jane picked up her mp3 player and the Tupperware container she kept the numbered mini flash cards in. Flipping open the moleskine notebook she kept with the flash cards, and skimmed through the list of contents on the cards. “Hmmm... Car Talk? No... not right now.... Fresh Aire? Maybe.... Oh, here we go. A set of Prairie Home Companions I haven't heard yet. That should do it.” A quick swap of the cards followed by settling back under the covers and Sarah Jane was ready for her bedtime ritual. She looked into each corner of the room, where floor or ceiling met two walls, and said a prayer to strengthen each meeting point. She'd always imagined that junior angels watched over people as they slept – the thought of being guarded always helped – but the fact that they were junior angels, just earning their wings, meant that they were usually useless to stop many of the demons that tried, and all too often succeeded, in disturbing her dreams. Sarah Jane wondered if it was because she didn't pray hard enough or often enough – if there was something she should be doing to give those junior angels more power. But try as she might, those junior angels never showed themselves to tell her so.

“Guide me waking, and guard me sleeping – that awake I may walk in Light and asleep I may rest in peace.” Eight times this prayer was said, once to each of the eight angels in the eight corners of the room. Sarah Jane reached for the light finally, and shut it off. She settled back into her feather pillows, Garrison Keillor gently ringing in her ears, as she said the prayer one final time to the All of the Universe, hoping that somewhere, somewhen, someone would hear that prayer and respond.

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

“Come on, boys! We almost hit black there. Keep it up and we'll be bringing home the geld tonight!” Streng Wittchomber was a good mine foreman, always encouraging his crew on to maximum effort and always able to find the bigger and better ores. Most crews made do with a journeyman foreman, but Streng's crew was the top crew of the whole outfit. There were only three master foremen in this area, and of those three, Streng was the most talented at knowing just when and where to dig. Men would fight to get on his crew, and work their asses off to stay on once they did make the grade. Never mind that there were accidents – there were always accidents. And the men knew that you had to risk in order to reap. Streng's talent lay in not only knowing where the gems would be found, but he had this uncanny knack of knowing just when to get his men out. There might be a man lost now and again, but it was less often on Streng's crews than on anyone else's crews – and the fact that Streng's ores put more than half again the amount of geld into each man's pockets never hurt.

“Cadence! Call the song for us!” shouted one of the miners. Cadence Strippleworth was small for a miner, quickest to wiggle into the cracks and fast to run when necessary. He also had a bright tenor voice that rang throughout the cavern, giving everyone a point to focus on and a solid beat to work to. The men would pay Cadence for singing the call for them, as it kept them on track, working as a team instead of disjointed individuals.

That was part of the magic of Streng's crew – the men knew that by working together they would all consistently bring home more over the long haul. Sure, if a man found a black stone, perfect and round, he could claim it himself and be set for a year's time. But that sort of find was once in a great long time when men worked alone. By working together and splitting the profits, more blacks were found on average here than anywhere else in the realm. What was best for all was best for each one.

There was one man, once, who tried to hide a black from the rest of the crew. Tried to sell it himself and keep the profits for his own. When Streng found out about it, he not only turfed the man out of his crew, he spread the word to all other foremen, masters and journeymen alike, that this man was a thief. He never worked a certified mine again.

Cadence heard the call for a song and looked at Streng for the beat. Streng grinned, listened for a long moment to some inner muse that only he knew and laughed aloud.

“This one will be an easy haul today lads.” Streng grinned at the miners around him. “Cadence, do you happen to know the call of Powdermilk?”

Cadence nodded and tapped a medium-fast tempo with his toe. “Like that, Boss?” he asked.

Streng nodded in tempo as a reply. “Call it, boy.... call it good.”

“Oh has your family tried 'em? Powdermilk! Oh has your family tried 'em? Powdermilk!” All around him the miners took up the beat with their picks and shovels and fell to work with abandon. It was going to be a good night.

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

Oh... forgot to post this. My novel's name is "The Labyrinth of the Mind."

too busy!

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 06:28:38 GMT

Got in just over 1,000 words today and most of them are crap and will come out during editing... but it's a start.

I wanted to get more done but family and party considerations took precedence.

dreams

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:28:15 GMT

I'm starting to dream in my main character's head. It is not a happy place, as my MC is on anti-depressants and other mental medications.

