author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Apparently Writer's Digest don't actually post a prompt a day anymore. They must have run out the bank or something. Now they only post one a week.

Here's the prompt that caused me such disgust the other day:

It's garbage day and you put your trash on the curb, but when you return home from work, it's still there (though everyone else's garbage has been taken away). The next week, it happens again--and again the following week. Why is the trash collector snubbing you? Write a scene explaining why he's skipping your garbage and how you figured it out.

You can visit their forums and see how others responded to it.

I don't know exactly what it is about that prompt that just kills inspiration dead at my feet. Maybe it's the sixth grade English teacher style: Now, class, here's your assignment. Something about the way it's worded puts me back at four and a half feet off the ground looking up at a middle-aged man or woman (it doesn't matter which) with a blackboard behind their heads and a half-patronizing, half-eager smile on their face. Isn't that exciting, kids? Doesn't it just rev up the old idea juicer? And maybe it's the way the prompt closes off all the possibilities except the least interesting ones. They've already decided for you why the garbage collecter isn't taking your trash: He's snubbing you.

I'm just not interested in the story behind that social drama.

I told some friends about the ghastly badness of this prompt, and we started brainstorming how the prompt could have been made interesting by being left more open-ended or simply being worded differently. Most of our ideas centered around having one's garbage indeed taken--except for a single item left behind. "You and the garbage collector are vying for the love of the same woman; the items the g. c. leaves behind are to throw you off the track." "You and the garbage collector are spies in a vast network. The g. c. leaves items of your trash behind in order to convey coded messages which you will then pass along to the only other member of the network you know of." "Yes, but your spy network trades only in the most mundane of data. 'Mrs. Murphy is planning a Mac & Cheese dinner tonight.'" "The messages the g. c. leaves you are entirely about food. Is he trying to ask you out on a date?"

The spy network was my idea. I liked it, so I ran with it.

I retrieved the garbage can lid from where it had been left. As usual, the garbage collectors had tossed it on the ground, projecting it in the natural trajectory caused by letting go of the lid the moment it could be said to have been removed from the can. There'd been a bit of wind around lunchtime, too, so it had gone down the block a ways. I picked it up off Mrs. Murphy's lawn, sighed, and trudged back to my own driveway.

It was when I went to put the lid back on the can that I saw it. And I remembered.

So many years... I'd almost forgotten. "Act natural," they'd said, "blend in," and I'd done such a good job. I'd found employment, found a social group, made friends. "Try to think like one of them." I'd even married one of them, had children with him, two children, Tom and Renee, sixteen and ten years old and so beautiful like their father.

Twenty years, and you almost believe you're one of them-- until the message comes that it's time to be one of you again. Looking down into the garbage can I felt the rest of me in the back of my mind, hidden away for so long but beginning to stretch and yawn after its long sleep. The temperature of my blood shifted two degrees to the cooler, and the subtle halos I'd learned to ignore stood out in my vision around everything with a pulse. A sparrow taking off from the curb: a glow of red and a haze of violet in the corner of my eye.

I had been told they would contact me, and that I would know it when I saw it. I knew it now.

My garbage can that should have been empty contained one thing: the shed skin of a snake. And to prove it was no accident, the fragile tube of dead matter had been threaded through a large bead made of no material found on earth. Ourlithk. I had to control myself from pouncing on it like a magpie. The metal was beyond price. You didn't buy it; you were only ever given it by the very powerful, and then you knew you belonged to them.

Of course I belonged to them. I was one of them.

And so, apparently, was one of the garbage collectors. At least.

I rolled the can back into my garage, carefully acting as though nothing had happened. Just in case a neighbor was watching. Once inside with the garage door closed, I reached in slowly and retrieved the ourlithk bead. The snake skin crumbled at my touch. It had been merely a symbol of what I was supposed to do. The bead I brought into the kitchen with me, strung on a piece of twine, and hung around my neck. I would not remove it again while I stood upon the earth.

