Photo Fiction

I found this fascinating old photo in a bookstore and couldn't resist buying it for a writing prompt I was doing. The prompt was to write a letter based on the photograph. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Uncle Al,
Mom and Dad got a new car last month. They'd been saving up forever. You should have seen how proud Dad was the first time he fired the thing up. He wore his Sunday church outfit even though it was only Saturday and honked the horn so loud I think all the neighbors must have looked out their windows at us.
Mom didn't drive, of course, because she never learned how but she looked pretty proud too sitting in the driver seat. She was all dressed up too even though they only drove around the block.
Mom says all us kids are going to learn to drive when we're old enough, even the girls. I can't wait! I'm almost 15-1/2 so it won't be long now.
Well, last week we drove to church and the car just wouldn't start up again. Some of the guys helped push the car into the street a ways and somehow it started up again. It made an awful wheezy noise like Grandpa when his lungs get bad. Dad looked pretty worried. Mom told him it was all right. Cousin Bill is studying to be a mechanic over at the gas station and will fix it for free.
That's about all the news. I start back at school next week. I'm not sure if I won't quit school when I'm 16 and look for a job. I hear one of the factories in Gary is hiring. Mom got kind of mad when I said that so don't tell her I told you. You know how much we need the money, especially with Mom expecting again. Anyway, Mom is looking at me like it's time to do some chores.
Sincerely,
Your Nephew, Eddie

Why Rats Were Added to the Chinese Zodiac--a Fable

(I was making a collage of some lines from old books, a Chinese envelope for money gifts and some Chinese lettering when I decided that I needed to stuff the envelope with a story that tied all the elements together. Here is what I came up with. I'll post the collage when it is finished. It isn't my usual sort of writing. Tell me what you think).

Once upon a time there was a family of rats that lived in Paris. At that time the cat population was particularly ferocious and the poor rats no longer dared to leave their holes. “Ooh, la la,” the rats said. “If we do not eat soon, we shall starve.” An old, wise rat told the younger rats to bide their time. “The cats have to sleep eventually,” he said. “Then we can get some food.” He cautioned them of the dangers of leaving Paris. “To the east, is the Wild Wood which has terrible dangers.” He told them of the owls, hawks, foxes and weasels which, he said, made the Parisian cats look tame. “Beyond the Wild Wood lies the Wide World, full of unspeakable dangers. There is no escape from Paris. We must stay here as best we may.”
One little rat, Valois, had a short attention span or perhaps he fell asleep. He missed the part about the Wide World. When the cats at last began their afternoon naps and the other rats were foraging for food, Valois climbed aboard a barge which was tied up on the banks of the Seine. He sniffed around and found a likely hiding place behind the bread box. After gorging on a crust of baguette, he slept.
A sharp nip to his left ear awakened him. He must have leapt six inches in the air, his legs and tail outstretched in all directions. There behind the bread box was another rat. “What’d you do that for?” Valois demanded.
“You ate my bread crust,” the other rat replied.
“Oh, sorry. I was starving.”
“Well there’s more where that came from,” she said, for one sniff had told Valois that she was a young female rat. “My name’s Colette.”
“I’m Valois,” he replied.
Suddenly Valois noticed that the counter he crouched on was swaying back and forth. “What is happening?” he asked, his hair standing on end.
“Haven’t you ever been on a boat before?”
“No, I have always lived in a hole next to a wine cellar.”
Colette tutted. “Well, you’re in for a surprise. We’re off to see the Wide World.”
“Is that safe?” he asked.
“Safe or dangerous, that’s where we are headed.”
. . . . . .

In the interest of time, I will not relate all the adventures of Colette and Valois. Suffice to say that their barge traveled the length of the Seine and, much later, the two rats were loaded onto a merchant ship, tucked in alongside a cask of dried meat and biscuits. Like rats will do, they matured quickly and Colette gave birth to many litters of ratlets. Grand children and great grandchildren followed. An entire dynasty of rats traveled the world until at long last the merchant ship docked at the port of Hong Kong. Colette and Valois sniffed the air and decided it was time to return to land.
Contrary to popular legend, China had never seen rats of this type before. The cats there were fat and lazy for the local mice were far too easy to catch. It took generations before the Chinese cats adapted to these meaner, overgrown mice, as they saw them. As the cats slowly wised up, the rats overran Hong Kong and from there the rest of China. After all, as we all know, rats breed like, um, rabbits. A time of human famine followed and the weary and hungry Chinese people added a new sign to their zodiac in the belief that this would appease the rats who were perhaps jealous of the ox, monkey and snake. Of course, what really happened was the cats finally learned to control the scourge of rats. But forever after, in the Chinese calendar, there will always be a Year of the Rat.

