Cop out

Mosaic image of Mars as seen by Viking 1, 22 F...

Mosaic image of Mars as seen by Viking 1, 22 February 1980 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a game going around Facebook today, wherein someone  tags you to share a passage from page 7 of your current work in progress.  I was tagged, but I had a little trouble deciding what to post – I’m working on three things at the moment (well, sort of).  I’m still working on that short sci-fi piece that I started back in May, in addition to mulling over revision possibilities for The Lokana Chronicles, and since my short been getting a lot of my time lately, I finally decided to go with that.

And now, because I’m too tired to come up with something better, I’m going to post it here.  (It was a long weekend; I’m still in recovery.)  From my story, The Colony, I give you a conversation between Lynn Treadwell, the protagonist, and Mr. Edward Barrington III, an executive with the Company, who’ve sent Lynn’s husband to Mars as part of a colony expedition:

A letter to my blog

Hello, pretty blog.  How are you?  Have you missed me?  Been lonely without me to update you?

I’m sorry.  Really, I am.  It’s just that I’ve been revising.  And writing.  And chasing one kid after another – it’s like herding cats, I tell you.

Don’t believe me?  Why not?  Oh, you want pics or it didn’t happen?  All right, fine.  Here you go.

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There, are you happy?  Proof I’ve been writing and drinking all the coffee.  What more could you want?

Oh, you want something of substance?  Well, I think I can help you out there.   Here’s an excerpt from my new short story…

To Mars!

Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey

Mars (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s post is brought to you by Thursday’s Children, a weekly blog hop about the things that inspire people to write.  I meant to get a post up for last week’s hop, but that didn’t happen.  Must…be…better…blogger…

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen my brain explode the other day.  This happens on a fairly regular basis, but not always in a public forum.  I was working away on my short story, the one that I’ve been trying to get posted for close to a month (I think – too lazy to go look), and it suddenly decided that it needed to become a full-fledged novel instead of a simple short story.  Does this sound familiar to anyone out there?   I think I might have had one slice too many of the Dark Lord’s cake…

Bedtime stories

ssI hope everyone’s staying dry tonight! As far as I can tell, the rain has finally stopped for a while, thank goodness. It was nice not to have to talk over the rain as I read Cricket and Thumper their bedtime story tonight.

I grew up watching Reading Rainbow. Anyone familiar with the show may remember that they read the title of the book, followed by the name of the author and the illustrator. I watched A LOT of Reading Rainbow as a kid and, as a result, when I read books aloud, I read them the same way: I start with the title, then the name of the author, and finally, the illustrator.

Seymour teases me about this particular quirk; clearly, he did not grow up watching Reading Rainbow.  But I don’t really mind.  I’m not going to change the way I read any time soon.  But that’s not really the point of this little story (I can take a little good-natured teasing, after all – my grandpa was known among our family as “the big teaser,” after all).  The point is that tonight, all my bedtime story efforts paid off in a surprising way: Cricket asked for a bedtime story by name.

One of the stories we’ve been reading at bedtime is A Sleepy Story by Elisabeth Burrowes.  I’ve always loved Richard Brown’s illustrations for this story and when I ran across it one day as we were preparing to move our bookshelf, I pulled it off so that I could read it to the boys.  It was one of my favorite stories when I was little and now they love it, too.  Or at least Cricket does – Thumper doesn’t really seem to care what story we read, just as long as we read something.  They do both love Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, though.  Not that I blame them – who doesn’t love that book?

Anyway, I thought it was adorable that my two-year-old asked for a book by name and I had to share.  At first I was just going to post this on Facebook, but then I kept typing and typing and then I decided that maybe I should just make a blog post out of it after all. 😀

So there you go.  Cute kids, books, cute story.  Happy Thursday, everybody!

(c) 2013.  All rights reserved.

 

Progress!

