Art Blogs

I've been reading a lot of other peoples' blogs lately, and I have to say, this foray has resonated with me. Specifically, I've been dipping into the wealth of blogs written by working artists. (And by working artists, I mean both A. artists who work really hard most of the time at their crafts, and B. artists who then make money off of said art...but mostly I mean type A.)

Even though I am, by and large, not a visual artist--drawings, paintings, sculpture, etc.--many of the artists I've been reading are. And I am amazed at how similar their working lives are to mine. I am also always amazed at how much more awesome their chronicles of their works are, compared to mine (and not just because they post pictures of their stuff!) It's kind of weird to phrase it like this, but I feel like I'm cut off from my work, like I can identify so much more with the struggles other people are going through.

Sometimes--well, okay, most of the time--I feel like my work is just so boring. I've been experiencing an abundance of creativity lately, which is really excellent, because I'm excited about writing again. And not just a little excited. I'm so full of ideas and snippets and just general excitement that my sleep is getting interrupted. The littlest thing will get me worked up so fast that (seriously) I feel ill with the strength of it. I'm frequently burning the candle at both ends, kept awake with the need to write and waking up early because I just can't lay in bed with words burning their way through me.

Yesterday, for example, I found I could not in good conscience retire to the bedroom for the night until I wrote a ballad. And so I struggled through it. I'm pretty in love with it today, but yesterday I just wanted to be able to stop. I took a couple breaks while writing it, yes, but I could not allow myself to quit before it was finished. (And even then, after that, I sat in my bed until two in the morning and scribbled frantically to capture a scene for a story before I was too exhausted to hold the pen any more.)

I'm also putting my hand in trying to create an art quilt. It's going fairly well, though I'm only in the planning stage. I'm using a couple of different traditional blocks in addition to the fancy parts. (I hate that quilting requires so much precise math! I'm terrible at figuring out how big I have to make certain pieces if I want them to come out a certain size.)


Doing so much all at once is really very tiring. But...I have found that reading about other people's works restores me. It makes me really happy to be creating things. It gets me excited about all kinds of art again. Now, if only I can control myself a little and stop missing/burning meals because I get distracted by writing.

~Later

Stretched Thin...

I feel pretty exhausted, truth be told. I managed to get myself started on another (potentially) fanfic-o-doom, this time for Saiyuki. This past weekend was hectic, because I was editing Entropy and drafting the as-yet-unnamed fic...at the same time. The new fic was hammering hard, demanding to be written, and yet I had promised myself that I would get another Entropy chapter ready for posting. I persevered and finished the editing.

I have good-ish news, I suppose. Today, I edited and posted a short piece for a Saiyuki challenge community on Livejournal. Did I mention I've gotten myself an LJ for the exclusive purpose of fanfic? Well, I did. I will probably end up crossposting all the things that go up on AFF on the LJ, mostly because I want to offer alternatives to viewing sites. (Read: posting on LJ gives a thin veneer of classiness to my tasteless writings, hahaha.)

Also today, I finished drafting part two of a two-parted fanfic/writing experiment. I say experiment, because it's one of those flip-side things, where you get one writing style and perspective in one half and another radically different style and different perspective in the other half. (And both halves cover the same events.) I need to figure out a real title for it, too. I hope to polish it off tomorrow.

I worked a short while on the unnamed fic, too. It kind of rickrolled me, really, because I was focusing on that two-parter (which is a vastly, vastly different kettle of fish) and the other story was all...BAM! Write this scene, since you're sitting right there! I don't care if you don't want to, you have no choice! Do it!

Let's see...I want to edit another chapter of Entropy over the next couple days, too. (It might be a good idea to draft more of that, while I'm at it. I'm running low on pre-written, just-needs-editing chapters for that.) I have a pretty good handle on where the story is going. It's just a question of connecting the dots with a combination of plot and character development. I haven't exactly lost interest in the story, but I am getting tired of grinding away. I suppose it's more accurate to say that other stories are getting my attention more than this one. (I shall do my best to persevere and get more done, though!)

Must go, words will eat me...

~Later

Updates and Odds and Ends

Here's the deal. I've temporarily down-ranked the Entropy index. I'm doing this partly because I don't want any crossover traffic to be getting confused about what's what with Entropy. I'm going through and revising things in order to post them elsewhere, and I don't want people to think that what they've read of it here is the be-all-end-all. It's not. The story is constantly evolving, changing, growing. Some changes are minor, but there are going to be some big revisions, too. I'm working hard to better mesh the older and newer material. It's hard to keep such a sprawling body of work consistent. So anyway, that's why the Entropy index is currently moved down a bit. It can still be found in the tags under "Entropy chapter index."

That aside, I have been working on new chapters for it in addition to polishing the old ones. At this very moment, I have three chapter thirteens. Or wait. No. I have four chapter thirteens and a general sketchy outline of what chapter thirteen is supposed to cover. Working from that outline has produced three chapter thirteens in addition to the fourth, original thirteen. Obviously, once they're all nice and ready for posting, they will no longer be 13a, 13b, and 13c. They'll be thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen...and depending on how the original thirteen looks after all that new stuff, there'll be a sixteen, too. (And all of that will trigger the domino effect, considering I already have a chapter 14, 15, and 16.) I swear, every time I turn around Entropy gets bigger. Maybe I should have called it Inertia. (I'm joking. ^_^)

Besides Entropy, I've recently done up a one-shot, also Naruto and also Kakashi/Sasuke-centric. I'm still on the fence about posting it here, because it definitely requires some sort of adult content warning. Is it possible to be graphic and tasteful at the same time? I definitely shot for intimate and delicate (versus raunchy and porntastic) but I didn't really skimp on the details...In fact, I sort of wallowed in the details.

I have a few other bits and pieces from various fandoms floating around, but nothing is too serious at this point. I've been consumed by the big projects recently.

As for non-fandom things...I haven't done too much. I drafted a poem recently but haven't touched it since. Really, I have two poems on the back burner. I also have been picking at a fiction piece, but I've been derelict in pushing forward with it. That particular one is tricky: I've written some for it before and it was quite serious. Doing bits for it now, I find myself dipping into the humorous and almost farcical. It's tough to balance the different moods and styles, and I'm not convinced I'm doing it successfully. I suspect it's going to be one of those stories where the different styles interrupt the main story every so often. (I consider the serious parts to be the real meat of this story.)

I've had a real yen for discussions of writing craft lately. I've been re-reading pieces of writing manuals and style guides. I've been reading about reading too, and have just encountered a rather interesting-looking book on the subject, entitled "The Crafty Reader." Part of the premise of it seems to be about reading as a multi-faceted discipline. the thing that grabbed me about it was that A. the dust jacket promised a good discussion on the craft and tools of critical reading, and B. it kind of promised to debunk and demean the New Critical theory. (I despise New Critical.)

