Ivy

The ivy, eaten by nighttime, crowded around the lamp post.  In the bluish light of the single bulb, the ivy looked like waves frozen in motion, suspended in a desperate reach toward their last saving grace.  I too reached with my eyes, slouched on a park bench.  I stared until I couldn't see the moths fluttering around the bulb, or the scalloped outlines of the waxy leaves.  Once the light went out, me and the ivy and the moths would lose each other, because only one thing connected us.  Night air pressed against my back.  I could feel its cold creeping along my shoulders and on my jeans through the bench slats.  I wanted to run up to the lamp and bury myself in the ivy, right smack in the whitewash of light.  But Alex was right.  I was just a prisoner, watching.

Hundred word stories - Sister

"We could've been friends if she weren't so darn pretty.  Everything she does is pretty."
"Bet surgery isn't pretty.  She does that."
"Probably turning people to butterflies." 
"I'd sign up." 
"I wish you were a man so I could ridicule you just now."  We stepped into the lunch queue, a line of blue collars. 
"Hot dogs.  Yum."  She handed me a tray.
"Smelled them from the parking lot."
"Maybe your sister could turn them into candy." 
"Or something edible. Like salad."
We took our food to a table by a window; a sheet of gray rain.
"Did she ever..do anything for you?" 
"Nothing cool.  Once she painted my room."
"Without touching anything?"
"Thought she was giving me a motorcycle mural.  No.  I got pink and purple butterflies."
"She painted those?  They look real."
"I can't believe I paid her for it."

Hundred word stories - Street

It was dawn but not morning. Everything in front of me was new and everything behind me was over. The air was damp and cool. There was no smell of food, no hot bread to share. No aftersmell of eggs. I could smell them anyway, as if we'd just had breakfast in his bright yellow kitchen.
Full green trees crowded along the street and obscured the sky. I passed parked cars in front of brick houses. My shoes, quiet rubber soles, made two lonely sounds against the blacktop.
This time of day made me feel like flying instead of walking, but I was heavy. My reflection moved against black windows. Every house was suspended in stillness as I went between them on the road, down the center where the rising sun through the branches cast a jagged river of light.

Hundred word stories - Library

It's a very bad way to store books, unless you're a fugitive and you need to put them where nobody is going to look. A ruined library lost in the jungle like a storyline pulled from one of its own dead volumes, is a perfect place to keep a secret collection. Mine already filled most of the south side.
"If you get desperate enough you'll hide things anywhere," I said to no one, scraping piles of moldy pulp from a shelf into a trash bag. I wiped the shelf clean with a bleached cloth before assembling the new tenants from the box I'd carried in.
Gold's Hymns. Give or Take: The true story of Riban Hooland. Gifford Guide to seventeenth century classical music, unabridged. I took that one back off the shelf and opened it.
He'd loved this kind of music.

Hundred word stories - Garden

It's just an exercise that means, well, nothing. The rules go: Choose a picture (I find the ones posted by papertissue on Tumblr quite useful). In no less than 100 words, no more than 150, write the first story that comes to mind about it. Here's number one:



The door was open, so I crouched and stepped through it. My foot touched a mess of somethings cool and prickly. I looked down, at the same time lifting my foot back up. Flowers. Their tiny indigo heads poked up from the green ground, bright and brave in the shadows. Beyond the mess of trunks and evergreen needles directly in front of me, smudges of brighter green promised the existence of a lawn or hill.
I moved carefully, stepping only on the bare spots, meshes of leaves and brown stems that crackled as they gave way. Then I remembered that I used to be wearing shoes. A warm, brassy thread of sunlight meandered over my right leg.
I looked up.

Whoever told you that love equals fun was lying, or a very great fool. Don't listen to them.