The rest of the week loomed ahead of me, a desert of dread and anticipation. I would have to act normal. And then, next Monday morning, I would wait for the garbage truck, and for my contact.

So I used "Planning a picky prompt thing" as my search phrase. That got me rather a grab-bag of topics, including two pages about planning weddings and one about smallmouth bass fishing.

And the words are...

1. movie
2. Florida
3. school
4. book
5. problem
6. success
7. New York
8. wedding
9. detail
10. chair

Let me tell you, counting nouns sounds easy. But do you count adjectival nouns? (Is "electronics junky" one noun or two, in otherwords?) Or verbified nouns? ("I enjoy flying"--contains a noun or not?) What about personal and/or demonstrative pronouns? How about people's names? And does "main text of page" mean the first bit with complete sentences, or do we skip titles and pull quotes? What about fill-in forms? Meh. You make your call; I've made mine.

The Florida panhandle raced by like a movie, the kind of movie that maybe stars Geena Davis and, oh, I dunno, Linda Hamilton maybe, in a cute green convertible with money flying out of the back seat, hundreds of twenties hitting the breeze, 'cause they just robbed a bank and now they're trying to escape the state. That's how we went through Northwest Florida. Not like gorgeous actresses portraying bank robbers, though that would have been nice. Like the scenery whizzing by unnoticed while the camera focuses on the driver's impertinent bare feet kicking the side-view mirror. Foreground: fire-engine red on seashell toenails. Background: indefinite blur of green and concrete gray.

School was out, and we were headed to New York. By car. From Mississippi. I-10 to whatever went north when we were sick of I- 10 or ran into the Atlantic, I dunno, don't ask me, we never got there. We got about three small towns East of Tallahassee. That was the problem.

By now my sister's probably had her wedding. It was perfect in every detail: a fine fall of snow for the flower girls to make angels in, sparkling icicles catching the camera eye but not quite outshining the diamond on her left ring finger, jazz music at the wedding reception, our father standing on a chair to make a speech. He'd be wearing the tie with the penguins on it. So will all the groomsmen; my sister is infatuated with penguins. She's probably got the album on the mantlepiece. She hopes that visitors will shyly ask to page through it. She hopes they'll notice something missing. They'll close the book (she hopes) and then they'll say, "But didn't you say you had a younger brother? Which one was he?" Knowing her, she'll have the speech ready to go.

And nowhere in the speech will she say, "He was supposed to get here in time to stop me marrying this bastard." She probably won't even admit he's a bastard--not that she won't have noticed it herself, that is. I mean, that was the one detail she neglected when she planned her wedding. Getting the husband right.

It should have been Ronnie. But Ronnie and I never had much success getting out of the south. This trip was no different. I had thought maybe we'd turn north at Jacksonville. We still might, one day, if we manage to get out of jail.

We're working on that.

Happy Mardi Gras! We had friends over to help us eat up red beans & rice, andouille sausage, cornbread, and ... oh, I'd say about half the King Cake that Mom sent. (John got the baby.)

Mom always sends me at least one King Cake from Haydel's bakery every Mardi Gras. Not only is this because I'm a homesick New Orleanian and she knows it, but also because Haydel's in particular puts a little collectable porcelain figurine in the package. This year's figurine is a "Beignet Waiter." You can tell because of the paper hat.

MORNING CALLS

Here: Praise for the man in the paper cap
and the matched streams of milk and coffee:
hot, hot, piping hot
and swirling before my spoon
even touches it.

Here: An ode to the hour, that the night has a case of
the two-aye-ems
and I've no place else to go:
just here, amongst the mirrors,
amongst the cups of coffee
swirling with milk.

The world hasn't woken up yet
I haven't woken up yet
I'm dreaming these mirrors, the mirrors are dreams,
I'm dreaming this cup of coffee,
the milk, your paper hat.

