I’m not sure how I’m feeling right now. I got pictures back from a photographer friend to use as professional head shots. Now my friend is an excellent photographer but she’s limited by the subject. I’m clicking through the photos and feeling bitter about having to age gracefully. I wondered if they make a Photoshop program powerful enough to tackle these pictures when I finally reached the last photo on the disk. It’s official. I got out cutie-pied:
I discussed murder with my mom the other day. I’m not usually so bloodthirsty but every year Japanese beetles leave my rose bushes looking like the skeletal remains from a landscaper’s nightmare. I found an all natural spray that sentenced them to the death penalty. I would have preferred life in prison but there’s no money in the budget to pay for their room and board and little TVs that play the latest in bug entertainment this season: American Insect, So You Think You Can Metamorphose, Desperate Houseflies and the ever popular singing sensation Flea.
Speaking of a glee club for fleas, someone I know had to treat their house for fleas. I asked if they had been able to find an all natural bug bomb. My thirteen-year-old son rolled his eyes and responded, “Ya’ Mom, because it’s important to use only all natural products to kill things.” I don’t think he should be listening to my telephone conversations.
Living with four younger siblings was like being drafted into an army of five: lots of shots fired, battlefield triage and maybe even a few toilet bowls cleaned with someone else’s tooth brush. Sun Tzu in the Art of War says, “The principle on which to manage an army is to set up one standard of courage which all must reach.”
My standard of courage is Mom. No one would have thrown her in the brig if she’d sentenced the five of us to a firing squad by the time we were fifteen. The bags of chips consumed before she could put them in the pantry, the flatulence, let alone the filthy bathrooms would be enough to earn her a purple heart.
When I was in high school, one of my brothers forgot his sleeping bag for a youth group ski trip. The white station wagon for all its nifty fake wood paneling wouldn’t start. Did she give up? No, she went beyond the call of duty and biked a couple of miles in the snow and ice with a sleeping bag balanced on the handle bars. She made it to the church before the van left and my brother lost any toes to frost bite.
My siblings wanted to thank her too. And well they should with all the trouble they caused. They fed cat food disguised in candy wrappers to the youngest two boys and locked them in a chest and sat on it until they screamed. Oh, wait that was me. I’ve got no excuse for the cat food but in my defense they volunteered to take turns in the chest with the rest of us sitting on it to test out a hypothesis on claustrophobia. They said not to let them out till the screaming sounded like a tortured prisoner of war. And if you’d ever met my brothers you’d believe me.
It may not be the parade Mom deserves but here’s some thanks from us:
“Mom, thanks for not giving me a hot seat when you opened up the dryer to find your first born living dangerously on the fluff cycle.”
“Mom, thanks for not sewing closed my pockets to stop the flow of treasures: snakes, frogs, lizards, nails, rocks, ball-bearings, string, pocket knives, tape, candy, etc.”
“Thanks for not sending me to an insane asylum when the inhuman noises were bursting forth from your hormone laden teenage son. We love you.”
“Mom, thanks for not leaving me out to dry when I came to you in 5th grade and told you I had a science project due…today.”
Moms don’t get promoted or metals pinned to their chest. They don’t get sick days and they don’t get compensated for post traumatic stress disorder. Mom, I salute you. You’re my hero and you’ll always rank four-star-general-high in our hearts.
I entered the waiting room of the surgical center and locked eyes with the tall, mahogany-skinned woman assigned to guard the waiting room from possible food and drink invasion.
“Leave it on the counter,” the woman said scowling at my offensive coffee cup. The furrows between her black eyes wrestled with the cheerful print on her smock. I was too scared to disobey that fierce command never mind a guy sitting behind her who had managed to sneak coffee past her. This was almost worse than getting chewed out by an English librarian.
“The doctor will let you know how your husband’s sinus surgery has gone in a few hours,” they told me. I waited, caffeine-less. Sad but true. And then came hours of perky morning shows and sappy soap operas. All the soap titles started to merge into one nightmare: All the Young Children were Restless and the Bold and Beautiful World Turned which is funny because young children in a waiting room really are restless.
The soaps were like watching congress pass a bill, absolutely nothing got done and we’re all poorer for it. Speaking of congress, voters should hire the watch dog attendant for the halls of government. She could glare and order them to leave their hot cup of greed with a shot of lies at the door. I can personally guarantee she’d do our founding fathers proud.
The doctor finally rescued me from another mind numbing episode; I think it might have been General put me out of my misery Hospital because someone got buried alive again. The doctor closed the door and smiled.