I won!

I can't believe I wrote the whole thing! 50185 words.
Now I can get back to being a "normal" blogger. If there is such a thing.

Crossing the Finish Line?

Tomorrow is the end of my writing marathon. I'm still playing catch up but I think I will make it yet. 44,807 words is the latest count.
I took a few pictures yesterday but I probably won't get any posted until this is over tomorrow night.

NaNo Home Stretch or Over the Hump?

38322 words!
So will I be able to do 10,000 words on Friday, Saturday and Sunday?
Wish me luck.

Mother son teams

It is funny to me that two people have commented on how my son might find it embarrassing to have his mom up on stage with him. What you have to understand is my son is only 11 years old. He still thinks I am cool (except when I'm nagging him to do his homework). He's more embarrassed that he is a boy that dances than that I am a mom who has a bit part in his show.
I know this might change one of these days. I'm glad he doesn't think I'm embarrassing to have around. I try to be a cool mom without being a mom who tries too hard to be cool, if you know what I mean.
With my teenage son, it is the reverse. I'm embarrassed to be seen in public with him. Some times he gets into what I call "doofus mode" and I just want to hide. I think it is the overdose of testosterone or something that makes him act more juvenile than his 5 year younger brother.
I still can't focus on blogging and photography. Too much of my energy is invested in getting my NaNo story off the ground. I finally passed the half way point. 25669 words.

More on Writing

19,771 words.

What have I learned from this, my second year doing NaNoWriMo?
I think actually a lot. Last year I wrote on a whim. It was a story that I had stored in the back of my mind for years but there was no reason to believe it would ever go anywhere.
This year from reading, thinking and going to a writing workshop, I'm focusing more on the craft of writing. Dialog, imagery, point of view are going through my head fully as much as plot. I still can't do metaphors. Well, no one's perfect.
And surprise, surprise, I actually think the writing is better. For a first draft.
I have 30,000 more words before I have to figure out the ending to this story.
This is a good thing because I don't want to drop the thing mid thought or end with a trite "and he lived happily ever after."
I'm also thinking a lot about keeping up the tension of the story line. I want to know what will keep the reader moving from one chapter to the next. A good story has to be more than a string of interesting events. After all, I'm not trying to write a soap opera script! One theme is the growth of my character as a person. But I'm not sure what else will draw one forward. My essential brilliance as an author? I don't think so.
Well, live and learn.

Cause it's work, work, work. . . .

17022 words. I'm shooting for 25,000 by Sunday. It is starting to feel more doable.

NaNo Update

Keeping up a steady but too slow pace. Now at 13,600 words. I had a few ideas for plot elements today which should help. I'm planning a writing marathon this weekend. I need to be at least at 20-25K since this weekend marks the halfway point. At least there is a long weekend coming up for Thanksgiving, even though I will be cooking turkey and entertaining too.
No time for a picture. Work calls.

How many words?

Actually I'm at 2205 out of 50,000 total. I'm a bit behind my daily goal but my meeting ended today so now I can get to the real work.

Do I have to?