Still, my search for shop-talk isn't turning up a lot of results. I want discussion, not a "Thou shalt write this way and this way only" sort of thing, of which so many books on writing are. I suppose I'd do better looking for essays on writing, really, but it's kind of the same problem there, with the added distinction that a lot of the "good" essays are either by or about authors I don't read, and the works they may discuss are, for lack of a better term, dated. If I wanted to delve more into the socio-historical aspects of writing craft, I would...but I don't. I think part of the problem is that I can't clearly define what I want; I am only able to look through and say that this or that is what I don't want.

Ugh. This was a singularly unproductive post, wasn't it?

~Later

Clearing up Confusion

I have been really busy over the past few days. Really, really busy...like working eight or nine hours every day writing and editing. What is it I am working toward? I suppose I'm preparing to transfer my fanfics (what few there are) over to a designated account (with another host) just for fanfics. I'm looking at a timeline of a few weeks to complete this process.

As I prepare for the move, I'm going through the chapters of Entropy posted here. I'm giving them an extra edit and polish before posting over at the new spot. This means that what is posted here for Entropy is growing increasingly obsolete. Should I bother posting the newest versions of chapters here?

I have not yet decided if I'm going to remove the fanfics from here entirely or not. I am somewhat concerned with someone out there somewhere accusing me of plagarism, despite my carefulness to keep everything I do linked together through various means. Perhaps I will make a redirect index to replace the current chapter index?

Of course, this also brings up the question of new Entropy chapters. I have two more that currently have no internet home. Should I continue posting here and then there? Or should I only post over there? I don't want to exclude anyone...

Ah, administration. How I loathe you.

In addition to the fanfics, I've been grinding away at some original fiction. Also, I woke up this morning and did a rough draft of a poem. I was up ridiculously early today and managed to start off on a good writing foot (though I did have a nap this morning as well, after a few hours of working.) I did something like ten or eleven hours' worth of writing stuff today. If only I were this productive every day! Also, I wish I wouldn't feel so wiped from doing all that work.

I have not been doing well on the daily freewrite and weekly book review goals I set myself. If I even get a freewrite in, it always ends up being something I don't want to share...which is frustrating because part of doing the dailies is to share! As for the book reviews, again, it's a matter of not feeling that what I've read is fit for public consumption. I mean honestly. I read no less than two books a week, and sometimes upwards of one book a day. There's no excuse!

Argh. My brain is fried and I have the attention span of a cracked-out hamster.

~Later

Take that, crappy exposition!

I have re-worked chapter one of the dread fic Entropy! I'm going to take a break before I give it a quick look over, but I'm fairly pleased at how I was able to streamline it and make it slightly less boringly expositional.

Expect it to be posted later this evening.

~Later

In the wind...

Remember when I said, back whenever it was, that I was going to have to write all-new material for chapter thirteen of Entropy? And remember how I said more recently that that chapter was going to be a boring montage-ish chapter? Well, I've made a fool of myself. I have a chapter thirteen now, and it is not a montage. It also covers a fraction of what I was intending to cover, which means I need to do even more new writing to catch up between twelve and the chapters that lay in the story's future (which I have already written and will need to rewrite.)

Speaking of rewrites, I've done a quick re-read of Entropy as posted here. I've found some parts of chapter one that I will be tending to in the next couple days. I can finally say that distancing myself from the story has helped me find the problems. I now see better what needs to be improved and removed in order for chapter one to fit in smoothly between the prologue and chapter two. Lesson learned: try to avoid writing prologues after laying out chapters of stuff that come after! I think I can properly streamline chapter one now. It's such a relief! (Especially knowing I had some serious, very obvious errors in there.)

In other news, I've officially taken up with an online fanfic community. This is exciting, mostly because it affords me the opportunity to expand my readership rather dramatically (and yet, so easily!) I'm just getting used to the setup over there as far as posting goes, and it also amazes me how satisfying it is to watch the number of hits my story has crawl higher. (I put up one quick story over there just to acclimate myself to the controls and process and all. I'm going to take my time with the rest of what I want to put up.)

Conversely, this may mean a gradual increase in visits over here, as I've listed this as my website...not that I'm expecting much of anything.

One thing is for sure, though. I'm going to try my best not to sit around waiting for warm fuzzies and hits to come my way. I'm going to try to keep busy writing! If I just keep my head down and work, I may eventually get somewhere. With that in mind, I'll probably post something here in the near future. Fingers crossed!

~Later

What's in a name?

For some reason, I seem to write about names a lot. Here's a short snippet entirely devoted to it.

---

Prudence Chastity Maheux, age seventeen, was counting down the time until her eighteenth birthday, when she would legally be allowed to change her name. She didn’t know what her parents had been thinking, naming her that. Maybe her mom had still been high on painkillers when she put that down.

Since age ten, when she had realized it was patently uncool to share her names with the Pilgrims coming off the Mayflower, Prudence had been looking for a better name. Her parents had been calling her Prudie since she could first talk. No amount of argument could convince them that her new nickname (adopted age twelve) was Chaz. It was the most cool, smallest part of her soon-to-be-ex name. Still, she reflected, Chaz was a little bit too boyish for a forever name.

Prudence had been collecting names over the past seven-and-a-half years. She kept the list in a three ring binder. She’d write down names of movie and book characters, classmates, and celebrities. If she overheard a name she liked, it went into the notebook. She had several baby name books and she eagerly awaited the coming of new phone books with their thousands of intriguing entries.

She knew all about last names as first names, and names that bridged the gender gap. She knew some names that crossed from widely male usage into widely female and the converse. Prudence was of the opinion that many Germanic names were too harsh for what she wanted. French ones sounded too snooty. And the Celtic ones…Prudence couldn’t even pronounce half of them, let alone imagine calling herself by one.

Still, she had hundreds of names to choose from, and she spent a little time each day trying them out in front of the bathroom mirror. Otherwise, how would she know which one she was? Sometimes she liked one enough to try it out for a day or two, signing her new name on her school papers and refusing to answer to her (soon to be ex) name. Prudence had invested in some “Hello my name is” stickers and they were invaluable.


---

I always have a hard time naming characters. I can't imagine how hard it might be to name myself. I mean, I go by a nickname I've had for years, but it's derived from my full name. I don't know that I could find the perfect, right name for me starting cold from a list, even if I took years to suss it out. And as for legal name changes? I don't know that I could jettison my old name. My name has history and sentimental importance attached to it.

But, if I were a Prudence Chastity, I'd make the effort.

~Later

The Dream Experience

So, for today's freewrite, a regurgitation of the dream I had whilst napping away the early evening hours.

----

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up smack in the middle of an alien invasion. I had been shopping in an antiques mall, hundreds of booths and corridors and staircases that looped around in a dizzying display of merchandise. I was stopped by an elderly gentleman who had apparently heard me whistling Beethoven and he wanted to know if I could sing. He gave me some sheet music and I embarrassedly admitted that my sight reading skills were bad. Nonetheless I sang for him.

And then things went wrong. People with clear torques around their necks started to crowd out the people without them. They started chasing me, relentless. They were going to collar me, make me one of them, an alien. Or, at least, under alien control because they were coming today. I ran and fought and tricked. I punched through walls and ceilings trying to get up and out, but the aliens were swarming near me. I asked the numerous cats lazing about for help, and they obliged. They collected, out of the antiques, necklaces that could serve as a fake torque. I had to slow down in my flight to try them on. I finally got one that fit and I made my way back to an alien, because no one had witnessed my deception. But there was a flaw in my plan: my necklace was not clear, but red.

