A full moon rising will make me say "wow". Or even gasp aloud, causing my husband, if he's driving, to panic, then become irritated. But the beautiful full moon, so luminous and bright and impossibly big, rising... Wow.
A falling star. A wow, when lying on my back in the summer grass at night, is a wow. Even better, walking the dog, and looking up at just the right time and place, to see an unexpected one... wow.
The northern lights are a wow, and woe, for I miss them.
Sunsets, sunrises, rainbows, beautiful clouds. Sky-things wow me.
I am going to write all the rental adverts in the Julian Blending style.
In fact, I already started to do so last week.
I save them in a special file. Then I edit all the humour out and post them.
Sigh.
I'm lucky enough to have some of my work "saved" in a row of story anthologies sitting above my desk.
The other 99.999999% of unpublished work is on CD, and going further back, floppy disks, and even further back, binders of actual paper. I have written short and longer fiction, poems, and I used to write songs. I still haven't got it together enough to produce a novel.
We have my husband's late grandmother's writing, and that was *not* how to save things: illegible scraps written on whatever bits of paper were handy, folded up, and stuffed into envelopes, which she then wrapped in plastic wrap like a word sandwich, then taped up.
The long-running goal of my life is to have a row of very neat black binders that will sit tidily on a long shelf, beneath the published stuff.
One day.
It must be winter.
All I want to do is eat (large amounts of meat, potatoes, pasta, bread, chocolate), sleep, watch movies, nap, snack, huddle under a comforter, and sleep.
It's dark and rainy, and it's most definitely winter.
I am also experiencing a lovely run through that time of the month. Oh, joy.
Is it time for bed yet?
I won't even address the procrastination.
My favourite television shows. I don't even watch a lot of TV, as evidenced by the fact that I don't believe any of these are current:
Chef!
The X-Files
Designing Women
Mad About You
China Beach
Twin Peaks
Thirtysomething
Sisters
ST:TNG
The Days & Nights of Molly Dodd
Prime Suspect
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
I don't need to buy Star Trek, as I bought each season for my husband. Now, I suppose I'll have to move on to buying him Voyager. We have Chef! (and still ponder the mystery of the seasons: diamond, diamond, coal). Buffy I am buying and watching as I missed it when it was on TV, and so many people who have the same tastes as I do love it. DVDs are actually great: when you're in the mood to watch televsion, there's sod-all on, but you can watch, commercial-free, an hour or three, of something, and really get into it.
And I can pick and choose which X-Files to watch, and I can pretend the last three seasons never happened at all.
It was mid-January, and the holidays were over.
Thank god.
Frank had survived another Christmas, working through the holidays and letting the family men have the time off. They’d be wanted at home, with wives and children waiting. He put overtime on his paycheque, and watched a lot of movies in the dark evenings, nursing a bottle from the couch to the bed most nights.
Then, suddenly, it was January first and he was heading, along with everyone else in the city, the lonely, the lovely, the unlucky, the loved and the losers, into a brand new year.
It was time for a new start.
Because it was getting more than scary, how quickly the months went by. How quickly the years went by.
Frank woke on January first with a hangover; even he’d managed to get the day off work. Since he didn’t have to go in to the station in the morning, the night before he’d been even heavier-handed with the bottle than usual. At one point, he found himself standing in the kitchen, holding the phone, trying to remember his ex-wife’s new phone number.
He couldn’t remember it, and got some more ice instead.
He woke at four in the morning, his mouth and throat a desert, aching for something cold and liquid, something that had no alcohol in it whatsoever. His body hurt from sleeping on the couch, and the first fingers of pain were beginning to slip into his head, getting ready to start squeezing…
I do not play in the stream of water alongside the driveway. I am merely clearing the area of debris so it won't run into the carport. The fact that it is fascinating to watch the water run, and see which paths it takes, and how one can change them is irrelevant.
And I am not playing with rocks and dirt in the backyard. I am landscaping, damn it. I am not trying to resculpt a hillside just because it's fun, I am...
Trying to resculpt a hillside just because it's fun. I confess.
I came in Sunday after raking, which turned into rock-moving, which turned into earth moving, wet, filthy and sweaty--and feeling very, very good.
Playing outside is fun!
It's pouring. POURING. Been pouring for two days.
And I have to go to work. Dang. Because there's a mini-flood in the back yard to play with. And I need to work on it. 'Cause, you see, the back yard, it gets a delightful little stream running through it, and I wanted to see if I could make the stream skirt the flower bed, and go around the ferns, and...
I don't want to go to work! I want to put on yellow rubber boots and perform water maintenance gardening tasks in the back yard.
And then come in and eat a toasted cheese sandwich and some soup.
It's really no fun being a grownup.
Whitehall clashed with the Americans, bombproof public buildings weren’t, tragically. War, greed, corruption and excess reigned. Entertainment vulgarly tried to out-shock in every genre. The newspapers made Madeleine shake her head, and television was worse.
She decided she was in the wrong century. She sold the television, switched to classical music on the radio, and stopped the paper subscription. Just one more test... could she give up the Web?
No. But if she balanced it with reading Jane Austen, and made wearing dresses her personal style…
She revelled in being a lady, even as she renewed her subscription to hunghunks.com.
100 words
The diggings were sorted, each shard carefully examined, nothing left to
chance. The miscellanea of ancient lives gradually re-emerged as they toiled in
the sun.
The stories of these lives would emerge, just as slowly. Time long ago, and time precious, so few weeks left to excavate the site before the bulldozers came. Another hotel-slash-resort, a 21st century playground on 2nd century land, where ancient people lived and died, striving to subsist.
Only a few days before the ground would be buried again, this time under a mountain of concrete and glass, with three restaurants, two pools, and a casino.
100 words / copyright savannah stephens smith
Was staying simply settling? Did she just attach herself to the idea of the pretty white dress, the ring, the indefinable comfort of being Mrs.? Gil was a good guy with a good job, and he loved her.
Or go. Seek, and maybe not find. Travelling, free. An empty road in a desert, sunset to sunrise. Under a million stars.
Lonely. Hard to imagine drawing another card as lucky as the first. Gil. Ready to say I do, when all she could say was I don’t…
…know.
He stirred, reached out, murmuring her name.
She wouldn’t decide, not just yet.
