The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Apparently it’s today. National Pie Day, Pi Day, and now this. I miss all the cool stuff!
[pouts]
She didn’t look elegant at first, with her enormous purse on her shoulder and her white NorthFace fleece jacket. She wore her shoulder-length hair in a tousled style, and her glasses were slightly off-angle. But her lips were rose-red, she had solid control of that purse, and her white jacket was immaculate.
There was a bookcase between where she was standing and where I was working at one of the tables, and she stood there, against that bookcase, looking around the library as if she was supposed to be meeting someone. But there was something nervous about the way she was doing it: she was looking around quickly, right to left to right to left, drumming the fingers of her left hand on the bookcase as she did so. I wondered what she was so nervous about. Was she having a clandestine meeting with an old lover, perhaps? What an odd place to do that – the public library where just several feet away was a guy pounding away on his Macbook, and two old guys sitting by the magazines talking about their respective health troubles.
But as she drummed her fingers on the top of the bookcase, I could see that she wore no ring on any of her fingers.
She decided that she had arrived before her expected party, and opted to sit down. So she came around the bookcase, into the area where the tables were. She had on a skirt of brilliant crimson, the most wonderful red ever. Somehow the skirt matched her lips exactly. She put the purse on the table next to mine and took off the white Northface jacket. The skirt was actually the bottom of a dress, the whole of which was that gorgeous red. The V-neck didn’t plunge too deep, and she wore a necklace of wooden beads that rattled ever so softly – had we been anyplace other than the library, I wouldn’t have heard them. She slung her jacket onto a chair and started unpacking her purse.
The beautiful red dress was also a maternity dress.
She pulled out a purple plastic water bottle, and her keys which hung from a long lanyard. She also pulled out a spiral-bound notebook and an iPad. Her nervousness from before disappeared entirely, which struck me as odd – if she could set that feeling aside so easily, why had she been nervous in the first place? She sat down and went right to work, taking absolutely no notice of anyone around her. She alternated between tapping the touchscreen of her iPad – only using her slender index finger – and jotting notes in her notebook with a number-two pencil. I returned to my writing.
Minutes later, her awaited party showed up. A teenaged girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen. The girl plunked her bookbag down on the table. “Hi!” the woman said, looking up and giving the girl a radiant smile.
“Hi,” said the girl. “OMG, you look amazing!”
“Thank you!” said the woman. “How was your break?”
“It was OK. We didn’t go anywhere.”
“Sometimes that’s the best kind of vacation. So, where were we?”
The girl pulled a thick textbook from her bookbag. “The Depression just started.”
“Bummer!” The woman laughed. “All right, let’s get into it. Can you tell me some of the causes of the Depression?”
Ah, I thought. That was it: she was a tutor. There tended to be a lot of them in the after-school hours at the library, and we were now sliding into that time of day. Their conversation delved into the Depression, and my attention returned to my writing. I spared one last look at the pregnant woman in red before I left, though.
Why had she been so nervous at the start?
I have linkage for you. You will click them. And then we will all frolic in the Land of Links!
:: If nothing else, that phone call was a valuable reminder that words have power, and the online world is not so insulated from the real world as we all like to believe. (This is a very powerful post…but you have to read his backstory to get it. It’s all very sad, all the way around.)
:: Oh, man, Darrin’s bio-dad is just not going to give up on his mission of assholery, is he? I have literally no idea what he thinks is going to happen if he goes public with the knowledge that Dead Lisa had sex as a teenager and had a kid and gave it up for adoption. (This storyline on Funky Winkerbean is seriously goofy. There’s this guy who keeps lurking around and sneering and saying things like “Soon we’ll all be one happy family again!” FW is one of the worst things ever, and yet, I can’t look away. It’s like getting to drive by a mangled car wreck each and every day, in which nobody actually died. Except the fictional characters, who all suffer endlessly.)
:: Tycho Brahe, apparently, used to put on his court robes every time he looked through a telescope.
One must approach one’s work with awe and respect.
I think that’s really cool. (As I noted in Sheila’s comments, I’ve over the last several months stopped writing in my PJs and whatnot. I dress for work. Even if it’s putting on overalls, it’s something. I’m getting to work.)
:: Because there has not been a triumph of reason over irrational fear, or an embracing of the statistically probable over the unlikely (or some might say a return of denial to avoid messy reality), but rather a choice to live my life in a more peaceful way. I learned in war that violence can happen to me, a white kid from suburban Buffalo. I learned it is not something that just happens to other people. I learned that when you are being shot at you should take cover behind your weapon. That if you are shooting at them they will put their head down and not shoot back at you. That when bullets fly – and they will, remember – that I should fight and not hide. (Brian Castner is a deeply thoughtful individual with whom I do not always agree, and with whom my disagreements almost always prompt me to at least think a bit more about my position; even if I usually come back around to my original way of thinking, I’m on better footing. My opinion of guns has not changed, but I’ve considered it more.)