Love is what you do whether it's fun or not. If you love your job, it may or may not be fun. The more important and more life-changing, actually, the less fun you'll be having as you proceed through the learning phases, and the parts where one thing in you dies and gives birth to another, deeper, stronger thing. To create something worthwhile involves a lot of pain on many levels. The more worthwhile, often, the more painful to the point of excruciating. Even something full of pleasure can be simultaneously the death of you, as you pour your soul into a thing that will one day break off and leave you, though you remain in its marrow and its message.
I don't speak of a hobby. This is something much deeper and everlasting.
You love your children, but you wouldn't describe raising them as "fun." More often, words will fail you to describe the experience of watching your heart grow outside your body, and kill you and bring you to life over days, weeks, years.
There is risk, in doing what you love. We've all heard the stories of failure. We have failed ourselves, and only a few rise again to continue as before.
"Going home already?" They watch me untie my apron and clock out.
"Yep. Now I get to start my other job." The scenes with the villain have been consuming me. I'm sleeping sporadically between ideas and images that wake me, exhausted to the point of tears when I come to the end of another long sequence.
"You have another job?"
"The one I do for free." Sometimes I consider freelancing, but bills are steady and the pay is not.
Then there are the days when I think I'd rather starve than go back to the paying job.
"That's not a job, that's writing. It's what you love to do. It's supposed to be fun."
"Yes..."
"Well when you have a job you love, it's not work, right?"
They think of writing as a hobby, like collecting feathers or pinning exotic bugs to velvet-covered cardboard. Odd but amusing.
"No. That's not right." It's not right at all. But that's the great secret among storytellers. We die, doing what we do, and our lives are in the stories.
All you have to do is read them.

From the People Journal

Been sick this week with symptoms of acute severe vertigo, nausea and transient nystagmus. I think it was from swimming. It turns out you can still write while the room spins around you if you sit very still, but coherent thoughts are hard to come by.

In other news...

I keep a people journal for the same reason I keep a texture journal. From time to time I run across someone who stands out for whatever reason. I write very quickly, to capture them in some way, on the page, before they're gone. This one was in a coffee shop in Oroville, CA, while I was visiting my family. She'll be in the books somewhere, once I think of a place for her. Of course, once an idea becomes part of a story, the idea merges with the world of the story and sometimes doesn't look like the original thought at all. In the end I might be the only one who knows where that piece of the story came from.


A girl walks in, skinny on the lower half and top heavy on the upper. Black pleated skirt that reminds me of a horizontal slinky, springy around her thighs when she walks. Rainbow striped socks, red, lime green, bright yellow and orange. Black shoes. Black and white zebra tie, collar folded down. Black hair in steppes around her dark round face, silky little stripes running down her cheekbones and brushing against her collar.
White linen button-up shirt with a skull and crossbones beautifully airbrushed across her shoulderblades, like a Japanese tapestry.
She's dainty. The boy with her, her friend or perhaps a cousin, doesn't fit.

And then I had to go.

General Mitchell Airport, Milwaukee Wisconsin

General Mitchell Airport, Milwaukee Wisconsin

5:45 am

I don't quite stumble down the broad hallway leading to the security check. It's more like almost tripping past lighted signs displaying neon letters and happy business men, beneath bleached fluorescence swimming in the lofty ceiling. I can't tell if I'm sick or just asleep on my feet. Of course, now is when I need to be assertive about who I am and what I'm doing in the airport to begin with. Not to mention tying and untying my shoes while people wait in line behind me, calculating the liquid measure of my portable toiletries and remembering on the spot if I removed my favorite pocketknife from my jeans pocket.

Every time I perform this travel strip-down I shake my head; we're disarming on purpose, so in the event of an attack, we just made things a little easier for antagonists. Well, I still have my Sharpie pen. One day air travel will be done naked, and standing up.

