Tag: STORY

NATURAL SELECTION…

Photography

OK, so there isn’t going to be an igloo in this post. But it feels like my house is turning into one.
By now those of us that are experiencing winter on steroids have PROBABLY learned how to stay safe if we need to go outside. My Son that is working in Wisconsin for the first time this winter has advised me that not everyone has survival instincts.

The night before last he was asleep in the apartment that he shares with two other employees in training when he heard someone screaming, “let me in! Let me in!” and they were pounding on the back door. It was one in the morning. He was the only one home and doesn’t know anyone who would come to the door like that without calling first. The panicked screaming of “help me!, let me in!, open the door!” went on for fifteen minutes. There were no windows near the door for him to see who was out there and finally he called 911. Keep in mind that the weather in the winter in Wisconsin is pretty much ALWAYS extremely cold.

My son was on the line with the deputy for quite a long time, trying to get them clear on where he was located…meanwhile the pounding had stopped and then he heard someone walking inside the house. It turned out that it was his airhead roommate. This person LIVES in Milwaukee and goes home every weekend, but for some reason he decided to drive BACK one hour to their apartment at midnight. He had driven his car into a snowbank outside. My son put him on the phone with the deputy and got things settled.

My son gave him a ten minute, shouted “lecture”.
What if my son had a gun and felt that the door was going to be broken down?
Why didn’t you call me and let me know it was you out there?…my phone’s been dead…
Where’s your other glove? No answer…
Where are your boots?…No answer…
Why didn’t you use MY NAME when you were screaming to be let in so that I would know it was you?…mumbled answer..
Why didn’t you walk around the house and use your key to get in the front door…”I was out of breath…(from screaming) and afraid that I would faint.

This young man, 23, was wearing a thin jacket, one glove, no hat and no boots. He has lived in that weather his whole life.
My son then put on all of the warm clothes that he had travelled out there with.(His Mother,moi,gave him her cherished super-duper warm hat that will get a person through anything.)

He got the kitty litter and shovel out of his own trunk and got his roommates car dug out. Then he told the kid to drive the car out, go around the block and drive back in the PLOWED driveway. The way he SHOULD have driven in, instead of the way he came, the unplowed drive with two and a half-foot drifts in it. The ‘lucky to be alive’ 23 year old got in the car and asked my son…”how do I turn off these orange blinking lights”……the hazard lights.

My son says he now knows what it feels like to be a parent.
He also thanked us for raising him to use his common sense.
My work is done.

DO THEY FEEL LIKE REAL PEOPLE TO YOU?..

Book, Photography
all rights reserved.
all rights reserved.

Yep…the image is all blurry. But it doesn’t have to be in focus…it’s that way to give me inspiration. I’m almost finished with the first draft of my first novel. Ooooooooooooohh…exciting times.

I like the image because you can see that they’re real people, but they’re not easy to see…you have to stare at the image and decide for yourself just what it is you’re looking at. I’m not going to keep you hanging and you’ve probably already figured it out, but the woman in white is a bride. A bride on the bow of a boat…the imagination takes flight! This is my round about way of getting to the subject of this post. Not too long after I started writing, someone asked me if the characters in the book felt real to me. They didn’t. They were like the people in the image. There, but somehow, not there.

My heroine was a mystery who took me by the hand and waded into the unknown with me. I was watching her, judging her, wondering about her. The question of whether she seemed real to me kept surfacing. When would she seem real? Should she start to feel real? Would I suddenly start to miss her when I wasn’t writing? Would I wish that she would ring the doorbell and ask me to go to Starbucks with her? (I’d have to pass on that one..coffee gives me palpitations…) Would we show up at a party wearing the same outfit?

I gave up wondering about the reality of it all. I wrote about my heroine and since I didn’t want this to be a book with just one character, I added more. The funny thing is, I started to like all of these people. I looked forward to what they would do next and I started to SEE them. They weren’t blurry like the bride on the bow of the boat and they had personality…the bride just kind of stood around and looked “bridal”.

So why am I writing this? Just because I’m so close to the end of the first draft that I can smell it and the people in the book?…Well it’s like some kind of magic happened, because…….THEY SEEM REAL TO ME!

AND THAT’S WHY I HAVE NIGHTMARES…

Photography
all rights reserved.
all rights reserved.

 

 

Makes me want to pile up the straw and take a little nap or get a spinning wheel and turn that straw into spun gold…wasn’t that a fairy tale?

Wasn’t there a hobbit in that fairy tale who had so many children it didn’t know what to do?  I think the  hobbit went over to the neighbors and tried out all of the beds and stuff in the house and it was either too big or too small.  After the hobbit broke a chair or two trying them out, the ornery little hobbit went across the street and huffed and puffed and blew some poor little rabbits house down.

The story gets worse!  He was nimble, he was quick but he couldn’t jump over a candlestick so his pants caught on fire and he chased a cow around Chicago while he was on fire and burned down most of the city!  His reign of terror continued when he pushed Auntie Em into the pig pen and told Toto to run put on some ruby slippers and kick the good witch in the pants.

This is all too awful!!  The next thing that happens  is that he fell down a rabbit hole, dug by the rabbit whose house he burnt down.    While he was down in the hole he started wearing a red cape and grew great big teeth and ears and ran around yelling, “who’s afraid of me?” and “Tell your Grandma I’m coming over and she’d better have cookies and milk and a poison apple on the table or I’ll make her run up the hill and fetch a pail of water.”  Well nobody was willing to make their Grandma run up a hill so he got so mad that he wasn’t watching where he was going and he fell UP the hole and met a cute, round, bear with honey all over himself…and two kids who were eating a gingerbread house.

The hobbit was just walking by when a little piglet, who was a friend of the honey covered bear, snatched him up and  tied him to a cow that jumped over the moon with him on it’s back.  I think at the end of the fairy tale the hobbit is tired and hungry and walking through Atlanta looking for Elvis.  He meets up with this nasty woman wearing a dress made out of curtains.  She’s nagging at this really good looking guy and the guy looks really bored, but he’s still handsome and my Grandma really thought he was the cat’s pajamas…anyway…the nasty, but beautiful woman takes a break from admiring herself in a mirror that keeps telling her how beautiful she is and she notices the hobbit.

“What the blankety blank are you lookin’ at?” she says…the hobbit says…this knight, Sir Laugh-a-lot told me to tell you that he still has a crush on you and if you don’t take him back he’s going to find a princess who sleeps a lot, sometimes YEARS and give her a big old kiss..and he wants to know, ‘how would you like that?”

The nasty woman eats some magic beans, sat on a wall, falls off and breaks into a million pieces..all the king’s horses and all the kings men are trying to put her back together and yet while all of this is going on, she still manages to yell..

“Frankly hobbit…I don’t give a damn.”

I think this is the way the fairy tale goes…at least that’s the way my mother told it to me.