:: The great thing is that I’ve met lots of new and interesting people out there in the blogosphere, with many viewpoints and stories to tell. I expect I’ll continue to visit them from time to time. Another benefit of this challenge has been the act of blogging every day without fail – getting into the habit and making it part of what I do. I’m also happy that I actually had something to say, whether it was in poetry, a quote or just a few words about wellbeing, which is very important to me. (This really is the main benefit of the A-to-Z Challenge. For me, I have found that two years in a row, it results in a brief and small influx of new readers, but they all tend to disappear again. If there’s one thing that bothers me about blogging here in 2013, it’s that the old sense in Blogistan of various communities emerging doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. But I’ll do it again next year; in fact, I’ve already picked my category.)
:: The main knock on the iPad as a camera is that the thing is big and people look goofy taking pictures with it. But, you know. If you’re the sort of person who judges another person for using an iPad to take a picture, who is the actual asshole in that scenario? Hint: Probably not the dude holding the iPad. (This really doesn’t bother me, although it can get distracting at things like school concerts. You can always tell which parents have kids onstage for each ensemble because all of a sudden, a whole new set of iPads get waved in the air.)
More next week!
The Muse is a fairly capricious being.
When we think of The Muse — that otherworldly being who is the source of all things poetic — we generally think of a being or beings who look like this:
But after however-many-years of wandering in the wilderness, chasing after the dreams and visions offered by The Muse in the hopes that my efforts at making use of one of those tiny scraps of an idea might, in my hands, become something worth reading, I’ve come to the conclusion that The Muse does not look like that at all.
First of all, The Muse is a guy. Why is this? I don’t know; I didn’t set it up. But he’s a guy. But he’s not a classical Greek God of a guy. No, he’s a dumpy fellow. Picture the love child of Danny DeVito and Tommy Chong, at the age of fifty-five. That’s The Muse. He’s cranky, probably from being too short, and lackadaisical, probably from smoking a lot of weed.
The Muse ain’t much for hygeine, it turns out. Or presentation. He just doesn’t care how he looks, because he knows that all the power is his. He knows that he’s got the goods, and that we want ’em. And he knows that he doesn’t have to give up the goods at all, and that when he does, he only has to do it on his timeframe. So when he shows up, he’s not all tall and muscular, wearing a perfect toga and a laurel branch on his brow.
No, The Muse shows up in a dirty tank-top that might have been white once-upon-a-time, but it was likely stained in the package. It’s just slightly too tight on his pot-bellied frame, as if it’s one half-size too small. Nevertheless, he insists on tucking it in, so that it comes untucked in the course of his day. So when he shows up, he’s got one side tucked in and the other side hanging there so you can see flashes of his gut.
His pants are also filthy. They’re brown slacks, shapeless and dirty. There’s a ketchup stain on his thigh, but he doesn’t care. His shoes are some strange blend of black, brown, tan, and gray, all in one color that has never had a word attached to it, in any language.
The Muse is cranky and foul-mouthed. He has no manners to speak of; he smokes and drinks and is insanely rude. When he talks, it’s with a thick accent, and almost never the same accent two days in a row. But that doesn’t matter, because he almost never sticks around long enough to have a conversation. He doesn’t even talk to you when he drops by to give away ideas.
In fact, he doesn’t even give ideas away. See, he’s got so many of them that he doesn’t need ’em. In fact, he doesn’t have ‘so many’ ideas; he has all the ideas, every single idea anyone ever had or is ever gonna have. And he just drives around with them, in his 1973 Dodge Dart. The whole car is painted metallic green, except for the right fender, which has a big old dent in it and is still the color of primer. The passenger door has a big orange ‘7’ on it, but not the driver’s door. In this vehicle The Muse speeds around town, never once obeying a speed limit (unless he goes on the Thruway, in which case he gets in the left lane and goes 45).
Once in a while The Muse drives by your house. And when he does, he might slow down for you, or he might not. If he slows down, he won’t stop to talk. He won’t even look at you. He’ll just throw a wad of garbage out the passenger side window, to land on your feet. It’ll likely be a paper bag from McDonald’s. It’ll be a few days old, so it’ll be stinky and the grease will have soaked through the paper a bit and there will be smeared ketchup on it. But that doesn’t matter, because you have to open that bag up, see. You have to dig through it, past the wax paper cup that’s still sticky with Coke syrup and the French fry thing with ketchup on it. You have to do this because you’re after the Big Mac wrapper. There’s still cheese and ketchup and Special Sauce on it, but you can wash your hands later. Because on the inside of that wrapper? That’s where he wrote your Idea.