The red necklace scared the other aliens. From what I could gather without revealing to myself, I was someone higher up in the invasion plan than the aliens had been anticipating seeing so soon. Still, sweating every inch of the way, I made my stately, deliberate way to the exit…and then I ran into my mom and I had to rescue her without raising suspicions and I was so, so afraid for her, much more than I feared for myself. I managed to get her to safety, and the aliens finally caught up to me.

They were going to hold me until their leaders arrived and, by then, I was so tired that I couldn’t fight any more. I basically laid down to die. I was so tired and sad because, really, there was nothing I could do anymore. And then I woke up…which I had tried to do earlier without success.

----

Ugh. I'm sick of alien invasions.

~Later

Returning to the Regularly Scheduled Program

I'm doing daily freewrites again. Just a reminder, these tend to be word vomit with terrible grammar, structural, and continuity problems. The following is no exception.

---

I was waiting for Jessica in the Krogers parking lot. It was the middle of a particularly nasty February Wednesday and the wind howled and clawed at the car. I looked at the dashboard clock. Eleven thirty. I’d been sitting in the car listening to the radio for a half an hour now. I sighed and shifted position. Jessica had said she just needed to pick up a new toothbrush and a couple other small ‘personal’ items. I now suspected she was waiting for a refill of her birth control prescription. Jessica didn’t like to talk about that sort of stuff with me, and I was fine with that. I didn’t like talking about it either. But still, if I’d known this quick errand was going to take so long, I would have brought a book.

Maybe I should go in, see if she was stuck in line at the register. No, I told myself. That was a bad idea. Better wait. She didn’t like to be caught in the act of anything personal. Even though we lived together, slept together in the same bed, and, occasionally, had shower sex, Jessica still wasn’t comfortable brushing her teeth in front of me. I can’t imagine what it would be like if she found herself with a prescription bag, confronted by me in the checkout line.

I was trying to respect her, but it was hard. She made it hard. Hell if I knew why. Maybe it would just take some more time. I looked at the clock. Eleven forty. I needed to go in and check on her. I didn’t want to be stuck waiting all morning. I sighed, looking at the dismal parking lot. It was rainy with standing slush on the ground, and the wind was fierce. I checked my windbreaker, zipped it up as far as it would go. I pulled the keys out of the ignition and unbuckled my seatbelt.

The wind heaved against my door as I tried to push it open. I sidled out and the door slammed, missing my fingers by an inch.

“Stupid wind,” I said.

I kicked the car’s tire and locked up. Jessica had insisted we park as far away from the entrance as possible.

“Just think of all those old people,” she had said. “They’re all lame and stuff. And besides, they can’t drive. You don’t really want to be so close to one of them trying to park in the handicap spot, do you?”

And so we were all the way across the vast, flat plane of tar. I snorted. It was ridiculous how all the new stores had such huge parking lots. It was like they expected the entire city to come in all at once. I’d never seen more than a half dozen cars there at any one time. I trudged through the slush and felt cold water seeping into my sneakers. The footing was shitty. The wind threw water into my face, stingingly hard. I skidded every few steps, and two cars tried their best to run me down. The whole parking lot is empty: why in God’s name did they need to come so close to me?

I made it to the front entrance and I stood there, just inside the doors, letting myself drip and enjoying the heaters blasting air onto the top of my head. I shook myself off, to the apparent disgust of an old lady on her way out. Screw you, grandma. You’re parked right next to the door. No wading across the parking lot for you.

And then, I began to look for Jessica. She wasn’t in any of the checkout lines near the entrance. I made my way to the back. Maybe she was at the prescription counter. I grinned as my sneakers squeaked. The noise echoed up to the huge empty ceiling and bounced around. The whole store could hear my every footstep. It would be even better if I’d picked up a shopping cart. I never failed, by random chance, to get the worst-repaired, most rusty, rattling one. But it was dumb to use a cart when I wasn’t going to buy anything.

Jessica wasn’t there. And, in fact, the pharmacy counter was closed. The blinds were drawn, and the lights were off in the pathetic little waiting area, with its square yard of carpet and two folding chairs. So I wandered the aisles, looking for her. Not in the snacks or greeting cards. She wasn’t sniffing shampoos or comparing razors. She wasn’t picking out Tylenol or vitamins. I spent a little time looking at the display of overpriced beer. That wasn’t even a good sale price.

I made a loop of the store. She wasn’t anywhere. And then, I heard her. It was her, definitely, by the photo counter. Oh. Crap. There was no mistaking it. That was her special “I’m having sex and loving it” noise.

I went over to the photo counter. There wasn’t anyone there, but the blinds on the photo booth were quivering. Fuck.

I didn’t wait around. I sped out of the store and crossed the parking lot in record time. I fumbled the keys, fished them out of the slush, and got in. I didn’t want to wait around and talk, so I left her there. I started the car and drove off, leaving her in the store with her…whoever. I didn’t pay much attention on the drive home, and I nearly got sideswiped because I was too busy thinking about Jessica in the cramped little room full of chemicals and the evidence of other peoples’ lives.


---

Okay, so for some reason, I just couldn't get with the first person past tense. Still, it must be an awful thing to find your girlfriend is cheating on you like that...I can't decide if Jessica was cheating with a pharmacy tech or a photo counter person.

~Later

Ethel Fantasizes

This is a quickie. I may come back to it later.

----
Ethel had a crush on the weatherman. That is to say, she was enamored of his sharply handsome looks and the way he cheerfully reeled off more information on cloud formations and low pressure systems and general temperature and dew point fluctuations than the average news watching person could ever use. There had also been a special report one time, in which the weatherman had been coaxed into a kilt. That sealed the deal.

She had never met the weatherman, and really she had no intention of doing so. But she liked the figure he cut in his suit as he strode across the stage and gestured at the maps. You see, Ethel spent a lot of her time in front of the television. She was getting older, and she couldn’t get around as well as she used to. She needed more time between bouts of activity, and the couch in front of the television was both comfortable and easy to get out of when she was rested.

Ethel lived alone and she liked the noise the television made in her small apartment. She liked to pretend that she knew the people on the television, that any minute now they’d be ringing the doorbell and coming to dinner. It was lamentable that this would never happen, but such is life. Ethel knew where the line was between reality and fantasy, but it was nice to imagine.

And then the weatherman moved in across the street.

----

I can't make up my mind how pervy Ethel will be. I do think that she's going to dance around trying her best to avoid the weatherman so as not to let reality intrude on her fantasy. Also, I'm not really clear on how old she really is. Maybe she has chronic health problems that are making her aging more difficult. I think she's just this side of housebound, though she's not precisely frail, just has mobility issues.

I must away! I'm pretty impressed I wrote anything, truth be told. I do not feel well.

~Later

I have no attention span.

Someday, this might turn into song lyrics.