We sit in a row of black vinyl chairs, which slowly fill up with fellow passengers. Some are dazed, clad in loose faded sweats and potentially smelling like sleep and unbrushed teeth. Some appear more wakeful but upon settling down beside their wheeled canvas carry-ons, they fit white earbuds into their ears and succumb to the prevalent stupor.
The really diligent, the proud few who can boast being fully dressed and fair smelling, stand with their backs to those of us slouched in the chairs, staring through the window wall at a slate pink dawn. We all keep polite distance with empty seats between us and pretend not to listen to each others' conversations. The nearest standing man caves into a chair at last: Standing was only a tactic to ward off sleep. I was made suspicious of this by the rapid sneaker-tapping he'd been keeping up while he inspected the soundproof glass between us and the runway.

The dawn fades up to a transparent blue, split on the horizon by bright pink and steel gray clouds. A few more minutes pass, the reflections of the overhead light boxes start to dwindle. I sip grainy hot chocolate as quickly as I can through the tic-tac sized hole in the plastic lid. The more it cools, the grainier it gets. The whipped cream was thin and disappointing, gone almost before Jeremy brought it.

A snarkid, sneezy smell of smoldering egg, starch and maple syrup is making my nose run more than usual. I can now add that to my list of allergies: Breakfast burning. It hits me in the face when I come out of the women's bathroom portal into the wide, polished hallway lined with convenience shops and the culprit, somewhere, pumping out that sickening smell.

It's incredible what one will put up with to visit one's family. More incredibly, people have put up with much worse and complained less.

Pick a favorite

"Tell me your three favorite words," someone requested, "and use all three in a sentence."

Hooboy. I'm in trouble. Whenever I try to answer this sort of
question, it turns into a mental argument with myself, beginning with an
avalanche of ridiculous quotes and ending (in frustration) with 'bezoar,
rheumatoid and polymethylmethacrylate!'

"Medical terminology doesn't count," I chide myself. "And those terms
are unrelated in any case."
"Fine, I don't have any favorites!" I huff.
"You can't pick three favorite words? Inconceivable!"
"What? Being impartial makes me a derelict?"
"You're just borrowing from the Decemberists. Learn to use your words."
"What's the superlative of curmudgeon?"
"You're better off using 'quark.'"
"I suppose 'timey-wimey' is unacceptable."
"Only when used in conjunction with 'ding' and 'stuff.'"
"How about David Tennant?"
"No names."
"So...not Wilhelmina. Because that's a favorite. How about syzygy?"
"When do you use that...ever?"
"But it's fun to spell."

And so it goes. Chalk it up to being a speculative fantasy fiction writer I
suppose. Nothing fits into the norm, not even my words. Most of the
oft-used favorites are in there, however, including Decemberists,
Tennant and Wilhelmina. (I do love them.) There I suppose are
favorite three words in one sentence at last.

Writer's journal, entry #52

(I'm not doing much besides write lately, so you get what you get...)

Writing, feverish.
Literally.
The week has been long and the sun shines bravely through the open window. The week to come is going to be even longer. Rent is probably going to be late. Again. I may have bronchitis, too early to tell. No worries-- if King can write in spite of a broken hip, I can write in the face of bronchitis. Heck, I could write in the face of zombies if I had to. Sometimes I draw pictures on a mini whiteboard, and that helps. Sometimes I fall asleep and wake up with the words all lined up in my head:

"The sun was already baking the top of the city, sliding gold heat down the walls. Soon they would all be drenched in it."

"She sat with her knees together in the frame of the doorway, watching the boy trudge past. Behind her, the cook murmured instructions while her subordinates thumped dough onto flat stones, splashed mint tea into tall pitchers and scraped nut paste into serving dishes."

Being a writer is fantastic.

Sunday word count: 899 and climbing.