“You’ll be glad to know I’m fairly certain what we removed was not brain tissue,” he told me with a smile. The villain always smiles like that as they bury their victim alive. I tried to act relieved as I plotted my husband’s demise. That’s right, my evil twin had locked the good me in the spooky attic of some run down cabin no one would be stupid enough to purchace and I seem to be loosing my memory, oh no, the soap opera plots stole my brain–
My husband recovered but no more waiting rooms for me for a long time. The memory of the waiting room attendant still scares me when I sip coffee. And no more brain washing soap operas at least until soap writers learn to actually advance the conflict instead of drawing tension out of a dead plot until the story has rigor mortis. They need a warning label for waiting rooms TVs: some brain tissue might be removed in viewing these shows.
The laundry Alps rise in my hallway. There’s Mount Blue Jean and Mount Undies and a blanket of white covers the tallest mountain of them all Mount Sheet, a glorious monument to our eight Easter guests. Other than introducing my nephew by the wrong name at church, I think I was a pretty good aunt.
Can you imagine what my sister-in-law thought about my renaming her kid? She probably briefly thought about throwing a few Easter eggs in my face except she’s such a sweetheart she’d never do that. I know, I should be able to remember all my nieces and nephew’s names; there’s only twelve of them.
Yicks! I’m turning into my mom and dad. They still sometimes call me by one of my sibling’s names preferably my sister’s name but not always. I gave up a while back and just answer to whatever they call in my general direction. When you’re one of five kids like me and my baby nephew you answer to whatever. Attention is attention in a big family.
I’m thinking with all this Easter egg on my red face there’s got to be a writing lesson in there somewhere. I already keep a file of all character names in my fantasy story. For some reason readers are like my sister-in-law, they don’t like you to forget their kid’s names. So which of my characters gets to make an embarrassing mistake first and get Easter egg on their face?
I must be like a teenager in writing years because I totally started to question the advice my writer elders gave me.
NaNoWriMo told me, “Track your word count every day.” For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is short for NAtional NO one wants to read a book WRItten in a MOnth without crazy edits. If I track word count then I’m focused on putting more words on the page instead of the right words. So I started to journal my character’s thoughts first thing every day and that gets me pumped.
“If you’re stuck, take a long walk,” said the published author. Blah, blah, blah. When I take a walk the stupid birds and flowers distract me. So I did the most logical thing. I gave myself a facial instead. A steamy bowl of herbs kept me from falling asleep and the quiet half hour made me focus on all those character’s voices that get drowned out by life. Nothing like vanity to make you work out, eat less dessert and write better.
The experienced author said, “Avoid prologues.”
The expert editor adds, “And what you need is a prologue.” With all this conflicting advice what I need is a bottle of tylonol. Before I knew it, I had actually started one prologue with, “I hate prologues.” Then I thought of a brilliant title. “Chapter One.” It’s all in the way you market it, baby.
I’ve learned don’t dis’ your personal style. Listen to good advice and then be sure to ignore some of it. Trust me, teen writers know it all. What good advice did you ignore today?
I recently read a couple of clean romances of the no bodice ripping until they’re married kind. I recommend the characters see an ophthalmologist because when eyes soften that often something is seriously wrong with their vision. I won’t put the titles on record because the story lines weren’t half bad if you speed read over the clichés.
Sol Stein says, “Try, fly, experiment, but if it shows strain, if it isn’t accurate, cut it.” I’ve written my smarmy share of inaccurate word pictures. What we need ladies is an editorial makeover. These are the kinds of clichés I suggest writers add to the list of words that land on the floor like split ends at the day spa:
It would be very inconvenient for your heart to belong to someone else and if someone’s eyes were upon me, well, that’s just gross.
Hare-brained characters wouldn’t just forget to pay the bills. They’d have a nose twitch and a lettuce fetish.
You can’t swim in blue eyes. I tried. The water wasn’t deep enough.
If eyes cut like daggers and tongues were sharp then we’d be in Nightmare on Elm Street. Now that might be romantic if you’re the son of Manson and daughter of Freddy in a sadistic Romeo and Juliet. Hmm, that just might work. I could be the next Steven King of romance but I digress.
Eyes need to stop rolling in every chapter unless you’re Ragetti with a wooden eye in Pirates of the Caribbean. Guilty as charged. My fantasy characters are teenagers and whoever heard of teenagers that didn’t circle their eyes like a posh lawyer’s revolving door?
What cliché would you add to the list and why?
