Hit the skids

For all the energy I started the week with, I must have used it all up over the early days, because my enthusiasm for simply getting out of a chair has completely disappeared. :) Okay, well it's not quite that bad, but I could sleep for a solid day.

That being said, I did sit in my recliner last night and designed a cover for the novel that I'm doing in November. I thought about posting it, but I don't think I will, because the idea is captured in the images, but the people aren't quite the people who are populating this novel. Hate to start minds down the wrong path. But looking at the cover through the transparent cover of my project organizer gives it a sense of reality that I didn't have before, which is a wonderful thing. I need to take more advantage of visuals to help me with this process. I also found a folder with some preliminary work on this book--it was in the computer case I took with me to the OWFI conference (back in May!!! Can you believe it? Can anyone get any less organized than this???) and it had my detailed character sketches that I did using Character Pro 4, so I was very pleased. Yes, there were ideas I had forgotten. I really think that pushing through a novel in a month will help me avoid that kind of "discovery" of good material. It makes me wonder what I've lost that I didn't jot down. But that's okay. Can't do anything about that.

I'm going to spend the rest of today updating the website for November. In addition to daily prompts I'm including daily inspiration in the form of quotes from other authors. I hope they help keep everyone on track, even through those not-so-wonderful days.

I'm supposed to be away from home tomorrow but I don't know that I'm going. We'll see how I feel.

Oh, and I just can't help but add: GO OU!!! What a game!

Henry Long, continued

Part 1

Part 2

Sara Long was finally sick to death of collecting dirty socks from the floor of her husband's closet. Of course he would point his "improvement." They were all in one place and out of sight instead of strewn throughout the house. Henry's socks had been a point of contention since their wedding day. Why couldn't he see that with just a few more steps, they'd land in a a laundry basket and she'd have one less thing on her to-do list?

Well, as of today, it was off her to-do list once and for all. Maybe when he ran out of socks, he'd think about putting his pile in a clothes hamper. Maybe not. But she wouldn't be picking them up anymore.

Perhaps it had just been too hard for him to understand the length of her daily chores list, the endless collection of mundane chores she could do by rote, but that left little time for anything interesting or challenging. His daily to-do list had always been maddeningly simple. Get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, change clothes, read the paper, eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed. Occasionally there had been a dog to walk between TV and bedtime. And he'd been good about helping the kids with homework and class projects. Even then, though, he never took it seriously enough. There was way too much giggling when he was involved. The last thing she wanted was her girls becoming those giggling, witless twits who snapped gum constantly while they filed their nails.

Well, at least that hadn't happened.

Sara marshaled her thoughts and put them back on task, thinking about the day ahead while she rolled through her morning routine. A routine. That's what Henry needed. His vacations were way too long these days. What company in its right mind would work their senior architect to death for months with endless overtime and then turn him loose to get under her feet for three whole weeks straight? It made no sense.

Her friend Betty Ann insisted he was having an affair, the notion of which still made Sara laugh. Good heavens. Betty Ann had this idea that life was scripted by the steamy book-of-the-month romance novels she devoured. No, if there was one thing she knew about Henry, it was the fact that he was a terrible sneak and a worse liar, so he didn't even bother trying.

Workshop Write

Had a lot of interruptions today and didn't get much done....

Prompt: Write a scene that includes sour milk, candlelight, a wool hat and dancing shoes.

Stacy looked at the collection on the kitchen table. How many times had she told Kimmy not to leave shoes--even ballet slippers--on the table? And there was Jerry's hat--the green wool one that he insisted on wearing even though their last mouse visitor had nibbled away half the pompom on top. Yep, his gloves were tucked inside it. It was intended to go from on top of his lunch box to his pocket, not to be flung aside in the wake of the inevitable morning rush to the bus stop. And there was that glass of milk. It had sat in Jerry's room for a week and he was supposed to deal with it before he left for school. Not move it to a new location for her to deal with. She wrinkled her nose and dumped it in the trash can, rinsed the glass, put it in the dishwasher and paced back to the table. She fingered both items, first the slippery pink satin and then the rough wool and thought about how much the colors and the fabrics reflected the personalities of her children....