I wanted to get down thoughts of a scene that I dreamed before they slip away
- mental institution: a "hip" place doing a new style of treatment
- One therapist: Quincey - who couldn't even say his own name becuase of his own issues. Had to make me guess at it and the clue was: 5th Hour (as in liturgical hours - prime, sext, none...)
- ceiling was made to look like it would fall on me - it was perfectly safe, but Hollywood built to seem unstable
- after a certain time no lights switches worked
- curtains over every window - including windows into smaller rooms inside, like bathrooms. Curtains were on the outside of the bathroom - you could never be sure that the wouldn't be drawn back while you were going
- "jokingly threatened" to put me in a body bag unless I did my therapy work
- never allowed out - teasingly given glimpses of the outdoors
- "let me do my fucking job and help you!"
- entire time the thought was escape... either out of the place entirely or if that didn't work, escape inward even farther
- the idea MC had: play along, be a good girl, "improve" and get the hell out of there

Good lord, that's a scary scene to me. I do NOT want to be in my MC's head like this all month.

Badges!!!!

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:35:40 GMT

I was silly and ordered some stuff from the Nano Store - got me a T-shirt and the Nifty Merit Badges. I'm setting myself the goal of earning all 10 in November.

What do they look like and how do you earn 'em you ask?? Well, you could just click on the link above - it's all explained there - but here's my contribution to the chaos that is our reality. Text is taken from the paper insert that comes with the merit badges.
Earn the NANO SOCIALIZING BADGE by...

Dragging a family member or friend into NaNoWriMo
Taking part ina word-war with an online NaNo Buddy
Attending a NaNo Kick-off party, write-in, or TGIO party.

Earn the CAFFEINE ABUSE BADGE by...

Consuming dangerous amounts of coffee, tea or caffeinated soda in your quest for 50K

Earn the PROCRASTINATION BADGE by...

Skipping writing for more than three days in a row
Spending over 30 cumulative hours during the month on the NaNoWriMo forums
Cleaning your home instead of working on your novel

Earn the WORD-COUNT PADDING BADGE by...

Quoting song lyrics or other books in your novel
Having a stuttering or triple-named character
Writing out contractions
Introducing unneeded dream sequences or hallucinations

Earn THE RALLY BADGE by...

Having a 5,000 word day
Overcoming a 10,000 word deficit

Earn the SECRET NOVELING BADGE by...

Noveling while at work, school, or any other place you're supposed to be doing something besides noveling.

Earn the CREATIVE NONFICTION BADGE by...

Plundering overheard dialogue and real-life events for novel material
Placing barely disguised friends and family members into your novel as characters

Earn the EUREKA MOMENT BADGE by...

Experiencing that "aha!" moment when a major plot issue is resolved, and your story comes together.

Earn the RANDOM ENDING BADGE by...

Writing a gleefully left-field or completely nonsensical ending

Earn the NANOWRIMO VICTORY BADGE by...

Writing a 50,000 word novel, from scratch, in thirty days. (We salute you.)

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:16:04 GMT

Time for me to fire up this blog again - I'm tackling Nanowrimo again. Should be easier than last time (2005) when I was trying to work a full time job, be in a play AND do Nano.

What was I thinking???

Anyway... I'm trying to decide if I should friendslock any of this. Probably not.

Good luck to other Nano-ers!

and more...

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 03:26:16 GMT

as of 9:15pm, Central time, 11/26/05: 35,315.

AND... I left myself in the middle of a scene so I can go back to it tomorrow... I'm dead now.

AND... it's a "dream sequence" sort of scene (actually, a "coma sequence") where the main character is trying to decide whether or not to let herself "cross the great pond" or not. Yes, the pond is named "Styx" but only because that's a great band...

yeah, right.

Need some words, kill a character off. Send them on the path to heaven. Describe it. In Tolkien-like detail. You know the "picture is worth a thousand words, and Peter Jackson ALMOST got enough frames of scenery film in the movies to cover all the words" sort of descriptions.

Don't know how much of this will be cut out again in NaNo-Ed-Mo, but who knows... it may stay. It's pure creative panic now.

Oh, and I had to steal this userpic. It SO fits!

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:07:29 GMT

Ok... going a little better.

According to my MS Word word-count, I'm at 23,061. According to the text file verified count, I'm at 23,085. Pretty good, considering that I was at 19K this morning.

Now I just gotta keep up this pace for the next 7 days....

arrgh

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 14:08:56 GMT

No way I'm going to finish... I'm at 20K words. How in the world do I expect myself to actually finish when I've got so much homework to grade over Thanksgiving!!

Why did I do this to myself?

Why am I still trying?

Why do I care about this stupid novel and these characters?

Why didn't I write more yesterday????

And now for something completely the same.

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:09:35 GMT

For those interested, the word count has jumped to 9,631. I'm only 1 week behind now. Which is doing pretty good for me, even though we're only 2 weeks into November. :)

Continuing with the insanity, here's

Chapter Two

"Dear Alice."