And the Idea won’t always be relevant to anything you’re working on. Sometimes it’ll be the key to solving a particularly sticky point in the tale you’re telling right then, a point where you’re stuck. Maybe you read it and realize that the key to a happy ending is having Captain Renault round up the usual suspects. Or maybe the Idea is a notion for a new tale, entirely — “Hey, what if there’s a great white shark who realizes that there’s good eatin’ in the waters off a New England resort island?”. Or maybe the Idea is something else.
The Muse visited me this morning. Drove by and chucked something out the window. It wasn’t a McDonald’s trash collection this time; instead it was a bag of non-returnable bottles. Took me a while to dig through it and find the Idea, but there it was. I won’t say what it is, but it turns out to be the essential key to the story, the thing that will make it work. This morning, The Muse gave me the way to win the ballgame.
But not on the novel I’m writing now.
No, today The Muse drove by and chucked me the key to the plot of The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title), the project which I shelved a while back so I could let the plot simmer in my head a time longer. Now that I’m trucking away on Princesses In Space!!! II: Ocarina of Time (not the actual title), I’ve had the other tale fall into place. And I won’t get to that one again, most likely, until 2014 at the earliest.
I stood there, sticky bag and useless bottles in hand, reading what The Muse had scrawled on the back of a cash register tape. “Oh, come on!” I shouted. “What the hell good is this gonna do me right now?”
In reply, The Muse only laughed. He’s got a nasty laugh, that guy.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.
(image above via)
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I saw this picture on Facebook yesterday, paying tribute to The Princess Bride.
Turns out that it’s created by a guy who sells them on Etsy. He’s got more, including this Firefly one!
That’s terrific!
:: I saw this on Tumblr yesterday and it’s in perfect harmony with my increasingly oddity-centric way of thinking.
As for Princesses II: A Game of Princesses (not the actual title), work continues apace.
This also assumes that I don’t encounter the same problem I had a few times whilst writing the first draft of Princesses Episode One: The Phantom Princesses (not the actual title). There were a couple of instances during that book when I realized that I had taken the wrong turn at Albuquerque, so to speak, and had to backtrack to get things fixed. This is where the “Kill your darlings” edict comes in handy; you have to be willing to scrap work already done, sometimes. There was one bad turn in the first book that I didn’t even recognize until I was four chapters past the point where the thing had been still pointing in the right direction. Scrapping four chapters constituted roughly 28000-35000 words…or, put another way, more than an entire month’s work. Ouch.
However, not only was it for the best, but I also suspect that it won’t be as much of a difficulty this time around because the chapters that got dumped came at a point when I was still feeling out my characters and my world. What happened is that I realized that a couple of important characters were related to people other than whom I had them related to in the first place. That may not make sense, but the general gist of things is that had I left it the way it was, I would have had a terrible time establishing some of the central conflicts in the book. If the conflicts don’t work, the book doesn’t work. There were also a few issues of worldbuilding that had to be fixed in those same chapters.
Now, however, a lot of that heavy lifting has already been done. How the characters relate to one another is pretty well set, now that I’m in the sequel; ditto how the major setting works. This time I’ve got a much clearer mental picture of how things are going to shake out, so I can concentrate on the good stuff. Which is nice, because it’s turning out that this book is more of a rollicking adventure than the first one. So far I’ve got quests, narrow escapes, and a map to hidden treasure. Oh, and spaceships. Zap! Pow!
Onward and upward, folks!
(But first, I need to check some moves on Words With Friends….)
Every year it strikes me as odd that we celebrate Star Wars on May 4 because of what is — come on, we must be honest — a really bad pun. For me, the real Star Wars day will always me May 25, but hey, society hath spoken. Whadda you gonna do?
I shall celebrate by reading some comics and doing some writing. (Which is what I do most days, but I digress….) Meantime, here’s some Star Wars art that I swiped from Tumblr.
I know, I know, I’m late!
Anyway, during the A-to-Z of April thing, I didn’t post any film music at all, not even during Something For Thursday posts, which I did not incorporate into the A-to-Z. So here’s a wonderful arrangement of Joe Hisaishi’s theme to Laputa, for solo trumpet and orchestra. That’s Maestro Hisaishi conducting.