Yes, that’s right, I’m making progress!  My synopsis-writing project is almost at an end (meaning I hope to be finished with it by tomorrow or the next day) and if you follow me on Facebook, you’ll know that I started a new short story.  I plan to post it here when I’m finished.  I’m really excited about it – it’ll be my first foray into sci-fi, but it’s not hardcore.  At least, I don’t think it will be.

I was inspired by the news I heard over the weekend that a Dutch company plans to launch an expedition to colonize Mars within the next decade.  I started writing late last night and kept at it today.   As I was driving home tonight…

Time flies

My little Tomcat at the tender age of fourPhoto by Kay Kauffman

My little Tomcat at the tender age of four
Photo by Kay Kauffman

My, how time flies!  Without my even realizing it, this little blog o’ mine has turned five years old.  That happened somewhere around the tail end of last month and I forgot all about writing my planned retrospective about my time in the blogging world.

Five years.  My, how the years have flown!  I started blogging about six months after my divorce was finalized.  I wanted to write passionate political spiels of great depth and insight; I wanted to pen fantastic short fiction that was sure to catch the eye of someone important, that elusive one right person who could make all my lifelong literary dreams come true; I wanted to create a wildly successful blog that would spawn book deals and syndicated columns and who knows what else.

In short, I had high hopes.  I was young, bright-eyed yet jaded.   Possibly I had delusions of grandeur.

Death Scare

One day in 1202 a boy named Jack told a legend to Trey in 1995.  A little boy named Steve disappeared on Halloween night, trick or treating.  A ***** took him.  The legend says that he was found the next morning DEAD!  One person knows what took him and that person is Tom Smith.  So Trey died of fright.

If you want to know what took him it will cost 5 bucks.

Note: I’ve been advised that the thing that took him was a ghost, but the author wanted to get people excited about the story, so he crossed out the word ghost and replaced it with a shaded box.  Nine years old and already a writer after my own heart.

Bubbles brought the preceding story home from school a week or so back.  He had written it for a project and set it rather unceremoniously on my desk in a pile with everything else from his Friday Folder.  I was tickled to see one of his stories because it seems like they all end up at his dad’s house.  His teachers have been telling me for years now that he is very creative and that they love reading his stories, which naturally makes me extremely proud.  As a matter of fact, his teacher invited me to speak to their class at his last conference when she found out that I write.

I love the way he ended his tale.  It reminds me of many of the things I wrote as a youngster.  I only hope that his love of storytelling will stay with him as he grows up.

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

The writer’s identity

Writing

My noon hour yesterday was much like many other noon hours at my day job.  I grabbed my computer, my wallet, and headed down the street to the local café-type establishment to quiet the beast inside (because yes, my stomach is a snarling, ferocious beast, foaming at the mouth as it waits, ever-impatient, for the victuals that will eventually slide into its gaping maw).  I took a seat, ordered my food, and withdrew my laptop from its handy-dandy carrying case to work on my story (and when that failed, to at least continue looking over one of five samples sent to me by a friend for some vicious red-penning).  As I was trying to solve a major plot problem (Ha!), a conversation caught my ear.  One of the waiters was discussing writing with the gal in the booth behind me.  He is a college student majoring in English; she is one of many people who have written a book, only to (likely) have it remain unseen by the masses, covered in dust, and taking up space in her home.  “But I sent it to so-and-so – he writes Christian books, you know – and he thought it was very good!” she proclaimed to half the bar, the waiter, and me.

Ignoring the woman, I asked the waiter what he enjoyed writing and what he wanted to do as a writer.  He was where my interest lay because he is at that point in his life where he still has the world at his fingertips and anything is possible.  Sure, anything is always possible, but at 28 with a husband and four kids, it’s not likely that I’ll be able to study abroad and learn French through immersion or spend a summer backpacking through Germany absorbing local culture anymore.  Anyway, he replied that he had wanted to be a novelist and he liked sci-fi, but that he’d been fighting depression and not writing as prolifically as he’d done before.  I mentioned that I’d just finished a fantasy novel and that my own depression had made me want to lock myself in my room to write.  Naturally, this piqued the woman’s interest, so she turned her curiosity away from the waiter and onto me.  “I’m sorry, what do you do?” Click here to find out!