["Who's Alice, Gramma?" "Shh… you'll see."]

"Dear Alice. I'm really glad I can write these letters to you…"

["Gramma, this is a letter? I thought you said it was a diary." "Shh… it'll make sense in a minute. Just listen."]

"Dear Alice. I'm really glad I can write these letters to you. Mother and Daddy wouldn't understand some of my worries, but I know you do. You fell down a rabbit hole, have been chased by playing cards, had an unbirthday celebration and changed sizes so many times it was amazing. And you still came out all right in the end."

["Gramma! You wrote to Alice in Wonderland? Don't you know she's not real?" "Shhh. She's as real as my imagination makes her. And I never expected her to answer back. Now stop interrupting."]

"You know, Alice, I really envy you sometimes. You had such wonderful adventures… though I bet you didn't think so at the time. But you got to go places that nobody else goes to. And see things that nobody else sees. Which is sort of like me. Nobody else I know at school has lived in all the places I have, and nobody else has seen some of the neato stuff I've seen. I mean, the Eifel Tower, London Bridge, the Swiss Alps? Those were all nifty, sure, but nothing like the places you went.

"And you've met so many interesting people. I've met tons of people that are really interesting, but nobody's ever heard of them. I mean, have you ever heard of Dr. Seaborg, or Dr. Bohr, or Dr. Oppenheimer? Yeah, everybody's heard of Dr. Einstein, but he was weird. I like Dr. Oppenheimer and his wife so much better, and they’ve got nice kids that I’m going to babysit sometime, but they're nothing like the Caterpillar or the White Queen or Tweedledee. You were so lucky.

"Anyway, I’m thinking that maybe someday I’ll be able to do what you did. Have wonderful adventures and come out all right in the end. But not now. Lately, things aren’t going quite so well. Mother and Daddy are worried about something, I can tell, but they wont’ tell me anything about it. They think that fourteen is too young to be worried about things, but when you’re dealing with this way explosive radioactive stuff, things can happen. And I think Mother just found something out that she’s not happy about at work. She and Daddy have been having these long conversations in the dining room, with the door closed, and they try to keep their voices down, but I can still hear sometime. I need to figure out how to get Daddy to tell me what’s bothering Mother maybe.”

Dawn Avis Jenkins paused for a moment, putting the end of her pencil in her mouth, which was a childish habit she hadn’t chosen yet to break because she knew it drove her mother crazy. She was in her favorite writing-and-thinking spot; curled up on her ugly purple ottoman, back against her bookcase, feet propped up on the end of her bed. The ottoman had been a present from her parent’s last employer, Dr. Seaborg. He had found it in a flea market off Fisherman’s Wharf and said its sad-eyed yet goofy face reminded him of her. He'd given it to her as a birthday present seven years ago next week. As a child of eight, Dawn had thought it adorable. As a young lady of almost fifteen, she still thought it was adorable, but sometimes felt that if people knew that, they’d laugh at her for such notions. A modern young lady didn't have such toys in 1945. She continued with her diary-letter.

“Sometimes I wish I could just find a rabbit hole and jump down it, and find you and everyone in Wonderland. I feel like I know you, like if I met you in real life, we could be friends. Which would be great, because every time we move, I have to leave friends behind and start making new ones. I’ve kind of given up doing that, making new friends, I mean, because I know we’ll just be moving again."

Dawn looked around her current bedroom. They had just moved here six weeks ago and already the room was "hers." There was her school bag, on the floor as usual, but that was all. She kept her room fairly well picked up, not because her parents made her do so, but because she was basically an organized, self-starting girl. She had the idea that it was just as easy to put things away right the first time, because that way you knew where they were, and could find them again when you wanted it.

Her best friend Jane Maxey, back in Minneapolis was the exact opposite. Clothes piled everywhere except her closet or bureau. Sweaters in a heap over here. Socks, unsorted, of course, in a mound over there. Skirts and blouses thrown haphazardly over hangers and then hanging stuck from the top of the closet's open folding door. Jane was a bit of a free spirit and let very few things bother her, including her parent's demands for a clean room. Jane said that she figured if she could find things when she wanted them, and if she couldn't find them, then she obviously didn't need it that moment. The one thing they did share was a passion for movie heartthrobs. They would never admit it to anyone but each other, but they both would do anything in the world to one day meet ANY of the stars in the movie magazines they hid in their school bags. Dawn missed Jane a lot and wrote to her almost every week. Jane sometimes wrote back.