Write something today? Today I felt sort of at loose ends. This was to have been my final child-free week but somehow things didn’t go as planned. The younger son continued to have stomach problems at camp this past week which culminated in our picking him up on Thursday, one week early. Needless to say, two days later, he is fit as a fiddle, complaining of boredom and asking for a play date. He was also fighting my “upset stomach diet” tooth and nail. Said diet is boring as all good diets seem to be.
Today, if all had gone as planned, I would have driven my son back to Wisconsin to rejoin his camp for the last week. Then, back home to start my final work week before vacation. However, a combination of wishful thinking (I’d rather be home with mom) and non-compliance with the GI diet led to a minor relapse. Younger son doesn’t exactly make symptoms up but he is a bit of a hypochondriac. Sadly, hypochondriasis runs in my family.
So here we are. Happy, not quite, camper is playing video games. And how have I spent my day? I could be revising my novel. But I decided to find yet another way to procrastinate. So I made a quilt. Well, a small quilt. A fragment. I think it will be a pillow cover.
I decided to write about this because I got my sewing machine out of mothballs (actually I excavated it out of the dust bunnies) and have been using it. My first major project in years was to make a quilt out of old t-shirts. We have enough discarded t-shirts floating around the house to make several quilts without compromising our leisure-wear status. The quilt came out pretty well, if I may say so myself. The principle is quite simple. You cut t-shirts into 13 inch squares, sew them together and add backing. I love it because the quilt is made up of outgrown shirts from 16 years of child rearing. I can see the University of Chicago onesie my oldest wore the day I graduated from medical school. And a Seattle Crab shirt I got for him the same year. There are a couple of camp shirts, a shirt from Duncan, British Columbia (from the train phase), another two shirts from the Pokemon phase, and so on. The quilt back was a $1 sheet I found at the Salvation Army. Here’s to recycling!
My next project was to make a pillow case out of a Hawaiian shirt I bought at the same Salvation Army store. The shirt was too loud for any of the men in my family to wear but it went well with the peach paint in our guest bedroom (where the quilt also resides). That project took my around an hour.
Yesterday, I decided I wanted to try crazy quilting. I liked the idea of making something without planning. No patterns needed. No trips to the fabric store for matching squares required. I had bought a couple of scraps of vintage fabric on my trip to Iowa last week. There were a couple of worn quilt squares and a ball of fabric strips intended for making a rag rug. Instead I incorporated some of these strips and scraps, bits of a (commercial) quilted pillow sham we had that disintegrated from too much machine washing, a few bits of the Hawaiian shirt used for the pillow (including a pocket), remnants of the sheet backing for the t-shirt quilt, bits of an old bathrobe and (don’t tell my husband I told you) of a pair of boxers I fished out of the garbage. I ran all the pieces through my truly ancient White sewing machine and I now have a rectangle of fabric waiting for me to figure out the next step. Even my sewing machine was bought used. Today was a good day for recycling.

Black and White

We generally consider flies to be ugly pests. But here, on this flower, the fly is putting his best feet forward. Beauty and the beast?

My writing workshop is going well. We've all sort of bonded over the ritual of analyzing each other's work. My stuff is up for review today. I'm a bit calmer knowing that people are kind and constructive.

Speaking of anxiety, I got a frightening phone call from the nurse from my younger son's camp. He seems to have developed the same lousy illness I had last week. He is all right but it scared him. After all, doesn't "pooping blood" scare everyone? Poor guy. The doctor in me came to the fore and I decided that there was no point in panicking since I seem to have survived. The little guy is eating, his color is good (per the nurse) and all other major organ systems seem to be functioning. I think this too shall pass (pun intended) and there is no need to race up to Wisconsin and pick him up as long as all else remains stable.
The mom in me did freak out a bit but I have her under control. She was also proud of her little bugger--he handled himself quite well, a little subdued but no tears, no pleas for me to come and get him. Alas they grow up!

Back to work now. And breakfast!

Greetings from Iowa City

The small towns of the strange middle of our lives
remain small
Sweet wintry
even in summer. . .
Robert Dana "Summer in a Very Small Town"

Well here I am workshopping away. We had a wonderful class meeting today. Although the topic is writing, our conversation involved film editing, specifically centering on the editing of Apocalypse Now. The amazing thing is, using film editing as an entree into editing of one's own novel works in the hands of the workshop leader.
Tonight I have two manuscript excerpts to read and critique. One is structured like an old fashioned adventure thriller (think Indiana Jones or King Solomon's Mines) and the other is a sci-fi novel. The folks at the workshop are interesting people from a particular varied lot of backgrounds. I think the next few days should be fun.
My own manuscript will be critiqued on Thursday. I'm naturally terrified but I'm handling it well. Somehow if I tell everyone I'm scared it helps me cope. The analogy that popped into my head yesterday is that I would be less anxious if I was expected to dance naked in front of these people than I am presenting my writing for their review. For those who'd rather see me dance naked--Nyah, Nyah.
I got a fabulous review from one woman who set the world record for manuscript reading today. She truly loved my work! The way she worded her opinion made me respect that it was sincere and also an opinion worth valuing. We'll have to see how the rest of the week goes. I'm still anxious but less so. Even if nothing comes of my story, I'll save her comments forever.