A Lovely Little Story

Once upon a time, there were two teenage girls, Tarah and Kaye. They decided to skip school on Friday and have a day off instead.

“Let’s drive to New York!” said Kaye.

“Okay!” said Tarah. So they hopped into Tarah’s car and did just that. “What should we do first?” asked Tarah as they walked down a New York street.

“Well,” answered Kaye, “if we had any money, we could go shopping, or go see a show on Broadway, but since we’re broke, I guess that kind of rules that out.”

Tarah whipped out her guitar. “On the contrary,” she exclaimed. “As long as I have my magic guitar, we’ll never be broke!” At that, she sat down and began to play her world-renowned composition, “Jenni,” which sounded remarkably like the hit tune “Smelly Cat.”

“Fabulous idea!” cried Kaye. Immediately, people began tossing dollar bills into the guitar case. “So, we’ve got some money,” Kaye said, counting the coins and dollars. “Let’s go to Aida!”

“Ooo, perfect,” replied Tarah.

At the show, a mysterious man suddenly appeared beside Kaye. “Good evening,” he said to Kaye, his voice thickly accented.

“Good evening,” replied Kaye shyly.

The man, who looked to be about twenty-five, looked worried. “We need someone to sing in the show tonight. Would you do us the honors?”

“S-s-sure,” Kaye mumbled, before she knew what she was saying. She mumbled, “See ya after the show,” to Tarah and walked off arm-in-arm with the accented man. Tarah went and sat down in her seat excitedly. Kaye was finally going to sing!

As Kaye ascended the steps leading to the stage, she suddenly took a very embarrassing tumble and landed in the arms of a young man with curly brown hair and the most romantic face in the history of time. Kaye looked up at him and, recognizing him, nearly stumbled again. “Are you okay?” he asked, steadying poor Kaye on the stage.

Kaye just nodded, unable to speak. For the first time in her life, Kaye had stage fright! She finally managed to overcome her shock and find her voice, but when she spoke, it was so quick that her savior had a hard time understanding her. “Oh my God!” she rattled. “My friend Tarah absolutely loves you! Oh my God! She is gonna be so jealous. Aaagghh, I sound like a thirteen-year-old! Oh my God!”

Kaye’s newfound friend just smiled. “My name’s Josh,” he introduced himself.

“Can I introduce you to Tarah later?” Kaye asked.

“After the show, sure,” Josh replied. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Oh, sorry! I’m Kaye,” she said. “I’m not usually like this, but – oh my God! This is the best day ever!”

Josh just smiled. “Okay,” he said, “we’re singing The Prayer as kind of a warm-up for the show.”

Kaye gulped. “Okay.”

The music began and the audience settled down. Kaye opened her mouth to sing – AND – suddenly she sang like an angel! Her clear voice rang like a bell through the theater. (Tarah clapped her hands with joy.) When the song was over, the audience went nuts. Josh and Kaye went backstage together. Kaye suddenly noticed the dark accented man she had met before. He eyed Josh, looking jealous.

Suddenly, Tarah appeared backstage. “I didn’t feel like staying for the show,” she said. Then she saw Josh. “J-J-Josh Groban! Oh, my-my-my goodness!”

Kaye just smiled. “Bet you feel like staying now, don’t you?” she laughed.

“Well, duh!” Tarah exclaimed.

“Josh, this is my friend Tarah, the one I was telling you about,” Kaye introduced them. “And I know Tarah knows who you are!”

“Somebody pinch me!” Tarah exclaimed.

Kaye just started to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Josh asked.

“Yeah, what are you laughing at?” Tarah inquired.

Kaye whispered in her ear, “Remember when Jennie had that dream about having his love child? Looks like you could beat her to the punch, since she’s never met him and you have!”

Suddenly they all died. The End.

(c) 2007. All rights reserved.