“Mother and Daddy don’t have many friends either. I sometimes wonder about them and worry. They always say that they are each other’s best friends, but don’t you need someone else too? I sometimes wish Mother would just learn to play bridge or Mah Jongg, or be a stay-at-home mom and be more like Harriet Nelson on the Ozzie and Harriet show. You’ve never heard that radio show, have you Alice? They didn’t have that back in Victorian England, and I’m sure they don’t have it in Wonderland. Ozzie and Harriet are the perfect family. Hmm… maybe I should write to them next in this diary…”

The pencil returned to her mouth in a moment of consideration. “Hmmm,” she thought. “Writing to Ozzie and Harriet? Now that’s just weird.” She pushed her large horn rimmed glasses back up the bridge of her nose and returned to writing.

"Of course while Mother is playing bridge with all her friends, Daddy would be out playing golf with all of his friends or doing whatever it is that handsome, responsible Daddies do. Speaking of which, Alice, I've seen your picture, and you're very pretty. You've got wonderful blonde hair and a cute button nose. Me? I'm just a nothing. My hair isn't silky blonde. It's just brown. Yup. Brown. That sort of brown that is not brunette, not dark blonde, not even 'mouse-brown.' Just a dull, boring, lifeless brown. It's a bit too short for what I'm seeing the other girls wear around here in Los Alamos, but that's OK because the longer it is, the harder it is to style and my hair doesn't style at all well. I bet you can just put your hair up in rag curlers over night and it turns out gorgeous the next day. Me? I just comb it out, put in two barrettes, and leave it for the day. If I fuss with it, it becomes a frizzy football helmet.

"And my nose! It's like someone took some clay, mashed it around and then shoved it on my face when I wasn't looking! It's ugly but its definitely big enough to hold my glasses up," and here she paused in her writing to push the aforementioned glasses again back up her not-squashed non-ugly nose, "and that's about all it's good for. Oh, that and getting pollen in it so I sneeze a lot. I guess that's one good thing about moving out here to the desert. Not as much pollen as when we lived in Chicago or Minneapolis.

"Now my eyes...Daddy says that my eyes are my real beauty feature. Well, I think that if I have even one beauty feature –which I doubt! - then I guess Daddy is right and it's my eyes. They are like a sparkling dark champagne color. Golden in the right light. I've seen champagne a few times, like when a Nobel prize is announced for one of Mother or Daddy's boss scientists, or a new book gets published or something. Daddy even let me try some once, but I didn't like it at all. I don't understand how grown-ups drink it. Mother said it's an 'acquired taste' but really, Alice, why would you want to acquire a taste for something that tastes bad? Like caviar. I had that once at Dr. Seaborg's Nobel party. It was terrible! It was salty and squishy and like eating pickled sand. When I found out that caviar was fish eggs, I almost threw up! But Mother said it was just another acquired taste. Well, no thank you. I'll let someone else acquire it!"

"But like I was saying, Daddy says that my eyes are my real beauty feature. And he says that I should try not wearing my glasses all the time. He was trying to get me to look at some other frames, but I like these nice big ones. They're big enough to let me see anything I want to see without turning my head much. And the horn rims are so like what Bette Davis wore in That Movie I Need To Look Up and while I know I'll never be as pretty as her no matter what glasses I wear, at least I look sort of smart in these. Not nearly as smart as my parents really are, but nobody really expects me to live up to their standard of brains. Well, nobody maybe except Mother. She's got her heart set on me being the third nuclear physicist in the family. You know, be just like Marie Curie. She's Mother's heroine, Madame Curie is. Which is so cool, because she's the only woman so far to have discovered and actually named a new element on the periodic table. Maybe some day they'll name a new element after Madame Curie. I wonder, Alice. Do you even know about the periodic table?"

She was thinking of what next to include in her letter when she heard a voice from downstairs.

Woot!

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 05:21:36 GMT

I'm up to 7K words! I know I'm "supposed" to be at 20K words, but hey, I was at 4K yesterday. I almost doubled my word count in 1 day! Woot! I'm proud of those hard fought-for words too! I wish they just flowed like water out of me and onto the electronic page, but they don't. It's sometimes like pulling teeth.

But today it was a bit easier. I was stuck at one point, just staring at the screen, when I had a sudden inspiration of what my final chapter should be. I jumped to the end, wrote that chapter quick and then went back to where I was stuck. Bam! 3K words in 3+ hours. That rocks!

Anywhoo... I'm stealing this idea from 9bloodychalices. Read at your own risk.