As if I could

If I could talk sense into someone, I wouldn't waste time on a random celebrity. That would be like trying to pick up the ocean between thumb and forefinger. I'd rather talk to someone who, in fact, wants to listen. That strikes out about ninety-eight percent of the customers who visit the drive-through Starbucks that employs me currently. I'm old enough (which is sad, considering I'm not yet 30) to remember when coffee shops were homey places that instigated conversation and quality over speed and quantity. If you're smart, you'll take the former over the latter, and make your to-go coffee at home (here's a hint: French press. Better coffee, every time. Google it).
I worked in a coffeeshop in Nevada where one could hold an actual conversation with a customer and learn something interesting. I don't vouch for the cultural depth of Nevada, because last I lived there, it didn't much exist (unless you like rocks. There's lots of rocks. And bull riding, and wind and fires and sage). However, into that little shop would walk some of the most interesting people. Some were drunk, stumbling in through the glass doors looking for something to kill the afternoon buzz they'd found in the bar two stores down the sidewalk strip mall. Not much culture out of them, unless the ferment in light beer counts for something.
Some were friends of the owners, who dropped by on occasion to admire the brown flagstone floor and the coyote mural painted across two walls, and drink a caramilla (pronounced cara-mee-ah) made to order by yours truly.
One of my favorite customers was a wiry, pepper-haired man from San Francisco, with a Van Dyke also peppered gray, tapering over his narrow chin. I have no recollection what he was doing in the desert when he could have stayed by the sea, but nevertheless. He introduced me to Coltrane, even brought his CDs in so I could listen to them while I worked. He knew his coffee, and I was just learning what riches lay below the corporate-glazed surface, so we had plenty to talk about. He came to the jazz nights, when we had live music playing and the whole store was a hum of bodies amidst the high walnut tables cast in the yellow glow of fan-shaped wall sconces. He liked lattes steamed extra hot with the shots poured in last: Upside-down. I began to drink my lattes upside-down, and I learned to appreciate the nutty bite of espresso, perfect tamped, hot and dark in the first sips, smoother and lighter with the last. I learned more from listening to that man than I ever would have debating brewing technique and music theory on a forum.

Comic part 2

I've worked on and off in the coffee industry for about five years. Stranger things have happened. This one hasn't yet, but I wouldn't be surprised.

When one visits a place so much it seems they live there, that place (in my case, a coffee shop with a drive-through) becomes so familiar that their own life and personal debris spill over into it. Convenience is abused by familiarity. It happens all over.

Because my job isn't stressful enough... (part 1)

This one is dedicated to those people emptying their bathroom wastebaskets into the drive-thru garbage can, and clogging it up (Click on the image to see it bigger). You're getting it in two parts because I'm obviously not a great drawer and because it takes me so dang long to get this much done. There's more though, much more.

We drink coffee so as to do stupid things quicker, and with more energy.

In Silence

When I was nine, I decided God was out there and I wanted to meet him. I had a vague notion I couldn't put into words at the time, that I wanted to meet him because he was out there and wanted to meet me too. It made sense (and it still does) that if he didn't exist I wouldn't feel the need to go looking for him. Since I started looking, I've found traces of him all over the place.

I went to my first Tenebrae service on Good Friday. I'm no stranger to the church and its various associated gatherings, but somehow missed this aspect of Easter. Much of the Tenebrae was spent in relative silence, surrounded by cool brick walls and shifting bodies of attendees, seated in stiff black folding chairs. The long rectangular room was chilled by wind that crept in around the windows along one wall, but I'm usually more aware of cold than most. A few hymns were sung as candles were extinguished, representing the death of Christ and the thieves crucified with him. Most were new to me, which was not bothersome. It's nice to hear and see something foreign once in a while.
There was nothing foreign about the children who could be heard banging about in a back room. We all pretended not to hear it; children have been banging about since the beginning of time, and I'm convinced will happily keep it up for all of eternity (God seems to have planned on this, and that's why children eventually grow up and quiet down. It's for the sake of sanity).
Between hymns and long bouts of relative silence, various people read aloud from the gospels, recounting the crucifixion and death of Christ. More silence, while a slideshow flickered constantly on small flat-screen TVs: Various depictions of Christ's final hour. Another candle extinguished.
The whole experience was aptly uncomfortable.
I do appreciate and respect that people have for so long, so ardently marked this event by gathering together. There's value to be had in gatherings. However, simply attending a service isn't enough for me. Application of virtue is too much talked about and too little practiced, as everyone knows.
So I won't go on about it.
In my life I've only begun to comprehend the sacrifice made on my behalf. I'm still coming to grips with it. No one likes to admit that all their efforts at decency don't cut it. I certainly don't. That sacrifice makes reconciliation possible. I have no hope without it.
Therefore I can't stand to cheapen it.
Sometimes a service just isn't enough.
Tears don't cut it.
An hour on Sunday doesn't do it justice.
In every relationship there comes a moment when words end. Life and fear and guilt and love sit down with you; they crack the world open in the other person's eyes. At that moment, you become bigger on the inside than you can stand. All ability to move or do abandons you, and you can do nothing but breathe.
There are places in my soul that are silent, in perpetual awe, since I first began to understand who Christ really is. What love means. How heavy it grows. At age twenty-six, I'm realizing how much I still don't know.