I must have been sleepwalking
I'm awake now

I used to bike to the Morning Call, which is the Metairie version of the Cafe Du Monde. It's about a mile and a half from my parents' house. Last time I biked there at two AM during a visit home, and it was closed. I ended up at the donut place at West Esplanade and Causeway instead. The people there told me its hours have been erratic since Katrina. (They also insisted that I looked like I was related to this other woman who just happened to show up and vouch for the fact that I was not actually her sister. It was surreal.)

Anyway. I want my Morning Call back. Dammit.

I'll check again in April when John and I come visit for the French Quarter Fest.

Tonight we had some friends over and took turns playing a favorite video game on the Sony PS2. Which game? Well, the one that would star in this parody of recent blockbuster film Cloverfield.

The scene begins from the point of view of a digital video recorder at a crowded party: dim lights, the press of bodies, a spilled drink, music thumping out of an overenthusiastic sub- woofer. Suddenly the room shakes and the lights flicker and die. People grab for the furniture and fall all over the place. Our intrepid camera person is on his feet quickly and runs to the window.

We're some thirty floors up looking down over the neighborhood streets. We can't see very far because the nearby buildings are just as tall. But everything shakes again and a sort of rolling roar rumbles across the middle distance, right to left. There's screaming along with it and air horns and car alarms and police sirens. After it passes there's quiet enough to hear the other party-goers ask each other what the hell is going on.

The sound, or montage of sounds, begins to approach again from the left, much closer this time. It gets louder and louder (somewhere in the middle of it one dog is barking at the top of its lungs) until it's a deafening, thunderous din. Something huge passes in front of us. We're aware only of a massive, indistinct shape whirling by. After it passes, the horizon is wide open--all the buildings across the street are gone.

At this point, the viewer wants to hear some sort of dramatic soundtrack accompanying the revelation. But this is a documentary style movie, so all we get is the shocked silence of the party-goers taking in the suddenly empty skyline.

The noise starts again to our right, but this time it's far in the distance. The camera is jostled as people crowd against the window alongside our camera person. Hands on the glass frame the view. The noise gets louder.

Someone shouts, "Look!" and someone else moans "Oh my God." The indistinct shape is easier to see from this distance. It rolls with an uneven gait into the middle of our field of vision. It's mostly round, but something's sticking out, something tall and pointed at one end. As the thing comes to a stop directly in the center of the frame, we finally understand what it is. It's the Statue of Liberty.

Then the thing seems to get its bearings, and it rolls right for us.

In the darkness caused by the thing blotting out the world, the movie title fades in.

PROJECT: KATAMARI DAMACY

About Cloverfield: You should go read this thread at Making Light.

So, about a week ago, I had this dream.

I dreamt that there was a parade passing by and fireworks and they were all for me (and I was a lot younger than I am now) but my parents didn't want me to go out and enjoy it. And I knew they were right, and what they wanted was all for the best, and what I was supposed to do now was eat this special sesame-bun and drink this special peach fizzy soda and they would make me forget. I would eat and drink and then not remember anything special had happened. And that was really the right thing to do. But I really, really wanted to see the parade! So I promised that I would eat and drink the forgetting stuff after I'd watched the parade and the fireworks. In the dream, I knew that this wasn't the first time I'd been made to forget special things happening. I hoped this time I'd at least remember that something had happened.

So that was the dream, and that's what came to mind when I tried to think of a Thing to write today.

This is rather more of a short story than a scene.

It had been the best night in Little May's entire life. And she was a whole ten years old tonight, so that was saying something.

Every year on her birthday, May was allowed to stay up past her bedtime, as long as she liked. She was allowed to eat all her favorite things for dinner, even if they were ice cream, freezie- pops, crawfish sushi, and M&Ms. She was allowed to stay home from school if she wanted, or go to school and have all her classmates sing Happy Birthday to her. Little May's birthday was the one day of the year that belonged to no one but her.