Dawn Came from the Wrong Direction

A NaNoWriMo novel about growing up in the nuclear age.

by Carol Townsend

Chapter One

She sat at her favorite window, in her favorite rocking chair, her feet on a tattered moth-eaten purple footstool, with an old faded diary in her lap. Outside her window an explosion of colors was splashed across the landscape, a result of the turning of the seasons. The sounds of a tune drifted in from the hallway; a muzaked version of a pop hit from 15 years ago, which was ironic, considering that the original hit was a diatribe on the cultural banality of muzak. Her eyes didn't see the colors of fall that the Arboretum was so joyfully displaying for all the world to see, nor did her ears hear either the tune or the quick footsteps running down the hall towards her. Her mind's eye was focused on the past; her mind's ear hearing discussions and arguments resolved long ago. Her heart was finally ready to let go of some of the pain, the memories, the anger that had held her trapped for so long. Finally ready to share what only she knew was in this diary. Yes. It was time to say what really happened so many years ago.

“Gramma Dawn? Gramma Dawn! Look! Look what I got!”

A grinning young girl came flying into the room, clutching something in her hands, waving it to make the floppy ears waggle erratically. She was followed by a more sedate young woman, obviously the young girl’s mother. She smiled indulgently down at her young daughter, enjoying the exuberance spilling out of the excited girl. The old woman snapped out of her reverie and smiled at her visitors.

“Well, what do we have here, Edie?” she said, looking at the child dancing before her. “For all the world, it seems to me that what we have is a Mexican jumping bean.”

“Aw, Gramma!” groaned Edie. “I’m not a bean.”

“Yes you are,” said her mother, taking a seat across from Gramma Dawn. “A human bean. Just ask your grandmother.” The two women smiled at the familiar joke. One thing the two women did still share was a love of puns, no matter how bad they were. In fact, the worse the pun, the better they liked it. And the best puns were those shared again and again, rolling down the familiar paths of contact between two people who don’t quite know how else to communicate.

“Oh Mother!” sighed Edie, rolling her eyes. “You are such a nerd.” The two older women chuckled. “Gramma, ignore her! And look what I got! Mama made me a Mehitable just like yours!” Edie flumped down on the purple footstool, the “Mehitable the Sittable” that her grandmother had rested her feet on before visitors had arrived. In her hand she held a small replica of the Mehitable: a short, squat, tuna can-shaped, purple-furred thing. It had big bulbous eyes and long floppy ears and fit just so in Edie’s hand. It was so ugly it was adorable. “Isn’t it cute?”

“Very cute. Much nicer than mine.” Dawn looked at the ragged lump under her granddaughter’s bottom. It was missing all of one ear and most of the other. The eyes had been torn off and replaced more times than she could count, and the purple fur was fur in name only. It had been restuffed a half dozen times, and one could sort of see what shape it was supposed to be. Even though it was bedraggled and worn, it was clean and obviously well cared for. You couldn’t find a moth hole if you looked with a magnifying glass. Most of all, it showed the love that had been poured into it, as if it were an oddly shaped, bizarrely colored velveteen rabbit.

“It’s very cute,” repeated her grandmother. “But not as cute as you are, Mehitable Jane.” Gramma Dawn reached out and ruffled Edie’s hair. “And definitely cuter than your brothers, Pinchbar Magruder and Sidney Piffendorfer.”

“Gramma! Their names are Will and Michael, as you well know!”

“And yours is really Emily Dawn, but I don't call you that all the time now, do I? Your initials work just fine: E.D. And besides, your brothers don’t have a Mehitable, do they, Edie? Not like us.” Dawn smiled. “I know what I do with mine,” and she nudged her granddaughter over a little with her toes to make room for both of them on the ottoman: one set of feet and one bottom. “What are you going to do with yours?”

Edie looked thoughtful. “I think I’ll carry it in my backpack so I can always have it with me. And maybe one day, I’ll make a full sized one so we can sit on them together!”

Her mother nodded once, as if that’s the answer she expected, then said, “Mother, are you sure it’s ok that Edie stays with you for a few hours? I’ll be back before dinner, but if it’s a burden…?”

“Oh harrumph, Helen. We’ll be just fine. You go scoot along to your interview and we’ll keep each other company. We’ll be just fine together here, I promise.”

Edie jumped up, gave her mother a hug, and flopped back down on the footstool. Helen waved to her mother, walked out the door, and the two were left alone.

“Gramma?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Why do you live here?”

“Here? Oh, you mean in this nursing home?” Edie nodded. “Well, it’s because I’m sick, sweetie.

“Sick?” She looked confused. “You don’t look sick. You don’t cough or have a runny nose, or anything.”