---


It was a long time ago, best of friends
Playing make-believe and believing
Nothing would ever end. But you moved away
to a different place and I couldn’t follow you.

High school, still in our small town
Playgrounds long gone, leaves fallen on the ground.
On to college, the memory of you surrounding me
Adrift in the air, I think of summers when we played.

Your fragrance haunts me, years after you’d gone
And I had moved away and moved on.
Walking in my new city, my heart stops at the crosswalk.
It’s turning the corner, your hair, your face.

Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know.

I follow you, for a while, to be sure
High heeled shoes lead my heart to your door.
You go inside and turn on the light, staring out
Before drawing the blinds against the world.

It’s you and the doorbell is right over there
I’d push the button if I thought you’d care.

Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know.


And don’t I still love you?
You’re the girl that I’m supposed to know
And you don’t even know I’m there.
Why don’t I reach out and say hello?
Passing silent in the night
Walking fast along the street
I just want to stop and say
Goodbye, good night, girl I no longer know.

----

This was much choppier than I had wanted. I got distracted after (almost) every line I pounded out. It was also a challenge to not have a specific incident as reference for the subject matter; I kind of picked and chose and formed a composite. Some of it is patently untrue. I don't know why, but I was thinking about how strange it is to bump into people, especially when you are somewhere you would not expect that person to be. I like to think I saved the narrator from an awkward and disappointing confrontation here.

I'm hesitant to call these song lyrics. Maybe they're in some sort of hybrid state? I haven't really jumped into full-on lyrics, but I like to think that I've started to shape the poem around the conventional bones of verses and chorus and funky bridge/ending-chorus-that-isn't-quite-the-same. It's hard to do lyrics with no music in mind! Can you tell I was listening to Coldplay as as I puttered? I was going to parody them, but I'm a not-so-secret sucker for their songs. Also, I imagine it would be difficult to make a parody that was more serious than what I might normally do. It would be more of an homage than a pastiche, really. (Frankly, I'd rather do something completely original and serious than a serious take on someone else's stuff.)

And now, a short list.

Possibilities for parodies:
1. Exerciser (Womanizer by the infamous Britney Spears): a song about gyms and fitness and women who engage in these activities.

2. Eighteen Gays (18 Days by Saving Abel): ...doesn't the title cover it all? Possibly about eighteen men the narrator has dated, possibly a song about how he has eighteen gay friends and therefore cannot possibly hate gay people.

3. Something to the tune of Hit Me With Your Best Shot (ala Pat Benatar)

That's all I've got right now.

~Later

Food as sex?

Ugh. This is what I get for reading fanfics and being hungry at the same time.

----
The reverse of the skin caught on her tongue, rough as it slid down her throat. The fragrance in her nose was delicate and floral and warm and sweet. Juice dripped down her chin and she chased it with a finger. The flesh was tender, falling apart in mellow slickness as soon as she touched her teeth to it. She worked her lips around it and sucked it into her mouth: the fruit slid off the core. She licked her fingers and swallowed the mouthfuls of juice, then closed her eyes and exhaled through open lips and a dropped jaw. Pear scented air circulated through her throat and mouth and up into her nose. It was ecstatic. She chewed the pear down to the soft fibers of its core, no more than a few strands holding the stem to the remainders of the blossom. She licked the leftovers and her fingers once more before rising to wash her hands and face.
---

Here I am, sitting around and fantasizing about how the skin of a pear feels when you eat it. I don't know if I'm the only person who exhales through the mouth in order to better taste a food, but let me tell you, it's kind of a strange habit to try and articulate on paper. I seem to remember a Carver story where a couple uses the eating of food as a substitute for sex. I suppose this snippet is along those lines, except...the eating of food is pleasurable in itself? I mean that the actual physical sensations and actions involved in eating are pleasurable, I guess.

Heh. I think I just made some food porn. Not particularly demanding, but I did have trouble varying the length of my sentences. I notice a tendency to get stuck writing heaps of medium-length ones, and then when I go through them I groan because they all read like clunkers.

~Later

Storytime!

The fruits of my labors!

---
While bending over to heft a ten pound bag of sugar into her grocery cart, Sarah had a wardrobe malfunction. Her beautiful, wonderful, perfect right breast squeezed out of her bra and out of the top of her shirt. She dropped the sugar and it exploded over the floor.

“Oh shit,” she said.

She blushed terribly as she tried, frantically, to stuff herself back into her shirt before anyone saw. Goddamn sugar for goddamn holiday cookies for the goddamn holidays. Why the hell was it on the bottom shelf, anyway?

“Hello there.”

Goddamnit. Sarah yanked the edges of her neckline together. Sugar ground into the skin of her hands and into the cashmere. Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit. She looked up, briefly. She froze.

Whoever he was, he was cute.

“You look like you need a hand,” he said.

Sarah stared at him. Whoever he was, he was cute, a twist on the tall, dark and handsome. He had bright green eyes, dark hair, and a seasonal sweater, very Fair Isles.

“Aww crap, that came out wrong. Sorry,” he said.

His mouth twisted into a smile. He had dimples, she noted. Dimples in his square, classically handsome face. This was so bad.

“Can I offer you my coat and a walk to the restroom?”

He held up the coat in question. It was long and large and probably and excellent cover for her mishap.
Sarah nodded and tried to force the lump in her throat back with a smile of her own. It didn’t go so well, judging from the concern suddenly visible on his face. She concentrated on not crying. He draped the coat over her shoulders and she sniffled. When he placed his basket into her cart and then made to steer the cart, Sarah’s eyes watered.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Let’s get you to the restroom, yeah?”

And suddenly, everything was simultaneously so much worse and better than it had been. Sarah and Dimples crunched through the sugar in formation. She stuck it out as everyone within eyesight stared at them, no doubt due to her cart being the loudest, squeakiest cart in the entire store. She put up with it, still red with embarrassment. Dimples was the nicest man on the planet. He was superhumanly nice…and he’d seen her beautiful, beautiful goddamn breast in the baking aisle. Sarah wanted to kill whoever had made her scoop-neck sweater. She vowed never to wear it again as they approached the customer service desk.

“I’ll wait here for you,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after your cart.”

Sarah fled to the bathroom. She locked herself into a stall and slid, reluctantly, out of his coat. His cologne made her mouth water and the rest of her feel warm. She fixed her bra and sweater and, all too late, realized she was feeling warmth that had nothing to do with either the burning of embarrassment or the scent of his cologne. She unlocked the stall and looked in the mirror. And then she looked down at the coat in her hands.

“No, no, no,” she said. “This can’t be happening.”

She wetted down a paper towel and wiped ineffectually at the hives raising on her skin. The cool water felt nice, but it wasn’t doing a damn thing to bring down the swellings. She was allergic to wool and that coat that Dimples had offered was a hundred percent boiled wool. At least it wasn’t going to kill her…but it was really the icing on the cake.

“Well hell,” she said, and began to cry. Sarah bawled and drew great heaving breaths that shuddered into more sobs. Her face got all red and her nose dripped and she felt horrible. She bit the inside of her cheek and, slowly, calmed down. She washed her face with cold water and patted dry with more paper towels. She blew her nose.