As a kid, my three brothers reminded me there’s a world of real life trouble beyond my shelf of books. We spent hours exploring abandoned fields and getting filthy at the creek. I miss the stories I used to make up while dodging the worst of the ‘ick’ to keep up with them–
“A creek wave washed her off the mossy log. He grabbed her hand. Wet hands slipped apart. From the creek bottom, bubbles of gas escaped and slithered up her leg. Are there snakes sliding through that deadened rot of water trapped leaves?”
We baked mud bricks in the abandoned dog house but never hardened enough for a castle tower, built forts in the coolest shadows of a Texan summer and threw all the fig buds into the alley so Dad couldn’t make us eat them. Shhh, don’t tell my Dad–
“The three thieves of Badtaste snuck into the secret garden and flung one tart, green bud over the wall at a time. The Cyclops would never use the fruit of puke against them again.”
Then came the day, one of many such incidents, when I helped my brother into the house dripping with blood because he’d failed to shave the stick with his pocket knife in a sensible direction, mainly away from tender skin around his knee–
“A nurse helped the wounded soldier limp off the battlefield. They dodged bullets. A goblin in Nazi red grinned and wagged a tongue at them from behind a tumbled truck bed. She shot him in the head with her best glare. She thought, ‘If only these soldiers would learn to use their swords properly.’”
Today when I write there is a brief moment when a character in trouble churns in the creek of my imagination and slithers up my spine like gas bubble snakes. That feeling of wonder should be locked up in a tower of mud bricks, forever saved from repeated amputations of the edit knife. As much as editing saves fiction from tedious scenes and confused wording, I love the uncut raw edges of imagination. All those dreams and stories that jumped on the bed when I tried to fall asleep–
“She reached for the light switch. Deep breaths rattled and rasped from behind the blanket that hung at an abnormal angle off the bed. Blast them all. She’d be hurdling into bed for week again.”
Then again maybe there’s such a thing as too much imagination.
The Crime Scene Photo
I love sticky notes. I could take over the world with a pad of sticky notes or at least make up a whole new world. I have story ideas stuck all over my desk like fluttering flags of imagination. The pale yellow ones in front of me stick out their tongues because I’ve procrastinated writing on my book again.
“Order more wrinkle serum,” says the golden rod note to the left. I recycled that one. As if I have wrinkles, that note is such a liar. I even file sticky notes. Then I discovered giant Post-it notes and I thought I’d died and woke up in office product paradise. (http://www.3m.com/us/office/postit/products/prod_ew.html?WT.ac=SideNav-Products-EaselPads) Long outlines and summaries on my wall, I know, it’s like one of those stalker obsessions. If the NCIS team investigated me, I’d be in trouble.
“The woman looks stuck on sticky notes.” Tony flashes his bleached teeth. Gibbs smacks the back side of his slick hair. “Sorry, Boss.”
Gibbs, without changing expressions, flips open his phone and says, “You got anything for me, Abbs?”
“Does Caf-Pow have caffeine? The chemical composition of the glue–”
“Abby,” Gibbs warns.
“But I digress…”
When Gibbs finished pumping Abby for the latest Goth fashion trends he turns and waves McGee forward.
“Sure Boss,” McGee says pressing his lips together to apologize for taking up valuable camera time. He snaps a photo of the writing scene.
“I like this girl,” says Zeeva. “She’s stalking some character. Does she have a concealed dictionary permit?”
And that’s when it hits me. An author who stalks their main character with the character’s favorite color of sticky note, writes characters that stick to the reader. So what office product can’t you live without?
Previously on Sunrielle Survivor four castaways were dropped on the island of my website. You can see the last episode here – http://www.mkhelland.com/?page_id=55) All four went to tribal council.
Survivor #1 got a serious puncture wound that’s not healing so he was our first survivor voted off. Survivor #2 passed out during a challenge and a helicopter had to take him off the island, the wuss. Survivor #3 and #4 have gotten an almost equal number of votes in the comments and through email although there’s a rumor that a viewer thinks Survivor #3 is underweight and needs to add a ’startling’ word.
These are our remaining contestants. Come on in you guys.
Survivor #3: American siblings create an inter-dimensional incident when they uncover a startling Irish artifact.
Survivor #4: War between the dimensions looms when fraternal twins uncover an artifact.
In an unprecedented move, the producer has added a new survivor. She’s our youngest player and doesn’t do a thing around camp but she’s got a wicked social game. Survivor #5 take your spot.
Survivor #5 Siblings must recover the Tower of Babel Mechanism before an army transports to the Eden Dimension.
These are our contestants in the ultimate game of which sentence will outwit the others. There are no more immunity idols up for grabs and I’ll bet there’s one you love to hate so vote for your favorite survivor. Could one of them be a million dollar book idea? Tune in next week to find out.