“It’s not that kind of sickness, honey. I’m sick on the inside, and it makes me too tired to do much. I can’t really stand long enough to cook food, or do dishes or laundry. I need help taking a bath, and I don’t drive any more. The nurses need to check on me regularly, and it’s just easier for me to be here, where they work.”

“Why are you sick, Gramma?”

Dawn took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, sweetie, that’s what this is all about.” She tapped the diary. “I’m glad we’ve got a few hours together, because I wanted to tell you the story behind it all. Here,” she patted lap. “why don’t you come up here, and we’ll read this diary together.”

“Gramma, what’s a diary?”

“Well, it’s sort of a journal. A story that you write to yourself. Or just ideas and thoughts and feelings that you want to write down somewhere, so you know they’re recorded somewhere safe.” She leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially. “It’s a secret thing. Nobody but you is ever supposed to read your diary.” She smiled and sat back up straight in her rocking chair. “Well, nobody but you and whoever else you choose to share your diary with. And I choose to share it with you. Now come on up here and we’ll get settled and read this for a bit, ok?”

“OK.” Edie climbed up carefully and scooted into a comfy position, snuggled against her grandmother’s left arm. She looked out the window at the view her grandmother had enjoyed on other occasions and smiled. “I know why you like to sit here. Those trees are as pretty as flowers.” While they were settling themselves, a nurse came in quietly, left a glass of water and a cup with a few pills in them on the side table.

“Would you like some juice, sweetheart?” she asked Edie. “We’ve got juiceboxes…apple juice, orange juice…? Edie looked at her grandmother, who nodded permission.

“Apple juice, please?” The nurse smiled warmly, left and was back in a moment with the promised juice box and a plate with a few graham crackers on it. She set the snack next to the pill cup, placed a light coverlet over the two laps, and withdrew. Gramma Dawn looked down at her granddaughter, smiled, and took the diary out from under the lap rug. She turned to the first page and began to read aloud.

I hate my job

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 04:07:01 GMT

Really. It's a pain. I was supposed to be done with this assignment by now, so I could focus on writing.

It will be going through (and probably past) Thanksgiving.

Ah well, there goes THAT Nanowrimo....

No, not done... not giving up. I've got 3,333 words done by this evening (when I'm supposed to have 15K done by now...) but it's more than I would have done if I hadn't even started.

There... that's the non-defeatist attitude, right?

sigh.

I'm posting this in both LJ's... it's too funny!

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 02:05:24 GMT

You will probably win Nanowrimo - it's a brillant
opportunity to lord your mighty brains over
your less well-endowed friends. Whatever.

It's Nanowrimo Time! Will you reach 50K? What kind of novel will you write?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 12:41:55 GMT

Time to interview Dawn's parents... or at least her mom right now.

Welcome to my office, Mrs. Jenkins...
-please... call me Avis... everyone does... or most do. My husband sometimes calls me... well, that's for a later question, I'm sure.

OK, Avis. Thank you. Now, on to a few questions. This list was invented by Marcel Proust, and if you want to see them in an easy-to-copy format, you can go here.

Let's start with the easy ones...

• What is your full name? And what about that nickname?
It is Avis Louise Foster Jenkins, though some call me Birdbrain because the taxonomical order "avis" is birds. My husband calls "Rah-rah" which is from "Rara avis," Latin for "rare bird." Sort of an inside joke. Avis is a family name... actually a first name, not a last name as many people believe... from an ancestress back in Revolutionary War times. Both my mother and grandmother were DAR's...

- Daughter's of the American Revolution?

Yes, that's right. They were both DAR's and were crazy about studying geneaology. We have one side of the family traced back to the 1400's. Anyway, the "original" Avis Foster was the wife of Jonathan Foster. Jonathan fought in the Revolutionary War as a foot soldier in the Green Mountain Boys and Avis went right along with him into the thick of things. She cooked and sewed and mothered those Boys, in the worst of conditions and the best of victories. Eathan Allen himself gave her a medal at the end of the war for her efforts, and she gave it right back saying, "I didn't do this for no medal. I did it for my home." Mother always liked that spirit, that spunk she showed. I think she was hoping I'd follow in her footsteps a bit. Little did she know....

• Let's get a quick description of you for our readers. What is your hair and eye color?
Light brown hair mostly, except when I can get outside and get some sun; then it's a deep tawny blonde. Blue eyes. Nothing really special, except they're usually hidden behind glasses or goggles.

• What kind of distinguishing facial features do you have?
I have a slight limp when I have to walk fast. If I can walk at a normal pace, then you don't notice it, but if I'm in a hurry, the limp shows up. It's from a short bout with childhood polio. I was really lucky that I only got a touch of it.