Sarah steeled herself and left the bathroom at a forced march. She pasted a smile onto her face and greeted Dimples.

“Thank you for the coat,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

She handed the coat back and noted that her palms were getting itchy now too.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Are you all right? You looked…different before.”

Sarah flushed as he looked her over. No doubt the hives were looking worse. Oh crap. Before for him was sugar-bag before. Crap crap crappity crap crap crap.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’d like my cart back now, please, so I can pretend none of this ever happened.”

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean…it’s just…”

Dimples looked uncomfortable. Good. Sarah was so beyond uncomfortable right now. She took the handle of the cart and tried to pull it away, but he was still holding onto it.

He stuck out his hand. Sarah stared at it like it was roadkill.

“My name is Scott,” he said. “Scott Garland.”

“Seriously?” she said. “Garland?”

Sarah’s brain felt like it was going to explode and she itched at her hives without thinking. Scott dropped his hand to his side.

“Yeah,” he said. A little wrinkle formed between his eyebrows.

“It’s so…festive,” Sarah said.

“You mean awful,” he said. “Or unfortunate?”

“That too,” said Sarah. “Well, uh, I’m Sarah.”

She held out her hand, which was currently red and itchy as all get out. Scott blinked at her and the corners of his mouth lifted.

“Sarah,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

He shook her hand.

“I’m allergic to wool,” she blurted. “But really it was so nice of you and I didn’t notice at first.”

Comprehension took over his expression. And then he threw back his head and laughed.
“I am so, so sorry,” he said. “I really was trying to help.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said.

And, suddenly, it was, despite the itchiness and mortal embarrassment and the sugar that crunched in the tread of her shoes.

“This whole thing, it’s just been unbelievable,” she said.

Scott nodded.

“Not how I imagined my grocery shopping would go,” he said.

Sarah snorted.

“Me either.”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s not every day I find a damsel in distress in with the flour.”

And then he froze and looked at her before feigning nonchalance. Sarah blushed again, but it wasn’t so bad.

“Believe me, I’d rather have skipped that part and gone straight to introducing myself,” she said. “Or maybe I would have just given you the eye if we happened to bump into each other.”

Scott laughed again, and Sarah fell a little bit in love with his nice, white, even teeth and the way his neck came out of the collar of his sweater.

“Well, I’ve got to get going,” she said. “Cookies to bake and all that. But thank you again.”

Scott let go of the cart.

“Take care,” he said.

“You too.”

And with that, Sarah wheeled away from the nicest guy in the world, hoping she would never see him again, even if he was handsome and funny to boot.

---

I thought this was both funny and slightly painful...but mostly funny. I know there's probably no man on earth this considerate, but that's the good part about fiction. I swear I was going to write more and have even more stuff go wrong for Sarah, but I'm just too darn tired.

~Later

Excerpts

I'm not putting the whole free-write up here. Suffice it to say that I'm feeling down again.

---
I’m pretending she doesn’t exist
even though everything I do reminds me.
Missing people leave
Ragged holes in the fabric of our space and time
Seen only at night when between the stars grows
Wider and darker than we remember.

The abrupt leavings that tear through us
Leave our united fronts asunder.
I hated her and she didn’t care.
I loved her and it wasn’t enough.
I want to save her
When she is gone, gone, gone.

Pick pick pick pick at the unseen wound
Turn it over and over, unable to decipher its shape
I am heartbroken.
Rejected: it wasn’t me
She chose to leave and not say goodbye.

If I could I’d excise this love
Weigh it, measure it
Box it up and throw it out.
She doesn’t deserve it, wouldn’t keep it
And I have no one else to take it.
---

Ugh. I wish I could sleep all this crap away, but I even dream about her.

~Later

Further Arctic Adventures...now with less Arctic!

...this whole thing makes me think. Maybe I'll try for a different story tomorrow?

---
Eventually, the unicorn was placed in a laboratory, where an international group of scientists puzzled over it. They marveled over its perfect preservation and were shocked to find that, despite its being frozen for untold eons, no cellular decay had occurred: its cells were neither blemished by time nor burst from the freezing temperatures. And so they took the unicorn off the mortuary table and lowered it into a vat of restorative liquid. They hooked it up to a ventilator and a machine that mimicked the function of its heart. The scientists studied it.

The scientists took scrapings of its horn and hooves. They took hairs from the tail and mane, swabbed the mouth for remnants of saliva. They drew blood samples and, with a very fine hypodermic needle, took a portion of the contents of its tear ducts.

The tests on all these materials were contradictory and inconclusive. Depending on who looked under the microscope, they were either something unlike any other earthly result, or they pointed to an exceptionally average horse. The blood samples were poison one day and an effective cure for every disease the scientists had on hand the next. The hoof scrapings were pure silver and lighter than air; they were heavier and duller than lead, giving off no reflection at all. The horn…well, four scientists in a row quit after handling it. Of those four, one became a monk and devoted his life to God. Another was soon arrested for a series of brutal murders. The other two were never heard from again, though it was rumored that they had both ended up in asylums. Shortly after, the scientists were forbidden direct contact with the samples. But the experiments continued.

After the fourth scientist had quit, Stephen St. Gradie started having strange dreams. He dreamed of the arctic, of the glacier where he’d found the unicorn. Even in his dream he knew, logically, that the entire area had been excavated and nothing else had been found. But, whenever he closed his eyes, he saw it as it had been. But everything was wrong and twisted, as was the wont of dreams. The sun shone hot, hotter, blistering until the ice melted into strange shapes. The ice fields, as far as he could see, bloomed with strange flowers and plants made of ice. His tent transformed into a pile of stones and the unicorn came bursting out of it, its steps shattering the rocks into spalls of ice. St Gradie was afraid, and he ran, he always ran from it. He ran until he tripped and fell, and, just as the unicorn bore down on him and would have crushed him with its hooves, he forced himself awake.

Stephen St. Gradie dreamt the same sort of dream over and over. Always the unicorn pursued him, and always he ran, waking just before it could harm him. His sleep became so poor that he visited a physician. The doctor prescribed a mild sedative to help him sleep, and for a time it worked. But then, it happened.

He was sprinting across the strange, glittering fields of flowers, and the sun was hot on him, and he could feel the unicorn’s breath on his back. A vine reared up in front of him, too fast, and he tripped and fell. St Gradie scrabbled on the ground, trying to get up, to get away, to get out, to wake from this nightmare. The unicorn stood over him, pawed at his legs with its shining hooves. It lowered its horn, snorted, and pressed forward. Stephen was trapped against a wall of ice. He couldn’t move; the ice-vines held him fast. He gasped for breath, sweat rolling down his face. The unicorn’s horn was directly in front of his face, and the hot breath from its nostrils washed over him. The tip of the horn pressed against St Gradie’s eye, and he did not move for fear of losing the eye.

And then, a voice.

“I’m sorry.”

And the strange logic of the dream told him it was the unicorn speaking.

“Sorry?” said Stephen. “For what?”