Someday I want to climb like this guy.

Real (now published on LIFEgeek)

I don’t know how I came to regard this book with such a sense of wonder. Perhaps because I’m the type who doesn’t just read stories–I live them. Perhaps this one had just enough fiction in its reality, with a rabbit who is alive inside of his cotton-stuffed skin, and a decent sense of wonder himself, that I recognized a kindred soul on the pages...  Read more on LIFEgeek

Sometimes I'm a mess.

Nighttime breathes cold air through the open front door--I need atmosphere. I feel like I'm suffocating. Fortunately it's not snowing or I'd be in real trouble. There's a faint chink of wind chimes filtering in.
I've been pouring over a certain scene in this story, about a young man after he loses his cousin and best friend. Wracking my brains, really. Scraping my heart out onto paper and spreading it around in different instances of emotion. I sit by the door. On the carpet. On the couch. Pace around. Something stirs, deep down, the story I'm trying to tell. I write furiously before it's gone again, a few sentences. Fragments. Thoughts.
This scene is taking forever.

It makes me miss long conversations with good friends. Barbecues. Being nine again. Nine was a good age. I didn't worry about much. Didn't have to pay attention if I didn't want to. Read a lot of books. If I lived on the beach, I'd be surfing right now. Lying in the sand. Watching seagulls. Kicking sand at ducks.
Too bad I'm not writing a story about an absent-minded nine year old or I'd be done by now.

The Day I Failed at Climbing

Jeremy and I went climbing at Devil's Lake on Saturday with a group of friends.
Like an idiot I forgot my shoes.
I would have wrapped my feet in tape and climbed anyway, but a nice girl took pity on me and let me borrow hers. I was grateful, but still. Who drives two hours to their first climbing day of the year (not to mention the first blessedly warm day since November) and leaves their shoes behind? A moron, that's who.
The rock face was slippery smooth and tiny trickles of water leaked from the crevices at the bottom, coating my shoes and fingertips. A decent grip was elusive. I managed to get up by cramming my left toes in a narrow crack and standing up with all my weight on that foot while stretching my fingertips to the next hold, a narrow shelf high above my head. In this fashion I fought my way through to the next move, and the next.

If I didn't possess a decent sense of balance, I wouldn't have eventually made it to the top. I'm not one of those who can just jump to the next good hold and hang on while their feet scramble up after. I shift my weight instead of heaving it, searching for a way to use the jagged fragments scattered over the surface of the wall like pieces of a vertical puzzle. I enjoy this immensely.

Some in the writing community treat their craft the same way certain climbers rely on their strength instead of technique and creative balance (to my quiet amusement). Climbers sometimes find it possible to maneuver a route just by throwing their weight upward ("You'll make it! Just keep going UP! Try harder!").
Writers who bang around in such a fashion rarely make it very far before giving up and starting another project.
There's a rhythm to storytelling, but at the same time more than that-- like a hundred rhythms coming together and breaking apart at once in a given moment. Every sentence, every scene pulls double and triple duty to weave conflict, setting, emotion and perspective together with the right amount of tension as the plot moves forward. The adrenaline of an idea can drive you far, but forging a story requires something more: It requires everything you have.
I have moments of focus on certain walls, where somehow in spite of the awkward holds and my cramped, stiff fingers, I'm able to figure my way through it. Adrenaline fuels my creativity, and I learn new ways to use those tiny, crimpy holds. I walk away more focused than ever, and whadda ya know-- a little stronger. Hopefully that focus will help me remember certain vital items on future endeavors.
More likely, you'll soon be reading about The Day I Climbed with Taped Feet.