• Do you have a birthmark? Where is it? What about scars? How did he get them?
Nope. None.

• Who are your friends and family? Who do you surround herself with? Who are the people you are closest to? Who do you wish you were closest to?
I have a husband, Randall. He's at the lab right now. And a lovely daughter, Dawn. They are my anchor. I'm lucky enough to be living next to my college roommate Kitty. We went to Berkely together. And OH are there stories to tell from those days....!

[notice what she often chooses to answer and what she ignores or doesn't answer....]

• Where were you born? Where have you lived since then? Where do you call home?

I was born at home in mid-winter, 1902...we couldn't dig our way out to get to the hospital... and raised in a very small town in Vermont. Middletown Springs. You've probably never heard of it. Anyway, I studied math and science in school, mostly to irk my older brother who said that girls don't do math, and found that I really liked it. I wanted to get out of that little town as soon as I graduated, and picked the school that was the absolute farthest away...both physically and philosophically... from that little Vermont town. I won a partial scholarship to Berkely and in the fall of 1920, off I went.

My junior year, I took a year's sabatical and went to Europe. This was shortly after Marie Curie took a whirlwind tour of America to raise money for her Radium Institute. Because of a few odd circumstances, I ended up in Paris and met her daughter, Irene, and we became quick friends. I stayed with the Curies for a month and I was hooked! I had been studying math, but my passion for physics was born! I came back to Berkely that next year and dove into my studies with a fervor!

Since then, I've lived in New York, Minnesota, Chicago, and now am in New Mexico.

• What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Personally? My daughter Dawn. She's the most important thing in my life.

Professionally? I added to the work of Dr. Seaborg in his discovery of Curium, and convinced him to submit that name for approval. It's named after Marie Curie, not her husband as most people think. I thought it was important to honor her... I mean, she's the first woman to have won a Noble prize and... I'm sorry, I can go on about this for quite a while....

• What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Discovering a new element! Or adding to the body of scientific knowledge in a way that will make a difference to the world! The work we're doing here at Los Alamos is some of the most exciting... I can't say much about it, but if things continue as we see, we will be able to have a totally clean world in 20 years! No more smokestacks billowing poison into our skies....

• What is your current state of mind?
Oh, optimistic and hopeful!

• What is your favorite occupation?
What I'm doing right now: pure research! Oh, and being a mother, of course!

• What is your most treasured possession?
I have a page of Marie Curie's journal that I keep in a small lead-lined box at my desk. She died 10 years ago, from radiation exposure, and her notebooks are all filled with radiation. I never open the box, but I know her work is in there.

Well, thank you for your time right now, Avis. We'll go over some more questions at another time.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 10:00:13 GMT

One thing has been bugging me for a couple of days, and I can't seem to get past it to do more planning.

Who is Dawn's foil? Who does she talk to? She's a loner... tough to get a buddy in there for her to talk to (and therefore have dialogue with).

Should I have her "talk" to her diary through the novel?

The plot is really thin so far too....
- establish characters
- first nuclear explosion just west of town
- the after effects on the town and this young girl

I need to do some more research (aaarrrgghhh.... WHEN do I have the time right now??!?) but suggestions would be appreciated.

Maybe I should have posted this on the NaNoBoards??

Fleshing out the characters

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:21:33 GMT

Yesterday, I needed to just jot down the characters that I had so far... to keep them in a "safe place" as it were, until I got around to doing something with them. So, now I'm doing something with them.

Questions that address the basics about a character (stolen from here):

• What is your character’s name? Does the character have a nickname?

Dawn Avis Jenkins. Last name taken from my maternal great-grandmother. I had considered "Black" from my paternal grandmother, but it didn't ring with me. Jenkins is fairly mid-america and will work for now... it may change as I start answering the questions below about her.

The only nickname she has was one when she was a baby: Scooter (she preferred to scoot on her butt instead of crawl). Only her father still calls her that on occasion.

Birthday: 11/30/1929. She's 15 on July 16, 1945. Birthdate is my father's.

• What is your character’s hair color? Eye color?

Brown. That sort of brown that is not brunette, not dark blonde, not even "mouse-brown." Just a dull, boring, lifeless brown. It's cut a bit too short for current trends, because it doesn't style at all well, and Dawn just combs it out, puts in two barrettes, and leaves it for the day.

Eyes are a sparkling dark champagne color. Golden in the right light. But you never really get to see them unless you've riled Dawn up, or piqued her interest. Dawn hides behind big hornrimmed glasses and rarely looks anyone in the eye.

• What kind of distinguishing facial features does your character have?