“For this,” said the unicorn. And it pressed forward with its horn and St Gradie was blinded in the blink of an excruciatingly slow eye.

He woke screaming and clawing at his face. The maid came running and, when she saw the state he was in, sent for the doctor. The doctor sedated St Gradie and had the maid lay him back into bed. The doctor bandaged the furrows Stephen had dug into his flesh.

St Gradie dropped back into the field of ice, pierced by that horn and seared by the pain. But, though it hurt terribly and he could not see, he came to a realization. The unicorn was feeding itself through its horn and his eye into somewhere beyond. But it didn’t make any sense, even in the dream. Why would the unicorn need to go somewhere? Why him? Where was it going? And then it was gone.

He opened his eyes and the field of icy flowers was gone. The unicorn was nowhere to be seen and his eye was once again whole. The tent was just as it had been, the ice with its slightly pocked surface stretching for miles in front of him. St Gradie peered into the tent. His two assistants were asleep, and the kerosene stove glowed with warmth. His bedroll waited for him, laid out in the heat cast by the stove, and he was suddenly unbearably sleepy. So he lay down, parka, boots, and all, and slept.

When Stephen St. Gradie woke from his sleep, the maid leapt out of her chair and ran from the room. He yawned. He felt remarkably refreshed, like he’d slept for years. Then a knock came on his bedroom door.

“Yes?” he said. “Come in.”

It was the doctor. He came in and sat in the chair at the side of the bed.

“How are you feeling?” said the doctor. “You gave us a nasty scare last night.”

“Ah yes, well,” said St Gradie. “Had a terrible nightmare you know. Just awful.”

The doctor hmmed into his beard.

“Well, anyway, I’ve fixed up your face where it got scratched,” said the doctor. “I recommend you get some more rest. We’ll talk more in a few days, how’s that sound?”

He stood again.

“All right,” said St. Gradie. “Sorry to be such a bother. I’m afraid my maid can be a bit flighty.”

“Nothing to worry about,” said the doctor. “Better safe than sorry, after all.”

“Yes,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

The doctor left the room. Stephen St. Gradie laid his head back against the pillows. Later. He’d rest and think about the dreams later. For now, though, he was ready to tackle the bathtub. He rang for the maid. It was going to be a good day. He could feel it.

----

Can you tell I don't approve of testing on animals?

More seriously, I tried my best to tone down the 'science is evil' mood that kept cropping up when I was thinking it over. I'm also considering the possibility of zombie unicorns. As to the weirdness of the samples' test results, I suppose I did a bad job of conveying the thought that maybe, just maybe, something can be all encompassing and nothing at the same time. (No, the unicorn isn't God. I'm not pulling an Aslan, I promise. I just think this unicorn is an extraordinary sort of creature.)

In other news, I'm in the process of selecting a book for the book review. I'm kind of busy with holiday preparations right now, so I haven't felt together enough to do a lot of reading beyond fluffy "romance" novels. I do love me some purple prose! But...is it worthy of reviewing?

~Later

Arctic Adventures part one?

Apologies! I was out of town for a couple days and was somewhere with no computer/internet access. But I have a little freewrite for today, so that's something. I may do more on this same topic...

---
On the last day of Stephen St. Gradie’s fifth Arctic expedition, his findings vaulted him from obscurity to worldwide fame. Had he found nothing on his dig, he would have retired and gone down as an eccentric has-been. As it was, however, he suddenly found himself the toast of the natural history and zoological science societies. For you see, Stephen St. Gradie had found something quite unexpected, and it all started with something small.

St. Gradie had been a solid (if unexciting) explorer in his day, looking for, largely, whatever hadn’t yet been seen and documented. The problem was that there were a lot of other, better explorers already ahead of him. He found himself constantly in second place. On the upside, he had become an excellent cartographer and many remote regions of jungles and mountains were mapped under his exacting eye. But really, what Stephen wanted, what any explorer wanted, was to discover something for himself.

In the last decade of his public career, St. Gradie became convinced that the two parts of the world that had not been explored to death were the bottom of the sea and the treacherous frozen polar caps. Since he was, at heart, a man devoted to the land (and since he had no feasible way to carry air down to the sea floor) he decided the poles were his destiny. He spent years preparing for the expedition: finding men to go with him, gear and supplies that would hold up to the extreme temperatures, a ship that would take them as far as they could go on the route he mapped.

The first expedition ended nearly before it started; their ship could not maneuver between the ice floes, and they spent so long getting the ship free that they had to turn back before they starved to death. As it was, St. Gradie spent months recovering, and the sensation in his hands and feet never fully returned. He was lucky, though, considering most of his crew lost fingers and toes to the cold.

The second expedition took even longer to organize. Stephen had lost a lot of credibility with the disastrous first attempt, and he had to make certain financial adjustments when one of his sponsors backed out. Still, there were many who did believe in him and did believe that he would find something of value in that frozen wasteland. St. Gradie’s second expedition turned up nothing. There had been massive storms, one after another, and they had been quite unable to leave their base camp for any length of time that might facilitate great discoveries. Still, on one of the very few clear days, St. Gradie did learn something valuable: there was another, wider break in the ice that went much further north.

The third expedition cost him all but one of his sponsors. It too, turned up nothing but ice and snow and frostbitten extremities, despite using the new route successfully. He didn’t see so much as a tree branch in the month he spent camped atop the ice.

St. Gradie’s fourth expedition was much smaller and was completely funded through his own money. By this time, the public eye held him as an ice-mad lunatic. Still, no one made to stop him when he pushed off and was gone for, all told, six months. He came back and, almost immediately, began to arrange his fifth and final journey.

On the fifth expedition, he found something amazing frozen in the ice. He and his two assistants had made camp some eight miles east from the ship‘s landing. They had been camped in the same spot for three weeks. When the weather was clear, in the beginning, they had ventured forth to explore the glaciers and crevasses and ice fields. Then, unseasonable storms rolled in, and they were forced to spend their time inside the large base-camp tent, making use of its kerosene heater, or otherwise they would freeze to death. The tent began to settle into the ground, in a combination of increased foot traffic of its floor, and the heat of the living space slowly melting the ice underneath it.

One day, St. Gradie noticed a lump in the ground next to the stove. He thought almost nothing of it; the icy ground was never even. This protrusion simply was in a spot that made each of his assistants stub their toes and trip while tending the fire. It was when he himself tripped over it that he took exception to it. He ordered that, as soon as the weather broke, they were to move the tent to more desirable ground.

Eventually, the weather cleared. But, as his luck was wont to run to the bad, it broke the afternoon before they were scheduled to start back to the ship. There was no sense in moving the tent for one more night.

The fateful morning dawned clear and cold. The assistants hurried to pack everything up again. They crated the stove and other essentials and moved all the luggage out of the tent. Then, they took down the tent as St. Gradie supervised. And then, while folding the ground cloth, one of the assistants tripped.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Must be a rock.”

The assistant made to get up.

But St. Gradie’s keen sense of orientation told him something important: it was the same spot where the stove had been, the same spot that had been the cause of so many bruises and stubbed toes and barked shins.