The One with the Baby Shower (or, When I Get Really Mad...)

I'm very feisty. I also tend toward colorful emotional outbursts that stem from my fantastic temper. I'm learning, slowly over time, how to curb my temper and redirect the outbursts toward benign outlets, such as freewriting. Below is one such outburst, penned some time ago in the throes of anger (and really, I promise, not directed at any one entity, but the entire world in general. I generalize when I get mad. It makes me feel much better much, much faster). Now it's just amusing proof of my ridiculous temper.
I should also mention I don't hate kids. I just hate being pestered on their behalf. I have nieces, I have nephews, I have younger brothers and I love them all.

***

7 AM...

Finds me drinking tea and scanning the internet for tea sandwich recipes, ridiculing myself for agreeing to make them in the first place. I've had many tea sandwiches in my life-- no, let me rephrase. I've taken bites of many tea sandwiches throughout my lifetime. The only ones I liked in any sense of the word were at an actual "tea" in Hawaii, and I think that was because of the location. Tea sandwiches were one of the weirdest ideas conceived by women. I'm positive men did not discover tea sandwiches because they are not meant to fill you up. Case in point. Point in case. I discover in my searching that tea sandwiches are generally not supposed to contain meat, crust or normal food. Here are some actual kinds of tea sandwiches out there, right now, in the world: Goat cheese and watercress. Cucumber mint with cream cheese. Broiled fig and Gorgonzola. Watercress olive. Lavender egg (Lavender egg!! Who eats that?).
Basically, what I'm gathering here is as long as it has watercress, cream cheese and something you would otherwise never put on a sandwich, it's kosher for a tea sandwich. I refuse to make a sandwich for anyone that contains lavender. So finally, I find an idea for cranberries and turkey with Dijon and say, to heck with it. I'm making something up.

9:30 AM...

Go to the store. FoodMaxx. I hate FoodMaxx. Find turkey, bread: Check. Cranberries. These are only found at Thankskgiving and Christmas, looks like. After hacking my way through the displays, I finally find a few cans (I assume forgotten from last year's holiday season) and take one. Go home. Start making sandwiches. It is at this point I realize, this is ludicrous. I don't know who would ever eat sandwiches like this. I tried one, just to see if they're edible. They're not. Now I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that tea sandwiches were only ever invented because someone, somewhere was starving, and all that was to be found were a few leftover pieces of bread, some cream cheese, watercress and lavender. Someone else noted this display of sheer desperation and decided to make the idea a monument to creativity. Eventually, everyone forgot why in the world we began eating these monstrosities in the first place and made them a requirement at baby showers, teas, bridal showers, and funerals. We still make them to this day. Meanwhile, said starving person finished the sandwich, got sick, and decided to go buy a hamburger instead.

10:30 AM...