But tonight, the night of her tenth birthday, tonight was special even by those standards. Tonight there'd come a knock at the door, and a little girl May's age was standing there in a dress redder than a valentine card and with sparkling gold hair down to her toes. "Come out," she'd said, "We all want to see you!" May had let her take her hands and had followed her into the street. The little girl's hands were slightly furry, like velvet.

Her mother had stood in the door behind her and begun to say something unhappy, but then she'd stopped. "Go on, dear," she'd said. "It's your birthday."

The parade was like nothing May had ever seen, not on Mardi Gras, not on Saint Patrick's Day, not ever. There were no marching bands or Shriners cars or clowns or floats or people yelling Throw me something mister. Instead there were--other kinds of people. People made of light, of wind, of bells, people with the faces of cats and birds, people with wings like bats and dragonflies. Like no people May had ever seen.

But they all knew her name. They all knew it was her birthday.

After the parade came the fireworks. Red and white and gold and green, they all exploded low in the sky, right above her head, fooling the street lamp into thinking it was dawn. And the noise! The whizzing and the booms and the popping and the sputtering! The strange, lovely people all stood in a crowd around May, looking up and going Oooh and Aaah. Every once in a while one of them would hug May. They looked so happy. Some of them were crying.

When the fireworks were over, the people walked away down the street waving goodbye. May waved after them. The last to leave was the little velvet girl in the red dress. She said, "You can't come with us tonight, not the way we came. But tomorrow--" And then she whispered in May's ear a series of instructions, one after the other like a how-to project in the magazine May's teacher brought to school. "You'll remember? We miss you, May. Come home." And then the little girl ran after the strange and wonderful people, out of sight.

May went straight up to bed, but she couldn't sleep. She felt like her skin was full of bees and her head was made of fireworks, she was that excited. And tomorrow--tomorrow she would do what the little velvet girl in the red dress had said! She would see all the strange and beautiful people again! While she lay there remembering and remembering and remembering, her mother came in with a glass of milk and little piece of pie. "Here," she said, "just a little midnight snack. 'Cause it's your birthday."

"What kind is it?"

"It's your favorite. Go on."

May ate it up, every bite. Her mother sat with her until she was done, and then she took the plate and glass away with her. May heard her parents' voices murmuring in the hall, but now she was very sleepy and couldn't quite make it out. Her mother's voice was high and sad. Her father's voice was low and rumbly. "...with it like we always do," was part of what he said, and "you'll see, it'll be OK."

In the morning, May woke up already disappointed. It wasn't her birthday anymore. And she felt, like she felt every year the day after her birthday, like maybe she could have had more fun if she'd thought of more exciting things to do. She'd gone to school, her class had eaten cake and ice-cream, she'd blown out her candles... there'd been presents, including the computer game all her friends were playing, just like she'd asked for... she'd had candy and, and pie for dinner, and... and she'd watched TV with her parents until she'd gotten sleepy. Seems like she'd wasted it, somehow.

Oh well. Next year she'd think of something exciting. Maybe a big party at the amusement park, maybe all her friends could come. Maybe fireworks just like it was New Year's Eve. Maybe...

"May," called her mother, "aren't you awake yet? You'll be late for school."

Yesterday John says, he says to me, "Hey, so, I'm going to be doing thing-a-day." And I says, "What?" And he says, "Thing-a-day?" And I says, "No. What?"

And after a few more volleys along those lines the conversation settled down into a more informative groove, with him telling me all about Thing-a-day and me getting all enthused.

He's gonna do it. (He's doing it now. Hey look! And now he's done! For today, anyway.) And me, I'm gonna do it too. Maybe I didn't get to the Official Site in time to register for this year's session and have a cool Thing-a-day.com blog of my own, but, y'know, oh well. I have a blog here.

And, it being Feb. 1, I have a thing here. Here it is. It's a scene-thing, circa 530 words. Maybe I'll be doing Scene-a-day.

Most people didn't get off the bus here. All of the offices were empty, and many of them had been vandalized. The neon orange and red of gang tags glowed from the dusty, broken glass and crumbling pebbled facades. For those who didn't know how to read them, their scrawl still communicated loud and clear: don't be here after dark if you know what's good for you. All the locks were busted. None had seen their rightful keys all winter.