“Don’t move a muscle,” he said to the assistants.

And, ever so carefully, he peeled the cloth off the ice. The assistant on the ground shifted his hands when asked, and eventually he was walked backward off the tent. St. Gradie knelt and examined the rock.

“It’s not a rock,” he said. “Is the teakettle still warm?”

He shoved the second assistant, who fetched the kettle. St. Gradie painstakingly poured the warm water over the ice while the assistants hovered.

The assistant who had fallen snorted.

“It’s just a narwhal,” he said.

St. Gradie got as close as he could to the tiny bit of horn and he studied it for long minutes. Then, finally, he stood. He brushed the ice off his knees.

“You,” he said. He pointed to the second assistant. “Get out my tools and heat some more water, quickly!”

“And you,” he said to the first. “You go to the ship as fast as you can and tell them to bring a sledge.”

“But it’s just a narwhal!”

“It most certainly is not,” said St. Gradie. “And I’ll thank you not to scoff at this major discovery! Now run!”

St. Gradie spent nearly a week extra in the arctic. He and his people had nearly starved to death; they lost two crew members to exhaustion. But it was worth it, in the end. St. Gradie returned home with a unicorn. It was frozen in a block of ice, but it was perfectly, exquisitely preserved. And it was most definitely a unicorn. The only question was: what would become of it?
----

Unicorns are awesome. Sometimes I find it interesting to think about what it might have been like at certain times in history, and the days of ship voyage and discovering new lands and things is definitely one of the most interesting ones, I think! There's also plenty of room for me to kind of pick and choose and go in a steampunk sort of direction. I'm really taken with the potential for weird details. I mean, come on. A frozen unicorn plonked down into a land of sci-fi Victorian technologies? It could be very cool.

I remember this book I read a long time ago-- "The Winter of the White Seal" or something similar. Anyway, it's about this ship full of whalers or sealers headed towards one of the poles, and they get blown off course and everyone dies except one man. He lives alone on a terrible little beach backed by a glacier for a really long time. His only companion is a seal that he half-tames...and then tries to kill when he gets really desperate. So then eventually the man takes himself out onto the glacier to die, and he falls through a crevasse/tunnel in the ice, and ends up on a much more habitable beach and, I believe, he eventually gets rescued.

That was a serious digression. Sorry. My point is that adventuring and stuff is very cool, provided you can suspend your disbelief enough to not focus on the lack of technologies at the time. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't seem like a big deal now (like, say, the Oregon trail) but it was a huge thing to do back in the day.

Consider this adventure story a two-parter. I've not yet written enough of the story to lay down my original inspirational scenes. This prologue, if you will, is just catch-up so I won't be scratching my head later trying to figure out how I got to where I'm going.

Also, I am not satisfied with the adventurer's name. I may have to re-spell it or something.

~Later

The Apocalypse?

...This quickie comes from me being really, really tired and dragging all day.

---

At first, Deliah was sure it was her imagination. The days were all the same; that’s how a person could tell time, because time did not change and days were the same length each time, twenty-four hours in a day and all that.

But then things got a little strange. Deliah passed it off as a dying battery when her watch’s second hand seemed to hitch every few seconds. She got the battery changed and didn’t think of it again until she noticed the clock in her office. It didn’t hitch so much as it paused as it ticked off the seconds. It ran on electricity. Deliah made a complaint to the office manager and the clock was replaced. The replacement did the same thing.

Next, the strangeness affected the timers that ran the cable television stations. A half-hour program would end and then, for a minute or two, blank tapes ran before the next program came on. But, as each day passed, the blank spaces grew longer and longer. Battery and electric clocks continued to slow down.

And then the atomic clocks went bad. The government tried to keep it quiet, tried to say it was merely an unforeseen quirk of the clock’s prolonged exposure to radioactive subatomic particles. So they built new clocks, and set them up in a grand televised special, broadcast live over every channel during one of the now-half-hour long gaps. The new clocks didn’t work right either. It was then that the nation decided to panic. Deliah sat on her couch in shock. Then, she picked up the remote and clicked through until she finally found one station that was, blissfully, clock-free. She sat in the darkness with the blank screen.

The scientists, after weeks and months of study, determined that time was, in fact, slowing down. World leaders all advised their people to try to keep going as normally as possible. Deliah found it impossible to ignore that a day, once twenty-four hours, was now taking up thirty-six. She found it interminable that she now spent twelve hours in the office each day. Her shower took forty-five minutes to complete each morning. Her commute warped from a ten minute walk to fifteen. She supposed there was an upside: sleeping and coffee breaks and really good movies all lasted longer now.

To cope with this, businesses switched from an hourly pay rate to a “pay for the day” scale: Deliah’s paycheck covered eight Old Hours’ worth of money, despite each ‘hour’ now being half again as lengthy. It was bullcrap, but if they kept going by Old Hours, they’d all go broke and everyone would be unemployed.

The only people with real job security were the scientists working on a solution to the problem. For months, they labored on it. Periodic news coverage showed the state of things to be grim, but there was always a new theory to test, new equations to solve.

Finally, after nearly a year--and Deliah was no longer sure exactly how long that year had been--the world leaders again appeared on television during one of the blank spots. It was time, they said, to face facts. The days were getting longer and longer, and they would never stop growing. There would come a time, not too far in the future, where the day would literally never end. At least, not for humans. At this time, the scientists explained, the day would stretch out so long that, by the time it ended, all the humans would be dead. The Last Day, it was cleverly coined. And they expected that Last Day to come…well…next Thursday.

Rioting broke out across the globe. Desperate, the humans tried to start a wave of babies to stretch out further than this strange ripple of slow time. But it didn’t work, because, no matter how strange it was, it was less than a week until Thursday, and babies take nine months. It simply wasn’t possible. Time was relentless and inexorable. Things calmed down in the interim and humans tried their best to go about like normal.

And then, the Last Day came. Deliah got dressed for work as always. A thought occurred to her. she stopped herself at the door. She took off her business suit and stepped out of her shoes. She put her pajamas back on and crawled into bed. And then, for the first time in her life, Deliah called in sick.


----

Wouldn't calling in sick really be the best way to deal with it? I know this was hasty and rushed (irony factor!) but I think I kind of got the concept across. I'm too sleepy to do any more with it tonight, at least.

~Later

I've been busy today. I almost forgot to A. do a freewrite and B. post it. I'm very, very tired now.


----

Magwyn climbed the stairs. The treads cracked like gunshots each time she put a foot down, wood and ice and cold all under the frozen sky. It was a stupid idea, whoever had decided that the middle of January was the best time to dismantle the tower’s indoor staircase. These outside ones were steep and dangerous in the middle of the summer, let alone when they were covered in sheer ice. If she were lucky, there would be enough bare tread, protected by the bulk of the tower, for her to put down the toe of her boot.

She reached the landing that marked the halfway point. Magwyn kept a hand anchored to the railing as she caught her breath. The land spread white and sparkling and soft before her. It was beautiful but deeply, deeply frozen. If it had been anywhere near the freezing point, all the snow and ice would have melted into shapelessness by now. As it was, the steady winter winds had carved fantastic sculptures through snow banks and bushes. Even the great waterfall, visible to the west, was solid, a vast, twisted hulk of ice dominating the landscape.