Get to the shower. I can't stay because I have to work. In fact, I should be working now, but instead I'm making sandwiches no one will survive past the first few bites.
Oh, the crazy hedonism of weekends.
Here, we arrive at one of the single most hated phrases I have ever heard in my life: "So, Jinn, when are you going to be having one of these(meaning, a baby shower for a munchkin of your own)?"
For upwards of five years now, I have been tolerating this idiotic phrase with some semblance of patience. Five. Years. Imagine someone asking you when you will decide to sit down at your kitchen table with a pair of pliers and proceed to pull one of your own teeth. To which you would reply with the appropriate rebuttal. Then imagine this same person pointing out that it is possible that it might happen at some point in your future (if you were a mental case, perhaps). Which, you have to concede the possibility, however small, does exist. Even though you would never do it in a million years. Now you have some small idea of how I feel when I am forced to face this hated question:
"So, when are you having kids?"
It's like, the single thought that goes on in the minds of everyone who knows me and knows I'm married. As if having children is all I am now capable of! (One of these days, I'm going to scream that statement, at the top of my lungs, to an unfortunate, unsuspecting soul, and then they'll all be sorry.)
Welp, you're married. Now that you've forgone the rest of the life experience, when are you having kids?
Up until this moment in time, I've managed to avoid stupid conversations about my own life choice by just saying, "I'm not ready for kids yet." A gross understatement, but it gives those people some small hope that I will, in fact, one day have kids. The possibility exists, but is so diminutive it's not even worth talking about. Today, I am done trifling.
I am in the room for no more than five minutes before the question comes out.
I put the plate of tea sandwiches very carefully on the table, turn slowly to face the speaker, and in a voice of uttermost calm, I tell her, "I am never having children."
Naturally, in the wake of this statement come the attempts to try to convince me that I am only joking and deep down, I really do want kids just like every good girl is supposed to. I ask you. Why would I joke about something like this? If I wanted kids eventually, I'd say so.
However, I now have some added ammunition that I have never before in my life been able to use, and I level it at my assailant with a scathing grin: "However, my brother is going to be having one."
And for the first time, in my life, this actually shuts them up about the matter. Triumph. I have triumphed over idiocy, for at least the next ten minutes. In the meantime, I am beating it out of there as fast as I possibly can. Jump in the car, speed out of the parking lot, and get the heck home to my cats and stories about assassins, elves and psychopathic shapechangers. And real-human food, like taquitos and chocolate chip cookies.
I will now return to my life. Thank you.

There's much to be said for 2:30 am

Jeremy said I should include pictures with my posts. He assures me it's a good idea even if they're random. Therefore...

This is a picture of my desk, lately. Cozy. Littered. Love it.

Why in the world would anyone care. Oh well.
Hey, I know. Everyone post a picture of their desk. Or a desk, if you don't have one. We'll add to the litter of pointless pictures clogging up the internet. This gives us something to write home about.

Here's what I'm considering for a prologue to The Manuscript. Considering that when I began I had no idea what was going to come out, it's not too shabby.

I give you, Prologue:

My memories are...erratic. I remember how the ocean sounded, breaking its foamy fists on the cliff face. I remember dirt and chalky rocks breaking away beneath my toes and spinning through the atmosphere, making tiny white dots on the surface of the water. My mother caught my wrist just in time, pulling me safely against herself. I cried, terrified of the horrible thought: Death in the water.
"The ocean is not evil," she murmured in my ear, caging my fragile existence inside her warm arms. I smelled her salt essence, tinged with rose oil. It was the smell of home. "It can be very dangerous, but it is not evil."
"I don't like it," I sniffed, burying my face in the soft crook of her elbow. I tasted my tears on my lips, and breathed salty rose into my lungs. "Can we leave?"
"Avoid falling into it, but do not run from its glory. Look."
I looked, and saw fearsome beauty in the glittering waters, painted pearl and jade and scarlet by the glowing paintbrush of sun that hung just above the horizon. We sat in the long yellow grass on top of the cliff and watched the sun disappear behind the rim of the world. We saw the elusive flash of green that was the sun's last light shining through the water. We watched the stars appear in a clear twilight.
"The dawn always comes," she said when I lamented the coming night. "You will live to welcome the morning."
I have lived through many nights since then. I have faced terrors more horrible than the ocean. I have faced the terror of love. The terror of destiny. The terror of loss. I have been conquered.
When I stood on the cliff edge the second time, my mother was not there to catch me.
When I fell, I didn't even remember her.
I didn't remember anything.

So. The Manuscript.