The cable news channels and the top-tier blogs called it "The bust after the boom after the bust," or simply "The second dot-com crash." It had left programmers, project managers, and technical writers without jobs. Business districts like this stood to no further purpose. Some of the signs you could still read: SineWave, WebNet, SpectralCore. Names that described nothing directly. Titles that appealed to an instinctual awe of the new and the shiny. Very little shone here now. The lawns were overgrown, the creek drowned in weeds, and the geese reigned supreme over grass and pavement. Why the bus even ran here at all was a mystery. The riders shrugged, called it a testimony to inertia, and waited for their stops. Their stops were further along, in retail and dining districts where business still flourished.

Closer inspection of the area revealed that a lot of the tagging was nearly as old as the bust, and the turf wars had already migrated east. Newer marks were subtler. A tracker might have sussed them out, or a bravely curious pedestrian might have observed the tracks being laid. For instance:

...inside an office formerly belonging to an online guerilla advertisement company, the handholds on the rock climbing wall that ascended beside the central stair were suspiciously well maintained. The ropes looped over the top bar were new. Each dawn found fresh handprints in the chalk.

...inside what used to be a broadcasting studio, down a windowless and electricity-less corridor, each recording booth had been altered. Where computers, microphones, and mixers once stood, there were now mechanical potters' wheels installed in the countertops. Red clay piled to the ceiling. On the walls were niches for tools, shelves for drying the greens, and sconces for the ten, fifteen, twenty candles per booth that gave the sculptors light.

...inside the former FedEx depot was a nest of generators gently humming, gently waiting for a neighbor squatter to ask it to do its job. The smell of gas filled the small storage space. A web of wires led to the closest buildings where electrical inventions underwent development. A cache of fuel and spare parts suggested a system of scavenge and contribution.

And the industry inside the buildings wasn't all there was to see. The crash had taken place late last summer, and the gangs had given up the space to the artisans some three or four months later. The frost hadn't left the ground yet, but you could see compost piles here and there, if you knew where to look. If you knew how to look. You could see that the shrubbery beds had been turned and tilled. They were waiting for seed-sowing time.

Of course, tomorrow, who knows, tomorrow might find me quilting. Or knitting. Or baking, even. But I'm guessing that the majority of my things will be writing-things, like this thing here.

It's a good thing, doing things like this every day.

Haven't quite hit the story rewrites yet. Will soon. Am meanwhile throwing stuff at the page that may or may not turn into anything worth a title. Some of it goes like this.

Observe her, there, beside the fountain downstairs in the library. Don't worry about seeming rude. She'll never notice your eyes upon her. She's not really here, you see. Not while those pages are turning.

She sits like a child, butt on the floor and legs straight out in front of her. Her right hand idly rests upon the fountain's edge, where the pool sinks below feet level, and her fingers are getting wet. It's OK, though. She's left-handed. She's not getting the pages wet. Sometimes her right hand seeks the hand of the bronze ballerina who kneels upon a bronze paving stone in the pool. Sometimes the fingers of her right hand dip deeper to pick up a penny, twist it through the liquid light, pass it from finger to finger like a carnival juggler. Sometimes she scratches her scalp and leaves chlorinated drops in her hair.

She is aware of none of this. She's not here, I tell you. She's not even in her body. The words her eyes pick up merely pass through on their way to her consciousness, which wanders around some far-off Matrix with a radio antenna in her ear. The left hand turns pages by remote control.

Unaware of our eyes, or the water, or the children running past her in a great roiling boister, she is yet keeping an ear open for some few things. Those things that cue that it is time to close the book. "The library will be closing in five minutes," is one of them. "Sadie, we're ready to go home." That's another. When these signals filter through her body's answering machine to the soul that is picking up messages far elsewhere, the left hand does a fearsome thing. It closes the book and makes the otherworld disappear.