Road Trip!

As if I haven't been on the road enough lately, I'm off again on Sunday (or tomorrow if I move swiftly). Both kids are out of town for the rest of the month and I decided to party (in my own nerdly way). Said partying involves driving to Iowa City. I'm going to digress for a bit before I tell you why I'm going to Iowa, of all places. First of all,a bit about Iowa. I've been immersed in my second of two Bill Bryson books. In case you aren't a reader of travel stories and memoirs, Bill Bryson is originally from Des Moines, Iowa, a city that I can confidently say, I have never set foot in.
Here is what Bryson has to say about Iowa: "Stand on two phone books almost anywhere in Iowa and you get a view. . . . but there was nothing on it except for a few widely separated farms, some scattered stands of trees and two water towers." Amazingly enought, I look forward to finding (and photographing) those two water towers. I have gotten the bug of previous and far greater photographers such as Edward Weston et al. who have taken photos of abandoned barns, small rural towns and run down gas stations. I hope to follow in their footsteps, camera in hand. Plus I'll be crossing the Mississippi and anticipate a bit of good birding if I'm lucky. If I'm unlucky at least there will be antique stores. Iowa City is slightly less than 4 hours' drive from Chicago. This should be a fun and easy drive as long as my health holds.
There's the rub. The bad news is I'm still not totally over my GI problems of earlier this week. I didn't want to go into gory detail but I had a minor episode of what in the profession we call a GI bleed. I saw a doctor (actually two) who thought I'll live but couldn't come up with a diagnosis more solid than the one I figured out on my own. This is why us doctors make such lousy patients. We hate waiting for hours to see a physician who is (truly) still in her residency. We get even more cranky when she tells you what you already know which is that she doesn't really know what is wrong with you but you don't need to be in a hospital bed.
Things haven't altogether resolved on the GI end in that the I'm eating, working and ambulatory but what passes in via the mouth isn't passing out the other end. This is leading to me having paranoid fantasies about me developing something truly delightful like projectile emesis while uncomfortably ensconced in an Iowa gas station bathroom. Charming visions of medical conditions that end in -ation, -itis, -osis and so on are dancing in my head. I have consoled myself that everything is probably fine and that I'm sure they have hospitals in Iowa.
The goal of my drive into the not-so-wilds of Iowa is that I have signed up for a writing workshop and am hoping that it will jump start the next step on the story I wrote for NaNoWriMo a good 9 months ago. I am terrified beyond belief at having to submit thirteen copies of the first 15 pages for review by my workshop leader and fellow participants but I'm not letting fear stop me.
So there you have it. I haven't been by your blogs lately. Forgive me. I will get to it when I can. Now I have to go do my homework in preparation for my workshop. Wish me luck.

SS--Time Machine

Happy 100th to Sunday Scribblings:

Here I have traveled in time to the year 2061.