Shaking herself, Magwyn forced her legs to bend again and continue to the top. Soon she was scraping her feet against the bottom of the doorframe. She knocked twice on the door and let herself in. She unlaced her boots and left them beside the door. Magwyn fitted her feet into a pair of slippers. She draped her coat and mittens on the back of a nearby chair.

“Uncle Irving?” she said.

Magwyn looked around the room. A fireplace radiated heat to her right and a tiny kitchen to her left gave way to a living space cum workshop, taking up nearly the entire circumference of the tower. A drafting table overflowed with papers. A basket of smooth river rocks shared quarters with several dismembered umbrellas. Pieces of his prized fungus collection had fallen off the walls and were currently being batted about by a large white cat, who stepped neatly around what appeared to be about a half a bushel of walnuts. Clean, though wrinkled, laundry hung from the railings that lead to the inner stairs. Magwyn shook her head. She crossed the room and started pulling it down. She stubbed her toe on a large ump of ore that had been holding the laundry in place, and so she kicked it again out of pique.

“Uncle Irving, I’m not your maid,” she said. “Come on! You promised you’d have time today!”

A metallic clanging from above had Magwyn ducking out of instinct. A ladder with brass fittings descended from the ceiling, stiffly unfolding. The feet of the ladder slid into two grooves in the floor. Down came Irving, looking as rumpled as ever.

“My dear Magwyn,” he said. “Of course I have time for you!”

He pulled her into a hug, laundry and all.

“Put that down,” he said. “And come up to the loft with me. I have something interesting to show you.”

“It’s not something on the telescope, is it?” said Magwyn. “You had me looking in it all night, the last time I was here, and I couldn’t see right for a week!”

Nonetheless, she let Uncle Irving lead her up the ladder.

“But those meteor showers were extraordinary,” he said. “And besides, it’s daytime. Very hard to see the stars when our sun is in the way.”

They got to the top of the ladder into a second, smaller workspace. Baskets full of pieces of metal filled most of the space: gears, rods, plates, tubes, and wires all crowded around a desk. Something lumpy, covered by a piece of cloth, lay on the worktable. The sun, by way of a narrow skylight, sliced into the clutter and highlighted all the dust. Magwyn sneezed.

“Close you eyes and hold out your hands,” said Irving.
She rolled her eyes.

“Is all this necessary?” she said. “Can’t we just play a game of chess or something?”

Magwyn loathed chess.

“Just do it,” said her uncle. “I promise you’ll like it!”

She sighed and closed her eyes.

Something remarkably heavy landed in her hands, and she nearly dropped it. He could have warned her it was heavy, but no. Just like that time when she was six and he hadn’t warned her about the etching acids. Or when she was nine and he’d enlisted her help in finding and carrying a long-dead deer home. She’d smelled for a week.

“Tada,” he said. “Just wind the key in the back.”

Magwyn opened her eyes and sucked in a breath of air. It was a cat. A very real looking cat. She wound the key and, to her amazement, it opened its eyes and uncurled itself from its sitting position. She set it down on the floor and it began to walk around. He’d fashioned a clockwork cat. She could see into its gears as it walked around and waved its tail, then took off after a lone housefly. Copper and silver and brass and other metals she didn’t know all gleamed in its every movement.

“How did you do it?” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I had to make special alloys. But it’s not perfect. It needs to be wound every couple days. And it needs to stay warm.”

“Warm?” she said. “Wouldn’t it have been better to make it in the summer, then?”


----

Vaguely middle-ages, yes. Magical, possibly. It's interesting to think about a mechanical cat, isn't it? Yes, there are simulated cats out there today, but that's all made possible with computer chips. It boggles my mind to think about non-computerized mechanical things. Ugh. All my sentences are becoming the same boring length.

~Later

Warning: May Contain Lesbians Invisible to the Naked Eye

Sometimes I cannot adequately convey my frustrations. Also, this poem is in rough shape. It may not be done. I can't rightly tell yet.

---
Invisible lesbians
Come from invisible isles
Have invisible names
Forgettable haircuts, paper coffee cups
Sedate sedans and understated smiles.

They’re there at the corner of your eye:
If you look for them in the street.
But face them straight on and they disappear
Away on shoes with quiet heels:
Unremarkable size eight feet.

The books about them are elusive:
In libraries they move from shelf to shelf
In stores they cower behind the books of
Dead white men. Those stories bore me, passing over
All the things a woman might have said or felt.

The world needs more lesbians: not invisible
Not hidden out of sight and out of mind
Not written out of fiction, not blotted out of scripts
But there and real. High budget. No nonsense, just
Human and woman and easy to find.
---

This poem really stems from three things: one, I am in a mood for lesbians. I want to read books and watch movies and look at comics that are all about women being together (and apart.) Two: I could not find a good film to watch tonight. Three: general frustration at the continued domination and exclusion of women's writing. (I'm thinking specifically of some short story collections that were completely composed of either Dead White Men's work or just plain men's stories, all on topics which women frequently, successfully, and eloquently write.)

I suppose it's my twisty sense of feminism speaking out. It's bothersome to want things to be available that are so (apparently) elusive. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of lesbian material for me to consume, but I can't find it. And my point is kind of that it shouldn't be this hard to find in the first place. Accurate or not, I get the feeling that what I'm looking for is a fringe element of a subculture, which would make it an even smaller pool of availability than if I were just looking for some man-on-man stuff.

Ugh. Cultural stuff is weird. There's so much of it that I just don't understand, only so much of it that is accessible to me. This is why I shall become a hermit and live in a shack in the woods and commune with squirrels.

~Later

Perhaps a poem?

I admit it's a bit word-vomit-y, but that's kind of the point of free-writes. I half-heartedly apologize for the following abuse of the semicolon. I was tempted to go get a sweater when I wrote this.

----
Snowflakes spitting down from a grey-crowded sky; the sun is blotted out moment to moment, here light there dark; and the icicles feed and grow slowly then faster as the sun disappears; a finger of ice pointing in accusation toward the ground; grown large grown fat grown indolent a handspan, a hand, a wrist, a man’s arm sculpted drop by drop and filled with poisons washing off roofs, even as the downward point trembles in the air; not yet formed and wavering on the cusp.

A break in the clouds, the snowfall broken for a breath or two; the window fogs as I stare out, too close to the glass and I remember; the dream I had last night took place a week ago, when I might have still had hope; but now I am tired, bowled over in the coldness, blown forward over the freezing rivers and tangled in the bare crowns of trees.
-----

Should I do any sort of revising, the semis will disappear. They're just very convenient, very visible separation markers...especially if I decide to arrange this into a poem of some kind. I was kind of thinking that each phrase separated thusly might become an individual line. (But that's no guarantee I'd keep them all.)I realize, as it stands, that it's hard to read and a bit clunky.

And yes, I did mean "crowded" and not "clouded."

~Later