Then Sadie rubs her wet hand dry upon her jeans, recoils her hair at the nape of her neck, and stands up on legs full of knee-popping and stiff-stretching. Wincing at the protestation of joints makes the faint lines reappear beside eyes and mouth. She no longer seems childlike. She no longer appears young. But she is not in great practice being aware of her body, so she does not count this a tragedy. She simply hobbles for a few steps until her legs limber up again and continues normally to the checkout counter. The book goes in her purse and the woman goes back to her friends (if they called her to leave) or simply to her car (if the library's closing time was the only impetus).

Once she arrives home, she will make the world disappear again. This world. The otherworld will be there, waiting for her, like a video tape left on pause.

This is Sadie's life. She spends only what time is necessary here with us, at work or eating or taking care of the children. Or socializing with friends over coffee, reassuring them that she remains among the living in both mind and body. But when she's able, when she can get away with it, she opens a book and disappears.

Our story begins, like many stories begin, on a day that begins like any other. Like any good story, that day soon diverges from routine, for what else are stories about if not the point of no return? For Sadie, the point came when she opened a book like any other book--or was it? Was it the book that differed, or something in her mind? Did something that noticed her comings and goings finally act upon it? Because, sometime later, she reached the point at which she realized she had passed the point of no return. And that was when she closed the book.

And the otherworld failed to let her go.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you say, "I shall write at 10 PM come hell or high water!" and in fact you do (well, 10:20 anyway, I was a bit late what with the blockade on Cochineal Island lingering a tad past schedule) but you have no idea what to write and you're still not ready to face the projects that have been intimidating you lately out of writing at all.

Well, that's what happens with me, anyway.

Like I said. If you can't get started on the one project, for the Gods' sake, write something else.

In other news, my first bloody mary experiment in Boulder has been semi-successful. Here in the land of No Effing Zing-Zang Anywhere, I went to Whole Foods and picked up a bottle of a local product called "Premium Gourmet Bloody Mary Mix." Also some V8 to cut it with, in case it packed the horseradish in a stomach-lining-corroding proprotions. Also a selection of pickled products in bottles and off the olive bar for use in garnish: marinated mini-onions, olives stuffed with garlic, hot pickled green beans (another local product, which the local grocery clerk (being local and not from New Orleans where a bloody mary doubles as your pre-dinner salad) thought was a very odd garnish for a bloody mary), capers, and those awesome little bumpy garlicky pickles.

But you know what we're missing? You know what I couldn't find at Whole Foods, neither on the baking aisle nor among the bulk spices?

You know what's not crusting the edges of my glass in this lovely picture here?

CELERY SALT.

This is why we're only talking semi-successful here. Maybe tomorrow I'll call... shudder... Safeway.

Dude! I know where the quill is! And I know what it does!

It came to me on the bus Wednesday night--I was using the hour-long bus ride between Boulder and Denver to get my daily 2K written. I was working on the scene with the one sympathetic family in the neighborhood, the one that actually tried to bring abuse charges against one of the missing kids' parents. The family comes to visit and they have a bit of a pow-wow. Well, the mom is more prepared to trust Gwen than the dad is, mainly because she grew up in the neighborhood too (so why doesn't she already know Gwen? Must think about this), but she wants to make sure Gwen really does have a history with The Bookwyrm's Hoard.

So she tells a story about Mrs. Nimbel and the quill, and she gently challenges Gwen to tell one of her own:

"...Anyway, I stormed out the house and came here. Like always. And Mrs. Nimbel said--" I could still hear her voice, surprisingly agile and sly, her voice "--she said, 'Gwen, what's with the glumsickle you're sucking on? Get over here and spit it out.'"

Cindy gave a little peal of laughter. "What's with that glumsickle, Mommy?" Dierdre patted her hand and favored her with a cautious smile.

"So I told her. And she did get out that quill, didn't she? A peacock's wing feather fitted with a brass wide-tip nib. And she made me tell her a question, just like you said. 'Do I have to be a doctor?' That's what I asked."