It’s hard to believe she turned 100 today. Gran is the oldest person I have ever met. When you look at her you can tell she is that old. Her skin is wrinkled all over and has those age spots everywhere. When you touch her, though, her skin is soft, so soft. Not like a baby’s. A baby’s skin is soft but plump with all that lovely fat just under the surface. Gran’s feels like a fine thin cloth tossed on a bed, with wrinkles and folds scattered randomly. The baby skin is warm to the touch and Gran’s is cool. I always want to hold her hands and transfer some young warmth to them.
People in 2061 live longer than they used to but Gran is still pretty old. We have discovered that science and improved diet can help people live longer and stay healthy but that eventually the body just starts to shut down. Even without cancer, heart disease, strokes and diabetes, people just plain get old and die. I don’t want to think about Gran dying. I’m not sure what I’ll do without her.
I’m amazed at how sharp Gran still is. I love it when she tells me stories about her youth. The technology back then, or more aptly, the lack of technology back then was amazing. I can’t even imagine what her life was like. Back then there were only a few television channels and the first TV’s were in black and white, sort of like an antique photo. You couldn’t record television, there were no DVD’s or CD’s and no one had their own computer at home. The internet didn’t even exist! They actually had to go to the library and look at books to do research for term papers. Of course, without the internet it was a lot harder to catch people who plagiarized too! Nowadays you have to be so careful to use your own words!
Gran taught me to read books. I already knew how to read but I had always done it electronically. Gran has an enormous collection of old books. She is a bit of a pack rat that way. Her house is full of bookshelves. So she would read to me when I was a little kid from books by authors from long ago. The pictures were so much more amazing on real paper. She let me hold the books as long as I promised not to tear the pages. Imagine, pages that can be torn! Later she let me browse her shelves and take home whatever I want to read as long as I return it. I know that antique stores would give a fortune for her book collection so I am very careful with her books.
Gran also tells me stories about her childhood. I like hearing about her grandparents and parents and about her two kids who are really my grandfather and great-uncle. They are pretty old now but her stories and pictures make me feel like I knew them when they were kids.
Gran’s stories about learning to be a doctor in the 80’s and 90’s are so funny sometimes I feel like they are science fiction. Psychiatry was really in the dark ages back then. I can’t believe the “treatments” they used. Maybe it was the best they had at the time but still. . . !
Gran kept working part time until she was 80. She still talks like a shrink from an old TV movie. (Yes Gran got me hooked on some of her favorite old series which we watch for hours together). Her voice is soft and soothing and she always seems to have the right thing to say. It is hard to imagine her being young and green and doing all the foolish things she says she used to do. Hardly anyone does talk therapy anymore because hardly anyone seems to want it but every time I visit Gran I feel calmer and more centered.
I hate to think of losing Gran but I know it could happen any day now. She seems not to be too worried about death. She says that it is something that you learn to accept as you get older. She says that she will live on through me and her other great-grandchildren. I know she must be right but the world will not be the same without her.
In the meantime, I am helping Gran write her memoirs. She told me she had wanted to do this since she was around 20 but never started. Her voice is a bit unsteady and sometimes it is hard for her to dictate so I help after school. Some of the things she says make me a little uncomfortable. You know what I mean—when she tells a story about her first sexual experience, stuff like that. But I feel happy to be part of keeping the past century alive. I’m looking forward to the first electronic edition. Too bad it can’t come out as a paper book. Gran would have liked that!

Sunday Scribblings--Fridge Space

No offense, but (as my kids would say): "What the. . . ?" Thankfully they leave that sentence incomplete but it is still vulgar.
Honestly, I couldn't even think of an essay-type theme for this prompt. I could have done fiction as in "Mary and John fought and eventually divorced over the lack of fridge space for his beer and her Diet Rite." I decided to forgo this work of literary brilliance.
The prompt most made me think of Jeopardy. What's his name reveals the Household Problems for $60--and the answer is: Fridge Space. The question is of course:
What is there never enough of in one's kitchen?
So instead of creative writing here is a picture of, what else?, my fridge, which is, of course, full.



Just a rhetorical question--which seems more intimate, a shot of my fridge or one of my underwear drawer?

Pecked to Death by Ducks

I tried to look up the origin of this expression but could only find reference to the book by this name by author Tim Cahill. Maybe he coined the expression in which case he has my admiration. I wish I could turn a phrase that evocatively. I can simply close my eyes and imagine some hapless soul besieged by ducks.
Pecked to death by ducks comes to mind as a metaphor for how I am feeling these days. It seems as if turning 46 has left me experiencing a foretaste of the woes of getting older. Nothing that will kill me but so far nothing that will make me stronger either. (Source of this expression: "What does not kill me makes me stronger." "Twilight of the Idols" (1899) by Friedrich Nietzsche). Little aches and pains that leave me, vaguely, feeling eroded.
Part of it is just winter weariness. This weekend it is predicted to get down to 0 degrees F. In Celsius, that would be "just too damn cold." The heat wave of last week is long gone. I don't know about you all but I am longing for a glimpse of the sun. But this too will pass. For me, living in Chicago, March is sort of the "hump month" when I start to feel in my heart that winter is almost gone. Of course, there will be the April Fool's Day snow storm to make us think that maybe we ought to hibernate for another month, but March is still the tipping point.
Here is a brief reminder of the exuberance of spring.

The Date

Photo taken at the time of the story.

