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Showing posts from August, 2012

“Things Every Southern Woman Should Know How to Make”

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Alice clicked on the headline, mildly curious about what yet another stranger thought should be in her kitchen repertoire. Pictures of China plates mounded with crispy fried chicken, greens, cobbler, and a pile of biscuits a mile high flooded the screen, all set off with a pitcher of sweet tea beaded with condensation. The table was set; an apron draped off to the side next to a box labeled “Gramma’s Recipes” in fine calligraphy. She closed the browser and put away her tablet. She was born a Georgia peach, but she couldn’t make a cobbler to save her life. Did that mean she wasn’t southern? Or maybe just not “Southern.” For Alice, there was no recipe box full of family traditions. Her younger years were filled with rental homes in different states and her father’s voice coaxing her toward a text book rather than a cookbook. Metalworking and fabrication held more interest than learning to flambé or sauté. Did it make her less of a woman that her cooking skills consisted of fresh salads
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Rewriting: A Pleasant Surprise

Rewriting. I thought it would be a nightmare. Something akin to ripping my skin off. How would I possibly tear apart something I had created, something that had made my heart swell with joy once I reached the final word? No way. I can’t destroy my precious story. Rewrite? Never. I’m doing it now. Driving home from work one day, a brilliant stroke of inspiration smacked me in the brain. It was undeniable, insistent. Though I hated the idea of majorly changing anything, the urge persisted. And since computers make it so easy to create a new file, I pushed my fear aside and surrendered. (Save As is my friend.) It started as a simplification of the beginning where I finally had to admit that there was too much going on. Then, I had another thought. Wouldn’t my villain be much more interesting if…? And then another idea that made a scene work much more emotionally than it had originally. Slowly, I’ve realized that rewriting isn’t tearing my story apart. It’s metamorpho
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Rambling of a Casual Gamer: Glitches Make Me Twitch

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My Bosmer, Fayruz. Wood Elf, FTW! I am 115 hours or so into Skyrim. The awesome part about that is, I’ve barely touched the main quest, and I’m not bored. My character has a dresser full of dragon bones and scales, just waiting for the moment I hit level 100 on my smithing. (I’m at 92. Soon, precious dragon armor, soon.) I am Arch Mage and Harbinger. And I’ve only been eaten by a dragon once. While I love all the fantastic dragon-slaying, bandit-smiting, ore-mining goodness of Skyrim, I have just one problem. Glitches. Most of them aren’t a big deal. The lag when I’ve played for a while is annoying, but by then it’s usually time to quit anyway. The inability to start a mission because I already have a mission at the same destination was a bit eye-twitch inducing, but I got around it, and it was fine. After I picked up a staff that was quest-oriented and it wouldn’t let me hand it over until I placed it on a weapon display…okay. But the one that sits like a white el
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Of Notebooks and Past Lives

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Once upon a time, I worked in the land of dirt and flowers and litter pickup. And while this world of physical labor was good, satisfying work—I loved planting flowers and didn’t mind so much the litter—it was difficult to write down those OMG moments of inspiration. For example: In the early morning of a spring-break abandoned campus, roaming the grounds in a drizzle, the hood of my yellow raincoat muffling the infrequent sound of traffic on the nearby street. Boom. A sudden impression, brought on by memories of late-night battles with padded PVC swords (showing my nerd here), of an old battlefield. Walking along the sidewalk underneath the great oaks, my litter-stick in hand, I saw the entire first scene unfold before me. I had a first line. I NEEDED to write it down. I learned early on that I have aha! moments at any given, random time, so I started carrying a notebook with me. Spiral notebooks were best, could be rolled or folded to fit in the space between the first ai
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Brain Confetti: 60K

I had this brilliant moment of profoundness that I was going to lay on the world this morning. But that was 5am, I was still half-asleep, and all that awesomeness evaporated from my brain while I brushed my teeth. So, today, I’m talking word count. Not what range a book should be in per audience/genre/attention span. There are lots o’ great places to find that information, particularly some agenty type people who will dish out all the publishing intel you could ever want to know. No, I’m talking personal word count. Yesterday, I made 60k on my WIP. Sixty-thousand words woven together in a language tapestry, bonded together by syntax and context to verbally paint the story playing out movie-style in my head. I cheered, did a little chair dance on my kitchen stool, and threw invisible confetti. Because 60k is a mile-marker, and now I’m closer to my destination than I was before. It’s taken me longer than I thought it would to get here. Life likes to throw wrenches in the
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Poetry: Therapy

The pen wicks the venom from my soul through veins and skin to the tiny ridges of my fingertips down the gleaming black shaft poison drips into the ink chamber to bleed into paper, forever sealed.
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