I started writing fiction at age seven. We had an old ecru-colored computer with a screen box longer than my torso at the time. You know how they were: Unattractive, heated dust magnets that required a desk the size of a dining room table to accommodate their angular mass. I sat down one night, without any clear goal in mind, and wrote a heartwarming story about two sisters finding the perfect gift. I wrote it in multiple points of view and in all three persons.
Stories often present themselves to me in this fashion. They don't come as a steaming entree, set before their recipient in satisfying, tasty glory. They come as raw meat needing to be seasoned, trimmed and cooked. Sometimes they still need to be...well you know. Dead.
This analogy is not going the way of inspiration. My apologies.
I have since learned something about the craft of storytelling, such as "finished" does not mean "revised," and when your gut tells you it's not ready to be submitted for publishing, your gut is probably right. Fortunately, my gut tells me that I'm finally getting close. The Manuscript, started at age 16, is nearly done. That's not the official title, but it's become a fitting nickname until it's deemed finished and publishable.
I had tea with the villains today (I drank the tea, they told me about their fears and ambitions). It was delightful, and very creepy. It turns out they're so much smarter than I gave them credit for, just like some real people. There seems to be a misconception about true villains among some storytellers these days, as if one can cut straight to the triumph of the protagonist without allowing the antagonist to really shine. Villains are people. They may be bullies, they may be mad with power, but they still care about something, and they can still grieve. They have their own reasons for what they do, thank you very much, and they want a little time to elaborate. Their contribution, if one chooses to accept it, is a conflict that deepens the story and makes it worth reading. My protagonists are more than willing to risk life and limb against these guys. The least I can do is listen to my villains for a few hours and allow them to tell me what they really, really want to do. I'm so glad I did.
Because when they were finished, I had my ending.

It's Sunday morning and I'm craving donuts yet again.

I keep a texture journal, in a black and white woven journal my brother Pete gave me for Christmas a couple years back. It's where I practice sensory description, using all of the senses to their full capacity. In it is stuff like:

Chicken left 3 days in crockpot. Felt like: Old fish, liquefied and mixed with mud, poured right into my lungs.

A kid who ordered a cappuccino. Colors that stood out: Dark, polished brown eyes. Actually, they were black-eaten brown. Eyelashes a thick fringe around curved eyelids.
Looked like: Polished glass marbles, with something alive inside of them.

Today, after waking up at 7 and reading from Description and Setting about sensory description by Ron Rozelle, then beginning the preliminary peruse of what I wrote yesterday (making small edits is so fun just after waking), I was craving a maple bar. We had no breakfast food to speak of (cardboard pizzas don't count), so I nipped off to the store to get a donut for me, and sausage and eggs for Jeremy. The donut was very good--in fact, I have another waiting for me when I finish reporting to you my excitement about the first. But because that's a dumb way to let you in on how much I enjoyed the pastry in question:

The first bite into a fresh donut. Felt like: Spongy, paper thin crust, miniscule chocolate icing. A big fat belly of donut in my hand. It expands toward the center as my teeth sink into it, bunching into itself as if trying to stay inflated. Chocolate icing smears the back of my teeth.
Tastes like buttery fried dough, seeping tasty fat from every sponge hole. Yum.
Reminds me of: Springtime chore days, when Nanny and Pop would bring an Albertson's dozen over: Maple bars, chocolate glazed, cream-filled, sticky raspberry-filled bars, bear claws. We ate them listening to Odyssey, watching dad get the mower ready through the front window, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans. The Vega sat baking in the sun, which glared from arching blueness overhead, brushed with whisps of clouds and trails of jet vapors. I was always happy that there were plenty of maple bars. We washed them down with cold millk and trooped outside in our faded neon shorts and worn tennies, bickering happily.

I'm learning to pay attention to not only sensory description, but sensory reaction. Tastes and smells transport us suddenly in memory, and we realize the depth of our own character before moving on. The same applies to fictional characters: Sensory perception evokes a response. Find the response, learn from it. Eat more donuts.