This prompt compels me to tell my favorite dating story. It is one that makes members of my family cringe but I enjoy the story because I see it as less a story of a big mistake, than as a story of adversity overcome.
My senior year in college, I was lonely, in the romantic sense. The year before had seen the end of my first serious relationship and I finally over the heartbreak. I spent the first six months of my senior year living and studying in Paris. It was a wonderful time but it was a time when I was often on my own. I had been treated badly by the last two men I had dared to hope might want a relationship with me, one at the beginning of my stay in France and the other right after my return.
Then Louis (not his real name) showed up at the airport to pick me up on my return from France. I was expecting someone else but Louis was drafted at the last minute. I didn’t know Louis extremely well. He was a French graduate student that took his meals at my undergraduate dormitory. I was single and, as I said, lonely and Louis was clearly hitting on me. Unfortunately he also had an out of town girlfriend. Louis explained that they had an open relationship and I wasn’t expecting much since I was heading off to medical school in 3 months, so I convinced myself over the course of the next couple of weeks that I could handle the far away girlfriend and allowed myself to get involved.
There was pain associated with knowing there was a girlfriend in the wings but that wasn’t why Louis turned out to be a poor risk in the boyfriend department. See, it turned out that Louis was one of those individuals who is a born adrenaline junkie. At first that just made him fun to be around. He taught me to drive his stick shift car. He took my flying since he was an amateur pilot. He was a fantastic swimmer and taught me how to push myself in the pool and as a consequence I managed to lose the extra pounds that my lousy Parisian diet had put on me.
As an aside, maybe French women don’t get fat, but American women in France can and do. In winter (at least in the 80’s), fresh fruit and vegetables weren’t easy to come by on a budget. I didn’t have a kitchen and I didn’t have much money. That meant I ate a lot of croissants, baguettes, yaourt (French for yogurt) and camembert. I had no access to a gym, and I hated running (besides only crazy Americans ran in France at the time). Even though I walked everywhere, sometimes for miles a day, I gained around 10 pounds.
My real story begins when Louis and I went cross country skiing. I was a novice at the sport. I had been on skis a few times but was still a rank beginner. It was Memorial Day weekend (the end of May) and we had to get to a pretty high altitude to find enough snow to ski in.
It was a gorgeous day. We were at around 10,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. There were no groomed ski trails. We just put on skis and took off. The day was warm and very bright. Things went pretty well until my friend decided he wanted to ski across a frozen lake. I am as susceptible to peer pressure as the next person (or I’d never have been dating this fellow) but I pointed out that it was almost June and that I could see cracks in the ice on the lake and did not think this was such a good idea.
Louis accused me of being a wimp and took off across the lake. I went the long way around intending to meet him at the other side. However, somewhere along the way, I lost sight of him.
Of course, by this time, I had steam coming out of my ears. I thought that Louis had intentionally left me behind and decided to head back to the car and wait for him there. Instead of following our trail back, I took a short cut.
I found myself on a very large downhill slope that exceeded my skiing prowess substantially. Cross country skis are not intended for serious slopes and I was in over my head. I fell a lot but the day was warm and I was still doing all right. At times the terrain got a bit rough. There were places I had to walk sideways where it was too steep to ski and a couple of times I lost my footing, slid downhill and had to use my hands and skis in lieu of an ice axe. There were a few scary moments when I seemed to be sliding toward a tree. This late in the spring the snow around the trees had melted leaving a sort of deep pit in the snow around the trunksk. It occurred to me that falling in one of these holes could be painful and that it would not be a good idea to break an ankle. My feet got wet when I had to cross a stream and missed a step. This added to the overall discomfort.
I continued to hang tough even when I realized that I was lost. I had no food, no matches, in fact, nothing but my clothes and my skis. I have good wilderness skills and didn’t every truly worry about dying out there but I did fear that I would get hurt and have to be rescued with all the subsequent embarrassment associated with that. My worst moment was when I thought I had to be finally nearing the road and came out of the woods on the side of a large canyon and saw the road far away on the other side. I have to admit that I cried a bit then.
All in all, I was out on the snow for around 6 hours before I regained the road. I had never lost my sense of direction and I kept on moving which is what got me out of there. At last I was at the road and found the car. The bad news is that my friend wasn’t there and I didn’t have keys to the car. I was tired, hungry and very angry and decided to hitchhike back to San Francisco. I think I thought Louis was out having a good time at my expense and didn’t have the sense to wait around for him to return. I didn’t have any money or identification but I wasn’t thinking all that clearly.
The first person I asked for a ride was going the wrong way. Before I had the nerve to approach a second person, Louis showed up. Of course, we had a major fight with recriminations being exchanged on both sides. It turned out Louis hadn’t abandoned me by the lake. He had merely ducked behind a rock to take a leak. He was nearly as tired and frayed as I was after spending hours looking for me. We settled the fight long enough to agree we were too tired to return to the city directly. We checked into a small motel nearby and ate something.
It was at this point that the final complication of the day began. On the way home from our dinner, I commented to Louis on what a foggy night it was. He looked at me strangely and said that it was perfectly clear. Over the next few hours I progressively began to go snow blind.
I had heard of the phenomenon. Anyone who read Jack London stories as a kid had heard of it. If London mentioned that it was painful, I hadn’t noticed. It turns out that having both one’s corneas seriously burned is painful and frightening in the way childbirth is painful and frightening. I think I was probably delirious since at some point during the ordeal I decided that my pain was less severe while my contact lenses were still in place so I tried to put them back in while blind, in immense pain and with tears streaming down my face. Needless to say I wasn’t able to manage it.
The next day I tied a shirt over my face and barely endured the drive back home and straight to the student health center at school. By then the pain had begun to abate and there was nothing that needed to be done for my eyes except some drops for the pain. When I was finally able to see clearly enough to tell, I realized that my eyes had sunburn lines from where my lids covered them. I also had time to realize that if I had succeeded in hitch-hiking into town as was my first plan, I would have probably landed in San Francisco with no money or ID, blind and delirious. Lucky for me the first ride didn’t work out.
I have had no ill effects from the burn but if I ever get a melanoma of my eyes (it happens) I will know the most probable cause. I have also learned to wear sun glasses while skiing. Louis and I parted ways when I left for Medical School and I have not heard from him for years.
I learned something that day. I learned that while I may not have the foolhardy courage that Louis had, I do have the kind of courage that kept me going when cold, wet, tired and scared that day. So I still tell the story, even if it makes my family shake their heads in dismay.