Large glasses on a small nose. They often fall down to the end of her nose and threaten to fall off.

• Does your character have a birthmark? Where is it? What about scars? How did he get them?

No birthmark, but there are a couple of scars on her left elbow and knee from when she wiped out on her bike a couple of years ago. There's at least one piece of gravel still in her knee from that fall.

• Who are your character’s friends and family? Who does she surround herself with? Who are the people your character is closest to? Who does he wish he were closest to?

Family:
-Mom (Avis Foster Jenkins) and Dad (Randall Abiel Jenkins), smart, fairly cool sorts of parents, both scientists who are working on post-docs at Berkely, but who are currently doing research with Dr. Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. They don't totally understand the full ramifications of what they are working on...they don't know they are working on a weapon. Avis has known Kitty Oppenheimer since they both started at Berkely years ago. They live next door to the Oppenheimers and Dawn is their baby-sitter.

-There had been an older brother (Foster Abiel Jenkins) who died in infancy. Dawn is an only child now.

-There are few friends. Dawn is quite a loner, as her family moves from research station to research station. She considers her books to be her best friends, as they don't desert her or get mad when she has to pack up and move to France. She wishes she were closer to her mother; she wishes she were much more like her mother: happy, beautiful, smart, vivacious, good with people... but awkward, shy, reclusive Dawn just can't seem to do that.

• Where was your character born? Where has she lived since then? Where does she call home?

She was born at home in San Fransisco, with a midwife and two medical students attending. The midwife taught the med students plenty! Since then, she has lived in a "group home" (it won't be called a commune for another 10 years or so) near Berkely (parents worked with Seaborg and Lawrence); Minneapolis (her parents were working for A. O. C. Nier of the University of Minnesota in 1939, helping him purify a tiny amount of U-235 by mass spectroscopy), Chicago in 1942 (working with Fermi and Seaborg on the only plutonium in the world)

edit I forgot to put in here that she's now living in Los Alamos, New Mexico with her parents, next to the Oppenheimers (Doc Opp is the leader of the Manhattan project). The time is July, 1945. The first nuclear test takes place July 16, 1945.

• Where does your character go when she’s angry?

There's a special spot in her room, between her bed and her desk, where she's got a "Mehitable the Sittable" foot-stool sort of thing (with big floppy ears, large eyes and a goofy smile). She keeps an old quilt folded up on there and shen she's mad, she'll go there, sitting with her back to her desk and her feet under her bed, curled up in her quilt, sort of hiding from the world.

• What is her biggest fear? Who has she told this to? Who would she never tell this to? Why?

Her biggest fear? Wow... she's not scared of snakes or spiders or anything really creepy-crawly. This is part of what sets her apart from the other girls at whatever school she's at. She's not afraid of heights or speaking in front of people... but she is afraid of failure. She HAS to do whatever she sets her mind to do. She's pretty smart, but doesn't think she is, and so studies all the time so her parents aren't disappointed in her. She's only told "Alice" (see below) and she never wants her parents to know. She's got to make up for the lost brother who would obviously have been a huge success at whatever he was going to do, and if her parents knew about this drive, they'd do things to try to make her not strive so hard.... and she's just GOT to succeed.

• Does she have a secret?

She has a diary that she's told no one about. She writes to "Alice" as in Alice in Wonderland, because Alice is about the only person who would understand.

She also would never tell her parents about her love of the movies and all the heartthrobs therein.

• What makes your character laugh out loud?

Abbot and Costello routines, even though she's got them memorized. And having her own Fibber McGee closet (she's a bit of a pack-rat, even with all the moving her family has done).

• When has your character been in love? Had a broken heart?

She's been in love with every heartthrob in the Hollywood magazines and had her heart broken dozens of times when she's seen them paired up with starlets.

Then dig deeper by asking more unconventional questions:

• What is in your character’s refrigerator right now? On her bedroom floor? On her nightstand? In her garbage can?

In the icebox: 1 quart of half-drunk milk. 2 sticks of butter. half a loaf of bread. Leftover cassarole. 2 apples. Some ham for making sandwiches and a chicken for tonight's dinner.

On her floor: it's pretty well picked up, but her schoolbag is there, with a "StarStruck" magazine guiltily peeking out of the bag. She's got no homework, as usual.

On her nightstand: Arthur Ransome's most recent novel (she'll be done with it by tonight), a short lamp, a wind-up alarm clock with only one bell.

In her garbage can: The can in her bedroom has only 3 tissues in it. In the kitchen, there's the remains of the snap beans that she cleaned after school... nothing out of the ordinary.

OK... that's enough for now... I'll continue w/ the other questions later....