Category: Essays

Essays I’ve written and published via the blog.

I Am A Scripting Warrior

I’ve hit a place with my script where I am in the doldrums. It’s just barely the beginning of week two of Script Frenzy and I’m bored with my script. My characters seem somehow less sparkly and beautiful. They seem flat and lackluster. Every time I sit down in front of my laptop to write, I have pondered the concept of becoming a Script Frenzy rebel and writing a novel instead because, while dialog seems to flow forth from my fingertips, this is my first script. That means only one thing and there is no doubt about this in my mind.

My script sucks.

Before my first NaNo, I had made a previous attempt at novelling and managed to get to 24,000 words on my own. It was a completed piece. It blew and I knew it, but the first one of anything that I write always sucks at least a little and I’m okay with that.… [Read More]

That Beginning of the End Place.

Sometime over the weekend (Friday or Saturday, but I am not sure which day exactly because I forgot to log it), I bent down to hold Lucy’s face in my hands and kiss her nose. My fingers are usually on her neck when I do this, with my thumbs on her cheeks. This maneuver serves a dual purpose for me. It holds her head still so I can kiss her and it affords me a low stress opportunity to check her for lumps and bumps. I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure. So I compared notes with Mugen and found a lymph node in his cheek in, what I thought, was a similar location. So I let it go.

Sunday night, I was watching TV with hubby and I pulled the same trick on Lucy. I took her head in my hands and went to kiss her nose and the thing was big and felt hard as a rock.… [Read More]

Good Morning Old Friend

This morning, I was sitting here working on re-drafting the outline for a novel that I began in 2009. That story has never really left my mind and it is crying out to be finished. We’ll see what happens with it when I get back into it, but it needs some work and the amount of material that I have left after culling the dreck that spewed out of my brain during word wars is, sadly, not much. Where the story sits right now, it’s not even a novella. It’s a short story.

Outlining, for me, is work. Writing is something I can slap down when I have twenty minutes and feel creative, but the work part of writing a story, is doing the outline. It requires that the entire length of my six foot long dining room table be available to me. I clear everything off of it and I actually grab pens and paper and I organize notes based on my “talking points”.… [Read More]

Christmas Garland

When I was a little girl, my mom and dad bought this beautiful garland for our tree. Well, I was eight and I thought it was beautiful. It was red with a red and white gingham check pattern in the middle. It wasn’t like all the other garland that everyone else had and I loved it. On Christmas morning that year, I don’t remember the presents that were under the tree at all. I remember how beautiful it was, I remember that Santa had been there and turned on the lights and made everything look like magic. I remember the awe and the wonder and believing that miracles could happen.

I think I might have gotten a cabbage patch kid that year.

The presents are not important to my thirty something year old mind. I remember the magic the wonder and the love and how the tree was really all about that.… [Read More]

The Morning Routine

The morning routine in this house doesn’t get deviated from, even on weekends. This is why I was up at 6:30 am this morning. Mugen must be let out, must have breakfast and must have a play time while I read my forums and drink my coffee.

It will take me 20 or 30 minutes to write this post in between sips of coffee and finding where Mugen’s lost his wubba this time and tossing it for him, but it wears him down so he will take a short nap in his crate while I shower… and then the fun begins.… [Read More]