NaNoWriMo Wrap Up

I promise no more NaNo posts after this. My final word count was 52,729 words, 86 pages. Now all I have to do is write, write, write some more. Then do 6 months of editing or so. Should be a piece of cake.
Hopefully by next week I will have relapsed to my more normal blogging mode complete with memes and Sunday Scribbling. In fact, maybe I'll do tomorrow's scribbling. See you then.

Thanksgiving is so, like, over!

Sorry for the title. I've been reading and writing too much young adult literature of late. I missed a day of writing and more than a day of blogging due to the demands of cooking and feeding 10 people on Thanksgiving. I lost a little momentum on my NaNo novel over the holiday but I seem to be back on track.
Today, I had the inspiration to have my character read a banned book and I happened to have just the right banned book in my library. (I bought it during Banned Book Week from my local independent bookseller). Last week I attended a local NaNo event and got a little feedback on my work-in-progress from a professional. Her take was that I needed to add more dialog and descriptive detail. She also recommended a couple of books that might help me with catching the adolescent "voice." (Don't forget I live with an adolescent voice.). So I dutifully went out and bought one of the books she recommended, dredged up a copy of Catcher in the Rye from my bookshelves--I never read it since I tried to read it and didn't like it as a teen myself--and bought a couple of modern YA books with catchy titles or themes.
Among my recent thematic readings are:
The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart
Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger
Ice Drift by Theodore Taylor (not YA but an adventure book for middle schoolers about kids surviving alone in the arctic).
Here is my favorite line from Hard Love: "I flopped on the couch, attempting to render myself invisible by passing for a normal teenage boy."
I don't really have time to review these books and others I've read this month. I really need to focus on surviving NaNo now that it is down to the finish line. To get back to the banned books theme, the book I am working into my story is the perks of being a wallflower--omitting capitals seems to be de rigeur in titles of teen books. So far it is interesting. It is pretty obvious why someone might want to ban it. In the first 42 pages there are references to drugs, alcohol, homosexuality and other naughty stuff. In other words, exactly what all the teens in my family and office are talking about. No magic yet which triggered Harry Potter haters to try to ban it.
I also found an interesting blog about banned books. It is recommended reading as is the American Library Association information about Banned Books Week. Happy reading!
The count for the day, so far, is:
46920 words
77 single spaced pages.

TTFN!