Stacy picked up the candle and headed for the living room. She needed to be busy. Normally she would start dinner about now, but without power that would be a little difficult to do. There had to be something that would help her push down the fear and the panic that would do absolutely no good. The storm had come up so quickly, so suddenly. Had the school held the children? Or were they out on a bus? There was no phone, no power, no way of knowing...

Henry Long

Henry Long was finally sick to death of collecting those stiff, put-out sideways glances from his wife when he did something she thought not quite right for his age.

"For heaven's sake, Henry. Act your age!"

If he had a dollar for every time she said it, he wouldn't have had to hide his overtime pay in a separate checking account so that he could take her on a cruise.

It was an odd thing--caught in the middle this way. She'd rant and rave and say she didn't have the time, energy, money or clothes to go. But he wanted to go, and he really didn't want to go without her. Besides he had a dream.

He had a dream about the warm sea breezes coming off the Caribbean and doing a number on her like in Little Mermaid where Ariel turned into human being. (Yes, watching "childish" movies was one of those things she clicked her tongue at, but he loved the music and the story and the way the grandkids lit up when he suggested they watch it.) Her hair, thick and heavy and waving like the ocean, would come out of her top not and stream down her back while she inhaled the magical fragrance and she'd become the girl that he had so much fun with back when they had gone to college. Of course she'd be a bit shorter and have a few more wrinkles and her hair wouldn't be that firey auburn, but all that didn't really matter as much as what was in her soul.

Henry had thought long and hard about what it was in their life that had turned her into such a taskmaster that she had forgotten how to tango. Oh how they used to tango. They turned so many heads, it was a wonder they didn't have people sending them chiropractic bills for whiplash. Yes, he'd lost that spark for awhile too. There were kids and bills and mortgages and ailing parents and friends and small disasters like the tornado that whipped away the kids bedrooms back in the 60s. Thankfully the kids weren't in it. Afterwards he got a great deal of joy in telling them that "your bedroom looks like a tornado hit it" and listening to them giggle, but by then the love of his life had quit giggling.

Would she have been happier if she'd worked outside the home? Lots of women were doing that nowadays and they were starting to when the kids were all in school. It might not have hurt if she'd gotten something part time then, though he was so grateful that she was home when they got in from school and they didn't fill their afternoons with the kind of mischief unsupervised children did. It was impossible to tell.

No use thinking about it. There was no way to go back and change the past. There was only the future to fix. He looked at the brochure in his hand and decided to head down to the travel agent. He'd find someone who knew exactly what she should have on this jaunt, from hair pins to flip flops, and he'd pack it for her. He'd call the kids and find out what all she might fret about not paying or doing or seeing got done while she was gone and ask them to do it. Then he'd just load her up on the day of their departure and drive her to the airport and carry her on the plane if he had to.

Oh, she'd fume for awhile. But he'd talk to her. Tell her it was killing him. Killing her, in fact. That she needed to have more fun, to find that girl who used to plant flowers and hike and dance. The full moon would rise over the horizon while they walked on the sand and she'd stop being clenched like a fist and relax and remember. Maybe. The effort would be worth it either way. He wasn't going to collect those angry darts and worry himself to death about what he should have done differently anymore.

Can't-neglect-it-another-day Ramble

Okay, for the record, I have written at least a scene a day on another novel I have underway, so I've been pretty pleased with the progress there. However, I don't know how I let four days slip away without posting a line here. Well, one of those days wasn't entirely my fault. I told you all about my lovely Friday with the house entirely to myself, with the gentle fall rain and the beginnings of the leaf color that stood out against the gray sky. But my post got sucked up into cyberspace and all those lovely thoughts didn't post and could not be retrieved and it put quite a damper on my enjoyment of the afternoon. :) I've recovered.

Today has been a Monday and this week will be turned on it's ear in a small way. I did my weekly errands run today rather than tomorrow or Wednesday because I will have a young houseguest before and after school for the rest of the week. It dawns on me as I sit here that this house looks like a tornado hit. I should be cleaning, not blogging. When I finish I have groceries to put away and dinner to prepare and an ASL lesson to get through. I'm pushing it.

Hey, but I don't have anywhere else to go all week, except picking Jared up at school, I got my workout in and I can do the rest if I can just stay focused. :)

Gotta run! Thanks for reading. It should get better through the week. LOL!