"And then what?"

Ron's voice made me jump. I hadn't been expecting him to get into the story. I looked up at him and said, "Well, I flung myself onto this sofa here, all dramatic-like, and I grabbed a magazine. I paged through it, got caught up in the articles, and after a while I reached the back cover and there was Mrs. Nimbel standing there with the paper in her hands. I read the question out loud back to myself, and what came out of my mouth, immediately, was, 'No. I have other obligations.' And then I just--like this--clapped my hand over my mouth, and said through my fingers, 'What the hell does that mean?'"

Among possibly other things, that quill is an oracle. Or a rorshach test. I'm not exactly sure how it works. It's definitely connected with the Space Between The Stories, though.

And I know where it is. That came to me too. I know where it is, why it got there, and how it's going to get found. It has also occurred to me that the thug's message about the parents wanting the bookstore gone isn't entirely a red herring. At least one parent is connected with the evil corporate mastermind guy, but it's not why I thought. It's much darker than that.

That I'm not going to reach THE END by 50K has nothing to do with plot after the Bookwyrm's grand opening. It has to do with how much plot is required in order to reach the grand opening.

Regardless of how the finished product looks, please believe me when I say that I very rarely set out to make a political point with my fiction. In fact, I can only think of one example--the post-Katrina New Orleans ghost story I began writing, flush with rage and helplessness during that first week after the storm as reports came in that the Red Cross had been denied entrance and trucks full of water were held indefinitely at the parish border--and that story will probably never be finished.

I certainly never set out to put politics in the books about Gwen and her bookstore. But tonight's writing turned up politics, all right. Tonight's writing featured the talemouse, that shy, retiring is-not-a-character, giving the Bookwyrm a furious lecture on reproductive freedom. I didn't expect that at all.

Her name is Gwen. Not 'prodigy.' Has a name. Isn't just a function. The talemouse is getting really mad now. How can the Bookwyrm be so obtuse? It knows so much, it governs the entire Fictional Hierarchy--how can it be so blind? Men characters, bad ones mostly, say, 'Woman's function is to reproduce.' Say, 'Should not have a job, should not write, should not be distracted from making babies.' Bookwyrm says, 'Gwen's function is to reproduce. Should not have bookstore, should not have family, should not be distracted from making stories.' He doubles over, panting with the effort of such speech. He has had to remember the voices of certain tertiary characters he's hidden inside in order to express himself so clearly. Bookwyrm. Woman-hating villain characters. Can't tell the difference.

Well then. Rakash Sketterkin tells us how he really feels.

Perhaps we can blame the never-ending Election Thread over at Slactivist. I just caught up on reading it today, watching the thread go from readers staying up all night tracking county-by-county results from Virginia to all abortion, all the time. Or maybe this had been building up for a long time now, and I never knew it until my timid little talemouse got mad enough to stand up and say--to the Bookwyrm, who is for all practical purposes his God--"People aren't just functions. They're people."

Brave little talemouse. Bless him. One day he may become a real character after all.

Well, that came out of nowhere. The first few lines of it occured to me as I walked down to the Dumpster to throw out some stuff. It's so warm out, I was thinking, you'd expect it would just go spring into summer and that's that, but April is supposedly the big snowy month in the Rockies. Hell, I'm told it's been known to snow on Midsummer up here. We don't actually get summer along the Front Range, I suppose; we just get occasional breaks between winter storms....

They've reopened some of the slopes in the Vail Valley. Katie and Joshua went, but I told them I'd sit this one out. I don't trust a June snow.

And off we went for 1500+ words. Neat.

Tomorrow, the synopsis for Drowning Boy. Tomorrow a lot of things. But today's writing session was evidently all about playtime. And why not? Today was my day to work at the RRSR studios, editing WireReady playlists and managing the listener and volunteer databases. That counts as work. Why shouldn't I play in the evening?

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

Nyaah.